Russell Sheaffer

Russell Sheaffer is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Sheaffer plans to study the history of stag films produced before 1950 based on the collection of the Kinsey Institute for Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.  This will involve a traditional history and textual analysis of the films of the Kinsey Institute’s collection while also working to log and take into account archival elements of the films, including their edge code. 

Looking at both the film holdings and other archival elements in the Kinsey Institute Archive, this study also seeks to understand the ways in which these films were exhibited – especially in and around Bloomington, Indiana – and the ways that people understood themselves in these spaces. In this way, the study will be both a history of stag films, of stag film exhibition, and of the ways in which individuals interacted with film, with space, and with each other in the presence of films that have come to be described as “stag.” 

Julian Gill-Peterson

Julian Gill-Peterson is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Rutgers University.

The transgender child opens onto an array of endocrine techniques designed to cultivate a plastic body as the form of the human, techniques belonging to the legacy of positive eugenics. Bringing together transgender studies and queer theory with critical race studies and science and technology studies, the project examines the transgender child as a medical and political problem of the eugenic cultivation of the sexed body. In doing so it moves to think alternate cultivations of the sexed and racialized body of the child not anchored in the violence of flesh instrumentalized for a teleological concept of human development.

The 2015 John Money Fellowship will allow Julian to undertake vital archival research on the centrality of the child to the major founders of transgender medicine in the United States, including John Money and Harry Benjamin.

Honorable Mentions

Saniya Lee Ghanoui, Department of History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Saniya's research analyzes changing depictions of sex and sexuality in mid-century sex education films alongside changes in popular discourses on sexuality from moral to scientific.

Megan Hurson, Department of Media Studies, University of Colorado

Megan's research analyzes the mediated discourses of the polyamory social movement.

Elizabeth Nelson, Modern European History, Indiana University

Elizabeth is researching French psychiatrist Constance Pascal and her theories on "chagrin d'amour", or romantic and sexual problems as causes of psychosis.

Karly-Lynne Scott, Department of Screen Cultures, Northwestern University

Karly-Lynne Scott examines moving-image pornography in relation to the different ways the body and sexuality have been understood throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, analyzing how shifts in psychoanalytic, sexological, and medico- scientific conceptualizations of the body and sexuality have altered how we imagine erotically engaging with media.

For more information about the John Money Scholarship for Students of Sexology, please visit our webpage here.