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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" 

Winner:
  • 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.
Highly Commended Essay:
  • 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"  

Winner:
  • Elara Sherman, "Birthing Monsters : Fetal Memorials, Horror Shows, and Feminine Writing of the Clandestine Abortion", Department of French and Italian.
Highly Commended Essays:
  • 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”