“To be a woman is to perform”- Simone de Beauvoir Does my body provoke you? Growing up as women, no matter the decade, you may been conditioned to believe one thing: your body, their pleasure. This project argues that adolescent women have been misrepresented in a number of ways, through the lens of the camera. I will interrogate the patriarchal framing of female friendship, purity, sexuality and parental figures by comparing classic “teen films”such as American Pie, Revenge of the Nerds, and Superbad to their independent competitors such as Thirteen, Welcome to the Dollhouse, and The Virgin Suicides. Scholars such as Timothy Shary, Frances Smith, and Caroline Madden support the argument that certain indie films reframe the myths of teenage selfhood. My presentation questions if teenage girls are a myth the patriarchy made up, or if we are simply conditioned to experience teen selfhood by harmful representational traditions.
What can we learn about social structures in early America from criminal trials and court documents? Student judges from Dr. Knouff's True Crime in Early America Spring 2025 class each present one of six significant cases from the early American period, analyzing their cultural significance and what they can tell us about social structures of the time. Themes of the cases include gender hierarchy, Revolutionary politics, race, class, traditionally silenced voices, and the importance of court documents as historical records.
Even before Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, state legislatures found ways to limit access to abortion, namely through Targeted Regulations of Abortion Providers or TRAP laws, which sidestepped the federal protection of the right to an abortion by placing excessively burdensome requirements on abortion providers.This study will examine the impact of TRAP laws on women’s labor mobility using county-level abortion data, state-wide TRAP law data, and data on the employment and average salary of workers in the leisure and hospitality industry, spanning from 2001 to 2022. The study will employ Local Projections Difference-in-Differences (LP-DiD) methodology (Dube et. al 2025) which utilizes a “clean control” to ensure appropriate control group assignment, mitigating the issue of negative weighting that arises from using earlier-treated panel members as controls for later-treated panel members. This methodology will ensure that differences among states in TRAP law enactment and abolishment are treated properly.
