While many typically believe transgender issues are new, Christine Jorgensen emerged as a media celebrity in 1952 as one of the first transgender women. Many historians and gender scholars have analyzed Jorgensen specifically in relation to gender, however, they do not analyze her larger role as the first representative of the transgender community. Thus, I ask: In what ways did Jorgensen both positively progress and negatively complicate the transsexual movement? How did Jorgensen articulate her understanding of gender? And in so doing, how did she become a key figure of social movements concerned with issues of sexuality and gender? My research contributes to the larger scholarly conversation about the transgender movement by analyzing the ways Jorgensen used her public platform to both occupy the spotlight and educate the public. She performed in her own show, released an autobiography, directed an autobiographical movie, and spoke at many universities, all to tell her story and answer questions. However, as much as she was an expert on transgender issues, she got into trouble when it came to both the Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements. A product of her time, her views on gender conflicted with feminists and her conservative thoughts on the Gay community’s efforts caused many to denounce her. I discovered, however, that Jorgensen’s views were transformed through interactions with the efforts of lesbians to declare their rights in 1973. Overall, my paper demonstrates the importance of Christine Jorgensen as an early voice for transgender identity and the fluidity of gender.

On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. The U.S. government enacted public health measures to reduce the number and severity of cases. Traumatic events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, often change an individual’s values. A study conducted by the Karamanoğlu Mehmetbey University looked at the psychological effects of the COVID 19 Pandemic on society and found that “COVID - 19 is a devastating pandemic that deeply affects all humanity” (Akat & Karataş, 2020). As such, personal values and consumption habits changed because of individuals’ lives adjusting to a more secluded lifestyle. These measures, along with the burden of the virus, profoundly impacted most students’ individual values and consumption habits across North America. Milton Rokeach, who is a renowned published researcher recognized by the Marketing discipline, developed a theoretical framework for personal values. The framework consisted of 18 terminal “end states of existence” values and 18 instrumental “modes of conduct” values (Rokeach, 1973). This presentation will review main topics on how personal values changed in college students and a proposed research study methodology to answer the question of what type of effect this change had on consumer behavior.

My research examines gender, race and class performativity as prescribed by print cookbooks from the 1950s-2020. This work attempts to press on the contemporary assumptions that texts and technologies can be inherently post-feminist, or that there has been such an evolution in the construction of these texts that they situate themselves as post-feminist, void of binary gendered roles and regressive socio economic assumptions of class and racial performance and the situation of women in society. A sampling of three to four cookbooks were selected from the 1950s, 1970s, 1990s and 2010s, loosely in alignment with pre-second wave feminism, second wave feminism, third wave feminism and post-feminism, respectively. Utilizing discourse and textual analysis, recipes and their anecdotal accompaniment were reviewed, as well as how the texts were constructing spaces and encoding class, race and gender within their instructions. This research provides support for the existing body of work tracing the pervasiveness of class performance, masculinities and gender binaries and race construction within cookbooks and other technical documents.