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Full-Text Articles in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Revenge Of The Nerds: Tech Masculinity And Digital Hegemony, Benjamin M. Latini Nov 2023

Revenge Of The Nerds: Tech Masculinity And Digital Hegemony, Benjamin M. Latini

Doctoral Dissertations

Revenge of the Nerds provides a cultural history of the evolution of white nerd masculinities in American culture through interpretations of a wide variety of texts and representations using the methods of literary studies and American studies. The dissertation is organized around four overlapping stages of nerd masculinity based on changes in technology and their effects on culture, as well as white male nerds’ efforts to remain culturally relevant and gain the benefits of being close to hegemonic masculinity. The four nerd types are the computer nerd, the gamer, the gatekeeper nerd, and the maladaptive nerd which reflect the following …


A Feminist Ethnography Of Care In The Infant/Toddler Classroom, Chesley Anne Sorrells Aug 2023

A Feminist Ethnography Of Care In The Infant/Toddler Classroom, Chesley Anne Sorrells

Doctoral Dissertations

In the neoliberal context of the Global North, early care and education (ECE) is a conceptually dichotomized and stratified field, with ‘care’ widely considered to be separate from - and lesser than - ‘education.’ Feminist perspectives challenge this dichotomization by reconceptualizing care as foundational to education, centering the historically feminized ideals of emotion, relationality, and interdependence. This three-part qualitative dissertation presents the findings of an 8-month feminist ethnography of care practices in one infant/toddler classroom. Participant observation and semi-structured teacher interviews were used to explore the following research questions: 1) What are teachers’ lived experiences of care in this early …


Embodiment And Gendered Subjectivity In Ukrainian Women’S Film, Poetry, And Prose During Perestroika (1985-1991), Sandra J. Russell Oct 2022

Embodiment And Gendered Subjectivity In Ukrainian Women’S Film, Poetry, And Prose During Perestroika (1985-1991), Sandra J. Russell

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I look to Ukrainian women’s literary and filmic contributions in the final Soviet years of perestroika to recontextualize and reconsider feminist and gendered epistemologies in Eastern Europe. I view the last Soviet Ukrainian filmmakers, writers, and artists as groundbreaking in their conceptualization a new, more “liberal” vision of nation, especially through their increasingly open and subversive critiques of the Soviet state. I locate perestroika as a powerful moment in Ukraine’s histories of resistance to the weaponization of colonialist and imperialist mythologies, past and present. For women in particular, the stakes of this shifting articulation of nation became …


Defining Black Masculinities: Intersectional Analyses Of Gender, Race And Sexuality In Caribbean And Latin American Literature, 1955 To Present, Jerry Eugene Scruggs Jr. Aug 2022

Defining Black Masculinities: Intersectional Analyses Of Gender, Race And Sexuality In Caribbean And Latin American Literature, 1955 To Present, Jerry Eugene Scruggs Jr.

Doctoral Dissertations

The objective of my dissertation is to define and construct parameters for analyzing the Afro-descendant male experience in four specific texts: Mi compadre el General Sol [General Sun, My Brother] (1955), Adire y el tiempo roto [Adire and Broken Time] (1967), Sortilégio II: mistério negro de Zumbi redivivo [Sorcery 2: Black Mystery of Resurrected Zumbí] (1979), and Negro: Este color que me queda bonito [Black: This Color Looks Good on Me] (2013). Black masculinities are distinct and this study sets five parameters: 1) Sexual Prowess, 2) Contentious relationship with the White woman, 3) Violence and Toxic Masculinity, 4) Emotive Numbness, …


Sexual Harassment As A Narrative Contest, Christine Vossler Aug 2022

Sexual Harassment As A Narrative Contest, Christine Vossler

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines how stories shape both the perpetration of sexual harassment and the experiences of victims during and after sexual harassment. During and after the experience of sexual harassment, a narrative contest transpires between the harasser, victim, and others who contribute to the contest by engaging in the formal and informal conversations that follow known experiences of harassment in the workplace. I analyze 22 public statements, interviews, and investigative reports, including statements from men accused of sexual harassment, women who were sexually harassed, and bystanders. A narrative framework, including concepts of narrative believability and story credibility, is used to …


Conjuring New Worlds: Black Women’S Speculative Fiction And The Restructuring Of Blackness, Chloe Hunt May 2022

Conjuring New Worlds: Black Women’S Speculative Fiction And The Restructuring Of Blackness, Chloe Hunt

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation, Conjuring New Worlds: Black Women’s Speculative Fiction and the Restructuring of Blackness, examines Black speculative fiction as a site of theorization within worlds where Black existence has not already been pre-determined by the forces of slavery and ideologies of race and culture in a white supremacist world. In this sense, my dissertation models ways of reading Black literature that demonstrates how Blackness can disturb, rather than reproduce, notions of racial meaning and the Human. I argue that writers of Black speculative fiction go beyond the creation of alternative realities to produce sites that allow for nearly limitless …


“In The Skin I’M In…I Represent A Different Version Of What Help Looks Like:” Black Women Sport Psychology Professional’S Experiences In Applied Sport Psychology, Sharon R. Couch May 2022

“In The Skin I’M In…I Represent A Different Version Of What Help Looks Like:” Black Women Sport Psychology Professional’S Experiences In Applied Sport Psychology, Sharon R. Couch

Doctoral Dissertations

Black Feminist Applied Sport Psychology (BFASP) is a culturally inclusive theoretical framework for centering Black women’s experiences in applied sport psychology (Carter et al., 2020; Couch et al., 2022). For the past two decades, (White) Feminist applied sport psychology professionals (FASPPs) described the experiences of Black women as unique but were overlooked in research and participant pools due to the prioritization of White women's and Black male sport experiences. (Carter & Davila, 2017; Carter & Prewitt-White, 2014; Gill, 2020; Hyman et al., 2021). The purpose of this study was to explore the life and work experiences of BASPPs (i.e., faculty, …


Wild Women Do Have The Blues: The Imagery Of Vaudeville Blueswomen And Their Influences On August Wilson And Sherley Anne Williams, Fangfang Zhu Sep 2021

Wild Women Do Have The Blues: The Imagery Of Vaudeville Blueswomen And Their Influences On August Wilson And Sherley Anne Williams, Fangfang Zhu

Doctoral Dissertations

Via a synthesizing analysis of representative Vaudeville Blues songs in relation to the affiliated advertisements posted by recording labels in a major black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, in the 1920s, this dissertation project seeks to illustrate how the image of “wild” black women is presented, or performed in an ambivalent but contested space created by contending social, political, economic and cultural forces in the race record industry. Constrained by racist and sexist gaze, such presentations and performances of “wild” black women still seize rare chances to invite conscious feminist interpretations, as their “wildness” voices out female independency, assertion and …


Emerging Adults’ Experiences As Receivers Of Sexually Transmitted Infection Disclosures From Sexual Partners: A Three-Part Examination, Kayley D. Mcmahan May 2021

Emerging Adults’ Experiences As Receivers Of Sexually Transmitted Infection Disclosures From Sexual Partners: A Three-Part Examination, Kayley D. Mcmahan

Doctoral Dissertations

Each year in the United States, over 20 million cases of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are diagnosed, mostly among those in the developmental period of emerging adulthood (ages 18-29). Research on STI disclosure to romantic and sexual partners has increased over the last two decades, but this research has (a) generally lacked a developmental and theoretical focus, (b) not examined disclosure recipients, and (c) not been systematically and critically synthesized. To address these limitations, I conducted a three-part examination. First, I systematically reviewed the STI disclosure literature and summarized findings, critical limitations, and future research and intervention directions. Next, I …


Stranger Compass Of The Stage: Difference And Desire In Early Modern City Comedy, Catherine Tisdale Apr 2021

Stranger Compass Of The Stage: Difference And Desire In Early Modern City Comedy, Catherine Tisdale

Doctoral Dissertations

In periods of social and political upheaval like ours, it is more important than ever to interrogate constructions of identity and difference and to understand the histories of alterity that separate us from one another. Stranger Compass of the Stage: Difference and Desire in Early Modern City Drama reimagines the cultural and social effect of alien, foreign, and stranger characters on the early modern stage and re-envisions how these characters contribute to, alter, and imaginatively build new epistemologies for understanding difference in early modern London. Resisting the field’s current critical inclination toward English identity formation, this project works intersectionally to …


Splinters From The Bamboo Ceiling: Understanding The Experiences Of Asian American Men In Higher Education Leadership, Jerald Adamos Dec 2019

Splinters From The Bamboo Ceiling: Understanding The Experiences Of Asian American Men In Higher Education Leadership, Jerald Adamos

Doctoral Dissertations

Asian Americans continue to confront perceptions connected to the perpetual foreigner and model minority concepts which challenges their acceptance as leaders in mainstream American culture. Asian men have recently been able to attain higher levels of education that opens doors to higher level positions and organizations yet still face barriers to career advancement opportunities. In consideration of the American higher education system, Whites continue to exceed their proportional representation in areas of the institution while Asian Americans do not. The purpose of this study is to understand how the intersection of racial and gender identity has influenced leadership through the …


Narratives Of Queerness: Queer Worldmaking (In) The Classroom With Undergraduate Students, Rachel Briggs Oct 2019

Narratives Of Queerness: Queer Worldmaking (In) The Classroom With Undergraduate Students, Rachel Briggs

Doctoral Dissertations

This research brings together education research, queer theory, and performance theory to consider the worldmaking potential of the queer classroom. Using students’ stories about queerness in the classroom and my own stories about the classroom, I ask what we can learn from students’ voices about how queerness is/can be performed in the classroom and through relations. This study uses critical ethnography, personal narrative, and performative writing to examine the production of subject positions in the classroom, to connect this to a queer theoretical framework, and to explore the worldmaking potential of the classroom. I interviewed seven undergraduate students at a …


The Body (Re)Public: Women On/As The Landscape Of Modernity, From Zola’S Au Bonheur Des Dames To Varda’S Cléo De 5 À 7, Christine Gutman Oct 2019

The Body (Re)Public: Women On/As The Landscape Of Modernity, From Zola’S Au Bonheur Des Dames To Varda’S Cléo De 5 À 7, Christine Gutman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the ways in which questions of gender, space and mobility intersect in a selection of fin-de-siècle French novels and 1960s French New Wave films in an effort to discern how the representational interplay of these three elements gives allegorical form to the sociopolitical anxieties of the times in which the works were produced. Using the Paris Commune of 1871 and the protests of May ’68 as anchoring points for the two periodizations underlying my inquiry, I examine how women in the novels of Emile Zola (Au Bonheur des Dames, Nana) and Villiers de L’Isle-Adam ( …


The Politics Of Feeling And The Work Of Belonging In Us Immigrant Fiction 1990 - 2015, Lauren Silber Nov 2018

The Politics Of Feeling And The Work Of Belonging In Us Immigrant Fiction 1990 - 2015, Lauren Silber

Doctoral Dissertations

“The Politics of Feeling and the Work of Belonging in US Immigrant Fiction 1990 – 2015” presents readers with a distinct optic: if we are to fully grasp contemporary US racial politics, we must recognize the narrative work emotion performs in popular US diasporic fiction. Comparing the work of authors who have become mainstays in the multi-ethnic US literary canon such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Julia Alvarez, Junot Díaz, Lan Cao, Achy Obejas, Cristina Garcia, Kiran Desai, and Nora Okja Keller, I explicate how these popular authors exhume the complex entanglements of racialization, US empire, and global capitalism by narrating the …


Charting The Terrain Of Latina/O/X Theater In Chicago, Priscilla M. Page Nov 2018

Charting The Terrain Of Latina/O/X Theater In Chicago, Priscilla M. Page

Doctoral Dissertations

There is a rich tapestry of Latina/o/x theater in Chicago. Through in-depth interviews, I use first-voice narratives to construct four decades of Latina/o/x theater history with the artists who were founding directors and/or members of these companies: Latino Chicago, Latino Experimental Theater Company, Teatro Vista, Teatro Luna, and Urban Theater Company. My aim with this project is to listen carefully to Latina/o/x artists in Chicago so that I can play a role in amplifying their voices as they articulate their experiences in this Midwestern city they call home. I organized my findings into three chapters and have kept the artists’ …


Do Not Separate Her From Her Garden: Anne Spencer's Ecopoetics, Carlyn E. Ferrari Jul 2018

Do Not Separate Her From Her Garden: Anne Spencer's Ecopoetics, Carlyn E. Ferrari

Doctoral Dissertations

Though she is primarily associated with the New Negro Renaissance, Anne Spencer’s writing career spanned over seventy years, and her archive consists of unpublished, undated poetry and prose about the natural world written on ephemera. This project centers Spencer’s unusual archive and writing practice to demonstrate both the range of her artistry and the degree to which her relationship with the natural world informed both her poetics and sense of being. In this project, I employ “ecopoetics” as an analytical framework that both encourages exploring the place of nature in black women’s writing and facilitates the method of close-reading and …


Golden Palimpsests: America, Cervantes, And The Invention Of Modernity/Coloniality, Antonia Carcelen-Estrada Mar 2018

Golden Palimpsests: America, Cervantes, And The Invention Of Modernity/Coloniality, Antonia Carcelen-Estrada

Doctoral Dissertations

While many theories of colonial discourse emphasize an imperial power imposing its way of thinking and modes of expression onto colonial cultures and peoples, in this dissertation I consider that this imposition affects members of the colonies and the metropolis in different but related ways. In core and periphery alike, the subjects of Spanish colonialism produced documents in which we recognize overlapping, conflicting narratives. I call this strategy for narrative resistance “golden palimpsests” because, as the epigraph suggests, they appear to tell the story of donkeys covered in gold, while in fact they hide the true story of noble horses …


‘Woman Thou Art Loosed’: Black Female Sexuality Unhinged In The Fiction Of Frances Harper And Pauline Hopkins, Crystal Donkor Nov 2017

‘Woman Thou Art Loosed’: Black Female Sexuality Unhinged In The Fiction Of Frances Harper And Pauline Hopkins, Crystal Donkor

Doctoral Dissertations

Race-sex narratives that dominated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries permeated the political, scientific, and social fabric of the nation, but did not solely center on black bodies. These narratives demeaned and degraded a race of black citizens, characterizing them as sexually deviant social pariahs. Consequently, these same notions elevated whites to the highest rungs of society, marking them as moral and desirable. This crafting of racial identity acted as just one way to justify racial subordination through the creation of notions that proved detrimental to black life and worthiness. Writer-activists penning their tales of fiction after the Civil War …


The Drama Of Race: Contemporary Afro-German Theater, Jamele Watkins Jul 2017

The Drama Of Race: Contemporary Afro-German Theater, Jamele Watkins

Doctoral Dissertations

The first investigation of Afro-German theater my dissertation, “The Drama of Race,” argues that Afro-German theater empowers as Black actors take ownership of a German stage, a white German space. My dissertation highlights four crucial Afro-German plays: real life: Germany (2008), Heimat, bittersüße Heimat [Home, bittersweet Home] (2010), Also by Mail (2013), and Mais in Deutschland und anderen Galaxien [Corn in Germany and Other Galaxies] (2015). In Chapter I, I discuss the cultural conditions in which Afro-German theater emerged—after an established literary corpus by Afro-German authors. Chapter II introduces the first Afro-German play and its improvisational methods as empowering for …


The Afroethnic Impulse And Renewal: African American Transculturations In Afro-Latino Bildung Narratives, 1961 To 2013, Trent Masiki Jul 2017

The Afroethnic Impulse And Renewal: African American Transculturations In Afro-Latino Bildung Narratives, 1961 To 2013, Trent Masiki

Doctoral Dissertations

Until now, there has been little sustained critical attention to the way African American literature, history, culture, and politics influence transculturation and ethnoracial identity formation in Afro-Latino bildung narratives. This dissertation addresses that oversight. The Afroethnic Impulse and Renewal: African American Transculturations in Afro-Latino Bildung Narratives, 1961 to 2013, examines a long, but often neglected, history of intercultural affinities and literary encounters between African Americans and Afro-Latinos from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. In The Afroethnic Impulse and Renewal, I explore African American literary and cultural influences in the personal essays, memoirs, and autobiographically inspired fiction of …


Protest Lyrics At Work: Labor Resistance Poetry Of Depression-Era Autoworkers, Rebecca S. Griffin Nov 2016

Protest Lyrics At Work: Labor Resistance Poetry Of Depression-Era Autoworkers, Rebecca S. Griffin

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that scholarly inquiry into American poetry of the Great Depression is incomplete without a critical understanding of poems produced within the labor movement. Through archival research and methodologies drawn from American studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and labor history, this dissertation demonstrates that autoworkers from 1935-1941 developed a rich poetic discourse that championed their cause. Autoworker poets—including autoworker song lyricists—used humor and borrowed extensively from popular, religious, and “folk” cultures to craft their own poetic styles and trope sets. They wrote about a diverse range of topics from their hopes for the unionization movement, to scab conversions, …


Time To Leave Uchronia: Queer Eco-Temporalities For A Livable World, Claire S. Brault Nov 2015

Time To Leave Uchronia: Queer Eco-Temporalities For A Livable World, Claire S. Brault

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation is a Feminist contribution to Environmental Political Theory focused on temporality. My research investigates the tension between the urgent need to act fast in a fast-changing world, and the necessity for time to pause and think through such radical and rapid changes. As it signals our nearing the planet’s limits, the emergence of the “anthropocene” crisis challenges growth-driven “progress.” I begin this dissertation with a survey of Environmental Thought that helps situate my contribution to the ongoing debates in this field, underscoring that as ecosophers pose the question of the nonhuman, in so doing they also are confronted …


Affecting Manhood: Masculinity, Effeminacy, And The Fop Figure In Early Modern English Drama, Jessica Landis Nov 2015

Affecting Manhood: Masculinity, Effeminacy, And The Fop Figure In Early Modern English Drama, Jessica Landis

Doctoral Dissertations

This project identifies and analyzes the fop figure in early modern English drama and treats the figure as a vehicle that reveals the instability of conceptions of masculinity in the period. This project establishes a theatrical history of the character type. Although the fop did not emerge on the English stage as a stock character until late in the seventeenth century, antecedents and proto-fops appear across dramatic genres beginning in the late 1580s. Identifying these characters and deciphering their functions in plot and character development reveals, in part, how cultural anxieties about masculine codes of conduct were manifested. The project …


Antigone Claimed, "I Am A Stranger": Democracy, Membership And Unauthorized Immigration, Andres Fabian Henao Castro Nov 2014

Antigone Claimed, "I Am A Stranger": Democracy, Membership And Unauthorized Immigration, Andres Fabian Henao Castro

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation offers a new framework through which to theorize contemporary democratic practices by attending to the political agency of unauthorized immigrants. I argue that unauthorized immigrants themselves, by claiming their own ambiguous legal condition as a legitimate basis for public speech, are able to open up the boundaries of political membership and to render the foundations of democracy contingent, that is to say, they are able to reopen the question about who counts as a member of the demos. I develop this argument by way of a close reading of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone[1], which allows me to …


Transnational Gestures: Rethinking Trauma In U.S. War Fiction, Ruth A.H. Lahti Aug 2014

Transnational Gestures: Rethinking Trauma In U.S. War Fiction, Ruth A.H. Lahti

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the need to "world" our literary histories of U.S. war fiction, arguing that a transnational approach to this genre remaps on an enlarged scale the ethical implications of 20th and 21st century war writing. This study turns to representations of the human body to differently apprehend the ethical struggles of war fiction, thereby rethinking psychological and nationalist models of war trauma and developing a new method of reading the literature of war. To lay the ground for this analysis, I argue that the dominance of trauma theory in critical work on U.S. war fiction privileges the "authentic" …


“Give Light And People Will Find A Way”: Black Women College Student Leadership Experiences With Oppression At Predominantly White Institutions, Andrea D. Domingue Aug 2014

“Give Light And People Will Find A Way”: Black Women College Student Leadership Experiences With Oppression At Predominantly White Institutions, Andrea D. Domingue

Doctoral Dissertations

ABSTRACT “Give Light and People Will Find a Way”: Black Women College Student Leadership Experiences with Oppression at Predominantly White Institutions MAY 2014 ANDREA D. DOMINGUE, B.A., THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN M. A., NEW YORK UNIVERSITY Ed.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Emerita Maurianne Adams Black women college students have a collective history of marginalization and discrimination within systems of higher education (Brazzell, 1996; Turner, 2008). Unlike their White women and Black men counterparts, these women have unique social location in their racial and gender identity where they experience multiple types of oppression from dominant groups …


Effects Of Gender Bias And Gender Inversion Stereotypes On Assessment Of Personality Traits And Diagnosis Of Personality Disorders, Beatrice Charmaine Mosier Jul 2014

Effects Of Gender Bias And Gender Inversion Stereotypes On Assessment Of Personality Traits And Diagnosis Of Personality Disorders, Beatrice Charmaine Mosier

Doctoral Dissertations

Past research has shown the results of gender and gender role biases on the diagnostic decision-making process, particularly with regard to personality disorders. This bias has implications for homosexual individuals, as they often are viewed as displaying traits of opposite sex individuals. With regard to personality assessment, current research continuously supports a more dimensional conceptualization of personality pathology. In the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a hybrid model of personality assessment, which utilizes both categorical methods and dimensional approaches, has been added as an alternative model. The study explored the effects of …


Be A Man, Comrade! Construction Of The ‘Socialist Male Personality’ In The Gdr Youth Literature Of The 1950s And 1960s., Joanna Broda-Schunck Aug 2013

Be A Man, Comrade! Construction Of The ‘Socialist Male Personality’ In The Gdr Youth Literature Of The 1950s And 1960s., Joanna Broda-Schunck

Doctoral Dissertations

One of the main goals of the East German government was the education of its population towards Socialism, and the creation of the new type of human – the Neue Mensch. The belief in the possibility of molding the next generation was particularly strong in the first decades of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), – in the 1950s and the 1960s. At the same time, the leaders of the regime presented the new Socialist state as the rightful heir to the German cultural and historical traditions. Both claims were aimed at strengthening the legitimacy of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei (SED …