Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Hair Is The Root Of A Revolution: How Black Women Are Embracing Their Identity With Hair, Shanel Dawson

Capstones

For years, black women have been demeaned for their features; their noses, complexions and hair. Straight hair and wavy hair have been considered “good hair.” And for centuries these ideas have been perpetuated by images in the media, cultural messages and even policies in schools and professional settings.

Today black women, nationwide, are rejecting straightening chemicals and embracing their natural hair as a point of pride. I spoke with several black women who are attempting to distance themselves from these negative narratives by honoring their roots.

For black women in America, hair has been the easiest way to connect on …

The Vibe, Sarah P. Douglass

Capstones

The Vibe is a long-form narrative about where tech is taking the female orgasm. The piece concludes that physiological research is a required next step when creating the climax of the future.

http://sarahpdouglass.com

Graphic Activism: Lesbian Archival Library Display, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Publications and Research

This chapter outlines the implementation of Graphic Activism, an exhibition of archival material from the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the oldest and largest lesbian archive in the world, located inside the display cases of the Graduate Center library of the City University of New York. The two-semester-long display stems from an institutional need to showcase material inside of the main library display cases, and the interest of including visual representations of Women's Studies material from the collection as well as those which represent the collection. The chapter discusses collaborative relationships outside of the academic institution, pointing to select challenges when …

Bodies Of Knowledge: An Anatomy And Kinesiology Of The American Prison Nation, 'Human'-Making, And Twenty-First-Century Techno-Gods, Lyndsey Karr

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The social production of hegemonic knowledge has historically been legitimized in relation to the sanctioned status of the ‘Human’.[1] Beginning with the American Prison Industrial Complex and what sociologist Beth E. Richie conceptualizes as the “prison nation,” I will show the ‘human’ as a contingent and composite status appearing along a spectrum of Flesh, Body, and ‘Human’ (Flesh-Body-‘Human’) statuses and subjectivity.

Bringing this ‘Human’ continuum into conversation with twenty-first-century media, (micro)computational technologies, and contemporary knowledge and social economies, I expand the notion, reach, and scale of the American “prison nation.” Following Mark Hansen’s treatment of twenty-first-century digital media, I …

The Queer Allure Of Digital Sociality, Benjamin Parrish Haber

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the resonance between queer sociality and emergent forms of digital communication. Drawing from queer theory and LGBTQ social histories, this dissertation charts the convergence of digital social modulation with the polyvalence, promiscuity, and mutability of queer sociality. A close analysis of the infrastructure and design of Facebook, Snapchat, Grindr, and other queered social media platforms demonstrates how digital capitalism’s desire for lifelong compulsive engagement is in part facilitated by an appropriation of the ongoingness of queer sexuality and relationality. In highlighting the key role of temporality, aesthetic, and affect in regulating the creation and circulation of digital …

Dreams And The Maternal Imaginary: From Nostalgic Intersubjectivity To Mourning, Julie Ackerman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation concerns the history of psychoanalytic thinking about dreams. It is about both the psychic function of dreams and their theoretical function, or the function that they have served within psychoanalytic discourse. It begins with a consideration of the significance of the dream in classical thinking, where it was conceptualized as a psychic emergence in the context of maternal absence. It traces the way in which the rise of object relational paradigms led to the reconceptualization of the dream in relation to the presence of the maternal mind rather than the absence of the maternal body. It describes how …

Walking As Ontological Shifter: Thoughts In The Key Of Life, Bibi (Silvina) Calderaro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With walking as ontological shifter I pursue an alternative to the dominant modernist episteme that offers either/or onto-epistemologies of opposition and their reifying engagements. I propose this type of walking is an intentional turning towards a set of radical positions that, as integrative aesthetic and therapeutic practice, brings multiplicity and synchronicity to experience and being in an expanded sociality. This practice facilitates the conditions of possibility for recurring points of contact between the interiority perceived as ‘body’ and the exteriority perceived as ‘world.’ While making evident the self’s at once incoherence with it-self, it opens to a space beyond the …

Woman Energy: How Our Lesbian Past Informs Our Lesbian Future, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Publications and Research

Sinister Wisdom Issue 3, published the year 1977 holds an essay by poet Adrienne Rich, titled, “It is the lesbian in us...”; The cover of the same issue has art by photographer Tee Corinne. Sinister Wisdom is a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal. This non-fiction creative essay written by Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz reflects on the first year of Sinister Wisdom's publication as a celebration of 40 years through this special edition anniversary print for which only 1000 have been printed. The essay remarks on the shift in lesbian identity and community and the potential impact of the Sinister Wisdom journal …

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice Of Black Uplift, 1890–1905, Timothy M. Griffiths

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice of Black Uplift, 1890-1905 situates the queer-of-color cultural imaginary in a relatively small nodal point: the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Through literary analysis and archival research on leading and marginal figures of Post-Reconstruction African American culture, this dissertation considers the progenitorial relationship of late-nineteenth century black uplift novels to modern-day queer theory. Bricolage Propriety builds on work about the sexual politics of early African American literature begun by women-of-color feminists of the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Hazel V. Carby, Ann duCille, and Claudia Tate. A new wave of …

Thine Is The Kingdom: The Political Thought Of 21st Century Evangelicalism, Joanna Tice Jen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite renewed attention to religion and ethics in political theory, there is a notable absence of inquiry into evangelicalism. Social scientists have studied Christian right policy in the late 20th century, but how has the movement shifted in the new millennium and what are the theoretical beliefs that undergird those shifts? By reading popular devotional writings as political texts, this dissertation distills a three-part evangelical political thought: 1) a theory of time in which teleological eternity complements retroactive re-birth; 2) a theory of being wherein evangelicals learn to strive after their godly potential through a process of emotional self-regulation; and …

Beyond Vulnerability: Refugee Women’S Leadership In Jordan, Widad Hassan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While both men and women are affected by conflicts and humanitarian crises, 80 percent of the world’s refugees and internally displaced persons are women and children, indicating that women experience conflict and war differently. The emphasis on women’s vulnerability during conflicts and humanitarian crises leads to their exclusion from leadership roles and decision-making on humanitarian programs and issues that impact them. Though women experience numerous socio-cultural barriers to exercising leadership in humanitarian settings, they have taken on important roles in emergency response and in refugee camps. This paper traces the progress of UN and humanitarian agencies recognition and development of …

Cruising Borders, Unsettling Identities: Toward A Queer Diasporic Asian America, Wen Liu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I challenge the dominant conceptualization of Asian Americanness as a biological and cultural population and a cohesive racial category. Instead, I consider it as a form of flexible subjectivity and an affective emergence that occurs and materializes due to the multiple sites of convergence in the neoliberal assemblage of model minority ideology, imperialist geopolitical history, racialized queer politics, and criminal (in)justices. I examine the spatial and temporal configurations of Asian American subjectivity through a queer and postcolonial lens, first by conducting a critical historical review of the category of Asian American in the geopolitical history of psychological …

“Pay, Protection, And Professionalism”: The History Of Domestic Worker Organizing And The Future Of Home Health Care In The United States, Julia R. Gruberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With a multidisciplinary approach, I analyze the socio-economic, political, and historical factors that led to the current state of home health care in the United States. The legacy of slavery and the devaluing of so-called “women’s work” explain how the field of domestic work has been historically excluded from protection and regulation in the United States. Caring for children and keeping house have been women’s work for centuries, regardless of whether women were paid to do it or it was outsourced to an employee. Domestic work is sometimes referred to as “the work that makes all other work possible,” but …

Black Models Matter: Challenging The Racism Of Aesthetics And The Facade Of Inclusion In The Fashion Industry, Scarlett L. Newman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The global fashion market is expanding every day, but often, the global fashion runways do not reflect that reality. On average, black models make up for six percent of models used on the runway during the fashion month calendar. This small percentage is also mirrored in advertisements and editorials featured in popular fashion magazines. In the 1970s, black models were met with great opportunities, and that success trickled down into the 1980s and the 1990s. As the 90s came to a close, top designers opted for an aesthetic that ultimately excluded models of color, but black models beared the brunt …

The Sounds Of Silence; Or, Isabella’S Counter Discourse In Measure For Measure, Gina Vivona

Theses and Dissertations

This argument reshapes the thinking about masculine dominance in Measure for Measure, and considers the patriarchy as a series of socially constructed, hence artificial, rules and regulations. It also explores how Isabella’s discourse and celibacy empower her to defy the constraints of early modern paradigms and achieve individual freedom.

Transgender Rights Without A Theory Of Gender?, Paisley Currah

Publications and Research

Why do courts and legislatures ban discrimination based on gender, and increasingly, gender identity, but exempt grooming and dress codes from the protections these laws offer? I argue that culpability for the courts’ and legislatures’ defense of hegemonic gender norms cannot be assigned to transgender rights movement, as some have done. These norms do not regulate only transgender people, they are not minoritizing—and neither should be the politics that seeks to transform them. The thought experiment of this review essay was to sever the analysis of particular political strategies from various assumptions about what gender really is. Agreement on the …

Wsq: At Sea Editors' Note, Cynthia Chris, Matt Brim

Publications and Research

This Editor's Note introduces the WSQ issue "At Sea" co-edited by Terri Gordon-Zolov and Amy Sodaro and Shefali Chandra, which explores the sea as a gendered and radicalized site of violence.

By Beauty Damned: Millennial Feminism And The Exploitation Of Women's Empowerment In Pop Culture And Corporate Advertising, Maria L. Carreon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Feminism has become a trendy cultural identity, leaving it open to exploitation by capitalists. Notions relating to “women’s empowerment” are used by capitalists to sell products to women, and yet many of those capitalists fund political campaigns that directly seek to quash or inhibit the advancement of women’s rights. With a little effort, any consumer can find out who their big purveyors are supporting politically. For example, Procter Gamble, who makes many products bought by women, gives the majority of its political contributions to republicans who oppose women’s reproductive rights. The same is true of McAndrews & Forbes, the parent …

The Fantastic Manifesto: Monstrosity Of Memory And Epiphany Of Selfhood In The Spirit Of The Beehive (1973), Layla Blodgett Carrillo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Spanish culture of storytelling suffered under the nearly forty-year dictatorship of Francisco Franco. The government-regulated cinema welcomed propaganda and melodrama, and denied the fantastic, the legendary, and the magical. These carefully manipulated histories, which served to romanticize the ideologies of the regime, also served to eulogize the delinquent and the depraved. In the early 1970s, at the heels of the collapse of Franco’s reign, the people of Spain bore witness to a new national cinema. The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), the feature debut from Victor Erice, exists at the threshold between a storied history of Spanish dictatorship and …

Mónica Mayer: Translocality And The Development Of Feminist Art In Contemporary Mexico, Alberto Mckelligan Hernandez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on Mónica Mayer (b. Mexico City, 1954), analyzing her work to understand the role played by the artistic and activist exchanges between feminists from Mexico City and Los Angeles in the development of feminist art in Mexico from the 1970s to the present. While scholars and curators are increasingly drawing attention to Mayer’s large body of work, which includes prints, drawings, installations, and public art interventions, the available literature emphasizes her connections to other artists working in her home country, positioning her artistic production within narratives of contemporary Mexican art.[1] In contrast, this dissertation foregrounds Mayer’s …

Dehumanization: A Case Study, Regina Varthi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The capstone “Dehumanization” is divided into three main parts.

The first part contains a brief presentation on the UN family (or UN system), showing its role through its organizational and managerial structures. All data are derived from UN corresponding websites.

The second part, “Homelessness,” focuses on the SDG 11 of the 2030 GA Agenda. In 2014 the United Nations Human Rights Council appointed Leilani Farha Special Rapporteur on adequate housing in order to conduct research on the subject of homelessness as a violation of human rights. In her report, presented at the Human Rights Council in March 2016, Farha claims …