Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Aging Intimately, Niamh Mcdonnell, Giulia Hjort

Capstones

We’re both familiar with grief after the loss of family members over 75. This project is our way of giving back in a small way by listening, but also as a way of remembering the people we unexpectedly lost. Each person we’ve met on this journey has inspired us in their own way, with their stories of resilience through grief and aging. All of our collaborators on this project are constantly learning, taking risks, and moving forward through loss and pain. They aren’t defined by their age. Rather, they embrace it with a willingness to reinvent their approach to romance …

The Miss America Pageant Should Restore Prioritizing The Evening Gown Segment, Keishel Williams

Capstones

Evening gown in pageants, as in society, has always represented a woman's way of expressing her personality and femininity through fashion. Miss America's attempt to stop requiring evening gowns implies that wearing formal gowns does not equate to being a modern, empowered woman.

Instead of attempting to erase the evening gown as an outdated part of a modern woman’s wardrobe, the Miss America pageant should restore the original gown segment and use this opportunity to reshape America’s perspective on how modern women can choose to wear gowns and still be empowered.

https://keishelawilliams.wordpress.com/

Boys Will Be, Victoria Hoffman

Capstones

SocialJ Presentation

SocialJ Report

W()Men, Natalia M. Keogan

Capstones

W()MEN is a short documentary that examines the horror movie genre and the way that it focuses on women’s bodies. It integrates talking head interviews, clips from over 50 horror films, and narration in order to critically examine how women’s bodies have been portrayed as monstrous within the genre.

nataliakeogan.com/thesis-film

Gay Social Networking Apps Are Fueling Crystal Meth Use, Moises A. Mendez Ii

Capstones

Selling crystal meth on gay social networks is a problem nobody is talking about; two men tell their stories. The LGBT+ community has a long standing relationship with the use of drugs. From the 70s to present day, there has been a popular drug used – currently, it's crystal meth. Adam and Christopher have dealt with their addiction to crystal meth for many years and the introduction of gay dating apps like Grindr, Scruff and Jack'd posed new problems for them when they were trying to stay sober.

https://medium.com/@moises.mendez/gay-social-networking-apps-are-fueling-crystal-meth-use-ac34f38fa636

Undocumented Survivors Of Domestic Violence Struggle To Get Resources In New York City, Florence Mafomemeh

Capstones

Many undocumented survivors of domestic violence in New York City struggle to gain access to resources they need to survive due to their undocumented status. City officials tell them that help is available at the Family Justice Centers located in all five boroughs. But some undocumented survivors say they don’t get all the help they need. These victims and survivors bring with them the scars of abuse from their exes, to seek help from the city.

Link to full project:

https://florence-mafomemeh.weebly.com/capstone.html

What If The Key To Climate Change Is Hiding Under The Sea?, Shira Feder

Capstones

“We know more about outer space than we do the ocean,” says Vicki Ferrini, a research scientist at Columbia University with over 20 ocean expeditions under her belt. And as the woman leading Seabed 2030, the charge to map the world’s oceans—which are 85% unexplored—she knows how vital this is to combat climate change and exactly how she’s going to do it. Read it here: https://medium.com/@shira.feder/what-if-the-key-to-climate-change-is-hiding-under-the-sea-4503565c33a2

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 …

Latinas In Transition And Translation: The Latina In Latinx Studies, Mariana Romo-Carmona

Open Educational Resources

This course will study the contributions of Latina writers to the field of Latinx Studies in the United States. Through their literary and scholarly work, we will explore the historical roots of Latino/a culture in this country and how the politics of race, gender, and class have defined the field of Latinx Studies, with Latinas at the forefront of the struggle.

Fake News Poetry Workshop As Radical Digital Media Literacy: It’S For The Thing We’Re Not Yet,, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

One of 17 saddle stitched pamphlets + custom designed box

What does pedagogy mean to your writing practice? How do your poetics intersect with your pedagogy and education commitments? We invited participants to join together to think about the inventive and urgent possibilities of intertwined poetic-pedagogical work. What might emerge differently when we bring them together?

Urgent Possibilities, Writings on Feminist Poetics & Emergent Pedagogies grew out of the Feminist Poetics, Emergent Pedagogies Symposium organized by Andrea Quaid and Margaret Rhee. The publication collects work by symposium participants with documents and elaborations, including poems, poetic tracts, essays, workshop plans, and …

Antillean Literature - Comparative Literature In The Spanish Antilles, Cuba, Dominican Republic, And Puerto Rico, Mariana Romo-Carmona

Open Educational Resources

This course will cover literature from Spanish Antilles and will be conducted in English. We will include a study of foundational texts in translation, from the 19^th and 20^th centuries, as well as contemporary works by Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican authors.

The Making And Silencing Of “Axé-Ocracy” In Brazil: Black Women Writers’ Spiritual, Political And Literary Movement In São Paulo, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

In this article, I will focus on two influential writers from the south of Brazil, Cristiane Sobral who currently lives in Brasília, from Rio de Janeiro, and Conceição Evaristo who currently lives in Rio de Janeiro state, from Minas Gerais. I got to know them in São Paulo in 2015 at a public event: the “Afroétnica Flink! Sampa Festival of Black Thought, Literature and Culture.” I will include references to some of their younger contemporaries such as Raquel Almeida, Jenyffer Nascimento, and Elizandra Souza, all of whom reside in São Paulo, in order to illustrate the Black Brazilian women writers’ …

Contemporary Stories Of Female Development And The Outer Limits Of Maternal Sexuality In Susan Choi’S My Education And Amy Sohn’S Prospect Park West, Christa Baiada

Publications and Research

While liberal sexuality has been integrated into contemporary discursive understandings of female possibilities, barriers remain to representing mothers as sexual beings. This essay explores maternal representations in Choi’s My Education (2013) and Sohn’s Prospect Park West (2009) that challenge cultural ideals of good motherhood and invite scrutiny of normative paths and goals of female development. These 21^st-century American novels confront and even embrace active maternal sexuality but retreat at the boundary of the maternal/sexual breast to allow protagonists in contemporary alterations of female stories of development to achieve maturity through acceptance of the ideal of good motherhood .Each …

In Her Own Hands: How Girls And Women Used The Piano To Chart Their Futures, Expand Women's Roles, And Shape Music In America, 1880–1920, Sarah F. Litvin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

American girls and women used the parlor piano to reshape their lives between 1880 and 1920, the years when the instrument reached the height of its commercial and cultural popularity. Newspapers, memoirs, biographies, women’s magazines, personal papers, and trade publications show that female pianists engaged in public-facing piano play and work in pursuit of artistic expression, economic gain, self-actualization, social mobility, and social change. These motivations drove many to use their piano skills to play beyond the parlor, by studying in conservatory, working as classical and popular music performers and composers, founding and teaching at schools, working as department store …

“Let’S Call Painful Sex Disorders Sexual Disabilities Instead”: A Feminist Disability Critique Of Feminist Representations And Medical Representations Of Sexual Disorders Of Pain, Oyku Akin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Historically, gender and sexuality have been privileged sites of analysis in feminist theory. Critical feminist engagements with “sexual dysfunction” employ gendered analysis’ of medical and pharmaceutical interventions to sexuality in capitalist modernity in order to underscore the ideological dimensions of modern sexuality. Although sexual disorders of pain received little attention from feminist academics until recently, contemporary feminist work on sexual pain disorders mimic the previous work on sexual dysfunctions in terms of analysis. Analysing recent major feminist contributions employing different epistemological orientations to the study sexual disorders of pain, I show that gender continues to be the privileged common category …

Through The Mouth: An Essay On Appetite And Ecocide, Iemanja Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an exploration of mourning and resilient joy in the midst of ecocide. Resisting the pervasive classification of the human as inherently destructive, I look to appetite as an aesthetic procedure that includes a material desire for intimacy with the more-than-human. My study considers the intersections of aesthetic production (primarily twentieth-century poetry and visual art), climate science, geology, cultural studies, theory within the contemporary nonhuman turn, and Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. I employ an interdisciplinary approach, which helps me explore the various ways that literal and figurative appetite can be a way of sensing and exploring …

Little Egypt: A Critical Biography, Katherine Vecchio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Structured as a biography, this thesis investigates the origins of Little Egypt—a stage name assumed by multiple women performing either the danse du ventre or the hoochie-coochie—and considers the character’s cultural legacy. The work draws on nineteenth and twentieth century newspapers, advertisements, photographs, and official publications and archival records from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Chapter one takes a new look at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and shows how the presence of dancers performing the danse du ventre on the Midway Pliasance was turned into a flashpoint of controversy by the popular press. This controversy would be key …

Words Are Found Responsible: Poetry's Jurisdiction And The Transformation Of Equal Rights, Talia Shalev

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Across various academic fields and from a range of political orientations, scholars note that a pervasive rights discourse shapes the imaginable horizons of identity, politics, and social life in the United States. Many critiques of rights since the 1970s highlight a particular conundrum of this rights culture: existing rights law and ubiquitous rights invocations fail to guarantee equal conditions for thriving across racialized and gendered axes of identity. Words Are Found Responsible: Poetry’s Jurisdiction and the Transformation of Equal Rights emphasizes and complicates elements of these critiques by reading poetry of the 1970s and 1980s in relation to shifting rights …

Feminist And Anti-Feminist Discourses On Abortion In Haiti From 2010 To 2019, Katia Henrys

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While women in Haiti obtained important changes in discriminatory laws after the end of the Duvalier era, other issues remained unresolved. Haiti is amongst six countries in the Caribbean and Latin America that criminalize abortion. This does not prevent women from practicing abortion at very high risks: it is estimated that a third of the maternal deaths are due to abortions in the country. The January 2010 earthquake killed thousands of people and feminist leaders were also victims. How did feminist activists continue the work to legalize abortion after this event? How are they perceived in the media? This paper …

Love And Revolution: Queer Freedom, Tragedy, Belonging, And Decolonization, 1944 To 1970, Velina Manolova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines literary works by U.S. writers Lillian Smith, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry written in the early part of the postwar period referred to as the “Protest Era” (1944-1970). Analyzing a major work by each author—Strange Fruit (1944), The Member of the Wedding (1946), Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Les Blancs (1970)—this project proposes that Smith, McCullers, Baldwin, and Hansberry were not only early theorists of intersectionality but also witnesses to the deeply problematic entanglements of subjectivities formed by differential privilege, which the author calls intersubjectivity or love. Through frameworks of queerness, racialization, performance/performativity, tragedy, and …

Gendered Subjectivity And Resistance: Brazilian Women’S Performance-For-Camera, 1973–1982, Gillian Sneed

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation considers the work of a group of women artists in Brazil during the period of the military dictatorship (1964–1985), working in the genre of “performance-for-camera” (i.e., performance for film and video, rather than for a live audience). The artists are Lygia Pape (1927–2004), Letícia Parente (1930–1991), Anna Bella Geiger (b. 1933), Sonia Andrade (b. 1935), Anna Maria Maiolino (b. 1942), and Regina Vater (b. 1943). Some of these women were friends and colleagues who collaborated with each other; all of them contributed significantly to the development of film and video art in Brazil. Their works share an impulse …

The Ends Of Plot: Rupture And Entanglement In L’Amica Geniale, Victor X. Zarour Zarzar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation employs narrative theory to contextualize Elena Ferrante’s successful saga, L’amica geniale, within the larger tapestry of European novelistic discourses. It engages with conceptions of narrative structure put forth by critics like Ortega y Gasset, Brooks, and Winnett to understand how L’amica geniale offers cutting commentary on our exegetic practices and advances a geometry of narrative entanglement. I contend that Ferrante recuperates and italicizes nineteenth-century modes of storytelling, displaying a form of epistemological tension rooted in a movement away from a belief in plot’s semantic potentialities and into the postulation of a poetics of smarginatura or rupture. I …

Getting Located: Queer Semiotics In Dress, Callen Zimmerman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The body, a long contested site of identity construction, has been used by historically by queers to convey desire, build affinity and transgress norms. Looking at the fashioned queer body, this capstone takes the form of a proposal for an art exhibition at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Seeking to engage with objects, performance and film which approximate, provide proxy for or depart from the body as a site, it explores the social and political quagmire of getting dressed. Comprised of contemporary art that looks at the rupture of legible bodily semiotics, this show wonders what …

Rape At Bergdorf's, Marleen S. Barr

Publications and Research

This article provides a feminist analysis of E. Jean Carroll's description of being raped by Trump in Bergdorf Goodman's lingerie department.

Ywca Of Brooklyn Collection, Brooklyn College Library And Academic It

Finding Aids

The collection of the YWCA of Brooklyn contains materials from the organization since its opening in 1888, until the records were transferred to Brooklyn College in 2010. These records span nearly 125 years, and include documents related to administration, governance, finance, legal cases, facilities, security, educational and health programs, publications, IT and telecommunications, public relations, events, photographs, newspaper clippings, multi-media, and ephemera.

Of particular importance for this collection are the minutes and reports: they document the trajectory of this institution, as well as the ways they fought to help meet the needs of the community of Brooklyn through the years. …

The Words And Worlds Of Carolee Schneemann And Barbara Hammer With Two Thoughts By Agnes Varda, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

Complied past interviews as a memorial

Suburban Captivity Narratives: Feminism, Domesticity And The Liberation Of The American Housewife, Megan Behrent

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Where Were The Lesbians In The Stonewall Riots? The Women’S House Of Detention & Lesbian Resistance, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

Where were the lesbians in the Stonewall Riots? They were jailed in the House of Detention for Women in Greenwich Village, New York City, two blocks away from the Stonewall Inn. Lesbians in the Women's House of Detention shouted from the windows to the rioters in the streets below, fueling the momentum of the Stonewall uprising. The women's prison was a site of lesbian confinement and resistance that inspired the 1969 uprising in Greenwich Village.

Polly Thistlethwaite is Chief Librarian at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She volunteered at the Lesbian Herstory Archives 1986 – 1997.

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.

All The Small Things, Talia E. Levitt

Theses and Dissertations

My paintings engage with the history of the still life as a marginalized and antiacademic genre. Rather than fool viewers into believing that there are real objects in front of them, as is the historical intention of trompe l’oeil, I use realistic rendering to emphasize the painting and painter.