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Wifely Figures: Gender, Marriage, And Biblical Typology In Early Modern England, Melissa Welshans

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation illuminates how the hermeneutic of biblical typology influenced the conception of the female life cycle in early modern English literature, especially the social roles of maid, wife, and widow. Reading texts from a variety of genres and by both male and female authors, this dissertation argues that a typological understanding of marriage gave additional, spiritual import to those social roles, thus further upholding ideologies that defined women by their proximity to marriage. However, this dissertation also demonstrates how a typological understanding of marriage and the female life cycle could also be used to critique gender norms. After providing …

Portrait Of A California Mystic, Lisa Francesca

Master's Theses

This book is about Helen van Löben Sels, an automatic writer born in the late nineteenth century, who was my great-grandmother. It explores a part of her life during which her writing was inspired by a spiritual or subconscious agency rather than by her conscious intention. I describe her childhood as an East Coast publisher’s daughter, and her career as a California ranch wife and mother to discern what might have precipitated her mediumship. By exploring cardboard boxes filled with her papers, family memoirs and other sources, I found that an inherited propensity to write, the difficulty of being heard …

Riding Ladies: Female Motorcycle Riders Try To Bring Down The Patriarchy, Kellie Ell

Capstones

The Brooklyn Invitational Custom Motorcycle Show is the last place one would expect to find the fall of the patriarchy. The number of female motorcycle riders has nearly doubled in the last two decades. Women riders are challenging the notion that motorcycle riding is a sport for men — and a man’s world. Feminism was supposed to be empowering. In my story, I am exploring who is benefiting from all of this female empowerment.

https://kellieell.wordpress.com/2017/12/20/riding-ladies/

Breaking The Celluloid Ceiling, Kellie Ann Cassel

Cinesthesia

The ignorance of the current state of gender equality in the film industry is not just on the rise, but the knowledge of such has been non existent for decades. Women were largely involved in the film industry during the turn of the century, until sound film became popular and Hollywood turned into a big business. As of 2016, only seven percent of the top filmmakers are women. The lack of female filmmakers in Hollywood is not only effecting the women who are trying to make a living doing what they love, but also the young and old female audiences …

Surrendering To Gender In Education? Complacency And The Woman Leader, Kimberly L. Clark Ed. D., Ane T. Johnson Ph. D.

Journal of Women in Educational Leadership

The purpose of our study was to better understand the role of gender performance for aspiring school leaders through a reflection of their journey through the administrative pipeline. The transformation of professional aspirations throughout and following the certification process and during employment was also analyzed. Also, the appealing factors of a nontraditional administrative preparation program were evaluated. Using heuristic qualitative methods, women graduates of and expedited certification for educational leadership program participated in focus groups and a select group returned for individual interviews. Coding was employed to analyze the data. Our participants entered into school leadership as a result of …

Lydia Cacho’S Role In The Transformation Of Human Sex-Trafficking, Antoinette Josephick

Faculty Curated Undergraduate Works

Lydia Cacho (2014) is a Mexican investigative journalist and feminist who fights for woman, children and human rights. She is known for exposing the Mexican child pornography run by wealthy businessmen through her book Demons of Eden. Cacho (2014) was raised by supportive parents and especially looked up to her feminist mother. Her remarkable work as a journalist exposing serious issues in Mexico and around the world have lead her to become one of the most important feminists in modern times. She continues to pave a way for victims of sexual exploitation to come forward and tell their stories. Cacho …

Women Issues, Fatimah Alasiri

WS 6800/MC 6400 Oral History Interview

Oral History Interview included the change, purpose, and population of women's studies program over time. Also, the role of gender in feminism, women movement, and liberal perspectives. Media representation of women and women rights

The Slow Work Of Democracy: Resisting Reductionist Views Of Women And Children, Stephanie C. Serriere

Democracy and Education

In her research article “State your defense!": Children negotiate analytic frames in the context of deliberative dialogue," Hauver offers important contributions to the field of elementary civic education that illuminate how young people apply various analytical frames to make collective decisions. First, I highlight significant contributions of her work, namely children’s capabilities to build perspective-taking through dialogue, which I suggest can be more solidly grounded in a sociocultural framework, not a developmental one. Second, I offer suggestions toward such a theoretical framework that loosens determinism for children’s development and offers a less deterministic framework for women. My review seeks …

« Les Celles Qui Sont Pas Contentes » : Françoise Durocher, Waitress D’André Brassard Et De Michel Tremblay (1972), Maxime Blanchard

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

More relevant than ever, Françoise Durocher, waitress, a 1972 short film directed by André Brassard (based on a screenplay by Michel Tremblay), keeps highlighting the current political alienation of the Québécois people within Canada. By analyzing the main character, Françoise Durocher, this article reveals the contradictions of a cultural, social, and feminist struggle against imperialism and domination.

With Great Power: Examining The Representation And Empowerment Of Women In Dc And Marvel Comics, Kylee Kilbourne

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Throughout history, comic books and the media they inspire have reflected modern society as it changes and grows. But women’s roles in comics have often been diminished as they become victims, damsels in distress, and sidekicks. This thesis explores the problems that female characters often face in comic books, but it also shows the positive representation that new creators have introduced over the years. This project is a genealogy, in which the development of the empowered superwoman is traced in modern age comic books. This discussion includes the characters of Kamala Khan, Harley Quinn, Gwen Stacy, and Barbara Gordon and …

Expanding Efficiency: Women's Communication In Engineering, Jennifer C. Mallette

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

As engineering fields strive to be more inclusive of women, focusing on perceptions of women's work is vital to understanding how women can succeed and the limitations they may face. One area in need of more attention is the connection between communication and women's experiences in engineering. This article examines the gendered nature of writing labor in engineering, focusing on case studies of three women who were able to use writing effectively, yet how communication emerged as a gendered form of labor subject to gendered perceptions. While these women's communication skills led to professional success, their association with writing echoes …

Editorial, Cheryl Sterling

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In thinking about this volume, questions that come to light are: how does transnationalism redefine aspects of feminist engagement, cultural forms, political causes, (hetero)patriarchal discourses and issues of sexuality and sexual difference? Conceptually, theoretically, and pragmatically, what is the potentiality and trajectory of the literary voices and creativity of African and African Diasporic women writers and artists in their trans-portation, transformation, incorporation, and dissemination as subjects within this movement, who authorize its formative constructs, indexical lens, and its range of permutations? Following the logic of such inquiries, transnationalism trajectory alongside postmodernity constitutes an important underlying rubric of the engagement with …

Deconstructing The Ivorian Vestimentary Traditions: New Fashion, Contemporary Beauty And New Identity In Marguerite Abouet And Clément Oubrerie’S Aya De Yopougon, Richard Oko Ajah, Letitia Egege

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This paper adopts an eclectic framework of semiotic, postmodern and postcolonial theories to interpret the representations of dressing as an aesthetic activity in Aya de Yopougon 1-3 and to investigate how Yopougon dwellers use their fashion sense to establish both a group identity and a form of everyday resistance. Characters’ bodies are remade, through dressing, to contain emotive qualities and to play symbolic functions with their everyday choice of dress. Their sartorial obsession is supported by psychic inferiority and pop culture; all characters engage in “disciplinary practices” for the clothing culture of their bodies that are ornamented surfaces for display.

Bastardly Duppies & Dastardly Dykes: Queer Sexuality And The Supernatural In Michelle Cliff’S Abeng And Shani Mootoo’S Cereus Blooms At Night, Rahul K. Gairola

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This paper explores the ways in which the "duppy," or malevolent spirit, circulates the fictive landscape of the queer novels of Michelle Cliff and Shani Mootoo. I explore the ways in which the unhappy ghost is a figure which comments on the sexual pathology of postcolonial queerness in the Caribbean. I focus on the characters of Clare in "Abeng" and Mala in "Cereus Blooms at Night" in a bid to elucidate the ways that Caribbean lesbianism invokes, on the one hand, what M. Jacqui Alexander calls "erotic autonomy as a form of decolonization politics" in the material eroticism of women …

Gendered Ecologies And Black Feminist Futures In Ibi Zoboi’S “The Farming Of Gods,” Wanuri Kahiu’S Pumzi, And Wangechi Mutu’S The End Of Eating Everything, Amanda Renee Rico

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This paper addresses how the works of three female authors and artists from various parts of Africa and the Diaspora — Pumzi by Wanuri Kahiu, The End of eating Everything by Wangechi Mutu, and “The Farming of the Gods” by Ibi Zoboi — imagine a black feminist future through ecological imagery. My argument is twofold: first, I take my cue from Mutu’s assertion that imaginative forms of world-building must connect systemic corruption to consumptive practices. Second, I claim such Afrofuturist works use geographical spaces marked by ecological abuse (poisonous spores, pustules, desert landscapes), displacement (discarded objects) and violence (human limbs) …

Exploring The Gendered Nature Of National Violence: The Intersection Of Patriarchy And Civil Conflict In Tanella Boni’S Matins De Couvre-Feu (Mornings Under Curfew), Janice Spleth

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Placed under house arrest during a period of civil conflict, the fictional narrator of Tanella Boni’s Matins de couvre-feu uses this time of enforced solitude to review her personal experiences as a woman in relationship to the instability now threatening the country. This reading of Boni’s work examines the narrator’s perspective on war in the context of feminist theories on the gendered nature of violence in order to better situate the narrative within a more extensive transnational discourse on the role of gender in the waging of war and the preservation of peace.

On Memory And Resistance: Motherhood, Community And Dispossession In Zora Moreno’S Coqui Corihundo Vira El Mundo (1981), Stephanie Gomez Menzies

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This paper examines Zora Moreno’s play Coquí corihundo vira el mundo (1981) as an alternative to the identitarian investment in the patriarchal myth of the gran familia puertorriqueña. I argue that by offering a feminist rewriting of Adolfina Villanueva through the protagonist Anastasia, Moreno combats the privileging of Puerto Rican identity as a light-skinned, male figure. Moreno critiques these colonial vestiges of racial discrimination through her interrogation of the spatial politics of home. Coquí corihundo vira el mundo problematizes the construction of a Puerto Rican identity that would erase Afro-Puerto Rican identity and thereby replicate a racialized hierarchy. Thus, in …

Rupturing The Genre: Un-Writing Silence In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’S Americanah, Felix Mutunga Ndaka

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This paper examines Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) and it’s troubling of the silencing and policing of black female migrants. Focusing on the salon/hairdressers and Ifemelu’s blog, I argue that the former represents an intimate and politicized narrative space whose production and habitation invites us to engage with migrant/feminine interactions and non-normative feminine aesthetics. In addition, I read the virtual site of Ifemelu’s blog as a space that transcends the circumscribed nature of interracial relations and dialogues. By portraying these spaces’ cultivation of heterogeneity and polyvocality, Adichie’s text advances an alternative politics of inhabiting racially and patriarchally hierarchized foreign spaces.

White Innocence: Paradoxes Of Colonialism And Race By Gloria Wekker, Duke University Press, 2016, Jakki Forester

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race by Gloria Wekker, Duke University Press, 2016

Dutch Caribbean Women’S Literary Thought: Activism Through Linguistic And Cosmopolitan Multiplicity, Florencia V. Cornet

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In a select group of works by late 20th and early 21 st century Curaçaoan women novelists and poets such as Nydia Ecury (1926- 2012), Diana Lebacs (b.1947), Myra Römer (b.1946), Aliefka Bijlsma (b.1971), and Mishenu Osepa-Cicilia (b.1978), we see through what is often an autobiographical subjectivity, a “transnational collective plurality and difference” that describes the empowering physical and psychological possibilities that come with cross-national travel, immigration, cosmopolitanism, and linguistic multiplicity. This paper will present the politics of Curaçaoan-Dutch Caribbean women’s cosmopolitanism and linguistic multiplicity as transformative tools for personal and collective agency and activism for autonomy.

Aids And Masculinity In The African City: Privilege, Inequality, And Modern Manhood By Robert Wyrod, University Of California Press, 2016, Miriam Kyomugasho

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

AIDS and Masculinity in the African City: Privilege, Inequality, and Modern Manhood by Robert Wyrod, University of California Press, 2016

Living A Feminist Life By Sara Ahmed, Duke University Press, 2017, Alonso Peña

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed, Duke University Press, 2017

Since The Time Of Eve : La Leche League And Communities Of Mothers Throughout History., Joanna Paxton Federico

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

La Leche League International (LLL) is the oldest and largest breastfeeding support group in the world. This thesis examines how, beginning in 1956, seven Catholic housewives from suburban Chicago built up the institutional knowledge to sustain a cohesive global network of breastfeeding mothers. It also explores how LLL managed this knowledge over time in response to developments in scholarship and changing social conditions. Based on a narrative analysis of LLL publications, this thesis argues that the League’s founders drew selectively from existing bodies of knowledge and from their own cultural perspectives to establish a sense of community among breastfeeding women. …

Pink Hats And Black Fists: The Role Of Women In The Black Lives Matter Movement, Jessica Watters

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Aphra Behn On The Contemporary Stage: Behn's Feminist Legacy And Woman-Directed Revivals Of The Rover, Nicole Elizabeth Stodard

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study theorizes the origins and history of the professional female playwright and director from the Restoration period to the present day through the stage history of Behn's most popular play, The Rover. Part one is comprised of two chapters: the first in this section argues the importance of appreciating Behn's proto-directorial function in the Restoration theatre and her significance to the history of feminism and women in professional theatre; the second chapter in this section examines the implications of casting practices and venue changes to eighteenth-century revivals of Behn's canon with a particular eye towards what a contemporary director …

Johnson, Myke, Marwa Abdalla, Colleen Fagan

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Myke Johnson (she/her pronoun) is a 64 year old Unitarian minister currently living in Portland Maine with her partner of 24 years. She is from Michigan and later moved to Texas and Wyoming with her family. She is the oldest out of 9 children. She grew up Catholic and found herself being an activist during her college years. She became a feminist and was part of the Women's Peace Encampment, March on Washington, Marriage rights campaigns and many more. She got her doctorate degree in the Feminist Liberation Theology Program and became a minister in Massachussets. She then continued to …

The Embodiment And Discourses Of A Taboo: #Brelfie, Sarah Beach

Kaleidoscope: A Graduate Journal of Qualitative Communication Research

#brelfie is an online social media trend that seeks to normalize public breastfeeding through exposure. “Brelfies” are “breastfeeding selfies”—in which a mother uploads an image of herself breastfeeding to social media. It is controversial even within the trend itself, as women disagree on how it potentially pressures women to perform motherhood. Much of Western culture views the female breast as a sexual organ, and thus creates norms about how breasts should be functioned and displayed in public. Yet, many others would argue that breastfeeding is the only legitimate use of the female breast and is therefore permissibly exhibited in public. …

Unsmiling Lips And Dull Eyes: A Study Of Why We Continue To Read Jane Austen, Kareen Barakat

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to take a closer look at Jane Austen’s work and understand the importance of it in both the academic and cultural sphere. With a specific focus on Pride and Prejudice, this research starts with a focus on feminist readings of the novel. Primarily, this research looks at the novel with a feminist lens in order to better understand the female characters and their involvement in the marriage plot. Secondarily, the research goes on to look at the cultural impact of Pride and Prejudice and attempts to understand the ways in which this novel re-appears …

Pitching The Feminist Voice: A Critique Of Contemporary Consumer Feminism, Kate Hoad-Reddick

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation’s object of study is the contemporary trend of femvertising, where seemingly pro-women sentiments are used to sell products. I argue that this commodified version of feminism is highly curated, superficial, and docile. The core question at the centre of this research is how commercial feminism—epitomized by the trend of femvertising—influences the feminist discursive field. Initially, I situate femvertising within the wider trend of consumer feminism and consider the implications of a marketplace that speaks the language of feminism. Then, through detailed content analysis of advertising by brands like Dove, Secret, CoverGirl, and Barbie, examples of this trend …

Demanding Spaces: 1970s U.S. Women's Novels As Sites Of Struggle, Kate Marantz

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation offers a new view of 1970s gender and race politics in the United States by analyzing struggles in and over space in four women’s novels: Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays (1970), Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973), Alice Walker’s Meridian (1976), and Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room (1977). My project reads space as a dynamic, politically charged realm of interactions between lived bodies, physical landscapes, and imaginative territories—including the formal characteristics of fiction. Using this critical lens, I highlight how these authors interrogate conditions of sexism and racism by representing their characters making and responding to “demands” for …