Madison Shumway
Life Editor
In one room, a Boise State student delivered a rousing spoken-word performance about the inevitable killing-off of fictional lesbian characters. On the other side of the partition, a debater from Emporia State played clips from the animated children’s series Spongebob Squarepants, drawing parallels between the Krusty Krab and capitalist neoliberalism. Next came a traditional research presentation, complete with black-and-white slides.
It was this colliding of thought that defined ISU’s interdisciplinary Intermountain Gender & Sexuality Conference, hosted April 12 and 13 in the Rendezvous ABC suites. Centered around the theme “Telling Our Stories,” the conference invited 314 undergraduates, graduate students and faculty from across the Northwest to present research papers, screen films and perform dramatic readings that addressed topics related to gender and sexuality.
“The Gender and Sexuality Conference is a wonderful opportunity for new and emerging scholars to exchange ideas in an interdisciplinary setting,” said organizer Sarah Partlow-Lefevre. “It provides a setting where students and faculty can make connections and draw inspiration from a variety of perspectives.”
Among the dozens of presenters featured on conference panels were several ISU students (including–full disclosure–this writer) and faculty members, many of whom moderated panels.
Two panels entitled “Movements” and “Education and Community” kicked off the two-day conference. Chaired by Communications, Media & Persuasion (CMP) assistant professor Betsy Brunner, the “Movements” panel featured research by an ISU alumnus and an associate lecturer.
Melissa Cortes, an educator who graduated from ISU in 2007, explored the gender dynamics of consensual non-monogamous relationships. Tera Joy Cole, who teaches within the English department, read a second-person-perspective story in discussion of the #MeToo movement.
Meanwhile, during the Education and Community panel, Jessica Willis of Eastern Washington University discussed incorporating feminist understandings of knowledge and power into the classroom.
“What is at stake in the stories we tell?” she asked the audience, drawing on the theme of the conference. She answered her own question in her paper abstract: “How we tell a story is a choice, and that choice has political consequences for the ways that individuals understand themselves as social subjects and global citizens.”
Panelists further explored their own stories of gender and sexuality during “Gender Spectrums” and “Performing, Resisting and Critiquing Masculinity” panels. Scholars featured in the former discussed asexuality, gender expression, pronouns and gender binary as panelists in the latter panel used the framings of media ecology, whitewater rafting, paternal leave and Brontë novels to to analyze performances of masculinity. CMP assistant professor Zac Gershberg chaired the masculinity panel, and English assistant professor Elise Barker presented her paper “Branwell Brontë: The Burden of Masculinity on Authorship.” Barker chaired the following panel, “Navigating Gender in Pop Culture.” In that panel, Daniel Shelden, a master’s student in ISU’s communications department, shared his study of sexual harassment within the video game community, “Video Game Harassment and What Companies Can Do.”
The conference’s keynote speaker also addressed the importance of media representation. Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre of Western Washington University discussed her book-in-progress, “Curious About George: Curious George, Cultural Icons, Colonialism, & American Exceptionalism,” exploring how race and gender are portrayed in the iconic book and television series.
Schwartz-DuPre characterized her book not as an attack on “Curious George” but as an invitation to revisit the series and analyze its messaging.
“When we read when we are young,” she said, “it shapes our understanding of who we are and who we are meant to be.”
She discussed the positioning of Curious George as an icon for STEM education and as a pinnacle of American exceptionalism, these roles aligning with the titular monkey’s place in the cultural canon. Drawing parallels between The Man in the Yellow Hat’s African explorations and historical colonizers, she highlighted issues of race and colonialism within the “Curious George” books, movies and TV shows.
“As students learn to read, they should also read to learn,” she said. “It’s really important to know what our children are learning.”
On Friday, ISU students spoke on the “Pop Culture Gender Portrayals” and “Gender and Politics” panels. Elisa Johnson presented a rhetorical critique of Carl’s Jr.’s use of women in advertisements, and Krystoff Kissoon shared his research on gender and Supreme Court opinion.
Rounding off the conference’s panels, assistant dance professor Kathleen Diehl performed a dance routine that challenged “expectations regarding gender and dance.”
ISU’s 2018 Intermountain Gender & Sexuality Conference concluded with a dine-and-debate event in which attendees ate lunch while four debate students debated about the Equal Rights Amendment. Participants Nick Grunig, Conner Coutts and Jack Bradley all attend ISU.
“Students benefit heavily by being allowed to participate,” Grunig said of the conference. “This allowed students to practice what it might look like in the professional world.
Partlow-Lefevre called the debate the highlight of the conference she had organized.
“To think that hundreds of intellectual people came to have a conversation about gender and sexuality throughout the whole conference makes me incredibly happy,” Grunig said. “I find nothing better than for people to talk about legitimate and difficult subjects in an environment that is easily accessible to students.”
