Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Mothering As Feminism, Meera Patel

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This critical essay proposes the concept of mothering-as-feminism, with the intention of interrogating American ideals of mothering and caregiving. Reforming the way we view mothering, as it relates to feminism, requires a re-evaluation of the American role of women and mothers—and how they are portrayed (and therefore seen and understood), valued, and supported. Focusing on the evolution of feminist theory throughout the past 70 years, as well as personal and secondary experiences, I demonstrate how political and social change occurs generationally and is dependent on the education of our children. Ultimately, I show the important role children’s literature plays …

The Dark House And Its Inhabitants, Emily Bielski

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

From the inception of the genre, Gothic horror has been fixated on the domestic space in distress. This essay explores domestic archetypes and roles of the Gothic novel, serving as a “tour of the house”, analyzing the iconography of the dark castle, and how it externalizes and exacerbates the fears and behaviors of its inhabitants. The power dynamic of the household is starkly divided by the expectations and authority of masculine and feminine figures. In turn the “house” becomes a vehicle for the anxieties of the inhabitants—both experienced and inflicted—regarding gender, sexuality, isolation, and abuse. Exploration of the visual and …

Lady Killers: Depictions Of Gendered Subjective Violence In Audition, Alexandra Rigby

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will examine the depiction of Asami as a female antagonist figure in the 2001 film adaptation of the novel Audition directed by Miike Takashi and adapted from the 1997 novel of the same name by Japanese horror author Murakami Ryū. By considering the differences in her original portrayal and how the language of film changes the presentation of Murakami’s female antagonist, this project aims to analyze how Murakami and the directors who choose to adapt his works approach depicting acts of violence committed by women in a genre inundated with male-coded violence against female-coded characters. The existing framework …

Because Potato, Candice Evers

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This thesis project explores the phenomenological qualities of the internet; asking, since the internet is difficult to grasp, what other modes of investigation might we have available? Using an investigative framework set forth by Jack Halberstam, this thesis declines to come to knowledge solely through understanding the formal, the structural, the highly visible and mainstream. The literature that I have gathered provides a range of modes for interrogating the simultaneously central and inconsequential subject of my thesis itself: the potato. Juxtaposing the physical, political and material conditions of the potato the internet’s least academic mode of knowing: the meme. Analyzing …

Superficial: An Exploration Of Decoration, Fashion, Taste, Camp, And Trends, Jillian Ohl

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

Since the rise of consumer culture in the late 19th century, Americans have had a complicated relationship with decorative objects, the idea of taste, and the cycle of trends within our classist society. This essay examines some of the decorative objects in my childhood home such as patterned wallpaper and an antique chair as well as a contemporary brand name mascara. While these objects do not have major functional properties, their decoration and superficiality bring me joy. To better understand my appreciation of decoration and aesthetics, I assess how an object or fashion is considered in good or bad taste. …

Crystal Queer: Fracturing The Binaries Of Matter, Creation, And Landscape, Sarah Knight

Graduate School of Art Theses

In this thesis, I compile a series of fragments consisting an analysis of my artwork in the gendered contexts of landscape, self-identity, mythology, and philosophy. I develop my concept of a “queer mark” in my art that serves as a form of queering, a disruption of visual and conceptual cohesion. I form a picture of how our contemporary selves are influenced by our gendered understanding of the landscape through the analysis of philosophical, artistic, and mythological concepts of creation. I see my sculptures as an atlas to an alternative means of understanding identity, a queering of these historical and exclusionary …

Big Girl | Little Girl, Emily Mueller

Graduate School of Art Theses

In my thesis document, I unpack the relationship of my photographs to space, bodies, language, and childhood through a feminist lens. The interaction with these various aspects alludes to larger societal structures that inform identity. I am interested in the negotiation between gender and the way it informs the occupation of space, both photographic and physical. The intersection between subjects and objects is dissected using the definitions of these terms set forth by Judith Butler. Becoming a subject does not indicate that one is free from the power that creates it. The figure in my photographs wonders if attempting to …

In A Child's Place: Centering Black Girlhood In Black Feminisms Through The Bildungsroman, Taylor L. Bailey

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

This thesis examines the effects of misogynoir— a specific form of oppression Black women experience due to the intersection of being deemed inferior in both race and gender— on the development of Black girlhood. In Black feminist theory and criticism, though, the language used often subordinates Black girls and does not ascribe adequate import to their experiences. Using the Black girl bildungsroman, specifically The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson, as a way to survey the effects of misogynoir and the significance of homosocial, intraracial bonding, I argue that Black feminisms should center Black girlhood …

I'M Sorry For Everything, Hille Sennott

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My work is rooted in the fact that women are practically conditioned to apologize for everything, and tells the intimate story of my life. By recording my apologies for several months and deeply examining my behavior, I noticed themes and made work based on these — work that exposed my private moments. I noticed a disconnect between times I needed to apologize, and this compulsive need to take on the blame for every little thing. I examine the feminine battle of soft and strong, eventually coming to the conclusion that there are occasions calling for both. Women are taught to …

Light On, Baby. No Future, Shane Dollinger

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This project is a realistic depiction of the circularity of experience. As Images of ourselves and our experiences become increasingly inescapable, the repetitive and nonlinear nature of those experiences is amplified. This issue is explored in looking at contemporary artists/filmmakers whose handling of inundation in representation and narrative distinctly embraces multiplicity. Queering structures of representation, the work holds a mirror to the way that we experience living, encountering images, narrative structures and memories.

Mr. Jonathan P. Berger: Gentle Conflations, Jonathan Patrick Berger, Mr. Jonathan P. Berger

Graduate School of Art Theses

Sentimentality is a critical aspect of human existence because it is human-natural, agendered, and provides ground for gentle conflation of the domestic sphere and the roles within it. As an artist, I am able to utilize sentimentality to open possibilities and welcome, instead of molest, viewers into contemplation with the assumed norms of domesticity.

With its origins founded in the Age of Enlightenment, sentimentality was a praiseworthy endeavor, one based on intelligence and contemplation. I define sentimentality as the emotional intellect’s way of encoding or decoding the soft emotions surrounding and within objects, people, times or ideas. Soft emotions are …

A Borrowed Language, Yvonne Osei

Graduate School of Art Theses

Art has the potency of mediation: bridging human differences, questioning voids in historical trajectories, negotiating spaces of relevance, and most importantly, being signifiers that embody the absent. I speak in a borrowed language, a multilingual visual tongue, inspired by a culmination of Western and African Art modes of practices to create charged platforms for multicultural communication.

My art presents visual portals that allow for intercultural and interracial mingling as issues of colorism, present-day colonialism, gender inequality and the politics of dress are foregrounded for collective deliberation. The essence of the work is often activated and brought to its full potential …

Pageant: Manufactured Beauty, Caitlin Penny

Graduate School of Art Theses

Pageant: Manufactured Beauty explores why the female body is abject and how that body is mitigated through sexually objectifying images. This paper discusses how the female body has been objectified in order to “correct” the elements of the body that are considered abject, through an exploration of psychological studies, philosophy and analysis of contemporary art and popular culture.

The effects of these images on the women who view them is often a desire to conform their own bodies to the images in order to gain social acceptance. Clothing and the decoration of the body, it is argued, are the methods …

Desire And Fantasy: The Conditions Of Reality Between The Self And The Other, Raleigh M. Gardiner

Graduate School of Art Theses

The human condition is constituted by the fluctuating operations of desire and fantasy, which emerge in response to one's fundamental differentiation between 'Self' and 'Other.' As infants, we exist in an expansive realm of sensational “sameness” with the world around us; but as we develop, we quickly learn to differentiate between our internal and external worlds, and are forced to divide and organize our once primordial experience of unity on the basis of isolated exclusion of difference. As we slip into the structures of our social and cultural reality, we absorb language, and are taught to construct our own identities …

Women Scholars, Social Science Expertise, And The State, Mary Ann Dzuback

Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Research

Building on scholarship on academic women and the (gendered) institutional constraints they faced, this article explores different trajectories in the careers of academic women economists in the United States, and their efforts to pursue research, establish their authority and influence public policy. It argues that, despite the obstacles, such women were still able to use their new knowledge to influence the development of the welfare state. This study provides new insights into women’s efforts to pursue research and establish their authority, indicative of the interweaving of gendered conceptions of knowledge and research as well as work. It particularly highlights differences …

Gender, Professional Knowledge, And Institutional Power: Women Social Scientists And The Research University, Mary Ann Dzuback

Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Research

Although US universities in the early twentieth century offered the promise of meritocratic entry into the academic profession via the graduate training they provided, they did not fulfill that promise for women. Most women who trained for the PhD in social sciences—the focus of this chapter—and who remained in academia could only find positions in colleges. There they pursued scholarship, teaching, and service, the three central activities of the professional scholar, but found themselves restricted by the expectations of large teaching loads, limited resources, and lack of opportunity to train graduate students in these largely teaching institutions. Yet even in …

Berkeley Women Economists, Public Policy, And Civic Sensibility, Mary Ann Dzuback

Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Research

Book chapter "Berkeley Women Economists, Public Policy, and Civic Sensibility," from Civic and Moral Learning in America, edited by Donald Warren and John Patrick, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

From its formative years to the present, advocates of various persuasions have written and spoken about the country's need for moral and civic education. Responding in part to challenges posed by B. Edward McClellan, this book offers research findings on the ideas, people, and contexts that have influenced the acquisition of moral and civic learning in the America.

Apocalyptic Empathy: A Parable Of Postmodern Sentimentality, Rebecca A. Wanzo

Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Research

This essay analyzes the relationship between feelings and politics in Octavia E. Butler's novels "Parable of the Sower" and "Parable of the Talents." Comparison of the sentimentalism approach used by the author and Harriet Beecher Stowe in the novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin"; Characteristics of Butler's novels which are categorize as postmodernism; Significance of feeling of the novels' heroines to political activism.

Creative Financing In Social Science: Women Scholars And Early Research, Mary Ann Dzuback

Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Research

Book chapter "Creative Financing in Social Science: Women Scholars and Early Research" from Women and Philanthropy in Education, edited by Andrea Walton, published by Indiana University Press.

Gender And The Politics Of Knowledge, Mary Ann Dzuback

Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Research

Contentious public debates about women's rational and moral capacity circulated during the European Enlightenment at the same time that science was emerging as a dominant mode of inquiry. As historian Karen Offen argues in European Feminisms, these debates preoccupied both men and women intellectuals of the middling and upper classes and represented a pivotal moment in the three-century campaign to rearticulate a politics of knowledge proclaiming women as deserving as men of formal schooling at all levels. Disputes about women's capabilities emerged in the context of efforts to redefine the rights and privileges of men, of male intellectuals to reassert …

Professionalism, Higher Education, And American Culture: Burton J. Bledstein's The Culture Of Professionalism, Mary Ann Dzuback

Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Research

Burton Bledstein classed his book The Culture of Professionalism with the work of the giants in American academik history. He suggested that his theory of the culture of professionalism ranked in significance with Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, Charles A. Beard's industrialization theories, and Perry Miller's analysis of Puritanism. Bledstein's fresh historical perspective on higher education and his skepticism regarding professional authority no doubt were shaped by his experiences at elite public and private institutions, the University of California at Los Angeles (B.A., 1959) and Princeton (Ph.D., 1967). He has spent his whole professional life at one public institution, the …

Women And Social Research At Bryn Mawr College, 1915-1940, Mary Ann Dzuback

Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Research

In 1911 M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr College, faced a golden opportunity. An alumna of the college had died suddenly, leaving Bryn Mawr its largest gift since Joseph Wright Taylor's initial endowment for the establishment of the college. Emma Carola Woerishoffer's unrestricted donation provided Thomas unaccustomed freedom to expand Bryn Mawr's curriculum. In 1915 Thomas used a large portion of the bequest to establish the Graduate Department of Social Economy and Social Research for the training and certification of social workers and for the master's and doctoral education of social researchers. Bryn Mawr's department and program were unusual, …