Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Queering The Ear: Podcast Aesthetics And The Embodied Archive In S-Town, Kira Schukar

English Honors Projects

Despite podcasts’ rising popularity over the last twenty years, literary scholars are only beginning to focus on their affective potential as multimedia texts. In this thesis, I argue that even mainstream podcasts are productively intertwined with queer theories and aesthetics of belonging. Using the 2017 podcast S-Town as my case study, I examine the aural aesthetics of queer failure, temporality, archives, embodiment, and desire as key elements in this complex medium. Putting these theories and aesthetics into practice, I describe my process of research-creation and present a podcast I made about my road trip to Woodstock, Alabama, S-Town’s place …

By The Power Vesta-Ed In Me: The Power Of The Vestal Virgins And Those Who Took Advantage Of It, Elena M. Stanley

Classical Mediterranean and Middle East Honors Projects

Vestal Virgins were high ranking members of the Roman elite. Due to the priestesses’ elevated standing, Romans made use of their inherent privileges. Through analyses of case studies from ancient authors and archaeology, I identify three ways Romans wielded Vestal power: familial connections, financial and material resources, and political sway. I end by exploring cases of crimen incesti, the crime of unchastity, which highlight all three forms. The Vestals were influential women who shared access to power in different ways. The Vestals were active participants in the social and political world of Rome.

Is Title Ix Enough?: Analyzing Feelings Of Institutional Betrayal Among College Students Who Experienced Sexual Assault, Zoe N. Kross

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Honors Projects

Institutional Betrayal reflects the failures of an institution to accurately prevent or respond to students after sexual violence has occurred. Previous literature shows that survivors of sexual assault are at an increased risk of PTSD and anxiety. The goal of this study was to understand what supportive services Macalester survivors want/need and to analyze if students feel supported by their institution. Grounded in analyses of the domestic violence movement, hookup and rape culture, the neuroscience of trauma, the history of Title IX, and commonly used survivor support services, the goal of this study was to understand what survivors of sexual …

"Je Vous Donne Toute Mon Âme" : Une Traduction De L'Intimité Féminine Dans Isidora De George Sand, Shelby M. Kruger

French Honors Projects

Malgré la célébrité de l’écrivaine prolifique George Sand, plusieurs de ses œuvres restent non traduites et inaccessibles aux lecteurs anglophones aujourd’hui. Ce projet examine le livre Isidora, écrit par Sand en 1846, et fournit une traduction partielle du texte. Un essai critique accompagne cette traduction qui explore les raisons de l'obscurité de ce texte en comparaison avec d’autres œuvres de Sand, et affirme la pertinence du livre aux lecteurs anglophones du XXIe siècle. Je propose que le cœur de la pertinence et l’excellence d’Isidora réside surtout dans les relations féminines intimes que Sand a créées. La création d’une …

Abundance, Lana Berry

Art and Art History Honors Projects

My Studio Art honors project identifies a parallel between the standards of ceramic beauty and human beauty. Symmetry, a smooth surface, perfect curves, weightlessness and clear functionality all contribute to the “perfect” ceramic vessel and similarly the “ideal” human form. Abundance is a rebellion against these standards. I investigate how ceramic forms can appear heavy and drooping under gravity, and how bumpy textures and speckled glazes intensify forms’ deviation from the standard. Alluding to fatness, my project took the final form of semi-figurative wall-hanging ceramic protrusions, which serve to disrupt the flat, smooth, white gallery wall with overflowing color, texture …

Tale Of Two Judiths: Queering Judith With The Works Of Judith Butler, Kat S. Lewis

Religious Studies Honors Projects

Biblical texts play a significant role in shaping expectations for behavior based on gender in Western societies. In my queer reading of the Book of Judith, I argue that Judith’s performance of gender is fluid and gender expansive. I use reader-response criticism to interpret Judith in conversation with the works of Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood on gender performativity, drag, and agency. This queer reading of Judith provides representation of gender expansiveness in biblical texts and explores queer possibilities in Judith as a way to challenge and subvert a patriarchal, heterosexist gender binary.

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.

Bodies In The Margins: Refiguring The Rebetika As Literature, Sophia Schlesinger

English Honors Projects

This thesis engages a literary analysis of a corpus of songs and recordings known as the rebetika (sing. rebetiko), which prospered in the port districts of major cities throughout the Aegean in the early 20th century. Engaging the rebetika as literary texts, I argue, helps us understand how they have functioned as a kind of pressure point on the borders between nation and Other. Without making unproveable biographical claims about the motives of the music progenitors, I examine why so many have reached for the rebetika as texts with which to articulate various political and cultural desires. Using a …

Between And Beyond, Noah F. Heil

Art and Art History Honors Projects

Between and Beyond is a series of handbuilt and wheel-thrown ceramic objects which explore intimate queer relationships through the human figure. I assemble slabs of clay to create openings and negative spaces within the sculptures, implying the ways in which the human form also acts as a vessel. The sculptures as well as the figures themselves remain open and vulnerable, literally and metaphorically. The body is depicted through fragmented sections, alluding to the ways in which society and culture break up gender and sexuality into limiting binaries. These intimate, private moments are meant to conjure an imagined future free of …

Why We Hear About It, And Why We Don't: Power Dynamics And Sexual Harassment Reporting In Us State Legislative Bodies, Halley Norman

Political Science Honors Projects

The rise to prominence of the #MeToo Movement in October 2017 opened the floodgates to sexual harassment and assault allegations in all fields and levels of employment, across the United States and the world. This movement has crucially revealed is that women often wait months or even years before reporting, if they report at all. Looking at US state legislative bodies, I argue that gendered power dynamics between men and women suppress allegations and promote harassment. Using interviews and data analysis, this paper identifies different factors that may delay or hinder reporting, with a specific focus on gendered power dynamics …

Destabilizing Domesticity: The Construction And Collective Memory Of Jewish-American Womanhood From 1900 To 1950, Mara Steinitz

History Honors Projects

Using cookbooks, newspaper articles about consumer protests, and children’s historical fiction books, this project explores the construction and collective memory of Jewish-American womanhood in the first half of the Twentieth century through a lens of food. Jewish-American women had intersectional identities and lived lives that contained a complexity of actions that could be both private and domestic and public and gender norm nonconforming. However, Jewish-American children’s historical fiction fails to encompass this complexity or accurately teach the women’s stories to the next generation by placing female characters into a binary of public or private.

How To Be The Perfect Asian Wife!, Sophia Hill

Art and Art History Honors Projects

“How to be the Perfect Asian Wife” critiques exploitative power systems that assault female bodies of color in intersectional ways. This work explores strategies of healing and resistance through inserting one’s own narrative of flourishing rather than surviving, while reflecting violent realities. Three large drawings mimic pervasive advertisement language and presentation reflecting the oppressive strategies used to contain women of color. Created with charcoal, watercolor, and ink, these 'advertisements' contrast with an interactive rice bag filled with comics of my everyday experiences. These documentations compel viewers to reflect on their own participation in systems of power.

Female Autonomy: An Analysis Of Privacy And Equality Doctrine For Reproductive Rights, Elizabeth Levi

Political Science Honors Projects

What is the constitutional basis for women’s equality? Recently, scholars have suggested that as the right to privacy has floundered against the political undoing of women's access to abortion, equal protection arguments have grown stronger. This thesis investigates the feminist utility and limits of the equality and privacy arguments. Taking liberal feminism and feminist legal theory as analytical lenses, I offer interpretations of gender discrimination, reproductive rights, and marriage equality case law. By this framework, I argue that while an equality argument is less inherently oppressive towards women than the privacy doctrine, equality doctrine has been constructed thus far to …

Private Deaths: The Impossibilities Of Home In The Modernist Novel, Ava Bindas

English Honors Projects

This project examines novels by Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and Nella Larsen featuring female characters who contemplate or commit suicide. Relying on a composite theoretical framework that weaves together geography theories of spaces as well as gendered theories of bodies by authors like Judith Butler, Rita Felski, and Victoria Rosner, I argue women commit suicide because their modern homes fail to accommodate their gendered bodies. Focusing less on the moment of death than on the conditions that make choosing to live impossible, this project tracks how, during a moment of supposed liberation, conceptions of gender, modernity, and domestic …

(Re)Constructing The Hybrid: Negotiating Transcultural South Asian Women's Subjectivity, Zoya Haroon

English Honors Projects

My project explores the transcultural South Asian woman as postcolonial hybrid subject. I do so by comparing two novels by transnational South Asian feminist authors (Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee and Anita and Me by Meera Syal) and using ethnographic work to complement my literary analysis of hybridity with the lived experience of South Asian women at Macalester. I contextualize my project within postcolonial and women of color feminist theory. Ultimately, I seek to contribute to the existing literature on transcultural South Asian women’s subjectivity and to place their experience alongside that of other women of color.

Honors project in English …

Toward A Transnational Queer Futurity: The Photography Of Catherine Opie, Zanele Muholi, And Jean Brundrit, Camille Erickson

Art and Art History Honors Projects

North American photographer Catherine Opie and South African photographers Zanele Muholi and Jean Brundrit create art that documents the lived experiences of queer and LGBTI-identified individuals and communities. Although their varying geographic and cultural specificities contribute to diverse representations, this research applies a queer transnational methodology to analyze how each artist uses the body as a site for re-visualizing queer identities. Employing cultural theorist, José Esteban Muñoz’s conception of a queer futurity reveals how these artistic projects resist the majoritarian politics of the present and envision potential utopian spaces of transformation. By embracing collectivity, belonging, and difference, the photographs enact …

Beyond Consent: Exploring Sexual Violence Prevention At Macalester Through A Framework Of Sexual Subjectivity And Sexual Ethics, Nola Pastor

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Honors Projects

This project explores the topic of sexual violence prevention at Macalester through 21 in-depth interviews with staff and students. Drawing on feminist and other scholarship on the connections between sexual subjectivity, violence, vulnerability, and ethics, I highlight the ways in which cultural ideals of subjective control and invulnerability are linked to sexual violence. In this paper, I argue that in order for prevention programs to intervene in violence at the (inter)subjective level, they must encourage the development of ethical subjectivity that embraces vulnerability and self-reflection. My analysis of interview data reflects and confirms the importance of these themes.

Imagining Female Tongzhi: The Social Significance Of Female Same-Sex Desire In Contemporary Chinese Literature, Ashley Mangan

Asian Languages and Cultures Honors Projects

In the wake of shifting cultural attitudes about gender and sexuality in Post-Mao China, new discourses have emerged about desires and subjectivities that had previously been denied visibility. This thesis takes one such emerging discourse as its focus, the discourse of female homoeroticism in contemporary Chinese literature. The project has three major purposes: (1) to investigate the historical and cultural conditions that have contributed to the emergence of this discourse in the 1990s, an era of profound ideological and cultural change in China, (2) to explore the local and global analyses that contribute to the discourse, and (3) to discuss …

Female Reverberations Online: An Analysis Of Tunisian, Egyptian, And Moroccan Female Cyberactivism During The Arab Spring, Brittany Landorf

International Studies Honors Projects

Digital technologies and social media networks have the potential to open new platforms for women in the public domain. During the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions, female cyberactivists used digital technologies to participate in and at times led protests. This thesis examines how Tunisian, Egyptian, and Moroccan female cyberactivists deployed social media networks to write a new body politic online. It argues throughout that female activists turned to online activism to disrupt gender relations in their countries and demand social, religious, economic, and political gender parity.

Roosevelt, Boy Scouts, And The Formation Of Muscular Christian Character, Gordon J. Christen

Religious Studies Honors Projects

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, many prominent Christians and political leaders saw a degenerative influence in industrializing America. For them, urban culture had eroded gender roles, personal strength, and moral fiber. So-called “Muscular Christians” prescribed physical exertion and wilderness experience to cure these ills. I argue that these values were embodied in idealized characters such as Theodore Roosevelt, Jesus, and the Boy Scout to give a form to cultural remedies. In the process, they became the terms upon which proper Americanism, and proper Christianity, were constructed.

Nos Ancêtres, Les Pervers: Reading Queerly And Constructing The Homosexual Before The Closet (1810-1830), Gary C. Kilian Mr.

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Honors Projects

Homosexuality is, popularly imagined, a twentieth-century phenomenon wherein medicine created homosexual identity and society worked to stigmatize it. Yet the proto-homosexual role can be traced to several notable historical figures before the rise of medicine at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, especially through literature, and this is most apparent in France, which had been the first country to decriminalize same-sex relations in private after the adoption of the Napoleonic Code. But how do we understand same-sex desire and homosexuality before the homosexual existed as such while respecting the oftentimes-unclear nuances of human …

A Rock Strikes Back: Women's Struggles For Equality In The Development Of The South African Constitution, Thuto Seabe Thipe

Political Science Honors Projects

In 1991, South African women’s organisations formed the Women's National Coalition (WNC) to identify and advocate for women's primary needs in the post-apartheid Constitution. The outcome of this advocacy was South Africa’s adoption, in 1996, of one of the most comprehensive protections of gender and sexuality rights of any national constitution. I argue that the WNC became a key actor in the development of the Constitution by drawing from a tradition of women’s organising in South Africa that emphasised women’s legitimacy in and value to public politics. The WNC rejected masculinist framings of politics and instead demanded that political structures …