Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Threading With Hair // Intertwined Stories, Cloris Ding

Masters Theses

“Threading with Hair // Intertwined Stories” is a poignant exploration that navigates the nuanced landscape of women's growth and identity recognition amidst biased societal influences, tracing the trajectory from the artist’s mother's generation to her own. Through a deeply personal lens, the thesis transcends individual narratives to articulate some shared female experiences. Employing reflective works in the form of jewelry, objects and writings, the study delves into female-centric topics, including the fluidity of identity, the transformative journey through various life stages, and the profound impact of societal expectations and family heritage. At the heart of this exploration is the metaphorical …

Memories Of Hope And Loss: “Kerhi Maa Ne Bhagat Singh Jameya”, Sheher Bano

Masters Theses

My Masters thesis focuses on socialist Indian freedom fighter Bhagat Singh’s memory in contemporary Pakistani Punjab. I use the analytical category of memory to argue that Bhagat Singh is invoked by various groups and individuals, specifically those who identify as leftists or Marxists, in contemporary Pakistan to serve a range of political purposes. My analysis particularly sheds light on how activists and writers use the figure of Bhagat Singh to highlight the erasure of regional and lingual identities in Pakistan. Their remembrances underline a perceived historical injustice; the imposition of a national identity based on Urdu language and Sunni Muslim-ness, …

In A Condition Of No Light, Alana Perino

Masters Theses

In a Condition of No Light is an autofictional investigation into lineages of familial domesticity. The performances therein circumnavigate one family in one domestic environment, yet are in dialogue with repertoires learned and rehearsed within legacies of myth, literature, theater, film, music, and image; as well as through the otherwise untraceability of embodied memory and inherited trauma. The methodologies used are primarily photographic but also encompass practices reaching towards sculpture, installation, and performance. The line of questioning reserved for this inquiry is how a home, its objects, and inhabitants generate, spacialize, and embody the conditions of wealth, whiteness, and gender. …

A Presence Of P____ And W__Th, Riley Wilson

Masters Theses

This body of work examines the involvement of association as it relates to our cultural interpretations of natural phenomena. Flowers and animals, both real and imagined, have been used as symbols for human morality since the beginning of human history. Two sources with which I drew inspiration from are medieval bestiaries and the Victorian practice of flower language. By combining elements from these references, I aim to pair this idea about the human need for classification with my own considerations about my identity. In combination, I also aim to highlight the responsibility that is intrinsic to curiosity. When faced with …

Plants And People: Foraging To Farming Foodway Transition From Late Archaic To Early Woodland In Western North Carolina, U.S.A., Catherine Linn Herring

Masters Theses

During the Late Archaic to Early Woodland Transition, 3,200 years B.P. [Before Present], some gathering communities in the Eastern Woodlands began to increase their cultivation of plants. While archaeologists have located several sites in the Upper Tennessee River Valley and near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee that explicitly show an increase in plant cultivation, less research has focused on the North Carolina Appalachian Summit Region. This paper uses paleoethnobotanical data and spatial analysis of site locations to explore cultivation and settlement patterns in Jackson and Swain Counties, North Carolina. Data include site locations obtained from the North …

Gendered Language In The Catalogues Of Saint Mary’S Academy, 1860-1871, Kylie Hamm

Masters Theses

This research builds upon studies that explore Catholic women’s and girls’ educational institutions in the nineteenth century. This case study focuses on one girls’ academy, Saint Mary’s Academy, precursor to Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana, founded by the Congregation of the Holy Cross in 1844. The research provided here analyzes the gendered language utilized by school leaders in the academy’s public catalogues during the decade of the Civil War, from 1860 through 1871. The language in these catalogues subtly changed over the course of the decade, reflecting changing white, middle-class gender norms surrounding women’s work and education. Leaders of …

Material Encounters: Making Memory Beyond The Mind, Ariel Wills

Masters Theses

Can acts of making carry the memories of our embeddedness within the world? This thesis explores how making things can nurture a sense of kinship that cuts across the organic and inorganic, erasing the distinction between living and dead, material and spiritual. Through handwork such as art-making, sewing, knitting, cooking, woodworking, and beyond, the burden of remembering and of archiving is shared across human and non-human bodies, cultivated through practices of making, and through the materials themselves. By recounting the stories of my family’s experience as Jewish immigrants in the United States, I aim to reveal how their domestic practices …

Queer Spaces, Religious Places: Sharing Risk And Making Kin Within A Queer Church Amidst A Pandemic, Sadie V. Counts

Masters Theses

This thesis aims to explore the effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic on a queer, Christian congregation of the Metropolitan Community Church in Knoxville, TN and the impacts of the pandemic queer kinship and intimacy within the church setting. The thesis explores the ways in which queer kinship manifests within the church and how those relationships have been disrupted and altered by COVID. It also compares the long-term effects of the AIDS epidemic on the church congregation and they ways in which they may be experiencing COVID in a similar manner. Finally, the project explores the ways that intimacy has …

The Meaning Of A Woman's Work: Refugees, Statelessness, Nationality, And The Women's International League For Peace And Freedom, 1918-1931, Monica Burney

Masters Theses

This work analyzes how the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) sought to influence how the League of Nations approached questions of nationality and statelessness between 1918 and 1931. Especially important were the WILPF's efforts to aid women and children who remained in Turkey following the Armenian genocide, as well as the organization's efforts to address the statelessness crisis that arose following the dissolution of Austria-Hungary. Their activism helped to pressure the League of Nations into creating the Commission of Enquiry on Deported Women and Children in Turkey and Asia Minor. Their efforts to end statelessness culminated in …

Blurring The Spectrum: Exploring Queer Conservatism, Austin P. Mejdrich

Masters Theses

Running parallel to the groundbreaking and historic advancement of LGBTQ rights over the past decade has been the rise in the prominence and public discourse of queer conservative thinking. From the Log Cabin Republicans to far-right nationalistic politics, queer conservatives underscore both diverging ideologies within the modern American conservative tradition and the increase of far-right politics in Western societies. This study argues that queer conservatism, while traditionally less explored in the broader context of sexuality politics, is consequential to an understanding of the LGBTQ community and queer politics. Thus, an exploration of queer conservatism as a political ideology is explored, …

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof: 60 Years Of American Dialogue On Sex, Gender, And The Nuclear Family, Amy Brooks

Masters Theses

This thesis is a two-part work. Its components, a written paper and a one-night symposium/film screening event entitled Tennessee Williams: Gender Play in 2015 and Beyond, have been closely coordinated with my dramaturgical research for the February 2015 University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Theater production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The written inquiry is structured around a chronological, selected American production history of Cat; this history, rendered in a series of three case studies, will (1) synthesize preexisting analyses of Cat’s dramaturgical profile, its impact on American theater, and its position in Williams’s oeuvre; …

Fighting For Inclusion: The Origin Of Gay Liberation At The University Of Michigan, Eric Denby

Masters Theses

The 1960s and 1970s were decades of turbulence, militancy, and unrest in America. The post-World War II boom in consumerism and consumption made way for a new post-materialist societal ethos, one that looked past the American dream of home ownership and material wealth. Many citizens were now concerned with social and economic equality, justice for all people of the world, and a restructuring of the capitalist system itself. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan was a hotbed of student activism. As an early headquarters for the Students for a Democratic Society, a …

From God Terms To Gaga: The Bad Romance Between Motherhood And Female Suffragists In American Film, Mary Ellis Glymph

Masters Theses

Ninety-five years ago, the Nineteenth Amendment was passed by Congress, and women across America were given the right to vote. Nearly a century later, the long-gone figure of the female suffragist continues to subtly permeate American film, a reoccurrence that is not easily justified. Why would viewers in the English-speaking world continue an interest in a historically-contextualized feminist that seems, at first, to have little to do with what a “modern-day feminist” portrays?

Although the woman that history calls the suffragette hasn’t existed in America since 1920, representations of her in film and visual media have reminded viewers that this …

"Fine Dignity, Picturesque Beauty, And Serious Purpose": The Reorientation Of Suffrage Media In The Twentieth Century, Emily Scarbrough

Masters Theses

Throughout the first half century of the woman's suffrage movement, the women of the movement were depicted as dastardly, masculine women who usurped the family structure with their penchant for politics. In the twentieth century, a new generation of woman's suffragists took command of their appearance in the media. Instead of controversial figures, woman's suffragists were envisioned as normal, beautiful women and mothers. Through the use of mass media, woman suffragists restructured their campaign to convince the general public that society needed women to clean up politics. In doing so, suffragists sacrificed their goals of sexual equality in favor of …

Blurring The Boundaries: Images Of Androgyny In Germany At The Fin De Siecle, Daniel James Casanova

Masters Theses

The following study inquires into the emergence and development of a positive, nonnormative homosexual identity in German social discourses regarding androgyny and same-sex desire during the Wilhelmine period. Literary works, medical journals, homosexual journals, and visual art in the late-nineteenth century reflect a growing interest in androgynous bodies throughout Germany’s developing homosexual community. Such primary media provide the evidence for this study. Of particular interest are the works and theories of homosexuals themselves with an emphasis on their organizational journals (such as The Own and The Annual Book of Intermediate Sexualities) and photographs. This project examines the dissemination and …

Gender And The Boundaries Of National Identity: U.S. Women As A Citizen Class In The Long 1960s, Sara Bijani

Masters Theses

This text analyzes the public ideologies and institutions that underpinned women's unequal status within the national collective of United States citizens during the long 1960s, paying particular attention to the executive office of Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the national security establishment. Women were frequently framed within these institutions as a separate special class of citizen, with rights and responsibilities not akin to those of the elite—male bodied—members of the national collective. Allowing for the imaginative construction of "women" as a subject class in U.S. society, this text argues that even with the guarantee of formal political rights in place, women …

The Hartford Female Beneficent Society And The Hartford Orphan Asylum: A Case Study From 1810 To 1890, Katherine M. Mcnulty

Masters Theses

Dedicated to Eugene Leach, PhD

"This Murder Done": Misogyny, Femicide, And Modernity In 19th-Century Appalachian Murder Ballads, Christina Ruth Hastie

Masters Theses

This thesis contextualizes Appalachian murder ballads of the 19^th- and early 20^th-centuries through a close reading of the lyric texts. Using a research frame that draws from the musicological and feminist concepts of Diana Russell, Susan McClary, Norm Cohen, and Christopher Small, I reveal 19^th-century Appalachia as a patriarchal, modern, and highly codified society despite its popularized image as a culturally isolated and “backward” place. I use the ballads to demonstrate how music serves the greater cultural purpose of preserving and perpetuating social ideologies. Specifically, the murder ballads reveal layers of meaning regarding hegemonic …