Digital Commons Network^™

Thee Black Female Rap Renaissance: An Intertextual Analysis Of Black Female Rap Lyrics As A Functional Feminism, Candace Hasan

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

Can women's liberation organizations draw inspiration from Black female rappers as contemporary feminist role models and embodiments of anti-misogynoir? Black female rap music asserts that women and femme-identifying individuals can counter harmful and oppressive portrayals by rapping life into alternative realities. Artists like Megan Thee Stallion, Cardi B, and City Girls actively resist patriarchal and heteronormative norms through their assertive and explicit lyrics, distinctive wardrobes, and performances. This paper utilizes intertextuality to delve into the themes and patterns across Black female rap music to illustrate how these artists use their craft to subvert violence, racism, and sexism, thereby reshaping the …

Sisters Of Conspiracy: A Feminist Analysis Of Evangelical, New Age, And Qanon Movements In Contemporary American Politics., Rachael Rollings

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

This thesis explores the link between New Age ideology, Evangelical Christianity, Qanon and the weaponization of women's body autonomy. It delves into how these factors have brought women into the Qanon conspiracy, leading them to engage in COVID denial, anti-vax movements, spreading medical misinformation, Qanon propaganda, and right-wing beliefs. Employing qualitative data analysis, cyberethnography, and feminist analysis, the research identifies online behavior, shared values, and beliefs in wellness, spiritual, and alt-right spaces through specific hashtags. This thesis focuses on a small set of social media hashtags on Facebook and Instagram between 2016 to 2020, revealing connections and shared agendas between …

Revolutionizing Knowledge Production: Transformative Reproductive Justice Activism Through Zine Making, Sierra R. Reyes

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

Often, academic knowledge and activist knowledge clash, one being dismissed as unscholarly and the other as impractical. As theory becomes further removed from its application in academic and activist spaces, how can scholars and activists work to produce revolutionary knowledge to transform our thinking and engage with social justice movements? This feminist action research project combines traditional and non-traditional methods of relaying feminist theoretical implications in the reproductive justice movement by pairing academic written text with a collection of “zines” to produce new and legitimate ways of transforming feminist scholarship and praxis. Because academia needs the “real world” experiences of …

Becoming Somebody: Black Women’S Escrevivências And Politics Of Resistance, Irimara Gomes Peixoto

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

Assata Shakur and Marielle Franco were activists fighting for racial and gender equality in the United States and Brazil. This work aims to observe their life stories and legacies, analyzing the documentary Marielle: The Crime That Shook Brazil and Assata Shakur’s memoir Assata: An Autobiography. This study will focus on the differences and similarities in their countries’ justice systems and how Franco and Shakur built strategies of resistance to navigate their homeland's necropolitics and also focus on the process of recognizing the self, using the concept of escrevivências. Therefore, observing how their political views and positions directly cause …

Ohh He Likes The Girls: A Genealogy Of The “Tranny Chaser”, Dennis Hardy

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

Research presented in this project examines how the social construction of sexuality affects cisgender (cis) men's attraction to transgender women. While mainstream discourse roots gender normative males' attraction to transgender women in heterosexuality, this project demonstrates how cis-trans pairings emerged from homosexuality in the twentieth century. This project traces the way sexologists' elaboration of the differences between sex, gender, and sexuality helped to distinguish transfeminine people from trans-attracted gender normative males using Foucauldian genealogy. Further, this project examines how researchers have adapted nineteenth-century frameworks of same-sex desires as sexual fetishes to construct gender-conforming “healthy” desires aimed at transsexual women by …

Tight Coils: Black Transfemininity, Transhegemony, And Identity Formation In The U.S. South, Vic J. Kennedy

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

Often without question, we are tasked with understanding gender as inherently predicated on the assumption of whiteness and understanding that Black trans women and other transfeminine people belong at the bottom of a silent “hierarchy” of sorts. How then do Southern Black transfeminine people form their genders under such tightly coiled restraints? To elucidate these questions’ answers, I interviewed 5 Southern Black trans women and/or Southern Black transfeminine people to discuss the issues facing those that find themselves often spoken about but rarely spoken to. After these interviews, I utilized both my own understanding of Southern Black gender theory as …

(Para)Normalizing The Patriarchy: How Supernatural Pregnancy Storylines Shape Perceptions Of Motherhood And Bodily Autonomy For Women In Angel, 1999-2004, Haley L. Strassburger

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

Bridging ideas presented in contemporary media analysis and feminist theory, the research presented herein investigates the representations of pregnancy within Angel in order to draw conclusions about the lasting impacts of these story arcs for both the women who fall victim to these violent possessions and pregnancies and the male characters who bear witness as well. Extending this analysis outside of the interpersonal conflicts that emerge between these fictional characters, this thesis argues that these pregnancy storylines serve as a “shibboleth of death” that extends past the minutiae of these characters’ lives and deaths to influence their legacies, or lack …

"The Accidental Virgin": An Analysis Of Sex, Sexuality, And Reproductive Health In Seventeen Magazine, Leah Berger-Singer

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

Public debates on youth sexuality, sex education, and reproductive rights are forever changing. Social media outlets are important knowledge spaces for teens to learn, share, and seek information regarding these topics. Using feminist content analysis, I explore how eight issues of Seventeen magazine construct and uphold conservative fears of teen sexuality. With the application of Michelle Fine’s four discourses of female sexuality, found in public-school sex education, (sexuality as individual morality, sexuality as victimization, sexuality as violence, and the missing discourse of desire) I seek to address how Seventeen constructs its target audience as a cis-gendered, heterosexual, teen girl who …

Stories Of Exile: The Construction Of Trans Athletes As A Political Category, Jordan Keesler

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

“Stories of Exile: The Construction of Trans Athletes as a Political Category,” asks: What is the relationship between gendered sports policy since 1936 and anti-trans sports laws in 2021? Utilizing a transfeminist sports studies’ methodology, I explore three significant points in Olympic sports where the discourse of the gender binary shifts: the introduction of sex verification in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the 1972 passage of Title IX, which shaped the classification of “female athletes,” and the 2021 Tokyo Olympics which featured the first out transgender and non-binary athletes. Aiming to bring attention to the connection between sports and the construction …

To Be Queer, Black, & Womxn: Self-Definition Of Queer Black Girlhood & Womxnhood In Film & Tv, Brittany Williams

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

This research explores the invisibility and marginalization of Queer Black women and girls in films and television and how these inaccurate depictions and stereotypes in media contribute to the real-world disenfranchisement and abuse of Queer Black women and girls in the United States. I highlight movies and tv episodes with Queer Black female characters and analyze how their character arcs and how their character is utilized to aid the plot within the film or series. I cite literature that examines homophobia, racism, and sexism, socially and institutionally in the US and highlight the research represented within these selected studies and …

Personalizing The Political In The Wake Of The Isla Vista Murders, Jasmine Montoya

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

This thesis identifies a political tactic I call “personalizing the political.” Personalizing the political inverts the responsibility of social ills from social institutions, the economy, and governance into personal problems created by individuals. Personalizing the political inverts the Marxist feminist understanding of “the personal is political.” Ultimately, neoliberal feminism has prompted personalizing the political and weakening feminist praxis. I identify personalizing the political in the response to the “incel killer,” Elliot Rodger, who committed a spree-killing in Isla Vista, California in 2014, which frames him as a “lone-wolf terrorist,” or mentally ill, rather than a fascist political actor. I take …

The Art Of Becoming, Charity J. Jackson

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

This study aims to bring attention to the ways in which Black womanhood is curated in the digital landscape by both Black women and non-Black women. Representations of Black women, often coded as negative, circulate mainstream media today, but when the same representations are taken up by non-Black woman bodies, they are regarded differently as unique, profitable, and desirable. In this context, Black womanhood is described as a specific performance assembled through cultural references popularized by Black women. To explore this topic, I analyze two Instagram accounts through visual analysis. The results show how my own curation of my image …

Praxis Of Lust: Alternative Sexual Culture In Personal Narratives Of Queer Disabled Sex, Caroline Jackson

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

This thesis focuses on emotions to analyze personal narratives of queer disabled sex to understand how queer disabled people talk about sex with the goal of identifying their constructions of their sexualities and sexual practices. By analyzing how the role of discourses on disability affect how these narrators and their partners feel about disabled sex, this thesis explores how sex can be used to combat negative emotions fueled by dominant ableist discourses that cause shame and self-disgust. This thesis explores how some of these narrators employ what I call a cross-crip praxis of lust, where they describe experiencing a radical …

Remembering And Feeling The Nation: Circulations Of Emotions Of The Imagined Community In The Contemporary Venezuelan Diaspora, Neidegar Martinez Parra

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

In the last five years Venezuela registered its first massive migration due to economic and sociopolitical circumstances. In this context, I explore visual discourses in which diasporic subjects imagine a modern nation through circulations of emotions and memories on Instagram. The Chromatic Environment, a piece by Carlos Cruz-Díez located at the Simón Bolívar International Airport, along with natural landscapes and circulations of commodities, become the evocative referents for Venezuelan diasporic subjects to claim their sense of belonging. A visual analysis of images reveals how Venezuelan migrants circulate their longing for recuperating and restoring icons, symbols, and consumption practices as …

Ancestral Wisdom And Spiritual Practices For Healing: Decolonizing Feminist Theory And Pedagogy, Justina N. Trim

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

African-indigenous spiritual practices, ancestral wisdom, and knowledge that pre-dates the institution of colleges and universities can be seen in multiple perspectives. For instance, this knowledge has been revered, or rejected. In this thesis, I advocate for the importance of understanding these spiritual practices and knowledges and regarding them as a form of healing, pedagogy, and rebellion. Finally, I discuss my curation of exhibits and altars that allow people to access the healing and restorative power of ancestral wisdom.

"Mamas Gotta Have A Life Too": Counternarrative Work On The Sex Negative Black Mother Figure, Nia Jasmine Byrd

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

SEX POSITIVE BLACK MOTHERS AND BLACK GIRLHOOD

Black girlhood is a beautiful experience despite the adversity many Black women face. In following the belief of the founder of Black girlhood studies Ruth Nicole Brown, "Black girlhood is a continuous life journey." While women throughout history have always struggled with respectability and sexual politics. Black women have had an even harder time being a woman, a sexual being, and a mother all in the sphere. We have experienced unique oppression due to both our race and gender that makes it vital that we tell our stories. Therefore, my thesis focuses on …

Towards Negotiating The Ethics Of Comedy Through Affective Pedagogies Of Feminist Humor, Muge Yuce

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

By calling for negotiating the ethics in the stand-up comedy, this thesis, first, focuses on the discussions around the issue of (in)appropriate comedic language in the stand-up shows that came out after 2017, that are Nanette by Hannah Gadsby, Sticks&Stone by Dave Chapelle, Right Now by Aziz Ansari, and Rape Jokes by Cameron Esposito. In doing so, it provides an analysis of how stand-up stages, in the face of Trump era and #metoo movement, have become a space of metacomedy, by enabling us to rethink about the form and ethics of comedy. Through its reflection on Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, …

The Fat Agenda: An Analysis Of Fatphobia, Race, Gender, Sexuality And Black Womanhood, Kara A. Lawrence

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

As a result of colonialism and hegemonic patriarchy, experiencing life with intersecting oppressions is extremely taxing. The added difficulty of being overweight can contribute additional stress in an appearance driven society. Yourdictionary.com reductively defines fatphobia as “the fear and dislike of obese people and or/ obesity” (yourdictionary.com). The term is not acknowledged in more credible dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster or Oxford. Through personal narrative I will reveal the ways in which fatphobia, along with the interlocking oppressions of racism and sexism, can negatively impact the expression of Black women’s sexuality and humanity.

The Bisexual To Be Corrected: Interrogating The Threat And Recuperation Of Women's Femme Bisexuality, Hannah Mcshane

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

In this project I seek to explore the ways in which women’s performance of femme bisexuality constitutes a threat to existing regimes of gender and sexuality in the West. In my analysis, I will consider how femme, femininity, womanhood, and bisexuality are constructed and policed, and further, how these forms of policing layer onto women’s femme bisexuality because of the identity’s potential to weaken existing hegemonic frameworks of power and control. In these considerations I will explore the history of femme as a descriptive/identity label, dominant perceptions of femininity both outside and within feminist circles, the history of bisexuality, the …

“You Are Not A Woman”: Disposable Mothers And The Clandestine Baby Factories In Nigeria, Irene Agunloye

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

My thesis ““You are not a Woman”: Disposable Mothers and The Clandestine Baby Factory in Nigeria”, seeks to address the exclusion and marginalization of infertile (barren) women, their experiences and voices from the ‘cult of motherhood’. The thesis is also a rallying cry for education, sensitization and action against the clandestine baby factories in Nigeria. Consequently, a screenplay is used to narrate an authentic account of this on-going assault on young unsuspecting women, bringing to light the driving force behind baby factories. In future, this screenplay will be filmed and used for advocacy to conscientize the general public (communities, government …

Hybrid – Can That Be My Nickname?: Intersectionality, Afro-Nihilism, And The Otherly Existence Of Queer Black Women, Bryana Jones

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

For Black women, recognizing, accessing, and exercising their ability to disrupt hegemonic categories of normativity is an important project. A combination of misogyny/sexism and racism relegates all Black women in America to an intersecting space of multiple marginalizations, and Black masculine lesbians ultimately occupy a space in the intersection of no less than four different oppressions: race, gender, sexuality, and gender nonconformity. This project examines, through narrative inquiry – primarily the poetic of storytelling – the ways that Black masculine lesbians, due to their particular positionality, experience an alternative, Otherly ontological existence. It also investigates the ways in which Black …

Refusals And Re-Creations: Imagining Utopia Through Black Lesbian Affect In Modern Dance, Shayla K. Robinson

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

This project explores how Black lesbian affectivity performed through dance, which includes gestures, comportment, expressions, etc., can provide a utopian framework of political and social organizing against white supremacist heteronormative hegemony. These affective performances create spaces of resistance within modern dance choreographies. These affective moments and performances demonstrate alternative forms of individual and collective existence in both the dance space and daily life. By examining the works of modern dancer Nora Chipaumire and the social justice dance theater ensemble, the Urban Bush Women, this project argues that Chipaumire and Urban Bush women use disidentification, affective performances, queer utopia and shapeshifting, …

Bringing Sex To Theory: Sensational Affinity, Pleasure, And Sexual Pedagogy, Andreanna Nattiel

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

This project is about theorizing black queer women’s sexualities and experiences with sexual pleasure outside the lens of traditional identitarian frameworks. Drawing on queer pornography and pleasure-based sex education, I analyze how these various forms of sex education conceptualize and deploy sexual pedagogy. Further, my project maps the ways in which black queer women’s sexual pleasure can be read through the lens of sensational affinity, which can serve as a form of queer world making.

Our Sacrifice Shall Not Be Required: Examining Maternal Ambivalence And Refusal In Black Motherhood, Candice J. Merritt

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

This thesis articulates motherhood as both a liberal and black humanist formation that conditions black women to mother and attempts to untether maternity from the black female body. By centering maternal ambivalence—the desire and distaste for motherhood—in selected works by black women, this thesis argues that black motherhood is an ambivalent site for some black women. Motherhood can be a site of joy and displeasure; sacrifice and refusal; life and death.

Women's Narratives Of Their Experiences With The Diagnosis Of Borderline Personality Disorder (Bpd), Jennie E. Lambert

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

Seventy-five percent of people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder are women; however, these women have only infrequently represented how they experience BPD. I interviewed three women with BPD and their narratives were transformed into vignettes using techniques from ethnographic fiction and affect theory. Salient themes from the vignettes were embodiment, trauma, and internal turmoil. This thesis represents how my participants experience BPD and demonstrates that their trauma needs more attention.

Talking About Clone Club: A Textual Analysis Of Orphan Black, Lisa Mcguire

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

Orphan Black is a television series rich with complex female clone characters and themes of surveillance and monster/monstrous feminine. I explore these two main themes through an analysis of the on-screen action in several characters’ story arcs. I am examining Orphan Black while revisiting Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” and considering the genres of horror and science fiction. I argue that the representation of the clones destabilizes woman as Other in terms of female monstrosity, expands the cyborg metaphor, and contributes to the feminist analysis of science fiction.

Ratcheting A Way Out Of The Respectable: Genealogical Interventions Into Atlanta's Respectability Politics, Sarah Abdelaziz

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

What do Black Lives Matter and Freaknik have in common? In this paper, I will argue that moments of Black Lives Matter in Atlanta exhibited refusals and undoings of respectability politics through the method of the ratchet. I define the ratchet as moments of non-normative embodiment and political possibility that refuse statist and Eurocentric norms through slippage of the self and the engagement of Black queer sexual politics. Freaknik is foregrounded as a ripe space for excavating such a display of the politically ratchet in Atlanta. I will look at a few different moments in the Black Lives Matter movement …

Picturing Queer Death: Alternative Instantiations Of Temporality Within Process Art, Jainey Jung Yeon Kim

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

During the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, the U.S.’ hegemonic heteronormative society saw AIDS as an epidemic threat to the future rather than as a threat to the present, which helped mark queer bodies affected by the virus as being erasable and replaceable. In response to this rise in fear and rage as the only potential affective productions of AIDS-related deaths, much of the queer art produced during this time sought to capture the permanence as well as ephemerality of queer desire and mourning. This project seeks to locate these alternative instantiations of temporality within queer art’s vivification of death …

Misogynists Have Feelings, Too: An Analysis Of Circulating Affect In The Red Pill, Samantha Pinson Wrisley

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

This thesis is a critical discourse analysis that seeks to identify and understand the various affects circulating within the anti-feminist, reactionary group, The Red Pill. The central argument is that, despite The Red Pill’s desire to cultivate an emotionless “essential masculine,” affect is made visible in these environments when it moves or circulates in the form of emotionally charged discourse.

"I Wanna Know Where The Rule Book Is": Youtube As A Site Of Counternarratives To Transnormativity, Jordan Forrest Miller

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

In June 2015, Caitlyn Jenner created waves of excitement with her coming out announcement on the cover of Vanity Fair: “Call me Caitlyn.” From the perspective of critical trans politics, however, the heightened visibility of trans people in mainstream media does not call for unequivocal celebration. Though trans women of color, such as Laverne Cox and Janet Mock, are more visible in mainstream media than ever before, mainstream media still largely depicts trans people through white constructs of what it means to be trans, namely medicalized binary transitions. Many trans people who deviate from mainstream media’s depiction of trans …