History of Gender Commons^™

Misrepresentation Of Victimhood During The Victorian Period, Elizabeth Davidson

Graduate Student Research Symposium

The sensation novel in the Victorian period often portrayed female victims as “fallen women.” These women encompassed those who suffered from addiction, engaged in prostitution, changed their identities, or were otherwise homeless. However, “fallen women” were generally misrepresented in both novel and reality. Anne Catherick, the female victim in The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, and the victims of Jack the Ripper are all represented as ending up in precarious situations resulting in their deaths by their own accord. However, these sets of victims traversed a multitude of missteps and unavoidable tragedy before their untimely deaths. The women who ...

Stranger Compass Of The Stage: Difference And Desire In Early Modern City Comedy, Catherine Tisdale

Doctoral Dissertations

In periods of social and political upheaval like ours, it is more important than ever to interrogate constructions of identity and difference and to understand the histories of alterity that separate us from one another. Stranger Compass of the Stage: Difference and Desire in Early Modern City Drama reimagines the cultural and social effect of alien, foreign, and stranger characters on the early modern stage and re-envisions how these characters contribute to, alter, and imaginatively build new epistemologies for understanding difference in early modern London. Resisting the field’s current critical inclination toward English identity formation, this project works intersectionally ...

Revising Mary Queen Of Scots: From Protestant Persecution To Patriarchal Struggle, Jennifer M. Desilva, Emily K. Mcguire

Journal of Religion & Film

Since Mary Queen of Scots’ execution in 1587, she has become a symbol of Scottish identity, failed female leadership, and Catholic martyrdom. Throughout the twentieth century, Mary was regularly depicted on screen (Ford, 1936; Froelich, 1940; Jarrott, 1971) as a thrice-wed Catholic queen, unable to rule her country due to her feminine nature and Catholic roots. However, with the rise of third wave feminism and postfeminism in media, coupled with the increased influence of female directors and writers, Mary’s characterization has shifted from portraying female/emotional weakness and religious sacrifice to female/collaborative strength in hardship and a struggle ...

Katie Sutton. Sex Between Body And Mind: Psychoanalysis And Sexology In The German-Speaking World, 1890s-1930s. U Of Michigan P, 2019., Elizabeth Bridges

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Katie Sutton. Sex between Body and Mind: Psychoanalysis and Sexology in the German-speaking World, 1890s-1930s. U of Michigan P, 2019. 347 pp.

Full Issue: Volume 2, Issue 1, Editorial Board

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

The first issue in the second volume of the Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal.

Reading The Old Norse-Icelandic Maríu Saga In Its Manuscript Contexts, Daniel Najork

Northern Medieval World

Maríu saga, the Old Norse-Icelandic life of the Virgin Mary, survives in nineteen manuscripts. In the extant manuscripts Maríu saga rarely exists in the codex by itself. This study restores the saga to its manuscript contexts in order to better understand the meaning of the text within its manuscript matrix, why it was copied in the specific manuscripts it was, and how it was read and used by the different communities that preserved the manuscripts.

Progress Narratives In Trans Internationalism: Surveying A Collected Archive Of The Global Trans Movement, 2008–2018, Flora P. Wolpert Checknoff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Trans liberation as a global movement began to be documented in public reports in the mid-2000s. Gathered together from their first decade (2008-2018), publications produced by three trans INGOs—Transgender Europe (TGEU), the Asia Pacific Trans Network (APTN), and Global Action for Trans* Equality (GATE)—demonstrate the cultivation of a global trans imaginary and materialize records of a coalescing struggle. The publications depict tensions between an evolving global trans imaginary and the construction of a rights deserving trans population in the development sector. The seeking of international action and resources has compelled the unification of messaging through rhetoric and data ...

Article 6.21, Tatiana Stolpovskaya

School of Arts & Sciences Theses

Article 6.21 is a short documentary film that aims to examine the state of censorship around queerness in Russia today and its effects on personal lives in the queer community.

Twenty years after Russia decriminalized homosexuality, on June 30th in 2013, President Vladimir Putin signed Article 6.21 "for the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values", also known as the "Gay Propaganda Law". Its broad and ambiguous wording allows the government significant leeway in deciding what kind of public queerness is punishable.

In 2020 Russia passed multiple constitutional amendments that affect ...

‘We Were Very Much Surprised At Their Worship’: American Girls And Religious Tourism In The Early Republic, 1780-1835, Sharon Halevi

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Following the Revolution, the United States formally embraced the ideal and practice of religious freedom. But how was this ideal instilled and practiced? Could a form of pilgrimage have been mobilised in order to inculcate it? In this article I argue that in the early American republic, religious freedom was demonstrated and imparted to adolescents through a unique form of pilgrimage: visiting and attending the worship services of religious minorities while on tour. I demonstrate my argument by considering the travel accounts of fifteen, Protestant, American adolescent girls (aged 10 to 21) between 1782 and 1835; I trace their visits ...

In Their Own Words: Forgotten Women Pilots Of Early Aviation, Fred Erisman

Purdue University Press Book Previews

Amelia Earhart’s prominence in American aviation during the 1930s obscures a crucial point: she was but one of a closely knit community of women pilots. Although the women were well known in the profession and widely publicized in the press at the time, they are largely overlooked today. Like Earhart, they wrote extensively about aviation and women’s causes, producing an absorbing record of the life of women fliers during the emergence and peak of the Golden Age of Aviation (1925–1940). Earhart and her contemporaries, however, were only the most recent in a long line of women pilots ...

Andrea Revised: Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist As Revolutionary By Martin Duberman, Phyllis Chesler

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Unspoken Whiteness: #Whitexicans And Religious Conservativism In Mexico., Ricardo J. Alvarez-Pimentel

Journal of Hispanic and Lusophone Whiteness Studies (HLWS)

This article explores intersections between religious conservatism, pro-Americanism, and whiteness in Mexican society. Specifically, it examines past and present attempts by white elites and religious conservatives to surveille indigenous women’s bodies and sexuality, to “Americanize” Mexico, and to glorify the nation’s European legacies at the expense of erasing—and even justifying— anti-indigenous violence. This paper analyzes conservative activism as carried out by early-twentiethcentury Catholic activists and contemporary social media users grappling with the present-day “whitexican” phenomenon. It analyzes Mexicans’ unspoken appeals to whiteness as they permeate prevalent discourses of feminine propriety and religious restoration, North American cultural proximity ...

Institutionalizing Gender: Madness, The Family, And Psychiatric Power In Nineteenth-Century France, Jessie Hewitt

Our House Books

Institutionalizing Gender analyzes the relationship between class, gender, and psychiatry in France from 1789 to 1900, an era noteworthy for the creation of the psychiatric profession, the development of a national asylum system, and the spread of bourgeois gender values.

Asylum doctors in nineteenth-century France promoted the notion that manliness was synonymous with rationality, using this "fact" to pathologize non-normative behaviors and confine people who did not embody mainstream gender expectations to asylums. And yet, this gendering of rationality also had the power to upset prevailing dynamics between men and women. Jessie Hewitt argues that the ways that doctors used ...

Patriarchy And Gender Law In Ancient Rome And Colonial America, John B. Kamp

Iowa Historical Review

Roman Antiquity and Colonial America shared much in common regarding limits on women’s legal rights and the role of gender in law. Gendered stereotypes regarding women’s ability and place in society are reflected in the patria potestas and manus of Ancient Roman law, as well as through the patriarchal and pious Puritan laws of New England society during the American Colonial period. Both male-dominated social and legal systems were based on the notion of women’s innate inferiority and female submission to male authority. Gender expectations and biases are also present, not only in family law, but also ...

The Evolution Of Defining Rape In The United States, Sophia Rhoades

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

From The Womb To The Word: Pregnancy And Pregnancy Metaphors In 16th And 17th Century English Literature, Kelly S. Westeen

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation employs a feminist theoretical lens in exploring the gendered uses of pregnancy and pregnancy metaphors in the production and dissemination of literary works in early modern England. By also examining the history of the printing press and the role it played in gendered textual production, early modern constructs of family and the role of mothers, as well as obstetric medicine and childbirth, I aim to demonstrate that mothering and authorship were congruent activities for female writers. Conversely, I argue that male writers of the period who employed metaphors of gestation did so not to try to claim biological ...

"A Friend, A Nimble Mind, And A Book": Girls' Literary Criticism In Seventeen Magazine, 1958-1969, Jill E. Anderson

University Library Faculty Publications

This article argues that postwar Seventeen magazine, a publication deeply invested in enforcing heteronormativity and conventional models of girlhood and womanhood, was in fact a more complex and multivocal serial text whose editors actively sought out, cultivated, and published girls’ creative and intellectual work. Seventeen's teen-authored “Curl Up and Read” book review columns, published from 1958 through 1969, are examples of girls’ creative intellectual labor, introducing Seventeen's readers to fiction and nonfiction which ranged beyond the emerging “young-adult” literature of the period. Written by young people – including thirteen-year-old Eve Kosofsky (later Sedgwick) – who perceived Seventeen to be an ...

Who Were They Working For? Sex Work, Working Girls, And Patriarchy In The Late 19th Century, Grace Files

The Macksey Journal

In the Late 19^th century, America’s “wild west” was notorious for its sex trade. Some historians argue that the women who participated in sex work were victims of a patriarchal society, yet others claim such women were empowered. While late 19^th century sex workers challenged certain aspects of patriarchy, they remained unable to escape from their overarching patriarchal society; their lives and work must be re-examined through a more nuanced lens.

Acknowledging Our Past: Race, Landscape And History, Alea Harris, Kaycia Best, Dieran Mcgowan, Destiny Shippy, Vera Oberg, Bryson Coleman, Rhiannon Leebrick Ph.D.

Student Scholarship

This book is the product of nearly a year's worth of student research on Wofford College's history, undertaken as part of a grant by the Council of Independent Colleges in the Humanities Research for the Public Good initiative. The research was supervised and directed by Dr. Rhiannon Leebrick.

"Guiding Research Questions:

How did Wofford College and its early stakeholders support and participate in slavery?

How is the legacy of slavery present in the landscape of our campus (buildings, statues, names, etc.)?

How can we better understand Wofford as an institution during the time of Reconstruction through the Jim ...

Women’S Suffrage Is “Nothing Less Than Treasonable:” An Analysis Of Rural Women And Their Group Activism In The Women’S Suffrage Movement In The Jackson Purchase Area, 1838-1940, Ashleigh Deno

Honors College Theses

The 1910s was a decade characterized by technological advancement, World War I, and a global movement for women’s suffrage, which would eventually culminate with legislation, most notably the 19th Amendment in the United States. In the United States, women staged protests throughout the country and were known to stand outside of the White House with taunting signs for President Woodrow Wilson to read. This movement came to the United States from other parts of the globe, particularly Britain, and suffragists from other countries were known to travel to the States to give presentations and provide guidance to suffragists on ...