Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

The Controlled Narrative Of “Jane Roe:” Norma Mccorvey’S Life Beyond The 1973 Trial, Eleanor G. Strickland

Honors College Theses

Norma McCorvey, Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade, 1973, wrote two memoirs twenty years after the Supreme Court trial that surrounded her third pregnancy. These memoirs (I Am Roe, 1994, and Won by Love, 1997), along with the recent documentary AKA Jane Roe (2020), provide an insight into McCorvey’s life and how she was used by politicians and civilians during and after the influential trial. McCorvey lived a complicated life and was constantly being pulled in different directions spiritually, politically, and personally. This thesis shows how McCorvey attempted to re-write the narrative of her life using …

Desire In Bridgerton: Defining The Female Gaze, Hailey C. Coles

Honors College Theses

Feminist literature is rife with multiple, sometimes conflicting, sometimes partial, definitions of the female gaze. A definitive understanding of the female gaze incorporates the literature but includes other modes of thought and analysis appropriate for a number of different media. Bridgerton articulates this understanding as it privileges female sexuality not just through dialogue, but through its focus on multiple characters’ bodily awareness. Non-verbal elements like blocking, the physical articulation of bodies, changes in camera angles and foci that privilege subtle and nuanced movements, and even the pervasive use of music all contribute to the form and characterization of the female …

Constructing (Un)Situated Women: Situated Knowledges In Arundhati Roy's The God Of Small Things (1997) And Balli K. Jaswal's Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows (2017), Necole T. Deloach

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis applies Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledges” to postcolonial feminist novels such as Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Balli K. Jaswal’s Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows in order to illustrate why there needs to be a new framework for analyzing literary postcolonial women. Despite the applicability of Donna Haraway’s “situated knowledges” to postcolonial feminist literary studies, there has been little research published that analyzes not just the intersection of “situated knowledges” and postcolonial feminist literature, but also the problems that occur when Western scholars approach postcolonial texts without completely acknowledging their own worldview. I argue …

Femininity Reclaiming Chivalry In The Harry Potter Series, Ashley M. Watson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper focuses on the reclaiming of chivalric values by female characters in the Harry Potter series by comparing them to Arthurian characters. Scholars have extensively compared the narrative of the Knights of the Round Table to the global phenomenon of the Harry Potter series, but in this paper I explore, through a feminist lens, a character comparison of the Harry Potter novels and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. I will show how female characters in modern literature reclaim chivalry. This is important because it exemplifies a shift in the position of women into a more active role. I …

Sacred And Profane Loves: The Renaissance Influence In C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces, Kevin Corr

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

C.S. Lewis’ last novel, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold, has often been regarded as his greatest work, but just as often as his most enigmatic work. The purpose of this thesis is to unveil much of the novel’s mystery by considering the impact Renaissance literature had in shaping the novel, most notably Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Although it is well-known that Lewis was Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, current scholarship on Lewis has overlooked the Renaissance influence in the author’s work, which particularly plays a vital role in Till We Have Faces. …

The "A" Word: Women's Abortion Experiences In Georgia, Kendra J. Cooper

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Abortion is a common medical procedure, with twenty-one percent of all American pregnancies ending in induced abortion in 2011. Literature shows that abortion is highly stigmatized in the United States and even more so in the American South. The contentious discourse surrounding the moral and ethical viewpoints, “right” versus “wrong,” often overpowers women’s lived experiences. Although abortion has been studied extensively across multiple disciplines, literature on women’s lived experiences is limited. Previous research has focused on women in the Midwest, West, and Northeastern regions of the United States but the South has not been a significant focus of study. The …

The Effect Of Religious Dress On Perceived Attractiveness And Trustworthiness, Courtney Swank

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The hijab, a symbol of modesty and privacy in the Islamic faith, negatively affects ratings of perceived attractiveness. Although postcolonial feminism strives to portray women as not one universal group, but as an incorporation of different races, ethnicities, social classes, and other cultures, the Western world may not be where it endeavors to be. In this study the impact of the hijab on people’s perceptions of attractiveness was examined. Participants rated four target photos of the same woman with and without a hijab, and with or without cosmetics. Attractiveness and trustworthiness was then assessed in each condition, between genders, in …

“There Was That In Her Face And Form Which Made Him Loathe The Sight Of Her”: Disfiguration And Deformity Of Female Characters In 19th Century American Women’S Literature, Kelsi E. Cunningham Miss

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary Wilkins Freeman challenge the way that society treats and views the disabled and deformed. Through different representations of the disabled characters, the three short stories by these authors reveal the realities that women faced in the 19^th century in response to rigid beauty standards and expectations. The authors in this study address the marginalized position of the disabled characters and show how society’s attempts to “normalize” the women confine them to a fixed identity. Analyzing the texts in relation to disability studies and the authors’ perceived effectiveness of social charity will …

Cruzando Fronteras De Género(S): La Dislocación Del "Bildungsroman" Y La Construcción Política Del Sujeto, Silvia Roig

The Coastal Review: An Online Peer-reviewed Journal

This study shows that Aurora Bertrana’s novels subvert the traditional Bildungsroman and uses the techniques of the Novel of Female Development with (auto) biographical characteristics. The core of my analysis is in the friction, the disruption and the confrontation between the subject and the social system represented by the family, the school and the community. Bertrana’s novels underline that men, similarly to women, are under a strong pressure to adopt a specific role according to heterosexual norms. Bertrana’s work demonstrate that women writers, like men, can introduce social, cultural and political innovations and experiment with a new literature genre.

Femme Fatales And The Shifting Gender Norms Of The 19th Century, Esther M. Stuart

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project seeks to explore female monstrosity, specifically the femme fatale, in Gothic literature and its reflection of the shifting gender norms of the nineteenth century. The late 1790s experienced a distinct narrowing of female gender roles. While authors like Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays publish during the eighteenth century, a backlash against such feminist voices took hold as a resurgence of spheres ideology and more traditional gender norms came into vogue. This particular shift in attitudes towards female gender norms is reflected in Scottish poet Anne Bannerman’s work as well as English novelist Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya. Both authors’s works …

Lilith: Quintessential Bad Girl Or Simply Misunderstood?, Yvonne B. Wichman

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

In some cultures, the earth, moon, water, and love are associated with the feminine. In others, women and their divine counterparts rule over war, death, demons, and destruction. The duality of good versus evil in feminine figures has intrigued cultures for thousands of years. In fact, the dichotomy of feminine archetypes has provided a basis for speculation and research since the beginning of recorded history.

Lilith, who appears in the world’s oldest text, The Epic of Gilgamesh, is one mythological figure who remains a point of fascination. She is the oldest goddess-demon figure from the Sumero-Babylonian era and the sole …

Gender Differentiation And Gender Hierarchy In C. S. Lewis, Alicia D. Burrus

Honors College Theses

This thesis explores the evidence of sexism in the literary works of C. S. Lewis. Lewis’s relationships with women in his personal life were often estranged, and his works frequently display a predominant view of women as inferior. Each of Lewis’s major fictional works shows evidence of sexism, though such evidence lessens in frequency and prominence with each subsequent work. Lewis’s opinion and portrayal of women did change with his marriage to Joy Davidman Gresham, though his fiction never achieved a complete lack of prejudice against women.

Amongst Women”: O’Brien, Beckett, And The Magdalen “Réamhscéal, Tiffany N. Manning

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

It is hard to escape the portrayal of what twentieth century life might have been like for a penitent living in one of Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries. With its saturation in contemporary pop culture, the morality of these Irish Institutions has been called into question through blockbuster films and best-selling books. However, some believe that the many public representations of the Magdalen Laundries fail to tell the whole story. As tension surrounding Magdalen Laundries, as well as Church and State involvement in them, has continuously grown over the last couple of decades, many citizens of Ireland and, indeed, the world have …