Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Eyes Open In The Dark, Brittany A. Forrest

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

An unusual dissertation that presents a science fiction autobiographical narrative, following a trial of trauma and identity dysphoria. Through a trans-queer biological female lens, the vulnerable tone of the author invites the reader into wording that describes matters they will care for on a human level. This study probes the question of what lives within the silence of our perceptions by appraising reverberations between interactions that coerce the human condition. Interrogating memory is inevitable when questioning how defense mechanisms interrelate and adapt to human needs. This study penetrates the complexities of perception fabrications, power dynamics, sensory perceptions, systemic moralities, and …

"The Whole World Opened Up, There's No Better Word For It Than Euphoria": Experience Of Embodiment In Trans*Feminine Individuals, Sara M. Stanley

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The “experience of embodiment” is a construct that captures how an individual experiences the body in their socio-cultural context and has important implications for mental health and well-being. The construct was originally developed to explain the experiences of cis-gender girls and women, and has not been investigated in trans*feminine individuals. Grounded in social constructivism, and integrating the gender minority stress model and principles of intersectionality, the present study investigated trans*feminine experiences of embodiment. To expand our understanding of this construct, trans*feminine participants engaged in focus groups (n=28), a photo-elicitation task (n=25), and one-on-one semi-structured interviews (n=25). Using a combined inductive …

Botho - Inspired Social Entrepreneurship In Sport: A Decolonial Intersectional Perspective On Social Entrepreneurship In Sport, Denise Kamyuka Ms

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Botswana is on a mission to reach high-income status by 2036. Therefore, the government has called for inclusive economic growth from all sectors of the economy, including the sport sector. Social entrepreneurship (SE) is recognized as a viable tool for inclusive economic growth as it presents economic opportunities for marginalized populations (particularly African women). The literature shows that SE will be beneficial in Botswana, given its high unemployment rate for women (26%) and the high percentage of female-led households (45%). However, the government’s strategies for growing the sport sector do not mention SE. In this dissertation, a group of Batswana …

Laughing [Until/Because] It Hurts: Finding Time For Queer Joy And Belonging Through Art And Aesthetics, Amy Keating

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This thesis explores queer art and aesthetics as rich in potential for the affects of queer joy and queer belonging. In addition to existing in a world that punishes deviance from systemic norms, marginalized groups are expected to be the leaders of systemic deconstruction. Moreover, I argue that the constraints of chrononormativity uniquely affect queer folks. These burdens are heavy. How, then, do queers find time for laughter? How do they create the opportunity to connect without the immediate pressure of socio-political reformation? When reformation is critical for survival, how do queer folks make time for joy? Research often prioritizes …

Period Poverty And Menstrual Perceptions Among Unhoused Menstruators In An Urban Center In Southern Ontario, Kristina D N Fernando

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The purpose of this study is to uncover, describe and examine period poverty among unhoused menstruators accessing an urban shelter in Southern Ontario. Situated in a postmodern feminist lens and explored through thematic analysis, I employ participant observations and semi-structured interviews with shelter residents (n=13) and shelter staff (n=3) to conduct an exploratory case study at Dahlia Women and Family Shelter. The study findings suggest that menstruators at Dahlia experience period poverty and undergo significant challenges to their menstrual hygiene management. Menstrual perceptions were also found to vary based on the menstrual education that menstruators received …

On Mothers And Measures: The (Re)Production Of Mothering Ideologies In Psychological Measures Of Motherhood, Ella R. Keogh

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Across disciplines, researchers look to motherhood as a site of theorization about the growth and wellbeing of the population because of their important role in biological and social reproduction. Psychologists frequently study motherhood and as such play an important role in producing an ideal maternal subject. Past research has shown that the measurement tools we use in psychology are laden with bias, stereotypes, and ideologies about the group being studied and as such are producing ideologically charged results that filter into the world under the semblance of scientific objectivity (McClelland et al., 2020). Using critical measurement analysis, I found that …

Listening To "Silence": Alternative Modes Of Communication In Korean And Korean American Women's Literature, Judy Joo-Ae Bae

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South Korean feminist activity may be relatively unknown to many Western readers; however, a distinct form of feminist activism can be seen when considering alternative modes of communication that are not less than, simply different from “speech” or “voice” as forms of agency celebrated in the West. Alternative modes of communications such as silence, song, touch, and performance also speak important messages which can be heard when understood through local knowledges. In the three cases of South Korean and Korean American women’s fictions used in this dissertation, I unpack these alternative modes of communications used by the female protagonists through …

Witnessing Conspiracy Theories: Developing An Intersectional Approach To Conspiracy Theory Research, David Guignion

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This dissertation proposes an intersectional approach to conspiracy theory research that engages conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists by considering their proximity and affiliations with hegemonic power structures. Against challenges to conspiracy theories based on their lack of empirical legitimacy (Rosenblum and Muirhead 2019) and building on arguments that propound their status as “subjugated knowledges” (Bratich 2008), this dissertation argues that conspiracy theories can be vectors of anti-oppressive resistance against systemic forces that disenfranchise racial, gender, and class minorities. Conspiracy theories are not a homogenous phenomenon; they are particular instances of potentially generative suspicion against powerful forces. The dissertation deploys Kelly …

Insatisfacción Y Tácticas De Oposición: Tres Novelas De Formación Femenina En América Latina (1870-1940), Andrea Angel Baquero

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Esta tesis estudia las novelas de formación femenina como un subgénero novelístico que se distancia del Bildungsroman en la noción de aprendizaje e integración social de las protagonistas. El auge de las novelas de formación femenina en América Latina transcurrió de forma conjunta con el posicionamiento de la mujer como escritora y la conquista de sus derechos políticos y civiles. Por lo cual, este trabajo parte de la hipótesis de que el surgimiento y posterior auge de las novelas de formación se dio de manera conjunta con la profesionalización de la labor escritural de las mujeres por una relación de …

Women And Medicine On The Gold Coast, 1880-1945, Michael Osei

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Prior to colonial rule and the imposition of western medicine and practices, several countries in Sub-Saharan Africa relied on traditional medicine to treat tropical diseases that ravaged the populace. Specialists in traditional medicine, both men and women, restored and preserved their patients' health through herbarium and spiritism. Like their male counterparts, female traditional medicine practitioners on the Gold Coast were highly respected by people for their knowledge and competence as their communities' primary healers and caregivers. This study, drawing on various primary and secondary sources, including oral traditions, colonial reports, medical journals, and historical accounts, argues that women played a …

Bodies Of Silence And Space: Victimhood, Complicity, And Resistance In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Sana H. Mufti

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This thesis examines the complexity of resistance and the conditions of power for women in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Using feminist theory, theories of neoliberalism, and Dominionism, this thesis works to understand the ways in which victimhood and complicity influence resistance in totalitarian regimes. I argue that neoliberal ideologies skew understandings of freedom, agency, and power in a way that ensures individuals, specifically women, remain trapped in the system. Focusing on reproduction, I examine how Gilead controls women’s bodies and reproductive abilities to ensure a future for itself. The Eve-Complex is one way that the state integrates itself …

The Poetics Of Environmental Destruction, Care, And Insurgency: Socio-Environmental Crisis In Women’S Contemporary Novels And Films In The Americas, Victoria Jara

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The effects of the climate crisis have reached a point of undeniability. Action is required urgently at a global level. Women’s activism against environmental dispossession in the Americas is expressed not only through the streets, classrooms, and social media, but also through their artistic filmmaking and writing. My focus on women’s literature and film was not only motivated by the need to study their overlooked contributions, but by the need to unravel how they illuminate the entanglements of environmental dispossession with injustices on matters of gender, ethnicity, age, class, and labour.

The aim of this dissertation is to demonstrate that …

Colombian Women’S Experiences Of The Canadian Refugee And Asylum Adjudication Process, Camila N. Parra Carrillo

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The present thesis “Colombian women’s experiences of the Canadian refugee and asylum adjudication process” is an ethnographic description and analysis of the experiences of Colombian refugee women as they move through the refugee and asylum adjudication system in Ontario, Canada. Using concepts such as liminality, politics of waiting, hermeneutics of suspicion and arbitrariness, the refugee and asylum adjudication system is shown to be a site of power and domination that creates negative emotions in the people who face it, especially in the oral hearing as a central event in the process. Centering Colombian refugee women’s voices, their experiences and emotions …

The Masochian Woman: Coming To A Philosophical Understanding Of Haudenosaunee Women's Masochism, Jennifer Komorowski

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This dissertation is a philosophical examination of women’s masochism from several different viewpoints. Beginning from a centre of Western psychoanalytic thought, I analyse what Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Slavoj Žižek say about women and masochistic practices, and then continue the discussion by looking at the work of several women theorists and writers, including Angela Carter, Judith Butler, Kathy Acker, and Luce Irigaray. This analysis centres around Lacan’s theorization of the death drive through the figure of Antigone, and while he does not describe her as the original woman masochist, I believe she is a central figure in …

Being Pushed And Pulled: Understanding How Climate Change And Multilateral Investment Interact To Influence Rural-To-Rural Migration In Sub-Saharan Africa, Jemima Nomunume Baada

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In this dissertation, I use a mixed methodological (qualitative and quantitative) approach to examine how climate change and multilateral investment (MLI) simultaneously influence the experiences of migrants, non-migrants and return-migrants in rural sending and receiving communities within sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), using data collected from three regions of Ghana. I explore the gendered, historical, geopolitical, environmental, economic and sociocultural factors shaping the experiences of these groups, and the opportunities and constraints that they face in their communities of origin and destination. My study findings are based on two years of data collection (2019 - 2021), involving in-depth interviews (IDIs), focus group …

Between Worlds: Artful Auto/Biography And/As Pagan Healing, Gina Snooks

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This dissertation draws upon the visual and oral life stories of thirteen participants (plus myself) to examine self-identified Pagan women and Pagan gender-variant persons’ experiences and memories of trauma and the potential healing power of storytelling. Specially, I use auto/biographical portraiture — framed as a form of self-guided visual life storytelling— to theorize links between embodied life experiences, traumatic experiences, and subjectivity. Geographically participants are located across Canada, United States, and Ireland where Paganism is still a minority religion, but also on the rise. Contemporary Paganism is a new religious movement that includes a plethora of religions and/or spiritual traditions …

Women And Western Mission: A Case Study On The Christian Khasi And Garo Tribal Women, Rosemary Philip

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Western mission justified a mission to the Global South that was ingrained with the dominance of its culture and values. Women’s mission, as a tool of this mission, patronized themselves as the ‘care-taker’ of the ‘subjugated’ women of the Global South. This mission promulgated new ways of thinking and prescribed new gender roles and values to the Global South. In doing so, it framed the traditional roles and cultural values of the non-Western world as oppressive and replaceable. Subsequently, Women’s mission along with Western feminism and Feminist theology as a broad idea has been challenged by feminists from the Global …

Timely Representations: The Queer Elder Figure In Canadian And U.S. American Film And Television, Jami L. Mcfarland

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Since the release of Mike Mills’s Beginners (2010), a critically acclaimed film about the late life coming out story of a 75-year-old father, representations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or trans (LGBT) characters in their sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties have multiplied in U.S. American and Canadian film and television. Instances of what I call the ‘queer elder figure', these contemporary representations comment on the intersections of aging and queerness. Evident in popular award-winning series, such as Grace and Frankie (2015-2022) and Transparent (2014-2017; 2019), the queer elder figure has emerged as a rather trendy subject in the second decade of …

In The Shadow Of The Atomic Cloud: Masculinity, Modernity, And The ‘Bomb’ In The Electoral Politics Of Canada And The United States, 1949-1963, Allen G. Priest

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This dissertation explores the impact of hegemonic masculinity, in the early Cold War era, on the electoral politics of Canada and the United States. It situates itself in the years between 1949 and 1963, arguably the height of nuclear fear, at a time when masculine ideals were adjusting to an uncertain postwar reality. Previous scholarship has established that the Cold War brought with it a retreat into domesticity, followed by an emergent “crisis” of masculinity. This monograph contributes to the historiography by demonstrating that the masculine architypes of the early Cold War are frequently reflected in electoral discourse. It also …

Unmade And Unmanned Men: Reading Traumatized Masculinity In Late Nineteenth-Century British Adventure Fiction Through The Lens Of The Indian “Mutiny” Of 1857, Madison A. Bettle

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Unmade and Unmanned Men: Reading Traumatized Masculinity in Late Nineteenth-Century British Adventure Fiction through the Lens of the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857 examines the selected adventure fiction of George Alfred Henty, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad through the historico-political context of India’s First War of Independence, known in Victorian Britain as the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857. Examining masculine trauma in adventure fiction reveals how British men, who were themselves colonized by the Empire’s expectations of them, sought not only to recover from the scars inflicted by imperialism, but also to expose the Empire for inflicting the psychologically damaging expectations that …

Making Meaning About Reproductive Work: A Narrative Inquiry Into The Experiences Of Migrant Caregivers In Canada, Crystal Gaudet

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This dissertation examines how migrant caregivers ascribe meaning to the (re)productive labour that they provide within Canada’s Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP). Introduced in 1992, the LCP was a temporary foreign worker program that recruited women, primarily from the Philippines, to care for children, elderly people, and people with disabilities in the homes of their employers. Numerous studies have shown how the stipulations of the LCP produce precarious working conditions that render caregivers vulnerable to exploitation and abuse and that result in their deskilling and de-professionalization. The conditions engendered by the LCP reflect and reinforce the devalued status of care and …

Narratives Of De/Retransition: Disrupting The Boundaries Of Gender And Time, Vanessa Slothouber

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This dissertation research draws on the lived experience of people who choose to de/retransition in order to complicate simplistic understandings of de/retransition as ‘sex change’ (or postoperative) regret. Specifically, I interpret narratives of de/retransition beyond the dominant framing of ‘sex change’ regret to analyze the ways in which these narratives produce ruptures in normative discourses that constrain trans genders and temporalities of gender transition. My research opens up space for interpreting processes of de/retransition as more complex, nuanced, and productive than they are commonly understood. The dissertation is organized in such a way that each chapter deals with narratives that …

Being A Child Bride In Nigeria: A Feminist Narrative Inquiry, Olubukola Foluke Sonibare

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This thesis draws on narratives of northern Hausa-Fulani Nigerian women married as child brides. The aim was to gain an in-depth understanding of Child Early Forced Marriage (CEFM) as experienced by these former child brides and identify the conditions that influence their decision-making autonomy on health care services utilization. A narrative inquiry approach within an intersectional feminist lens was used to analyze the structural, social, cultural, and religious realities that shape the experiences of former child brides in Nigeria. Fifteen former child brides from rural northern Nigeria who now reside in a southern urban setting of the country completed semi-structural …

“Fashionable To Be Ethnic”: Malka Marom, Yorkville Reimagined, And The Cbc’S A World Of Music, Maureen Chow

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In 1999, looking back at her 1960s career as a folk performer, Malka Marom commented that she and her former singing partner, Joso Spralja, had reached mainstream success in Canada when it was considered “fashionable to be ethnic.” Here, Malka is referring to the mid-1960s, when she was classified as an ethnic folk singer in Toronto’s Yorkville Village folk scene. She performed alongside Canadian folk “greats” such as Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, and Ian and Sylvia. Malka and Joso released four studio albums through Capitol Records of Canada and were later chosen to host their own CBC television show, A …

(In)Tolerance And (In)Visibility: Lgbtq+ Sense Of Place In The Stratford Area, Dayna Prest

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In this thesis, I draw on a thematic analysis of 23 interviews with white LGBTQ+ participants in the Stratford area to examine factors affecting participants’ sense of place. The research questions guiding this work are: How do participants make sense of their place in the Stratford area? How and where do participants experience a sense of belonging and not belonging in the Stratford area? And how does a sense of belonging or not belonging affect participants’ experiences within these spaces? My approach to this research is informed by feminist and queer methodologies. When possible, interviews for this research were conducted …

Investigating The Experiences Of Faculty Members And Administrators With Quality Assurance And Accountability In Higher Education In Ontario, Melanie Lawrence

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The main objective of this qualitative case study was to explore the professional experience of six faculty members and three administrators in higher education during a time of increasing quality assurance and accountability policies so to gain a deeper understanding of how neoliberalism is changing their work experience as academics in Ontario, Canada. I have presented the research findings by employing policy sociology as both theory and methodology using the method of the qualitative case study. This form of qualitative inquiry provided an opportunity to explore how each interviewee navigated the current context of neoliberalism within their respective roles in …

Yoga As Embodied Peacebuilding: Moving Through Personal, Interpersonal And Collective Trauma(S) In Post-Conflict Colombia, Mayme Lefurgey

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In this dissertation, I examine creative methods of peacebuilding that are both community-driven and embodied in their approach. I evaluate how these methods can simultaneously challenge the confines of conventional peacebuilding mechanisms in transitional and post-conflict contexts, while also offering a unique complement to existing programs and structures. I look at the multifaceted socio-cultural expressions of yoga globally, inquiring as to how this mind-body practice can offer opportunities in peacebuilding on both individual and collective levels.

My project is rooted in the principles of community-engaged research and feminist research ethics. More specifically, this dissertation closely engages with the work of …

Desmitificando Un Nombre. Juana, “La Loca”, A Través De Su Representación Biográfica Y Dramática. Siglos Xviii-Xxi, Maria Carmen Vera Lopez

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The mythification of the character of Queen Juana I of Castile is the subject of this thesis. The biographical and literary representation are discussed from the biographical and literary perspectives which implies the study of two fundamental aspects in the formation of this myth: woman-power and madness. The main objective of this research is to break down the myth known today as Juana, “the mad” through historical and literary analyses.

This work is part of new Hispanic medievalism because it explains a phenomenon that began in the Middle Ages. The five chapters affirm that, in the case of Juana I …

Toward A Fluid Cinematic Spectatorship And Desire: Revisiting Laura Mulvey’S Psychoanalytic Film Theories, Taylor Ashton Mcgoey

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This thesis project re-evaluates Laura Mulvey’s film theories regarding psychoanalysis and the “male gaze,” first found in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). By re-evaluating the limitations of Mulvey’s use of the Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic model this project seeks to understand the desires and processes of identification of cinematic spectators who reject the ideological imperative of the “male gaze”. As many critics have noted, Mulvey’s initial examination of cinema does not account for LGBTQ+ spectators and/or black spectators who occupy looking relations that reject cis-normative and heteronormative white Hollywood cinematic conventions. From this standpoint, we begin the …

Between Worlds, Between Times: Thinking With Trans Narratives At The Limits Of Ontology And Temporality, Elden L. Yungblut

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My thesis offers up an explicitly transfeminist mobilization of the theoretical notions of ontological pluralism and queer temporality against the pervasive cultural norm of cis-normativity and the dominant temporal logic of chrono-normativity. First, I critique the blatantly transphobic and fallacious rhetoric of Kathleen Stock, the face of the “gender critical” feminist movement in the UK, which I contextualize as part of a contemporary resurgence of the hateful legacy of trans-exclusion rooted in the second wave feminist movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s and cemented in academic theory by Janice Raymond’s (1979) Transsexual Empire. I then delve deeper, aiming to …