Women and Lindy Hop Culture at SJSU
→ About Us
Our website is a student project made for the Digital Humanities department aimed to explore the discourses about women through the lens of two topics that interested us the most: Lindy Hop and Violence against women. We have mainly picked archival material from The Spartan Daily, as well as interviewed current and former SJSU peers, and took a closer look at how women have been represented and discussed through these different social contexts at SJSU.
We first chose the topic Violence Against Women, with many of the archives found focusing on the reporting and commentary of assault, harassment, systemic sexism, etc. during the times they were created. Though there are many pieces of media that contain content that reflect persistent biases against women's safety and autonomy, there is also a display of a positive and progressive shift of attitude and outlook towards the group.
For our second topic we chose Lindy Hop, a historically significant swing dance, to explore how gender roles and expectations shaped women’s experiences in entertainment and performance spaces. By focusing on this cultural form of dance, we examine how femininity, agency, representation, and ideas of liberation were portrayed within student-produced media in SJSU.
Both of these topics in the navigation bar contain two subsections: Archives and Interviews. The Archives sections will include newspaper clippings found from The Spartan Daily that relate to their respective topic. The Interviews sections will include multiple interviews from SJSU people/alumnis discussing their perspectives and opinions pertaining to the certain subject.
→ Goal
Together, these two topics reveal how broader social systems influenced media production and helped shape gendered narratives on campus. By analyzing articles from The Spartan Daily archives, we’re able to look back in time and examine the everyday language that contributed to evolving public perceptions of women. Our third section in the navigation bar, Intersecting Discourses, aims to piece together common themes found within the archives across these two topics.
→ Important Note
In the context of our project, we define “women” in relation to the old gender binary, meaning stereotypical traits are what people used to assume and perceive who was a woman at the time of these archives. Women in the media during this time are referred to as those who are cisgender, which means they were assigned female at birth and continued to personally identify as one. This was the dominant perspective we observed in the Spartan Daily articles we found, and although we focus on this outdated definition and representation in our project, we still acknowledge that gender is more inclusive and broader than how it was portrayed back then.