Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Woman Flytrap, Brianna Jo Hobson

Student Theses and Dissertations

Woman FlyTrap is a short story zine collection that explores the topic of sexual violence through the perpetrator and victim relationship with an explicit lens. Replete with cultural and entomological themes and motifs, Woman Flytrap seeks to remind survivors that we are not alone. In our bodies or in our lives. Neither in the world. There are over a million insects to every human, proving that there is strength in numbers. All five stories in the collection present different abstracts: revenge, transformation, justice, healing, body image, self-harm, mourning, etc. There is also a playlist and a section about the author. …

The Immigrant Nannies Of New York City: An Examination Of The Friendships Between Nannies And Mother-Employers, Esmeralda Paula

Senior Projects Spring 2022

This ethnography focuses on the emotions of the women of color who elaborated on their experiences working for wealthy, white families in ethnographic interviews. This project is interested in the connections formed between nannies and mother-employers with the goal of better understanding the positionalities of female domestic workers of color. Immigrant populations are frequently depicted by news outlets as overworked, underpaid, and poor. When interacting with nannies, I realized that these women did not consider themselves impoverished despite working in a role that is identifiable with servanthood. The labor that nannies perform calls back to a long tradition of women …

“The Speechmaking Of A Girl-Orator”: Reason, Gender, And Authority In Dorothy Hunter’S Free Trade Oratory, Erinn Elizabeth Campbell

Honors Projects

Dorothy M. Hunter (1881-1977) rose to prominence during the 1906 United Kingdom general election as a markedly “girlish” yet widely respected free trade orator. While men on the Edwardian public political platform typically built a reputation for oratorical prowess through theatrical displays of “heroic” masculinity, Hunter established her authority as a speaker through two very different (and apparently contradictory) strategies. Her performance of “charming” middle-class femininity helped demonstrate her right to speak on free trade as a “women’s question,” extending women’s traditional authority over matters of domestic consumption to include questions of political economy. Trusting in the power of education …

Queering The Carceral Cycle: Women's Resistance To The Carceral State, Ashley Ruderman-Looff

Theses and Dissertations--Gender and Women's Studies

Building upon feminist and queer scholarship that recognizes mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex as elements of an inherently violent carceral state, Queering the Carceral Cycle excavates and analyzes twentieth-century incidents in which women resisted the state’s criminalization and/or punishment of multiply marginalized women. I argue that the state’s response to women’s acts of resistance prompted the development of new carceral strategies and technologies that expanded the carceral state’s investment in control and punishment. Moreover, by critically embracing a Foucauldian scheme known as the “carceral cycle,” I demonstrate how the state traps multiply marginalized women in a seemingly endless recurrence …

The South African Women's Movement: The Roles Of Feminism And Multiracial Cooperation In The Struggle For Women's Rights, Amber Michelle Lenser

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the historiography of South Africa’s recent past, focus has been most heavily placed on apartheid and the anti-apartheid movement, with much emphasis placed on male involvement and men as the primary agents of change in the country. Women are largely viewed as playing a supportive role to male activists throughout the movement, and far less has been written on female involvement or women’s activism in its own right. Running parallel to the anti-apartheid movement, however, was a women’s movement characterized by women across the racial and socioeconomic spectrum struggling to secure their own rights in a very hostile and …

Uncovering Alice Bag: An Alternative Punk History, Emily Macune

Scripps Senior Theses

The intention of this thesis is to provide an alternative counter-narrative to the mainstream histories of punk that center white men. By focusing on the contributions of fem queer and POC punks, I aim to legitimize punk music as a form of resistance against systems of oppression that are oppositional to the commodified forms of mainstream punk. Using Alice Bag, as my central case study as a fem queer punk that is often left out of punk historical narratives, I contextualize her work through feminist, queer, and media studies lenses to bridge the gap between academia and forgotten personal experience.

Contact, Christine M. Stevralia

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

A year after Alyssa Milano’s tweet launched the #MeToo movement, survivors of sexual assault are being called ‘accusers’ in the media, and public opinion is swinging in favor of guilty men. #MeToo raised awareness but not understanding. What is rape? What is consent? As evidenced by the #MeToo movement and the backlash against it, clearly, as a society, we don’t know. Contact is a work of Creative Nonfiction that uses scenes and details from the narrator’s personal experiences to illuminate the micro-negotiations that occur in sex and seduction.

In a world where women are still expected to stay small and …

The Creation Of Power: Leaving The Closed Space Of Voluntary Servitude, Isabel Mae Torgove

Senior Projects Spring 2018

This project is a collection and absorption of concepts and frameworks drawn from centuries of thought. Indebted to the past, this philosophical and literary journey seeks to elucidate a productive path to follow in the wake of the “moment,” derived from Du Bois’ “double consciousness.” This split second explosion, resulting in the severance of the conception of the self from the world’s perception of the self, places one in the position of either submitting voluntarily to the dominant forces or producing and creating something, anything, to aid in the search for understanding the self. The transitive property of a split …

Since The Time Of Eve : La Leche League And Communities Of Mothers Throughout History., Joanna Paxton Federico

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

La Leche League International (LLL) is the oldest and largest breastfeeding support group in the world. This thesis examines how, beginning in 1956, seven Catholic housewives from suburban Chicago built up the institutional knowledge to sustain a cohesive global network of breastfeeding mothers. It also explores how LLL managed this knowledge over time in response to developments in scholarship and changing social conditions. Based on a narrative analysis of LLL publications, this thesis argues that the League’s founders drew selectively from existing bodies of knowledge and from their own cultural perspectives to establish a sense of community among breastfeeding women. …

Vim Parat: Patterns Of Sexualized Violence, Victim-Blaming, And Sororophobia In Ovid, Melissa Marturano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation argues for the importance of understanding the depiction of sexualized violence and rape in the Roman poet Ovid’s extensive corpus through the modern feminist concepts of victim-blaming (blaming victims of sexual abuse for their own abuse) and sororophobia (female figures participating in misogyny). It explores sexualized violence and rape in Ovid long-form, examines the discernible patterns that emerge and the deviations from them as he depicts that violence throughout his texts, and more importantly, introduces victim-blaming and sororophobia into an analysis of these patterns. Despite the fact that previous scholars have done substantial analyses of the patterns of …

The Parton Paradox: A History Of Race And Gender In The Career Of Dolly Parton, Lindsey L. Hammers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With a career that has spanned over five decades, country music artist Dolly Parton has continually redefined her image and her music to remain relevant. By incorporating the musical and lyrical stylings of disco and other popular music genres into her songs, Parton moved beyond music’s color line to increase her popularity as an artist. This thesis shows how Parton established a distinct career that catered to different audiences as she traversed the musical color line and repackaged what feminism looked like to country music fans during the Women’s Movement of the 1960s. Placing Parton’s actions in conversation with music’s …

Archiving The '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture, Margaret A. Galvan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Archiving the '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture locates a shared genealogy of feminism and queer theory in the visual culture of 1980s American feminism. Gathering primary sources from grant-funded research in a dozen archives, I analyze an array of image-text media of women, ranging from well known creators like Gloria Anzaldúa, Alison Bechdel, and Nan Goldin, to little known ones like Roberta Gregory and Lee Marrs. In each chapter, I examine how each woman develops movement politics in her visual production, and I study the reception of their works in their communities of influence. Through studying hybrid visual …

Reclaiming And Reconciling What Was Originally Ours--Christianity And Feminism: A Concise History, Soquel Filice

History

No abstract provided.

"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 …