Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Why We Stay, Brittany Nicole Mcintyre

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Why we stay is a piece of Creative Non-Fiction, is a work that is heavily focused on region. The narrative takes up the life of a female Appalachian. The challenges of being an Appalachian woman raising a family are analyzed alongside such issues as domestic violence, family dysfunction, and mental illness. Because the piece is set in both rural and urban Appalachia, the issue of family is examined in terms of generational conflict and the strong bonds of a matriarch.

Approaches To Life Narrative: A Scholarly And Creative Thesis, Tanya Bomsta

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis includes both scholarly and creative approaches to women’s life narrative and rhetoric. The author first analyzes Terry Tempest Williams’ recently published memoir, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice, through the lenses of writing and rhetorical theory. She examines how Williams’ hybrid genre negotiates the boundaries between journaling and autobiographical writing and between silence and voice. She argues that Williams employs a feminist rhetoric in her writing in order to negotiate these boundaries.

The second and third works are personal essays in which the author examines her journals and her marriage. These creative works meditate on the …

Literacy, Discourse, And Identity: The Working-Class Appalachian Woman Academic, Sarah Marie Mcconnell

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Drawing on conversations about the politics surrounding literacy acquisition, I take a deeper look into the effects of obtaining membership within an academic discourse community on Appalachian women from the working class. The tensions that develop between the two opposing discourses promotes a sense of loss as they create distance between these women and their home community, alter relationships, and disrupt identity. Working-class Appalachian women occupy the borderlands between discourses: one foot in their Appalachian community; the other in their academic community. They negotiate their fragmented identities in order to play the appropriate role within the appropriate context. Their status …

A Place Between Heaven And Hell, Holley Barker

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

After twenty-some years of marriage, routine, and living life without feeling, time finally catches up to Effie Crunkleton, giving her the opportunity to confront a haunting past (her hell) which thwarts peace of mind (her heaven). As inner and outer voices lure Effie to a nearby cemetery (actually found at Twin Falls State Park), she exposes herself to a lifetime of suppressed memories and emotions that have taken place in the fictional Appalachian town of Coal Hollow.

Establishing An Elsewhere In Contemporary American Women's Autobiography, Jennifer Alena Gingerich

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

“Establishing an Elsewhere in Contemporary American Women’s Autobiography” explores women’s self-writing and the ways in which it offers another story or an elsewhere in the genre of autobiography. This elsewhere is distinct from traditional or conventional autobiography or, more specifically, how traditional autobiography has come to be understood. The project outlines various ways contemporary American women autobiographers deal with the issues of fragmentation (the lack of a coherent self), truth and lying (the self as a construction), and interconnectedness with others (the self as communal) when they write about themselves. It is both an analytical and creative thesis in which …

Journeys: A Critical Analysis Of The Diary Of Sarah L. Wadley, Regina C. Davis

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

As a young woman living in Louisiana during the Civil War, Sarah Lois Wadley documented in her diary the fractured, conflicted perspective that was her experience as a woman living in the war ravaged South. Her writing is evidence of the confusion she felt as a result of the discrepancy between the expectations of Southern patriarchal society and her own needs as a woman. Wadley’s diary is a complex text similar to a novel in that it relates events through a construct that reflects her response to her reader’s/society’s expectations. From a deconstructionist perspective, the power of Wadley’s text lies …