Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Seduction As Power? Searching For Empowerment And Emancipation In Sex Work, Jennifer Chisholm

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

A longstanding debate within feminism has been whether sex work is empowering or ultimately disempowering for those who engage in it. This essay seeks to contextualize discourses about seduction, prostitution, and sexual tourism as they relate to Brazil and to make a preliminary assessment as to the ways in which the act of seduction might be empowering for Brazil’s sex workers. Based on ethnographic research and borrowing from literary theory, tourism theory, and interdisciplinary theories of power and agency, I argue that seduction has the potential to be empowering for Brazilian prostitutes who can capitalize on the racial and ethnic …

The Trans Complaint: Contributions To The Disagreement About Desire, Brandon L. Aultman

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Trans studies has been argued to be at a defining crossroads. The discipline needs to reorient itself toward new theories of transness and subjectivity or face its own dissolution. This means contesting received dogmas of gender-determination, identity, history, and narrative convention. This essay examines how recently proposed uses of narratives, poetry, and satire can enable such contests in generative ways. It theorizes the trans complaint as an index for how popularly and academically mediated trans cultures, or intimate publics, might turn toward ordinary life theories in order to understand desire, fantasy, and their interlocking complexities of making a life.

Women’S “Empowerment” In The Bangladesh Garment Industry Through Labor Organizing, Chaumtoli Huq

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

By critiquing empowerment in international development discourse and reconceptualizing it, the article shows how Bangladeshi garment workers have used the trade union space to achieve socio-economic empowerment despite barriers to labor organizing. Further, it argues for the development of working class women’s leadership.

Homosocial Desire In Tsitsi Dangarembga’S Everyone’S Child, P. Jane Splawn

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This paper explores the subtle explorations of homosocial desire in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s 1996 film Everyone’s Child. In her deft, though subtle, treatment of the social bonds among young males in the film, the filmmaker opens a space for queer readings. Societal inscriptions of gender and sexuality are also queried, as a teen engages in sex work to provide for herself and her orphaned siblings. While the film has been described as a film “about AIDS and orphans” (Lee, 2006, p.135), the paper proposes that Everyone’s Child is so much more than this. The paper considers the work of Sommerville (2000) …

Gender-Based Perceptions Of The 2001 Anthrax Attacks: Implications For Outreach And Preparedness, Christopher Salvatore, Brian J. Gorman

Christopher Salvatore

Extensive research dealing with gender-based perceptions of fear of crime has generally found that women express greater levels of fear compared to men. Further, studies have found that women engage in more self-protective behaviors in response to fear of crime, as well as have different levels of confidence in government efficacy relative to men. The majority of these studies have focused on violent and property crime; little research has focused on gender-based perceptions of the threat of bioterrorism. Using data from a national survey conducted by ABC News / Washington Post, this study contrasted perceptions of safety and fear in …

Review Of Women Who Fly: Goddesses, Witches, Mystics, And Other Airborne Females By Serinity Young, Nancy Schultz

Nancy Lusignan Schultz

Dialogue Between Islam And Environtmental Ethics Through The Seyyed Hossein Nasr Thought, Aulia Rahman Nugraha, Naupal Asnawi

International Review of Humanities Studies

Islam is often regarded as a religion that teaches anthropocentrism through the concept of the caliph in which humans occupy a central position on earth. However, the concept of the caliph itself is a complex concept where the special status of humans always implies a moral obligation. Through alternative explanatory methods and critical reflection, the authors try to clarify the concept of the caliph and show the teachings of Islam that are environmentally friendly through the thought of Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Philosophy and environmental ethics of Nasr have two major projects, namely the resacralization of nature and the clarification of …

“The Worlding Game”: Queer Ecological Perspectives In Modern Fiction, Sarah D'Stair

Doctoral Dissertations

Cultural and literary theorists have been increasingly advocating for a posthuman ethic that challenges oppressive binaries of all kinds. In turn, the field of queer ecology, which investigates discourses of sex and nature for implicit heterosexism and androcentrism, has come to the fore. This dissertation, rooted firmly in this newer branch of ecocriticism, focuses on various inter-species environments imagined by early twentieth-century queer women writers. Each of their works, in different ways, challenges the naturalization of social hierarchies based on gender, sexuality, race, class, and species being reinforced in the burgeoning fields of sexology, psychology, and evolutionary biology. Their novels …

Narratives Of Queerness: Queer Worldmaking (In) The Classroom With Undergraduate Students, Rachel Briggs

Doctoral Dissertations

This research brings together education research, queer theory, and performance theory to consider the worldmaking potential of the queer classroom. Using students’ stories about queerness in the classroom and my own stories about the classroom, I ask what we can learn from students’ voices about how queerness is/can be performed in the classroom and through relations. This study uses critical ethnography, personal narrative, and performative writing to examine the production of subject positions in the classroom, to connect this to a queer theoretical framework, and to explore the worldmaking potential of the classroom. I interviewed seven undergraduate students at a …

The Body (Re)Public: Women On/As The Landscape Of Modernity, From Zola’S Au Bonheur Des Dames To Varda’S Cléo De 5 À 7, Christine Gutman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the ways in which questions of gender, space and mobility intersect in a selection of fin-de-siècle French novels and 1960s French New Wave films in an effort to discern how the representational interplay of these three elements gives allegorical form to the sociopolitical anxieties of the times in which the works were produced. Using the Paris Commune of 1871 and the protests of May ’68 as anchoring points for the two periodizations underlying my inquiry, I examine how women in the novels of Emile Zola (Au Bonheur des Dames, Nana) and Villiers de L’Isle-Adam ( …

Pathways To Parenthood: Attitudes And Preferences Of Eight Self-Identified Queer Women Living In Tampa Bay, Fl, Emily Noelle Baker

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This small-scale ethnographic study looks at the how queer women living in Florida imagine navigating family building decisions under the current climate of policies such as a lack of federal non-discrimination protections and the largely unregulated use of assisted reproductive technologies. Despite the federal legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States in 2015, state and county legislations continue to vary greatly on the extent of support they will provide for LGBTQ families. The goal of this research is to evaluate parenting desire, intentions, and preferences for queer women living in Tampa Bay since the passage of the Marriage Equality …

Purchasing Products To Make A Difference: A Study Of Corporate Social Responsibility, Gender, And Cosmetic Purchasing Behavior By College Students, Allegra Blomenberg

Honors Theses

The purpose of this study was to investigate gender differences that exist in the way corporate social responsibility (CSR) is perceived by college students and how this affects cosmetic purchasing behavior. Two other objectives included finding what drives millennial cosmetic purchasing behavior as a whole and the ways in which millennials are informed of companies’ corporate social responsibilities. Through analyses of interview data from fourteen college-age millennials, the study showed that non-binary participants more positively perceived CSR and actively bought from responsible brands. The male participant perceived CSR positively but had never been sure to purchase products from a brand …

Undiagnosing Iphis: How The Lack Of Trauma In John Gower’S “Iphis And Iante” Reinforces A Subversive Trans Narrative, C Janecek

Accessus

Trauma has long played a role in queer narratives, including Ovid’s “Iphis and Ianthe”, which many scholars have interpreted as reinforcing heteronormativity through Iphis’s transformation into a man in order to marry Ianthe. However, I argue that John Gower’s rendition of this tale reframes Iphis as a trans man and allows us to understand the poem as a subversive trans narrative that revolts against cisnormative conceptions of gender. Utilizing Judith Butler’s writing on the medicalization of gender, I explore the relationship between trauma, performance, and gender within the Ovidian and Gowerian versions of Iphis.

Reflections On A Transnational Project: Suffrage In The Americas, Patricia Harms, Stephanie Mitchell

Journal of International Women's Studies

Suffrage is the most significant political development within modern Liberal states. Despite this fact, it is curious as to why suffrage movements have so little history. This article focuses on the creation of an edited volume that seeks to address the women’s suffrage story across the Americas. While the intellectual process of the project is discussed in some detail, this article is predominantly a reflection on the process of developing a collaborative project and the challenges inherent to a transnational approach. This project reveals both the significance of suffrage and simultaneously the fractured landscape within individual countries, suffrage movements and …

The Perfect Misogynist Storm And The Electromagnetic Shape Of Feminism: Weathering Brazil’S Political Crisis, Cara K. Snyder, Cristina Scheibe Wolff

Journal of International Women's Studies

In Brazil, the 2016 coup against Dilma Rousseff and the Worker’s Party (PT), and the subsequent jailing of former PT President Luis Ignacio da Silva (Lula), laid the groundwork for the 2018 election of ultra-conservative Jair Bolsonaro. In the perfect storm leading up to the coup, the conservative elite drew on deep-seated misogynist discourses to oust Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s progressive first woman president, and the Worker’s Party she represented. Imprisoning Lula and preventing him from running solidified the effects of the coup and opened the field to the right wing. In this article, we track the roots of the elite’s …

Políticas De Feminicidio En México: Perspectivasinterseccionales De Mujeres Indígenas Para.Reconsiderar Su Definición Teórica-Legal Y Las Metodología De Recolección De Datos, Dolores Figueroa Romero

Journal of International Women's Studies

Feminicides of indigenous women are not easy to distinguish in the data and statistics that feminist activists collect, to document gender-based violence against women in general. The killing of women because they are women responds to a legal definition that specifically refers to a particular type of victim: poor, working-class, urban women (Lagarde 2008). Very often the violent deaths of indigenous women defending communal/territorial resources, or violent acts related to the militarization of rural areas and extortion by organized crime may not necessarily be classified as feminicide since that violence is the result of the intersectionality of several orders of …

The Making And Silencing Of “Axé-Ocracy” In Brazil: Black Women Writers’ Spiritual, Political And Literary Movement In São Paulo, Sarah Ohmer

Journal of International Women's Studies

In this article, I will focus on two influential writers from the south of Brazil, Cristiane Sobral who currently lives in Brasília, from Rio de Janeiro, and Conceição Evaristo who currently lives in Rio de Janeiro state, from Minas Gerais. I got to know them in São Paulo in 2015 at a public event: the “Afroétnica Flink! Sampa Festival of Black Thought, Literature and Culture.” I will include references to some of their younger contemporaries such as Raquel Almeida, Jenyffer Nascimento, and Elizandra Souza, all of whom reside in São Paulo, in order to illustrate the Black Brazilian women writers’ …

“Me Gritaron Negra”: The Emergence And Development Of The Afro-Descendant Women’S Movement In Peru (1980-2015), Eshe Lewis, John Thomas Iii, Spanish Translation: Https://Revistasinvestigacion.Unmsm.Edu.Pe/Index.Php/Sociales/Article/View/19567

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article examines the evolution of the Afro-descendant women's movement in Peru between 1980 and 2015. We examine the development of women’s conscious through other movements, specifically through the national Afro-Peruvian movement and the regional feminist encounters that have been taking place since the 1980s. Our study outlines the tensions, and points of convergence and divergence that have existed for Afro-Peruvian women in these movements. We demonstrate how these issues characterize the nature of Afro-Peruvian women's struggle and their social and political position within the realm of race- and gender-based activism. We show that this friction has prompted women to …

La Circulación Y Resignificación Del “Feminismo” En La Argentina De Fin-De-Siglo A Través De Su Proceso De Integración Al International Council Of Women (1899-1910), Marcela Vignoli

Journal of International Women's Studies

The formation of the National Council of Women of the Argentine Republic in 1900 (CNMA), was an important step to integrate women into an international network that had formed similar entities in other parts of the world and came together in the International Council of Women (ICW), which had been founded in 1888 in Washington. The International Council saw with great expectation that other countries of the region imitated this first experience of Latin America. For their part, some of the local members looked forward to the possibility of coming into contact with feminist and women’s issues in other parts …

Framing The Final Issue On Women’S Movements And The Shape Of Feminist Theory And Praxis In Latin America, M. Gabriela Torres, O’Connor Erin

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

Death Of The Clinic: Trans-Informing The Clinical Gaze To Counter Epistemic Violence, Diana E. Kuhl

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This case study research (Patton, 2002, 2014; Flyvberg, 2006) has grown out of an awareness of deep resistance from the psy disciplines to trans-informed epistemologies as a source of legitimate knowledge (Tosh, 2015, 2016; Winters, 2008). It focuses on examining how the closure of The Gender Identity Clinic (GIC) for Children and Youth at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, signaled a paradigm shift from the ‘treatment model’ to the ‘affirmative model’ with respect to clinical approaches for supporting trans and gender diverse children and youth. As such the case study involved tracing the …

The Clothesline Project [Poster], University Of Northern Iowa. Women's And Gender Studies Program.

Women’s and Gender Studies Program Documents

No abstract provided.

Pamphlet Proofs: Invisible Histories Mississippi, Amy Mcdowell, Jessica Wilkerson

Queer Mississippi (Complete Collection)

Color page proofs for a tri-fold brochure to introduce the Invisible History Project: Mississippi to collect both oral histories and archival materials.

Tupelo Pride 2019 Exhibit, Amy Mcdowell, Jessica Wilkerson, Maddie Shappley, David Hooper Schultz

Queer Mississippi (Complete Collection)

The Invisible Histories Project-Mississippi launched during Tupelo Pride 2019's opening event at the Link Centre. IHP-MS had an information table with two pop-up exhibits: a selection of record covers from the collection of DJ Prince Charles (Charles Smith), now housed in the University of Mississippi Libraries Archives and Special Collections, and a selection of "ethno-poems", curated by graduate student oral history interviewers Maddie Shappley and Hooper Schultz.

Encouraging Self-Esteem, Wilde Stein: Queer Straight Alliance

Social Justice: Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

Signs, hand painted by members of the Wilde Stein Club, promoting messages of self-esteem including, "You are worth it. You are valid;" "You are Worthy;" and "You ARE Enough."

The Gendering Of Voice In Medieval Hindu Literature, Nancy M. Martin

Religious Studies Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"To fully grasp the implications of the gendering of voice in this literature, we must first understand the religious context that generates these voices and the life stories of the saintly figures in whose names these voices continue to be spoken. Accordingly, we will trace the origins and nature of devotional Hinduism. Theologically gender inclusive and embracing a feminine spiritual identity, the stories and songs of its saints will nevertheless reveal an ongoing bias against women and upholding of patriarchal norms that is continually challenged, particularly by women saints whose life stories follow very different trajectories than their male counterparts, …

Critique Of A Hegemonic View Of Feminism: A Reflection, Elsa Muñoz-Garcia

Access*: Interdisciplinary Journal of Student Research and Scholarship

This article gathers the critiques of “Western feminisms” that came up in conversations with Kurdish women during an ethnographic study of Kurdish women in Europe. The purpose is to build a conceptual foundation for a stronger coalition that is key to a transnational feminist discussion. In order to that I define a framework receptive of the criticism. I review some key elements in the existing conversation on hegemonic Western feminisms, such as eurocentrism and individualism. I also comment more features that I extracted from my study during my interactions with Kurdish women, such as institutionalized way of operating that keeps …

Sargent’S Mysterious Sitter: Objectification And Subjectivity In Madame X And Other Works By John Singer Sargent, Silvia Lopez

History in the Making

No abstract provided.

The Life And Legacy Of Norma Mccorvey, Jacqulyne Anton

History in the Making

No abstract provided.

How To Help When It Hurts? Think Systemic, Corey L. Wrenn Ph.D.

Corey Lee Wrenn, PhD

To resolve a moral dilemma created by the rescue of carnivorous species from exploitative situations who must rely on the flesh of other vulnerable species to survive, Cheryl Abbate applies the guardianship principle in proposing hunting as a case-by-case means of reducing harm to the rescued animal as well as to those animals who must die to supply food. This article counters that Abbate’s guardianship principle is insufficiently applied given its objectification of deer communities. Tom Regan, alternatively, encouraged guardians to think beyond individual dilemmas and adopt a measure of systemic reconstruction, that being the abolition of speciesist institutions (The …