Essays
Writing essays is both a career and passion for me. I love the research that essays allow and the opportunities to delve into serious topics during my academic career.
Although I have written on a range of topics as a ghostwriter and freelance writer, for this portfolio, I have focused on essays that I've written over the course of my academic career at Western University, which also includes some courses through King's University. The topics focus, primarily, on gender, sexuality, and women studies.
Academic Papers
A two part research essay that explores how modern day, white feminism continues to perpetuate the white colonial gaze. The research essay dives deeply into critiquing white feminism, while a presentation video explores the ways that white feminism uses the tools of the white colonial gaze to continue "othering" marginalized groups.
This essay was selected to be presented at the Flaunting It! Undergraduate Conference on March 21, 2025.
Exploring the words fit and misfit, I look at the duality of meaning that could be both positive and negative for both words and centering them around dis/ability studies.
In this essay, I examine the poem Fit/Misfit that I wrote for this assignment and how it both reflects and, in some ways, critiques the very concepts and readings that we have examined in the fall term.
In this essay, I explore the lack of social justice for domestic violence that exists and how we need to refocus the lens on domestic violence as its own unique social justice issue. In addition, I explore how art activism is important to raise awareness of the issue of domestic violence in order to dispel the dehumanization that many victims of domestic violence experience.
This essay shows my editing process through a pdf file, along with the final version of the essay.
Although known for her role as an organizer in the civil rights movement, Ella Baker was more than an activist or organizer. She was pivotal in key moments of the Black Liberation Movement and had a direct impact on Black feminist thought through her unorthodox way of life for Black women at that time, which challenged respectability politics while being aware of the intersectionality of experience well before the term was coined. In my essay, I explore Ella Baker, her work as an activist, and the ways that I feel she is an important person whose life engenders the Black feminist praxis.
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Blackness is a way of being that transcends the narrow view of what white, hegemonic society believes it to be. It is complicated, transgressive, and is constantly evolving. Blackness is radical in its resistance as it overcomes the anti-Blackness inherited by Black bodies, ideas, and from mainstream society.
For my essay, I will be focusing on this diversity of Blackness through the exploration of themes and a quote from our week five lessons. Furthermore, I will touch briefly on how Blackness, when it becomes solidarity allows for Black joy.
Aging has long been a topic of contention within society as it centers around the worth of older populations. While aging can be freeing for some population groups, marginalized groups, including women, often face growing restrictions regarding autonomy and often find their self worth and self determination minimized as they age. In addition, with the views around aging, there is a loss of activism, stories, and agency for older women, especially for older Black women. In my essay, I will analyze Corinne T. Field’s, “Old-Age Justice and Black Feminist History: Sojourner Truth’s and Harriet Tubman’s Intersectional Legacies.” In addition, I will explore the erasure of old Black womanhood and link it to previous readings we have had in the course, specifically around activist mothering that is a dominant trait of Black communities and culture. In doing so, my essay will agree with Field that it is important to look at Black feminist history and how it is applied to old age justice for Black women.
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