Arts and Humanities Commons^™

De La Discriminación A La Descriminalización: El Camino De Las Mujeres Transgénero De Queens Por Sus Derechos Laborales Como Trabajadoras Sexuales, Bruce Gil, Sara Herschander, Juanita Ramos

Capstones

Una mirada a la legislación propuesta que despenalizaría el trabajo sexual en la ciudad de Nueva York a través de las historias de las trabajadoras sexuales inmigrantes transgénero que se están organizando en Queens, Nueva York.

http://trabajadorxssexuales.tilda.ws

Femicides: The Other Growing Epidemic We Don’T Want To See, Natalia Gutierrez

Capstones

This report analyzes how gender-based killings is a growing topic within the feminist community of New York and Mexico City and how the use of the right terminology is essential to understand the scope of the problem. I worked for 18 months with the feminist community in both cities and the term ‘femicide’ came over and over in the interviews Femicide, how it is referred in the rest of the world, is the intentional killing of women or girls because they are female, and it is a growing epidemic in the U.S. and in Mexico. I interviewed more than 40 …

A Dumb Mouth From Which The Teeth Have Been Pulled, Anna Sofie Jespersen

Theses and Dissertations

This paper consists of a series of scenes in which various narratives with proximity to the truth plays out. within it I aim to articulate the dispersed subjectivity and forensic aspects to my work, as well looking at the perverseness in the desire for proximity to the fantasy, utilizing the self as a vehicle of desire.

Working With West African Hair Braiders In Nyc, Houreidja Tall

Capstones

This project is a culmination of collaboration efforts with a group of West African hair braiders in Harlem, New York City. Through listening efforts, a WhatsApp group was formed.

https://houreidja-tall.medium.com/reflections-on-working-with-west-african-hair-braiders-in-nyc-5086a173ac9c

Gendering The Virtual Space: Sonic Femininities And Masculinities In Contemporary Top 40 Music, Michèle Duguay

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes vocal placement—the apparent location of a voice in the virtual space created by a recording—and its relationship to gender. When listening to a piece of recorded music through headphones or stereo speakers, one hears various sound sources as though they were located in a virtual space (Clarke 2013). For instance, a specific vocal performance—once manipulated by various technologies in a recording studio—might evoke a concert hall, an intimate setting, or an otherworldly space. The placement of the voice within this space is one of the central musical parameters through which listeners ascribe cultural meanings to popular music. …

Autobiographical Narratives Of Sexual Violation: Trauma, Genre, And The Politics Of Telling, Sarah M. Hildebrand

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation engages with literary trauma theory and rape studies by investigating how scholars through the 1990s theorized the relationship among trauma, narration, and silence, and how the #MeToo movement causes us to rethink these views. Attending to the specific silence generated in the wake of sexual violation reveals how power structures influence the act of telling, challenging the idea that trauma is untellable. I argue that literary trauma theory needs to push beyond its foundation in biomedical models of trauma—in which the (in)ability to recall or articulate traumatic events is rooted in neurology—to examine the ways traumatic narratives are …

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 …

Desde El Fuego Que En Mí Arde: Performance, Literatura Y Cine Afro-Latinoamericano Producidos Por Mujeres Afrodescendientes En Perú, Cuba Y Brasil (1960–2000), Elena Ekatherina Chavez Goycochea

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines different films, literary, and performance art pieces created by contemporary afro-descendant women from Peru, Cuba, and Brazil after the sixties with emphasis on the most relevant works of Conceição Evaristo, Sara Gómez, Victoria Santa Cruz, and Lucía Charún-Illescas. I focus my research on the crucial role these artists played in the cultural identity formation of Latin America when inserting ‘race’ as a category of socio-political analysis and cultural production. How did their films, performances, and texts challenge national narratives and imaginaries after 1960? Although in the sixties, women improved their civil rights in different countries, the ‘mujer …

What We Owe To Our Audience: The Hermeneutical Responsibility Of Fiction Creators, Kathryn Wojtkiewicz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this project is to provide a theoretical underpinning for the belief that creators of fiction should dedicate time to diversifying the cast of characters in their fictions, and to avoiding harmful stereotypes when doing so. I establish this as a hermeneutical responsibility: because of the epistemic influence fictions can wield over their audiences, trafficking in harmful stereotypes of marginalized identities (instances of which I call Bad Representation Problems) or excluding marginalized identities entirely (which I call No Representation Problems) from one’s fictions can reinforce harmful beliefs about real people with those identities. The more popular the fiction, …

Fantasies Of Representation: Methods Of Feminist Literary Analysis, Alexandra Johnson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The push for diversity in media and literature has resulted in an increase in representation, at least on the surface. While the range of representation may have broadened in terms of subject identity – gender, sexuality, race, ability, etc. – the way this diversity has occurred has not necessarily encouraged ethical or allied development. The aim of my thesis is to develop and deploy five methods of feminist critique and analysis of representation in popular media. I begin by laying out the five methodologies, in a manner that allows for the use of these methods on other examples. Then, I …

Poems Of Debate And Praise: Women As Published Authors In Sixteenth-Century France, Anna Soo-Hoo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Non-fictional, published poetic exchanges between men and women in sixteenth-century France provide new perspectives into how women writers operated in a literary culture whose main producers and dominant voice were male. Contrary to the notion repeated by many critics that women of that period were supposed to stay out of the public sphere, my study finds that publishing a woman’s poems did not destroy her reputation, and there appears to have been no major backlash when a man decided to include poems by a female contemporary in his book. My study takes as its point of departure the notion that …

(In)Hospitable Modernity: Hospitality And Its Discontents (1920–1953), Daniel A. Hengel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation discusses the tacit forms of political activity operating through the performance and space of hospitality in modern fiction. I read the habitus, praxis, and dissemblages of hospitality in modern fiction as conduits that reveal dialectics of submission and resistance to Victorian and Edwardian markers of normativity. This is ultimately an infrapolitical work. I locate fulcrums of dissent, cloaked in a guise of hospitality, in the domestic sphere and the politicization of formerly private spaces into sites with the potential to reorder legitimated forms of agency. This project attempts to uncover veiled forms of sociopolitical resistance in and through …

Data Analysis And Visualization To Dismantle Gender Discrimination In The Field Of Technology, Quinn Bolewicki

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the United States, a significant population is facing an uphill battle trying to thrive in an industry that has seen exponential growth in recent years. Women, who account for approximately 50.8% of the U.S. population are statistically underpaid and underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Despite women-led technology teams establishing a 21% greater return on investment than teams who don’t, and young women largely outperforming men in math according to a 2015 study, there are only three fortune 500 companies led by women, and they comprise only 10% of internet entrepreneurs. Research generates hundreds of articles, infographics, …

No Hair! Don't Care! Resistance And Empowerment Of Bald And Low Shaved Black Women, Monica Rivers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No Hair! Don’t Care! Resistance and Empowerment of Bald and Low Shaved Black Women is an invitation to discuss the experiences of Black women who choose to wear bald and low shaved haircuts. The project examines standards of beauty, femininity, sexuality, sexual harassment, self- acceptance, and self-expression through the voices of Black women: Because sometimes the biggest statement you can make with your hair is by having none.

Pierce And Pine: Diane Di Prima, Mary Norbert Korte, And The Meeting Of Matter And Spirit, Iris Cushing

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Diane di Prima (1934-2020) and Mary Norbert Korte (b. 1934) are two poets whose contributions to postwar American poetry are vitally important, and yet their status on the margins of mainstream literary culture has left their work largely unstudied. Di Prima, the granddaughter of Italian Anarchist Domenico Mallozzi (with whom she shared a close relationship) grew up in an Italian-American community in Brooklyn and bore witness to the cultural schizophrenia of WWII as a child. Korte was raised in an affluent Bay Area family, and encountered hardships (including the death of her father when she was 12) that affected her …

Sartorial Semiotics: Constructs Of Gender And Female Sexuality In Post Wwii American And European Cinema, Patricia Cabral

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cinematic costume design functions as a system of visually-perceived, material and indexical signifiers, an effective and compelling language further informed by styling and embodiment. Sartorial semiotics support and inflect role characterization, while equally underpinning or subverting tropes generated by ideological paradigms. The following methodological approaches were adopted in scrutinizing this topic: Roland Barthes’ application of semiotic theories to the domain of fashion in The Language of Fashion, and Laura Marks’ discussion of the dialectics of optical and haptic visualities in apprehending film images in The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses.

By examining the costume …

On The Woman Question: A Defense Of Alexandra Kollontai Against Liberal Critics, Nicole Baltzer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Alexandra Kollontai envisioned a world in which all women and their proletarian comrades were liberated from subordination under capitalism. She served as People’s Commissar in the Bolshevik government and established the Zhenotdel, the government’s department for women. Under the Bolsheviks, women were granted equal legal status to men, divorce rights, access to birth control, and were the primary benefiters of the nationalization of domestic work (i.e., communal childcare, dining, and laundry halls). Kollontai and the Soviet Union provide us with one of the few examples of Marxist feminism in action. Liberal critics of Kollontai and her Marxist comrades and contemporaries …

Kinstitution: A Topia Between Archive And Proposal, Christopher Lineberry

Theses and Dissertations

Situating Topher Lineberry's work, this paper offers a primer on institutional critique, preliminary developments of "kinstitutional critique," and the cultivation of family-derived art history through the work of the artist's grandmother, Helen Lineberry. Feeding into a working understanding of family-and-kin-as-institution, the paper ultimately locates Topher Lineberry's work between relations to place, historical archives, and speculative proposals.

“A Space Where You Can Imagine In”: Queer World Building With Wynne Greenwood’S Tracy + The Plastics, Colleen M. O'Shea

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Tracy and the Plastics was a video and music project conceived and performed by artist Wynne Greenwood from 1999 - 2006. In it, Greenwood played lead singer Tracy alongside keyboard player, Nikki and drummer, Cola (both also played by Greenwood) where Tracy performed live alongside prerecorded images of Nikki and Cola. For Greenwood, the interaction between Tracy, the Plastics, and the audience provided an opportunity to create new, intentional worlds together. In this paper, I will demonstrate that Greenwood relies on collisions and alternative temporalities to instigate the creation of these worlds with her audience. I will incorporate the principles …

The Impact Of State Violence On Women During The 22 Years Of Dictatorship In The Gambia, Isatou Bittaye-Jobe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis investigates the gendered dynamics of dictatorship in The Gambia by exploring the impact of state sanctioned violence on women during former President Yahya Jammeh’s twenty-two years of tyranny in the country. During the two-decade long brutal reign under Jammeh, Gambians from all walks of lives faced gross human rights violations and abuses that inflicted collective national trauma on the population. Therefore, this project examines how Jammeh’s tyrannical rule affected women’s rights, health, and wellbeing. Using a content analysis approach coupled with semi-structured interviews with victims and survivors, I argue that although the dictatorship affected all sectors of the …

In Order To Escort Her, Kimberly Baglieri

Theses and Dissertations

In Order To Escort Her is a thirty-five minute hybrid-documentary in which Lila, my great-aunt, converses with her niece, my mother, about various supernatural creature encounters and spirit visitations from relatives. This is interspersed with a “visitation” from another close relative, communicating from a different time and space dimension. By weaving together supernatural stories and matter-of-fact accounts of resilience and survival, a magical world is created where boundaries between the material and the invisible realms blur. The main thematic concerns of this film are love, care, presence in joy amidst terror, and the journey of the soul.

The Space Between “Seen” And “Unseen:” Queer People And The 1915-1945 New Negro Renaissance, Claudia R. Campanella

Dissertations and Theses

In November 1926, a group of Black artists, writers, and activists created the first and only edition of Fire!!, edited by novelist Wallace Thurman. Fire!! was created by a younger generation of New Negroes and “devoted to the younger Negro artists” who dissented from the mainstream ideas of the New Negro Movement and used the magazine to spread their own views on the 1915-1945 New Negro Renaissance. Fire!! and other texts speaking to this dissent against a Black intellectual middle class image of the movement will be studied in reference to showcasing the multi-faceted elements of the movement touching …

Body Appreciation As A Means To Protect Social Media Users From Body Dissatisfaction, Jennifer Yurchisin, Alyssa Dana Adomaitis, Kim K. P. Johnson, Haesung Whang

Publications and Research

When young adult women and men are exposed to idealized images in traditional media outlets, they often experience body dissatisfaction. As the use of social media increases, so do the opportunities for appearance-based comparisons. Individuals who are heavy users of social networking sites also tend to exhibit body dissatisfaction. Body appreciation is a personal characteristic that seems to counteract the negative influence traditional media exposure, and it may have a similar effect for social media exposure. The purpose of our research was to investigate the impact of body appreciation on the relationship between social network sites usage and body dissatisfaction …