Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Digital Commons Network

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 13 of 13

Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network

Southern Veils : The Sisters Of Loretto In Early National Kentucky., Hannah O'Daniel Dec 2017

Southern Veils : The Sisters Of Loretto In Early National Kentucky., Hannah O'Daniel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the experiences of Roman Catholic women who joined the Sisters of Loretto, a community of women religious in rural Washington and Nelson Counties, Kentucky, between the 1790s and 1826. It argues that the Sisters of Loretto used faith to interpret and respond to unfolding events in the early nation. The women sought to combat moral slippage and restore providential favor in the face of local Catholic institutional instability, global Protestant evangelical movements, war and economic crisis, and a tuberculosis outbreak. The Lorettines faced financial, social, and cultural pressures—including an economic depression, a culture that celebrated family formation …


Gender, Race, And Violence: A Critical Examination Of Trauma In The Color Purple, Jessica Lewis Oct 2017

Gender, Race, And Violence: A Critical Examination Of Trauma In The Color Purple, Jessica Lewis

Sacred Heart University Scholar

The purpose of this article is to analyze the roles gender and race play in relation to trauma in Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple. Specifically, the article argues that gender and race are the underlying causes of the violence and trauma experienced by Walker’s female characters, Celie, Sophia, and Squeak. While violence does not always lead to internal conflict, this critical examination looks chiefly at trauma that is derived from violence. As a catalyst for targeted violence, identity categories, in particular female and African American are explored and their roles in oppression are investigated. In doing so, the …


Custodian Of The Specie: White Women, Capital, And Slavery In The Hemispheric South, Jenny Leroy Sep 2017

Custodian Of The Specie: White Women, Capital, And Slavery In The Hemispheric South, Jenny Leroy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation argues that white women played crucial roles in the economic, political, and cultural circuits that linked the United States and Cuba, and the hemisphere broadly, during the nineteenth century. It inserts white women into a historical account of U.S. imperialism by analyzing the literary works of a number of American women who traveled to or simply fantasized about Cuba during this period of intense and widespread interest in the island. It identifies white women not just as providing the symbolic rationale for Cuban annexation or intervention – the preservation of their chastity being a common justification for the …


Not So Revisionary: The Regressive Treatment Of Gender In Alan Moore's Watchmen, Anna C. Marshall May 2017

Not So Revisionary: The Regressive Treatment Of Gender In Alan Moore's Watchmen, Anna C. Marshall

The Downtown Review

While Alan Moore’s comic book Watchmen is often hailed as a revisionary text for introducing flawed superheroes and political anxiety to the genre, it is also remarkably regressive in its treatment of gender. Some critics do argue that women are given a newfound voice in Watchmen, but this interpretation neglects to examine character Laurie Jupiter adequately, or the ways in which other female characters' appearance and dialogue are limited and/or based on their sexuality and relationships with male characters. Watchmen's main female characters, mother and daughter Sally and Laurie Jupiter, lack autonomy and their identities are completely intertwined …


Barbie As Cultural Compass: Embodiment, Representation, And Resistance Surrounding The World’S Most Iconized Doll, Hannah Tulinski May 2017

Barbie As Cultural Compass: Embodiment, Representation, And Resistance Surrounding The World’S Most Iconized Doll, Hannah Tulinski

Sociology Student Scholarship

Since 1959 the Barbie doll has held the status of cultural icon in American society. In the past six decades Barbie has dominated the toy industry as an unmatched competitor among girls’ dolls, generating approximately $1 billion in annual sales. Originally intended by her creator Ruth Handler to “allow girls to project their future self,” Barbie continues to remain a household name, and it has been estimated that each American girl owns an average of eight Barbie dolls (Newman 2013). As a cultural object, Barbie continues to re-enter the “human circuit of discourse” (Griswold 1987) with each changing public appearance, …


Breaking The Cycle Of Silence : The Significance Of Anya Seton's Historical Fiction., Lindsey Marie Okoroafo (Jesnek) May 2017

Breaking The Cycle Of Silence : The Significance Of Anya Seton's Historical Fiction., Lindsey Marie Okoroafo (Jesnek)

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the feminist significance of Anya Seton’s historical novels, My Theodosia (1941), Katherine (1954), and The Winthrop Woman (1958). The two main goals of this project are to 1.) identify and explain the reasons why Seton’s historical novels have not received the scholarly attention they are due, and 2.) to call attention to the ways in which My Theodosia, Katherine, and The Winthrop Woman offer important feminist interventions to patriarchal social order. Ultimately, I argue that My Theodosia, Katherine, and The Winthrop Woman deserve more scholarly attention because they are significant contributions to women’s …


Indigenous Resistance: Settler-Colonialism, Nation Building, And Colonial Patriarchy, Megan E. Vallowe May 2017

Indigenous Resistance: Settler-Colonialism, Nation Building, And Colonial Patriarchy, Megan E. Vallowe

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

“Indigenous Resistance: Settler-Colonialism, Nation Building, and Colonial Patriarchy,” interrogates the Western Hemisphere’s spatial construction by settler-states, Indigenous nations, and activists groups. In this project, I assert that Indigenous/Settler contact zones are significantly more convoluted than current scholarship’s use of contact zones in that the distinctions between Indigenous actors and settler-colonial ones are often blurred. These hybrid contact zones sometimes contain negative outcomes for all participants and often include undercurrents of insidious power dynamics within and across settler-states and Indigenous peoples alike. Using critical cartographic theory and deconstruction methods, this project first illustrates how empires ascribed a racialized patriarchy onto the …


Wayward Women, Macho Men: Linguistic Construction Of Gender Binaries In Yxta Maya Murray's Locas And Denise Chavez's Loving Pedro Infante, Stephanie Tangman May 2017

Wayward Women, Macho Men: Linguistic Construction Of Gender Binaries In Yxta Maya Murray's Locas And Denise Chavez's Loving Pedro Infante, Stephanie Tangman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Language labels and defines in order to enhance meaning and communication, but through these labels and definitions speakers are also conditioned to associate certain connotations with words and, therefore, their referents. While often harmless, linguistic conditioning can at times create unsavory associations with these referents. One of these instances occurs in gendered labels and conceptions of male and female bodies and purpose. Both Yxta Maya Murray’s Locas and Denise Chavez’s Loving Pedro Infante can be read through a lens that applies linguistic conditioning with gender theory in order to examine the reinterpretation of female archetypes in the Chicana imagination. It …


The Book That Made Me: A Girl, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner Apr 2017

The Book That Made Me: A Girl, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

In this installment of The Book That Made Me, a series from Public Books reflecting on the books that have changed our lives, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner reflects on the freedom he received—to become a whole other person, in a whole other place—from an unexpected source.


Nightmares In The Kitchen: Personal Experience Narratives About Cooking And Food, Sarah T. Shultz Apr 2017

Nightmares In The Kitchen: Personal Experience Narratives About Cooking And Food, Sarah T. Shultz

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This thesis explores personal experience narratives about making mistakes in the preparation and serving of food. In order to understand when these narratives, referred to in the text as “kitchen nightmares,” are told, to whom, in what form, and why, one-onone and group ethnographic interviews were conducted. In total, 13 interviews were conducted with 25 individuals (men and women) ranging in age from 19 to 70. Six major themes of kitchen nightmare narratives are identified in Chapter One. Chapter Two explores one of these themes, resistance, in the context of the kitchen nightmare stories of heterosexual married women. Chapter Three …


Empirical Reflections On Women Students In Usa Nonprofit Academic Programs And Realizations About Ideological Influence, Norman A. Dolch Jan 2017

Empirical Reflections On Women Students In Usa Nonprofit Academic Programs And Realizations About Ideological Influence, Norman A. Dolch

Journal of Ideology

This research reports on the beliefs of a select sample of women and men faculty across the USA regarding women in nonprofit organization academic programs. The main differences were on professional orientation among graduate students, difficulty with quantitative oriented courses, and portrayal of women in coursework. To eliminate these differences, beliefs (ideologies) among faculty and students need to be altered. Sanberg’s book Lean In is especially informative about changing beliefs about career orientation for both men and women to what she calls a belief in sustainable and fulfilling positions. Another valuable resource for faculty concerned about these issues is Creating …


"If You Want To Be The Man, You've Got To Beat The Man": Masculinity And The Rise Of Professional Wrestling In The 1990'S, Marc Ouellette Jan 2017

"If You Want To Be The Man, You've Got To Beat The Man": Masculinity And The Rise Of Professional Wrestling In The 1990'S, Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

This paper traces the relationship between the shifting representations of masculinity in professional wrestling programs of the 1990s and the contemporaneous shifts in conceptions of masculinity, examining the ways each of these shifts impacted the other. Most important among these was a growing sense that the biggest enemy in wrestling and in day-to-day life is one’s boss. Moreover, the corporate corruption theme continues to underscore the WWE’s on-screen and off-screen coverage, well into the second decade of the twenty-first century. Thus, the paper provides a template for considering a widely consumed popular cultural form in ways that challenge the determinism …


Gender Revolution Of The Jazz Age: The Source Of Disillusionment In The Works Of F. Scott Fitzgerald And Ernest Hemingway, Mary Killeen Jan 2017

Gender Revolution Of The Jazz Age: The Source Of Disillusionment In The Works Of F. Scott Fitzgerald And Ernest Hemingway, Mary Killeen

All Master's Theses

The Lost Generation was forced to develop their own principles regarding gender identity in an environment of ever-shifting cultural norms, which called into question all of their predetermined ideas on femininity, masculinity, and the ways in which members of the opposite sex should interact with one another. Although much of their writing is set amid and seems to embrace the evolving social culture of the early twentieth-century, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway largely criticize the gender revolution of the 1920s and blame evolving gender roles for the collapse of their generation. Nevertheless, I argue that Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s cultural …