Gender and Sexuality Studies - NMU Events and Announcements

Gender and Sexuality Studies

The NMU Gender Fair is an annual event designed to increase awareness and positive conversations regarding gender and sexuality, intersectionality, and diversity on campus and in the Marquette community.

Gender and Sexuality Studies

Northern Michigan University's annual Gender Fair will take place from 10 a.m to 3 p.m. Friday, March 25, in the main Jamrich Hall lounge. It will feature informational booths, student projects, and faculty presentations to spread awareness, education and conversation about gender and sexuality and related topics between students, staff, and the Marquette community. There will also be raffle drawings. For the duration of the event, the restrooms on the first floor of Jamrich will be gender-neutral. Other restrooms in the building will maintain their gender-specific designations. 

The NMU Gender Fair is hosted by the Gender and Sexuality Studies minor program. Its purpose is to create and enhance diversity and inclusion on NMU's campus. For more information, please visit our webpage: https://nmu.edu/gender/. You can also email us at gender@nmu.edu or find us on Facebook and Instagram. 

Gender and Sexuality Studies

On December 19, 2014, the last episode of Nickelodeon’s Legend of Korra showed Korra, the young Avatar able to bend all four elements, and the nonbender Asami holding hands and smiling into the other’s eyes, similar to the final moments between the main romantic couple of the prequel series. One of the creators, Bryan Konietzko, writes in a blog post about roadblocks he and his co-creator faced pursuing the ending they wanted: “We approached the network and while they were supportive there was a limit to how far we could go with it.” Despite its faults, Korra and Asami’s relationship was revolutionary not only in its depiction of a same-sex bisexual relationship, but also for the show’s portrayals of disability.

Gender and Sexuality Studies

College, specifically undergraduate, men are often described as “drunken, promiscuous… lovers of pornography, sports, and video games who rape women, physically assault each other, [and] vandalize buildings on campus” (Harris & Harper, 2014, p. 10). These behaviors are perceived to be common, even normal, for undergraduate men; however, there are many men who forego engaging in these behaviors and actively work to undermine toxic gender norms on their campuses. This presentation highlights college men who actively work to disrupt toxic gender norms that perpetuate men’s violence. Those who attend will begin to understand what motivates these men to act and how to implement effective initiatives to address toxic masculinity on college campuses.

Gender and Sexuality Studies

As their routines disappeared and their domestic responsibilities doubled, Puerto Rican mothers Noelia and Mariel, found themselves absorbing the impact of the disaster for their families. While Puerto Rican mothers have historically carried the burden of decades of structural and economic decline, overnight the stakes had changed, and their mothering practices needed to yet again, adjust "on the march." When taken together, the paradigm of intensive mothering and the gendered stratification of disaster relief and recovery efforts produced conditions that not only push them back into the private but also double their mothering obligations, and endowed them with guilt and burdens of the selfless. At the same time, mothers must creatively approach mothering in these conditions, building new neighborhood relationships and rethinking the old familiar routines. Put differently, these mothers were not immune to cultural and societal norms that are not only engendered by care work but place the responsibility and expectation for resilience on women. As I will show in this presentation through two different mothering narratives, mothers reconciled the material, psychological, and discursive tensions by shifting not just the way they mothered, finding empowering moments in the disempowering conditions, but also how they came to feel about mothering and themselves in light of the narratives around them.