Women's Studies Essays Take Top Honors at Vermont Symposium

Author: Leyla Kattan

Essays written by two Middlebury College students were presented at the Seventh Annual Women's Studies Symposium, held in Castleton on March 22.
Rebecca Adams '03 and Jena Siegel '04 were chosen along with 10 other students from Vermont to present their papers to a panel at this year's symposium entitled "Feminism for the Post-Viagra Age." The papers were placed in one of four sections. The authors then read their works and fielded questions posed by the panelists.
At the conclusion of the readings, three papers were selected and given special recognition as the top three of the symposium. Adams and Siegel took two of these awards, and the other was given to Anne Moore of the University of Vermont for her paper entitled "It's in the Blood: Dark Doubles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
Siegel's paper, entitled "What Do You Mean By 'No?' Pornography and the Game of Sex," was written for a class. According to Siegel, who is a philosophy major, "It was an attempt to evaluate the claim that pornography subordinates and silences women." Although some philosophers say this claim is indefensible because pornography itself cannot have the power to subordinate silence, Siegel concluded that it did indeed have this power.
Adams' paper was titled "Defining Male and Female: Intersex as a Window to Understanding the Cultural Construction of Sex." The paper presented some of the major ideas from her senior thesis. Within the essay, Adams examined the reasons for and the subsequent implications of surgical alterations to hermaphrodites. Since it is the doctor who decides the sex of a child, Adams argued that sex is a cultural construct. She focused upon the need to "end the surgical paradigm" in order to ensure a "shift of society's focus from biological sex to gender, thereby shifting the emphasis from biology to how the individual chooses to present his or her gender."