Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Dinesen’S Diana: The Transformative Power Of Symbols In Ehrengard, Aishwarya A. Marathe

Anthós

This analysis of Dinesen's Ehrengard aims to illuminate the subversive transformation of the titular character of the novel, using the literal and symbolic application of artistic power.

Embodiment And Gendered Subjectivity In Ukrainian Women’S Film, Poetry, And Prose During Perestroika (1985-1991), Sandra J. Russell

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I look to Ukrainian women’s literary and filmic contributions in the final Soviet years of perestroika to recontextualize and reconsider feminist and gendered epistemologies in Eastern Europe. I view the last Soviet Ukrainian filmmakers, writers, and artists as groundbreaking in their conceptualization a new, more “liberal” vision of nation, especially through their increasingly open and subversive critiques of the Soviet state. I locate perestroika as a powerful moment in Ukraine’s histories of resistance to the weaponization of colonialist and imperialist mythologies, past and present. For women in particular, the stakes of this shifting articulation of nation became …

Womanist Poetics: Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, And Audre Lorde, Aya Telmissany

Theses and Dissertations

Today, the sentimentality associated with poetry is often condescendingly dubbed in a patriarchal society as “feminine poetry.” The first women poets who dared to attempt the pen were often met with attacks on their femaleness and harsh critiques of their writing which was likened to sorcery and witchcraft. Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Audre Lorde are three American women poets who countered these attacks and turned them inside out in favor of their own womanist poetics. They wrote about experiencing the world as women and most importantly about experiencing poetry as women. What happens to poetry when a woman appropriates …

Elgin's "Native Tongue": A "Me Too" Universe?, Amir Barati

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

Suzette Haden Elgin’s novel Native Tongue (1984) provides a fascinating critique of the ideologies inscribed into patriarchal language and evokes an extremely valuable linguistic and political awareness. This article will examine the liability of the ways the novel revolts against the patriarchal society via the introduction of a gynocentric linguistic intervention. I claim, Elgin’s novel showcases an invaluable instance of how it is possible for women to revolt against the pillars of patriarchy through manipulations at the gestalt and schematic level of language and most specifically, the bodily metaphoric quality of the English. This proposed transformation of the schematic and …

Imagined Locality Of A Girlhood Home: A Performative Reading Of Maxine Hong Kingston’S “White Tigers”, Jing Tan

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

Both the locality and the language of Sze Yup are of immense significance to Kingston, as well as to her narrator-protagonist: it is the locus of her mother’s storytelling, the land whence her mother absorbed the incredible power of “talking-story” that has been inherited by Kingston and has permeated her text, the soil whose spirit has been transplanted to her birthplace in America and whose mystery has never ceased to inspire her imagination. Likewise, the Sze Yup dialect is the language that both the writer and her narrator first learned to speak (Jaggi): she “entered school speaking no English” (Talbot …

Women, Writing, And Storytelling In Medieval England And The Canterbury Tales, Sadie O'Conor

The Criterion

For a woman to succeed in an academic sphere, it is never enough for her to be clever-- she must be brilliant. “The Second Nun’s Tale” in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales explores the metaphorical brilliance (in sexual purity, intelligence, and faith) of St. Cecilia. The tale is also a mechanism for the Second Nun to advocate for her own vocation of “holy work,” for the sake of the learned religious women who preserved such writings. The themes of her tale are quite different from those espoused by the Wife of Bath, but the Wife also argues to have her voice …

The Inappropriate/D Fantastic: A Proposal Beyond Feminism, Teresa López-Pellisa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Teresa López-Pellisa’s article “The Inappropriate/d Fantastic: A Proposal Beyond Feminism” discusses a type of narration that goes beyond the feminist fantastic. These are fantastic texts permeated not only by a feminist discourse, but by intersectionality, transfeminism, ecofeminism, cyberfeminism, post-humanism, xenofeminism and/or necropolitics as well. Borrowing the term inappropriate/d others from Donna Haraway (The Promises of Monsters), who in turn takes it from the feminist theorist Trinh Minh-ha, we can analyze those fantastic stories that call into question the categories of gender, class, race and sexuality established by Western enlightened humanism. These types of non-mimetic narrations have …

On First-Person Narration In The Disguise Of Shōjo ——An Analysis Of Dazai Osamu’S “Joseito” And Kon Satoshi’S Perfect Blue, Yimeng Sun

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Sexual Violence, Traumatic Memory, And Speculative Fiction As Action, Kate Rose

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

Starhawk’s speculative novel City of Refuge (2015) depicts rape trauma and its consequences in a dystopian society that is the logical conclusion of patriarchy. French psychiatrist Muriel Salmona’s research on how traumatic memory contributes to inequality and how reconstructing narrative can heal survivors places her similarly at the intersection of story and activism. City of Refuge is a literary experiment focused on survivors of institutionalized sexual assault, while Salmona’s work maps consequences of traumatic memory linked to childhood sexual violence. The basic tenet of narrative medicine that life experience affects mental and physical health coincides with Salmona’s critique of how …

Female Empowerment In Classical Spanish Theatre, Sarah Gielink, Johanna Adrian Burr

Student Symposium

Last spring, after reading Golden Age plays in our Early Modern Spanish Literature and Culture course, Adrian Burr and I became interested in the role women played in these stories. Within the Spanish comedia, women are relegated to two stock roles, the “dama” (lady), or the “criada” (maid), while men are able to play a much wider variation of roles. Classical Spanish works by playwrights such as Lope de Vega, Miguel de Cervantes, and Pedro Calderón de la Barca are still produced today, just as English-speakers still revive Shakespearean works. We became curious about how modern directors and theatre practitioners …

My Big Fat Catholic Queer Wedding, Kourtney Baker

Comparative Woman

No abstract provided.

The Rise Of The Neoliberal Chinese Female Subject In Go Lala Go, Su-Lin Yu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Built upon feminist critique of neoliberalism, this paper will examine a prominent medium through which neoliberal feminist ideology is disseminated: Go Lala Go. By analyzing the film, I will show how it co-opts the discourse of neoliberalism, and reworks it to construct neoliberal female subjects. First, I will explore what kind of role neoliberalism has enacted in the formation of an emergent type of female subject in China. Then, I will demonstrate how the contentious process of neoliberal feminism affects young career women’s identities. More than career guides promoting different techniques for making women more successful at their workplaces, …

Abuse Or Be Abused: Traumatic Memory, Sex Inequality, And Millennium As A Socio-Literary Device, Kate Rose

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

This article applies the research of French psychiatrist Muriel Salmona to literary analysis of Stieg Larsson’s protagonist, Lisbeth Salander, in the Millennium trilogy (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 2008; The Girl Who Played with Fire, 2009; The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, 2010). It suggests that Larsson’s novels may be useful in raising awareness of childhood sexual abuse, through reading neglected signs linked to the neurology of traumatic memory. In the tradition of Nordic noir novels, hyperboles in Salander’s sensationalized identity serve to magnify and bring to light a misunderstood social problem. The article …

Ecofeminism In The Speculative Fiction Of Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, And Margaret Atwood, Cara Williams

Honors Scholar Theses

The aim of this article is to explore the speculative fiction works of three prominent, female speculative fiction writers: Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood,and Octavia Butler through an ecofeminist lens. Ecofeminism, as first coined by Francois D'Eaubonne in 1974, is a philosophy that compares the oppression and abuse of women to that of the environment. This article notes how Le Guin, Atwood, and Butler portray women and the environment in post-apocalyptic science fiction. Specifically, this article looks at how these authors explore food acquisition and consumption in their various worlds. This article asks the question, how does our relationship …

The Still Slamming Door: Relevance Of A Doll’S House In The 21st Century, Hope Morris

Student Scholarship – English

The infamous slamming door at the end of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House has been controversial from its beginning, leaving audiences with uncertainties about the meaning of family, morality, and personal responsibility. Written in 1879 when the “women’s issue” was still a relatively new subject, the play was met with criticism for its radical female protagonist and her decision to abandon her marriage. In a society where a woman’s primary role was one of domesticity and subservience to her husband, the ending of A Doll’s House was disquieting to audiences. However, Ibsen’s masterpiece remains just as controversial and important today. …

Away From The End Of Motherhood: Sites Of Haunting In The Social Imaginary In Lemonade And The Handmaid's Tale, Julia Michele Fleming

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the television series adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale, specifically the episode "A Woman's Place," and Beyoncé's Lemonade: A Visual Album. I argue that these cultural texts leverage representations of women's lived experiences to scrutinize contemporary American anxieties about motherhood and reproductive justice. Lemonade, a celebration of Black womanhood, presents a counterpoint to The Handmaid's Tale's preoccupation with white motherhood in way that speculates on the utopian potentials of a woman-centered society.

Using bell hooks' film analysis, Avery Gordon's "haunting," and Luce Irigaray's "mimicry," I examine two interconnected themes: feminist aesthetics and generational haunting. …

Reimagining African Authenticity Through Adichie's Imitation Motif, Ivette Rodriguez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In An Image of Africa, Chinua Achebe indicts Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for exemplifying the kind of purist rhetoric that has long benefited Western ontology while propagating reductive renderings of African experience. Edward Said refers to this dynamic as the way in which societies define themselves contextually against an imagined Other. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s fiction exposes how, by occupying cultural dominance, Western, white male values are normalized as universal. Nevertheless, these values are de-naturalized by their inconsistencies in the lived experiences of Adichie’s black, African women. Women who are at once aware of and participant in, the pretentions that underlie …

Mermaid Song: The Notebooks Of The Writing Woman, Gianna T. Ward-Vetrano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is built on the model of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, that is, it is a feminist project of holistic integration that does not reject fracturing, ambiguity, or contradiction, but aims to attain a more complex and thus truer portrait of the woman writing. Lessing’s notebooks examine conflicts between communism and capitalism, racial conflict in Africa, conflict between men and women, and the conflict between the protagonist Anna Wulf’s identity as a woman and her identity as a writer, each of which she then attempts to integrate into the singular golden notebook of the title. I propose …

The Formation Of The Autonomous Woman Through A Hegelian Lens: A Comparative Study Of The British Fin De Siecle "New Woman" And The Post-Mao "Amazing" Woman, Robyn L. Buro

English Department Theses

This thesis utilizes the Hegelian concept of self-consciousness development to explore the formation of the autonomous woman within the New Woman movement of the British fin de siècle and the literature of women writers in 1980s Post-Mao China. The sexual figuration of the New Woman via an unremitting male gaze as well as the absence of individual awareness due to limited reflective self-assessment lead to a misrepresentation of the female figurehead in fin de siècle Britain. Through an in-depth study of literature by Charlotte Mew, Victoria Cross, George Egerton, and Thomas Hardy, the reader can identify key points of failure …

The Road Trip As Artistic Formation In Defeo's Work, Frida Forsgren

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Road Trip as Artistic Formation in DeFeo's Work" Frida Forsgren discusses previously unpublished photographic material documenting Jay DeFeo's road trip in Europe and North Africa in the 1950s. Forsgren argues that the Beat road trip is by no means an exclusively masculine enterprise and quest: DeFeo's journey helped open the door to her emancipation as a female artist and propelled her artistic development. Moreover, the global experience represented by the trip helped shape her local Beat milieu upon her return to San Francisco. While European, Medieval, Italian Renaissance, and Hebrew influences in DeFeo's oeuvre have been …

Politics Of Feminist Revision In Di Prima's Loba, Polina Mackay

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Politics of Feminist Revision in di Prima's Loba" Polina Mackay explores Diane di Prima's two-volume epic Loba (1998) and, through a comparison of di Prima to the work of Adrienne Rich, argues that Loba practices a politics of feminist revision. Further, Mackay examines the ways in which di Prima starts to move away from the recovery project of female voices in patriarchal culture, associated with late twentieth-century Feminism, towards a women's literature which need not be defined entirely through its resistance to patriarchal narratives of gender in men's literature. Here it focuses on di Prima's revisionist …

French Women In Art: Reclaiming The Body Through Creation/Les Femmes Artistes Françaises : La Réclamation Du Corps À Travers La Création, Liatris Hethcoat

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The research I have conducted for my French Major Senior Thesis is a culmination of my passion for and studies of both French language and culture and the history and practice of Visual Arts. I have examined, across the history of art, the representation of women, and concluded that until the 20^th century, these representations have been tools employed by the makers of history and those at the top of the patriarchal system, used to control women’s images and thus women themselves. I survey these representations, which are largely created by men—until the 20^th century. I discuss pre-historical …

Barrie's Traditional Woman: Wendy's Fatal Flaw, Charlsie G. Johnson

Oglethorpe Journal of Undergraduate Research

The primary goal of this literary critique of J.M. Barrie’s novel Peter and Wendy, with the utilization of a feminist psychoanalytical approach, is to explore issues such as: Neverland’s perpetuation of patriarchal structures under the guise of a false modernity and Wendy’s inability to achieve modernity through the societal expectations that undermine the freedom within Peter’s Neverland, as well as her inherent tendencies to gravitate to the traditional feminine role. The arguments and conversation of this topic is based upon a close reading of the Centennial Edition of The Annotated Peter Pan, Barrie’s Peter and Wendy, and articles …

Hybrid, Subversive, And Skeptical Performances Of Gender, Power, And Space In The Postcolonial Avant-Garde, Alyson T. Inouye

Honors Projects

In her one-woman play, Iraqi-American playwright and actress Heather Raffo performs the testimonies of nine resilient Iraqi women, emphasizing their diverse experiences of the American occupation and life under the Baathist regime. Near the end of the play, one of the soliloquies breaks down into incoherence: an instance of poetic rupture. There is revolutionary potential latent in this avant-garde technique, and by applying it to her urgent and immediate postcolonial context Raffo simultaneously enacts and demands a response of justice to the injustices attested to throughout. Through the poetic rupture of Layal’s textual/psychological breakdown, Raffo undermines the system that, by …

Talking Nonsense: Spiritual Mediums And Female Subjectivity In Victorian And Edwardian Canada, Claudie Massicotte

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study traces the development of mediumship in Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Especially popular among women, this practice offered them an important space of expression. Concealing their own identities under spiritual possession, mediums ubiquitously invoked well-known historical figures in séances to transmit their opinions on current issues. As such, they were able to promote new ideas to interested audiences without claiming responsibility for their potentially controversial words.

While many studies have been conducted in the United States, Britain, and France regarding the significant role of mediumship in the emergence of women on the political scene, …

Anticipative Feminism In F. Scott Fitzgerald’S This Side Of Paradise And Flappers And Philosophers, Andrew Riccardo

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

“Globalized Philomels: State Patriarchy, Transnational Capital, And The Femicides On The Us-Mexican Border In Roberto Bolaño’S 2666”, M Laura Barberan Reinares

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Forest Of Eyes: Selected Poetry Of Tada Chimako, Jeffrey Angles

Jeffrey Angles

One of Japan's most important modern poets, Tada Chimako (1930-2003) gained prominence in her native country for her sensual, surreal poetry, and fantastic imagery. Although Tada's writing is an essential part of postwar Japanese poetry, her use of themes and motifs from European, Near Eastern, and Mediterranean history, mythology, and literature, as well as her sensitive explorations of women's inner lives make her very much a poet of the world. Forest of Eyes offers English-language readers their first opportunity to read a wide selection from Tada's extraordinary oeuvre, including nontraditional free verse, poems in the traditional forms of tanka and …

Killing Kanoko: Selected Poems Of Hiromi Itō, Jeffrey Angles

Jeffrey Angles

Itō, born in 1955 in Tokyo, is one of the most important and dynamic poets of contemporary Japanese literature. After her sensational debut in the late 1970s, she emerged as the foremost voice of the wave of women's poetry that swept Japan in the 1980s, writing about the female body, sexuality, abortion, migration, and international displacement with a frankness that revolutionized the way that poetry was being written in Japan. To date, she has published more than a dozen collections of poetry, several novels, and numerous books of essays. This book provides the first retrospective of Itō's career in English …

Fantasies Of Gender And The Witch In Feminist Theory And Literature, Justyna Sempruch

Comparative Cultural Studies

In Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and Literature, Justyna Sempruch analyzes contemporary representations of the “witch” as a locus for the cultural negotiation of genders. Sempruch revisits some of the most prominent traits in past and current perceptions in feminist scholarship of exclusion and difference. She examines a selection of twentieth-century US American, Canadian, and European narratives to reveal the continued political relevance of metaphors sustained in the archetype of the “witch” widely thought to belong to pop-cultural or folkloristic formulations of the past. Through a critical rereading of the feminist texts engaging with these …