Department Hosts First Gender Fair

On December 2nd and 4th 2009, the Department of Communication Studies hosted its first Gender Fair in the Student Union’s One O’clock Lounge.  Conceived of and presented by members of the Gender & Communication class (COMM 4220) under the guidance of Dr. Suzanne Enck-Wanzer, the Gender Fair drew in more than 200 participants over the two days including two middle-school classes of eager and energetic students.

Following the theme, “Gender, Sex, Race: We’ll Do Whatever it Takes,” the fair’s aim was to raise awareness on campus of five intersecting aspects of gender and communication (mirroring the five segments of the class): One group presented information about the intersections between race and gender; one group discussed gender as it relates to sex and sexuality; one group presented materials pertaining to (dis)orderly bodies (e.g., thinking through how various discourses affect our expectations of what men’s and women’s bodies should look like); one group communicated information about women’s advancements in the political sphere; and one group presented information on gender and violence as it relates to communication.

Students were asked to follow three goals—to be educational, provocative, and controversial—and they certainly succeeded in all three areas.  The Gender Fair included a wide variety of educational outreach including three multi-media videos, posters documenting gendered advancements and drawbacks, candy attached to informative quotations and statistics, and trivia games aimed at improving cultural competence about gender in the U.S.  The class also reached its goals of being provocative and controversial by including a cross-dressing Olympic-style contest, a game that awarded participants for naming the various parts of women’s and men’s anatomies, distortion mirrors that questioned people’s ideals of their own bodies, opportunities for people to draw outlines of their bodies to discuss further their self-perceptions, challenges to inflammatory language, and graphic images of bodies in pain.

This year is UNT’s MLK Year of Service—UNT’s program to spotlight the good works done by UNT students.  UNT seeks to bring service and community involvement to the top of people’s minds and transform Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and teachings into actual community service that helps solve social problems.  In line with this mission, the Gender Fair actively sought participation from the local and University communities, it included a representative from Denton County’s Friends of the Family (domestic violence prevention program) as part of the event, and it collected donations of food, clothing, and money for Friends of the Family.

Click here to view the Gender Fair Flyer

Click here to view the Gender Fair Brochure