Arts and Humanities Commons^™

At The Same Time African Women And Mothers Resisted: Dialectical Constructions Of Race And Gender In The Black Atlantic And Early Colonies Of The New World, Anna L. Biesecker-Mast

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

We find the rough beginning of this story in the dynamic and contingent scene of the early Atlantic. I say contingent because it is these early complex transatlantic (political and cultural) encounters that fundamentally shaped and shape the trajectory of modernity. At the heart of this development of modernity are constructions of race and gender. And given the contingency of history, it must be noted that, if responses to these encounters had been different, perhaps we would be living with a different modernity—maybe one with different or less harmful notions of race and gender difference.

Understanding how these conceptualizations came …

Protofeminist Freedom To Choose Colonialism, Josie Forsthoff

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

Intersectionality has been a legal and socio-cultural term since 1998 thanks to Kimberlé Crenshaw who put a name to the particular phenomenon of oppression. Her naming of culminating and connected marginalizations also provides an approach to address them. Nevertheless, feminisms that neglect intersectionality persist. The individualist feminist who prioritizes personal choice as the ultimate act of autonomy rarely evaluates the intersections of identity, even their own. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre presents a protofeminist protagonist whose choices to advance her own freedom often contradict the freedom of those who live and labor outside of white and Western society. She is free …

Theories In The Flesh: Latina Feminist Philosophy Approaches To Identity, Sofia Garcia

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

The idea of identity is thoroughly debated by a plethora of philosophers, and it is also a subject that non-scholars question and battle within themselves as well. For those in marginalized communities, whether they are Hispanic, African American, LGBTQ, identity is extremely complex and comes with extreme political, socio-economic, and physiological implications as well. In our current climate these identity questions play out in discussions over critical race theory, immigration policies like DACA, and so many other grave issues. Latinx philosophers take conversations about identity seriously and ask questions such as what is Latina identity really? Is Latina mestiza identity …

"If You're Ugly, The Blackpill Is Born With You": Sexual Hierarchies, Identity Construction, And Masculinity On An Incel Forum Board, Josh Segalewitz

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

The manosphere is one new digital space where antifeminists and men's rights activists interact outside of their traditional social networks. Incels, short for involuntary celibates, exist in this space and have been labeled as extreme misogynists, white supremacists, and domestic terrorists. This project aims to understand discussions happening among incels and situate them within social understandings of masculinity. I downloaded 4,532 threads posted on incels.is and randomly sampled 100 for analysis. Through grounded coding methodology, I identified the importance of making meaning of manhood on this site, particularly with respect to sexuality. Further, I found that incel ideology rests on …

(In)Security: Gendered And Bordered, Mary Mcloughlin

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

No abstract provided.

Bearing Witness To Sexual Violence As A Violation Of Women's Rights, Josh Segalewitz

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

On January 21, 2017, masses of people around the globe gathered for one of the largest collections of public protest in history. It is estimated that over seven million people gathered to raise awareness of human rights violations towards several different groups. However, perhaps the largest common trope was echoed time and time again in the phrase, "women's rights are human rights." Conversations surrounding women's rights have been pushed to the forefront of human rights discourse in the recent past, and although there has certainly been a lot of progress towards the universal enforcement of women's rights, the role of …

Gendering Patriotism: Wartime Culture And Propaganda In Wwi, Emily Elizabeth Haynes

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

The cover of a popular 1918 American song, "Keep the Home Together, Mother, Thaf s All We're Fighting For/' suggested that the main goal of World War I was to protect and sustain the home.1 It depicted three women from all different generations sitting at a kitchen table. One is reading and two are working on a sewing project. A small black cat meanders nearby this domestic scene. This image placed an emphasis on gendered spatialization-women are at home performing traditional women's work, such as sewing and maintaining the home, while men are outside performing men's work, such as fighting …

Feminist Futures, Julia Nicole Court

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

No abstract provided.

Tripping On All The Faces: The Identity Work Of Native American Women Artists, Amanda Dee

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

Native American women artists are constantly tugging at a tangle of identities, all while others are pulling on them just as hard. These identities—Native American, Woman, Artist— struggle in one body to express themselves “authentically,” against and toward privacy, against and toward openness. On the outside, however, others flatten the identity of Natives as stoic, wise warriors with elaborate headdresses. Or even flatter to long braids, tan-skin. The confluence of a Cheyenne Lakota cowboy father and artist mother, Cannupa Hanska Luger produced a series in 2013 titled and expressing just that: "Stereotype: Misconceptions of the Native American" in Figure 1 …

F***** From The Start: Misogyny In Medieval Literature, Amanda Dee

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

It all started at the very beginning. In Genesis, when Eve was created from the rib of Adam and when she bit into the forbidden fruit, the literary character of Eve determined the perception of women who would be born hundreds of years after the biblical story was told -possibly until the end of eternity. About 1,600 years after this story allegedly originated, Joesph Swetnam decried the rib, the woman, as "a crooked thing, good for nothing else." He blames Eve as representative of womankind for "man's fall" (Greenblatt 1651). Interpretations like this, of the woman as the sinful servant …

Gender Disparity Within The Employment Sector In Saudi Arabia, Alyssa Bovell, Libby Durnwald

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

The purpose of our research is to examine why an increased access to higher education has not resulted in an expansion of employment opportunities for women in Saudi Arabia, and how this affects the development of the country. We examine this topic through a feminist and cultural relativist lens in order to understand why Saudi Arabian women are living in such a gender-segregated state. The lack of opportunity to enjoy one’s right to employment renders the progressivism of women’s rights as civil society has taken measure to eradicate such a disparity in the employment sector and disrupt the institutional norms …

Joan Jett In "I Love Rock 'N' Roll": Gender Boundaries And Female Address, Megan Colleen O'Mera

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

Joan Jett was not like other 23-year-olds. But, what else would you expect from a woman who grew up idolizing Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin? When she grew into adulthood under the lens of the public eye, Jett's shockingly masculine style in I Love Rock 'n' Roll was not what the average 1981 MTV viewer was accustomed to seeing from a female music video artist. Her female contemporaries such as Cyndi Lauper, Pat Benetar and Madonna were more traditionally feminine, sometimes even overtly sexual. Instead bending her style to feminize or sexualize herself, Jett expresses her gender by exposing the …

Dependence On Or The Subordination Of Women? Examining The Political, Domestic, And Religious Roles Of Women In Mesoamerican, Andean, And Spanish Societies In The 15th Century, Christine Alwan

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

What is the value of a woman? In the modern West, one may answer with appeals to human rights and the inherent dignity and equality of the human person. However, before the recognition of human rights, many societies’ ideas about the value of women laid in the specific roles women played religiously, politically, and domestically within a particular society. Through the examination of women’s roles in Mesoamerican Aztec society, Andean Incan society, and Spanish society in the 15th century, one is able to observe how gender ideology influenced the roles women played and how these roles had significant implications for …

Drag Kings: Performing Masculinity, Lauren Cummerlander

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

Gender performance as a means of political message has always been fascinating to me. The idea of being able to put on and take off gender at will is interesting; the added layer of power relations makes it even more intriguing. What better illustration of gender performance than drag. Drag is all about the performance of gender, with the goal of disrupting the power hierarchy. To me drag is an important part of gender performance because it is one which illustrates that gender is a performance and is nothing more than culturally accepted features that come to identify people. Surprisingly …

Food And Feminism, Ellie Myers

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

Food production is a rarely thought about topic in industrialized countries like the U.S. There is an assumption that our food comes from big farms in the states, but in reality, “the poorest two-thirds of humanity feed the richest third” (Hamer, 28). This paper seeks to understand how this patriarchal relationship of American agribusiness and between lesser developed countries, specifically India, is affecting both the producers and consumers of these bioengineered crops. This will examine how food production is a feminist issue and how ecofeminism believes this problem can be remedied by local knowledge is the solution to the global …

Extreme Pornography And Obscenity Legislation, Julianne Morgan

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

Section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act (CJIA), a piece of UK legislation that came into effect in 2009, seeks to criminalize the possession of extreme pornography with a particular focus on controlling the spread of such images available via the internet. The law mandates that an image is pornographic “if it is of such a nature that it must reasonably assumed to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal.” An image is considered extreme if it is “grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character” and “if it portrays, in an …

The Myth Of Choice: The Cultural Shift In Cosmetic Surgery, Kelly Neyer

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

What comes to mind when you hear the words cosmetic surgery? The majority of the population would think of breast augmentations, liposuction, or rhinoplasties; but what about vaginal rejuvenation, labiaplasties, or pubic liposuction? In the United States, cosmetic surgery is undergoing a major cultural shift concerning the types of procedures done on women. Moving away from the outer, visible parts of a female body, cosmetic surgery is advancing to the inner and more private domains of a female body. Known as female genital cosmetic surgery (FGCS), these procedures are part of the larger cultural shift in the trends and practices …

The Rhetoric Of Writing For A Male Audience, Danielle Black

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

No abstract provided.

Portrayal Of Women And Clothing In Domestic Housework Commercials, Julie Brady Ramaccia

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

5✸`‰©5❷O";">There are over 90 million televisions in the United States, serving roughly 98% of the United States’ population. An average American will watch 30,000 commercials in a year, which results in a total of over 2,000,000 commercials in a lifetime (Allan and Coltrane, 1996; Bretl and Cantor, 1988). An American will end up spending about three years of his or her life watching commercials (Kilbourne, 2001). Since the media and particularly commercials are so pervasive in American society, it is imperative that the effects of this advertising be studied and understood. It is also important to analyze the clothing …

Medieval Romance And British Romanticism: Gender Constructions In Pullman’S "His Dark Materials" And Tolkien’S "The Lord Of The Rings", Emily Elizabeth Howson

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

In a 1999 interview, Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials, replied to a question about gender, saying, "Eve is the equal of Adam and shares in whatever it is that happens" (Pullman, Parsons par. 30). J.R.R Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings expressed a different attitude toward male and female. In a letter to his son in 1941, Tolkien wrote, "A man has a lifework, a career ... A young woman, even one 'economically independent' as they say now ... begins to dream of a home, almost at once" (Letters 50). Tolkien's notion of the sexes does …

Even The Good Guys Are Bad In Sin City, Melanie Woods

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

No abstract provided.

To Abandon Our Culture Or Not? A Real Look At Indigenous Guatemalans, Allison A. Kretz

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

A month spent in Guatemala shed light on issues surrounding the rights of the indigenous Mayans and the importance of their traditional dress. I combine my experiences and work in the field with bibliographic research to convey the extent to which the Mayan population has been discriminated against, particularly indigenous women. Historical background focused on the progression of discrimination adds to the depth of understanding of race relations in Guatemala. However, it is not enough to simply discuss this population's plight. Therefore, I present three schools of thought on education as building blocks for implementing a more democratic system, and …