WGSS Graduate Students Host Conference on Social Justice in Pop Culture

What do Lady Gaga, Glee, the Bachelorette and Buffy the Vampire Slayer have in common? Aside from being ubiquitous in pop culture, they were all discussed last Friday at the University of Cincinnati’s “Pop Praxis: Social Justice and the Media,” a conference hosted by the graduate student organization of the

Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

(WGSS) in the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences.

The conference took a close look at pop culture in its representation of race, class, gender, sexuality disability and religion.

“We started talking about this conference after all of us noticed common themes in our classes where we found that pop culture was a very important site of analysis for us,” says conference organizer and WGSS graduate student Christina Black. “This conference was an opportunity for us to make the conversation both academic but also popular in a way that might involve undergraduate students or members of the community.”

The conference included 35 speakers, including faculty and students (both graduate and undergraduate) from UC and other area institutions like University of Kentucky and Ohio State University.

The keynote speaker was Andi Ziesler, co-founder and editorial/creative director of Bitch, a feminist magazine. Her lecture, “Feminism, Technologies and Pop Culture Activism,” highlighted the intersections of popular culture, feminism and activism.

Other titles from the all-day conference included:

“Black Stereotypes and Resisting White Hegemony in Good Times”

“Postfeminist Math Barbie: Danica McKellar's Provocative Education Advocacy”

“30 Rock and Feminism in Flux”

“True love and happiness: Sexuality and romance on The Bachelorette”

“Queer Sex in a Straight City: Gender, Bisexuality, and Heteronormativity in Sex and the City”

“Outsider Within: Homosexuality and the Black Church”

“Freak of Culture: A Feminist Analysis of Lady Gaga’s Postmodern Disability Drag”

“All Is Not Glee-ful: How Glee’s Representation of Marginalized Groups Has Informed the Public Imagination and Perpetuated Harmful Stereotypes”

“Consuming Buffy: Embracing the Darkness and Female Empowerment in the Buffyverse”

“Batman and the Cultural Construction of Masculinity Ideals”

The conference was sponsored by the

Charles Phelps Taft Research Center

, Graduate Student Governance Association, Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio Region, Friends of Women’s Studies, the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Graduate Student Organization (WSGSO).