Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Donne’S 'Elegy 19': To His Mistress Transcending The Bed, Femininity, And Gender Distinction, Christopher Sarachilli

Faculty Curated Undergraduate Works

No abstract provided.

Handling A Social Threat : The Fate Of Women Beyond Victorian Societal Definition., Alexandra Clifton

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

The New Man: Evolving Masculinity In F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side Of Paradise, "Winter Dreams," And "The Swimmers", Adrian Nicole Coursey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The evolving culture and ethos of American capitalist modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was marked by a nervousness, or neurasthenia. Strongly gendered, it was characterized among men by effeminacy and an anxiety about masculinity. Confronted by the eroding ideals of Victorian American self-reliance and independence, a stout-hearted willingness to labor to establish one's masculinity seemed an increasingly doubtful prospect for men in the new modern age. Under the twin influences of industrial capitalism and a market economy and a fledgling women's movement, affecting, especially, the work place, the American male felt nervous, anxious, and emasculated. In …

Beauty-Ful Inferiority: Female Subservience In Disney’S Beauty And The Beast, Jeremy Chow

LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University

The ubiquity of Disney movies has certainly transformed the American cultural landscape. The Disney zeitgeist manifests itself as generations of children actively seek Prince Charmings, unrealistic fairy tale relationships and the omnipotent, happily-ever-after. One such Disney favorite, Beauty and the Beast (1991), reveals typical Disney themes such as the power of altruism, the transformation of the anthropomorphic, and the catharsis of true love. Yet, under these benevolent-seeming Disney themes lurk more sinister, subliminal messages. Beauty and the Beast promotes female subservience and subjugation in addition to the glorification of abusive relationships. Belle, the female protagonist, embodies these gendered disparities and …

Femininity And The Gothic Animal: Spofford And Bierce, Gender And Genre, David Greven

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

All The Ways…, Natasha Lobo

Journal of International Women's Studies

‘all the ways…’ was written for a Women’s Studies module – ‘Identity, Difference and the Body’. This module explored feminist perspectives on the nature/culture divide and the production of sexed, gendered and raced bodies, and surveyed a range of different feminist analytical approaches to the body, including postmodern, phenomenological, Black feminist and post-colonial perspectives. It considered the construction of sex, gender and sexuality through different cultural and social practices which take the body as their principal focus, and examined a variety of case studies such as: body image and norms of femininity; food, dieting and eating disorders; body modification; …

The Rationality And Femininity Of Mary Wollstonecraft And Jane Austen, Rachel Evans

Journal of International Women's Studies

This essay addresses the issues of self-representation in women’s writing of the early nineteenth-century British literary culture. I explore the subordination of women by a construction of femininity which did not allow them to be rational thinking subjects. Through the work of Mary Wollstonecraft I demonstrate how she provided a space for the rights of women to be discussed in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the impact this had on a patriarchal society. Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park serves as a fictional articulation of this, which illustrates the way in which women writers were disguising their political intent …

The Social World Of Prostitutes And Devadasis: A Study Of The Social Structure And Its Politics In Early Modern India, Karuna Sharma

Journal of International Women's Studies

This research paper discusses two groups of professional women who had a distinct place in the sexual economy of the period under review. By analyzing the actions and situations of prostitutes and the devadasis (literally meaning servants of God) in terms of a broader context of relationships, I consider the sexual-services and the entertainment provided by them as a meaningful labor, which got integrated at both the social and cultural levels. I have looked at how and to whom the prostitutes and the devadasis sold their labor, and how they related to other women, to men, and to various social …

Deconstructing Masculinity In A ‘Female Bastion’: Ambiguities, Contradictions And Insights, Charles C. Fonchingong

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article is informed by my experiences teaching women’s studies and specifically feminist theory to predominantly female and male students offering Women’s studies. As a mainstream academic discipline at the University of Buea, housing the only such Department in Cameroon’s Higher Education system, this study uncovers the broader polemics regarding gender and women’s studies.

Against the backdrop of a patriarchal society, this study attempts to account for the shifting strands on masculinity and femininity and gender transgressions as played out by students taking women’s studies. It also analyses the notions, misconceptions and stereotypes that characterise the discipline of women’s studies, …

‘What Happens, Or Rather Doesn’T Happen’: Death And Possibility In Alice James And Christina Rossetti, Erika Kvistad

Journal of International Women's Studies

The idea of the dying Victorian woman as passive victim or object of desire has justly received critical attention, but this has meant a comparative neglect of the dying Victorian woman as an active, speaking, writing subject. In response, this article focuses on the death writing of Alice James and Christina Rossetti, reading the central role of death in their work as a way of articulating a space of possibility beyond what life has to offer. In Rossetti’s death poetry and James’s Diary, death is what gives form to the text, and represents the possibility for the text and its …

Understanding Antiwar Activism As A Gendering Activity: A Look At The U.S.’S Anti-Vietnam War Movement, Say Burgin

Journal of International Women's Studies

Research into the gendered nature of war experiences has provided rich ways of understanding how gender constructs society and the nation. Scholarship on peace activism and gender has deepened our knowledge of women’s roles within warring societies and the ways women have understood themselves as promoters of peace. While much of this research asks how antiwar activities and war are predicated upon dominant gender ideals and focuses in particular on women’s experiences, this article aims to explore how some wartime events, specifically antiwar activism, constitutes or reconstitutes gender. Focusing on the United States’ anti-Vietnam War history, I examine how activists …

The Caustic Pen Is Mightiest: A Tradition Of Female Satire In The Novels Of Jane Austen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, And Muriel Spark, Jaclyn Andrea Reed

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Female satirists have long been treated by critics as anomalies within an androcentric genre because of the reticence to acknowledge women's right to express aggression through their writing. In Pride and Prejudice (1813), A House and Its Head (1935), and The Girls of Slender Means (1963), Jane Austen (1775-1817), Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969), and Muriel Spark (1918-2006) all combine elements of realism and satire within the vehicle of the domestic novel to target institutions of their patriarchal societies, including marriage and family dynamics, as well as the evolving conceptions of domesticity and femininity, with a subtle feminism. These female satirists illuminate …

Matrices Of Disorder: Class, Race, And The Policing Of Normative Southern Femininity In William Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, And Requiem For A Nun, Claire B. Mischker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this project, I apply Judith Butler's late twentieth century theory of gender performance, outlined in her book Gender Trouble , to three major novels from William Faulkner's early career, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Sanctuary, and to one novel from his later period, Requiem for a Nun. This project examines the main female characters of these novels: Caddy Compson, Addie and Dewey Dell Bundren, Temple Drake, and Nancy Mannigoe, respectively, to reveal how race and class are indelible to the performance of gender in the literature of the early twentieth century South. The focus …