Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Narratives Of Incarcerated Women, Kaceylee Klein

Honors Scholar Theses

Our criminal-justice system mandates the silencing and disappearing of 2.3 million people, a consequence of its historical context as an inherently violent institution, carrying on traditions of slavery, oppression, and extortion. While any voice that makes it out of a prison cell is resisting the effort to silence, smother, and make compliant the voices of those labeled criminal, the form of publication of that voice allows more or less agency to the author depending on its conventions and structures. There is a spectrum from more controlled or mediated forms of publications to more author-directed ones and they vary over the …

The Simultaneous Book: Women's Writing In Contemporary Art, Maryse Lariviere

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Novels written by women authors who don’t adhere to the classification “visual artist” are nonetheless gaining momentum in today's contemporary art world. Yet works by authors such as Chris Kraus or Catherine Millet are often not recognized as artist’s novels because their authors are not or/and do not consider themselves to be visual artists. I contend that we can usefully situate their work within the genre of the artist’s novel by addressing how they invent artistic postures and artistic alter-egos within the autofictional worlds of their texts. My dissertation The Simultaneous Book proposes to open up the definition of the …

Healing Through Creativity And Creation: Drama Therapy As Treatment For Individuals With Eating Disorders, Hayley Werner

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

For those living with eating disorders, intervention and effective treatment can mean the difference between life and death. Conventional treatments, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, forms of talk therapy, and Nutritional Counseling, focus solely on the psychological patterns or nutritional science of eating disorders. Though these treatments are effective for some individuals, there is a gap in treatment options that address both the mind and body as one and appeal to the humanity of patients outside of their disorder(s). Herein lies the power and potential of integrating drama therapy as a widely available treatment. Drama therapy …

Contradictory Shakespeare: An Investigation Of Female Protagonists In Othello, Measure For Measure, And Pericles, Mingyue Xu

Student Theses and Dissertations

Unlike the stereotyped image of women in the Elizabethan era, in which women should submit to men’s control, Desdemona in Othello, Isabella in Measure for Measure, and Marina in Pericles present their powerful and brave characteristics when facing male dominance. More specifically, all three young women — Desdemona, Isabella and Marina — negotiate sexual and marital arrangements with their language intelligently, despite the fact that they sometimes lack self-determining power in the plays. That is to say, Shakespeare gives women rhetorical power while in certain circumstances, men cannot be persuaded. Such contradiction within how Shakespeare depicts his female …

Lindsey, Ian-Meredythe, Zackary Caron

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Ian-Meredythe Lindsey moved around often during their childhood due to their parents being transferred for jobs. They lived in Oregon, Colorado, and finally Maine. Ian-Meredythe identifies as a non-binary transgender individual who considers themselves pansexual. Ian-Meredythe speaks in depth about their experiences with the erasure of themselves due to their gender identity and sexuality due to those not fitting within the gender-binary. Ian-Meredythe also focused on their experiences within the theatre, as they see very little room for non-binary individuals and storylines within the mainstream theatre productions. Ian-Meredythe focused on their involvement with Equality Maine, as well as their own …

Reflections On A Transnational Project: Suffrage In The Americas, Patricia Harms, Stephanie Mitchell

Journal of International Women's Studies

Suffrage is the most significant political development within modern Liberal states. Despite this fact, it is curious as to why suffrage movements have so little history. This article focuses on the creation of an edited volume that seeks to address the women’s suffrage story across the Americas. While the intellectual process of the project is discussed in some detail, this article is predominantly a reflection on the process of developing a collaborative project and the challenges inherent to a transnational approach. This project reveals both the significance of suffrage and simultaneously the fractured landscape within individual countries, suffrage movements and …

“Me Gritaron Negra”: The Emergence And Development Of The Afro-Descendant Women’S Movement In Peru (1980-2015), Eshe Lewis, John Thomas Iii, Spanish Translation: Https://Revistasinvestigacion.Unmsm.Edu.Pe/Index.Php/Sociales/Article/View/19567

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article examines the evolution of the Afro-descendant women's movement in Peru between 1980 and 2015. We examine the development of women’s conscious through other movements, specifically through the national Afro-Peruvian movement and the regional feminist encounters that have been taking place since the 1980s. Our study outlines the tensions, and points of convergence and divergence that have existed for Afro-Peruvian women in these movements. We demonstrate how these issues characterize the nature of Afro-Peruvian women's struggle and their social and political position within the realm of race- and gender-based activism. We show that this friction has prompted women to …

"We Neither Are Of The Past Nor Of The Future" : Analyzing The Two Opposing Aspects Of A Female Character Through Four Modern Works Of Persian Fiction", Ronak Karami

Journal of International Women's Studies

Under Iran’s growing contact with the West from 1925 until 1979, which caused cultural changes, modern writers were stuck between two realities: the vanishing culture of the past with its unified view of women and the modern Western-oriented culture of the present with its doubting, ironic, and fast-changing view of women. Both labels, the ‘ethereal’ (or inaccessible paragon) and the ‘whore’ (or accessible temptress) for female characters emerged in a major literary work of the 20th century in Iran, The Blind Owl (1937), by Hedayat due to these cultural changes. Furthermore, the labels appeared within some later modern Persian fictional …

Traveling Feminista: A Blog About Traveling As A Pakistani/American/Muslim/Feminist Scholar-Art-Ivist, Fawzia Afzal-Khan

Journal of International Women's Studies

At the heart of my blogging lies the desire to be a traveler moving through the world in a body marked as female, a woman whose evolving feminism can help heal herself and in so doing, inspire others to do the same. Journeying without and within, allows for the self to turn toward its other, to recognize the other in oneself; in so doing, one can learn to connect across the divides that threaten to engulf us, dissolving boundaries that keep us from loving our multiple selves.

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 …

The South African Women's Movement: The Roles Of Feminism And Multiracial Cooperation In The Struggle For Women's Rights, Amber Michelle Lenser

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the historiography of South Africa’s recent past, focus has been most heavily placed on apartheid and the anti-apartheid movement, with much emphasis placed on male involvement and men as the primary agents of change in the country. Women are largely viewed as playing a supportive role to male activists throughout the movement, and far less has been written on female involvement or women’s activism in its own right. Running parallel to the anti-apartheid movement, however, was a women’s movement characterized by women across the racial and socioeconomic spectrum struggling to secure their own rights in a very hostile and …

"Roll" Models: Fat Sexuality And Its Representations In Pornographic Imagery, Leah Marie Turner

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to use specific fat pornographic imagery as a means to help us understand fat tropes and fetishization. The goal is to use our understandings of masculinity and race within fatness to create a possible launching point for further study within the field of fat sexuality studies. My rationale for writing such a paper is because fat sexuality studies is a field which has very little content, but potential for incredible scholarship which can impact not only our understandings of fat bodies, but of all bodies. The method for this thesis involves looking at specific …

Flora Tristan, Precursor Lecture By Magda Portal, Kathleen Weaver

Journal of International Women's Studies

A major figure in Latin American struggles for women's rights and social justice, Magda Portal (1900-1989) co-founded the revolutionary nationalist APRA Party of Peru and was the principal women's leader of that party. In her Chilean exile Portal discovered the nineteenth century writer and social reformer, Flora Tristan. In 1944 Portal offered her first lecture on Tristan (1803-1844)—a brilliant diarist and journalist as well as a seminal social theorist, labor organizer, champion of women's rights, and a significant precursor—arguably co-founder—of socialist internationalism. Expanding and revising her initial account, Portal continued into her later years to lecture on Tristan, whom she …

Are Postmodernism And #Metoo Incompatible?, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

If postmodernism renders the replicant Rachael legible as a glossy simulacrum, then #MeToo renders her brutally legible as a victim of sexual violence.

Panmela Castro: Feminism In Brazilian Graffiti Art, Giulia Chu Ferri

Student Theses and Dissertations

This paper is an analysis on the graffiti artist Panmela Castro and her murals in Brazil and around the world. My thesis emphasizes the importance of feminist subject matter for graffiti art in Brazil, as well as its impact on the public sphere. The paper is separated into four sections: “Formative Years,” describing her biography and the development of her works; “Interaction with the City,” analyzing the interaction between graffiti and the urban environment, and using that discussion as a frame to contextualize Castro’s work; “Feminist Imagery and Ideology,” examining some of her concurrent themes and imageries; and finally “Transnational …

Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms Of Capital” In Fitzgerald’S Gatsby And Watts’ No One Is Coming To Save Us, Allie Harrison Vernon

English (MA) Theses

Looking primarily at two critically acclaimed texts that concern themselves with American citizenship—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Stephanie Powell Watts’ No One is Coming to Save Us—I analyze the claims made about citizenship identities, rights, and consequential access to said rights. I ask, how do these narratives about citizenship sustain, create, or re-envision American myth? Similarly, how do the narratives interact with the dominant culture at large? Do any of these texts achieve oppositional value, and/or modify the complex hegemonic structure? I use Pierre Bourdieu’s “The Forms of Capital” to investigate the ways in which economic, cultural, …

Women Artists' Salon Of Chicago (1937-1953): Cultivating Careers And Art Collectors, Joanna P. Gardner-Huggett

Artl@s Bulletin

This article reconstructs the history of the Women Artists’ Salon of Chicago, which was founded as an exhibition society in Chicago in 1937, and argues that the Board of Directors turned to the 19^th century precedents of the Palette Club and the Woman’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exhibition as models for their organization. The essay also traces how members of the Women Artists’ Salon deliberately exhibited traditional artworks associated with the feminine and domestic and coordinated social events in order to cultivate greater sales and a new generation of female art collectors.

What's The Deal With Childcare: Childcare As A Women's Issue - And Why It Should Matter To Everyone, Jenny Janssen

Sociology Student Work Collection

A Visual presentation of a feminist perspective on access to affordable childcare, including how it affects various spheres of women's lives, and how it affects society at large. This zine briefly examines the historical context of Federally funded daycare during WWII, current effective childcare systems in place in other developed nations, and the many consequences which the lack of affordable childcare has on women and the entire economy in the USA today.

Black Feminism: Switching The Script On Traditional Feminist Narratives, Monee Reis

Senior Honors Projects

MONEE REIS (Gender and Women’s Studies, Africana Studies) Black Feminism: Switching the Script on Traditional Feminist Narratives

Sponsor: Kathleen McIntyre (Gender and Women’s Studies, Honors Program)

I developed a 300-level undergraduate course aimed at exploring the history of Black feminism. This idea came to me after reading Audre Lorde’s 1984 article “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.” Lorde detailed the various ways Black women’s contributions to feminism are underrepresented in the overarching historical narrative. Lorde’s 1980s activism and feminist scholarship ultimately influenced legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to coin the term intersectionality in 1989. Intersectionality, the multiple ways that …

The Woman We Don’T Want To Be: The Anti-Heroine In American Women’S Modernisms, Madison Priest

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Anita Loos’ Lorelei has a baby because “a kid that looks like any rich father is as good as money in the bank.” Edith Wharton’s Undine uses hers as a pawn in divorce negotiations with the child’s father. Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Angela abandons her sister so her boyfriend won’t guess she’s black, and Nella Larsen’s Helga frustrates and alienates everyone she loves. Yet these protagonists were subject not just to gleeful mockery and sanction, but to furtive pity, uncomfortable recognition, even envy. Each age calls for its own bogeys; and the anti-heroine was, I contend, the perfect instantiation of American …

"Buried...Like A Human Being" At The Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery: A Bioarchaeological Approach To Defining Fetal And Infant Personhood Through Biological Development, Historical Discourse, And Diapering, Brianne Charles

Theses and Dissertations

The ambiguity of life is visible in the complex sets of beliefs that cultures develop around abortion, stillbirth, and neonatal death. This research grew out of ambiguities surrounding bioarchaeological methods of age estimation among fetal and infant remains and the need for additional lines of evidence to define what a prenatal or postnatal age contextually means, how these definitions were upheld or challenged, and what impact these definitions had on the mortuary treatment of these bodies.

Discernment between fetal and infant skeletal remains is important to forensic investigations and bioarchaeological questions of personhood, infant mortality, and maternal health. However, skeletal …

Trace., Kcj Szwedzinski

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Trace utilizes autoethnography to investigate aspects of Judaism to discover how one decides what to embrace, embody, or deny from inherited legacies. Autoethnography attempts to combine quantitative and qualitative data in order to systematically analyze and describe personal experience. The artist acting as Ba’alei Kushiah, or question bearer, uses Talmudic philosophy as a methodology and approach to art making. This research is self-referential; using Jewish thought to ask questions about Judaism. Judaism, often existing in an in between place with outward characteristics that reflect regional influences, facilitates a dialogue about whether there are relative or absolute delineations within and between …

Queering Dominant Modes Of Writing And Identity Formation In Audre Lorde’S Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name, Charlie Martin

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

As part of a historical formation of marginalized authors who interrogate dominant modes of writing and identity formation in their work, self-described “Black lesbian mother warrior poet” Audre Lorde remakes and reimagines dominant conventions of identity and literary genres in her novel Zami: A New Spelling of My Name to articulate her unique subjectivity as a Black American lesbian writer. Drawing on the work of scholars and activists in the fields of queer theory and feminism, including Cheryl Wall, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Audre Lorde herself, Charlie Martin uses textual and contextual analysis to examine the indelible link between Lorde’s …

Exploiting The Patriarchy: Privilege, Context, And Masculine Accomplishments, Elizabeth Iobst

History Presentations

No abstract provided.

Scripting Resistance: Rape And The Avenging Woman In Hindi Cinema, Isha Karki

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article considers how contemporary Hindi cinema engages with traditional cinematic representations of rape and the extent to which it inscribes resistance by rewriting dominant cultural scripts. It analyses Pan Nalin’s Angry Indian Goddesses (2015) and Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s Pink (2016) by locating them within the tradition of the avenging woman genre in 1980s Hindi popular cinema. It argues that the historical avenging woman genre was unable to successfully dismantle dominant rape scripts, and that these contemporary films, by subverting the genre, offer alternatives to the problems inherent in the visualisation of rape. It explores issues of eroticisation and spectacle …

‘Red Amazons’? Gendering Violence And Revolution In The Long First World War, 1914-23, Matthew Kovac

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article seeks to position gender theory as critical to making sense of one of the First World War’s largest remaining historical problems: the persistence of mass violence after November 1918. While Robert Gerwarth and John Horne’s pathbreaking work on veteran violence has challenged the standard 1914-18 periodisation of the war, their focus on military defeat and revolution obscures the centrality of gender relations to the continuation of violence after the formal end of hostilities. By putting their work into conversation with that of feminist theorists, I argue that countries which experienced more extreme gender dislocation or ‘gender trouble’ witnessed …

Widows And Concubines: Tradition And Deviance In The Women Of Raja Rao’S Kanthapura, M. E. P. Ranmuthugala

Journal of International Women's Studies

Raja Rao’s 1938 novel Kanthapura depicts the impact of Gandhian thought on women and men, and this research focuses on the novel’s fashioning of female identities in terms of nationalism as espoused by Mahatma Gandhi. This analytical research paper hypothesises that although women constitute a considerable part of the narrative and have political agency, their identity is moulded by men to serve men’s nationalist interests: The paper contends that women must undergo transformation and refashioning of their identities for nationalism. The novel provides a strong argument for Mahatma Gandhi’s political ethic of empowering people and engages with diverse issues such …

Autonomous Women's Movement In Kerala: Historiography, Maya Subrahmanian

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper traces the historical evolution of the women’s movement in the southernmost Indian state of Kerala and explores the related social contexts. It also compares the women’s movement in Kerala with its North Indian and international counterparts. An attempt is made to understand how feminist activities on the local level differ from the larger scenario with regard to their nature, causes, and success. Mainstream history writing has long neglected women’s history, just as women have been denied authority in the process of knowledge production. The Kerala Model and the politically triggered society of the state, with its strong Marxist …

Sexual Misconduct, Religion, And Culture, Alev Dudek

Alev Dudek

Sr. Miriam: Community And Habits, Loretta Dantuma

Ask a Sister: Interview Wisdom from Catholic Women Religious

This paper includes part of an interview on January 11, 2019, with “Sr. Miriam Drake” – a sister who has served her congregation for almost 60 years – and her views on evolution of habits after Vatican II as well as the role of community in faith.