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Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies

Guide to Resources for Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies

Finding Popular Cultural Materials

Since popular culture is such a huge category, there isn't just one place to search or one search strategy to use. Provided below are some starting suggestions. 

 

  1. Popular culture magazines, both online and print, typically suggest and discuss a wide range of popular culture resources. A feminist magazine is a good place to start looking for popular culture suggestions
  2. To see if there is a piece of popular culture that is gaining scholarly attention, try searching for the type of source or genre of the source in GenderWatch or another database. You will likely not get very many results if you search specific item titles like “maintenance phase” (unless they are extremely popular like the Barbie film) but searching “podcast” may lead to some good podcast recommendations. 

In addition to the Film & Video section of this guide, check the following:

There are several feminist thinkers who are involved in podcasting. Podcasts can be found with Podcatchers like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Besides checking magazines or other materials for recommendations, see the below “Finding Reliable Social Media” to find websites or social media accounts that advertise podcasts. 
 

Magazine Database: PressReader

You can find several relevant magazines in the PressReader database! Popular magazines ranging from Cosmopolitan  to Newsweek are available, as well as magazines from all over the world in a variety of languages. 
 

Other Online Magazines

There are several online magazines that cater to a female audience. Below are a few examples: 

Other Sources

Additionally, you can search Google Arts and Culture for online exhibits, collections and themes for relevant art work. 
 

Newsletter platform sites such as Substack and Medium have become outlets for a wide range of writers--amateur, professional, and scholarly. If a scholar or writer on gender issues that you find credible publishes a newsletter, it may be worthwhile to browse their writings and recommendations for relevant potential sources. As always, evaluation is crucial to determine how you might want to cite or build from their arguments.

Finding Reliable Social Media

Blogs

  1. Lots of academics, Institutional departments,  and feminist activist keep blogs because blogs are an easier and faster format for keeping up with the scholarly conversation than traditional publishing 
  2.  However, this means you as the reader will need to be careful about evaluating the information since it is NOT peer-reviewed.
  3. You can find blogs by searching the names of scholars, departments, etc.  on Google. For example, see Dr. Amerlia Hruby's blog. 
  4.  Alternatively, you can use your typical search terms and include “site:.edu” to the end of the search to limit the results to academic websites. See Gender Matters: The Blog from the University of Buffalo Gender institute as an example. 
  5. You need to cite blogs that you use as sources. The APA Style Guide section on Blog Post and Blog Comment References is a helpful resource. 


 

Social Media Accounts of Reliable Sources
 

  1. Most organizations, activist, and scholars have some sort of social media. Searching out these accounts is more effective at finding reliable sources over searching for specific topics. 
  2. Most reliable social media sources will have an presence elsewhere (i.e. a fully-fledged website, a publication of some sort, a directory entry at an institution, etc). Trying searching for the poster and see if you can find other sources that cover the person or organization. 
  3.  Some social media sites are hard to search. You can limit a google search to a specific site and search for items that way! For example, enter “site:.reddit” at the end of your search for results from reddit
  4. Social Media posts are not stable, meaning you may have issues finding the material again after you first see it, even if you saved the link. Save the post another way either by downloading it or taking a screen shot. 

  5. You still need to properly cite Social Media sources. The American University's Citation Style Guide: Citing Social Media is a good resource for how to do this.