Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Darling: An Adaptation Of "The Yellow Wallpaper", Dawniqueca A.L. Steele

FUSION

Based on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the following story depicts the vacation of a young woman and her fiancé to an isolated mountain cabin. Similar to the original text, the woman gains a fixation on a specifically colored item, this being the white snow outside. The intentions of this story were to depict how misogyny and female insanity have both evolved and remained stagnant throughout time. Even though the original text featured traditional concepts of misogyny while the following focuses on modern forms, the two show the same maddening fear of a woman in the presence of inequality. …

Psalms Of Unknowing: Poems, Heather Lanier

College of Communication & Creative Arts Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Conjuring The Moon, Ariella Berkowitz

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Conjuring The Moon wrestles with the question of why we as women still submit to norms created by men who can't possibly understand our reality. Why should we support ideologies that claim to represent us while actively working against us? Why should we conform to a system that positions us as inessential Other? The speaker of this book aspires to liberate herself from such burdens. Conjuring the Moon encapsulates one woman's search for the feminine divine within herself, her religion, and her environment; but as empowering as this search may be, it remains inextricably connected to her social and historical …

Woman Flytrap, Brianna Jo Hobson

Student Theses and Dissertations

Woman FlyTrap is a short story zine collection that explores the topic of sexual violence through the perpetrator and victim relationship with an explicit lens. Replete with cultural and entomological themes and motifs, Woman Flytrap seeks to remind survivors that we are not alone. In our bodies or in our lives. Neither in the world. There are over a million insects to every human, proving that there is strength in numbers. All five stories in the collection present different abstracts: revenge, transformation, justice, healing, body image, self-harm, mourning, etc. There is also a playlist and a section about the author. …

Mothering As Feminism, Meera Patel

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This critical essay proposes the concept of mothering-as-feminism, with the intention of interrogating American ideals of mothering and caregiving. Reforming the way we view mothering, as it relates to feminism, requires a re-evaluation of the American role of women and mothers—and how they are portrayed (and therefore seen and understood), valued, and supported. Focusing on the evolution of feminist theory throughout the past 70 years, as well as personal and secondary experiences, I demonstrate how political and social change occurs generationally and is dependent on the education of our children. Ultimately, I show the important role children’s literature plays …

Wronged Women: A Foray Into The Wronged Woman's Mind, Suzanna Poole

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

This capstone is about the wronged woman and how she is the the hated woman, the lonely woman, or the crazy woman. I have been a wronged woman and know countless women in my life that have been wronged in some sort of way; either by a lover, a friend, family, or even herself. This project was created to put a spotlight on these various women. My research covered various mental illnesses that occured after a woman was wronged and the ways these can affect women. I wrote four short screenplays about various women at different ages in their lives: …

I, Discomfort Woman: A Fugue In F Minor, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Sex In The Bible: A Poetic Female Retelling, Gabriella Raffetto

Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal

In my poetic analysis, I tease out the differences between Biblical and modern conceptions of rape. Many of my ‘episodes’ feature rape narratives between a husband and wife or concubine/slave; in the Biblical narrative, these relations were not considered rape, because rape only constituted relationships outside of legal bounds. In this way, I attempt to diversify preexisting stories in the Biblical narrative, making monsters out of praised patriarchs; even God is not safe from becoming the villain. In this way, I paint the patriarchal system in the Bible as a gothic house disguised in tradition and spirituality that women must …

Water Lake And Other Stories, Allison Rose Levy

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This excerpt from the novel Water Lake takes place at an undisclosed time in an undisclosed American location called Water Town. It primarily follows Jason and Holly, who are employees at Water Hardware and lifelong residents of the insular, religious, isolated town. Water Town is in constant industrial and environmental decay and hosts many mysterious natural and social phenomena such as an unusual amount of animal deaths, a gender ratio skewed disproportionately towards men, and a single seal in a local body of water hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean. During an episode of impulsivity induced by neurological trauma, …

"Dear Stanford: You Must Reckon With Your History Of Sexual Violence" By Seo-Young Chu, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

In 2000 a Stanford professor raped me. My rape is now older than I was. (I’m still not as old as he was.) The more time passes the more I’m struck by Stanford’s apathy and fecklessness about sexual violence. I wrote a letter asking Stanford to stop compounding the abuse and to reckon with its rape culture. This letter—including the “Incomplete Compilation of Links to Sources Documenting Stanford’s History of Sexual Violence, in Chronological Order”—should be mandatory reading for administrators, faculty, students, alumni, and stakeholders at both Stanford and CUNY. #MeToo #MeTooAcademia

Womanist Poetics: Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, And Audre Lorde, Aya Telmissany

Theses and Dissertations

Today, the sentimentality associated with poetry is often condescendingly dubbed in a patriarchal society as “feminine poetry.” The first women poets who dared to attempt the pen were often met with attacks on their femaleness and harsh critiques of their writing which was likened to sorcery and witchcraft. Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Audre Lorde are three American women poets who countered these attacks and turned them inside out in favor of their own womanist poetics. They wrote about experiencing the world as women and most importantly about experiencing poetry as women. What happens to poetry when a woman appropriates …

Crooked Smile, Kaitlin Jacobson

Vázquez-Valarezo Poetry Award

As a songwriter, I love connecting my poetry to songs. There are so many similarities between life and music, and that is just beautiful to me. I wrote this poem about very real experiences I have had, about the idea of sugarcoating reality for the sake of what life really looks like under the surface. This is similar to my songs, when my melodies are seen as catchy but the lyrics are overlooked. As a queer woman, there have been many times where I have felt silenced, or where my pain has been overlooked and my lyrics haven't been taken …

Don't Be Another Girl, Brittany M. Owens

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

DON’T BE ANOTHER GIRL is a collection of poetry that braids together themes of familial relationships, death, abuse, mental illness, feminism, and attempts at healing. These free-verse and prose poems use pop culture, politics, and elements of nature as vehicles to explore and reject the violence of the western white patriarchy. In the first section the speaker questions the curses that flow out from bloodlines—genetic traits, behaviors, and gender expectations. The second section utilizes lyrical prose blocks that thread together trauma and sleep paralysis, following an emotionally immobilized speaker who struggles to step off a dangerous escalator, away from toxic …

The Female Stigma: Menstruation Attitudes In The Women's Liberation Movement, Kayla Becknuss

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

Femininity Reclaiming Chivalry In The Harry Potter Series, Ashley M. Watson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper focuses on the reclaiming of chivalric values by female characters in the Harry Potter series by comparing them to Arthurian characters. Scholars have extensively compared the narrative of the Knights of the Round Table to the global phenomenon of the Harry Potter series, but in this paper I explore, through a feminist lens, a character comparison of the Harry Potter novels and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. I will show how female characters in modern literature reclaim chivalry. This is important because it exemplifies a shift in the position of women into a more active role. I …

Twenty-Nine Delusions Concerning Love, Jackie Donaldson

Masters Theses

Twenty-Nine Delusions Concerning Love is the story of my relationship. I narrate the relationship's unfolding through the contexts of philosophy and cultural theory, and through artifacts of my own work rendered since the relationship's inception in December of 2020. The purpose of this project was to identify a gap in the autotheory genre, and to fill that gap with my own meaningful contribution -- a book which hybridizes life writing with prose and poetry. This piece is both a narration of my own experience, and an investigation into hookup culture and the way technology has redefined the modern romantic relationship. …

Hannah & Nana: A Personal Memoir On Appalachian Intergenerational Trauma, Womanhood, & Family, Hannah Dunn

Honors Projects

I was deeply affected by the death of my beloved nana in 2018. After her death, my family asked me to be the storyteller for us. Thus, for my Honors Project at Bowling Green State University (BGSU), I decided to write a personal memoir on my family. This memoir explores how we fit into notions of womanhood and family in Appalachia, as well as studying the effects of intergenerational trauma on us. Qualitative research, in the form of the autoethnography, serves as the methodology for this project. In writing a creative memoir, I have transformed my personal to the academic.

If I Knew What My Mother Was Going Through. Book Review. Not Dead Yet: Feminism, Passion, And Women's Liberation. Edited By Renate Klein And Susan Hawthorne, Dana Vitalosova

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Þorn: A Novel Excerpt Exploring Giantesses, Their Relation To Women's Bodily Expectations, And Patriarchal Control In The Literature Of Early Modern Britain And Contemporary America., Brady P Alexander

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

This thesis will analyze examples of women of size in the literature of the British Isles throughout history, focusing predominantly upon the Early Modern Period, and will create a fiction piece in response to such attitudes. I argue that one of the most clear ways to dissect contemporary cultural attitudes about powerful women and women who occupy more space than men is to examine giantesses and other examples of women of size within this period of literature. From this, a novel excerpt will be written from the perspective of a time-traveling woman of size who engages with these texts and …

Andrea Revised: Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist As Revolutionary By Martin Duberman, Phyllis Chesler

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Navigating The Wreck: Writing Women’S Experience Of The Japanese Occupation Of Singapore. Salvaged From The Wreck: A Novel -And- Diving Into The Wreck: A Critical Essay, Dawn Nora Crabb

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis is in two parts. The first and major part consists of a historical novel followed, in part two, by an essay. The title of this thesis, “Navigating the Wreck”, refers metaphorically to the Fall of Singapore in 1942, the ensuing human tragedy unleashed on the people of Singapore and Malaya, and the literary and historical processes of exploring, interpreting and depicting the past. The Japanese occupation of Singapore has, to date, been described mostly by Western historians and former prisoners of war who have forged a predominant patriarchal narrative. In that narrative—despite the all-encompassing nature of the occupation …

Stray Thoughts And Desire Paths—A Dialogue, Jenna Butler, Yvonne E. Blomer

The Goose

In this dialogue, authors, teachers, and environmentalists Yvonne Blomer and Jenna Butler discuss the ways in which our desire paths—our intents for our lives—have changed since the start of the pandemic. Covering women's writing, feminism, daily life during the pandemic, environmentalism, and race, this dialogue is an act of allyship from two women of different backgrounds writing together.

Mise En Place, Amie M. Geistman

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Mise en Place is a collection of essays that chronicles the author's experiences working as the lone female line cook in the culinary boy's club of professional restaurant kitchens. These essays follow the author's descent into a wild love affair with food, the burnout and gender dynamics associated with the job, and how she navigates the passion and the stress that the kitchen brings out in her.

Brilliant Women: Prose And Poetry, Amelia Fisher

MSU Graduate Theses

This collection of creative writing explores themes and subjects relating to feminism, sexuality, performativity, societal woes, popular culture, and the different ways we communicate. The individual pieces often examine women’s empowerment and lack thereof. These stories, essays, and poems are introduced by a critical work situating the contents of the thesis within greater literary traditions, such as Viktor Shklovsky’s defamiliarization, which I claim can function on the structural level as well as the story level, and his theory of the Chronotope; time and place are significant threads I follow from one genre to the next to create a cohesive collection …

When Valerie Solanas Shot Andy Warhol: A Feminist Tale Of Madness And Revolution, Phyllis Chesler

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

In 1967 Valerie Solanas published the Society for Cutting Up Men (the SCUM) Manifesto. She shot artist Andy Warhol in 1968. Her Manifesto raises issues about whether a revolution can be fought or won without using violence. “Nice” girls were of no use to her Radical feminists, especially Ti-Grace Atkinson and Flo Kennedy, saw Solanas as a symbol of a feminist fighting back and rushed to her side. They found a smart, very paranoid woman who was a decided loner. Ultimately, Solanas would not work with Atkinson and Kennedy; she refused to allow them to help her or explain …

Growth Theory, Samantha Leon

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

GROWTH THEORY reckons with a natural world in distress and imagines what attributes and learnings are needed for the individual to become a more beneficial part of the natural world. What does a person’s interaction with their surroundings say about them, and say about the surroundings? Violence, art, relationships, community are all examined along with the mediums through which we record our reality: speaking, writing, singing, taking photos. Despite covering a breadth of physical places and topics, a central tension that takes place between fear and curiosity colors the manuscript throughout. Poems are ordered by subject or temporal consideration, but …

Switch, Freesia Walsh Mckee

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

SWITCH is a collection of post-confessional feminist poems exploring what it means to be a Millennial, a witness, a woman, a daughter, a dissident, and a student and teacher at the same time. Bookended by two long poems, the poetic-narrative heart of this collection dives into experiences of queer self-actualization, violence, community, family, and love. Narratives about simultaneity, empathy, and politics drive home the message of these poems: the dailiness of our lives is both quotidian and profound.

SWITCH is inspired by writers like Ellen Bass, Audre Lorde, Allison Joseph, June Jordan, Judy Grahn, and Marge Piercy, who’ve used intimate, …

Vindicating The Feminism Of Mary Wollstonecraft, Olivia Moskot

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

Sing, Woman!, Emma Marie Spencer

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Hear Me Roar, Abigail R. Seethoff

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Hear Me Roar, a compilation of personal essays interspersed with short forms, grapples with the nuances of compliance versus autonomy in the context of the male gaze, beauty standards, and pop culture. The collection also explores what it means to treasure something—another person, an object—and how to express and deepen that affection.