Open Readings: Identity

In this blog post from 2014, Baron contrasts the multiple gender identifiers Facebook provides for its users with the limited number of gendered pronouns available.

Beck analyzes the role of friendships in happiness and traces the development of friendship through adult life.

Crosley-Corcoran discusses her childhood poverty and her own dawning awareness that, regardless of her economic or social status, she benefited from white privilege. She acknowledges the arguments poor whites would voice in response to that claim and argues that acknowledging privilege does not mean you must feel guilty or hated.

Cunningham considers many different approaches to the question of why women smile and are expected to smile more than men.

Franklin offers a character study of his coworkers at Wendy's and highlights how work and gender roles are subject to stereotypes and stigma.

Gay explores popular obsession with the sexuality of public figures and what that means for LGBT people and the coming out process.

Goode offers a personal reflection on living, and cooking, with a disability.

Hughes describes her experience living with a disability and participating in the disability rights movement.

Hunt discusses the trend of people having plastic surgery to make themselves look like their snap chat filters.

Joseph discusses both how the film Moana represents progress in how indigenous people are being portrayed in movies and how critics of the film were disappointed that Disney did not consult indigenous people when making their decisions.

Lucashenko discusses her struggles living through a divorce, single parenthood, poverty, and her desire to be rooted in her aboriginal community with her daughter.

McClune argues for the importance of recognizing and protesting the negative conception of women in hip hop music.

Miller discusses the open queerness, and rarity, of Kate McKinnon's Saturday Night Live Justin Bieber drag king impersonation and compares it to the more numerous drag queen portrayals in media, from Tootsie to Transparent.

Based on data collected for her dissertation, Montgomery explores how hearing "Thank you for your service" affects veterans, and provides suggestions on how to truly show support for those who have served.

Morrison focuses on the way news articles cover topics regarding transgender issues and stories, as well as how that coverage both reflects and shapes the transgender community.

As part of the CBS series "Note to Self" Michelle Obama penned a letter to her former college self.

Olisa discusses confidence and body image.

Pasulka shares one church's decision to be inclusive of LGBT congregants primarily through the perspective of one member who struggles to be both gay and Christian.

In his 2019 feature profile from Smithsonian Magazine, Percy examines the life of Joshua Casteel, a U.S. interrogator who struggled to align his deep faith with his experiences as an interrogator.

Posnanski mythologizes the New York Yankee player, Mariano Rivera, using stats, personal history, as well as quotations from Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea.

The Swiss charity to Pro Infirmis, which advocates for disability rights, released this video covering an art project in which artists create mannequins modeled after people with physical disabilities to put on display in retailer's street window displays.

In this shocking depiction, Reinstein describes how hard it is to be female film critic because of how many men respond with hateful messages, death threats, comments about her appearance, questions about her credibility to review comic book movies because she grew up playing with Barbie, and so on. The responses rarely have anything to do with the content of the reviews--unless they are written by women.

Rich argues that as more and more efforts are made to broaden girls' access to things traditionally thought of as male, efforts are also needed to expand options for boys—including the way they dress, behave, interact with others, and so on.

Sanders uses narrative, historical, biological, and cultural references, and questioning to reflect on possible answers to questions he raises about the male (sexual) gaze.

Smith challenges our societal need for labels, specifically that of transgender, and questions how we establish our sense of belonging.

Stokes examines the messages about masculinity and female representation that movies like Star Wars send to boys. Stokes refers to the Bechdel Test, which gives parameters for viewers to "test" a movie's handling of female roles and female inclusion.

In this reflective letter, Thomas writes to hos younger self on the day he dropped out of college: "A day that will alter the trajectory of [his] life."

Zhang describes Cannon's video "experiment" called "Decoy" and how it illustrates how stereotypes of people can be represented through the images we create of them.