Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Domestic Violence And The Implementation Of The Hague Convention On The Civil Aspects Of International Child Abduction: Japan And U.S. Policy, Sawako Yamaguchi, Taryn Lindhorst

Journal of International Women's Studies

Around the world, an increasing number of married couples have at least one person who is not a citizen of their spouse’s country. The global growth in transnational families has necessitated the development of international legal agreements to address issues that have arisen upon the dissolution of these relationships. Of particular note to feminist scholars has been the issue of domestic violence in these relationships and how these circumstances are addressed under international agreements such as the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. In 2013, Japan became the last of the major industrialized countries to sign …

Domestic Violence In Chinese Families: Cold Violence By Men Towards Women, Helen Mclaren

Journal of International Women's Studies

China has experienced rapid social and economic transformation since the early 1990s. While state control has attempted to maintain a collectivist spirit that emphasizes communal goals and obligations over unrestricted capitalism, rapid economic growth has weakened socialist ideals and individualism has thrived. The present paper draws attention to potential associations between the rise of capitalism, individualism in mainland China, the one-child policy and changes in domestic violence laws with the increased perpetration of cold violence by some men towards their female partners. Cold violence refers to an emotional form of domestic violence characterized by a complete withdrawal of all verbal …

A Macro Economic Approach To Gender Disparities In Hiring At The Ceo Level, Abigail R. Wood

Business and Economics Summer Fellows

More men named John run S&P 1500 companies than all women combined, causing many to wonder what factors are limiting women’s career advancement. While many studies have been written about the topic of women’s success in the business world, most focus on individual firms or positions and therefore miss macroeconomic factors such as women’s completion of master’s degree programs and labor force participation rates. This research examines the disparity of gender in CEO positions through the examination of macroeconomic data which captures women’s career trajectory and qualifications. This research specifically examines trends in women’s obtainment of master’s degrees in business …

The Queer Omaha Archives, Amy Schindler

Criss Library Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

The Queer Omaha Archives, in Criss Library Archives & Special Collections at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, preserves and provides access to the history of LGBTQIA+ life in the region. The archives collects, preserves, and makes available to the public material documenting the diverse people and organizations of the greater Omaha region and their experiences and work. In this session, we’ll share how this new community collecting initiative was begun and how the library is extending existing and establishing new relationships with campus and community members to preserve the region’s LGBTQIA+ history and make it available for use.

Queer History Of The United States: A Syllabus, Jordan Ostrum

History Summer Fellows

This project is a proposed syllabus of a college level history course dealing with queer and trans experiences in the 20^th century. The course utilizes the Ursinus inquiry based approach to learning, focusing on the core questions “How can we understand the world?” and “How should we live together?” Supplementary materials, such as the course proposal, are meant to encourage the Ursinus College History Department to offer the course in the future.

My Body, Not My Say: Justice Blackmun's Influential Decision In Roe V. Wade, Kisha K. Patel

Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies Summer Fellows

Abortion laws have regulated women’s bodies since the beginning of the country. Many people associate regulation with the case of Roe V. Wade in 1973, in which the Supreme Court ruled that states could not outlaw abortion during the first trimester. Roe v. Wade remains controversial to this day as it failed to establish consensus that women’s decision whether or not to terminate a pregnancy falls within their constitutional right to privacy. Understanding the implications of this decision is fundamental to analyze the debate over the constitutionality of abortion today. This paper examines the opinion written by Justice Blackmun in …

Perceptions Surrounding Cyberbullying And Self-Disclosure Among The Lgbtq Community: A Qualitative Approach, Alec Martin

Media and Communication Studies Summer Fellows

LGBTQ adolescents, like all youth, face challenges: the push for high academic marks, the desire for positive relationships, and the right to be themselves in a safe environment. Unfortunately, LGBTQ youths are far more likely than their heterosexual peers to experience bullying and cyberbullying. According to a 2005 study by the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network, the second largest cause of bullying was actual or presumed sexual orientation or identity. Gay males were more than twice as likely to be bullied on school property than their heterosexual peers, 43.1% and 18.3%, respectively (Olsen et al, 2014). In addition, 23.1% …

Female Moments / Male Structures: The Representation Of Women In Romantic Comedies, Jordan A. Scharaga

Media and Communication Studies Summer Fellows

Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl again. With this formula it seems that romantic comedies are actually meant for men instead of women. If this is the case, then why do women watch these films? The repetition of female stars like Katharine Hepburn, Doris Day and Meg Ryan in romantic comedies allows audiences to find elements of truth in their characters as they grapple with the input of others in their life choices, combat the anxiety of being single, and prove they are less sexually naïve than society would like to admit. In 1999, a character struggles …

Investigating Asylum And Assimilation Procedures In European Countries As It Relates To The Independence Of Women, Katherine R. Avetta

International Relations Summer Fellows

This project investigates and analyzes immigration policy, specifically focusing on asylum seeking women, in European countries including, but not limited to, Germany and Sweden. Many European nations have limited immigration policy that ultimately negatively affects immigrants from Middle Eastern and African nations, especially female migrants fleeing those nations in order to gain independence and freedom from torture and gender based persecutions. However, what little policy European countries do utilize inevitably hinders women from gaining independence and rather mirrors the male dominated socio-cultural societies from which these very women fled. Through the examination of articles and policy, this project will analyze …

Statistical Plight Of Black Women, Kimberly-Joy M. Walters

Sociology Summer Fellows

The purpose of this research is to examine how television shows and their portrayals of professional Black women impact the interpretation of marriage rates by race and perpetuate ideologies about the angry, unlovable Black woman. Using a content analysis of cable and network television shows with Black professional women as lead characters, this study connects an analysis of the characters’ lived experiences to normative expectations of Black women in relationships to call into question the prevailing narrative that Black women are in part personally responsible for their statistical plight. I will closely study how the two stereotypes, the Jezebel and …

Text And Paratext: Analyzing Edith Wharton's Hudson River Bracketed In Its Periodical Context, Paige Szmodis

English Summer Fellows

Studying a novel in the context of its paratexts — including the illustrations, advertisements, and captions surrounding the fiction — reveals how the publication context can shape a literary work. This project examines Edith Wharton’s Hudson River Bracketed (1929) and its paratexts by comparing the final version of the novel with textual changes made in its monthly periodical publication in the magazine The Delineator (1928-1930). As mass-consumerism and advertising increasingly targeted women during the 1920s, examining Wharton’s work in a popular middle-class women’s magazine like The Delineator illuminates how paratexts affect audience perceptions of the novel’s characters, conflicts, and themes. …

Family Affairs Newsletter 2016-07-15, Zack Paakkonen

Family Affairs newsletter (2004-2016)

FAMILY AFFAIRS was a free, twice-a-month, social activities newsletter for the GLBTQI (gay/lesbian/bisexual/trans/queer/intersex) community, sent out around the 1st and 15th of each month. It covered the State of Maine only. The list was begun and maintained for many years by Jean Vermette in Bangor, and later operated by Zack Paakkonen of Portland. Over the years it evolved from a social activities newsletter into a business directory, classified ad service, and community bulletin board.

Is There A Woman's Perspective? : An Exploration Of Gender Differences Along Republican And Conservative Lines., Jason Gainous

Jason Gainous

Is there a distinct “woman’s perspective?” This paper argues that the answer is an emphatic yes. American National Election Study survey data are used to explore Republican and conservative women’s attitudes concerning social spending issues and religiosity. Most of the previous gender gap research focuses on gender differences in attitudes by examining gender shifts in political party identification and voting, but do not adequately address opinion differences along gender lines between groups that think of themselves as similar. This paper asserts that if men and women who classify themselves as both conservative and Republican exhibit distinct differences, evidence of a …

“If There Are Men Who Are Afraid To Die, There Are Women Who Are Not”: African American Women's Civil Rights Leadership In Boston, 1920-1975., Julie De Chantal

Doctoral Dissertations

Since the 1980s, narratives surrounding the Boston Busing Crisis focus on South Boston white working-class’s reaction to Judge Arthur W. Garrity's forced desegregation order of 1974. Yet, by analyzing the crises from such narrow perspective, the narratives leave out half of the story. This dissertation challenges these narratives by situating the busing crisis as the culmination of more than half a century of grassroots activism led by Black working-class mothers. By taking action at the neighborhood and the city levels, these mothers succeeded where the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People and the Urban League had failed. …

Cultural Subtexts And Social Functions Of Domestic Music-Making In Jane Austen’S England, Lidia A. Chang

Masters Theses

Barring a few notable exceptions, English music between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries earns scant notice in music history textbooks, despite overwhelming evidence that England enjoyed a vibrant musical culture, especially during the Georgian era. However, I will argue that the English of this period were, in many respects, even more committed to music than their continental counterparts. The problem, for England, was not that it made no music during this period, but that it made the wrong kind of music, and enjoyed it in the wrong ways. At a time when Germanic critics like E.T.A. Hoffmann and A.B. Marx …

(Re)Imagining Haiti Through The Eyes Of A Seven-Year-Old Girl, Iliana Rosales Figueroa

Journal of International Women's Studies

Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat’s new novel Claire of the Sea Light (2013) explores themes of love, loss, and death. The first character that is presented to us is Claire of the Sea Light, a seven-year-old girl, whose mother died giving birth to her and who is missing. It is at the intersection of this little girl’s loss that all the other characters and topics unfold. Madame Gaëlle, an upper class woman who has a fabric shop in Ville Rose, decides to adopt Claire in order to give her a better life. In this essay I demonstrate that Edwidge Danticat articulates …

Reassessing Caribbean Migration: Love, Power And (Re) Building In The Diaspora, Andrea Natasha Baldwin, Natasha K. Mortley

Journal of International Women's Studies

Traditional research has framed Caribbean migration as a socio-economic issue including discourses on limited resources, brain drain, remittances, and diaspora/transnational connection to, or longing for home. This narrative usually presents migration as having a destabilizing effect on Caribbean families, households and communities, more specifically the impacts on the relationships of working class women who migrate leaving behind children, spouses and other dependents because of a lack of opportunities in Caribbean. This paper proposes an alternative view of migration as a source/manifestation of women’s power, where women, as active agents within the migration process, in fact contribute to re building relationships, …

Claiming The Politics Of Articulation Through Agency And Wholeness In Two Afro-Hispanic Postcolonial Narratives, Silvia Castro Borrego

Journal of International Women's Studies

Following a context-based approach and the tenets of post-positivist realist theory, this paper will analyze two post-colonial Afro-Hispanic novels immersed in their articulation of moving towards Caribbeanness within the phenomenon of Diaspora Literacy: María Nsue Angüe’s Ekomo (1983) and Michelline Dusseck’s Caribbean Echoes (1997). As part of the Diaspora Literacy, these texts will be read employing the search for wholeness as a theoretical tool, towards an epistemology of anti-colonial feminist struggle. These texts take active part in a decolonizing process that fosters a definition and vision of agency which makes wholeness possible, becoming an active expression of black women’s spirituality …

A Subtlety By Kara Walker: Teaching Vulnerable Art, Marika Preziuso

Journal of International Women's Studies

In late Spring 2014, the nonprofit organization Creative Time commissioned artist Kara Walker to create her first large-scale public installation. Hosted in the industrial relics of the legendary Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby was as controversial as it was revered. The powerful presence of the installation, coupled with its immersion in historical consciousness, makes A Subtlety rich in educational value. This article engages in a comparative reading of A Subtlety in the light of female writers and thinkers from the Caribbean, but also incorporates some of the generative questions Walker’s installation has …

Finding Your Own Magic: How Obeah And Voodoo Provide Women Agency In Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea And Tiphanie Yanique's Land Of Love And Drowning, Matthew Cutter

Journal of International Women's Studies

One of the most important functions of Caribbean literature is to give voice to characters that would be otherwise voiceless. These characters are often slaves, women, racial minorities, and poor people; in other words, anybody who has been touched by the devastating oppression of a colonial society. The oppressed in the Caribbean have often turned to their belief in Obeah in order to assert themselves in the face of the colonizer. Obeah and magic are still ingrained in the culture of the Caribbean people because the culture of the European colonizer is still influencing society in the Caribbean.

Through this …