Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Restorative Practices In English Language Arts: My Journey Towards Linguistic Justice, Ariana Skeese

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

In this final portfolio, I examine anti-racist pedagogy in English Language Arts Education.

Pedagogy, Sexual Violence, And Contemporary Extremist Films: Baise-Moi (2000), Irréversible (2002), And Promising Young Woman (2020), Olivia Harris

All Theses

Baise-moi (dir. Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, 2000), Irréversible (dir. Gaspar Noé, 2002), and Promising Young Woman (dir. Emerald Fennell, 2020) embody characteristics of the extreme. Working from James Quandt’s formative writing in 2004, I define extremism as the purposeful inclusion of transgressive themes and situations. However, each of the selected films portrays the extreme under different production styles, aesthetics, and modes of storytelling. My connections to early exploitation film (a precursor to extremist cinema) demonstrate the genre’s important history of teaching and educating. Similar to the original intent of classical exploitation films, which taught spectators about taboo topics …

Loving Blackness: A Sense Experience, Ricardo J. Millhouse

Feminist Pedagogy

The late bell hooks framed feminist pedagogies as a set of practices and systems that provide a description of feminism, a feminist learning environment, and ways to cultivate a community that is ready for feminist instruction. Using intersectionality, hooks (1992) discussed “loving blackness” as a representational and destabilizing practice to de-center whiteness. hooks (1992, 20) writes, “loving blackness as a political resistance transforms our ways of looking and being, and thus creates conditions necessary for us to move against the forces of domination and death and reclaim black life.” I propose a black feminist praxis teaching tool, “a sense experience,” …

An Arbitrary Aesthetic: Cultural Reproduction And Hegemonic Canonical Formations In The Western Theatrical Academy, Sim C. Rivers

Theses and Dissertations

Theatre as an artistic practice has often been celebrated as an art of and for the people, being a modality that in theory the common person has access to learn, explore and experience. In recent years I have become preoccupied with the growing rarification and privileging of this art form, particularly in how it is cognized and taught in the academic world. As such, I set out to investigate the mechanisms at work at levels structural, artistic, and personal that determine how theatre is taught and understood within the western academy.

This thesis seeks to examine and unpack the perceived …

Sharing Walks As A Witnessing Practice: Exploring Movement-Based Pedagogies, Catalina Hernandez-Cabal

Feminist Pedagogy

How we walk—or our inability to do so—is telling of who we have been. I propose this simple movement practice as a pedagogical engagement with the concept of faithful witnessing, which refers to attending to modes of power unbalance that might go unnoticed, and to people's creative and resistant possibilities (Lugones, 2003; Figueroa-Vásquez, 2015). This activity is suggested to provoke reflections about how we understand and experience social difference and power unbalances. The work introduces a simple score (a creative prompt) to explore walking-with others, creating instructions to teach others our movement, learning others', and delving into conversations concerning the …

A Transgressive Pedagogy Of Tenderness In Hybrid Education, April M. Jones, Stephanie Anne Shelton

Feminist Pedagogy

In the midst of the dual/dueling pandemics COVID-19 and anti-Black racism, the instructors considered how best to have the course requirements for a qualitative research course meet students' personal and academic needs, while managing students' and their own exhaustion and fear. Through hybrid Zoom-based focus groups, instructors and students applied a "pedagogy of tenderness" that centered care and humanity as essential to classroom interactions and learning.

Archiving Feminist Truth In Trump’S Wake Of Lies, Julie Shayne

Humboldt Journal of Social Relations

This article is about an assignment I do in one of my Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies social movement classes. I revised the assignment the first time teaching the class after Trump lost the 2020 election. For the assignment, students work in groups to research local feminist and gender justice organizations and deposit all of their original materials – recordings, photos, flyers, etc. – into a digital, open access archive I co-created several years ago with librarians and staff on my campus. In 2021 I had my students do the “post-Trump” edition where they researched local organizations about how their …

Becoming A Fan: Reinventing, Repurposing, And Resisting In First-Year Composition, Keshia Mcclantoc

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis explores the cultural and pedagogical potential of the fanfiction community. The practices of recursive peer feedback, reinvention as invention, and production of subversive narratives via repurposing posits the fanfiction community a democratic space where a myriad of identities can react to, interact with, and disseminate information in a productive learning community. During a time when socio-political interactions are so intense, it is necessary that teachers of composition and rhetoric pay attention to learning communities where democratic deliberation is promoted through the production and sharing of writing. Ultimately, this thesis argues that reinvention and repurposing within the fanfiction community …

Insurgent Knowledge: The Poetics And Pedagogy Of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, And Adrienne Rich In The Era Of Open Admissions, Danica B. Savonick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Insurgent Knowledge analyzes the reciprocal relations between teaching and literature in the work of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, and Adrienne Rich, all of whom taught in the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) educational opportunity program at the City University of New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drawing on archival research and analysis of their published work, I show how feminist aesthetics have shaped U.S. education (especially student-centered pedagogical practices) and how classroom encounters with students had a lasting impact on our postwar literary landscape and theories of difference. My project demonstrates how, …

Teaching Critical Looking: Pedagogical Approaches To Using Comics As Queer Theory, Ashley Manchester

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Given the challenging depth of queer theoretical concepts, this article argues that one of the most effective ways to teach the complexities of queer theory is by utilizing comics in the classroom. I focus on how college-level instructors can use the content, form, and history of comics to teach students how to enact and do queer theory. By reading and making comics, students learn concrete and theoretical tools for combatting oppressive discourses and modes of meaning making. Teaching comics as queer theory promotes both innovative critical thinking and critical looking skills by centralizing both the rich history of queer comics …

Rhetoric As Inquiry: Personal Writing And Academic Success In The English Classroom, Erica E. Rogers

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Holistic and critical pedagogy, an approach to learning and teaching, integrates the everyday realities students live, with the systemic and institutional objectives of education itself. Working with theories from composition, rhetoric, feminist studies, and cognitive psychology from a teacher-researcher perspective, this dissertation explores and theorizes holistic, critical pedagogy within the composition classroom while outlining the use of personal writing as a means to develop critical consciousness. Student study participants kept “Inquiry Notebooks,” semester-long personal writing projects that served as receptacles for practical and theoretical engagement with a variety of texts and ideas, then interviewed after the course to discuss their …

Queer Pedagogical Desire: A Study Guide, Matt Brim

Publications and Research

This essay explores the queer pedagogical desires that attended my writing of the Study Guide for the documentary film United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (Jim Hubbard, 2012). The analysis takes up Robyn Wiegman’s central question in Object Lessons, “What is it we expect our relationship to our objects of study to do?”, which is of particular importance to the discipline of queer studies insofar as the field is oriented around the desire to meld social justice with critical pedagogy. The queer professor’s desire in the case of the Study Guide-as-object was to create a text that …