The University of Akron’s Women’s Studies Program will host their upcoming Rethinking Gender Series. The series will include five different events that take place over the course of the 2023-2024 UA school year. All events take place on Tuesdays, from 12:15-1:15 p.m., at various locations across The University of Akron’s campus. Each event will be hosted by a different UA professor or speaker who will offer unique perspectives on various topics within women’s studies. The Rethinking
Gender Series will provide students with information surrounding the inequalities women face, how women are viewed in society and how we can open our minds to dispel those ideas and create a brighter future for women.
The first event of the Rethinking Gender Series took place on Tuesday, Oct. 10, in the Jean Hower Taber Student Union. Dr. Kara Kvaran, professor in the Women’s Studies Program, hosted the first event titled “Strong Female Characters: Depictions of Women with Super Strength on Television.” Kvaran focused her presentation on how superhero women have been depicted in television shows throughout the past six decades. Kvaran selected 19 shows where the female superhero is the main character. She watched the first and last episodes of the first and last seasons, and she studied the main female characters’ occupation, appearance, personality and masculine vs. feminine traits.
“Can we chart the change in these shows against the change in general attitudes about women, and how that is reflected in popular culture?” Kvaran asked during her presentation. We can. Kvaran’s findings showed that depictions of female superheroes experience stages that mirror how society views women, starting in the 1970s and moving towards modern day. When women are viewed as weak and controllable by men in the real world, those traits are given to superhero women in television. Women character’s traits and appearances have improved as society shifts towards a more accepting and less objective view of women, but we still have a long way to go.
“These shows very much reflect societal attitudes towards feminism and female empowerment,” Kvaran said.
The Rethinking Gender Series has four more events throughout the academic year. The next talk is on Tuesday, Nov. 14 titled “It Takes a Village: Narratives of Black Women Faculty Navigating Motherhood in Academe,” presented by Martina L. Sharp-Grier. Other events include researching recipe archives, a guided tour of sexology in the Cummings Center at UA and a poetry reading. For more information regarding specific event times, dates and topics, refer to the Rethinking Gender Series flyer above, or visit the Women’s Studies events home page. https://www.uakron.edu/ws/events.dot
