Studies in Sexualities Essay Prize
2025 SIS Essay Contest Winners
The winners of the 2025 SIS Essay Contest have been chosen!
Undergraduate Winner:
Iris Wu, WGSS and Quantitative Sciences, “Naked Power: Digital Nudity as Queer Resistance in China’s Anti-Domestic Violence Campaign“
Undergraduate Commended Essay:
Ariella Shulman, Philosophy, “Sex Work, Mother, and Gendered Stigmatization”
Graduate Winner:
Graduate Commended Essays:
Josh Howard, GDR, “Can’t Keep a Good Hoedown”: Queer Country Dancing and Community Building in Atlanta, Georgia”
Mariana Rodríguez-Espinoza, Spanish and Portuguese, “Caribbean Geographies of Refusal“
Undergraduate Essay Award Winners
Winner:
- Iris Wu "Naked Power: Digital Nudity as Queer Resistance in China’s Anti-Domestic Violence Campaign"
Highly Commended Essay:
- Ariella Shulman"Sex Work, Mother, and Gendered Stigmatization"
Winner:
- Jay Jones "Race-ing the Family, Denying Black Kinship"
Highly Commended Essay:
- Claudia Smith "Phallogocentrism and Emotional Dissonance in Pornography: Exploring Feminist Theories on Identity, Pleasure, and Power"
Winner:
- Karina Nehra, "Care and Femininity in Colonial India: The Gendered Medical Gaze"
Highly Commended Essay:
- Gabriella Shapcott, "How Queerness Enhances Spiritual and Religious Practices in Africa"
Winner:
• Katy Mayfield,"Affect and Agnotology in SB 8's Abortion Rhetoric"
Highly Commended Essay:
• Amalia Tenuta, "From 'Fetal Rights' Legislation to the 'Transgender Child': Considering a 'Trans of Color' Critique of Reproductive Justice Frameworks"
- Emma Kantor, "Agents of Destruction : Sexual Assault Realisation in Girls and I May Destroy You". Written for Film 102 with Dr. Michelle Schrieber in the Department of Film and Media Studies.
- Hannah Thomas Risman, "Where can the Black/Queer Body Rest in Amerika?". Written for Black Queer Studies with Dr. Alix Chapman in the Dept. of African American Studies.
Winner
- Kira Tucker: "Embracing the Abject: Queer as a Term of Linguistic Resistance”
Winner
- Misa Stekl: “Queer Bio/Necropolitics in Terrorist Assemblages and Beyond”
Highly Commended Undergraduate Essays
- Laura Briggs: “Class Boundaries, Masculinization, and Sexual Assault in Kenneth MacMillan's Manon”
- Felipe de Almeid: “At the Margins of the Homosexual/Transgender Divide”
Graduate Essay Award Winners
Winner:
- Sana Noon,"Coming of (R)age in Pakistan: The Event and the Everyday"
Highly Commended Essays:
- Josh Howard, "Can’t Keep a Good Hoedown”: Queer Country Dancing and Community Building in Atlanta, Georgia"
- Mariana Rodríguez-Espinoza, "Caribbean Geographies of Refusal"
Winner:
- Emilie Casey, "Pastoralizing Care: Carceral Power, Sexual Deviance, and Psychological Disability in the Early Clinical Pastoral Education Movement"
Highly Commended Essay:
- Joslyn Gardner, "Feeling Ecstatic: Ecstasy as Embodied Practice"
Winner:
• Corwin Davis, "Kin/folk: Notes on Black queer Diaspora and Ancillary Modes of Kinship"
Highly Commended Essay:
• Mansi Hitesh, "Troubling Transracialism: Transgender, Transnationality, and the Progress Narrative of Trans"
- Elara Sherman, "Birthing Monsters : Fetal Memorials, Horror Shows, and Feminine Writing of the Clandestine Abortion", Department of French and Italian.
- Sana Malik Noon, "Muslim Women's Subjectivity : Beyond Piety and Promiscuity", Department of Anthropology.
- Samantha Wrisley, "The Affective Content of "Normal Contempt" : Misogyny as a Condition of Ambivalence", Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Winner
- Rohit Chakraborty: "(Over)Bearing Desires: Reassessing hegemonic masculinity and validating female carnality in Radhika Govindrajan The Bear Who Loved a Woman"
Winner
- Brendan Moore: “Theory’s Trasvestissement”
Highly Commended Undergraduate Essay
- Suzanne Persard: “Decriminalizing Section 377: The Liberal Limits of Decolonizing Brown Queer”