Academic literature on the topic 'Women Women college students Mass media'

Feminist discourse is evolving and a new wave of feminist consciousness is appearing in the media, in political debates, and in the classroom. I teach literature at a community college in Las Vegas, where the students are similar to the “common readers” of Woolf’s Morley College in their desire to educate themselves, in their educational preparedness, and in their socioeconomic circumstances. Many of my students work as entertainers on The Strip and throughout my four years of teaching in Sin City, I have observed that my female students who work in the sex entertainment industry take a special interest in Woolf’s work. These students connect their concerns about female independence, sexual assault, pay inequality, and body-shaming, with Woolf’s feminist writings. Many of these women strongly identify with Woolf’s declarations of independence in A Room of One’s Own, as well as some of her most radical philosophies, such as her proclamation in Three Guineas that, “to sell a brain is worse than to sell a body.” Woolf speaks to and for these women in unique ways, and their responses to her work reflect a new, fourth wave feminist awareness. This study considers emerging, fourth wave feminist readings of Woolf both in theory and in practice. I wish to share the unique experience of teaching Woolf’s work to college students who identify as sex-entertainment workers, and highlight ways that these contemporary women are using Woolf’s work to create a new feminist heritage.

The 1990s witnessed the emergence of stalking as a new social construct that was recognized through the development of antistalking statutes. Simultaneously, stalking received widespread attention in the popular news media and in scholarly works by mental health professionals. Considerable variation exists among the legal, clinical, and research definitions of stalking. Large-scale epidemiological studies, conducted in Australia, Great Britain, and the United States, suggest that stalking is a relatively common behavior. Women have an 8–33% lifetime risk of being the victim of stalking, depending on the definition. For men, the lifetime risk is 2–7%. Studies on the epidemiology of stalking violence give a wide range of results: 3–46% of stalkers progress to violence. Higher rates of stalking have been reported among some populations, including college students, mental health clinicians, and celebrities. Female stalkers differ from male stalkers in their motivations and target populations. Finally, children and adolescents also exhibit stalking behaviors outside of normal developmental behaviors. Behavior patterns that we now call “stalking” have been described for thousands of years. Hippocrates, Galen, Plutarch, and various physicians of the Middle Ages described these behaviors (Lloyd-Goldstein, 1998). In 1837, Esquirol differentiated erotomania and nymphomania (Esquirol, 1838/1965). Both Kraepelin (1921/1976) and de Clérambault (1921) described erotomania in the 1920s. Classic literature provides several historical instances of what appears to be stalking. It has been argued that Shakespeare’s last 25 sonnets reflect his obsessional attachment and spurned pursuit of the “dark lady,” with evidence of obscenities, threats, paranoia, and irrationality (Skoler, 1998). Mullen, Pathé, and Purcell (2000) describe evidence of behaviors typical of stalkers in the lives and written works of Italian poets Danté Alighieri (1265–1321) and Petrarch (1304–1374), and the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855). Louisa May Alcott’s first novel, A Long Fatal Love Chase, written in 1866 but discovered and published in 1993, tells the story of a young woman pursued with increasing anger, resentment, and ultimately violence by the husband she left (Mullen et al., 2000). Two of the late twentieth century’s most notorious forensic psychiatric cases arose from the mental problems and violent behavior of stalkers.