Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Teaching Poetry With Anne Finch: Manuscript Culture As Early Modern Social Media, Jennifer Keith

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

This essay discusses two approaches I use to teach Anne Finch's—and others'—poetry. Drawing on certain habits of early modern manuscript culture, I make visible to my students ways that reading and writing are socially embedded practices, which may variously involve exchange, reciprocity, or censorship. By adapting the "quaint" habits of manuscript culture practiced by Finch and many others to specific assignments, I encourage students to experience poetry as living, sociable occasions of reading and writing. To augment my students' engagement with early modern poetry I connect it to frameworks from their twenty-first-century reading and writing worlds. These exercises in "early …

Anne Finch On The Patio: A Scholarly Eat And Greet, Melissa Schoenberger

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

This article recounts an instructional event for English majors held in the central campus library. Students engaged with various materials related to the career and editorial history of Anne Finch. The event offered students an introduction to questions of information literacy, textual history, and literary studies.

Teaching Finch And / In Performance: A Media Studies Approach (With Toolkit), Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook

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

Teaching the birdsong poems and compositions for musical settings of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, through media theory allows students to connect their own social-media-based expressive arts practices with the multimedia practices of early modern women writers.

More Than A Punchline: A Comparative Analysis Of Diversity In Dropout.Tv & Collegehumor, Alexander Gluchowski

Student Research Submissions

This paper examines the evolution of digital comedy through a comparative analysis of CollegeHumor and its offshoot, Dropout.tv, focusing on how each platform has approached the portrayal of diversity and inclusion. Utilizing a qualitative content analysis, the study contrasts selected episodes from both platforms to explore shifts in the representation of queer and POC comedians, and the thematic treatment of identity issues. The findings reveal that Dropout.tv significantly advances the inclusivity of comedic content, moving beyond CollegeHumor’s earlier reliance on stereotypical and controversial humor. This shift not only reflects changes in contemporary comedy but also highlights Dropout.tv's commitment to fostering …

Girl Rot, Maddie Foss

Graduate Theses

Does individual identity curate our personal environments, or do environmental variables infiltrate the idea of selfhood? My work is a journey of questioning the origins of selfhood while simultaneously trying to understand identity through the lens of the physical world and online landscapes that influence me. Through an examination of identity work, the history of pop culture icons, and online aesthetics, my artwork is immersed in gender, sexuality, and media study conversations that help me better understand myself and others that heavily engage online. I am an interdisciplinary artist working in digital drawings, collages, and installations with my media reflecting …

Older Women As Active Online Agents: Diversifying Cultural Conceptions Of “Grannies” Through Social Media, Hanna Varjakoski

Journal of International Women's Studies

With the advent of social media, the media environment has become more participatory for its users, making it possible for older adults to produce content for social media and be agential in online spaces. This article observes a group of older women known as Activist Grannies (Aktivistimummot in Finnish) and 60+ Finnish women bloggers who identify as “grannies” to discover what kind of agency social media potentially enables for older women. In addition, this article explores the cultural knowledge produced by older women’s self-representations as activist grannies and “granny bloggers.” I demonstrate that social media offers a space to …

An Intersectional Approach To Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Women’S Sexualized Body-Positive Imagery On Instagram, Megan A. Vendemia, Kyla N. Brathwaite, David C. Deandrea

Communication Faculty Articles and Research

Our work adopted an intersectional approach to investigate how women’s racial identity may influence how they evaluate and are impacted by body-positive imagery of women on social media. In a 2 × 2 × 2 experiment (N = 975), we examined how source race (Black vs White) and sexualization (non-sexualized vs sexualized) in body-positive images affect Black and White viewers’ impressions of self-interest, moral appropriateness, and body positivity. Results indicated that viewers generally responded more favorably to non-sexualized (vs sexualized) images: Participants reported less self-interested motivations for sharing, found the images more morally appropriate, and believed they were more …

A Qualitative Exploration Of Discourses In Fan Community, /R/Boyslove, Jessica Lin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Boys Love (BL) genre, which tells stories of male-male romantic and sexual relationships, and originates in Japan, has made strides through transnational and transcultural engagement across countries, aided heavily by the internet age. I examine the development of the BL genre from its controversial beginnings to its feminist response as well as queer reception. Over the course of fifty years, the genre has exploded in popularity, becoming a more progressive medium of social change. As BL has become more diverse in content and broken with older conventions of the genre, what are the current discourses among the BL fan …

A Content Analysis Of Queer Slang On Tik Tok, Kuri Benitez

Student Research Submissions

Social media platforms’ concentration of diversity and interactions has accelerated the rate of cultural change on the Internet. With the rise of Tik Tok, a video-sharing social media platform, language used by marginalized groups is being incorporated into the platform’s slang due to the rapid rotation of trends. This study aims to provide data to a new field related to Tik Tok culture and the effects of trends on marginalized groups.

Using qualitative content analysis, this article studies an LGBTQ+-inspired Tik Tok trend to determine if the portmanteau of “-ussy”’s meaning has changed from its original use and if trends …

The Role Of Emirati Women In Confronting Social Media Misconceptions On The Covid Vaccine, Muhammed Musa, Ahmed Mansoori

Journal of International Women's Studies

As disagreements rage about the source of the Covid-19 virus, one universal consensus has been established. It is that humanity’s surest guarantee to curbing and mitigating the deadly pandemic is the discovery and wide administration of a vaccine to prevent infection, serious illnesses, and hospitalizations etc. As different countries grapple to roll out the covid vaccine, the world is confronted by another virus that could prove to undermine efforts at curbing Covid-19. Vaccine misinformation is playing into the hands of anti-vaccine groups who are taking advantage of social media platforms that are easily accessible and devoid of editorial gatekeeping to …

Anti-Pornography Feminism, Kinktok, And Consent: What We Can Learn From The Sex Wars And Leather/Sadomasochistic History, Nic Cloyd

Honors Theses

Sex education and LGBTQA+ history have long been censored and removed from curriculums across the United States. As this information has disappeared from our education systems, important values like consent and boundary setting have become increasingly obsolete despite the modern body autonomy movement. Leather and SM culture, which began post-WWII and reached their peak in the 1970s during the sexual liberation, have become increasingly important as their ethical and moral codes have been lost over time to the HIV/AIDs epidemic and censorship from second and third wave feminsism. Two prominent movements, anti-pornography and sex-work exclusionary radical feminism, have worked to …

The Digital Age: Our Feminist Echo Chamber, Amanda H. Nguyen

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Shopping For A Cause: Social Influencers, Performative Allyship, And The Commodification Of Activism, Emily Mckellar

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Since the early 2010s, social media has been a powerful tool for protestors and activists throughout the world. In times of crisis and political uprisings, users have pulled out their phones and taken to platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and, more recently, Instagram, to capture “the revolution” in real time. Although originally intended for networking purposes, social media has provided people with a digital space to share their stories, disseminate resources, and broadcast live, allowing them to share their efforts with millions.

While social media has helped assemble protests, amplify marginalized voices, and educate the public, it has also become a …

Ekart, Donna, Gretchen Muehle, Brooke Hall

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Donna Ekart is a 53-year-old queer, femme woman living in Portland, Maine. Ekart grew up in Manhattan, Kansas surrounded by both her immediate and extended family. Ekart moved to Portland, Maine with her wife when she was in her mid-forties. Ekart came out as queer to her friends and family when she was 40-years-old. She has been involved in LGBTQ+ organizations including Equality Maine, which is Maine’s biggest queer organization whose aim is to secure full equality for the LGBTQ+ community in Maine through political action, community organizing, education, and collaboration. Ekart’s religious identity and relationship with the Catholic Church …

Put Yourself First (In A Sexy Way): Postfeminist Beauty Messaging And Resistant Media Texts, Margarita Artoglou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The makeover montage trope is one of the most recognizable in media content aimed at young women, sending the message that social status and acceptance are only a new outfit and face of makeup away. While this trope and its message have been heavily critiqued by scholars, the message that beauty—and all its social benefits—can be achieved through consumerism has not disappeared, though the means by which this message is conveyed has changed. As a result of companies co-opting feminist rhetoric, conforming to standards of beauty has been recast as a “choice” one makes for herself, often wrapped in the …

Media And Social Media Best Practices For Feminist Activist Groups And Organizations, Arien Rozelle

The Seneca Falls Dialogues Journal

Feminist organizations and activist groups from the Women’s Suffrage movement to the Women’s March have utilized media relations tactics and techniques to share organizational messages. Over time, the art of media relations has evolved from a tactical role to a strategic necessity, one that is vital to the success of any activist organization or group as they seek to inform, educate and/or persuade their intended audience through the use of media and social media.

This essay identifies best practices for feminist activist groups and organizations to help begin or improve their media relations efforts, ranging from initial hiring, to media …

Still We Rise: A Black Feminist Qualitative Inquiry Exploring Black Women’S Experiences On Twitter, Yvonne C. Morris

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

#WOCAffirmation was a hashtag created by April Reign in October 2017 in response to how Black women do not have the same supports of solidarity from populations who are non-Black women. Serving as a counterpublic, #WOCAffirmation embodied how Black women created space to affirm and amplify each other while also highlighting the harassment and abuse they experience in form of misogynoir on Twitter. As Black women are already under-researched in academia and fields within digital humanities, this study centered Black women while also highlighting oppressive systems of power in both physical and digital spaces. Using Black feminist thought as the …

Final Master's Portfolio, Alyssa Zuber

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This MA explores the body's response to trauma, social media's impact on modern young women, the Women's Health Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and how the memoir can be used as a tool to explore radical honesty.

Who Contrives The Moment? On Cyberfeminist Dating, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

Really Fake takes up story, poetry, and other human logics of care, intelligence, and dignity to explore sociotechnological and politico-aesthetic emergences in a world where information overload has become a new ontology of not-knowing.

World Wide Wake: A Look Into Digital Wake Work In Response To The Murder Of Breonna Taylor, Kalyn T. Coghill

Graduate Research Posters

In Christina Sharpe's, In the Wake, she refers to "wake work" as conscious work. Wake work makes a conscious and intentional effort to celebrate one's life as they are passing and after they have transitioned on. Wake work includes grief, sadness, reminiscing, happiness, laughter, and many more emotions. We think of wake work happening in the physical, but I want to look at how weight work exists in the digital. This paper will discuss how wake work is done in digital spaces such as social media platforms. I will also be looking at how social movements such as black …

Kiss Of Love Campaign: Contesting Public Morality To Counter Collective Violence, Sonia Krishna Kurup Miss

Peace and Conflict Studies

The paper studies the immense opposition to a nonviolent campaign against the practice of moral policing in Kerala to understand the dominant spaces, collective identities, and discourses that give shape to the outrage of public morality in India. The campaign through its politics specifically targeted rightwing and political groups as well as socially embedded familial and institutional structures that exercise control over individuals through patriarchal regimes. The adverse reaction to the campaign revealed that collective aggression or violence can be used to impose majoritarian values and exert social control through the authority of public morality and everyday acts of moral …

From Swiffers To Swastikas: How The #Tradwife Movement Of Conventional Gender Roles Became Synonymous With White Supremacy, Frankie Hope Sitler-Elbel

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Study On The Implementation Of The Regulations Of Terrorism Activities In Social Media, Angga Dewanto Basari, Muhammad Syauqillah, Asep Usman Ismail

Journal of Strategic and Global Studies

The legal scope of the Terrorism Law and the Information and Electronic Transactions Law in Indonesia is considered as lacking to cover the problem of cybercrime in social media. Aside from literature review, this paper is also supported by data from direct interview with the Head of Counterterrorism Special Detachment 88 (Densus 88 AT) of Indonesian National Police. The data found out that the Terrorism Law is a repressive response towards terrorism crimes that have already occured, but less preventive to future crimes. The existence of laws in Indonesia is often one step behind its crime. The difference of perception …

An Examination Of Pervasive Language Around Sexual Harassment Through The Lens Of Anita Hill, Christine Blasey Ford, And #Metoo, Elizabeth Theriault

Honors College

This thesis explores the hypothesis that the #MeToo Movement and Twitter have contributed to the changes in language used by individuals to describe sexual harassment and the survivors that come forward with their stories. To do so, this thesis identified common themes derived from language used in New York Times articles published during the Hill and Thomas hearings of 1991, as well as Tweets published between the dates surrounded the Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh hearings, September 25, 2018 and September 29, 2018, to create a comparable platform for language used in similar settings 27 years apart. It contains a literature …

Utilization Of Social Media In Giving Information Related To Activities And Performance Of Legislative Members (-A Case Study Of Women Legislative Members In The Aceh People's Representative Council (Dpra), Ainol Mardhiah, Dadang Rahmat Hidayat, Agus Rahmat, Nuryah Asri Sjafirah

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The existence of communication media cannot be separated from everyday human life today. Social media provides extraordinary benefits for members of Aceh House of Representatives (DPRA) to get closer to its people. The use of social media to socialize the performance of board members, absorb aspirations and information from the public. The qualitative research method and the case study approach used in this study, this study intends to describe the use of social media in providing information related to the activities and performance of women legislative members in the DPRA in carrying out political communication in Aceh's local parliament. The …

Media Empowers Brave Girls To Be Global Activists, Gayle Kimball

Journal of International Women's Studies

A surprising way to silence young women globally, in addition to overly protective families, is by scholars of youth studies and development professionals. Ageism against youth is rarely discussed, so this article reveals this academic bias that ignores or discounts youth voices—especially young women. However, in the safe space of their bedrooms, the Internet and the cell phone enable young women to express their voices, even to organize uprisings. They can get around family restrictions and desires to protect them by speaking publicly from a private space. Some media provide empowering images for young women activists and informative networks of …

Vlogging Truth To Power : A Qualitative Study Of Resilience As Practiced By Transgender Youtube Content Creators., Corey J. Feger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents an exploratory account of ways that transgender people’s personal YouTube channels, or “vlogs,” provide new avenues to cultivate resilience as a collective. To make sense of this unstable, contested model of identity and community, I apply a three-part model of “social resilience,” a theory of resilience that transcends the individual and welcomes incoherency, contradiction, and “messiness” into its analysis. In Chapter One, I provide a snapshot of transgender history and present my research objective and justification. Chapter Two consists of a literature review and argues in favor of a hybrid theory of intersectionality and assemblage. Chapter Three …

Rural Transgender And Gender-Nonconforming Individuals' Experiences With Social Media During Adolescence, Heather Lynn Anderson

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Suicide attempt and completion rates are significantly higher for the transgender and gender-nonconforming (TGNC) population. TGNC adolescents experience many challenges and adversities, which are compounded when they live in rural communities. The lived experiences of rural TGNC adolescents with social media were unknown and created a gap in the research. This study was grounded in transgender, gender minority stress, and resiliency theories, along with the conceptual frameworks of rural communities and grit. The purpose of this descriptive phenomenological qualitative research study was to explore the lived experiences of rural TGNC individuals (18-24-year-olds) with social media during adolescence. Data was collected …

"It's Like They're Right There Next To You": Maintaining Girls' Camp Friendships Via Mobile Media, Elise Bragard

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores how a group of adolescent girls uses mobile and computer-mediated communication as a resource for social and emotional support from their friends. In the midst of widespread public panic about teenage social media use, this study finds nuanced and positive ways that technology is being used in girl culture. Within the context of a technology-free summer camp, adolescent girls form close relationships, which continue throughout the school year. The girls construct a virtual-symbolic camp space using mobile-emotive communication to stay connected with their friends. As a result, they recreate the intra- and inter-personal benefits they experienced at …

Reinforcing Sexism And Misogyny: Social Media, Symbolic Violence And The Construction Of Femininity-As-Fail, Sue Ann Barratt

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper demonstrates, through content analysis, how online audiences can enforce gender based violence (GBV) as a real threat in the online space through verbally aggressive speech acts that function as symbolic violence. I examine cases emerging out of the context of Trinidad and Tobago, to articulate, how, for example, prejudicial chastising of women is used as a discourse to not only shame and blame but construct femininity-as-fail, however that femininity is embodied. This symbolic violence I read as a spectre, a force that enforces, both in the offline and online, the reassertion of strict respectability and responsibility as …