Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Factors Contributing To The Educational Success Of Single-Mother Welfare Recipients At An Urban Southwestern Community College: Case Studies Of Six Success Stories, Rhonda Rose Faul

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study gave voice to the issues, needs, and concerns of economically disadvantaged single mothers and determined the motivational and institutional factors that helped lead them to their successful completion of a community college degree or certificate program while at the same time coping with the challenges of financially surviving on meager public welfare assistance, raising their children, and meeting welfare-mandated work activity requirements. While American society has a long tradition of regarding higher education as a means of achieving long-term financial security and self-sufficiency, current welfare policy unfortunately adds additional obstacles for welfare recipients who may be motivated to …

Where In The World Are The Women Of Time? Women And The "Person Of The Year" Covers For Time Magazine, Krystle Lynne Anttonelli

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Through a content analysis of Time magazine's "Person of the Year" issue, formerly titled "Man of the Year," this thesis examines how the news magazine has reevaluated and revised the once gender suggestive title to a more inclusive title in correlation to the portrayal of women featured on the covers from both past and present. This thesis also provides background on the feminist theory in order to put into perspective the professional and intellectual growth of women throughout the decades. The supporting literature contextualizes the findings with reference to other mainstream magazines and the portrayal of women versus men featured …

Conservative Feminism And Its Potential To Interact With, Influence, And Transform Traditional Feminist Identity, Aja Cacan

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

The recent emergence of conservative female public figures has posed a challenge to the traditional notion of feminist thought. Although they define their particular form of success in terms of conservative ideology, many of these women operate according to feminist paradigms, and would not even have the opportunity to assume such a public role if it were not for the past feminist breakthroughs that have cleared the way. Their association with feminist logic and adoption of the feminist moniker notwithstanding, these conservative women most often speak out in reaction and opposition to traditional liberal feminist views and activism. Regardless of …

The Emergence Of Feminism During The Late Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries By Female Artists And Authors, Tracy S. Koubek

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

This thesis paper identifies the ways in which the painters Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and Mary Cassatt and the writers Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning challenged the limitations of their sex by engaging in professions outside of the domestic sphere during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This essay first focuses on the negative effects that a separation between the private and public spheres had on women, how these changes came about, the expectations society imposed on women, and how many women learned to cope and step forward into the public sphere. The emphasis shifts to an examination of the lives …

La Valorisation De La Maternité En France Contemporaine Et Ses Conséquences, Margaret P. Matlock

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis is an analysis of the effects of pronatalist policies and social pressure to have children on the role of women in society. Written in French.

(R)Evolution Grrrl Style Now: Disidentification And Evolution Within Riot Grrrl Feminism, Lilly Estenson

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis examines the evolution of feminist praxis within the riot grrrl movement, focusing on two specific riot grrrl demographics - founding riot grrrls in the early 1990s and currently active riot grrrls in southern California. This thesis argues that riot grrrl activism is still thriving but in diverse, strategically modified ways. Using José Muñoz’s concept of “disidentification,” it analyzes how contemporary riot grrrls have appropriated and adapted the original movement’s tenets to allow for greater accessibility and diversity.

Don't Blame It On My Ovaries: Exploring The Lived Experience Of Women With Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome And The Creation Of Discourse, Jennifer Lynn Ellerman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) is the most common endocrine disorder among females of childbearing age, affecting between 6-8% of the population. It is also the most common cause of infertility. Females with PCOS may have two or more of a constellation of symptoms that can potentially leave them at odds in terms of normative ideals of femininity. This study examines how feminist theory interrogates and analyzes knowledge about the body and PCOS, integrating the lived experiences of women to provide a deeper, more meaningful understanding of what it means to be a woman with PCOS.

Redefining Sisterhood: The New Nuns, Laywomen And Catholic Feminist Activism, 1953-1992, Alexandra Elizabeth Michaelides

Dissertations

The involvement of American Catholic women in the feminist movement after 1960 is considered an anomaly. Yet, Catholic feminist activism thrived in large American cities like Chicago. This dissertation works to explain the origins, trajectory, methods, and eventual radicalization of the Catholic feminist movement in the United States. I argue that the events of the Second Vatican Council and the Sister Formation Movement (an organized effort to educate American nuns) set the stage for unprecedented reforms, brought an excitement and optimism to women religious and laywomen, and led to unintended revolutionary consequences. Nuns and laywomen were optimistic that the church …

Flowers In The Trenches : The Experiences Of Women In The Landscaping Profession, Paul E. Calarco, Jr.

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This research project aims to provide an in-depth analysis of women in the landscaping field. It is important to expand on the literature on nontraditional blue-collar occupations, as more women are moving into these jobs in this 21st century. According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (2001), the landscape and horticultural services industry is ranked 11th in the top twenty fastest growing service industries, almost two times the average for job growth. This occupation represents a significant, viable and fruitful arena for sociological investigation, as well a fantastic occupational option for women.

Mediums Change, Fears Stay The Same, Lucy Wilhelms

Honors Theses

Although generally dismissed by scholars as being overly sentimental or superstitious, the gothic genre has survived for over four centuries and maintained significant cultural appeal, outlasting the sentimental novel and the travelogue as popular literature. What, then, makes this genre different? What is so special about the gothic?

In my thesis, I examine the evolving cultural appeal of the gothic genre that keeps it attractive and relevant for readers by tracing the gothic text, The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, through its initial inception and its subsequent adaptations. As a novel, The Woman in Black both repeats and revises …

Invisible Margin: Marginalization And Activism Of Adivasi Women In Researches In Bangladesh, Aanmona Priyadarshini

Master's Theses

In the context of historical marginalization of indigenous people from diverse ethnic communities in Bangladesh, this study will investigate how mainstream researches and writings, in books, research reports, newspapers, and blogs on indigenous issues have ignored women's relegation by homogenizing women's distinctive problems with communities' marginalization. The research will explore indigenous women's subordinations in diverse sphere of lives and activism against the power structure that mainstream researches have overlooked. The study will also investigate the possible pathways of solidarity to challenge the systems of power that create control over indigenous people's lives. Thus this research will explore following research questions: …

Can You Believe She Did That?!:Breaking The Codes Of "Good" Mothering In 1970s Horror Films, Jessica Michelle Collard

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The threats found in horror films change with time, each decade consisting of threats that were most frightening for the time period. Horror film scholars, such as Andrew Tudor, determined that in 1970s horror films the threat has migrated from external forces into the home and the family. Invading aliens and monsters were thrown replaced by psychosis and evil children. This notion of making the familiar unfamiliar and threatening is paralleled in concerns addressed during the second-wave of feminism; women were making the normative and familiar idea of mother unfamiliar as they migrated from the private and into the public …

"This Murder Done": Misogyny, Femicide, And Modernity In 19th-Century Appalachian Murder Ballads, Christina Ruth Hastie

Masters Theses

This thesis contextualizes Appalachian murder ballads of the 19^th- and early 20^th-centuries through a close reading of the lyric texts. Using a research frame that draws from the musicological and feminist concepts of Diana Russell, Susan McClary, Norm Cohen, and Christopher Small, I reveal 19^th-century Appalachia as a patriarchal, modern, and highly codified society despite its popularized image as a culturally isolated and “backward” place. I use the ballads to demonstrate how music serves the greater cultural purpose of preserving and perpetuating social ideologies. Specifically, the murder ballads reveal layers of meaning regarding hegemonic …

Nongovernmental Organizations And Sex Work In Cambodia: Development Perspectives And Feminist Agendas, Jessica Catherine Schmid

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

This project focuses on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Cambodia that deal, either directly or indirectly, with sex work and sex workers. The NGOs outlined in this study have goals ranging from preventing Cambodian women from entering the commercial sex industry to empowering Cambodian sex workers through the formation of sex worker unions. Through the textual analysis of documents and web materials disseminated by these NGOs and from interviews with representatives from the NGOs, I seek to analyze how underlying assumptions about development and about the commercial sex industry shape the ways in which the personnel leading these NGOs think and …

Teaching Activist Intelligence: Feminism, The Educational Experience And The Applied Women's Studies Department At Cgu, Tara Chaffee Robinson

CGU Theses & Dissertations

The need to teach students how to be community activists becomes increasingly relevant as women's studies continues to evolve from its activist roots. Living in a culture that discourages activist work, many women's studies students feel passionately about activist issues, but with frustrating paralysis. For this reason, many of them pursue graduate degrees to equip themselves for an activist-oriented life, since they are not sure how to do this themselves. Without the presence of a concrete social movement, women's studies students need activist behavior and community modeled for them through the institution of the university. Teaching feminist activism to women's …

Invisible Mink, Jessie L Janeshek

Doctoral Dissertations

Emily Dickinson, Frances Sargent Osgood, and Sarah Piatt render the nineteenth-century “women’s sphere” ironically Unheimliche while simultaneously conveying it as the “home sweet home” the sentimental tradition prescribes it should be. These American women poets turn the domestic milieu into, as Paula Bennett phrases it, “the gothic mise en scene par excellence…the displacements, doublings, and anxieties characterizing gothic experience are the direct consequence of domestic ideology’s impact on the lives and psyches of ordinary bourgeois women (121-122).”

Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath continue to represent the Unheimliche home in their poetry through the middle of the twentieth century, specifically by …

Inequities Of Contemporary French Women, Olivia Kuhlman

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis is an analysis of the current situation of women in contemporary France. It analyzes the current situation of French women in education, the work force, politics, and French society, with the intent of uncovering the gender inequalities French women encounter in contemporary France.

Three Waves Of Underground Feminism In "Soft" Conscious' Raising Novels, Jeannina Perez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the chapters of my thesis, I explore how "soft" consciousness-raising novels of the first, second and third-waves of feminism practice underground feminism by covertly exposing women's socio-political issues outside of the confines of feminist rhetoric. In moving away from the negative connotations of political language, the authors enable the education of female audiences otherwise out of reach. Working from and extending on various theorists, I construct a theoretical model for what I term underground feminism. Running on the principal of conducting feminist activism without using feminist rhetoric, underground feminism challenges the notion that "subtle" feminism means weak feminism. In …

Woman Has Two Faces: Re-Examining Eve And Lilith In Jewish Feminist Thought, Diana Carvalho

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the religious history of American feminism, Jewish feminist biblical interpretation shifted attention away from Eve as a viable example of women's identities. Instead, Lilith, the independent, "demon" and "first wife" of Adam is praised as a symbol of female sexuality for "Transformationist" Jewish feminists. Re-claiming Lilith as the "first Eve," "Transformationist" Jewish feminists turn scripture on its head. Eve's creation and her actions in Genesis are interpreted as a product of patriarchy and male dominance, while Lilith in the midrashic narrative, the Alphabet of Ben Sira, is used by Jewish feminists to reclaim their identities on religious and …

Petticoat Government: Poems And Essays, Tiffany Ann Noonan

Dissertations

Petticoat Government is a collection of poems and essays that draw upon the varied lexicons of science, mythology, sports, literature, travel, art, fashion, and popular culture in an attempt to understand what deliminates womanhood. Using a mix of traditional and contemporary forms, these texts seek to complicate the myriad—and often conflicting—models of femaleness and the female body.

Brothers Are Better Than Sisters: A Semiotic, Feminist Analysis Of Hbo's "Rome", Patricia Mamie Peers

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In 2005, the Home Box Office and British Broadcasting Corporation partnered to produce Rome , a television series that retells the Roman histories of Julius Caesar, Marc Antony and Augustus through the lives of two centurion soldiers, Titus Pullo and Lucious Vorenus. The show's producers endeavored to bring Roman streets to life and included more storylines of women, men and children of all classes. At first considered a more egalitarian approach to history, Rome 's women are said to "challenge expectations" (Vu, 2005) and "forge a new path" (Ragalie, 2007, p. 2). But does this new representation challenge the old …

Beyond Postmodern Margins: Theorizing Postfeminist Consequences Through Popular Female Representation, Victoria Mosher

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In 1988, Linda Nicholson and Nancy Fraser published an article entitled "Social Criticism Without Philosophy: An Encounter Between Feminism and Postmodernism," arguing that this essay would provide a jumping point for discussion between feminisms and postmodernisms within academia. Within this essay, Nicholson and Fraser largely disavow a number of second wave feminist theories due to their essentialist and foundationalist underpinnings in favor of a set of postmodernist frameworks that might help feminist theorists overcome these epistemological impediments. A "postmodern feminism," Nicholson and Fraser claim, would become "the theoretical counterpart of a broader, richer, more complex, and multilayered solidarity, the sort …

The Unpopular Practice: Being Feminist In An Anti-Feminist Age, Brooke Zeligman

Theses : Honours

The position being explored within this dissertation is that feminism has been deemed 'passe' within contemporary western popular culture. The research wishes to counteract this overriding negative impression of feminism, which extends through from popular culture, into the institutions of academia, and beyond, into the gallery context. Female artists are often subjected to gender based readings of their artwork such as 'feminine' or 'feminist', which serve as a way of dismissing the importance of their work. Labelling work feminine involves similar implications as work labelled feminist - both can be seen as negative, which in turn can render the work …

Un Voyage Vers Une Photographie Feminine: The Gender Politics Of Body And Space, Panizza Ruth Allmark

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

In 1999 I embarked on a photographic journey to various cities around the world. The photographs produced are the results of my critical attention as a woman and a feminist to the issues concerning gender, travel and landscape aesthetics. This dissertation is an analysis of my documentary photographs. I am interested in ways in which my photographs correspond with the French feminist theories of Helene Cixous and Lucy Irigaray on ecriture feminine. Their work on the politics of the body has been influential in my journey towards a photographie feminine. 'Moreover, I also incorporate the feminist work of …

Manipulating Images Of Women's Power In Elizabethen England: Elizabeth I, Spenser, And Shakespeare, Amanda Kaye Martin

Theses & Dissertations

This work celebrates the influence of Elizabeth I on Elizabethan society and literature. In the opening of his Shakespearean Negotiations. Stephen Greenblatt describes writing as an outlet for the dead to speak to the living through "textual traces of themselves" that "make themselves heard in the voices of the living". These textual traces form the foundation for the critical theory of New Historicism, which perceives such traces as a conduit for literary critics to learn about an author's view of the nation, and era, in which he or she lived. In "The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text," Louis …

The Content And Process Of Women’S Decision-Making Viewed Through The Lenses Of Feminine/Feminist Ethics And Roman Catholicism, Nancy Parent Bancroft

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this investigation was to expand the understanding of ethical decision-making by contributing women’s experiences and thoughts to the issue. Fifty women shared a decision that they had made or were in the process of making having to do with their health or reproductive life. The research method of phenomenology was used with the women in the semi-structured interviews in an attempt to capture the meaning that they gave both to what they paid attention to and to the process that they used in arriving at their decisions. After researchers gained as clear a rendering as possible of …

Christian Feminist Publications And Structures Of Constraint: A Comparison Of Daughters Of Sarah And Exponent Ii Within The Contexts Of Neo-Evangelicalism And Mormonism, Sasha S. Cluff

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses content analysis to compare two conservative Christian feminist publications: Daughters of Sarah, produced by neo-evangelical feminists, and Exponent II, produced by Mormon feminists. Findings are based on insights from three main theories: Debra Minkoff's organization-environment perspective, Nancy Folbre's model of collective action based on structures of constraint, and the church-sect typology from the sociology of religion literature. Although both organizations similarly endeavor to integrate feminist and religious identities, the loose boundaries of evangelicalism allow Daughters of Sarah to explore a more liberal feminist agenda and interact with broader feminist sources while still remaining within the …

The Female Language Barrier: A Close Reading Of The Poetry Of Emily Dickinson And Adrienne Rich, Annmarie Faiella

Honors Theses

Historically, the First Amendment right to free speech was limited to certain groups. Language, although constitutionally guaranteed since 1776, has not always been a freedom for everyone. Among those at language's mercy are immigrants, slaves, and women. Women's speech was limited not by a lack of knowledge, but by a societal acceptance of women as inferior.

What then do women do to overcome this ever-present chasm? What women did in the nineteenth century, the 1960s, and are still doing today is: write more creatively. The tighter the restraint of language, the more inventive the woman must be to use it …

American Feminism And Social Democracy, Cathy Elizabeth Hinshaw

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The concepts of both social democracy and feminism will be discussed in detail in the course of the thesis. By way of introduction, broad definitions for these concepts will be offered here. Before attempting these definitions, however, the "central validity" of which Lippmann speaks and around which the definitions revolve should be established. The core of both social democracy and feminism, as they are to be used here, is a particular understanding of the notion of equality.

A Comparison Of Socialization And The Current Attitudes Towards Personal And Feminist Issues Of Women Over 65, Gayle Austin, Anna Belle Sime

Dissertations and Theses

Women, as feminist and as familist, have been in many varied ways the subjects of study. They have been studied as black women, middle-aged women, sexual women, women in poverty, women in prison, women raped, executives, celebrities, lesbians and homemakers. The classifications and combinations approached infinity. Now older women are becoming a more popular research topic, as their numbers increase with medical attainments. With the increasing participation of older “sisters” in such organizations as the National Organization for Women, and the advent of groups such as the gray panthers, it has become apparent that there are no age barriers to …