Sim Gill (she/her)

"Finding Sarah Everard: A Critical Discourse Analysis Exploring the First Two Weeks of News Media Coverage Following Her Disappearance and Murder"
 
Abstract: 

On March 3, 2021, Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old marketing executive, was last seen walking around Clapham Common in South London. Through the lens of a content and discourse analysis, this article analyzes a total of 525 news media headlines, covering the first 2 weeks of her disappearance and murder. This analysis unpacks the pedagogic process of the mediated performance of violence against women and girls (VAWG) to principally argue that the British news media construct a narrative arc that invites audiences to follow a curated ideal victim. The utility of this narrative leads Sarah to become a sympathetic narrative citation, to be called on by various interest groups when negotiating the social performances of VAWG. Crucially, this article interrogates the power and affect behind news media performances of VAWG that privilege an ideological conception of the ideal victim, a disturbed perpetrator, a period of mourning, and a neoliberal discourse of justice. 

M.C. Overholt (she/her)

"The City of Sexual Deviancy: Race, Rodents, and the Queerness of Single Motherhood"

Abstract: 

In 1975, Northwestern University Hospital administrators cut the ribbon on a new building project – the Prentice Women’s Hospital and Maternity Center. Designed by Bertrand Goldberg Associates, the project publicly represented a shift in the medical field toward “family-centered care,” which aimed to incorporate the heteronormative, nuclear family into the child-birthing process. In this presentation however, I argue that while Goldberg’s maternity center revealed certain advances in medical care, it was also designed to conceal – obscuring both the genealogy of human behavioral and sexological research that informed Goldberg's design, and years of feminist protest against the arrival of Northwestern’s new maternity center and the associated demise of the Chicago Maternity Center. 

Register by emailing GSWS Graduate Associate Caitlin Adkins [adkinsca@sas.upenn.edu]