GSFS Advising 

Honouring GSFS & GWS Students Graduating in the Class of 2020

The IGSF is very proud of our graduating students in the Class of 2020.

Since there will be no traditional commencement ceremony this year, we wish to honour the tremendous contributions our graduating students have made to Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill in other ways. We hope that wherever you are headed after McGill, gender, sexuality, feminist and social justice studies will continue to support and inform the life and work from here.

Books have brought us together and grounded our conversations. We will be providing graduating GSFS Majors and students in the Graduate Option in Gender and Women’s Studies with a copy of a book from Montreal’s Metonymy Press, https://metonymypress.com/, to mark this achievement.

We extend warm congratulations to our GSFS graduates, who are listed below.

Class of 2020

Joint Honours

Kate Marr-Laing: Marrying Prairie Nationalisms: Creating and Maintaining the Albertan Citizen Subject

I examine the ways in which a particular conception of the gendered and heteronormative citizen has pervaded throughout the colonization and political development of Alberta. By centering my analysis on the particular subjectivities produced and enforced through colonial policy, I aim to reveal its continued effects in contemporary policy development. In a historical institutional analysis, I focus specifically on the discursive framing of marriage laws and social welfare policy, finding arguments for economic prosperity to undergird violent mechanisms of social control in the Canadian prairie region throughout the late 19thand early 20thcenturies. Drawing on queer theory and sexual citizenship scholarship, I use this historical analysis to shed light on the obscured impacts of Jason Kenney’s more contemporary political rhetoric since his election as Premier. It is my aim, in this research, to turn critique towards the erasure inherent to the deliberate creation of the Albertan citizen subject in order to create space to imagine alternative subjectivities in policy development.

Mohammed Odusanya: Wúrà: Reflections on the Gender of Gold in Pre/Colonial Yoruba Societies

Examining the shifting relationship between acquisition, fungibility, and gender in pre-colonial and colonial era Yoruba societies, this presentation examines how gold, specifically gold jewellery, came to possess gendered significations amongst the Yoruba people of West Africa. Through an analysis of travelogues, early divorce records, newspapers, and other historical records, I aim to reconstruct the emergence of a gendered Yoruba subjectivity borne out of the coterminous historical processes of Western capitalist accumulation, slavery, anti-slavery, and colonialism. Addressing the scholar’s dependence on European observers and other logocentric sources in order to promote this argument, this presentation will also attempt to reflexively address the methodological limits of reconstructing marginalized subjectivities in historical feminist research.

Honours

Gabriele Surprenant: Sugar Babies, Sex Work, and Slander: Examining the Moral Arguments Against Prostitution, Then and Now

I analyze and compare the historical construction of morality in North America around sex work, as this sets the precedent of the moral arguments brought forward against sex workers, including Sugar Babies who “participate in typically long-term romantic and sexual relationships in exchange for money and/or gifts”, today. I will then build upon these findings in order to better understand the impact of Sugar babies’ work on perceptions of morality and acceptable female behaviour. Finally, I will use this to discuss the manner in which Sugar-Babying differs from other forms of sex-work because how it fits into social expectations of relationality, and how social constructs associated with sex work continue to adapt to current regulations, social norms, and behaviours.

Majors

Bei Evely

Sarah Graham

Yasmina Male

Catherine Morrison

Amani Premjee

Rasha Rashid

Joanie Ricard

Victoria Taber

Misra Trana Atli

Elise Weber

Minors

Hani Abramson

Eloise Albaret

Patrick Augustin

Juliette Barré

Emilie Belanger

Camille Bergeron

Reid Bevan

Lillian Blouin

Lamia Bushra

Melissa Cavaloc

Johanna Cline

Audrey Deschamps

Bea Dimaculangan

Jade Downie-Landry

Zoe Dummett

Caitlin Durcan

Isabella Focsaneanu

Elanore Fuller

Christina Gagliardi

Avery Galea-McClure

Sara Ghandour

Lindsey Gray

Tamara Janowski

Zeynep Kartal

Ariana Kaye

Bee Khaleeli

Mariah Lamont-Lennox

Ali Lapeña-Barry

Véronique Leblanc

Julia Loach

Alexandra Machalani

Alex Mactavish

Adeline Makin

Kelvin Mansaray

Colin McCrossan

Sarah Miles

Caroline Monahan

Emily Murphy

Paola Neocleous

Macayla Nesbitt-Batten

Jessica Pan

Yasir Piracha

Emma Potochny

Jamélie Renaud-Steppan

Emily Thomson

Léo-Michelle Trépanier

Kate Turpie

Moizza Ul Haq

Alexa van Abbema

Eva Vandervort-Charbonneau

Sabrina Vo

Zoe Voigt

Amy Wang

Jessica Wang

Jessica Yanko

Graduate Students in the Option in Gender and Women’s Studies

Viviane Josephine Cottle: MA in Sociology with a concentration in Gender and Women’s Studies, Public Perceptions of Restorative Justice in Canada: Survey Data versus the McClintic Case

Liuba González de Armas: MA in Art History with Graduate Option in Gender and Women’s Studies, Revolutionary Poster Women: Socialist Realism, Pop, and Model Femininity in Cuban Political Graphics (1961–75)

Tai Jacob: MA Geography, Embodied migrations: Mapping trans and gender nonconforming refugee narratives in the Canadian refugee regime

Harpreet Mander: MA in Education & Society: Gender and Women Concentration, Hybrid-ges: Navigating Bicultural Identities as Indo-Canadians in Surrey

Brian O'Neill: MA in Second Language Education (Gender Studies Thesis Option), Queering English Language Teaching Materials: Censorship and Intersectional Approaches

Yasmeen Shahzadeh: MA Education & Society (Gender & Women’s Studies), Gendered Citizenship: Investigating representations of women in Jordanian Civic Education textbooks

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