Digital Commons Network^™

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 …

“When The Details Are No Longer Too Much”: The Embodied Citizen-Subject In Régine Michelle Jean-Charles’S Conflict Bodies, Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal

Régine Michelle Jean-Charles’s Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (2014) is a stunning first book by a dynamic scholar working at the intersection of Africana Studies, Human Rights Studies, and Feminist Studies, not to mention literary studies in French. Jean-Charles’s title “Conflict Bodies” gestures both to the context of "conflict zones" as identified by human rights institutions, and it also refers to how the body of the victim-survivor is at once one that has survived, but whose survival reinscribes the body with new subjectivities, subjectivities that are informed both by the extremely intimate, and by …

“I Know You Want It”: Teaching The Blurred Lines Of Eighteenth-Century Rape Culture, Emily J. Dowd-Arrow, Sarah R. Creel

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

“‘I Know You Want It’: Teaching the Blurred Lines of Eighteenth-Century Rape Culture” is a collaborative pedagogical article that addresses the problem of so-called “post-feminism” in the contemporary college classroom by way of a comparative approach to eighteenth-century literature. Specifically, we contextualize and compare the early and late work of Eliza Haywood with current cultural debates and events in order to demonstrate not only the relevance of Haywood and eighteenth-century writers like her, but the importance of continuing the feminist conversation. The article provides texts, readings, and discussion points for consideration, as well as links to relevant contemporary issues and …

Prudery And Perversion: Domination Of The Sexual Body In Middle-Class Men, Women, And Disenfranchised Bodies In Victorian England, Ashley Barnett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research argues that with the rise of the middle-class, Victorian England saw the development of a power model in which middle-class men, middle-class women and disenfranchised bodies of children and lower-class women suffered from the demands of bodily domination. Because the bodily health of middle-class men was believed to represent national health, it was imperative that he dominate his body, particularly with regard to sexual urges. Consequently, the bodies of women with whom he sought sexual release suffered from forms of bodily domination as well. Through an analysis of journals and private writings of those living in Victorian England, …

Gay Liberation Is One Thing, But Nobody Likes A Dyke: Emerging Frames In Queer Radio, Ryan Charles Sugden

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how a social movement uses the media to progress in society. I conduct a framing analysis on the queer community’s use of radio during two time periods: 1970s queer radio program Gay Perspective and a 2015-2016 program, Queery. I examine the show through three emerging frames: Cultured, Diversity, and Assimilation. The thesis studies how segments of the LGBTQIA+ community framed the discussion of gay rights in the 1970s and how those frames have (and haven’t) changed in 2016. Gay Perspective focused much of its energy on trying to demonstrate the need for rights and attempts to demonstrate …

Schoolgirls: Embodiment Practices Among Current And Former Sex Workers In Academia, Jennifer Heineman

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation looks at how marginalized people experience embodiment in intellectual spaces. By looking at the experiences of twenty current and former sex workers in academia, I find that individual actors practice two kinds of embodiment, what I label 1) fragmented (consciously separating erotic and intellectual work) and 2) confluent embodiment (making erotic and intellectual work more confluent). I find that embodiment practices change depending on the social context in which they occur. My findings expand the literature on embodiment and sociologies of the body for a more robust and fluid definition of the ways individual actors practice and reflect …

Abdurraqib, Samaa, Iris Sangiovanni, Samar Ahmed

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Samaa Abdurraqib is a Black, queer, Muslim woman living in Portland, Maine. Abdurraqib was raised in Columbus, Ohio. She attend the University of Ohio, and later the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she received a PhD in English Literature. After graduating she worked as a visiting professor at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Next she went on to work the American Civil Liberties Union in Maine as a reproductive rights organizer. She now works for the Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence. Her advocacy and organizing work has included places such as Sexual Assault Response Services of Southern Maine, …

You Look Different In Real Life, Aylea Stephens

Children's Book and Media Review

Five kids were chosen to be the stars of a reality documentary, showing them in their regular lives doing what they do. It’s time for another movie, but Justine isn’t sure she wants to do another one. It’s been five years since the last movie, but now she feels like a disappointment and like she hardly knows most of the other kids who were so important to her early life. The new movie gives them a chance to reunite again, but after years of hurt and having personal things from their lives being shared with strangers, they aren’t very willing …

Punishing Sexual Fantasy, Andrew Gilden

William & Mary Law Review

The Internet has created unprecedented opportunities for adults and teenagers to explore their sexual identities, but it has also created new ways for the law to monitor and punish a diverse range of taboo sexual communication. A young mother loses custody of her two children due to sexually explicit Facebook conversations. A teenager is prosecuted for child pornography crimes after sending a naked selfie to her teenage boyfriend. An NYPD officer is convicted for conspiracy to kidnap several women based on conversations he had on a “dark fetish” fantasy website. In each of these cases, online sexual exploration and fantasy …

Fearless Friday: Casey O'Higgins, Casey O'Higgins

SURGE

This week is Spirit week. Because of this, today’s Fearless Friday honors a student who has worked tirelessly to promote education around LGBTQ issues.

Casey O’Higgins is a senior from Detriot, Michigan, who is majoring in Women & Gender Studies and minoring in English. He is the President of Outerspace, an LGBTQ organization on campus that provides a safe, social space for students in the LGBTQ community and allies to socialize. Casey also works at the Office of LGBTQA Advocacy and Education as one of their program coordinators. In this role, he is responsible for organizing campus events that are …

Bearing Witness: The Sight Of A Sacrifice In Cristian Mungiu's Beyond The Hills, Megan Girdwood

Journal of Religion & Film

Drawing on the theories of sacrifice advanced by Sigmund Freud (1913) and René Girard (1972; 1982), this article interprets the exorcism depicted by Romanian director Cristian Mungiu in Beyond the Hills (2012) as a sacrifice. Explicating Girard’s defence of Freud, I use his framing of sacrifice as a function of religion to reassess scholarship addressing the parallels between liturgical and cinematic forms of representation. If, as some scholars propose, the practices of the cinema-goer and the worshipper mirror each other, then the sacrificial witness portrayed by Mungiu constitutes a third pillar in this discourse. I argue that Mungiu dramatizes the …

Fearless Friday: Tiffany Lane, Tiffany Lane

SURGE

This week, SURGE is highlighting the fearless work of Tiffany Lane, the new director of the Women’s and LGBTQ Resource Center on campus.

Although she is a new addition to the Gettysburg community, Tiffany has been working with issues of systemic injustice for much of her life. Her social justice journey began when she was an undergrad at Michigan State University (MSU), where she began to accept her identity as a queer woman. Tiffany was a student leader and activist at MSU and became so passionate about this work that she decided to make a career out of her activism. …

Real Gender: Identity, Loss, And The Capacity To Feel Real, Hannah Wallerstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project concerns gender and feeling real. It begins with a seeming paradox: on the one hand, since Judith Butler (1999; 2011) we can no longer think gender as ontological in any simple sense; on the other, clinical experience and the voices of transgender and gender-queer individuals shows gender to function on the order of reality, and one exceeding the social. In other words, if feeling real depended entirely on being read as such, how would we account for the many who pass easily as “real” men or women and yet feel unreal, or come to feel more real by …

In Search Of Argentinidad: Identity Affirming Bodies In Movement In Latino-America, Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project is a multi-sited investigation into the production of Argentinidad (the embodied feeling of Argentine national identity) post the economic crisis of 2001 known as el Argentinazo. A special attention is paid to the role of the body as a culturally and socially mediated site of identity formation. Additionally, this project engages with the intersections of cultural and psychoanalytic theories that have influenced Argentinean self-identity in addition to social identities that are negotiated in moments of personal and national crisis. This project examines the roles and relationships of family and migration within Argentinean diasporic communities originating from the Provinces …

Fearless Friday: Julie Davin, Julie E. Davin

SURGE

In this week’s edition of Fearless Friday, SURGE is honoring all of the amazing work that Julie Davin ’17 does for our community.

Julie, originally from Newtown, Connecticut, is currently a senior at Gettysburg College majoring in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and minoring in English and Philosophy. Over the course of her college career, Julie has been involved with the Gettysburg Anti-Capitalist Collective (GACC), Students Against Sexual Assault (SASA), Outerspace (formerly Friend or Foe), SURGE, Gettysburg Cares, and the annual Vagina Monologues. This long list of activities does not faze Julie; she cares deeply about each and every cause …

Good Vibrations: Charting The Dominant And Emergent Discursive Regimes Of Sex Toys, George Rossolatos

The Qualitative Report

Sex toys promote a new consumptive ethos whose significance may be adequately outlined by attending to the institutional implications of this product category’s consumption. By drawing on Foucault’s theory of sexuality and the technologies of the self that materialize with the aid of discursive formations about sexuality, as well as on relevant sociological and ethnographic insights, I undertake a qualitative content analysis on a corpus of 100 sex toys’ product reviews from popular magazines and web sites in order to identify how the discourse about sex toys is articulated in terms of three dominant categories of sexual scripts (Simon & …

Successful Sexual Aging: A Feminist Gerontological Examination Of Sexual Behavior And Health, Christina Barmon

Sociology Dissertations

As gerontology has shifted from emphasizing the problems of aging to exploring how older adults can thrive, researchers have increased their attention on new issues including sexuality and aging. A sometimes explicit, but often implicit assumption in this research, is that sex is good for you—that it is an integral part of a full and healthy life or successful aging. Although successful aging is one of the most commonly cited theories in social gerontology (Alley et al. 2010), it has not gone without criticism (Martinson and Berridge 2014). Using an unrefined successful aging framework for sex research has the potential …

"Some Guys Do, But That's Not Me." Language Use And The Rejection Of Hegemonic Masculinity., Lanier Basenberg

Sociology Dissertations

Young men experience daily struggles to live up to an American ideal of masculinity that does not leave room for emotion, tenderness, and respect for their sexual partners – and they are beginning to reject this ideal outright. In this study I give young men the space and freedom to talk openly about sex in general and their sexual experiences in particular, with the goal of ascertaining how their talk illustrates and impacts their performance of masculinity. I employed a qualitative approach, including focus groups consisting of college men of all sexual orientations, and a comprehensive survey regarding their sexual …

Heteronormative Labour: Conflicting Accountability Structures Among Men In Nursing, Marci D. Cottingham, Austin Johnson, Tiffany Taylor

Austin Johnson

Teaching In A Gendered World, Karen Sotiropolous, Ian Christopher Fletcher

Karen Sotiropolous

No abstract provided.

“If You’Re Not That As An Asian Woman, You’Re Not Shit As An Asian Woman.”: (Re)Negotiating Racial And Gender Identities, Andi T. Remoquillo

College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations

This studies utilizes a critical, postcolonial feminist lens when analyzing the ways in which Asian-American women are (re)negotiating their gender and sexual identities within the contemporary United States. Through the use of empirical research, as well historical content and discourse analyses, this M.A. thesis deconstructs the ways in which Western society has constructed Asian/Asian-American women as the hypersexual Other, and revisits the ways in which empowerment, agency, and autonomy are reconfigured by Asian-American women themselves.

Sex, Sexuality And Sexual Practice For Trans Individuals And Their Romantic Partners., Kinton Rossman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Transgender populations demonstrate significant sexual diversity, with over three-fourths (77%) of transgender individuals identifying as sexual minorities (Grant et al., 2011); however, a majority of research on sex, sexuality, and sexual practice has focused exclusively on cisgender and heterosexual individuals and, perhaps more importantly, addressed these issues a heteronormative and cisnormative perspective (Nichols, 2014). Such frameworks have created significant gaps in research about sex, sexuality, and sexual practice for trans individuals including understanding how gender transition influences sex and sexuality and how trans individuals and their partners engage in sexual practice. The current study addressed these omissions in the literature …

Female Moments / Male Structures: The Representation Of Women In Romantic Comedies, Jordan A. Scharaga

Media and Communication Studies Summer Fellows

Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl again. With this formula it seems that romantic comedies are actually meant for men instead of women. If this is the case, then why do women watch these films? The repetition of female stars like Katharine Hepburn, Doris Day and Meg Ryan in romantic comedies allows audiences to find elements of truth in their characters as they grapple with the input of others in their life choices, combat the anxiety of being single, and prove they are less sexually naïve than society would like to admit. In 1999, a character struggles …

“Black Americans And Hiv/Aids In Popular Media” Conforming To The Politics Of Respectability, Alisha Lynn Menzies

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines narratives about racialized gender, sexuality, and class through media images of black Americans with HIV/AIDS. Through textual analysis of media sites featuring HIV/AIDS and blackness (The Announcement, Precious, and Marvelyn Brown’s website, www.marvelynbrown.com), this project analyzes how the politics of respectability—a set of precepts that govern how black men and women can present themselves in public spaces to align with white ideals of gender and sexuality—construct black people in media representations of HIV/AIDS. This work examines how respectability politics deployed in media representations of HIV/AIDS and black Americans reclaim notions of acceptable black sexuality …

Dating As An Occupation: Swipe Right For Ot, Karen Mccarthy

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Background As occupational therapists (OTs) we claim to treat our clients holistically, yet despite research indicating the importance of sexuality in practice (White et al 1992, Northcott and Chard 2000) sexuality and the occupations surrounding it, such as dating, can often be ignored in practice. Sexuality is expressed through many forms including sexual activity, self care and dating. As OTs, how often do we acknowledge or actively address a client’s desire to find a partner and the occupations that surround such a goal? Krishnagiri discusses “mate selection” as an important occupation with rich cultural and personal significance to the person …

The Impact Of Anti-Gay Politics On The Lgbtq Movement, Amy L. Stone

Sociology & Anthropology Faculty Research

Since the late 1970s, the Religious Right has mobilized to oppose the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) movement in the United States. Sociologists have studied the relationship between these two movements as a classic movement-countermovement dynamic, in which the strategies, actions, and framing of one movement impact the other. I analyze the way Religious Right reactive and proactive opposition to gay rights has affected the LGBTQ movement. First, I provide an overview of the literature on the negative impacts of the Religious Right, including the diversion of movement goals, transformation of frames, and marginalization of queer politics. Second, …

Perceived Life Satisfaction Among Gay Males: The Coming-Out Process, Kimberly D. Carter

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This research project was a mixed method of both a quantitative and qualitative design to examine the perception of 38 gay male’s life satisfaction post coming out. In the past few years, laws affecting the gay community have been at the forefront of policies and debates, given all communities an insight into the specific challenges that are endured. As the gay community starts to openly live their lives as a gay man, there has been a need to accept and understand not only the challenges, but to give acceptance.

Additionally, this project sought out to determine if the gay community …

Toilet Talk, Michael Blake

Theses and Dissertations

Toilet Talk explores both formal and autobiographical themes related to desire, sexuality, and the relationship between public and private space. My work and research aims to reposition and queer the industrial object and its promotion of hyper masculine ideals.

The Language Of Non-Normative Sexuality And Genders, Emily Bolam, Samantha Jarvis

Scholars Week

This project is about how asexual, intersex and transgender identities challenge normative ideas about what it means to be human. Our research primarily focused on how language used in the medical community influences societal perceptions of non-normative identities. Western culture is pervasively heteronormative, meaning that there is a narrow idea of what constitutes a “normal” human being, which is typically heterosexual and limited to a binary gender system. While society is making strides with accepting non-hetero sexual identities, there persists the notion that humans are inherently sexual beings. Asexuality, an orientation characterized by a lack of sexual attraction, challenges this …

“He Enjoys Giving Her Pleasure”: Diversity And Complexity In Young Men’S Sexual Scripts, Diane M. Morrison, N. Tatiana Masters, Elizabeth A. Wells, Erin A. Casey, Blair Beadnell, Marilyn J. Hoppe

Erin Casey

Research on heterosexual men’s sexual expectations has focused on self-described personal traits and culturally dominant models of masculinity. In a pair of studies, we used a sexual scripts perspective to explore the range and diversity of young men’s thoughts about sex and relationships with women and to develop measures for assessing these scripts. In the first study, we conducted semi-structured interviews to elicit young men’s accounts of their sexual relationships. We used these narratives to produce brief sexual script scenarios describing typical sexual situations, as well as conventional survey items assessing sexual behavior themes. In the second study, we administered …