Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Reconciling The Past In Octavia Butler's Kindred, Haley V. Manis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses the observations of Nancy J. Peterson on historical wounds as a springboard to discuss Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred and its use of both white and black characters to reexamine the origins of the historical wounds and why they are so difficult to deal with even today. Other scholarly works will be used to further investigate the importance of each character in the story and what they mean to the wound itself. Specifically, Dana is analyzed alongside the other main characters: Rufus, Alice, and Kevin. Though Dana’s relationships with these characters, Kindred’s version of the past can be …

Women Of The Incan Empire: Before And After The Conquest Of Peru, Sarah A. Hunt

Student Research

This paper contrasts the life of Incan women before and after the Spanish conquest of Peru by Pizarro. Spanish colonization of Peru had a significant, negative impact on Incan women, across social, economic, and religious sectors. Before the conquest, women held fairly complimentary, rather than subordinate roles to men in society. Spanish rule introduced a strict patriarchy, which reduced Incan women to second-class citizens. The Spanish exploited women within the economy, and destroyed the once revered female religious institutions. Examining women in conquest history provides an intimate look at gender and power relations, socio-economics, and the shifting familial and cultural …

History Of Key Events In Women’S Health Care, Zoё M. Chambliss

Student Publications

In 1973, ninety-three percent of all American doctors were men (Ehrenreich and English). Gender based inequity permeates all spheres of women’s health care from employment to access to treatment to biologically-based myths of male superiority, yet women once presided over the health and spirituality of their communities and their own bodies. All of the earliest human societies worshipped the Earth Goddess and respected women as holy givers of life. This tradition persisted until the rise of the patriarchy and Western “Civilization” increasingly forced women out of positions of power and rewrote the religious stories to give supremacy to male sun …

Silhouettes Of A Silent Female’S Authority: A Psychoanalytic And Feminist Perspective On The Art Of Kara Walker, Angelica E. Perez

The Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research

The focus of my research centers on the contemporary work of Georgia-based artist, Kara Elizabeth Walker. In conducting extensive research on the life of the artist as well as three select artworks which recall the antebellum slave era within the south, I argue the explicit presence of the power of the enslaved prepubescent girl and young woman. The three select works that I intend to analyze are Burn, a cut-paper silhouette on canvas created in 1998, The Invisible Beauty, a mixed media piece made in 2001, and Cut, a paper cut-out silhouette made in 1998.

In a …

Beneath The Mulberry Tree: Sarah Edmonds And Women In Memory, Anika N. Jensen

The Gettysburg Compiler: On the Front Lines of History

In her memoir Nurse and Spy in the Union Army, Sarah Emma Edmonds, a woman fighting in the Union Army disguised as a man, employed florid diction and a subtle romantic flare to illustrate an emotional and confounding moment in the aftermath of the Battle of Antietam: discovering another woman undercover. Edmonds writes of the “pale, sweet face of a youthful soldier,” of a boy trembling from blood loss who, she knew, had only a few more minutes on earth. He tasted his last sip of water, and with his remaining breaths the soldier beckoned Edmonds closer and uttered a …

Shifting Understandings Of Lesbianism In Imperial And Weimar Germany, Meghan C. Paradis

Scholarly Undergraduate Research Journal at Clark (SURJ)

This paper seeks to understand how, and why, understandings of lesbianism shifted in Germany over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through close readings of both popular cultural productions and medical and psychological texts produced within the context of Imperial and Weimar Germany, this paper explores the changing nature of understandings of homosexuality in women, arguing that over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the dominant conceptualization of lesbianism transformed from an understanding of lesbians that was rooted in biology and viewed lesbians as physically masculine “gender inverts”, to one that was …

German Women In The Wild West: Contradiction In Post-Wwii Gender Roles, Romy Franks

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

While postwar German women were portrayed as gritty and strong from their lived experiences, West German newspapers articles reiterated the contradictory roles proffered to women in German society. Rather than speaking up against the genre’s masculine dominance, popular western novels, films, and the press continued to reinforce widely held opinions and norms by encouraging women to be content with the ideal female character offered them.

Swing It Sister: The Influence Of Female Jazz Musicians On Music And Society, Kirsten Saur

The Research and Scholarship Symposium (2013-2019)

Female jazz vocalists, both as soloists and in groups, and instrumentalists, both as solo artists and in ensembles, of the jazz era influenced music and society in their own times and in later times. They added new musical concepts, added new vocal styles, worked to change the society they lived in, and worked hard to find their place in music no matter what got in their way, making them inspirations for future generations of women striving to succeed in the world. This paper looks at how these women of jazz influenced music, society, and future generations of women through their …

Whose Story? His-Story., Meghan E. O'Donnell

SURGE

The essay instructions finally landed in front of me. I passed the extra sheets on and quickly glanced over the page, hoping that the prompt would be inspiring. There were two open-ended options from which to choose: military and social/political aspects of the war. My eyes first fell upon the social option and I pondered using this opportunity to shed light on the experiences of women during the war. I’d done this before – used assignments to explore history’s untold stories – and found it interesting. Then, in a fit of frustration that erupted out of nowhere, I thought to …

Feminism In Revolution: Women Of The 19th Century Anti-Tsarist Movements, Kayley Delong

Undergraduate Research Awards

The climate of political upheaval in Russia over the course of the 19th century reached a violent climax in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in March of 1881. His death was the result of decades of civil unrest amongst Russian citizens who had taken hold of enlightenment ideas and sought justice for economic and social inequality. In a complex equation of issues and policies, the ways in which the women question combined with the surge of new ideas produced a unique and perfect storm. Russia was the epicenter of a collision between an underdeveloped infrastructure and changing philosophies about …