Digital Commons Network^™

#Hotgirlsemestersyllabus, Katrina Marie Overby, Gheni Platenburg, Niya Pickett Miller

Feminist Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

Identity-Making Processes In The Storytelling And Experiences Of Tabletop Roleplaying Game (Trpg) Players, Allen Barnhart

Master of Rhetoric and Composition

Tabletop roleplaying game (TRPG) play involves complex social interactions and imaginative processes. These recursive elements cause players to evaluate and reevaluate the identities of themselves and the identities of their imagined characters. Previous research has established that TRPG play unwittingly allows players to rehearse social interactions and potential self-identities. Explorations such as these can be desirable to educators trying to give students a critical outlook on identity and perspective. This study presents a novel survey of Discord users from communities with the goal of understanding players’ awareness and experience with these identity-making processes. Nineteen experienced TRPG players responded to the …

Disney Princess Films: Feminist Movements And The Changing Of Gender Roles, Mckinley M. Frees

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Digital Waves: Communicating Feminist Movements, Shauna M. Macdonald

Feminist Pedagogy

Online learning provides opportunities for pedagogical growth and innovation. When tasked with teaching an undergraduate Gender and Communication class during a virtual semester (amid the COVID-19 pandemic), I sought ways to engage students through online technologies rather than working against or despite them. The Digital Waves (DW) assignment, one that asks students to research and then create digital representations of a particular “wave” of feminism, was one of several strategies I adopted; it quickly evolved into a favorite.

Gendered Rhetoric Of Video Game Streaming : Female Agency, Harassment And Cat Girls, Tommie Ann Sutton

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The streaming community is large and varied, with the most popular streamers playing video games daily for audiences of tens of thousands of people. The community is well known for its exclusion and harassment of female players and streamers, despite demographic information showing that most player populations represent an even spread amongst men and women. This study analyzes two case studies in female streamer agency: the first is an IRL streamer named Pokimane and the second on the female animated streamers called VTubers. Specifically, it shows how Pokimane disrupts gendered harassment and how VTubers ignore harassment and perpetuate stereotypes that …

The Rhetorical Significance Of Women Deminers And Female Participation In Post-Conflict Operations, Brenna N. Matlock

Masters Theses, 2020-current

Across the globe, all female or mix-gender demining teams are working to eradicate landmines and other explosive remnants of war that threaten their communities. However, more generally, women are often absent from the various elements of security and peacekeeping that exists in post-conflict environments. The purpose of this research is to examine the rhetorical significance of women deminers and to analyze wider implications for female participation in post-conflict operations. Using a phenomenological, feminist, and transformative framework, I collected qualitative data from a range of public texts (or “artifacts”) written about women deminers and from online surveys distributed to women demining …

Murder She Rewrote: Redefining The Female Presence In Crime Fiction, Claire E. Snider

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

Brainstorming was first and foremost. Several ideas and possibilities for my final research paper came to me over a course of about a month before I finally settled on my topic. The next step was a brief outline that helped me visualize the setup for my final product. Formulating a list of unusual and powerful vocabulary was something that I sought out to do for this paper, so I ended up including a list at the end of my outline. My next step was to develop a research proposal, and this ended up being a condensed version of what ended …

Defying Expectations: One Female Preacher's Exploration Of Preaching Performance, Listener Expectations, And Emotion, Amy Lea Wiles

Doctor of Ministry Theses

In this thesis, one female preacher explores preaching performance, listener expectation, and emotion. Using exploratory research methodology, the thesis seeks to answer the following questions in a particular context: What are listener expectations of sermon delivery? Do listeners hold differing sermon delivery expectations for female preachers? How does meeting or straying from these expectations affect receptivity of the message? Data was collected through interviews with pastors, focus group questionnaires, and feedback forms of respondents who responded to sermons preached with different performance choices by both a female preacher and a male preacher. The results revealed a bias around performances related …

Gender, Race, And Class In Various Aspects Of American Literature: A Portfolio, Harry Olafsen

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

In this portfolio, Harry Olafsen takes a closer look at various texts in American Literature, including women in 1960s country music, Us directed by Jordan Peele, and southern women's diaries from the Civil War.

Student Disposition Towards Discussing Race In The Classroom, Natalie Salagean

English (MA) Theses

Discussions of race in the classroom have always been fraught. How do we broach such sensitive topics? How do we create an environment in which students feel both safe and comfortable discussing race on both a personal level and at a systemic scale? How does a student’s race factor into the conversation? And how does the instructor’s race factor in as well, or in conjunction with a student’s racial identity? As a Latina educator of color, I designed a research study which examined the impact my own race and ethnicity held in the classroom, and additionally how intersecting factors such …

The Commodified Body And Post/In Human Subjectivities In Frears’S Dirty Pretty Things And Romanek’S Never Let Me Go, Rocio Carrasco

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Following new materialist analysis, this article takes the body as the central locus of analysis, and relates it to broader questions such as ethics, ideology, power and/or technologies. Specifically, it revolves around the idea of embodied subjectivity as articulated by scholars Rosi Braidotti, Sherryl Vint or Cary Wolfe, whereby body and subjectivity are indissolubly and interestingly connected. Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go (2010) exploit the idea of the commodified body, understood here as a vulnerable body, a disposable commodity at the service of powerful and/or wealthy people. Victims of the cruelties inflicted …

Poison Ivy's Green Screen Debut: A Rhetorical Criticism On Erasing Identity On Screen, Jennifer Baney

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

This project investigates the loss of power on screen for female comic book characters. Specifically, I investigate how scenes create narratives using heteronormativity and over-sexualization of female characters. The artifact of analysis included in this project is Batman and Robin (1997). This text focuses on Poison Ivy, including the background of the character before dissecting her role in the film. Turning to Sonja J. Foss (2009) and her feminist critique as a guide to understanding the implications of this research. Using feminist criticism, I argue that Poison Ivy was put in a lesser position, removed of her power, and was …

Identity Negotiation, Saudi Women, And The Impact Of The 2011 Royal Decree: An Investigation Of The Cultural, Religious, And Societal Shifts Among Women In The Saudi Arabian Public Sphere, Maha Alshoaibi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Historically, Saudi Arabian culture has been deeply rooted in tradition, religious customs, family-oriented structures, and gender derived expectations for men and women alike. Saudi Arabian culture emphasizes a patriarchal family structure where men financially provide for their family whereas women are expected to manage internal household duties such as raising children, upholding household affairs, and working within a limited scope of employment. The concept of Saudi Arabian women integrating into the public workforce has been a source of contention and debate for the last several hundred years. Due to recent changes in political and economic events, a royal decree issued …

Discrimination Against Women In The Field Of Engineering, Julia Weber

Undergraduate Voices

This article focuses on the position of women in the field of engineering, specifically why the field is male-dominated and why this condition should change. When I state the field is male-dominated, I am addressing both the proportion of men in the field in comparison to women and discrimination towards women in the workplace.

Throughout this article, I will be focusing on women in the field of engineering. I will look into why the field is so male-dominated (Chu, 2005; Hunt, 2016; Ramirez & Wotipka, 2001) and how this has begun to change over time (Hill, Corbett, & St Rose, …

Rendering Reliance: Consuming Coloniality In The Global North, Victoria L. Brown

Dissertations

In this dissertation, I offer a theoretical lens for understanding how the Global South is imagined by the Global North. The Global South has become a popular cause that for-profit companies use in order to engage in what Samantha King terms cause-marketing. While individuals in the South are certainly helped by these campaigns, they are harmed through Northern consumers being empowered by private companies encouraging them to adopt a colonizing gaze that subjugates those in the South with adhering to stereotypes. I develop three rhetorical devices that fulfill stereotypes long-held about those who are “other.”

First, I offer the endangered …

American Studies + Computational Humanities, Lauren Tilton

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

While often commonly positioned at the intersection of computer science and digital humanities, computational humanities engages with other fields including data science, (computational) linguistics, and statistics.Such a transdisciplinary approach creates "a digital ecology of data, algorithms, metadata, analytical and visualization tools, and new forms of scholarly expression that result from this research," as Christa Williford and Charles Henry, of the Council on Library and Information Resources, write. Text analysis, particularly the method of topic modeling, has enjoyed broad exposure within computational humanities. Given the scale of the corpus, computational methods were used to identify reprinted texts in 41,829 issues.The goal …

From Feminist Activist To Abortion Barbie: A Rhetorical History Of Abortion Discourse From 2013-2016, Skye De Saint Felix

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides a rhetorical history of abortion discourse with an emphasis on the rhetorical moment from 2013-2016. To uncover the rhetorical strategies used to shape consensus on abortion, I highlight three major events—Senator Wendy Davis’s (D-Fort Worth) notorious 13-hour filibuster against Texas’s HB2, the conservative capture of Davis as Abortion Barbie, and the Supreme Court case, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (2016). Because of these key rhetorical moments, pro-choice and anti-choice publics cultivated a period of heightened tension that reinvigorated abortion debates. While pro-choice groups employed narrative to centralize women as rhetorical agents and open spaces to discuss abortion, …

Politics Of Feminist Revision In Di Prima's Loba, Polina Mackay

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Politics of Feminist Revision in di Prima's Loba" Polina Mackay explores Diane di Prima's two-volume epic Loba (1998) and, through a comparison of di Prima to the work of Adrienne Rich, argues that Loba practices a politics of feminist revision. Further, Mackay examines the ways in which di Prima starts to move away from the recovery project of female voices in patriarchal culture, associated with late twentieth-century Feminism, towards a women's literature which need not be defined entirely through its resistance to patriarchal narratives of gender in men's literature. Here it focuses on di Prima's revisionist …

Beer, Blogs, And Bitches, Lauren Murray

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Beer has been branded as a product that is available to men; we see this in popular advertisements online and on television. The heteronormatively-masculine image that is created presents a complicated rhetorical situation for women interested in beer. When searching the online community for female beer bloggers, I came across blogs that seemed to be addressing women who are alienated in the beer community with hyper-feminine rhetoric. This stark contrast to the rhetoric that we typically see in beer advertisements did not appeal to me either. I've been referred to as "the girlfriend with great taste in beer" and intercepted …

Siren Song: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Gender And Intimate Partner Violence In Gotham City Sirens, Katlin Schmidt

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This project investigates comic book discourse. Specifically, I investigate how comic narratives provide readers with an interpretation for how they should discern and assess “appropriate” behaviors for women. The artifact of analysis included in this project is DC Comics Gotham City Sirens (2009). This text features popular female superheroes, Catwoman, Harley Quinn, and Poison Ivy. Because comic books utilize both textual and visual means to disseminate a message, this project evaluates the visual rhetoric of these characters within the narrative. Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm is used to provide an understanding to how these visual means contribute to the meanings assigned …

Forging Family Ties, Kristin Davis

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

The assignment for this essay was to develop an argument related to gender in the United States and to use your own original research in addition to other sources. First, I thought about prominent issues in the United States and decided to focus on prejudice against homosexual couples who were attempting to adopt children. After doing some initial research, I decided that homosexual adoption rights need to be expanded on in the United States. I did more research on databases and in Roesch Library to find sources that would both support my side of the issue, but also some sources …

How Toni Morrison's Facebook Page Re(Con)Figures Race And Gender, Beatriz Revelles-Benavente

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "How Toni Morrison's Facebook Page Re(con)figures Race and Gender" Beatriz Revelles-Benavente explores Morrison's Facebook page and comments on it. In 2010, Morrison opened a Facebook page where she received a large amount of comments and created debates and Revelles-Benavente analyses how these comments navigate questions of race and gender. Based on theoretical considerations about issues of race and gender in cyberculture and applied to the narratives posted on Morrison's Facebook page, Revelles-Benavente argues that the problematics of race and gender are relational and the question needs to be centered on the object of study as the relation …

Gender Identity Construction Through Talk About Video Games, Sara M. Cole

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Gender Identity Construction through Talk about Video Games" Sara Cole discusses the construction of gender identity in terms of experiences of digital media and interactive play. Digital literacy expresses, shares, and reaffirms gendered self-identification through experiences of video game play with narratives that either confirm or deny stereotypical biases. In-depth interviews were used to explore the effects of play practices on conceptions of masculinity and personal identity in males who grew up in the 1980s by focusing on a linguistic analysis of the pragmatics of their shared thoughts on play, fantasy, use of digital media, and violence. …

Queer The Tech: Genderfucking And Anti-Consumer Activism In Social Media, Matthew A. Vetter

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

A companion text to a piece of online activist rhetoric, this essay attempts to explain how social media networks and other digital interfaces intercede and influence users' constructions of gender and consumer identity. Gaining awareness of the influence networks have over our lives, should empower users to appropriate and subvert those networks for alterior agendas. This essay, and the activism it introduces, demonstrates an appropriation of Pinterest, a "pinboard-style" social media network, for the purposes of suberting and exposing its typical hetero-normatie and pro-consumer practices.  Â

Is First, They Killed My Father A Cambodian Testimonio?, John Maddox

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Is First, They Killed My Father a Cambodian testimonio" John T. Maddox discusses aspects of the testimonial. Dialoguing with leading Latin Americanists, Maddox argues that Cambodian writer Loung Ung's First, They Killed My Father (2000) challenges this uniqueness and opens studies on the testimonio to new possibilities for intellectual reflection and political activism. In Maddox's view, the continued use of the term testimonio would serve as a reference to this long-standing tradition of writing and thinking about political violence in Latin America. After a discussion of the debate of the definition and function of testimonio and …

The Image-World: A Found Comic Poem, Franny Howes

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

The text of this comic is excerpted entirely from Susan Sontag's essay, "The Image World," from her 1977 book On Photography. I was assigned to read and respond to this piece when I attended the Adventure School for Ladies Comics Intensive, an alternative graduate program focused on gender, labor, and the comics industry.Sontag's essay critiques the way contemporary western culture uses photography for "imprisoning reality" and "depersonalizing our relation to the world." Photography creates another reality by the physical impression of light on film: what she calls the "image world." The idea of a separate and additive reality created through …

She’S Forever Present, Marina Abramović: An Artist, An Innovator, And The Grandmother Of Performance Art, Jessica Volmer

Communication Studies

No abstract provided.

Examining Gender In Pharmaceutical Rhetoric Through A Cultural Studies Lens: A Case Study On The Gardasil Vaccine, Jennifer Fickley-Baker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

On June 8, 2006, Merck announced the debut of Gardasil, the world's first vaccine found successful in preventing human papillomavirus (HPV) infections, a sexually transmitted infection that is one of the main causes of certain cancers in men and women, including cervical, vulvar, penile and anal cancers. To promote the vaccine's release, Merck launched Gardasil's "One Less" advertising campaign that included television commercials, print ads and a consumerfocused website (www.Gardasil.com), each promoting the message that "you" could now be "one less woman" affected by cervical cancer ("One Less" campaign). The vaccine, tested and approved only for females age 9-26, was …

Subversive Liminality And Ideological Warfare: The Zombie Mash-Up As Resistance To Hypermasculine Revenge Narratives Post-9/11, Veronica L. Cooper

Online Theses and Dissertations

This project plots the coincidence of the "zombie renaissance" and system-justifying nationalist rhetoric post-9/11. The project discusses this cultural cross-section with zombie mash-up fiction, using masculinity and trauma theories, in an attempt to illuminate the motives of "us vs. them" rhetoric and hypermasculine revenge narratives in the post-9/11 decade. First, I use Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim (2009) to examine liminality as subversive counter-discourse to the masculine hegemony post-9/11. Second, I use Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) to look at the effects of revenge culture and how non-emphasized femininity and hegemonic (hyper)masculinity co-construct each other.

Gender And Race, Online Communities, And Composition Classrooms, Jill Anne Morris

Wayne State University Dissertations

As the culmination of a two-year long Internet ethnographic study of three separate sites, I use examples of women and minorities fighting against discrimination online to explore the power structures inherent to networks and how these might affect classroom practice. I will show how our ordinary assumptions in rhetoric and composition as well as computers and writing about the necessity of safe spaces in fostering communication about gender and race and safety for people of color and women online might actually be harming the rhetorical effectiveness of these writings. To focus this discussion, I will develop three case studies and …