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Revolutionizing Knowledge Production: Transformative Reproductive Justice Activism Through Zine Making, Sierra R. Reyes Dec 2023

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 …


Sisters Of Conspiracy: A Feminist Analysis Of Evangelical, New Age, And Qanon Movements In Contemporary American Politics., Rachael Rollings Dec 2023

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 …


Becoming Somebody: Black Women’S Escrevivências And Politics Of Resistance, Irimara Gomes Peixoto Aug 2023

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 Aug 2023

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 …


(Para)Normalizing The Patriarchy: How Supernatural Pregnancy Storylines Shape Perceptions Of Motherhood And Bodily Autonomy For Women In Angel, 1999-2004, Haley L. Strassburger May 2023

(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 …


Tight Coils: Black Transfemininity, Transhegemony, And Identity Formation In The U.S. South, Vic J. Kennedy May 2023

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 …