Honors

Divine Femininity in the Digital Age: Postfeminism, Aesthetic Entrepreneurship, and the Politics of Empowerment

Born and raised in Southern California’s Inland Empire, Syd (they/she) is a queer, mixed-race, soon-to-be college graduate representing the Andean diaspora (Pomasqui, Ecuador). Their academic and creative interests explore decolonial and Indigenous feminisms, gendered and racialized labor, and digital culture. You can find them drinking matcha, practicing yoga, or vibing to neo-soul playlists. Syd carries the love, resilience, histories, and sacrifices of their ancestors with them wherever they go. Their thesis examines digital content promoting the "divine feminine" on the video sharing platform, YouTube. By examining content creators Teal Swan, Jillz Guerin, and Tam Kaur, they trace how divine femininity functions as both a historical ideology and a distinct postfeminist phenomenon. Drawing upon theories of aesthetic entrepreneurship and postfeminist sensibility, they argue that divine femininity represents a spiritualized and commodified mode of femininity that reinforces neoliberal, racialized, and gender-essentialist hierarchies. Rather than challenging dominant power structures, digital divine feminine content recasts colonial gender roles in the language of self-care and personal transformation, offering a commodified sense of empowerment that reproduces the logics of colonial racial capitalism.

Feminism’s Woman Question: Investments and Disinvestments from the Category of ‘Woman’ across Late Twentieth-Century Feminist Thought

Hailing from the valleys and gorges of Oregon, Eva Astrid Jones’s curiosities pool at the feet of contemporary and historical feminist movements, searching for inspiration and stories in lesbian histories of gender transgression and solidarity. During her time at Stanford, Eva engaged in anti-sexual violence organizing efforts and cooperative living communities. They work at the Clayman Institute of Gender Research, where they worked under Dr. Susan Stryker to support the newest edition of Transgender History, amongst other projects. Eva is receiving a Bachelor’s of Arts and Science, having studied Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies concentrating in Queer and Feminist Histories, as well as, Freshwater Systems Engineering. Next year, she will work towards completing her graduate studies in Hydrology at Stanford. “Feminism’s Woman Question: Investments and Disinvestments from the Category of ‘Woman’ across Late Twentieth-Century Feminist Thought” interrogates the ideological struggle over the category of woman in late twentieth-century feminist thought. Through a comparative analysis this paper traces how different feminist traditions alternately invested in woman as a foundational political subject or disinvested from it as a patriarchal constriction. The project reveals how the movement’s shifting boundaries redefined not only who could claim feminism, but what political work feminism was imagined to do. As the category of woman became an increasingly stable identity rather than a construct to be dismantled, feminism’s earlier commitments to collective liberation were displaced. In turn, feminist rhetoric became vulnerable to co-optation by neoliberal and right-wing projects, while marginalizing those whose legitimacy as women remained contested. By excavating these tensions, this thesis insists on the political urgency of renewed engagement with the unresolved tensions at the heart of contemporary feminist politics: what is woman to feminism?

The Yoetzet and Her Halakha:Discursive Practice of Female Experts in Jewish Law

Chana Lanter is a senior from Los Angeles studying Philosophy and Religious Studies with minors in Linguistics and Translation Studies. She is pursuing an interdisciplinary honors in FGSS; the focus of her research is yoatzot halakha (female Orthodox Jewish experts in menstrual purity law). Broadly, a yoetzet halakha communicates community women’s legal questions to rabbis, where the yoetzet and the rabbi work toward an answer, and then the yoetzet brings said answer back to the woman in a way that she can understand. Chana's thesis explores how yoatzot manage the different discursive environments of the rabbinic sphere and the public sphere. Chana is grateful for all the support she has received throughout the project. She especially wants to thank her advisor Ari Kelman and the Stanford Humanities Center.

Eating Taro

Lyn Lee Loth is majoring in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Biology. Their thesis, Eating Taro ញាំត្រាវ, is a collection of experimental poetry named after the Cambodian idiom “to gossip”–when your mouth becomes hot and swollen after eating the taro root, you can’t help but speak the truth. In the wake of the Khmer Rouge Genocide, mass execution, familial fracturing, and the gendered migration where women stay behind to rebuild, Lyn gossips with Cambodian women in an attempt to grapple with the impossibilities of grief, absence, and state violence. They carry the ongoingness of their kin (in life & death, across diaspora & beyond) and the fight for collective liberation in their work.

Campus Sexual Violence, Institutional Betrayal, & COVID-19: A Quantitative Analysis ofthe Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Campus Sexual Violence Reporting

Sofia Penglase (she/her) is majoring in Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and Public Policy, with a minor in Human Rights. Her thesis explores the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on campus sexual violence reporting through a quantitative analysis using Clery Act data. She argues that student trust in institutions of higher education declined after the pandemic, affecting students’ willingness to report campus sexual violence. Her thesis was inspired by her work in sexual violence education at the Stanford SHARE Title IX Office. Her thesis advisor is Dr. Marcia Stefanick. Sofia will be attending Yale Law School in the fall. 

“No blacks, dirty bodies”: Representations of Black Men in Drummer’s Formative Years (1975-1980)

Erick Angelo Ramirez (he/him) is a senior pursuing a B.S./M.S. in Computer Science with a minor in Biology. His thesis examines representations of Black men in the formative years of Drummer magazine, a foundational gay leather publication launched in 1975. Through analysis of editorial content and personal advertisements, Erick argues that Drummer reproduced racialized sexual tropes—the Mandingo, the Black Brute, the Violable Black Body, and the Dirty Black Body—that rendered Black men as sites of projected white desire based on enduring racial stereotypes that marked them as hypersexual, threatening, abusable, and uncivilized. While Drummer styled itself as a space of sexual liberation, Erick shows how whiteness remained centered in its erotic imagination.

Unearthing Roots: Stories of Midwives and Plants as Reproductive Medicine

Sarae Sinville (she/her) is a Human Biology major specializing in sexual and reproductive health. Her thesis, Unearthing Roots, examines the tension between Black reproductive traditions and the systemic racism underlying reproductive healthcare in the United States. Inspired by the Reproductive Justice framework, Sarae’s research centers the lived experiences of Black southern midwives, explores the erasure of Black women in medicine, and highlights the vital role of herbalism and community care. Her work concerns Black birth workers, their legacies, and their contributions to medicine. Her project is meant to challenge a system that continues to criminalize and endanger Black bodies.

The Trap of Survivorhood

Olivia Ziegler is an artist and educator majoring in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Olivia’s creative honors thesis, “The Trap of Survivorhood,” dissects the impact of individualism in approaches to sexual violence through a hybrid style piece, weaving critical analysis with personal narrative. The thesis implicates individualism— whether guiding institutional support (or lack thereof), defining societal attitudes or motivating readers’ own actions — as a key force in ensuring that efforts to support victims and address sexual violence at large are ultimately inadequate. Olivia hopes readers are left with a clarity and discomfort that compels them toward collective care and action.

Luke Babbitt (he/they) is a senior pursuing a B.A. in Political Science and an M.S. in Computer Science. Their thesis measures the social motivations behind gender assignment before birth, at birth, and in early childhood. From a sociologist’s perspective, Luke’s research seeks to diagnose gender assignment as a social norm — meaning it is a decision made due to normative expectations and sanctions rather than independent preference. His thesis also analyzes our obsession with the gender binary in early childhood and explores alternative models of parenting. Before we can change gender assignment, we first must understand it. His thesis is for non-binary and transgender youth and adults everywhere.

Kirsten Mettler is majoring in political science with a minor in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies. She is pursuing a creative thesis, writing a speculative fiction short story collection on the intersection of technological evolution and gender-based violence. Her project is inspired by policy work she conducted at AccessNow and ChildFund International on issues of online privacy, content moderation, social media, gaming, digital harassment, and nonconsensual image sharing. She thanks Michelle Dauber for her mentorship, and her thesis advisor is Sarah Frisch. Mettler will be attending Harvard Law School in the fall.

Muhammad is a senior studying philosophy. His thesis is an effort to draw on phenomenological critiques of artificial intelligence in order to generate an ethical framework for its governance. The thesis first attempts to diagnose the type of reasoning narrow AI systems engage in and how that might be more adept at dealing with certain problems over others. Despite great progress in the field, he aims to argue that the strictly statistics-driven framework embedded in AI has some serious limitations. Muhammad's hope with this paper is to introduce a new perspective to current conversation about ethics and tech, separate from predominant instrumentalist point of view. His advisors are Adrian Daub and Gabrielle Jackson. 

Matthew Haide Zheng (he/they pronouns) is a double major in Political Science and Human Biology, also completing the Interdisciplinary Honors program in FGSS. Matthew thesis is an ethnography of LGBTQ+ political power in Washington, D.C. In summer 2020, Matthew conducted over 50 interviews spanning 75+ hours with LGBTQ+ individuals, groups, and organizations in the House of Representatives, the Senate, the White House, government affairs-lobbying firms, the nonprofit sector, and grassroots activists all in the D.C. metropolitan area. Using this ethnographic data, his thesis aims to break novel ground in studies of the LGBTQ+ movement, scholarship on LGBTQ assimilation/radicalism, and the measurement of political power more generally. The project is supported by the Franz Boas Summer Grant from the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. His thesis advisors are Margaret Levi and Sylvia Yanagisako.