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The Rise And Fall Of Gilmore Girls' Feminist Legacy, Mckenna Ahlgren Oct 2018

The Rise And Fall Of Gilmore Girls' Feminist Legacy, Mckenna Ahlgren

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the feminist legacy that the television series Gilmore Girls (2000-2007, 2016) built during its original airtime and how its later revival diminished that legacy. Gilmore Girls’ main characters are three generations of women within the Gilmore family, providing a unique opportunity to analyze their feminist identities and characterizations relative to different iterations of feminism. This paper examines how the youngest Gilmore, Rory, is influenced by her mother’s and grandmother’s embodiments of feminism. Their expressions of femininity and sexuality, their approaches to motherhood, and their behaviors in their romantic relationships throughout the series correlate with the predominate feminism …


A Woman's Gaze, Emily Fiore Jun 2018

A Woman's Gaze, Emily Fiore

Honors Theses

My work merges my passion of thinking politically and artistically. This series, A Woman’s Gaze, is an extension of my Political Science thesis, where I focused on artists who combat the male gaze by representing women’s lives realistically, from a woman’s perspective. These paintings focus on intimate scenarios from women’s lives where the male gaze is absent. The large scale imagery brings visibility to these otherwise private moments.


La Genara: La Libertad Falsa De La Mujer Elite En México, Emily Sullivan Jun 2018

La Genara: La Libertad Falsa De La Mujer Elite En México, Emily Sullivan

Honors Theses

The goal of feminism is to ensure the equality of all genders. This goal means that women are supposed to be seen as equal to men in society. However, despite the many feminist efforts to bring this equality into reality, many in the world still believe that women are inferior to men. This belief stems from historical oppression of women that has continued up until modern day times. In Mexico, there is still strong beliefs that exist that prevent women from achieving liberation and freedom in society. Ideas related to traditional family values, machismo, and internalized misogyny all act as …


Nasty Women: Television Portrayals Of Societal Anxieties Toward Female Leaders, Emily Sullivan Jun 2018

Nasty Women: Television Portrayals Of Societal Anxieties Toward Female Leaders, Emily Sullivan

Honors Theses

Historically, women have been excluded from leadership positions around the world, while instead men occupy the highest positions of power in society. The lack of female leadership is especially prevalent in the United States, where there has never been a female president, and the majority of high political offices are still held by men. In a similar manner, women have also been excluded from the sphere of comedy throughout history. Women have constantly had to deal with the assertion that women are not funny. This double exclusion from both leadership and comedy has led to the development of my concept …


Naturalism And The New Woman: Fated Motherhood In Kate Chopin's The Awakening And Edith Wharton's The House Of Mirth, Lindsay J. Patorno May 2018

Naturalism And The New Woman: Fated Motherhood In Kate Chopin's The Awakening And Edith Wharton's The House Of Mirth, Lindsay J. Patorno

Honors Theses

Proto-feminist novels have garnered great critical attention in recent decades, largely owing to the reclamation efforts of feminist scholars from the 1960s onwards. These feminist scholars have remarked the fin-de-siècle emergence of a recurring narrative archetype: the unabashed New Woman, whose exploits in what were traditionally male-dominated spheres distinguished her from the domesticated matrons and sentimental bachelorettes of past literary paradigms. While the New Woman is now a commonplace among feminist critics, the following thesis uniquely interprets this feministic archetype in conjunction with the concurrent movement of American literary naturalism—a genre that proffers a deterministic worldview and is often regarded …


American Muslim Women: Feminism, Equality, And Difference, Amber Coniglio Apr 2018

American Muslim Women: Feminism, Equality, And Difference, Amber Coniglio

Honors Theses

American Muslim women face constant surveillance, stress, and pressure to change and adapt to mainstream society. In the United States, Muslim women find ways to negotiate their identities, express their concerns, and learn through their faith by means of Islamic scholarship, Islamic feminism, and reinterpretations of the Quran. They are reconciling their multifaceted identities with better understanding of sacred text as well as solidifying their desired gender roles within their communities. They are challenging norms and creating new spaces for themselves within the ummah as well as the United States. American Muslim women find courage, strength, and autonomy through Islamic …


A Reason To Daydream, Corinne Schipull Mar 2018

A Reason To Daydream, Corinne Schipull

Honors Theses

Sexism in American culture comes as no surprise. In 2017, the film industry saw an increasing number of powerful men within its ranks exposed and exiled for allegations of sexually predatory behavior. Many see this purging as a sign of changing times, but this view is optimistic: the tides of change ebb in and out, and this problem far exceeds the movie industry. Well before the onslaught of articles on the likes of Harvey Weinstein, my classmates and I resolved to craft our senior thesis film with a crew made up entirely of women: we simply saw the pool of …


"It Came In Little Waves": Feminist Imagery In Chantal Akerman's Je, Tu, Il, Elle +, Staci C. Dubow Jan 2018

"It Came In Little Waves": Feminist Imagery In Chantal Akerman's Je, Tu, Il, Elle +, Staci C. Dubow

Honors Theses

Chantal Akerman writes, “she who seeks shall find, find all too well, and end up clouding her vision with her own preconceptions.”[1] This thesis addresses the films of Chantal Akerman from a theoretical feminist film perspective. There are many lenses through which Akerman’s rich body of work can be viewed, and I would argue that she herself never intended for it to be understood in just one way. I wish to situate Akerman’s films, in particular her 1974 Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1h 30m), within a discourse of other feminist film theorists and makers that were further rooted in …