Name: Dora Callahan
Hometown: Chicago Proper. She made sure to clarify that she’s not from the suburbs.
Year: 2016. Thank goodness we all have another year with her.
Zodiac Sign: Libra. She only knows this for the use of buzzfeed quizzes. You know, in order to know her future job or what to eat for lunch that day. The practical things.
Summer Plans: First and foremost, Dora is taking a ceramics class, and she is “very excited for that.” Second, she will be at home in not the suburbs of Chicago doing a virtual internship with Davidson’s non-commerical radio station WDAV. She will be their digital media intern, which is super cool because she gets the opportunity to learn a lot of different things and get experience with contact management that she wouldn’t be exposed to otherwise. It is a lot of knowledge that she says she can’t gain from her major which is just reading and writing.
Major: What is her major, you ask? Dora is a Gender and Sexuality Studies (GSS) and English double major.
Why a GSS/English double major: Dora says that she is a GSS major because “I love vaginas and menstruation. It’s something that I care about. I’d rather study things [in reference to both GSS and English] that make me happy and that I enjoy than what someone would deem marketable.” She also chooses the courses that she takes based heavily on what she think she’d like to keep the books for.
Favorite Quote: Sadly, Dora couldn’t find her favorite quote from 30 Rock, so, instead, she explained another one of her favorite quotes to me: “Male blood is celebrated for being brave, while ours is a shame. This won’t change until we release our body as the first stage of political struggle, repression, and male power of centuries.” This quote is from an onlooker at one of Carin Ubeda menstrual art exhibits in Chile.
Abroad: Speaking of Chile, during Dora’s fall 2014 semester she spent a month in Chile, Jordan, and Nepal. On the SIT program for Human Rights, she met with a lot of non-profits to learn about how grassroots organizations work and about the economical, political, and social situations of each country. Each student in her cohort was assigned to pick a research topic to make a comparative analysis. Dora, as daring as she is, became known as the “period girl” in her group of 20 other college women, for she decided to research cultural practices surrounding menstruation. Fascinatingly, Dora learned much more about America through her interactions with her cohort and administration and ended up writing her final paper just on the US. Whoops. She still did amazingly, however.
Dora on the back of an elephant in Nepal. She is genuinely always this excited about life.
Project: Dora’s interest in menstruation did not stay abroad without her. For a recent final project, Dora wanted the chance to not only study at menstruation but also to work with her own menstrual blood, which is exactly what she did in the coolest way possible. Long story short, Dora collected her blood and dyed thread in it, which she then cross-stitched into an oversize sanitary napkin that she sewed (she will never take a sewing machine for granted again). The phrase she cross-stitched is, “nothing but the blood.” This comes from an old hymn that valorizes Jesus’s blood as being the mightiest of all substances, which is in stark contrast to how people view people’s menstrual blood. Dora wants people to know that it’s not gross; she says, “I just stopped being grossed out by it. This isn’t a big deal. That was just me growing and learning with part of my body.”
A picture of Dora’s menstrual art final project. It might just be the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
What to take away: “I think periods are cool. Everything you need to know about Dora. That’s me.” While I beg to differ that all you need to know about Dora is her love of menstruation, as Dora should be known for much more than being the “period girl,” I think that she is sending an awfully important message to our campus, and I hope that you take the time to get to know her during her last year on campus.