Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Spa203. ¿Qué Hacemos Con La Lengua? Lenguaje, Diversidad Y Derechos Humanos, Juan Jesús Payán

Open Educational Resources

Descripción del curso

SPA203 - (For native or near-native speakers.) The grammatical structure of today's standard Spanish. Intensive practice in reading, speaking, and elementary composition.

En SPA203 vamos a explorar la relación entre el lenguaje y la diversidad en el marco de los derechos humanos fundamentales. El título del curso, “¿qué hacemos con la lengua?”, nos pregunta dos cosas: qué tipo de prejuicios perpetuamos por medio del lenguaje y cómo hacer para que la lengua albergue de manera efectiva la diversidad de nuestra sociedad. En un contexto actual, sorprendente estancado en la indiferencia, la ignorancia, el prejuicio y estigmatización de …

Spa321. Búsquedas De La Igualdad: Feminismo Y Abolicionismo En Los Siglos Xviii Y Xix (Sílabo Y Materiales De Lectura), Juan Jesús Payán

Open Educational Resources

SPA321 - 3 hours, 3 credits. Readings from representative works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

El curso está dedicado al examen de la situación de la mujer en la sociedad patriarcal y el compromiso abolicionista durante los siglos XVIII y XIX. Tras una contextualización sumaria sobre los problemas que subyacen a la naturalización acrítica del canon y la periodización hegemónica, debatiremos sobre los estigmas que pesaron sobre las mujeres que querían dedicarse a la literatura; discutiremos el perdurable impacto que tuvo el modelo de domesticidad del “ángel del hogar” y finalmente analizaremos la contradictoria posición ideológica encarnada en el …

"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

Narrative Side-Stepping: Disability Beyond The Narratology Of Normalcy, Christian Lewis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation theorizes a new mode of reading, narrative side-stepping, that reveals how disabled characters provide a unique opportunity for non-normative narratives. In insisting on the narratological innovations that disability affords, I revise both Lennard Davis’s notion that the novel form valorizes normalcy and David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s theory of narrative prosthesis, which claims that disability is a crutch, and that disabled characters are merely metaphors and/or plot devices. I move beyond these theories to focus instead on the more complicated ways that authors represented disability and used disabled characters to critique societal and narrative norms. I think about …

Staging Retro-Perspectives: Performing Age, Memory/Loss, And Queer Desire In The Later Works Of Split Britches (2009–2020), Benjamin Gillespie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project investigates the later works of the celebrated New York–based lesbian-feminist performance troupe Split Britches made up of founding members Peggy Shaw (b. 1944) and Lois Weaver (b. 1949). Revealing how the duo consciously interlaces aspects of aging and age-based identity into the very fabric of their later performances in both form and content, this project analyzes how Shaw and Weaver integrate an explicitly anti-ageist and overtly queer representation of aging on the experimental stage. Their later performances serve to challenge narratives of decline and debilitation that come with (hetero)normative representations of old age and the life course in …

An Overview And Assessment Of The Editorial Assistant Position At Women’S Studies Quarterly, Amy M. Iafrate

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper represents the culmination of my internship at Women’s Studies Quarterly, and documents my experience of working from September 2020, to June 2021. I will begin with a discussion of the journal’s historical importance; from its origin in 1972, to its more contemporary issues. This background will segue into a critical analysis of my role at the journal, supported by anecdotes and ideas of critical feminist theorists.

The Feminine Harp As Feminist Tool: Early Professional Footing For Women In Mid-Twentieth-Century America, Chelsea Lane

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1930s North America, women—for the first time—were accorded permanent principal positions in significant American orchestras. Edna Phillips, Alice Chalifoux, and Sylvia Meyer, all students of the legendary harp pedagogue Carlos Salzedo, have been celebrated as pioneers for the prestigious employment they obtained in the Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, and National Symphony Orchestra, respectively, between 1930 and 1933. Despite the impressiveness of these accomplishments, however, the narrative of their “firstness” is not wholly accurate. In actuality, female harpists have occupied orchestral posts as acting principals, substitutes, and second harpists since the very inception of orchestras. The cause for their early …

How Marlon T. Riggs Queered The Documentary Form, Anthony M. Sweeney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Marlon T. Riggs’s documentary films and their paratextual elements are rooted in his intersectional identities as a Black and gay man. His activist goal of Black gay liberation was based on what he saw as deeply engrained internal and external racist and homophobic societal structures that subjugated Black queers. In this thesis, I place research from Black cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, and film studies in conversation with one another to show how Riggs’s filmography is an example of queer form. In doing so, I attempt to redefine the focus of the scholarship on Riggs from an avant-garde filmmaker …

Homage To Eleanora: A Musical Journey Through The Billie Holiday Songbook, Keith A. Dames

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Billie Holiday was a singer, songwriter, vocalist, bandleader and composer in the fields of music, black culture and more specifically the genre of jazz. The primary focus of this study is Billie Holiday’s discography, music, and compositions as treated in relation to the black culture of production. This study will explore a secondary content analysis of Billie Holiday’s music, musicianship, musicality and compositional skills within the American jazz mainstream, broader jazz audience and world at large. This project will take an analytical look at the structure and form of the compositions of Billie Holiday. Billie Holiday is credited with composing …

Brujas Of Yesterday, Their Legacy Today, Maggi Delgado

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Brujas of Yesterday, their Legacy Today explores the impact of witch narratives on the lives of Latin American women. This bilingual interactive space collects both myths passed down through generations, ones still taught today, and stories of real women who bear the consequences of the legendary bruja character. Like witch hunts of women who did not fit the model of a “good woman,” the now correctly named femicides are examples of the prevailing misogynistic and anti-feminist rhetoric plaguing Latin American cultures diasporas. With a digital interactive map and timeline, the project aims to breathe new life into these old tales, …

Freestyle's Forsaken, Sage D. Rivera

Theses and Dissertations

Freestyle is a genre of music born in the mid-1980s from Latino and Black communities in the urban epicenters of the United States. This project spotlights a freestyle music artist “Corina," and how she suffered a patriarchal construct but finally got the moment of significance she deserved.

Claiming Ownership Of One’S Body Through Language: The Disability Memoir, Sarah Elizabeth Kaufman

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the ways in which the disability memoir creates pathways that generate new ways of thinking. Focusing primarily on the disability memoirs of Simi Linton, Ellen Forney, and Kenny Fries, this analysis will personalize the disability experience as these authors live it and redefine its social stereotypes.

Visual Diaries: Towards Art History As Storytelling, Alpesh Kantilal Patel

Art History Pedagogy & Practice

This essay examines variants of what I refer to as “visual diaries” – or thinking through images and written or oral language – as important “worldmaking” exercises, essential for students of color, women, sexual minorities, or other marginalized subjects. I provide my reflections on assigning this dynamic and student-centered, practice-based assignment in my contemporary art courses at a Hispanic-serving institution (HSI) of higher education and a summer art residency program unaffiliated with a university. Besides my reflections on my pedagogy, I also share student feedback from unsolicited testimonials and answers to questionnaires. I argue that visual diaries transform students into …

Surveilling The Fat Disidencia: Policing The Bodies Of Plus-Size Black Women On Instagram, Daniela V. Verdejo Salazar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Instagram has shaped how we network and share content with others, making interactions far more accessible for everyone who uses this platform daily. Unfortunately, it has also given space to some surveilling mechanisms that tend to police and norm how users and their bodies should present themselves to the rest of the world.

The body can be understood as a manifestation, a presence, and a performance. As Judith Butler argues, the body is also a political space where ideas of resistance and vulnerability take place, and I will understand the body as a combination of the physical manifestation of it …

From Abortion Rights To Reproductive Justice: A Call To Action, Erica Goldblatt Hyatt, Judith L.M. Mccoyd, Mery Diaz

Publications and Research

As aggressive cultural and legislative attacks on abortion rights and access continue, we call upon social workers to pursue the liberatory aims of the reproductive justice (RJ) movement. We argue that the RJ framework, rooted in feminist theory, aligns with social work’s social justice ethos and goals, appropriately guiding advocacy and intervention. After outlining the central aims and tenets of the RJ movement, we consider policies that impair RJ and those that could promote RJ, focusing on enhancing body sovereignty, childbearing, and parenting. We conclude with concrete recommendations for how social workers can pursue RJ professionally and personally.

A House Of One’S Own: Challenges And Re-Definitions Of Female Subjectivity And Domestic Space In Italian Women Writers From The 1950s To The Early 2000s, Nicole Paronzini

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With an in-depth analysis of selected Italian novels written by female writers from the 1950s to the early 2000s, this dissertation addresses and discusses the challenging relationship between female identity and the home, perceived both as constraining space and metaphor of human interiority. The projects aim to show that these characters, as representative of the female individual, are capable to use the domestic space as a privilege universe in which re-defining themselves, modifying their own and other perception as passive objects of patriarchal society to the one of subjects in fieri.

If, on one hand, the house has been …

“She Too ‘Omanish’”: Young Black Women’S Sexuality And Reproductive Justice In Bluefields, Nicaragua, Ishan Elizabeth Gordon-Ugarte

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Most never-married young “Creole” (Afro-Caribbean) women in Bluefields, Nicaragua are raised in fundamentalist Protestant families and institutions that emphasize sexual abstinence before marriage. In this context, abstinence is required to maintain social standing and “respectability.” Nevertheless, women in Bluefields, the administrative center of Caribbean Nicaragua, exhibit what Creoles themselves understand to be high rates of sexuality and pregnancy among post-menarche unmarried teenaged women (USAID, 2012; Mitchell et al. 2015). Such young women’s pregnancies occur at an important developmental stage of their lives and have long been associated by social scientists with adverse social, emotional, and health situations. These scholars have …

Inheritance: A Memoir, Jennifer Skoog

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I was born and raised on a small farm in central Minnesota, the youngest of nine. Our lives centered around a dogmatic faith that banned sex education and birth control in any form. The consequences of these teachings put my life on a tragic course, and I paid dearly for my ignorance. With the help of a therapist and a deep commitment to myself, I left the faith. After I earned a college degree in my early 40s, I began to critically examine my upbringing. Through my educational journey in Black studies, I saw deeply troubling ways in which my …

Historical Sisters: Black Feminist Actions Across History And Literary Studies, Jazz A. Milligan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis seeks to understand how the actions of Black women from the past have inspired the modern Black female literary movement. This thesis focuses on three historical women: Phillis Wheatley, Elizabeth Freeman, and Cathay Williams, and their literary sisters: bell hooks, Barbara Smith, and Patricia Hill Collins. By viewing the lives of these historical women through a modern-day lens, we can understand how their actions created a ripple effect that Black women are still discussing today. Black feminism did not start in a vacuum, and the actions of everyday Black women have pushed us forward to being more accepting …

A History Of The Center For The Study Of Women And Society, 1975–2015, Clarisa Gonzalez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the early 1970s, New York City was experiencing an extreme fiscal crisis, with a reported debt of at least $600 million. In CUNY, students were protesting admissions policies that favored the white middle class and hikes in tuition. At the same time, the women’s movement was in the midst of the “second wave,” focusing on women in the workplace and in education. It’s in the midst of these tumultuous times that the first motions to create what was then called the Center for the Study of Women and Sex Roles began in 1975 by Graduate Center faculty Joan Kelly, …

Girl Friends, Camila Santander

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Friendships between women are common and essential parts of women's lives; however, they are often overlooked. This capstone project titled Girl Friends is a film on which eight women are interviewed and asked about their friendships with other women. They discuss the importance of having female friends and how they create love, support, and companionship. The interviewees also talk about female friendships and romantic partners coexisting, the pressures to find a romantic partner to find fulfillment, as opposed to good friends. Additionally, they describe how friendships between women can be competitive and catty, and how female relationships can change as …

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, …