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Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

American Studies

University of Rhode Island

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Articles 1 - 6 of 6

Full-Text Articles in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Translation, Weather, And Erasure In Bhanu Kapil’S Schizophrene, Flore Chevaillier Jan 2023

Translation, Weather, And Erasure In Bhanu Kapil’S Schizophrene, Flore Chevaillier

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

For Bhanu Kapil, the drafting process of writing involves the translation of non-linguistic realities into storytelling, the nature of which must leave room for the performative experience that shapes writing. In Schizophrene (2011), Kapil engaged in adventitious composition processes when she sealed her manuscript in a Ziploc bag and threw it in the garden to spend months outdoors in the Colorado winter. The text, full of gaps created by the erased parts of the “winterized” manuscript, documents schizophrenia in diasporic Indian and Pakistani communities. The decaying process of the book that created a void in her writing also impacts the …

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Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery (Sewing) Society: Handcraft As A Metaphorical Tool For The Abolitionist Cause, Hinda Mandell Jan 2022

Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery (Sewing) Society: Handcraft As A Metaphorical Tool For The Abolitionist Cause, Hinda Mandell

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

In 1851, in Rochester, New York, a group of six women banded together as the founding members of an anti-slavery group in order to support the work of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. They called themselves the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery (Sewing) Society, although they dropped “Sewing” from the group’s name in 1855. Yet the fact that “Sewing” was included in the original name of this reformist group indicates the foundational role of craft not only as a guiding activity but also central as an activist mechanism to abolish the institution of slavery. They were the benefactors of Frederick Douglass, himself regarded …

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Fugitive Knowledge And Body Autonomy In The Folklore And Literature Of Zora Neale Hurston And Gloria Naylor, Renée M. Vincent Jan 2022

Fugitive Knowledge And Body Autonomy In The Folklore And Literature Of Zora Neale Hurston And Gloria Naylor, Renée M. Vincent

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Amidst battles for Covid-19 vaccine mandates and accessibility, media coverage of judicial proceedings stemming from state-sanctioned racialized violence, and the exacerbation of gendered workplace/space inequality via a new virtual reality, the year 2021 marks yet another conflict over the legality of abortion in the United States, with conservative Supreme Court justices aiming to walk back the legalization of a woman’s constitutional right to terminate pregnancy as per Roe v. Wade. Through an exploration of the historical record in conjunction with Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, signifiers of what Marilyn Motz calls “fugitive …

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“Ain’T My Mama’S Broken Heart”: The Mothers And Daughters Of Hillbilly Feminism, Alyssa Dewees Jan 2021

“Ain’T My Mama’S Broken Heart”: The Mothers And Daughters Of Hillbilly Feminism, Alyssa Dewees

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The women of country music have long defied the genre's patriarchal associations and used their music as a platform for subversive social messages about gender inequality, and in the past several decades, the country music establishment has grown more willing to alter its image and accommodate these feminist themes. Because country music is marketed and understood by many of its fans as a representation of a lifestyle, this shift in expectations for women’s social roles and possibilities in the genre has an impact on the women who identify themselves with the particular rural, down-home image country music aims to define. …

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History, Activism, Erasure: Archival Paradox As Institutional Practice, Sarah H. Salter Jan 2021

History, Activism, Erasure: Archival Paradox As Institutional Practice, Sarah H. Salter

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This essay connects the reparative assemblages of queer archiving practice to growing conversations in university studies. Tracing the fraught legal history of Penn State University’s first “Homophile” association in the 1970s, this essay theorizes how university records—and the processes of recording they index—participate in the creation of institutional identity and help establish institutional relations with their communities. Ultimately, it suggests that archivists and librarians act as mediators, unintentionally or purposefully, of the relations between vulnerable communities and the structures of power in which they are embedded.

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Occupied Land Is An Access Issue: Interventions In Feminist Disability Studies And Narratives Of Indigenous Activism, Jess L. Cowing Jan 2020

Occupied Land Is An Access Issue: Interventions In Feminist Disability Studies And Narratives Of Indigenous Activism, Jess L. Cowing

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Native/Indigenous narratives of health and environmental activism often engage with feminist disability issues to center the connections between land, health, sovereignty, and historical legacies of settler militarized colonialism. Within the context from which Native women and youth act as key leaders in health and environmental activism, expanded modes of feminist disability inquiry could interrogate how transformative justice issues require historicizing concepts of ableism through ongoing legacies of settler colonialism. Considering the work of Native writers such as Winona LaDuke, feminist disability studies scholars might critically examine how key tenets of feminist disability issues such as access require attention to Native/Indigenous …

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