Digital Commons Network^™

Memories And Trauma Of An Absent Past- Women Filmmakers In Argentina, Nicholas P. Pezzote

Doctoral Dissertations

This work analyzes the relationship between personal and historical memory in five Argentine films made after the end of the country's last dictatorship. All are directed by, and feature, women. Besides approaching the topic of memory, this work examines how patriarchy influences narratives of both personal histories and, more broadly, of history in: Camila (María Luisa Bemberg, 1984), Un muro de silencio (Lita Stantic, 1993), Los rubios (Albertina Carri, 2003) and La mujer sin cabeza (Lucrecia Martel, 2008). Trauma and the handing down of memory—issues that appear in all of the chosen films—are approached from a critical feminist perspective. At …

The Performative History Of Tomboys In Anglophone Literature Prior To Little Women, Kimber Palmer

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the expansive history of literary tomboys in the century preceding Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868). Applying concepts from gender performativity theory, it explores earlier and previously overlooked portrayals of tomboys (or, alternatively, "hoydens" or "romps"), especially in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's A Trip to Scarborough (1777), Isaac Bickerstaffe's The Romp; A Comic Opera in Two Acts (1786), Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1817), and E.D.E.N. Southworth's The Hidden Hand (1859). Because the tomboy phenomenon emphasizes that gender roles must be learned and can be resisted, tomboy characters are …

Angels Of Many Houses: Reconciling Domesticity In 19th-Century Victorian Literature, Amanda Vierra

College Honors Program

The rise of the Victorian middle class is known for solidifying a separation of gender roles, with women operating in the private, domestic sphere and men in the public sphere. This historical value placed on domesticity is reflected in the rise of domestic fiction, the dominant genre of Victorian literature, which commonly depicts young, middle-class women making their way in the world. The plot of these narratives revolves around women perfecting or contending with their place in the domestic sphere through courtship, marriage, and family. Scholars on domestic fiction have continued to argue over whether domestic fiction reflected the oppressive …

Understanding How Women Navigated The Fight For Equality During The Second Republic And Transition-Era Spain Through Feminist Literature, Amanda Jeanette Pagoaga

Honors Theses

This paper explores how women navigated the fight for equality during the Second Republic and Transition-era Spain through the lens of feminist literature. Specifically, comparing and analyzing two books, Doble esplendor by Constancia de la Mora (1939) and Crónica del desamor by Rosa Montero (1979). Both books feature women in their thirties who work and explore themes of marriage and romantic love, friendship as a space of freedom, motherhood, working women, and politics against the backdrop of the ever-changing sociopolitical situation in Spain. Through close analysis of these works, the author examines how these women navigate gender roles and societal …

The Rape-Revenge Genre In The Digital Age Of Heightened Visibility: The Rise Of Female Storytellers And Fourth-Wave Feminism, Marynell Dethero

Film Studies (MA) Theses

The rape-revenge cinema genre has continued to evolve since its initial emergence in the 1970s. Many of the most popular films belonging to the genre produced in the 1970s, like Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave (1978) or Wes Craven’s directorial debut The Last House on the Left (1972), have been criticized heavily by film critics and scholars for their exploitative tropes. However, I argue that regardless of the production value of the films, the rape-revenge genre is inherently feminist because sexual violence is and always has been an inherent issue to the feminist movement and because the genre …

Reproductive Justice And Feminism: A Comparative Legal Analysis Of The Policies And Healthcare Systems In The United States And Colombia, Samantha Cooke

Modern Languages, Philosophy and Classics Theses

This thesis seeks to offer a comparative legal analysis of the state of the laws regarding abortion and reproductive autonomy in the United States of America and Colombia. This thesis will first address a brief history of feminism and its origins in the United States and Colombia. It will also analyze the policies held by each respective nation; starting with old legislation and moving to current policies regarding abortion. It will also include a comparison between both the U.S. and Colombia; offering suggestions for the future with regards to potential policy changes. The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate …

Becker, Ann Joy, Sophia Maier Garcia

Bronx Jewish History Project

Ann Joy Becker, born 1959, grew up outside of Parkchester on Thieriot Avenue in the Archer Stratton Co-op. Her grandparents, immigrants from Eastern Europe, were peddlers on Pelham Parkway. She attended PS 102 and Columbus High School, because her mother did not want her to go to James Monroe High School because it was considered a bad school and dangerous for a white girl. The co-op and surrounding area was mostly Jewish and Italian, with minorities on the other side of the highway. Becker explains there were more issues with other white ethnic groups than with minorities at that time. …

“Edna O’Brien: An Interview With Maureen O’Connor”, Maureen O'Connor, Martha Carpentier, Elizabeth Brewer Redwine

Critical Inquiries Into Irish Studies

No abstract provided.

Hettie Jones And Bonnie Bremser: Complicating Feminist And Beat Master Narratives, Nancy Effinger Wilson

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The Beat master narrative suggests that all Beats ignored racism; the feminist wave model suggests that there was no feminist activism between the first and second wave of feminism and no attention to the intersection of race and gender prior to the third wave. Both models discount and in the process erase the efforts by Beat writers Bonnie Bremser and Hettie Jones who challenged racism and sexism before the more visible civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s. Employing Milton Bennett's Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity to analyze the intercultural/interracial attitudes present in Bonnie Bremser’s Troia and Hettie Jones’ …

Femagogical Strategies In The Art School: Navigating The Institution, Barbara Knezevic, Amy Walsh

Articles

This writing aims to define and examine ‘femagogy’ and the transformative potential for an inclusive intersectional feminist teaching practice in Fine Art education in the context of the contemporary Irish art school. This writing will trace the influence of linguistic power structures and the influence of broader institutional patriarchy in an educational setting and outline the inspirations and genealogies of femagogy. This writing provides situated embodied examples of femagogy in practice. It proposes the femagogical model of teaching as one that situates itself outside prevailing patriarchal models and proposes strategies to reimagine knowledge production and navigate the prevailing structural patriarchy …

Women For Ireland: Republican Feminism In The Northern Ireland Troubles, Laura Jacobsen

Theses and Dissertations

This paper studies the involvement of republican women in the Northern Ireland conflict, a struggle which defined life in Northern Ireland from 1969-1998. Too often, the Troubles, as the conflict is known, has been conceptualized as a struggle of men, while women are seen to be little more than suffering wives, girlfriends, and mothers. The image of “Mother Ireland” reinforces this notion: in this trope, Ireland is a woman begging for her sons to save her from British subjectivity. Similarly, contemporary feminist critics did not consider republican women to be equal to men. It was their belief that republican women …

I Speak As One In Doubt, Margaret Hazel Wilson

Masters Theses

A written thesis to accompany the M.F.A. Exhibition I Speak as One in Doubt. Blending epistolary format and visionary narrative, the artist addresses her complex relationship to her Catholic upbringing.

The Maternal Body Of James Joyce's Ulysses: The Subversive Molly Bloom, Arthur Moore

Lawrence University Honors Projects

This paper provides a feminist criticism of Ulysses in an attempt to understand the relevance of Joyce and this novel today, as academia is experiencing a welcome pressure to move away from the study of ‘old white men.’ The interest of this paper is an interest in the alterity of the bodies of Ulysses. While once these bodies challenged the common discourse because they were ruled obscene, the bodies of the text continue to challenge both critics and a male literary tradition. As Joyce said about Ulysses, “my book is the epic of the human body.” Ulysses itself …

‘Red Amazons’? Gendering Violence And Revolution In The Long First World War, 1914-23, Matthew Kovac

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article seeks to position gender theory as critical to making sense of one of the First World War’s largest remaining historical problems: the persistence of mass violence after November 1918. While Robert Gerwarth and John Horne’s pathbreaking work on veteran violence has challenged the standard 1914-18 periodisation of the war, their focus on military defeat and revolution obscures the centrality of gender relations to the continuation of violence after the formal end of hostilities. By putting their work into conversation with that of feminist theorists, I argue that countries which experienced more extreme gender dislocation or ‘gender trouble’ witnessed …

Understanding The American Subaltern: An Exploration Of Complex Literary Characters Through Socio-Cultural Lenses, Sophie Gioffre

English Summer Fellows

This project involves the analysis of three novels — Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Ann Petry’s The Street, and Toni Morrison’s Sula — featuring main characters who are forced to navigate realistic socio-economic environments rooted in racist, sexist, and classist systems of oppression in the United States of America. Through the process of completing close-readings of the novels, conducting extensive secondary research on historical contexts, and examining other scholarly criticisms and interpretations of these novels, I develop new insights into the main characters’ plights. To transfer this conceptual understanding into a more personal and empathetic …

Broadening The Focus: Women's Voices In The New Journalism, Mary C. Wacker

Master's Theses (2009 -)

The New Journalism Movement chronicled a decade of social turbulence in America by breaking the rules of traditional journalism and embracing narrative elements in the writing and publication of literary nonfiction. The magazine publishing industry was controlled by men, and the history of this transitional time in journalism has been chronicled by men, neglecting to recognize the significant contributions of women working in their midst. This study shines a light on the historical narrative that defines our understanding of the significance and key contributors to the New Journalism Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. To better understand the …

Feminist Oral History Practice In An Era Of Digital Self-Representation, Margo Shea

Margo Shea

Women At The Helm: Rewriting Maritime History Through Female Pirate Identity And Agency, Wendy Vencel

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

The subject of Atlantic-based Golden Age (1650-1720) piracy has long been an area of historical and mythical fascination. The sea has historically been a realm outside the reaches of mainland society, where women could express any aspect of their personal identity. Women at the Helm: Rewriting Maritime History through Female Pirate Identity and Agency queers the history of Golden Age piracy while placing the colonial period’s seafaring women within a longer historical tradition of female maritime crime and power.

Notable female pirates of this era, including Ireland’s Grace O’Malley and the Caribbean’s Anne Bonny and Mary Read, through the act …

Alba As Eternal Mother: Violent Spaces And The ‘Last Woman’ In Manuel De Pedrolo’S "Mecanoscrit Del Segon Origen", Pedro Nilsson-Fernàndez

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

The ambitious literary project of Catalan author Manuel de Pedrolo i Molina (1918-1990) has generally been perceived as belonging to the tradition of popular literature, a label often reinforced by the unprecedented success of his minor work Mecanoscrit del segon origen. This has clearly damaged Pedrolo’s status in the Catalan literary; as Kathryn Crameri highlights, “(w)hen authors such as Manuel de Pedrolo championed more popular genres such as crime fiction” –or science fiction as far as this study is concerned– “they had to endure criticisms of the quality of their writing” (Crameri, 2008, p. 23). This article will challenge …

Ironic Deference : An Inquiry Into The Nineteenth-Century Feminist Rhetoric Of Kesiah Shelton., Melissa Rothman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project examines the works of Kesiah Shelton, a writer for popular magazines in the late nineteenth century who used irony in interesting ways to critique the social norms of the period. Although, scholars have noted that female authorship was a an expanding field during this period, there were very specific gendered expectations limiting what female authors wrote about; women were primarily limited to writing about domestic matters and were discouraged from taking up other topics associated with the male public sphere such as politics. Many scholars have noted how the cult of domesticity valorized women as superior moral beings, …

(Re)Writing Woman With "The Laugh Of The Medusa" And Antioedipus, Samantha Rodgers

Online Theses and Dissertations

The importance of tattooing as an area of feminist composition study lies in its challenge to male discourse concerning the subjectivity of sexed, particularly female sexed, bodies that feminism has long ignored due to fear of essentialization. Cixous argues: "…Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard" (8). Tattooing has transitioned from writing masculine group identity (gangs, prisoners, sailors, etc.) into writing feminine embodied experience. It is a way for women to rewrite institutionalized norms of womanhood and humanity. Consequently, this paper argues that tattoos are a form …

We Who Have Never Bled, Betty Frances Fisher

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The poetry in We Who Have Never Bled explores landscapes of the personal and the mythic, centering women in a position of both traveler on and witness to this journey that is both violent and hopeful, both personal and universal.

Sari Not Sorry: A Discussion On Whether Or Not Gulabi Gang's Feminist Vigilantism Is Necessary In A Welfare State, Namrata Mohan

Scripps Senior Theses

The Gulabi Gang is a feminist vigilante based in northern India. They are known as a group that uses physical violence to fight systems of oppressive power. The idea of a Gulabi Gang vigilante, interacting with the people and the state will be discussed, while incorporating John Locke’s social contract theory into the argument as a way to critique vigilantism, or as a basis of critique to then argue why the Gulabi Gang’s vigilantism is necessary. After both sides of argument are weighed, possible solutions of how the Gulabi Gang can better their organization will be discussed in the concluding …

A National Style: A Critical Historiography Of The Irish Short Story, Andrew Fox

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the artistic, historical and theoretical concerns that, for the past century, have shaped the Irish short story, the Irish nation and the body of criticism that mediates between the two. In Ireland, I argue, the prevailing critical narrative of the short story’s emergence and ongoing literary purpose has been bound up with the political narrative of the nation state’s decolonization. This process I view as symptomatic of a broader critical tendency to view Irish cultural narratives as inextricable from national ones, whereby literary interventions either are viewed as mere reflections of, or are assimilated to systems of …

Abortion Is Communism: A Genealogy Of "Abortion Culture", Heather Nicole Bradford

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

In the twenty years since the collapse of communism in the Eastern Bloc, various scholars of history, women's studies, sociology, political science, and reproductive rights have studied the occurrence of abortion in these formerly communist countries. Although some have sought to question the notion of "abortion culture," most look to these countries as places where abortion was tragically prevalent and accepted. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the assumed knowledge concerning abortion and how this obscures understandings of abortion in formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe. By creating genealogy of "abortion culture," this research seeks to trace the …

'On Behalf Of All Young Women Trying To Be Better Than They Are': Feminism And Quakerism In The Nineteenth Century: The Case Of Anna Deborah Richardson, Elizabeth A. O'Donnell

Quaker Studies

Historians of the early British women's movement have frequently drawn connections between the theology and practice of Quakerism and the involvement of female Friends in nineteenth-century 'women's rights' campaigns. These connections are usually expressed in terms of religious, organizational and environmental factors particular to Quakerism, and embody the assumption that the cultural milieu of Quaker women was peculiarly conducive to the development of 'feminist consciousness'. This article examines the complexity of these assumed links, through an exploration of the life and writings of Anna Deborah Richardson (1832-1872) of Newcastle Monthly Meeting. Through her close association with Emily Davies, who established …

Women, Feminism, And Aging In Appalachia, Sherry Kaye Ms.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Aging has become a problem for men and women in Western societies where youth is touted and revered as a standard of success by which individual value is measured and esteemed. Older women in particular find that as they age they face discrimination in the form of ageism and social diminution. The purpose of the study is to remedy a lack of scholarship on aging in Appalachia and to establish a precedent for future studies. A liberal, feminist approach is used to analyze the results of recorded interviews and to interpret transcripts of relevant data. The results of the analysis …

Gender & Genre, Sharon Harrow

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

No abstract provided.

Surviving The City: Resistance And Plant Life In Woolf’S Jacob’S Room And Barnes’ Nightwood, Ria Banerjee

Publications and Research

In Jacob’s Room (1922) and Nightwood (1936), Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes use plant life to express a profound ambivalence about the masculine-inflected ordering functions of art and morality. They show that these processes codify lived experience and distance it from the feminine and sexual. To counter this turn towards the urban inauthentic, both novels depict non-urban spaces to upend conventional notions of usefulness. They fixate on evanescent flowers, wild forests, and untillable fields as sites of resistance whose fragility and remoteness are strengths. In Jacob’s Room, I argue that the eponymous protagonist is destroyed by his conventional education …

Spirit Injury And Feminism: Expanding The Discussion, Nick J. Sciullo

Nick J. Sciullo

To discuss spirit injury, it is at first necessary to articulate a space in the theoretical diaspora to conceptualize spirit injury as a concept deeply tied to the historical tradition of several theoretical frameworks. “Spirit injury” is a phrase popularized by critical race feminist Adrien Katherine Wing. It is a term utilized in critical race feminism (CRF) that brings together insights from critical legal studies (CLS) and critical race theory (CRT). Wing’s training is as a lawyer and legal scholar, not as a communication scholar, yet her work may help communication scholars more keenly theorize harm and violence. Her scholarship …