Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

"My First Best Love": Women's Writing On College Friendships 1880–1905, Alyssa J. Kayser-Hirsh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, American society encouraged strong bonds between women. As separate sphere ideology took hold, highly-structured female relationships were created and maintained through shared rituals, language, and expectations. The resulting friendships enabled women to build a range of emotional ties with one another. At the same time, an expanding array of gender segregated educational institutions further promoted homosocial networks. Women’s college students built community through their shared experience inhabiting a collective space, forging social circles as well as one-on-one intimate relationships. This thesis examines women’s experiences of friendship within the college setting between 1880 …

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. …

The Feminine Harp As Feminist Tool: Early Professional Footing For Women In Mid-Twentieth-Century America, Chelsea Lane

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1930s North America, women—for the first time—were accorded permanent principal positions in significant American orchestras. Edna Phillips, Alice Chalifoux, and Sylvia Meyer, all students of the legendary harp pedagogue Carlos Salzedo, have been celebrated as pioneers for the prestigious employment they obtained in the Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, and National Symphony Orchestra, respectively, between 1930 and 1933. Despite the impressiveness of these accomplishments, however, the narrative of their “firstness” is not wholly accurate. In actuality, female harpists have occupied orchestral posts as acting principals, substitutes, and second harpists since the very inception of orchestras. The cause for their early …

Historical Sisters: Black Feminist Actions Across History And Literary Studies, Jazz A. Milligan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis seeks to understand how the actions of Black women from the past have inspired the modern Black female literary movement. This thesis focuses on three historical women: Phillis Wheatley, Elizabeth Freeman, and Cathay Williams, and their literary sisters: bell hooks, Barbara Smith, and Patricia Hill Collins. By viewing the lives of these historical women through a modern-day lens, we can understand how their actions created a ripple effect that Black women are still discussing today. Black feminism did not start in a vacuum, and the actions of everyday Black women have pushed us forward to being more accepting …

“She Too ‘Omanish’”: Young Black Women’S Sexuality And Reproductive Justice In Bluefields, Nicaragua, Ishan Elizabeth Gordon-Ugarte

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Most never-married young “Creole” (Afro-Caribbean) women in Bluefields, Nicaragua are raised in fundamentalist Protestant families and institutions that emphasize sexual abstinence before marriage. In this context, abstinence is required to maintain social standing and “respectability.” Nevertheless, women in Bluefields, the administrative center of Caribbean Nicaragua, exhibit what Creoles themselves understand to be high rates of sexuality and pregnancy among post-menarche unmarried teenaged women (USAID, 2012; Mitchell et al. 2015). Such young women’s pregnancies occur at an important developmental stage of their lives and have long been associated by social scientists with adverse social, emotional, and health situations. These scholars have …

Desde El Fuego Que En Mí Arde: Performance, Literatura Y Cine Afro-Latinoamericano Producidos Por Mujeres Afrodescendientes En Perú, Cuba Y Brasil (1960–2000), Elena Ekatherina Chavez Goycochea

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines different films, literary, and performance art pieces created by contemporary afro-descendant women from Peru, Cuba, and Brazil after the sixties with emphasis on the most relevant works of Conceição Evaristo, Sara Gómez, Victoria Santa Cruz, and Lucía Charún-Illescas. I focus my research on the crucial role these artists played in the cultural identity formation of Latin America when inserting ‘race’ as a category of socio-political analysis and cultural production. How did their films, performances, and texts challenge national narratives and imaginaries after 1960? Although in the sixties, women improved their civil rights in different countries, the ‘mujer …

Pierce And Pine: Diane Di Prima, Mary Norbert Korte, And The Meeting Of Matter And Spirit, Iris Cushing

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Diane di Prima (1934-2020) and Mary Norbert Korte (b. 1934) are two poets whose contributions to postwar American poetry are vitally important, and yet their status on the margins of mainstream literary culture has left their work largely unstudied. Di Prima, the granddaughter of Italian Anarchist Domenico Mallozzi (with whom she shared a close relationship) grew up in an Italian-American community in Brooklyn and bore witness to the cultural schizophrenia of WWII as a child. Korte was raised in an affluent Bay Area family, and encountered hardships (including the death of her father when she was 12) that affected her …

Article 6.21, Tatiana Stolpovskaya

Theses and Dissertations

Article 6.21 is a short documentary film that aims to examine the state of censorship around queerness in Russia today and its effects on personal lives in the queer community.

Twenty years after Russia decriminalized homosexuality, on June 30th in 2013, President Vladimir Putin signed Article 6.21 "for the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values", also known as the "Gay Propaganda Law". Its broad and ambiguous wording allows the government significant leeway in deciding what kind of public queerness is punishable.

In 2020 Russia passed multiple constitutional amendments that affect many areas …

Bloodied Hearts And Bawdy Planets: Greco-Roman Astrology And The Regenerative Force Of The Feminine In Shakespeare’S The Winter’S Tale, Christina E. Farella

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis offers a new reading of William Shakespeare’s late play The Winter’s Tale (1623), positing that in order to understand this complex and eccentric work, we must read it with a complex and eccentric eye. In The Winter’s Tale, planets strike without warning, pulling at hearts, wombs, and blood, impacting the health and emotional experience of characters in the play. This work is renowned for its inconsistent formal structure; the first half is a tragedy set in winter, but abruptly shifts to a comedy set in spring/summer in its latter half. What’s more, is that planets, luminaries, and …

Emergent Women's Global Political Leadership: Progress Despite Constraints, Aoife Meehan

Dissertations and Theses

“Emergent Women’s Global Political Leadership: Progress Despite Constraints” seeks to trace why and how female political leaders emerge at the global level. Evidence points to certain cultural factors, often expressed by laws, constraining or supporting women as they seek political advancement. Data shows women leaders are emerging more and more, though slowly, as political leaders around the world. Reviewing women’s participation and representation regionally and nationally in parliaments, as ministers, and as heads of governments and states confirms that women can and do emerge as political leaders. Finally, learning about and examining women leaders themselves, their style and substance, proves …

Creating Herstory: Female Rebellion In Arundhati Roy’S "The God Of Small Things" And "The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness", Priyanka Tewari

Theses and Dissertations

In The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness novels, the author Arundhati Roy is not only attempting to give feminist weight to the multiplicity of locations in which gender is articulated by recasting her female characters in their quest for selfhood, she is also focusing on women and women-identified characters as agents of history, thereby contributing to an ongoing project of feminist historiography.

Building Brand Kurdistan: Helly Luv, The Gender Of Nationhood, And The War On Terror, Nicholas S. Glastonbury

Publications and Research

In the early 2000s, the Kurdistan Regional Government hired a US-based firm to begin a public relations campaign called “The Other Iraq.” Since that time, it has worked with a number of PR and lobbying firms to build a cultural, political, and financial apparatus that I refer to as Brand Kurdistan. This apparatus aims to prove to Western audiencesthat the Kurds are a liberal exception in an illiberal Middle East, and to build prospects of KRG’s eventual national independence. This article explores the connections between Brand Kurdistan and the gendering of Kurdish nationalism, focusing particularly on Kurdish pop diva Helly …

Woman Energy: How Our Lesbian Past Informs Our Lesbian Future, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Publications and Research

Sinister Wisdom Issue 3, published the year 1977 holds an essay by poet Adrienne Rich, titled, “It is the lesbian in us...”; The cover of the same issue has art by photographer Tee Corinne. Sinister Wisdom is a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal. This non-fiction creative essay written by Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz reflects on the first year of Sinister Wisdom's publication as a celebration of 40 years through this special edition anniversary print for which only 1000 have been printed. The essay remarks on the shift in lesbian identity and community and the potential impact of the Sinister Wisdom journal …

Study Guide For United In Anger: A History Of Act Up, Matt Brim

Open Educational Resources

The United in Anger Study Guide facilitates classroom and activist engagement with Jim Hubbard’s 2012 documentary, United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. The Study Guide contains discussion sections, projects and exercises, and resources for further research about the activism of the New York chapter of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). The Study Guide is a free, interactive, multimedia resource for understanding the legacy of ACT UP, the film’s role in preserving that legacy, and its meaning for viewers' lives.