Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

“We Need To Have A Place To Vent And Get Our Frustrations Out”: Addressing The Needs Of Mothering Students In Higher Education Using A Positive Deviance Framework, Melissa León

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examined the experiences of mothering students at four different colleges using a positive deviance (PD) framework. PD is an approach that seeks to identify positive behavioral patterns that help members of a community overcome structural barriers (Gross, et al. 2017). The Positive Deviance Framework was applied to investigate how some mothering students are successful in college and how their experiences could potentially help new or struggling mothering students. Eleven mothering students were interviewed to determine what interventions could assist mothering students who lack representation in the traditional college environment, a situation that often leads to feelings of isolation. …

Social Media And Women Empowerment In Nigeria: A Study Of The #Breakthebias Campaign On Facebook, Deborah Osaro Omontese

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines how the March 2022 #BreakTheBias campaign on Facebook was used as an empowerment platform in Nigeria, where women experience gender disparity. Research on the role of social media in women’s empowerment in Nigeria is an area that has not been fully studied. Previous studies have looked at women’s empowerment mainly through an educational or political lens, neglecting how social media have also been effective in empowering women. Other researchers have studied how women utilize social media platforms for leisure, entertainment, and media sharing. In the present study, non-probability sampling was used to identify 20 posts that convey …

Vulnerable Resistance In Victorian Women’S Writing, Stephanie A. Harper

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores how socially vulnerable characters, often dismissed as lacking access to agency, create space for resistance in nineteenth-century women’s writing. Central questions the dissertation addresses are, “Why is resistance by vulnerable characters not read?” and “How are women writers encoding resistance?” Working within a comprehensive historical picture of the challenges and concerns women writers of the nineteenth century had to contend with, and informed by feminist scholarship on women writers of the nineteenth century, the dissertation looks at vulnerable characters within Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, and Olive …

Transnational Perspectives On The #Metoo And Anti-Base Movements In Japan, Alisha Romano

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the connections between the #MeToo movement and the anti-base movement in Japan regarding transnational activism and Japanese feminist activism. As both movements have focused on sexual violence and the impacts on victims, the movements are strongly linked in their goals. While the anti-base movement in Okinawa has a long history, the #MeToo movement is a relatively new movement, therefore these connections aid in establishing the #MeToo movement as a part of a history of feminist activism in Japan. There is a limited amount of English language scholarly work done on the #MeToo movement in Japan and the …

Making A Way: An Auto/Ethnographic Exploration Of Narratives Of Citizenship, Identity, (Un)Belonging And Home For Black Trinidadian[-]American Women, Anjuliet G. Woodruffe

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this research study is to gather, convey and explore the lived experience related to transnational identity construction for Black Trinidadian[-]American women. I adopt an interdisciplinary approach to better understand what it means to live as, and be, a Black Trinidadian[-]American. Using auto/ethnography and interviews, I seek to answer the following research questions: (1) How do Black Trinidadian[-]American women describe their negotiation of cultural identity in Trinidad and the United States? (2) How do Black Trinidadian[-]American women describe “in-between” homeplaces within the intersectional context of gender, race, class, and culture? (3) How do Black, Trinidadian[-]American women describe transnational, …

Incorrect Athlete, Incorrect Woman: Ioc Gender Regulations And The Boundaries Of Womanhood In Professional Sports, Sabeehah Ravat

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Professional sports are a cornerstone of mainstream capitalist society, a site where issuesof race, class, gender, nation, and religion amongst others are produced, contested, and negotiated. In particular, gender regulation policies serve to delineate the acceptable boundaries of racialised gender and create sanctioned opportunities to surveil transgressive bodies. In this thesis, I posit that professional sports rely on and protect uniformity of gender experience to regulate and exclude trans* and intersex participation and, furthermore, that gender regulation policies delineate the boundaries of gender and particularly womanhood in a way that further marginalises nonbinary athletes. Using critical discourse analysis, a methodology …

Listening To Queens: Ghana's Women Traditional Leaders As A Model For Gender Parity, Kristen M. Vogel

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A movement begun in 2011 inspired multilateral organizations such as the United Nations to collaborate with Ghana’s women traditional leaders on an inherently postcolonial indigenous and transnational feminist project, promoting Queens’ national recognition. Despite the initial power of the movement, it faded over time. Yet it spurred the formation of various new Queens’ associations throughout Ghana. The associations have grown and continue to grow, and the National Council of Women Traditional Leaders that spurred the first movement has returned stronger and with new strategies. As Ghana’s Queens seek their traditional right, an equal voice at all levels of leadership, it …

Criminalizing Lgbtq+ Jamaicans: Social, Legal, And Colonial Influences On Homophobic Policy, Zoe C. Knowles

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Based on colonial and neocolonial models of oppression, Jamaica has adopted many laws, policies, and systems mandated by the British monarchy. Many of these laws contain anti-LGBTQ+ policies which remain in effect today. To address the criminalization of LGBTQ+ identities, I used queer theory and queer criminology to analyse the ways Jamaica constructs LGBTQ+ people as criminals and how they are treated in the legal and criminal justice systems from a postcolonial standpoint. Using a qualitative text-based feminist and queer policy analysis, I investigated social, legal, and colonial influences on current anti-LGBTQ+ policy by looking at the Offences Against the …

Jane Anger Her Protection For Women And The Emergence Of A Radical Female Voice In Late Sixteenth Century England, Ashley M. Wessel

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores how women authors responded to masculine discourses of dominance in late sixteenth-century England. Directly, it concentrates on the pamphlet Jane Anger her Protection for Women, written in 1589 and published under the pseudonym Jane Anger. I argue Anger’s pamphlet was a radical voice within Elizabethan print culture which lends a view into gender politics of the time in which this piece was produced. I also argue that though Anger’s target audience was the gentlewomen of England, she crafted her pamphlet for a broad audience that included any literate man or woman across social station. The importance …

Bad Bunny’S Purplewashing As Gender Violence In Reggaeton: A Feminist Analysis Of Solo De Mi And Yo Perreo Sola, Dairíne Hoban

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Bad Bunny has skyrocketed to fame in the past few years, gaining worldwide recognition as one of the best reggaetoneros of his time. His self-promoted image as an ally to women’s movements and the Queer community has garnered him the recognition of being a role model for youth and as an anomaly in the misogynistic genre of reggaeton. However, few have looked beyond the assertion of allyship to see if his work truly does support women and anti-gender violence ideology. While scholarship on reggaeton has well documented the prevalence of gender violence in the lyrics, videos and overall culture of …

Women Entrepreneurs In China: Dialectical Discourses, Situated Activities, And The (Re)Production Of Gender And Entrepreneurship, Zhenyu Tian

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Despite the number of women entrepreneurs on the rise globally, the business world and the identity of the entrepreneur remain to be normed masculine and male gender stereotyped. This male gender stereotyping situates women who practice entrepreneurship in disadvantages, limiting their access to resources on which they depend to make meaning of their activities and identities. This imbalanced masculine gender order also manifests in China’s economy. Women entrepreneurs in China face complex contradictions and challenges when navigating an arena that privileges men and masculinity. However, not much is known about the micro-dynamics of Chinese women’s entrepreneurial experiences in light of …

Dismantling Hegemony Through Inclusive Sexual Health Education, Lauren Wright

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the process of developing a sexual health education curriculum that is not only tailored to the unique needs of foster-engaged young women, but also those who may experience further marginalization from other mainstream programs due to their race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and/or their religious beliefs. In conjunction with the Adolescent Sexual Health Education and Research (ASHER) Program, I helped develop a sexual health education curriculum, "Choosing Myself," targeted toward foster-engaged young women and young women (ages 13-24) in the state of Florida. "Choosing Myself" is intended to be an inclusive program that empowers participants, improves their …

Peminist Performance In/As Filipina Feminist Praxis: Collaging Stand-Up Comedy And The Narrative Points In Between, Christina-Marie A. Magalona

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project documents the interdependent effort between performers, authors, and texts, through re/theorizing the role of the personal narrator in autoperformance as both an individual, and a part of a political collective. Through a scripted and staged performance, studied as the data, I critically engage with representations of first-generation women of color via comediennes (Ali Wong and Cristela Alonzo) and their personal narratives, and dialogically consider moments of dis/identification as a Filipina American.

Rooted in performance in/and communication studies, the overarching method employed is conspicuous aesthetic performance, via a scripted and staged narrative performance. I join performance and other methods …

Transfat Representation, Jessica "Fyn" Asay

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study defines and analyzes representation of transfats, those who are both transgender and fat, through the examination of two popular media texts, Jabba the Hutt from The Return of the Jedi and Pat from the Saturday Night Live tv program in the 1990’s. I analyze these two texts using a queer feminist media studies lens to reveal the media construction of a transfat representation that is rooted in racism, transnormativity, and fatphobia and that positions the transfat body as non-normative and grotesque through the use of abject horror and fear. My analysis reveals how racism, transnormativity, and fatphobia shape …

“Placing Our Breasts On A Hot Kerosene Lantern”: A Critical Study Of Microfinancialization In The Lives Of Women Entrepreneurs In The Informal Economic Sector In Ibadan, Nigeria, Olubukola Olayiwola

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study uses an anthropological perspective to investigate everyday lived experience of women borrowers and entrepreneurs (in the informal economic sector in Ibadan, Nigeria) relating to microfinancialization. Study such as this becomes important given the popular Yoruba metaphor “owo komulelanta” (“Placing our breasts on a hot kerosene lantern”) women borrowers use to express their experience particularly in their attempts to make repayments of MFB loans. Hence, there is a need to pay close attention and listen more carefully to operators of the informal sector and borrowers of MFB loans. This study employs ethnographic mixed methods to generate data in various …

Anorexia Nervosa And Bulimia Nervosa As Expressions Of Shame In A Post-Feminist, Emily Kearns

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Anorexia nervosa and Bulimia nervosa are heavily gendered conditions affecting women to a far greater degree than men in a post-millennium Western setting. The psychologistic and medicalized approaches to studying and treating these disorders do not account for socio-cultural and epistemic preferences. This paper draws a connection between shame (as emotion and affect) and these gendered disorders. Further, this work analyzes neo-liberalism, post-feminism, and consumerism as predatory elements of Western culture especially affecting women.

Examining The Effect Of Context On Responses To Social Interaction, Renee R. Hangartner

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The ambiguous nature of social interactions between coeds may lead to under reporting of sexual harassment. Sexual harassment has been studied using mostly cross-sectional methods for over 30 years. However, despite decades of research, prevalence rates of sexual harassment have been found to vary considerably across and within studies. This inconsistency in findings makes drawing conclusions about the prevalence of sexual harassment challenging. Thus, the focus of the field should shift to identifying what behaviors are perceived to be sexual harassment and how that perception may vary by context. To reduce the ambiguity surrounding the labeling of an interaction as …

Queer Authority In Old And Middle English Literature, Elan J. Pavlinich

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

I argue that select early English texts queer normative authorizing conventions to authorize Old English and Middle English literatures. During the European Middle Ages, Latin cultures and literatures were privileged with authority that extended to and subverted the cultural capital of the inhabitants of England at the edge of the known Western world. I identify four exceptional English texts that employ authorizing conventions to disrupt normative networks of power that traditionally privilege Latin and to authorize English literature instead. The Norman Conquest had altered the English language and social structures; still, these altered networks of power continued to marginalize English …

"Roll" Models: Fat Sexuality And Its Representations In Pornographic Imagery, Leah Marie Turner

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to use specific fat pornographic imagery as a means to help us understand fat tropes and fetishization. The goal is to use our understandings of masculinity and race within fatness to create a possible launching point for further study within the field of fat sexuality studies. My rationale for writing such a paper is because fat sexuality studies is a field which has very little content, but potential for incredible scholarship which can impact not only our understandings of fat bodies, but of all bodies. The method for this thesis involves looking at specific …

“The Most Muscular Woman I Have Ever Seen”: Bev Francisperformance Of Gender In Pumping Iron Ii: The Women, Cera R. Shain

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The question of what constitutes femininity has been widely debated, not only in gender studies, but also in the broader social world. A venue for this debate is the 1985 documentary, Pumping Iron II: The Women, in which gender and femininity in particular become part of the central plot of the film when Bev Francis, a woman bodybuilder more muscular than any other competitor, enters the competition. While feminist scholars have analyzed gender and sport from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, little attention has been paid to female bodybuilding in particular. To fill this gap, this thesis will examine the …

Ain't I A Woman, Too? Depictions Of Toxic Femininity, Transmisogynoir, And Violence On Star, Sunahtah D. Jones

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the rate of the murder of Black trans women at the hands of Black cisgender men rises steadily every year (HRC, 2017), discourses regarding the detrimental impact of toxic masculinity within Black communities continue to increase within different branches of feminist literature. However, the role that Black cisgender women and toxic femininity play in the violent and systematic subjugation of Black trans women is largely ignored in feminist literature. In this thesis, I conduct a cultural analysis of the representations of the Black trans character Cotton Brown (from the Fox show Star) to examine how the show illustrates toxic …

‘If He Hits Me, Is That Love? I Don’T Think So’: An Ethnographic Investigation Of The Multi-Level Influences Shaping Indigenous Women’S Decision-Making Around Intimate Partner Violence In The Rural Peruvian Andes, Isabella Li Chan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how the intersections of gender, ethnicity, place, and class shape indigenous women’s risks for and experiences of intimate partner violence and related decision-making in Carhuaz province, an underserved, resource-poor setting in the Peruvian Andes. This dissertation applied a mixed-methods, community-based approach to 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Peru, which included 82 face-to-face surveys using the World Health Organization’s Multi-Country Study Instrument, 38 semi-structured interviews with survivors, community members, and IPV-related service providers, and 6 participatory action research workshops (n=64).

Through this dissertation, the voices of indigenous women struggling with intimate partner violence illuminate the lived realities …

Influencing Gender Specific Perceptions Of The Factors Affecting Women’S Career Advancement Opportunities In The United States, Kevin C. Taliaferro

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research investigates the sociological, psychological, and physiological factors known to affect women’s career advancement opportunities. It examines how awareness and knowledge shared through the #MeToo (hashtag Me Too) movement influenced gender specific perceptions about the factors affecting women’s workplace opportunities. Finally, it recommends measures to alter the divergent gender perceptions that remain an obstacle to gender equality in the workplace.

This study was conducted because gender inequalities continue in the U.S. workplace in 2018. Currently women fail to advance in careers at the same rate as men, and they are paid 21% less for similar work with equal skills …

“Neither East Nor West”: Shia Women Negotiating Gender Norms In America, Raheleh Dayerizadeh

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With growing hostilities towards the Ummah (Muslim global community and Diaspora) in Western countries and the fear of Sharia laws, the socialization of international human rights norms within religious institutions, makes for a timely case study. Specifically, this dissertation project aims to capture the process of norm transformation at the grassroots level by investigating the religious, cultural, and social encounter between Islam and the West by interviewing Shia women at a local mosque in Florida. Critical constructivism, post-colonial feminism, and qualitative interpretive methods, are used to address the following: how practicing Shia women are navigating between competing liberal gender equality …

Beyoncé As A Semiotic Resource: Visual And Linguistic Meaning Making And Gender In Twitter, Tumblr, And Pinterest, Addie L. Sayers China

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

At the intersection of digital identities and new language and social practice online is the concept of searchable talk (ST). ST describes the process of tagging discourse in a social networking service (SNS) with a hashtag (#), allowing it to be searchable by others. Although originating in Twitter, ST has expanded into other SNS, and is used therein not only to mark language-based posts, but also multimodal posts and images. While scholars have elucidated the structure and function of ST, their studies have primarily examined ST within language-based posts; few have researched ST with respect to images and other types …

Becoming A Woman Of Isis, Zoe D. Fine

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this study, I examine how terrorism is produced and consumed in communication. Using discourse analysis, I investigate how terrorism is constituted in the accounts of four women described in online news reports as having joined, or almost joined the so-called Islamic State (IS): “Alex,” constructed as having been lonely and flirted with IS; “Khadija,” presented as a schoolteacher turned member of IS’s all-women’s brigade; Laura, described as a woman whose partner abandoned her, who met a man online, and who brought her son with her to join IS; and Tareena, referred to as a health worker who brought her …

Reproducing Intersex Trouble: An Analysis Of The M.C. Case In The Media, Jamie M. Lane

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

How do members of the media represent intersex people? Do the voices of intersex activists find their way into mainstream media representations, or are they ignored? What types of discourses are produced by the presence (or lack thereof) of activist voices in news articles? The goal of this thesis is to interrogate the discourse surrounding intersex, or individuals who fall outside of the typical male/female binary for sex classification, and intersex activism in the media. The legal case M.C. vs. Aaronson, settled in 2017, was one of the first legal cases in the United States involving an intersex person. This …

Penalizing Pregnancy: A Feminist Legal Studies Analysis Of Purvi Patel's Criminalization, Abby Schneller

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Purvi Patel is an Indian American woman who, in 2015, was the first U.S. citizen to be convicted under feticide statutes for allegedly attempting her own abortion. Though her 2015 conviction was overturned the same year, the feticide conviction was significant as a legal precedent as well as part of a larger trend criminalizing pregnant women of color. With an eye towards the greater pattern of the criminalization of other pregnant women of color (Boyd, 1999; Faludi, 1991; Humphries, 1999; Mahan, 1996; Roberts, 1997), in this thesis I employ a feminist legal studies methodology and the theoretical frameworks of intersectionality …

The Spirit Of Friendship: Girlfriends In Contemporary African American Literature, Tangela La'chelle Serls

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Spirit of Friendship: Girlfriends in Contemporary African American Literature examines spiritual subjectivities that inspire girlfriends in three contemporary novels to journey towards actualization. It examines the girlfriend bond as a space where the Divine Spirit can flourish and assist girlfriends as they seek to become actualized. This project raises epistemological questions as it suggests that within the girlfriend dynamic, knowledge that is traditionally subjugated is formed and refined. Finally, girlfriend epistemology is considered in light of Black Girl Magic, a contemporary social and cultural movement among Black women.

The Time To Love: Ideologies Of "Good" Parenting At A Family Service Organization In The Southeastern United States, Anna Davidson Abella

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to understand definitions of what it means to be a “good” parent as described by parents and child development specialists at a family service organization in the Southeastern United States. Previous research on social reproduction and concerted cultivation have opened up pathways to understanding how social and economic inequality manifest in family life and the social structures of which they are a part. This ethnographic study is an effort to contribute to an anthropology of parenting by unveiling the ways that definitions of “good” parenting in middle-class and wealthy communities reflect time-intensive, attachment-based ideologies …