Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Performing Stereotypical Tropes On Social Media Sites: How Popular Latina Performers Reinscribe Heteropatriarchy On Instagram, Ariana Arely Cano

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This research analyzed three Latina social media celebrities’ self-presentations on Instagram and focused on whether or not the content they published potentially challenges or simply perpetuates stereotypical tropes of Latinas found in mainstream media. This qualitative study took an Ideological Critical approach through a textual analysis that was informed by Feminist Theory. More specifically the research focused on: What were Latina social media celebrities self-presentations on Instagram that characterize what a Latina is? How were Latina social media celebrities self-presentations different from or similar to, mainstream stereotypical tropes for Latinas? Lastly, how do the Latina social media celebrities’ self-presentations compare …

Book Review: Mai N. Moua (2017). The Bride Price: A Hmong Wedding Story. Minnesota Historical Society Press. 240 Pp. Isbn: 978-1681340364, Kong Pheng Pha

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

Book reviewed by Kong Pheng Pha: Mai N. Moua (2017). The Bride Price: A Hmong Wedding Story. Minnesota Historical Society Press.

Un/Dead Animal Art: Ethical Encounters Through Rogue Taxidermy Sculpture, Miranda Niittynen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Beginning in 2004, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists began an art movement of taxidermied animal sculptures that challenged conventional forms of taxidermied objects massively produced and displayed on an international scale. In contrast to taxidermied ‘specimens’ found in museums, taxidermied ‘exotic’ wildlife decapitated and mounted on hunters' walls, or synthetic taxidermied heads bought in department stores, rogue taxidermy artists create unconventional sculptures that are arguably antithetical to the ideologies shaped by previous generations: realism, colonialism, masculinity. As a pop-surrealist art movement chiefly practiced among women artists, rogue taxidermy artists follow an ethical mandate to never kill animals for the …

The Politics Of Wounds, Jonathan Nash

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What configuration of strategies and discourses enable the white male and settler body politic to render itself as simultaneously wounded and invulnerable? I contextualize this question by reading the discursive continuities between Euro-America’s War on Terror post-9/11 and Algeria’s War for Independence. By interrogating political-philosophical responses to September 11, 2001 beside American rhetoric of a wounded nation, I argue that white nationalism, as a mode of settler colonialism, appropriates the discourses of political wounding to imagine and legitimize a narrative of white hurt and white victimhood; in effect, reproducing and hardening the borders of the nation-state. Additionally, by turning to …

Graphic Representations Of Grammatical Gender In Spanish Language Anarchist Publications, Mariel Mercedes Acosta Matos

Publications and Research

This paper offers a descriptive analysis of the suffixes -@, -x, -e and other orthographic innovations as transgressions to the genderedness of Spanish language. First I discuss the grammatical rules of expressing gender in Spanish and a summary of the ongoing debates concerning linguistic sexism and androcentrism in Spanish language. Then I present some examples of the gender neutral suffixes drawn from articles found in 3 “Do It Yourself” journals published online by three anarchist collectives in Latin America.

Queer Terror: Life, Death, And Desire In The Settler Colony, C. Heike Schotten

C. Heike Schotten

Waging War On The Womb: Women’S Bodies As Nationalist Symbols And Strategic Victims Of Violence In Susan Abulhawa’S Mornings In Jenin, Noora Badwan

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Nationalism is a patriarchal construct that clearly delineates women’s roles in the social structure, and assigns female bodies specific roles in the nationalist, social, and political narratives, albeit passive ones; ironically, as integral to nationalism as women are, they are only ever pawns used by the state, never equal participants. They are often assigned the role of the mother figure who produces new citizens to populate the nation and who are expected to raise them to be “good citizens” and offer them up to the state as potential tools. The mother figure is a nationalist icon who is also often …

Toward Culturally Competent Archival (Re)Description Of Marginalized Histories, Annie Tang, Dorothy Berry, Kelly Bolding, Rachel E. Winston

Library Presentations, Posters, and Audiovisual Materials

Influenced by the radical archives movement, panelists discuss their (re)processing projects for which they wrote or rewrote descriptions in culturally competent approaches. Their case studies include materials regarding underrepresented peoples and historically oppressed groups who are marginalized from or maligned in the archival record. Targeted to processors, this session aims to teach participants to apply their cultural competencies in writing finding aids through an introduction to cultural competency framework, the case study examples, and a short audience-participation exercise.

“María Llena Eres De Gracia” Y Una Desconocida: La Fortaleza Del Espíritu Humano, Yaakov Oliveira

Best Integrated Writing

The compassion for, and understanding of, The Other, without bias, is the most revealing attribute of this paper. Given that immigration, and undocumented people constantly coming to the US, has become a national issue, it is inspiring to see that there still are ways of evaluating the problematic--with objectivity--yet with admiration. This writer is capable of seeing with the inner eyes, perceiving the colloquialisms of the Spanish language, the traits of the culture, and the emotion of both narratives that he is comparing. At the end of the day, film and art remain as the bridge between cultures.

Best Integrated Writing 2018 - Complete Edition

Best Integrated Writing

Best Integrated Writing includes excellent student writing from Integrated Writing courses taught at Wright State University. The journal is published annually by the Wright State University Department of English Language and Literatures.

Will To Remember: Counter-Archives In The Work Of Alvarez, Danticat, And Díaz, Megan Elizabeth Feifer

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues the essays, fiction, non-fiction, and non-profit work of authors Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, and Junot Díaz produce counter-narratives that when assembled, create a counter-archive of the Rafael Leonidas Trujillo dictatorship and its lasting effects. To support this claim, I analyze the various genres and medias they employ throughout the late 20^thand early 21^st centuries as redressing not only the “official” state history of the dictatorship, but also the overarching construction of history with a capital “H”. Through a close reading of form and the thematic concerns present in their work, I demonstrate how they …

Creating Herstory: Female Rebellion In Arundhati Roy’S "The God Of Small Things" And "The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness", Priyanka Tewari

Theses and Dissertations

In The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness novels, the author Arundhati Roy is not only attempting to give feminist weight to the multiplicity of locations in which gender is articulated by recasting her female characters in their quest for selfhood, she is also focusing on women and women-identified characters as agents of history, thereby contributing to an ongoing project of feminist historiography.

Refusing To Be Made Whole: Disability In Contemporary Black Women's Writing, Anna Hinton

English Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation argues that disability profoundly shapes the thematic and aesthetic choices of black women writing in the post-Brown era, despite arguments that suggest the contrary. For instance, Gayl Jone’s Corregidora is told from the first-person perspective of a black woman diagnosed as insane and incarcerated in a psychiatric prison for murder. The use of the first-person results in what I argue, building on Michael Berube’s work, is a disabled text. Moreover, a through the protagonist’s story, a stark critique of misogynoir and ableism emerges. Thus, while taking seriously disability studies scholars’ arguments that African American writers and activists …

The Journey Of An Emotional Black Boy, Alonzo Elias

Philosophy Summer Fellows

The title of my project is "Emotional Nigga" a.k.a. "Emotional Black Boy" because people would be comfortable if I called it so. The audience for this project may want to think of it this way. The title I chose is meant to express the struggles I faced in my journey to self-awareness. I decided to share my story through fifteen topics, which have brought me a better understanding of myself and will hopefully help the audience as well. These topics are Self-Love, Prelude: Intimacy and Attachment Theory, Relationships, Sex, Beauty, Sexuality, Love, Self-Love, Spirituality, Religion, Astrology, Psychology, Self-Care, and Life. …

Understanding The American Subaltern: An Exploration Of Complex Literary Characters Through Socio-Cultural Lenses, Sophie Gioffre

English Summer Fellows

This project involves the analysis of three novels — Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Ann Petry’s The Street, and Toni Morrison’s Sula — featuring main characters who are forced to navigate realistic socio-economic environments rooted in racist, sexist, and classist systems of oppression in the United States of America. Through the process of completing close-readings of the novels, conducting extensive secondary research on historical contexts, and examining other scholarly criticisms and interpretations of these novels, I develop new insights into the main characters’ plights. To transfer this conceptual understanding into a more personal and empathetic …

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 …

Kiskeyanas Valientes En Este Espacio: Dominican Women Writers And The Spaces Of Contemporary American Literature, Isabel R. Espinal

Doctoral Dissertations

We can learn and gain a lot by putting Dominican women writers at the center of our attention. Yet they rarely have that place. This dissertation looks at Dominican women authors who have lived and written in the United States —Josefina Báez, Marianela Medrano, Yrene Santos, Aurora Arias, Nelly Rosario, Annecy Báez, Ana Maurine Lara, Raquel Cepeda— and how they fit within the spaces of contemporary American society, and more broadly within world flows of peoples and cultural productions. I draw on the theories and methodologies of Gloria Anzaldúa and her generation of feminists of color, as well as subsequent …

Relations Of Discriminatory Experiences And Marianismo Beleifs With Ptsd Symptoms In Latinx Women, Claire Maria Bird

Master's Theses (2009 -)

Research examining the discriminatory experiences of Latinx women in minimal. The present study examined if various forms of discrimination predicted mental health symptoms in a sample of Latinx women, with the conceptualization of chronic discrimination as a possible form of trauma. There is evidence showing that Latinx individuals are at risk to develop posttraumatic stress disorder at higher rates than their non-Hispanic White counterparts, with many studies pointing to the experiences of racial/ethnic discrimination as a significant contributor (Kaczkurkin, Asnaani, Hall-Clark, Peterson, Yarvis, & Foa, 2016). Given the multiple forms of discrimination that women of color experience, ethnic discrimination, sexism, …

The Impact Of The Number Of Dual Enrollment Credits On Racial Minority Students’ Completion Time At Five Virginia Community Colleges, Elizabeth Gardiner Dingess

Educational Foundations & Leadership Theses & Dissertations

The five-year college completion rate for students of color can be 15-20% lower than it is for White students (Fink, Jenkins, & Yanaglura, 2017). Dual enrollment courses have been researched as a predictor of college completion (Taylor, 2015), but fewer racial minority students enroll in dual enrollment courses; this enrollment disparity affects their college preparedness skills and may lead to lower college persistence and graduation rates (Evenbeck & Johnson, 2012). Despite the benefits dual enrollment courses could provide to racial minority students, few studies have examined the differences in college completion outcomes between racial minority and majority dual enrollment students …

Risk And Resiliency Factors Affecting The College Adjustment Of Students With Intersectional Ethnocultural Minority And Lgbtq Identities, Stacey Christina Fernandes

Counseling & Human Services Theses & Dissertations

Adjustment to college has been demonstrated to be a multifaceted process with several developmental challenges for young adults entering higher education. As colleges and universities in the United States increase in racial and ethnocultural diversity and as LGBTQ students become more visible on campus, it has become crucial to cater support services and interventions to their specific needs. This study used archival data to examine the relationships between gender identity, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, risk and resilience factors, and college adjustment in a sample of treatment-seeking students at four-year institutions nationwide. The data were analyzed using three three-way multivariate analyses of …

Race And Gender In (Re)Integration Of Victim-Survivors Of Csec In A Community Advocacy Context, Joshlyn Lawhorn

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I use feminist ethnography at a nonprofit organization to analyze the racialized gender in (re)integration of victim-survivors of commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC). Critical race feminism and intersectionality are the theoretical frameworks to guide the analysis of community advocacy. The analysis considers two themes with various subsections that capture CSEC at the site. The first theme analyzes the definition, challenges, coordination and rhetoric of reintegration at the site. The second theme highlights the site’s racial identity, Black victimhood of victim-survivors of CSEC in the context of community, and racialized gender within reintegration. I discuss the strategic …

Jarrod Hayes. Queer Roots For The Diaspora: Ghosts In The Family Tree. Ann Arbor: U Of Michigan P, 2016., Annie De Saussure

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Jarrod Hayes. Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts in the family tree. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. 325 pp.

«NãO Há Lugar Para Mim
 Na Casa De Deus?»: Identidade E Espiritualidade De LéSbicas Brasileiras Na RegiãO Kanto, JapãO, Nilta Dias

Conexión Queer: Revista Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Teologías Queer

Many Japanese Brazilian immigrants in Japan question their own ethnic, cultural and national identity. Considering the sexual diversity, many queer Brazilian immigrants add to this dilemma the question of sexuality. Living in the diaspora, many people —especially in times of difficulty— usually turn to friends or take refuge in religion. How do society and religious institutions in Japan —both Christian and non-Christian— treat queer people, especially women, and their spirituality? The purpose of this article is analyze the social and religious reality that —directly or indirectly— influences the life of queer Brazilian women in the Kanto region of Japan.

I Got Hot Sauce In My Bag: Understanding Black Feminism Through The Lens Of Beyoncé’S Pop Culture Performance, Kathryn M. Butterworth

Honors Projects

In this paper I argue that Beyoncé’s visual album, Lemonade, functions as a textual hybrid between poetry, surrealist aesthetics and popular culture—challenging the accepted understanding of cultural production within academia. Furthermore, Lemonade centers black life while presenting mainstream audiences with poetry and avant-garde imagery that challenge dominant views of black womanhood. Using theorists bell hooks, Stuart Hall, Patricia Hill-Collins and Audre Lorde, among others, I argue that Beyoncé’s work challenges the understanding of artistic production while simultaneously fitting within a long tradition of black feminist cultural production.

Mutual Vulnerability And Intergenerational Healing: Black Women Hbcu Students Writing Memoir, Zelda Lockhart

Expressive Therapies Dissertations

This qualitative phenomenological study sought to gain insight into the unique experiences of Black women students who were writing memoir toward the goal of self-definition in a Black feminist learning environment at a Historically Black College/University (HBCU). Two teaching methods included personal plot (an extension of expressive writing that offers writing prompts for emotional closure), and biblio-fusion (a combination of expressive writing and bibliotherapy) (Lockhart, 2017a; 2017b). Interviews were conducted with six Black women participants and triangulated against their personal essays and online journal responses. Personal plot, a form of narrative analysis was used to construct paragraphs on what each …

Radical Social Ecology As Deep Pragmatism: A Call To The Abolition Of Systemic Dissonance And The Minimization Of Entropic Chaos, Arielle Brender

Student Theses 2015-Present

This paper aims to shed light on the dissonance caused by the superimposition of Dominant Human Systems on Natural Systems. I highlight the synthetic nature of Dominant Human Systems as egoic and linguistic phenomenon manufactured by a mere portion of the human population, which renders them inherently oppressive unto peoples and landscapes whose wisdom were barred from the design process. In pursuing a radical pragmatic approach to mending the simultaneous oppression and destruction of the human being and the earth, I highlight the necessity of minimizing entropic chaos caused by excess energy expenditure, an essential feature of systems that aim …

“Unwanted In My Own Country”: Testimonies Of Identity And Belonging-Negotiations In A Post-Trump America, Nadia Naghedi Baradaran Hajjar

Master's Theses

This research investigates the impact of Donald Trump’s campaign during the 2016 presidential elections and the so-called, “Muslim” Travel Ban presidential executive orders, on communities of first and second-generation Middle Eastern, Muslim immigrant women in the Los Angeles area, and it is framed within the context of post 9/11-biases and racial discrimination. The ethnographic-like methodology for this research has been conducted with the use of 11 semi-structured in-depth interviews from 2017 that have been transcribed and coded. Findings from the interview data shows that there is a varied amount of responses from the 2016 Presidential Elections and travel ban, however, …

We Are A Fantasia: Violence, Belonging, And Potentiality In Transgender Latina Sexual Economies, Andrea Bolivar

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation ethnographically centers the lives of sex working transgender Latinas in Chicagoland. Based on 14 months of research collected between June 2015 and August 2016, I introduce "fantasia" as a racialized queer analytic to illustrate the unique ways in which transgender Latinas are objectified, racialized, and dehumanized in sexual economies of labor and in U.S. nation more broadly. Fantasia conveys trans Latinas' sexual otherness on account of their race and gender. They are imagined as hypersexual because they are Latinas, and fetishized because they are transgender women. Fantasia also indexes their ephemeral presence--they are always at risk of disappearing …

East Asian "China Doll" Or "Dragon Lady"?, Joey Lee

Bridges: An Undergraduate Journal of Contemporary Connections

This paper argues that the representation of East Asian women in popular media is harmful through its exaggerated portrayal of the ‘China Doll’, and ‘Dragon Lady’, ultimately further exoticizing and dehumanizing East Asian women, ensuring the dominance of the West. I will study these portrayals and their impacts through historical and modern film, modern magazines, and intersectional oppression that the restrictive categorizations place upon women of East Asian descent.

Intersectional Experiences: White And Black Deaf Lesbians In Metro Dc 1980 - 2000, Paige E. Watson

Undergraduate University Honors Capstones

This study looks at the experiences of two groups with intersecting identities: white and Black Deaf lesbians who lived in Washington, DC from the 1980s to the early 2000s, a transformative period for lesbians. During the 1980s, the larger LGBT community united as one to push for recognition. The 1990s brought the lesbian feminist movement, and with it attention towards classism and sexism within the LGBT movement. During this period, the focus of the lesbian community shifted from a white and middle-class movement to a more inclusive one. However, even with this attention and the eventual fracturing of the LGBT …