Congratulations to our Graduating Honors Thesis Students:
GSF First Major (Second Major: Global Health)
Thesis Title: Fetuses for Likes: An Analysis of the Contemporary Uses of Fetal Imagery by American Anti-Choice Extremists Online
Abstract: This thesis engages critically with the historical and contemporary uses of fetal imagery to explore how it has been leveraged by American anti-choice extremists on social media to promote notions of fetal personhood. I develop an analysis of fetal imagery in a medical context to understand what social forces shaped the depiction of the fetus and how these forces contributed to the framing of fetal imagery in popular culture and the abortion debate. This informs my analysis of the use of fetal imagery by anti-choice extremists as well as everyday social media users on platforms including Twitter and Instagram. Ultimately, I argue that social media has enhanced anti-choice rhetoric around fetal personhood by exposing fetal imagery to larger audiences and eliciting these audiences to propagate their own fetal content online.
GSF 2nd Major (1st Major: Biophysics)
Thesis Title: Queering Oocytes: State, Laboratory, and Body
Abstract: Recent advances in stem cell technology enable new possibilities for biological reproduction among same-sex couples and transgender people who have undergone medical or surgical transition. Despite this promise of revolutionary queer futurity, biomedical science has been harnessed to marginalize the reproductive capacity of the poor, colonized, and people of color for eugenic and capitalist aims. This study draws upon firsthand experiences working in a reproductive biology laboratory to explore how the formation of scientific knowledge (re)produces normative temporalities of the reproductive body. Embracing politics of multiplicity elucidates concrete changes in scientific and medical practice that forge more equitable somatechnic reproductive presents and futures.
Gender, Sexuality Feminist Studies