Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Something To Do With A Girl Named Marla: Eros And Gender In David Fincher’S Fight Club, Vernon W. Cisney

Interdisciplinary Studies Faculty Publications

David Fincher’s 1999 film, Fight Club, has been characterized in many ways: as a romantic comedy, an exploration of white, middle-class male angst, an existentialist search for meaning amidst the moral ruins of late capitalism, an anarchist manifesto, and so on. But common to nearly every reading of the film, critical and laudatory alike, is the assumption that Fight Club is indisputably a celebration of misogynistic, masculinist virility and violence. On its face, this assumption appears so overwhelmingly obvious as to render superfluous any argumentation in support thereof, and absurd any opposing argumentation. Consider the ubiquitous homoerotic adulation of the …

Sex Trafficking In Asia: The Impact Of Policy, Economic Opportunity, And Globalization, Emma C. M. Lavoie

Student Publications

This paper examines the prevalence of sex trafficking in Asia and considers factors that make it stand out among other regions of the world. It explains the consequences of poorly designed policy on sex trafficking, using the Chinese One Child Policy as an example. It also looks at the lack of economic opportunity in countries like Thailand and Cambodia, that can incentivize the selling of women to traffickers. Finally, this paper considers the role of globalization in making the transport of sex trafficking victims easier as well as the effect of modern communication technologies on trafficking.

College Campus Sexual Assault And Retention Rates, Abigail R. Hauer

Student Publications

Increased media attention on college crime, specifically sexual assault, has led to greater prioritization of campus safety when deciding whether to continue attending a college. This, coupled with society’s view of a four-year college education as a necessity to succeed in the labor market, creates a potential tradeoff between safety on campus and future employment success. To analyze such tradeoff, I use data from the US Department of Education from 2014 to 2017 to examine whether college campus sexual assault at four-year American institutions impacts retention rates. Such results have implications for college policies to combat sexual assault on campus …

The Imposition Of White Beauty Standards On Black Women, Sabrina E. Robinette

Student Publications

This paper explores the impact of racist beauty ideals on black women through a survey of personal testimonies and an examination of media’s role in perpetrating white beauty. Without sufficient black representation in media, Western beauty standards have excluded black women from defining beauty, which inflicts psychological, physical, and even economic harm on women of color. Companies make profits off of black women’s insecurity from products such as skin lightening cream, chemical straighteners, and hair dye, all of which are an economic burden on black women at best and are life-threatening at worst. Often, black women are forced to turn …

Saving Pocahontas: A Conversation On Gender, Culture, And Power In The Storied Saving Moment, Claire Ehr

Undergraduate Honors Papers

Pocahontas is a figure with much cultural capital, even today, and her influence was historically important to Native and European agendas alike. Pocahontas as a person indeed had a life that seemed to influence political relations between Native and European (specifically Powhatan, specifically English). However, the storied construct of Pocahontas has had significantly more cultural sway, influencing (or at least representing changes in) everything from gendered power dynamics to the interplay between the European Colonizer and the Indigenous Other.¹ Pocahontas’ image has been re-appropriated over and over throughout time to further political agendas and to represent the female and …

Fake News Poetry Workshop As Radical Digital Media Literacy: It’S For The Thing We’Re Not Yet,, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

One of 17 saddle stitched pamphlets + custom designed box

What does pedagogy mean to your writing practice? How do your poetics intersect with your pedagogy and education commitments? We invited participants to join together to think about the inventive and urgent possibilities of intertwined poetic-pedagogical work. What might emerge differently when we bring them together?

Urgent Possibilities, Writings on Feminist Poetics & Emergent Pedagogies grew out of the Feminist Poetics, Emergent Pedagogies Symposium organized by Andrea Quaid and Margaret Rhee. The publication collects work by symposium participants with documents and elaborations, including poems, poetic tracts, essays, workshop plans, and …

Antillean Literature - Comparative Literature In The Spanish Antilles, Cuba, Dominican Republic, And Puerto Rico, Mariana Romo-Carmona

Open Educational Resources

This course will cover literature from Spanish Antilles and will be conducted in English. We will include a study of foundational texts in translation, from the 19^th and 20^th centuries, as well as contemporary works by Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican authors.

Radical Feminist Nuns: Spiritual Activism, Catholicism, And The Power Of (Sister)Hood, Emily Lauletta

Gender & Women’s Studies Student Scholarship

Based on the readings of authors such as Gloria Anzaldúa, AnaLouise Keating, Leela Fernandes, and others, throughout the course of this semester, I have been able to develop my own definition of spiritual activism that I believe integrates the theories and concepts that these scholars have written about with my own experiences. Having done both intensive self-study and academic research, I have come to understand that spiritual activism is the act of transforming one’s self through personal and communal reflection in order to work towards transforming the world and set it on a pathway towards equity and social justice. Based …

Public Perceptions Of Angela Merkel And Other Female Politicians In Germany: A Mixed Survey Approach, Erin Woggon

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

This thesis seeks to understand public perceptions of women politicians in Germany, specifically Chancellor Angela Merkel, and evaluates these perceptions based on gender, region, and representation of CDU/CSU female legislators in the Bundestag. While literature suggests that there are benefits of greater female representation in legislatures, there is a lack of research regarding how this representation impacts perceptions held by the citizens these women represent. Important to the study is also the difference in perceptions according to gender and the former East/West divide in order to understand the gender gap in Germany and the extent of the social impact left …

Uni Women's & Gender Studies Presents 2019-2020 Swag Forum: Sexuality, Women & Gender Schedule [Poster], University Of Northern Iowa. Women's And Gender Studies Program.

Women’s and Gender Studies Program Documents

No abstract provided.

Gender-Based Experiences Of Migrant Smuggling At The Us-Mexico Border, Sarah E. Rinehart

Student Publications

The US-Mexico border has been increasing its security measures, which has corresponded with increases in migration. Due to increasing restrictions on who is able to legally migrate, many turn to irregular migration, and the more effective way of achieving irregular migration is through use of a migrant facilitator. Migrant smugglers are individuals who receive compensated for assisting others in crossing a national border through illegal means. In discourses about irregular migration from the media and political, migrant smugglers are typically portrayed as criminalized men who take advantage of vulnerable, victimized women migrants. While the experiences of men and women migrants …

Designing Women: Essentializing Femininity In Ai Linguistics, Ellianie S. Vega

Student Publications

Since the eighties, feminists have considered technology a force capable of subverting sexism because of technology’s ability to produce unbiased logic. Most famously, Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” posits that the cyborg has the inherent capability to transcend gender because of its removal from social construct and lack of loyalty to the natural world. But while humanoids and artificial intelligence have been imagined as inherently subversive to gender, current artificial intelligence perpetuates gender divides in labor and language as their programmers imbue them with traits considered “feminine.” A majority of 21st century AI and humanoids are programmed to fit female …

How Commercial Advertising Enforces Gender Stereotypes Among Children And The Ways This Affects Them Psychologically, Abigail Frisoli

Sacred Heart University Scholar

Some people believe that children of different sexes are born with completely separate preferences and mindsets which are permanent and predetermined. However, children are very influenced by their surroundings, which is often the main deciding factor which is predetermined by parents and caretakers from birth. Separating children by gender puts them into boxes, stunting their ability to make their own decisions and creating stereotypes. This segregation is painfully apparent in commercial advertising and is proven to have affected children psychologically in ways that can be detrimental.

The Isom Report - Fall 19, Jaime Harker, Theresa Starkey

Isom Report

The official newsletter of the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies.

The Macro Drawbacks Of Microfinance, Meghan E. Guy

Student Publications

For decades, microfinance has been utilized as a tool to reduce global poverty rates. Many communities become entangled with microfinance institutions (MFIs) with the hope of achieving the financial independence, security, and empowerment that these institutions promise their clients. This paper highlights the negative consequences of relying on microfinance institutions to improve the development status of nations. Specifically, high interest rates attached to microloans, strict loan repayment schedules, and corrupt microloan officers threaten the safety and increase stress on majority-female microloan borrowers. MFIs fail in their mission to transform economic and social structures in developing nations.

Negotiating Political Identity In Community-Based Film Festivals: Reflexive Perspectives From Curator-Scholar-Activists, Eve Oishi, Marisa Hicks-Alcaraz

Faculty Papers and Conference Presentations with CGU Graduate Co-authors

This article is a cross-generational exchange of ideas and experiences that explores the intersections of film curating and activism. Its authors set forth accounts of their own experiences as scholars who have worked as film festival curators “on the side” from the 1990s to the present within the context of the new yet rapidly growing field of film festival studies, which provides a useful set of perspectives and methods for understanding how film festivals function and what significance and impact they can have on the multiple stakeholders involved, including but not limited to the filmmakers, festival organizers and staff, and …

Ua19/16/2 Womens' Basketball Press Releases, Wku Athletic Media Relations

WKU Archives Records

Press releases, photos and game statistics related to WKU womens' basketball team from July to December 2019.

Peace And The Barrel Of The Gun In The Internationalist Women’S Movement, 1945–49, Elisabeth Armstrong

Study of Women and Gender: Faculty Publications

In 1949, at a conference instigated by the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) held in Beijing, China, the Asian Women’s Conference solidified an anticolonial, antifascist, and antiracist theory for organizing women transnationally. This transnational feminist praxis drew its movement demands and strategies from the masses of women in anticolonial movements, both rural and urban poor women. It also framed a two-fold theory of women’s organizing: it delineated one platform for women fighting imperialism within colonized countries, and another platform for women fighting imperialism within aggressor nations. This transnational feminism supported an explicitly pro-socialist vision for the future.

Negotiating Ambivalent Gender Space For Collective And Individual Empowerment: Sikh Women's Life Writing In The Diaspora, Jaspal Kaur Singh 2508334

Journal Articles

In order to examine gender and identity within Sikh literature and culture and to understand the construction of gender and the practice of Sikhi within the contemporary Sikh diaspora in the US, I analyze a selection from creative non-fiction pieces, variously termed essays, personal narrative, or life writing, in Meeta Kaur’s edited collection, Her Name is Kaur: Sikh American Women Write About Love, Courage, and Faith. Gender, understood as a social construct (Butler, among others), is almost always inconsistent and is related to religion, which, too, is a construct and is also almost always inconsistent in many ways. Therefore, my …

A Delphi Study: Retention Of Women In Leadership Positions In Stem Disciplines, Kimberly T. Luthi

Educational Foundations & Leadership Theses & Dissertations

This Delphi study explores barriers and support systems that impact women’s professional advancement in STEM disciplines. There were 20 expert panelists who committed to participate in the study and 15 panelists completed the four rounds of the study after attrition. The panelists were selected based on specific criteria including educational background, diversity within STEM disciplines, experience as a former or current female administrator who served at two-year degree offering institutions, leadership and membership within women’s advocacy organizations in STEM and related workforce education fields, and depth of knowledge and understanding of the research questions. Through the four rounds of the …