Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Influenced: Performing Gender And Femininity In Mormon And Evangelical Online Spaces, Kathryn Ann Davis

CGU Theses & Dissertations

The construction of a digital self is fully performative; online identities are simultaneously highly curated, edited, and uniquely personal. These spaces allow users to become producers of identity and religious narrative. In this dissertation I examine the online communities which are a dynamic and developing aspect of religious life in America. I will argue that religious women have created increasingly diverse virtual spaces for themselves, and that these online communities give women a safe space to talk about their faith and create common bonds with other female adherents. I have engaged with these creators directly through oral history interviews and …

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 …

Mothers And Daughters: Reclaiming The Besieged Body Of Woman In Ashapurna Debi’S Trilogy, Subhadeep Ray, Goutam Karmakar

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper offers a close reading of the intergenerational trilogy by Ashapurna Debi, one of the first-canonized women-novelists of post-independence India: Pratham Pratisruti (The First Promise), 1965, Subarnalata, 1967, and Bakul Katha (Bakul’s Story), 1974. Reconstituting a history of almost two centuries and countering the colonial/postcolonial grand narratives, these novels act as a saga of Bengali Hindu lower and middle-class women’s plight under and resistance against a patriarchal social order operating at the most intimate levels of domestic relationships. Ashapurna Debi’s treatment of the intricacies of gender inequality and a woman’s response to the violence …

"I Want To Know What I'M Looking At": Surveilling Gender As A Response To Cultural Anxieties In Halloween, Sleepaway Camp, And Scream, Jennifer Jacinda Mclawhorn

Institute for the Humanities Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate slasher films and how they use gendered tropes to respond to and perpetuate cultural anxieties. The methodology primarily uses textual analysis that includes close attention to content, context, and discourse. The study reveals structural patterns and problems that emerge within slasher films, specifically within the Final Girl trope and the behaviors that govern it. In surveilling the Final Girl’s gender performativity, it is apparent that abjection, or a gut reaction to something that exists between two distinct boundaries or categories, is provoked when the Final Girl crosses a socially established gender boundary. …

Traces: Embodied Ephemera From Here To There, Alice Svetic

Dance (MFA) Theses

This thesis work explores contemporary queer dance making through the concept of ephemera - what is left after performances "end." Taking heavy inspiration from José Esteban Muñoz's Cruising Utopia: the then and there of queer futurity, the research situates one young queer dance maker’s own past, present, and future choreographies as a site for the extraction of queer embodied experience. The textual and written research culminates in a gallery installation which houses a series of vignettes that act as preserved documents of these queer performance histories. The live performance calls the alive, dancing body into the conversation of the ephemeral. …

Women Entrepreneurs In China: Dialectical Discourses, Situated Activities, And The (Re)Production Of Gender And Entrepreneurship, Zhenyu Tian

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Despite the number of women entrepreneurs on the rise globally, the business world and the identity of the entrepreneur remain to be normed masculine and male gender stereotyped. This male gender stereotyping situates women who practice entrepreneurship in disadvantages, limiting their access to resources on which they depend to make meaning of their activities and identities. This imbalanced masculine gender order also manifests in China’s economy. Women entrepreneurs in China face complex contradictions and challenges when navigating an arena that privileges men and masculinity. However, not much is known about the micro-dynamics of Chinese women’s entrepreneurial experiences in light of …

Changing The Angle Of Perception: Making Meaning For Identity Performance In China And On The Internet, Cecilia Cs Twanmo

Senior Projects Spring 2021

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

Holy Stitches Batman, Or, Performative Villainy In Gothic/Am, A. Luxx Mishou

English Theses & Dissertations

Holy Stitches, Batman, or, Performative Villainy in Gothic/am is an interdisciplinary examination of gothic affect and deviant fashion in the narrative construction of villainy. It asks not just what a villain looks like, but what it means to look like a villain. A villain is a character who consciously and purposefully deviates from standards of normativity in order to pursue their own, often criminal, interests. The signifier of “villain” articulates a different purpose – an adversarial relationship with normativity that guides personal identification. Not exceptional to a gendered cultural system, they are informed by the societies in which they operate, …

From Protecting To Performing Privacy, Garfield Benjamin

The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique

Privacy is increasingly important in an age of facial recognition technologies, mass data collection, and algorithmic decision-making. Yet it persists as a contested term, a behavioural paradox, and often fails users in practice. This article critiques current methods of thinking privacy in protectionist terms, building on Deleuze's conception of the society of control, through its problematic relation to freedom, property and power. Instead, a new mode of understanding privacy in terms of performativity is provided, drawing on Butler and Sedgwick as well as Cohen and Nissenbaum. This new form of privacy is based on identity, consent and collective action, a …

Paul By Paul By Paul, Paul Finch

Theses and Dissertations

In 2020 flamboyant fashion is associated with queer performativity. Psychologist Alan Downs and queer theorist madison moore understand this to be a response to a culture that is hostile to sexual behaviour and gender expression that falls outside a rigid binary. I study the history of flamboyant aesthetics and camp sensibilities from an intersectional perspective, and locate designers and artists who have produced clothes in ways that materialize the political implications of fashion. As a studio-based artist, I employ traditional sewing techniques, digital technologies, and performance to create clothes and new media works that demonstrate a circular understanding of time, …

(And I Can't Stress This Enough) In My Mouth: Extradiegetic Affect As Material, C. Klockner

Theses and Dissertations

(and i can’t stress this enough) in my mouth: Extradiegetic Affect as Material is a non-linear exploration into the structures of feeling that exist in relation to cinema in its role as a technology for generating subjectivity. In the development of this research, a proposal of cinema’s likeness to the ecological circulation of microplastics is drawn in order to illustrate cinema’s materiality and nearly invisible ubiquity. The notion of extradiegetic affect is outlined as a post-cinematic condition in which lived experience becomes secondary to cinematic representation and which, simultaneously, becomes directly shaped by engaging with these representations.

Research Before Teaching And Service? Performances, Perceptions, And Experiences Of Faculty At Teaching-Intensive Institutions, Megan Elizabeth Throm

Wayne State University Dissertations

The privileging of research over teaching is well documented in scholarship regarding the teaching-research nexus. In this dissertation I analyze the experiences and identities related to research, teaching, and service of sixteen faculty members at teaching-intensive institutions through intensive interviews. The focus on teaching-intensive institutions is driven by two goals. The first goal was to gain a better understanding of how the privileging of research over teaching and service is experienced, understood, and reified by faculty members at teaching-intensive institutions. Second, by giving voice to the experiences of those at teaching-intensive institutions I hope to increase the value placed on …

The Sin Of Pride In Dressing Bodies In Spanish And Anglo-American Ballads, Ana Belén Martínez García

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Sin of Pride in Dressing Bodies in Spanish and Anglo-American Ballads" Ana Belén Martínez García argues that trying to decipher the reasons for characters to dress in a certain way may help discover the underlying sociocultural mechanisms that prevail. The author aims to reveal the gender divide associated to clothing through a comparative approach towards popular literature in Spanish and English. She uses Judith Butler's theory of performative acts in order to conduct the text analysis. Clothes-related acts feature prominently in the case of popular balladry. Spanish "romances" and Anglo-American ballads are poems that were and …

Reimagining African Authenticity Through Adichie's Imitation Motif, Ivette Rodriguez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In An Image of Africa, Chinua Achebe indicts Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for exemplifying the kind of purist rhetoric that has long benefited Western ontology while propagating reductive renderings of African experience. Edward Said refers to this dynamic as the way in which societies define themselves contextually against an imagined Other. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s fiction exposes how, by occupying cultural dominance, Western, white male values are normalized as universal. Nevertheless, these values are de-naturalized by their inconsistencies in the lived experiences of Adichie’s black, African women. Women who are at once aware of and participant in, the pretentions that underlie …

We Call It Pulling A Thread: Deconstructing Femininity At The Molly Brown House Museum, Emily J. Starck

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Despite making up around half of the global population, women are consistently underrepresented in museums. Where women's experiences are present in exhibitions and programming, they are often misrepresented within an entrenched heteronormative and patriarchal framework. Through this thesis, I show how Denver's Molly Brown House Museum works to upset traditional narratives through their dynamic interpretation of the life of their namesake, Margaret Tobin Brown. Using new museology, feminist anthropology, and performance theory, I analyze data from staff interviews and tour participant observation to explore how the museum deconstructs popular understandings of historical femininity. Through visitor surveys, I measure the extent …

Individual Thought Patterns: Women In New York's Extreme Metal Music Scene, Joan M. Jocson-Singh

Theses and Dissertations

Extreme metal music (EMM) is both an umbrella term and a sub-category of heavy metal. Although women have a small but steady presence in heavy metal, this number shrinks when applied to the EMM scene. Using ethnographic research, participant-observation and interviews, this study surveys women in New York's EMM scene to address participation, gender performativity and feminist musicology.

“Mi Resistencia Me Nutre” Las Vivencias De Mujeres Matagalpinas De Acoso Callejero Y Sus Estrategias De Resistencia / "My Resistance Nourishes Me" The Experiences Of Female Street Killers Of Matagalpinas And Their Strategies Of Resistance, Olivia Linn

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Según un estudio del Observatorio Contra Acoso Callejero de Matagalpa en 2015, acoso callejero es una experiencia casi universal para las mujeres en Nicaragua—el 96% de las entrevistadas reportaron que lo habían experimentado regularmente. Inmediatamente cuando llegué a Managua, descubrí que no era una excepción, pero la cifra no hizo justicia a lo que experimentaba como violencia descorazonadora. Lo que más me desalentó fue la minimización y normalización con que se encontraron mis expresiones sobre mi frustración. De mi lucha por encontrar estrategias adecuadas de resistencia para proteger mi salud mental y emocional, decidí estudiar las experiencias de acoso callejero …

We Are Standing In The Nick Of Time: Translative Relevance In Anne Carson's "Antigonick", Michelle Alonso

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The complicated issues surrounding translation studies have seen growing attention in recent years from scholars and academics that want to make it a discipline and not a minor branch of another field, such as linguistics or comparative literature. Writ large with Antigonick, Carson showcases the recent Western push towards translation studies in the American academy. By offering up a text that is chaotic in its presentation, she bypasses the rigid idea of univocality. By giving the text discordant images, she betrays the failed efficacy of sign and signification, and by choosing a text to be performed and mutually participated …

Flinging The Apron And Tearing The Kerchief: Janie Crawford's Gestures In Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Madeline Elizabeth Celley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I argue that in her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston demonstrates protagonist Janie Crawford's development through her use of gesture. As the narrative moves throughout Janie's life, she becomes progressively able to communicate her feelings and desires through the use of her body's movements. By depicting Janie's subjectivity as fundamentally embodied, Hurston indicates an awareness of the cultural oppression Janie suffers, linking her body to those of women in the past that suffered as slaves. She draws attention to Janie's body by relying on her gestures in order to emphasize the …

Fetishizing Southern Brutality: An Intersectional Analysis Of Animalistic Dehumanization In Interracial Pornography, Shawna Faye Felkins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Pornography has been a widely debated issue within the feminist movement since the sex wars of the 1970’s. The conversation has shifted to a sex radical position within the third movement, seeking to be “sex positive” in representations of pornography as a potential site of empowerment. This work, however, seeks to complicate the idea that all depictions of sex are empowering by examining the popular genre of interracial pornography through the lens of the southern tropes that are often enacted within them: the jezebel, southern belle, and black brute. By using these historical tropes with the work of Judith Butler …

Assuming Identities: Gender, Sexuality, And Performativity In The Silence Of The Lambs, Lynne Stahl

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

In the introduction to Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick discusses the instability of the ignorance/knowledge binary, which generally equates the latter with power and the former with impotence. She argues that ignorance (or the appearance thereof) can be a tool of power as well, citing as an example the 1986 ruling by the United States Justice Department that employers “may freely fire persons with AIDS” provided that those employers “can claim to be ignorant of the medical fact, quoted in the ruling, that there is no known health danger in the workplace from the disease” (5). That this …

Gendered Performance Performing Gender In The Diy Punk And Hardcore Music Scene, Naomi Griffin

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article considers the relevance of geographical theories about gender roles and how gender is performed, to the situated context of a local DIY (‘Do It Yourself) punk scene. It draws on an auto-ethnographic study carried out by the author between September 2008 and May 2009, which explored the themes of the body, gendered performativity and gendered spatialities. The study was based on the author’s observations, reflections and conversations with other participants at live music events (‘shows’) in a particular region of the UK, but also revealed how DIY punk offers an example of an imagined community, crossing temporal, spatial …

Performances Of Gender And Sexuality In Extreme Sports Culture, Carly Michelle Gieseler

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to expose the strategies through which extreme sports constitute gender through exaggeration, parody, queering, resistance, and transcendence of normative gendered binaries. I interrogate how extreme sports operate on the margins of sport, gender, media, and lived experience to better understand the processes and performances that retain, reinforce, and resist our notions of normative gender, bodies, and sexuality. Starting with the claim that performance is constitutive of gender and culture, I will focus on how extreme sporting performances create significant commentaries on mainstream assumptions surrounding sporting gender, sexuality, and corporeality.

These commentaries function in extreme …

Selling The Third Wave: The Commodification And Consumption Of The Flat Track Roller Girl, Mary Catherine Whitlock

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In an ethnographic examination of the "modern" roller derby movement that began in the early 2000s, I explore Women's Flat Track Derby in Florida. What does it mean to be a roller derby player? How is she conceptualized and commodified? Or more centrally, how is third wave feminism used as a catalyst of this commodification? In order to fully appreciate, understand, and even embrace roller derby, I look at roller derby leagues as social movement organizations (SMOs) in order to note how they frame themselves and maintain collective identity the commodification of third wave feminism. First, I will explore various …

Los Fantasmas Queer De La Dictadura Franquista: ¡Toda Una Re-Velación!, Danae Gallo González

Theses and Dissertations--Modern and Classical Languages, Literature and Cultures

This paper is part of the academic effort to recover historical memory in post-Civil War Spain and metaphorically applies the so-called Giobert Tincture to Carmen Martín Gaite’s El cuarto de atrás (1978), Dulce Chacón’s La voz dormida (2002) and Pedro Almodóvar’s La mala educación (2004) in order show how these works reveal the ghosts of the repression exerted against the epitome of the abject/obscene by Franco’s dictatorship: the queer collective. This collective continues to suffer from marginalization as well as from the effects of repression. I argue that El cuarto de atrás reveals C.’s repressed hybrid/queer identity and sexual orientation, …

Borders That Matter : Trans Identity Management, Reese C. Kelly

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation presents the responses, strategies, and meaning-making processes that forty trans (transgender) people engaged in when confronted with or when preparing for the possibility of encountering two different types of identity checkpoints, or what I regard as "borders": situations where sexed bodies and presentations of self would be matched against identity documents or records, and the use or attempted use of sex-segregated facilities. The project addresses the questions: In what ways do trans people prepare for and respond to identity inspections in border crossing scenarios? What strategies do they employ in order to successfully border cross? What effect does …

From Cosmogony To Anthropogony: Inscribing Bodies In Vedic Cosmogony And Samskara Rituals, Christine Boulos

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that the inscription of bodies is necessary in order to constitute the cosmos, gender and sex. A study of the Vedic cosmogonic mythologies of the deities Purusha and Prajapati illustrates the ways in which sacrifice, as a form of inscription, constitutes the cosmos by ordering and fashioning the boundaries of the bodies of the deities through differentiation and unification. An analysis of samskaras, or consecratory rites of The Law Code of Manu, show that they operate as regulatory norms in order to constitute sex and gender. But the instability and unnaturalness of the categories of gender and …