2003 McNair Program Abstracts

The Heretic: A Creative Approach to the English Reformation
Sarah Walker
Mentor: Prof. George F. Steckley, Knox College

The question of how the English Reformation, a time of great change and upheaval, when people were asked to choose state over religion and change ways hundreds of years old, affected ordinary people on a personal level might be best done in fiction. "The Heretic" is the story of Anne Richardson, a devout Catholic woman of nineteen living in Exeter. Her widowed mother is ready to remarry a merchant whose son is fresh from Cambridge, a hotbed of Protestant fervor. The clash that took place all over England between the old ways and the new is told in the microcosm of one ordinary family. (Research Year: 2001)

More Than Just Sex: Bringing the fear out of the feminist porn wars
Frances Elaine Hackler
Mentor: Professor Magali Roy Fequiere, Knox College

During the Women's Liberation Movement of the 1970s feminists began to search and explore the reasons why violence and oppression directed against women occurred in society. In this search some feminists identified pornography as a component enabling men to subordinate women by combining sex with violence and enacting an attitude of intolerance. However, as feminists against pornography mobilized so did other feminists, who had a different perspective on the role of pornography in society, which included such views as pornography as a means of sexual exploration and as an expression of free speech. This split feminists into two visible groups identified by the public and feminists themselves as anti-porn and pro-porn. Although identifying feminists as pro-porn and anti-porn oversimplifies the rationale behind the formation of their thoughts, the debate that developed lead to many questions amongst feminists. Some questions included what pornography is, what pornography does and whether or not sexually explicit material can ever be incorporated into women's lives in a positive manner. In my research I analyze the different perspectives of the debate and explore the context of their ideologies and how they were formulated in order to understand the climate of the times. (Research year: 2001)