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Full-Text Articles in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

For The Women Who Wear Pi Day Shirts, Jacqui Weaver May 2022

For The Women Who Wear Pi Day Shirts, Jacqui Weaver

Honors College

This project, entitled To The Women Who Wear Pi Day Shirts, is a poetry manuscript that explores a journey of a women in STEM. While taking college English courses, I read about characters such as the creature in Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, who had intelligence, yet was physically hideous, an outsider from the human population. The creature was an outsider to the normal human, much like how I feel as a woman in STEM, which gave me the idea to write about my own journey. The poetry in this manuscript is a reflection from being in elementary school learning mathematics …


Exploring The Marginalized Voice: Queering Form In Contemporary Short Fiction, Madalyn M. Jackson May 2020

Exploring The Marginalized Voice: Queering Form In Contemporary Short Fiction, Madalyn M. Jackson

Honors College

Feminist and queer narrative theory calls into question the systemic way of thinking about categorizations such as genre conventions, form, and length. The short story subverts all of these, flipping common love plots or hero arcs, denying readers whole pictures, and privileging plot over character development. Through the application of feminist and queer narrative theory, this study evaluates Lambda Literary Awardwinning texts from authors Chinelo Okparanta, Krystal Smith, and Carmen Maria Machado on how the function, form, and common conventions of the short story are subversive in nature and lend themselves to the functions, forms, and conventions of the queer …


An Examination Of Pervasive Language Around Sexual Harassment Through The Lens Of Anita Hill, Christine Blasey Ford, And #Metoo, Elizabeth Theriault May 2020

An Examination Of Pervasive Language Around Sexual Harassment Through The Lens Of Anita Hill, Christine Blasey Ford, And #Metoo, Elizabeth Theriault

Honors College

This thesis explores the hypothesis that the #MeToo Movement and Twitter have contributed to the changes in language used by individuals to describe sexual harassment and the survivors that come forward with their stories. To do so, this thesis identified common themes derived from language used in New York Times articles published during the Hill and Thomas hearings of 1991, as well as Tweets published between the dates surrounded the Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh hearings, September 25, 2018 and September 29, 2018, to create a comparable platform for language used in similar settings 27 years apart. It contains a literature …


“Putting Out Fires”: An Original Situational Comedy Pilot Episode Examining Modern Motherhood, Keely Gonyea May 2020

“Putting Out Fires”: An Original Situational Comedy Pilot Episode Examining Modern Motherhood, Keely Gonyea

Honors College

Even in an age of easily accessible and ever-changing digital content, television remains one of the most influential modes of media. Shows, on television and on streaming services, play key roles in informing their audiences of societal conventions. Situational comedies are an easily identifiable genre on television and their popularity has not wavered as seen by their steadfast presence during primetime viewing slots. This thesis explores and analyzes how situational comedies have created spaces for potentially harmful stereotypes for their female characters, specifically mothers. The creative work of this thesis offers an original situational comedy pilot episode that looks to …


Female Political Campaigns: Just The Right Amount Of Femininity, Harley Rogers May 2020

Female Political Campaigns: Just The Right Amount Of Femininity, Harley Rogers

Honors College

This paper seeks to understand how female politicians develop their public identities to meet and reject the gender stereotypes society holds of women. The case study looks at Margaret Chase Smith’s political career, with a special focus on her 1964 presidential campaign. The research analyzed Smith’s career through the newspaper coverage of her in order to understand Smith’s choices surrounding her public identity and the media’s response. The analysis identified four distinct points of interest that contributed to Smith’s public persona: physical appearance, examples of housewifery, dialogue on women’s issues, and legislative accomplishments. These factors demonstrate how Smith presented her …


Behind Closed Doors: Unpacking College Students’ Complex Relationships With Pornography Consumption, Samantha K. Saucier May 2018

Behind Closed Doors: Unpacking College Students’ Complex Relationships With Pornography Consumption, Samantha K. Saucier

Honors College

This thesis is a quantitative and qualitative study of University of Maine students attitudes and consumption habits of pornography. It contains a literature review of anti-pornography feminism from the Second Wave, as well as an overview of sex-positive and sex-critical theories of pornography from more recent years. The goal of the thesis is to understand how sex-negative and/or sex-positive ideas have or have not permeated college student’s understanding of pornography. Over 800 students were surveyed about pornography consumption through the Psychology Department’s Fall prescreen. 4 students from the survey, who all happened to be women, were interviewed about their relationships …