Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Mama’S Got A Brand New Degree: Education And Changing Perceptions Of Femininity During The Mexican Revolution (1910-1917), Eden E. Baize

The Cardinal Edge

Bloody struggles, tense political debates, and general unease characterized Mexico in the early twentieth century. Under former president Porfirio Díaz, tensions grew as the lower classes pleaded for labor and land reform, culminating in a violent period of revolution from 1910 to 1917. As with all conflicts of this scale, the Mexican Revolution prompted the challenging of many long standing social conventions, specifically as they pertained to the role of government and the organization of social classes. With the restructuring of society already underway, many activists capitalized on the uncertainty of the era to push against the subjugation of women. …

Asking For It: Gendered Dimensions Of Surveillance Capitalism, Jessica Rizzo

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

Advertising and privacy were once seen as mutually antagonistic. In the 1950s and 1960s, Americans went to court to fight for their right to be free from the invasion of privacy presented by unwanted advertising, but a strange realignment took place in the 1970s. Radical feminists were among those who were extremely concerned about the collection and computerization of personal data—they worried about private enterprise getting a hold of that data and using it to target women—but liberal feminists went in a different direction, making friends with advertising because they saw it as strategically valuable.

Liberal feminists argued that in …

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 …

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.

“Let's Hear It From The Girls”: Abortion Activism At Cal Poly, 1970-1980, Michelle L. Mueller

The Forum: Journal of History

No abstract provided.

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal Of Gender And Sexuality 57.2 (2022)

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Gender, Race, And Religion In An African Enlightenment, Jonathan D. Lyonhart

Journal of Religion & Film

Black Panther (2018) not only heralded a new future for representation in big-budget films but also gave an alternative vision of the past, one which recasts the Enlightenment within an African context. By going through its technological enlightenment in isolation from Western ideals and dominance, Wakanda opens a space for reflecting on alternate ways progress can—and still might—unfold. More specifically, this alternative history creates room for reimagining how modernity—with its myriad social, scientific, and religious paradigm shifts—could have negotiated questions of race, and, in turn, how race could have informed and redirected some of the lesser impulses of modernity. Similar …

The Female Stigma: Menstruation Attitudes In The Women's Liberation Movement, Kayla Becknuss

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

Archiving Feminist Truth In Trump’S Wake Of Lies, Julie Shayne

Humboldt Journal of Social Relations

This article is about an assignment I do in one of my Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies social movement classes. I revised the assignment the first time teaching the class after Trump lost the 2020 election. For the assignment, students work in groups to research local feminist and gender justice organizations and deposit all of their original materials – recordings, photos, flyers, etc. – into a digital, open access archive I co-created several years ago with librarians and staff on my campus. In 2021 I had my students do the “post-Trump” edition where they researched local organizations about how their …

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal Of Gender And Sexuality 57.1 (2021)

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Warrioress In White: A Semiotic Analysis Of America's Joan Of Arc In The Women Of The Copper Country, Akasha Khalsa

Conspectus Borealis

Mary Doria Russell’s The Women of the Copper Country is a fictionalized historical account of the 1913 mining strike in the Keweenaw Peninsula. Significantly in this strike, a great deal of leadership was focused in the Union’s Women’s Auxiliary. In particular, one woman formed the backbone of the local movement. Known by her community as Big Annie, Anna Klobuchar Clements was the heart of the 1913 strike. Memories of her bravery linger today in the form of recorded testimonies by elderly community members, immortalization in plaques and songs, and Russell’s popular novel. Today she is remembered not as herself, not …

The 1848 Declarations Of Sentiments: Usurpations And Incantations, Leah Shafer

The Seneca Falls Dialogues Journal

Three video recordings of participants reciting the "1848 Declaration of Sentiments" at the Seneca Falls Dialogues conferences. In the first video titled "Sentiments and Usurpations", an excerpt is repeated over and over until it begins to sound like an incantation. In the second video, "Declaration of Sentiments 2014", still images accompany an audio track featuring the voices of the participants. The third video, "Declaration of Sentiments Wesleyan Chapel" uses the 2014 audio track for an avant-garde exploration of the interior of the Wesleyan Chapel.

Confronting Student Resistance To Ecofeminism: Three Perspectives, Jennifer Browdy De Hernandez, Holly Kent, Colleen Martell

The Seneca Falls Dialogues Journal

Teaching ecofeminism is a dynamic, vital practice, demanding a great deal of both educators and students. At the heart of this essay is the question: how can we teach ecofeminism effectively? In this work, we reflect on our successes and failures teaching ecofeminism within various topics and in different settings. While each co-author of this piece brings ecofeminism into our classrooms, we do so in very different ways and have diverse approaches to making ecofeminist theories and ideas feel vital, necessary, and relevant for our students. In our essay, we aim to offer some productive and provocative suggestions and ideas …

Andrea Revised: Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist As Revolutionary By Martin Duberman, Phyllis Chesler

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Towards Women’S Minor Cinema In Socialist Yugoslavia, Dijana Jelaca

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This essay theorizes the concept of women’s minor cinema in socialist Yugoslavia, conceptualized through examples of cultural texts that circulate within the so-called women’s genres: romance films, “chick flicks,” and TV soap operas. Women’s cinema is here not defined solely as films made by women, but rather, films that address the spectator as a woman, regardless of the spectator’s sex or gender. I argue that, in the context of Yugoslavia, such works frequently articulated emancipatory, feminist stances that did not demarcate a dichotomous opposition to the socialist state as such, but rather called for the state to fulfill its original …

Too Much And Too Graphic: Dr. Ruth Westheimer And The Struggle For 1980s And 1990s Feminism, Louisa Marshall

Voces Novae

During the second wave of feminism, spanning from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s, the United States saw unprecedented levels of change regarding the status of women. However, the conservative administrations of Reagan and H.W. Bush that followed turned the tides against the feminist movement and towards re-establishing traditional gender roles. Trail blazing women, including sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer, dedicated their 20th century careers to combating traditional sentiment, thus changing gender roles forever.

Α “Guarantee Of Clustered Energy And Collective Promotion”: The Association Of Greek Women Artists And Its Exhibitions In The 50s And 60s, Glafki Gotsi

Artl@s Bulletin

Founded in Athens in 1954 the Association of Greek Women Artists aimed at promoting art among the Greek public, confronting the problems of women artists through collective action, and encouraging the presentation of Greek art on the international scene. In the 1950s and 1960s it organized a significant number of group exhibitions in Greece as well as abroad, where its members showed their work. This paper examines the context of the association’s all-women shows and their meaning in relation to feminist cultural politics inside but also beyond national borders. More specifically, it analyzes the circumstances under which the collectivity was …

Intersectionality In The Contemporary Women’S Marches: Possibilities For Social Change, Sujatha Moni

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The Women’s Marches of January 2017 and 2018 were some of the largest mass demonstrations in history. They represent an important stage in the American feminist movement in its current iteration. Unlike the first and second waves of the movement, which were led by privileged class cisgender white women, the leadership of these marches includes women of color who have brought a vision of intersectionality and diversity to the marches. Banners covering a wide range of issues including reproductive choice, #MeToo, equal pay, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ rights, and support for immigrants, became the hallmark of these marches. Is the …

Introduction To Feminism And The Academy Today: A Graduate Forum, Kara Watts, Heather Turcotte

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Against All Odds: A Legacy Of Appropriation, Contestation, And Negotiation Of Arab Feminisms In Postcolonial States, Hoda Elsadda

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Arab feminists have always faced challenges related to the burden of colonialism, accusations of westernization, isolation from their cultural heritage, and elitism, but the biggest challenge of all has been the fact that their activism and their entire lives have all been in the context of authoritarian postcolonial states. This article engages with a persistent challenge to Arab feminists that questions their impact, their awareness of their cultural and societal problems, and undermines their achievements over the years. It constructs a narrative of what feminists have achieved against all odds, within the constraints of authoritarian postcolonial states that have politically …

‘I Am That Very Witch’: On The Witch, Feminism, And Not Surviving Patriarchy, Laurel Zwissler

Journal of Religion & Film

While contemporary discussions about witchcraft include reinterpretations and feminist reclamations, early modern accusations contained no such complexity. It is this historical witch as misogynist nightmare that the film, The Witch: A New England Folktale (2015), expresses so effectively. Within the film, the very patriarchal structures that decry witchcraft – the Puritan church from which the family exiles itself, the male headship to which the parents so desperately cling, the insistence, in the face of repeated failure, on the viability of the isolated nuclear family unit – are the same structures that inevitably foreclose the options of the lead character, Thomasin.

"We Sick": The Deweys As Women's Willful Self-Destruction In Toni Morrison's Sula, Kathleen Anderson, Gayle Fallon

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Toni Morrison explores the complexities of race, gender, and matrilineal influence in Sula. Although much recent feminist criticism has addressed the operations of race and gender in the novel, this essay provides the first developed examination of Morrison’s strategic use of three diminutive boys, all named “dewey,” to emphasize the willfully self-destructive tendencies of the novel’s female characters. Burdened with their community’s limiting idealizations of femininity and motherhood, the women of Sula practice various forms of self-harm in an effort to develop and proclaim their holistic, autonomous selves. The deweys’ mischievous childhood games foreshadow the consequences of female self-harm, but …

Precarious Responsibility: Teaching With Feminist Politics In The Marketized University, Lena Wånggren

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

One of the most pressing characteristics of the neoliberal restructuring of academia, together with increased managerialism, performativity measures, and a “customer service” approach, is the casualization or precarization of academic work. Casualization entails a fragmentation of academic work, where academics are forced to move between workplaces on hourly-paid and fixed-term contracts, often doing their job without access to resources such as an office, training, or paid research time. While a number of feminist scholars have investigated the ways in which feminist academics negotiate the ever-increasing mechanisms of individualization, ranking, and auditing of their work, this article focuses on the precarious …

Reclaiming The Streets: Investigating Female Experience Of Cinematic Urban Violence, Angelica De Vido

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The spatial ideologies and narrative tropes of gendered victimhood, which are designed to induce fear and anxiety, are routinely employed to govern and restrict female access to and experience of urban spaces—both in cinematic depictions and in the real world. This paper explores how such tropes are challenged and rewritten in three screen narratives based in urban landscapes: London in Happy-Go- Lucky (2008), Paris in Amélie (2001), and New York in Sex and the City (1998–2004). Contrary to the ideologies of fear that routinely dominate urban narratives, I will argue that the texts under discussion instead display the city as …

Emancipating The Passive Muse: A Call For A Feminist Approach To Writing Biographies On Historical Women, Ina C. Seethaler

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This essay analyzes two popular biographies on historical women to interrogate how a focus on gender has shaped the genre: Nancy Ruben Stuart’s The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation (2008) and Jung Chang’s Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (2013). I argue that biographers who perpetuate gender stereotypes miss a momentous opportunity during the current life writing boom in the United States to educate readers on women’s social, cultural, and political contributions worldwide. In proposing that feminist-informed biographies are more accurate, complete, and make social …

« Les Celles Qui Sont Pas Contentes » : Françoise Durocher, Waitress D’André Brassard Et De Michel Tremblay (1972), Maxime Blanchard

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

More relevant than ever, Françoise Durocher, waitress, a 1972 short film directed by André Brassard (based on a screenplay by Michel Tremblay), keeps highlighting the current political alienation of the Québécois people within Canada. By analyzing the main character, Françoise Durocher, this article reveals the contradictions of a cultural, social, and feminist struggle against imperialism and domination.

Not Mine Alone, Nor Mine To Own: Some Reflections On The Young Girl, Jacqueline Mabey

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This essay looks at the role of the young girl in the curatorial practice of Jacqueline Mabey. Mabey reckons with the young girl as the signifier of a spectrum of mutable cultural signifieds and young girls as subjects on their own terms in the two exhibitions under review, Miss World and Utopia Is No Place, Utopia Is Process. In doing so, she recognizes a shift in motivations from an interest in what the young girls mean as a narcissistic reflection to how she could work in service of the development of young girls.

Más Rudas Collective, 2009-2016 (An Archival Epilogue To An Epic Pachanga), Josh T. Franco

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Contemporary artists Más Rudas Collective (MRC) were active in San Antonio, Texas, from 2009 to 2016. This essay looks to primary source documents from preceding decades and keystone exhibitions of Chicana/o art to articulate MRC’s position in a network of art production and curatorial activity that takes Chicana/o identity as a conceptual framework and/or departure point. Specific examples of MRC members’ reappropriations of Mexican, Mexican American, and Chicana/o cultural elements are analyzed and considered as “weaponizations” against cultures of body shaming and misogyny. Their approach is compared to that of other artists and curators in order to highlight the variety …

Nonconsensual Collaborations, 2012-Present: Notes On A Shared Condition, Aliza Shvarts

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

"Nonconsensual Collaborations, 2012-present: Notes on a Shared Condition" is an extended performance text. It investigates the unmarked gendered dynamics of artistic collaboration, documenting a series of “nonconsensual collaborations”—that is, performances with other artists who did not agree to their participation. Presented here as written narratives, these nonconsensual collaborations frame everyday occurrences of violation, erasure, and misrecognition, exploring how discourses of consent arise from the raced and gendered histories of property relations. They call into question the politics of representation, the status of the document, the formation of evidentiary truth, and the interpenetration of sexual and aesthetic economies. These nonconsensual collaborations …