Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Good Girls Don't, Tess Fresco

English Honors Theses

Set in the year 1980, "Good Girls Don't" is a bracing coming-of-age story about Cathy, a young woman in Los Angeles who dreams of escaping the city yet feels intimately bound to it. Los Angeles as a terrifyingly beautiful place, in this specific time, figures prominently in this novella; even as Cathy enjoys smoking pot with her best friend Heather, rolls her eyes at her boss at Jack In the Box, and moons over sexy surfer boys, the threat of a serial murderer targeting young women hangs over her mind. On a date one night with Jim, an older boy …

"A Narrative Is A Living Body”: Trans-Relations In Contemporary Transmasculine Fiction, Madison Rougier

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores how recent novels are able to expand representations of transgender experiences and promote identification with these characters and their experiences, even if the reader is not trans themself. It begins by delving into a brief history of transgender narrative and the problems associated with these narratives having been primarily in the form of memoir. It then examines how Rose Tremain’s Sacred Country, despite being one of the first instances of a fictional narrative focused on a transgender man, reflects similarly problematic narrative characteristics to those found in memoir. Proposing a concept of trans-relational reading, which promotes identifications …

Ships In Houston, Nadia Villafuerte, Julie Ann Ward

Undiscovered Americas

Ships in Houston by Nadia Villafuerte, translated by Julie Ann Ward, is a harrowing and heartrending collection of fifteen stories that bring to life characters who, though they exist independently from one another, inhabit the same world: Mexico’s southern border. Using acute attention to language, such as various dialects and slang, to create a nuanced and varied mood and setting, Villafuerte’s stories track exotic dancers, sex workers, truck drivers, drug dealers, immigration officials, and even a mayor’s daughter to create compelling fictions rooted in the harsh realities of borderlands that many choose to overlook. While the US’s southern border with …

Feminist Critique And John Updike's 'Holes', Sue Norton

Books/Book Chapters

Feminism, John Updike

Woman Flytrap, Brianna Jo Hobson

Student Theses and Dissertations

Woman FlyTrap is a short story zine collection that explores the topic of sexual violence through the perpetrator and victim relationship with an explicit lens. Replete with cultural and entomological themes and motifs, Woman Flytrap seeks to remind survivors that we are not alone. In our bodies or in our lives. Neither in the world. There are over a million insects to every human, proving that there is strength in numbers. All five stories in the collection present different abstracts: revenge, transformation, justice, healing, body image, self-harm, mourning, etc. There is also a playlist and a section about the author. …

Coup De Grâce, Violet Rea Mass

Senior Projects Spring 2023

This project, composed of an introduction and a fiction piece, explores the complex power dynamics at play on the university stage put into perspective of the Human Rights study. The fiction follows young Olive as arrives for her first term at a university in a secluded valley where she must come to terms with a darkness greater than she had ever imagined.

Payton's Final Master's Portfolio, Payton Boshears

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

Here is my final Master's Portfolio. I did not have specialization for the English program, so for the portfolio I chose four different projects that represent the variety of courses I have taken during my time here at BGSU.

Bodies In Transit: Women, War, And Violence In Select Fiction From Nepal, Lakhipriya Gogoi

Journal of International Women's Studies

The figures of women in conflict zones have been presented in South Asian literature chiefly as torn and battered bodies/souls, usually carrying an irremediable suffering and sense of loss that they bear as wives, mothers, and daughters while their male compatriots participate in the zone of war. The twentieth century surge in identity movements and political conflicts in South Asia, however, offers us new figures of women as “warriors” or direct participants in the zones of violence. The usurpation of such new bodies, on the one hand, defies the hegemonic feminization of women’s bodies as caregivers, and on the other …

Broken Reflection, Jenny Carpenter

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

“B, grab me my napkin, why don’t you,” Jim says, leaning back into the plush, bloodred chair at Spanky’s. Spanky’s is hardly a dinner date—I mean, it’s a sandwich place.

But it’s what Jim wants. And what he wants, he gets.

Still, I hesitate, thinking about telling him to just snatch it up off the ground himself. I’m not his slave. The napkin’s right in front of him.

Fantasized Masculinity Performed In American War Narratives, Shea O'Scannlain

English Honors Theses

In this thesis I wanted to explore the ways that masculinity has been written in history through the genre of fiction. The first chapter discusses traumatized white masculinity in Kurt Vonnegut's novel SlaughterHouse Five and Oliver Stone's film Born On The Fourth of July. The second chapter deals with the female Black experience in response to the white patriarchy in Toni Morrison's novel Home and HBO's television series LoveCraft Country. And finally chapter 3 deals with mythologized masculinity redeemed through violence in Martin Scorsese's film Taxi Driver and Frank Miller's comic book series The Dark Knight Returns. …

Serendipityblah, Amanda Linn Kunkel

English Theses & Dissertations

So, you’ve stumbled upon my neck of the woods, where the weird and fantastical reside. Wit and humor may save you here but beware of what draws near. Beneath the bright and smiling facade, you may find the danse macabre. Within these pages you’ll find magic and wonder, darkness, and failure. The setting is post-March 2020 in Norfolk, Virginia. An urban city at the heart of Hampton Roads where the lines between reality and otherworldliness blur. Witches protect ghosts in a downtown Abbey. The fae break new ground in the art district of Ghent. Even Death stalks the halls of …

Bi Design: Strategies For Fiction, Audrey T. Heffers

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

How can bisexuality be represented in fiction in a way that is realistic and nuanced? This article presents five strategies of representing bisexuality in fiction, listed here as Implying, Demonstrating, Describing, Using Explicit Labels, and Having Conversations. These practical approaches highlight craft techniques that writers can implement in their own work. By articulating some of the ways in which bisexuality is already written in fiction, these strategies provide tools for writers to write bisexuality in ways that work against common stereotypes. These strategies are presented through an interdisciplinary lens, primarily relying upon Creative Writing Studies, …

Electric Snake, David Y. Liang

Senior Projects Spring 2022

A blend of fantastic, noir, and cyberpunk elements. Prose.

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College

What Is The Female Gaze In Literature?, Cadence Dangerfield

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Just as Laura Mulvey defined the male gaze, feminist scholars are constantly working to identify a female gaze in visual arts and literature. Does it exist? This project works to answer the following questions: What is the female gaze? Is it simply the male gaze in reverse, or is it something more, a lens encompassing the desire of intimacy instead of an inherent sexual desire? To find the answer, or at least one possible answer that I can situate myself and my writing into, I plan to read both fiction and scholarship and write utilizing a female character as she …

What We Owe To Our Audience: The Hermeneutical Responsibility Of Fiction Creators, Kathryn Wojtkiewicz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this project is to provide a theoretical underpinning for the belief that creators of fiction should dedicate time to diversifying the cast of characters in their fictions, and to avoiding harmful stereotypes when doing so. I establish this as a hermeneutical responsibility: because of the epistemic influence fictions can wield over their audiences, trafficking in harmful stereotypes of marginalized identities (instances of which I call Bad Representation Problems) or excluding marginalized identities entirely (which I call No Representation Problems) from one’s fictions can reinforce harmful beliefs about real people with those identities. The more popular the fiction, …

Madwomen And Mad Women: An Analysis Of The Use Of Female Insanity And Anger In Narrative Fiction, From Vilification To Validation., Lindsay Haralu

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

This project examines the use of female insanity and anger in narrative fiction, as demonstrated by the character of the madwoman. Madness is a concept that has long been gendered female throughout Western history, in medicine, language, religion, and culture. Socially and culturally constructed madness can be used to determine the boundaries of society, the norms and values from which “madness” deviates, while the character of the madwoman can be used to demonstrate how women have challenged these boundaries and how the roles of women and definitions of femininity have changed over time. This study analyzes the madwoman trope from …

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: Girlhood In The Creation, Content, And Consumption Of Victorian Children’S Literature, Betsy Barthelemy

English Honors Projects

The Golden Age of (British) Children’s Literature was famous not only for the proliferation of fiction it hosted, but also for how much of that work featured young heroine protagonists. Starting with the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and examining two other fantasy works compared with three realistic children's novels from this half-century period, this project elucidates the differences between these genres and examines how authors used the characteristics of each to empower their heroines. It argues that these fictitious heroines influenced real-world readers to create progressive futures by providing examples of rebellious girl characters finding happy endings.

A Nameless Blue, Francis (Elle) Lawson Mitchell

Senior Projects Spring 2021

A Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College, Written Arts. A science fiction novel about queerness, disability, the heart and the body. The novel considers where the biological and the mechanical meet, and where the body intersects with relationships of power, the state, production and religion.

An Open Bag, Matilde Benmayor

Theses and Dissertations

What do we take with us? How much space should we leave in the bag for what we might find? This paper is a journey from under the rug and onto the pavement. Sowing spiderweb maps I try to make a new city my own.

A Troop, A Raft, A Bed, Hanna Jane Guendel

Senior Projects Spring 2020

A Troop, a Raft, a Bed tells the interwoven fictional stories of three major animals (the mountain gorilla, the Adélie penguin, and the American eel) and four transitional animals (the white stork, the humpback whale, the common octopus, and the great white shark). The stories are told from the animals' perspectives, and are written with language that considers each animal's unique intelligence, mind, and behavior. These stories seek to communicate how animals around the world may be experiencing the various effects of climate change and global warming.

Kentuckiana, And A Dash Of Cambodia: A Collection Of Short Stories, Brodie Lee Gress

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The following is a collection of five short stories set in regions familiar to me: “Dewberry Park,” “YouLead,” and “The Color Violet” in Indiana; “Mens Rea” in Kentucky; and “Tory Ride” in Cambodia. Gay identity plays a role in many of these stories, and other themes explored include family, region, socioeconomics, gender, mentality, and change. These stories are concerned with people on the brink, failing and surviving all the same. Some of them are intended to weigh, and some to satirize. I hope they all nick their readers.

Challenging Girlhood, Mary Ann Harlan

School of Information Student Research Journal

No abstract provided.

"The Tyrant Father": Leslie Stephen And Masculine Influences On Virginia Woolf And Her Novel, To The Lighthouse, Anya Graubard

Honors Theses

This paper examines the volatile yet nurturing relationship between Virginia Woolf and her father, Leslie Stephen. It specifically considers the effects of three male “tyrants” in Woolf’s childhood, including not only her father but also her two half-brothers, who abused her sexually. Analysis of the dynamics of these relationships provides insight into Woolf’s lifelong battle with mental illness and helps us to understand the complicated relationships she had as an adult with men and women.

In her letters, diaries, and memoir essays, Woolf reveals how she drew from her own experiences of childhood to write her most famous novel, To …

The Fiction Of Women In Contemporary American Literature : The Borderlands Of Intersectional Feminism, Postcolonial American Studies, And Creative Writing, Skye Anicca

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

A collection of nine short stories entitled THE TROUBLE WITH BRIGHT GIRLS is unified by women’s diverse coming-of-age experiences in late twentieth century transnational America. The story collection relies on techniques that highlight dislocation—temporal skips and wide temporal frames, fragmented and recursive narratives, borrowed genres, absurd premise, anti-heroines and anti-epiphanies—which gesture toward collective human experiences while troubling notions of universal knowledge and values and resisting redemption or closure. The critical introduction situates the collection through the theoretical lens of intersectional feminism, informed by Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the borderlands, and in relation to field of multiethnic/transnational literature of the U.S. …

Unbecoming : A Collection Of Short Fiction, Angélica Luisa Valentín Schubert

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This collection contains nine short stories addressing various concepts and issues relating to contemporary femininity in the United States.

"The Politics Of Literature In Michel Foucault: Veridiction, Fiction And Desire", Azucena G. Blanco

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article is based on two hypotheses. The first is that in the later Foucault we would find a reformulation of the status that literature had occupied in his work and the development of a politics of literature (already developed in “Sujetos irregulares: ficción y política en el Sade de Michel Foucault”). The second considers that fiction and desire are inseparably joined, which leads me to analyse the logic of Sade as logic of desire in the lectures that Foucault gave on the author at the University of Buffalo (1970). A reading of both aspects together needs to be …

The Language Of Love (Memoir Fiction), Sarah Justine Skriloff

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

Fiction/memoir of a young woman's encounter with her mother over body weight issues.

Writing With Vs. Writing About: Co-Producing Consciousness-Raising Fiction With Young Women From Aid-Supported Communities In Malawi, Emma Makepeace

Journal of International Women's Studies

While some African women have access to education and avenues for writing and publishing their creative work, there remains a gap in accessibility for young African women from aid-supported communities to write and share stories of importance to them. In contrast to their own silencing, these young women are often written about by the aid organizations supporting their communities for fund or awareness raising purposes. The way in which young women from aid-supported communities are written about can present issues of representation, as often the author is from another culture and a position of privilege. Co-producing consciousness-raising fiction with young …

Speaking The Unspeakable: Armenian Women’S Fiction Generations After Genocide, Elena Lucine Lefevre

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Spearfish, Sawyer Germaine Dohman

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.