Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Prudery And Perversion: Domination Of The Sexual Body In Middle-Class Men, Women, And Disenfranchised Bodies In Victorian England, Ashley Barnett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research argues that with the rise of the middle-class, Victorian England saw the development of a power model in which middle-class men, middle-class women and disenfranchised bodies of children and lower-class women suffered from the demands of bodily domination. Because the bodily health of middle-class men was believed to represent national health, it was imperative that he dominate his body, particularly with regard to sexual urges. Consequently, the bodies of women with whom he sought sexual release suffered from forms of bodily domination as well. Through an analysis of journals and private writings of those living in Victorian England, …

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 …

Barteaux, Kennedy, Kayla Woodward, Nathanial Koch

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Kennedy Barteaux is a 38 year old trans man who grew up in Norridgewock, Maine who knew from a young age that he was queer. He was outed to his parents as a lesbian at age 14 and was kicked out of the house and moved in with a supportive friend’s family in Skowhegan. He moved to Portland at age 18 and got involved with the Dyke March. Barteaux discusses his discomfort with existing gender expectations and stereotypes in both the gay and trans communities. He talks about community organizing and public speaking with and for the trans community (including …

Solomon, Howard, Richard Morin, Michelle Johnston

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Howard Solomon is a 76 year-old man who grew up in New Castle, Pennsylvania. During his early years, and still today, Judaism played a significant role in his life. His dad was a Kosher butcher, and Solomon attended a Hebrew school while growing up. Solomon’s profession was teaching history as a college professor at New York University, Tufts University, and the University of Southern Maine. Towards the end of his full-time teaching career, he taught a class about Lesbian and Gay History. During the same period, he openly discussed his homosexuality in the university context. He witnessed the AIDS epidemic …

Abdurraqib, Samaa, Iris Sangiovanni, Samar Ahmed

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Samaa Abdurraqib is a Black, queer, Muslim woman living in Portland, Maine. Abdurraqib was raised in Columbus, Ohio. She attend the University of Ohio, and later the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she received a PhD in English Literature. After graduating she worked as a visiting professor at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Next she went on to work the American Civil Liberties Union in Maine as a reproductive rights organizer. She now works for the Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence. Her advocacy and organizing work has included places such as Sexual Assault Response Services of Southern Maine, …

Vermette, Jean, Annie Holland, Olivia Tryon-Nadeau

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Jean Vermette, born in 1954, is a transgender woman from Skowhegan, Maine. At the age of three, Jean knew that her biological sex did not match her gender identity. When Jean came out as transgender to her wife in the 1980s, her marriage soon dissolved. After Jean filed for divorce, she spent five years transitioning. In addition to working as a self-employed electrician, Jean has dedicated her adult life to advocating for Maine’s transgender community. She created the Maine Gender Resource and Support Service and spent over fifteen years speaking publicly to Maine college students and medical professionals about the …

Parsons, Betsy, Shanisa Rodriguez, Madison Leblanc

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Betsy Parsons grew up in a Midwestern town in the 1960s and 1970’s in a middle class educated family active in the local community. Her father and mother were both teachers. Her mother and father met in Orono, Maine in English class before migrating to the Midwest. Parsons describes developing a love a teaching from her parents; she knew from a young age that she wanted to become a teacher herself and began teaching at Portland High School in 1977. She describes herself as a ‘late bloomer’ in terms of her sexuality; she didn’t come out to herself until her …

Bull, Steven, Alanna Larrivee, Tracy Payne

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

In this interview (part 1 of a two part interview), Steve Bull describes growing up in the 1950s in Kennebunk and Cape Porpoise and becoming conscious at a young age of being “different.” At age 6 or 7, he was discovered having sex with a playmate. When, at age 13, his family moved to New Jersey, Steve instead secured a scholarship to instead attend an expensive boarding school in Massachusetts where he found himself surrounded by children from wealthy families and became aware of social justice, anti-war, and civil rights activism. After attending Johns Hopkins University for two years he …

Research And Study Of Fashion And Costume History Spanning From Ancient Egypt To Modern Day, Kaitlyn E. Dennis Miss

Posters-at-the-Capitol

Through a generous donation to Morehead State University, research has been conducted on thousands of slides containing images of artwork and artifacts of historical significance. These images span from Egyptian hieroglyphs to the inaugural dress of every first lady of the United States. The slides are in the process of being recorded and catalogued for future use by students in hopes of furthering academic comprehension and awareness of the influence of fashion and costume history through the ages. Special thanks to the family of Gretel Geist Rutledge, faculty mentor Denise Watkins, as well as the Department of Music, Theatre, and …

Welcome To Dignity, Donna M. Hughes

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Review: Sylvia Martin, 'Ink In Her Veins: The Troubled Life Of Aileen Palmer', (Crawley: Uwa Publishing, 2016)., Rowan Cahill

Rowan Cahill

Review: Sylvia Martin, 'Ink In Her Veins: The Troubled Life Of Aileen Palmer', (Crawley: Uwa Publishing, 2016)., Rowan Cahill

Rowan Cahill

Arbor, Kelly, Alanna Larrivee, Emma Wynn Hill

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Kelly Arbor, who identifies as genderqueer, was born in Rumford, Maine in 1977. Arbor is an artist, educator, and proud activist. They have been involved with activism throughout their life including in college at the University of Vermont. In this interview, Arbor talks about overcoming challenges growing up trans in a rural community, and discusses such issues as poverty, classism, LGBTQ representation, sex education in schools, incest, consent, AIDS, and substance abuse. Kelly Arbor also describes being involved in the Maine-based group MESH – Maine Educationalists on Sexual Harmony – a group working to create a dialogue surrounding sex positivity …

Women Of The Incan Empire: Before And After The Conquest Of Peru, Sarah A. Hunt

Student Research

This paper contrasts the life of Incan women before and after the Spanish conquest of Peru by Pizarro. Spanish colonization of Peru had a significant, negative impact on Incan women, across social, economic, and religious sectors. Before the conquest, women held fairly complimentary, rather than subordinate roles to men in society. Spanish rule introduced a strict patriarchy, which reduced Incan women to second-class citizens. The Spanish exploited women within the economy, and destroyed the once revered female religious institutions. Examining women in conquest history provides an intimate look at gender and power relations, socio-economics, and the shifting familial and cultural …

The Bodies, Minds, Desires And Scorn Of Britain's "Stepdaughters Of War", Alexandra J. Lightle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis revolves around Evadne Price’s novel, Not So Quiet… Stepdaughters of War, published in 1930 under the pen name Helen Zenna Smith. The book delves into the inner life of a young female driver in a voluntary ambulance corps in France during World War I. Throughout the novel the reader is witness to the hardships of young women who left their sheltered drawing rooms only to be plunged into the apocalyptic landscape of the Western Front. They were ill informed as to what they were volunteering for and they struggled desperately to cope with the heretofore unimagined carnage. …

Shaken, Not Stirred: Espionage, Fantasy, And British Masculinity During The Cold War, Anna Rikki Nelson

Master's Theses

This project seeks to define and explore the development of Cold War British masculinity and national identity in response to decolonization. Following World War II, Great Britain experienced a time of political and cultural rebuilding. This project argues that following World War II, Britain had to renegotiate gender and national identity within the context of decolonization, the rise of the welfare state, and Britain’s diminished role in global politics, and the tensions within gender and national identity were expressed in Britain’s interest in espionage narratives both real and fictionalized. British spy novels by Ian Fleming, Desmond Cory, and John Le …

Queer History Of The United States: A Syllabus, Jordan Ostrum

History Summer Fellows

This project is a proposed syllabus of a college level history course dealing with queer and trans experiences in the 20^th century. The course utilizes the Ursinus inquiry based approach to learning, focusing on the core questions “How can we understand the world?” and “How should we live together?” Supplementary materials, such as the course proposal, are meant to encourage the Ursinus College History Department to offer the course in the future.

“If There Are Men Who Are Afraid To Die, There Are Women Who Are Not”: African American Women's Civil Rights Leadership In Boston, 1920-1975., Julie De Chantal

Doctoral Dissertations

Since the 1980s, narratives surrounding the Boston Busing Crisis focus on South Boston white working-class’s reaction to Judge Arthur W. Garrity's forced desegregation order of 1974. Yet, by analyzing the crises from such narrow perspective, the narratives leave out half of the story. This dissertation challenges these narratives by situating the busing crisis as the culmination of more than half a century of grassroots activism led by Black working-class mothers. By taking action at the neighborhood and the city levels, these mothers succeeded where the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People and the Urban League had failed. …

A Tale Of Two Sisters: Family Histories From The Strait Salish Borderlands, Katrina Jagodinsky

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Based on legal and genealogical records, this microhistory chronicles the difficult choices between whiteness and Indianness made by two Salish sisters and their biracial children in order to maintain their kinship networks throughout the Salish Sea borderlands between 1865 and 1919. While some of these choices obscured individual family members from historical records, reading their lives in tandem with other family members’ histories reveals remarkable persistence in the midst of dramatic racial and political transformation. Focused primarily on San Juan Island residents, this article suggests that indigenous and interracial family histories of the Pacific Northwest and other borderland regions in …

Following Saint Teresa: Early Modern Women And Religious Authority, Stacey Schlau

Stacey Schlau

No abstract provided.

More Than One Way To Measure: Masculinity In The Zurkaneh Of Safavid Iran, Zachary T. Smith

The Hilltop Review

The zurkhaneh of early modern Safavid Iran was an institution where men undertook physical training, in some ways reminiscent of a modern-day gymn. This paper attempts to theorize the zurkhaneh as a public space in which primarily non-elite men participated in the social economy of early modern Safavid Iran based upon their pursuit of the ideal of javanmardi, or young manliness. To accomplish this, this paper will combine the themes of publicity, the social utility of the body, and the authority of textuality with an examination of the physical culture of the zurkhaneh to theorize the utility, representation, and …

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 …

Editorial, Franziska Dubgen

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

Epistemic injustice gives a name to experiences that we struggle to articulate due to the injuries of hegemonic speech. This normative grammar seeks to enable social philosophers and activists alike to name experiences of injustice that have not been previously addressed as such. This includes experiences that we cannot make sense of because the society we live in does not provide a vocabulary to make them intelligible or because we are not entitled to give them a name due to our specific identity position, which supposedly disables us from judging matters objectively. By looking at epistemic injustice in practice, this …

Toilet Talk, Michael Blake

Theses and Dissertations

Toilet Talk explores both formal and autobiographical themes related to desire, sexuality, and the relationship between public and private space. My work and research aims to reposition and queer the industrial object and its promotion of hyper masculine ideals.

Shifting Understandings Of Lesbianism In Imperial And Weimar Germany, Meghan C. Paradis

Scholarly Undergraduate Research Journal at Clark (SURJ)

This paper seeks to understand how, and why, understandings of lesbianism shifted in Germany over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through close readings of both popular cultural productions and medical and psychological texts produced within the context of Imperial and Weimar Germany, this paper explores the changing nature of understandings of homosexuality in women, arguing that over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the dominant conceptualization of lesbianism transformed from an understanding of lesbians that was rooted in biology and viewed lesbians as physically masculine “gender inverts”, to one that was …

"In The Land Of Tomorrow": Representations Of The New Woman In The Pre-Suffrage Era, Natalie B. O'Neal

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This digital anthology explores feminism in selected short fiction by women writers from the 1911 run of the popular women’s magazines Woman’s Home Companion, Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Farmer’s Wife. This fiction furthered the women’s rights movement by allowing women to imagine a world similar to their own with a heroine who voiced their desires and enacted change. Rather than the more experimental, inaccessible literature of avant garde high modernist writers consumed by the upper class, popular fiction reached a wider, middle class audience and was more effective at producing a progressive zeitgeist following the stilted Victorian …

Daughters Of The Sun: "The Birth" (An Excerpt), Megan Lynn

Scholarly and Creative Works Conference (2015 - 2021)

“You have never heard of me before. You have never heard of me, but my name has come out of your mouth thousands of times.”

So begins my novel, Daughters of the Sun, the story of Jesus’s twin sister, Alleluia. Using the narrative framework seen in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Alleluia tells her story over one night—Saturday into Sunday morning—in an appropriated apartment facing a church. She weaves into her story another tale of women who have lived in shadows cast by the men around them, women whom history chose to vilify—Lilith, Adam’s first wife who was written out of …

The Life Of The Factory? Or The Life Of The Farm? That Is The Question., Adam C. Mcelwain, Bethany Lutwin

Migration in Global Context Symposium

Abstract: The focus of this lesson on Global Migration is the emotion behind young women’s decision to leave for the city and work in the factory, or stay in their hometown. Both have an opportunity cost for a life that may be better. The essential question is “Is it better to be a factory girl who has emigrated to the city or a country girl living and working on a farm?” Students will examine the motivation behind leaving the country for a factory job in the city or staying behind and working in a rural setting like a farm. They …

Naccs 43rd Annual Conference, National Association For Chicana And Chicano Studies

NACCS Conference Programs

¡Chicana/o Power! Transforming Chicana/o Activism, Discourse and Scholarship into Power

April 6-9, 2016

DoubleTree by Hilton

Fort St. Joseph Post - Spring 2016, Michael S. Nassaney

Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project

We hope you enjoy this issue of the Fort St. Joseph Post, filled with information about current activities that are being conducted under the auspices of the Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project, a partnership between the City of Niles and Western Michigan University. As you can see, students, staff, faculty, and volunteers are busy investigating, interpreting, and promoting the archaeology of Fort St. Joseph, one of the most important French colonial sites in the western Great Lakes region. We are regularly present at professional conferences, community events, and other venues sharing information about the fort and inviting the public to …