Karina Mohammed

Karina Mohammed

A smiling young woman with warm brown wavy hair looks directly at the camera, her right hand gently placed under her chin. She wears a light-toned plaid blazer with thin dark blue and orange stripes over a white top. The background shows a window with blurred greenery to her left and a textured beige wall to her right.

I’m Karina, a Professional Communication student who loves to tell stories. My story involves Toronto’s arts and academic communities, where making meaningful relationships built on a mutual love for creativity and working with organizations like Luminato and TIFF taught me how to lean into my curiosity. I currently work at AlphaPR as a Publicity Coordinator, where I have the pleasure of working on films that highlight stories by women-identifying and QTBIPOC that elevate voices of the historically marginalized. I’m also currently working at Ryerson’s Centre for Communicating Knowledge, where I’m gleaning knowledge from researchers and socially innovative communities to co-produce a podcast about navigating tumultuous times. My research on virginity comes from my deep-seeded intersectional feminist roots, my love for film, and is the beginning of sparking a conversation around the inequalities we see in storytelling.

Research

My research project is about the gap between sexual expectations for men and women when it comes to the notion of virginity. Not only is the concept of virginity heteronormative and a factor in perpetuating toxic masculinity, but it also often compromises the health and wellness of young women to satisfy the hetero-patriarchial system. On a practical level, understanding, analyzing, and continuing the conversations about virginity across cultures will ultimately save and improve women’s lives.

A research poster by Karina Mohammed titled 'Attitudes Toward Virginity', analyzing the concept of virginity in teen films from 1980-2020. The top section displays a collage of movie posters including 'Juno', 'The Breakfast Club', 'American Pie', 'Mean Girls', 'Lady Bird', and 'Booksmart'. Below, the central question 'How is equality hindered when notions of virginity in storytelling are dominated by the hetero-patriarchy?' is highlighted. A bar chart, titled 'Percentage of Positive Associations with Virginity Loss to Characters', illustrates a stark gender disparity: the bar for Women extends to approximately 30%, while the bar for Men reaches nearly 100%.
Lightning Talk
Project Webpage

Project Tags

feminist, intersectional, virginity, equality, expectations, attitudes, sex, gender, social construct, toxic masculinity, health
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