Olivia GilbertUndergraduate Humanities Honors Fellow

Olivia Gilbert is a senior from Montevallo, Alabama completing majors in both Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Film Studies.

Her honors thesis will explore how women’s stories were told in 1930s and 1940s Hollywood, with focus on the “unruly woman” trope which challenged the common film image of women as “damsels in distress.” This project will also focus on Mae West, who starred in some of these films and was known for shaking up the industry with her prominence as a sex-symbol. This genre, and figures like Mae West, tell important stories about the lives of women which this thesis will seek to explore. Olivia’s work on the unruly women in Hollywood is a continuation of her past studies at Emory of radical feminist and “unruly woman” Valerie Solanas who’s play, Up Your Ass, she produced and directed in the fall of 2023.