Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Neither Meek Nor Docile: An Analysis Of Margaret Hale And Jane Eyre In Elizabeth Gaskell’S North And South And Charlotte Brontë’S Jane Eyre, Mckell Ferguson

English Department Theses

The Victorian period was an era of societal change in Great Britain. Viewing gender in hetero- and CIS- normative terms, the “woman question” – what to do with unmarried women – became a topic that was widely debated. Activists such as Barbara Leigh Smith, Francis Power Cobbe and Josephine Butler advocated for better education and employment opportunities for women emphasizing the need for women to find dignity and fulfilment outside of the private sphere to which they were relegated. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell reflect the issues facing middle-class women during this period, …

Adrienne Rich And Women's Confinement, Marissa Weber

Student Writing

Adrienne Rich's poems "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-law," "Living in Sin," and "From a Survivor" weave a tale of the average American housewife expressing her discontent with her day-to-day and searching for a way out. All three poems contain themes of societal oppression scaled to a personal level, and the varying conclusions speak to the harsh reality of being a woman in the mid-twentieth century. Rich's career as an activist defined her poetic style, and her feminist pieces have remained relevant decades after they were originally published.

Gender Stereotypes And Representation Of Women In Roald Dahl's Books, Sarah Hunt

Senior Theses and Projects

The purpose of this qualitative study is to examine the role and representation of women in Roald Dahl’s children’s novels. To do this, I conducted a document analysis of five of Dahl’s books - “James and the Giant Peach” (1961), “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (1964), “Danny, The Champion of the World” (1975), “The Witches” (1983), and “Matilda” (1988) - in order to answer the following questions: How does Roald Dahl portray women and girls in his novels? What gendered stereotypes are present, and how does this portrayal change over time? I was able to answer this question through utilizing …

The Feminist Gothic Journeys Of Shirley Jackson, Grace Sanko

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Women: Radically Glorified, Oppressed, Or Set Free?, Easton Finger

Senior Honors Theses

A woman’s identity in society has often been debated, starting from the beginning of time. The answer to this identity question has been sought in systems ranging from oppression, slavery, radical feminism, and over-exaltation of power. This thesis suggests that the value of women and their role is not found in those systems but in the knowledge of their Creator. Two questions will be posed, including how women’s identity has been previously defined and can a woman’s identity be found in her Creator God. The history of women in biblical times will be reviewed, as well as how Christ valued …

Strategies Of Liberation And Empowerment In Maya Angelou's And Audre Lorde's Black Feminist Literature, Lydia Jernigan

Student Works

The progression of second-wave feminism in America saw Black feminist writers such as Maya Angelou and Audre Lorde utilizing literature, and notably poetry, to resist against their oppression, due not only to their gender but also to their race. Lorde states in her 1977 essay, “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” that poetry, for women, “is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” One of the aims of Lorde’s explicitly political poems—as …

Terry Pratchett’S Witches Novels And The Consensus Fantasy Universe: A Feminist Perspective, Clair J. Hutchings-Budd Ms

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Abstract

Between 1987 and 2015, Terry Pratchett published eleven novels and one short story within his Discworld universe that came to be known as his “Witches” sub-series. In these texts he engaged with the narrative imperatives, preoccupations, and tropes which together make up the consensus fantasy universe, and those deeper mythologies and legendarium with which the author necessarily has an intertextual relationship. This paper focuses upon one aspect of that consensus universe, which is the difference between male and female magical practitioners—witches and wizards—in the fantasy canon, and how Pratchett sought to challenge and subvert the stereotypes of the genre …

Revisiting Tocqueville's American Woman, Christine Dunn Henderson

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This paper revisits Tocqueville’s famous portrait of the American female, which begins with assertions of her equality to males but ends with her self-cloistering in the domestic sphere. Taking a cue from Tocqueville’s extended sketch of the “faded” pioneer wife in “A Fortnight in the Wilderness” and drawing connections to Tocqueville’s criticisms of the division of industrial labor, I argue that the American girl’s ostensibly free choice to remove herself from public life is not an act of freedom. Rather, it is a manifestation of a particular type of unfreedom that reveals underappreciated connections between the two great dangers about …

Power Dressing And Its Importance In Modern Democracy, Mansiben R. Patel, Dr. Catherine Amoroso Leslie

Undergraduate Research Journal for the Human Sciences

This research aimed to study the significance of Power Dressing in a modern democracy, by exploring the dynamics of clothing concerning the power it portrays for women holding influential positions in public office in a variety of countries throughout the world. This research accomplished its motive by collecting, reviewing, and analyzing scholarly articles, academic journals, newspapers, and current events which formed the foundation for data collection using a survey developed by the researchers. The analysis provided a platform for procuring knowledge of the association between Fashion and Politics, the concept of Women’s Power Dressing, and its significance in a modern …

Power Dressing And Its Importance In Modern Democracy, Mansiben R. Patel, Dr. Catherine Amoroso Leslie

Undergraduate Research Journal for the Human Sciences

This research aimed to study the significance of Power Dressing in a modern democracy, by exploring the dynamics of clothing concerning the power it portrays for women holding influential positions in public office in a variety of countries throughout the world. This research accomplished its motive by collecting, reviewing, and analyzing scholarly articles, academic journals, newspapers, and current events which formed the foundation for data collection using a survey developed by the researchers. The analysis provided a platform for procuring knowledge of the association between Fashion and Politics, the concept of Women’s Power Dressing, and its significance in a modern …

Organizations Ensuring Resilience: A Case Study Of Cortez, Florida, Karla Ariel Maddox

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

“Resilience” has often been defined by examining case studies in resilience failures. In contrast, this case study utilizes the oldest, still functional fishing village in Cortez, Florida to rhetorically analyze how organizational communicative practices have worked to ensure its resilience. Situating this conversation within Rhetoric proves valuable since so many attempts to define and utilize “resilience” seek to capitalize on its positive connotation but distort resilience definitions and practice. This dissertation explores three research questions: 1. “What systems and/or structures made our continued existence possible and what ideologies or goals drove their creation?” 2. “What ideologies, perceptions, and/or goals inspired …

To Be Necessary: The Remarkable Life Of Mary Wollstonecraft, Elisabeth Phillips

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

Although overshadowed by her daughter, Mary Shelley, in the public imagination, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) stands as a significant figure in her time who left a significant legacy. Her writings advocating for women’s education, equal rights, and career opportunities established her as the progenitor of the modern women’s rights movement. Wollstonecraft’s ideas resonated in the era of the Atlantic world revolutions and laid the foundation for later advances of women in the Western world; therefore, it is important to study her contributions in the present.

Feminist Theorizing In The International Relations Discipline, Inass Abdulsada Ali

Journal of International Women's Studies

The discipline of International Relations has been a science for almost a century and has undergone considerable development and dynamism as a field of knowledge. In the aftermath of the First World War, traditional idealistic trends prevailed. Still, after the end of the Second World War, the theory of realism dominated the analysis of international relations, international politics, and its laws and mechanisms. With the inter-paradigm debate of the 1980s, a broad spectrum of theories of international relations emerged, the most significant of which are critical theories including feminism. Feminist theory has since become central to the debates about global …

Bell Hooks And Online Feminism, Hazel T. Biana

Journal of International Women's Studies

Feminist theorist and cultural critic bell hooks was known for calling out modern-day feminists for failing to take into consideration the plight of other non-privileged women. She intricately analyzed how various factors of oppression form a web, which contributes to the complexities of women’s marginalization. The vision of hooks, thus, is a revolutionary type of feminism which is inclusive and for everybody. This means that everyone, all persons of various races or classes, should become enlightened witnesses and be a part of the struggle towards eradicating what she refers to as White Capitalist Supremacist Patriarchy. Such vision, however, seems to …

Feminism In Modern Japan: A Historical Review Of Japanese Women’S Issues On Gender, Polina Lukyantseva

Journal of International Women's Studies

This study primarily illustrates the evolution of the feminist movement in Japan by comparing two waves of the feminist movement. Furthermore, this paper examines the development of gender roles and gender bias in modern Japanese patriarchal society. It also illustrates and explains traditional roles, Japanese ideologies, the system of Fu-you (Jap. 扶養, Eng. dependent), and modern trends in contemporary Japan. In this study, the following qualitative research methods were applied. A thorough historical context analysis was done to comprehend the social dynamics, issues, and specifics of feminism in Japan, and the principle of historicism was used to illuminate and compare …

Final Master's Portfolio, Alaina Brubaker

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

The following is my final portfolio for the Master of Arts in English with a specialization in Professional Writing and Rhetoric. It includes an analytical narrative and the three essays I revised to complete this portfolio. The narrative reflects on my academic journey, the three essays contained in the portfolio, and the skills that I learned through completing the MA program. The first essay, “Feminism, Rhetoric, History, and the Impact of Audience Assumptions in Sewing Machine Manuals,” investigates the intersection of feminism, rhetoric, and historical perspectives in technical communication by analyzing two sewing machine manuals that share a 102-year age …

Loving Blackness: A Sense Experience, Ricardo J. Millhouse

Feminist Pedagogy

The late bell hooks framed feminist pedagogies as a set of practices and systems that provide a description of feminism, a feminist learning environment, and ways to cultivate a community that is ready for feminist instruction. Using intersectionality, hooks (1992) discussed “loving blackness” as a representational and destabilizing practice to de-center whiteness. hooks (1992, 20) writes, “loving blackness as a political resistance transforms our ways of looking and being, and thus creates conditions necessary for us to move against the forces of domination and death and reclaim black life.” I propose a black feminist praxis teaching tool, “a sense experience,” …

Resisting Burnout: Bell Hooks’ Pedagogy Of Hope And Teaching Antiracist Feminism Online At The University Of Wyoming During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Samantha L. Vandermeade

Feminist Pedagogy

After earning a PhD in Women’s Studies from an urban, multicultural, R1 university in 2020, I accepted a teaching position at the University of Wyoming, where I was hired primarily to teach feminist and critical race-focused courses. When an in-person position suddenly moved entirely online, I found myself facing not only the culture shock of teaching at a rural, primarily White institution whose state legislature and general populace are largely hostile to antiracist feminism, but also the myriad daily challenges of teaching online during a global pandemic. I had felt personally prepared--as a White lesbian raised in a rural environment, …

I, Discomfort Woman: A Fugue In F Minor, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

A Critical Reading Of Nawal El Saadawi’S Woman At Point Zero, Sawsan Al-Darayseh

Association of Arab Universities Journal for Arts مجلة اتحاد الجامعات العربية للآداب

Women all over the world, and Egypt specifically, have been looked upon as second-class citizens for a long time in comparison to men. However, this paper argues that it is unethical for feminists, specifically here Nawal El Saadawi, to discuss this issue in an extreme way where the truth is lost. Hating men and holding them wholly at fault for the plight of women while giving alibis to and even praising women for their selfdestructive decisions is not a solution. The paper critically reads El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero, discussing the very methods and elements that El Saadawi uses …

Bodies Of Silence And Space: Victimhood, Complicity, And Resistance In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Sana H. Mufti

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines the complexity of resistance and the conditions of power for women in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Using feminist theory, theories of neoliberalism, and Dominionism, this thesis works to understand the ways in which victimhood and complicity influence resistance in totalitarian regimes. I argue that neoliberal ideologies skew understandings of freedom, agency, and power in a way that ensures individuals, specifically women, remain trapped in the system. Focusing on reproduction, I examine how Gilead controls women’s bodies and reproductive abilities to ensure a future for itself. The Eve-Complex is one way that the state integrates itself …

Several, Ruth, Sophia Maier Garcia

Bronx Jewish History Project

Ruth Several was born in 1951 and grew up living on the Grand Concourse, where her parents were living at the time. Her father worked at the Concourse Center of Israel, an orthodox synagogue on the Grand Concourse. They lived in a large apartment in an art deco style building. She remembers 95% of the building as Jewish, not including the non-Jewish superintendent. The neighborhood had many mom and pop stores, no chain stores, and many synagogues. Several attend a Jewish Day School in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, so her mother was a bookkeeper nearby who would take …

Schwalb, Susan, Sophia Maier Garcia

Bronx Jewish History Project

Susan Schwalb’s father was raised on the Lower East Side to immigrant parents, while her mother grew up on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. Her mother’s family was German immigrants from the mid-19th century, and owned and operated restaurants. Her grandparents would sell their restaurant and move to Miami, but her uncle owned a famous restaurant in Manhattan that Schwalb would visit as a child. Her mother’s family was wealthy for the time, with extravagant birthday parties that once involved an elephant. Her parents met in the Catskills and Schwalb was born in 1944.

Schwalb grew up in the …

Waldo Sangren Scholar Karen Schaper And The Best And Worst Of Times On East Campus, University Libraries

East Campus Oral Histories

WMU Alum Karen Schaper meets with Cassie Kotrch at Heritage Hall to share her stories and memories of her time at WMU as an undergrad and graduate student. Aside from her busy life as a Waldo Sangren scholar and meeting the wives of the first two presidents, she also shares stories of some of her "worst" times like riding a motorcycle up and down the grassy hill, and her best times like starting the first Women's Studies course at WMU.

Rooms That Awaken Us: A Poetic Inquiry Of Multiple Selves, Rawda Harb

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Using poetry as a research method, the author wrote for self-expression, self-discovery and self-healing during the pandemic. As she wrote, she realized that she is a different person in different settings with differ- ent people. Without intending to ever share this work, she then examines her multiple selves’ learning-teach- ing dance with life using literature by Aoki, Leggo, Dewey, Tajfel and others. She even discusses the notion of multiple selves in life with her young children and is fascinated by their artistic response.

Autonomy, Post-Puberty Bacha Posh And Third World Feminism In Selected Afghan Fiction, Asma

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper examines the fictional representation of the ways in which Afghan girls attain autonomy in their post-puberty stage through the tradition of bacha posh despite the traditional constraints to switch back to their gender at birth. This analysis of bacha posh characters in Ukmina Manoori’s I Am a Bacha Posh and Zarghuna Kargar’s Bakhtawara’s Story attempts to demonstrate how the bacha posh tradition develops the potential for transgression in Afghan girls, fostering a resistance to traditional gender roles. In doing so, this paper challenges and rebuts Western feminist views regarding Afghan women, who are stereotyped as incapable, voiceless, and …

Veiled Figures: Attached Settler Women In Andaman’S Post-Colonial Archive, Raka Banerjee

Journal of International Women's Studies

Dominant discourse on India’s eastern Partition (1947) has constructed settlement as a masculine prerogative and man as the settler prototype. Women were eligible for rehabilitation on account of being “attached” to a male guardian, who would be assigned the head of the household in granting state benefits. In the case of these attached settler women transported by the state to Andaman Islands, a range of marginalities–region, gender, caste, and class–intersect with each other to create a veiled figure. The essay locates the settler women in the island’s post-colonial government archive to bring out the state’s construction of gendered settler subjecthood. …

“Am I More Than A Housewife”? An Exploration Of Education, Empowerment, And Gender Preference In Relation To Female Genital Cutting/Mutilation In The Far North Region Of Cameroon, Maurine Ekun Nyok

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

The Heart Is Not Hopeless: Pakistani Television Drama, Patriarchy, And Activism, Neelam Jabeen

Journal of International Women's Studies

A Muslim society that interprets feminism as anti-Islamic may not accept overtly feminist maneuvers to challenge patriarchy. However, there are subtle ways of steering out of the Islam vs. feminism dichotomy. What triggers anti-feminists are phrases like women’s rights, female emancipation, and women’s freedom since all these are interpreted as the agenda of the West and hence are considered anti-Islamic. In this paper, I argue that since feminists are fighting against all forms of oppression and have joined forces with other forms of activism such as child protection, human rights, animal rights, rights of the underclass and minority groups, and …

How The U.S. Mainstream Media Perpetuates Cis White Masculine Hegemony, Yelena Dzhanova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The news is important because it helps individuals understand their place in the world and make the best decisions for themselves. Throughout its strong history and presence in the United States, the journalism industry has prided itself on delivering fact-based news using an objective framework, meaning that there is an expectation that journalists communicate the news impartially and without bias. Through an examination of gendered language and visual representations published in and by recent mainstream U.S. digital and print media outlets, this paper explains how the media plays a major role in the perpetuation of cis white masculinity. This paper …