Women's Studies Commons^™

El Pasado Está Enfrente: Descifrando La Importancia De Las Perspectivas Femeninas A Través De Tiempo En “Mujer Negra” Y Nostalgia De La Luz, Catherine Van Wey

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

Las perspectivas de las mujeres han sido frecuentemente ignoradas o censuradas a lo largo de la historia, aunque las mujeres son la base de la sociedad. Eso no quiere decir que las perspectivas femeninas no existan o no puedan encontrarse en el pasado. Según la teoría del punto de vista feminista (Feminist Standpoint Theory), lo cual es detallado en muchos de los argumentos escritos por teoristas Rita Segato y Maria Lugones, las experiencias y conocimientos de las mujeres son esenciales para entender la sociedad. Esta teoría sostiene que las mujeres, debido a su posición marginada en la sociedad, tienen ideas …

"A Guiding Star To The Youth Of Every Land": Analyzing E. D. E. N. Southworth's Depiction Of The 19th Century Ideal Man In Ishmael, Grace Mowery

Channels: Where Disciplines Meet

Much of E. D. E. N. Southworth’s literature falls into Nina Baym’s category of “woman’s fiction,” a genre of 19th-century fiction written by women, about women, and for an audience of women. However, Southworth’s self-proclaimed favorite, Ishmael, breaks away from her past successes as she weaves a story about the male experience. From childhood to his successful career in the courtroom, Ishmael Worth navigates various discourses of manhood – restrained and martial, self-made, and sentimental – and redeems the best elements of each to provide a model for 19th-century men. With a male helming her book, Southworth tears down True …

A Listening Guide Analysis Of Bisi’S Story Of Living With Female Genital Mutilation, Chinyere Elsie Ajayi, Sunday Ajayi

Journal of International Women's Studies

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is recognized worldwide as a fundamental violation of the human rights of girls and women. It reflects a deep-rooted inequality between men and women and constitutes an extreme form of discrimination against women. Studies have examined the short and long-term impacts of FGM, including the impact on the sexual functioning of women. The aim of this article was to gain an in-depth insight into one woman’s experiences of living with FGM. The analysis presented in this article is grounded in the voice-centered relational or “listening guide” (LG) method of in-depth narrative data analysis developed by Gilligan …

Smokebox: Writing Into Embarrassment, Julia Storch

Theatre & Dance ETDs

Engaging with theoretical concepts and dramaturgical tools, this essay follows my journey through The Dramatic Writing MFA program at the University of New Mexico, focusing on the production of my thesis play, Smokebox. In Part I, I give the background and development of my journey as a playwright, exploring the obstacles I faced and overcame through my engagement with coursework and staged readings. I map out the development of Smokebox, from its humble beginnings as a class assignment, to its transformation through workshop, and finally its realization through an intense rehearsal and production process. In Part II, I …

“I’Ll Tell You No Lies”: An Exploration Of Trauma, Memory, And Violence Against Women In North Carolina Murder Ballads, Madison Ava Helman

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

This dissertation explores trauma, memory and violence against women in Western North Carolina murder ballads “Tom Dooley,” “Poor Omie Wise,” “Poor Ellen Smith,” “The Ballad of the Lawson Family,” and “Frankie Silver.” I posit that these ballads were influenced by prescriptive societal conceptions of femininity, which in turn influenced societal ideations of violence against women. Using folklore performance theory, I analyze the text and context of these ballads and their subsequent histories, eventually arriving at a template for polyvocality that incorporates multiple ballad variants and encourages diverse performances.

Women And Gender Studies And The Potentiality Of Feminist Leadership, Clara Perka

Thinking Matters Symposium

Graduates of Women and Gender Studies (WGS) programs gain skills that aid in the development of a feminist leadership, a leadership practice that is committed to challenging oppressive structures and institutions and empowering others to reach their full potential. Through semi-structured interviews, this qualitative study explored the experiences of five graduates of WGS undergraduate programs in the Northeast region of the United States whose post-graduation work across a variety of professional fields has offered them opportunities to practice feminist leadership. While research on both WGS and Leadership is abundant, this research addresses the gap in the literature on feminist leadership …

What Is The Female Gaze In Literature?, Cadence Dangerfield

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Just as Laura Mulvey defined the male gaze, feminist scholars are constantly working to identify a female gaze in visual arts and literature. Does it exist? This project works to answer the following questions: What is the female gaze? Is it simply the male gaze in reverse, or is it something more, a lens encompassing the desire of intimacy instead of an inherent sexual desire? To find the answer, or at least one possible answer that I can situate myself and my writing into, I plan to read both fiction and scholarship and write utilizing a female character as she …

Women's Work: A Feminist Standpoint Theory Study Of Scholarship, Voice, And Resistance In The Academic Generation Of Knowledge, Linnea Angelica Spitzer

Dissertations and Theses

More women than ever are earning doctoral degrees and are taking research or teaching positions at universities. However, the number of tenured women in full professorships have not yet achieved parity with the number of men in similar positions. Of the many reasons proposed for the disproportionate representation of women in the higher ranks of academia, one of the most commonly cited is the lower rates of publication by women in scholarly journals, an important criterion for promotion and tenure. However, women faculty are not unproductive. As scholars, they produce research and publish their findings in mainstream academic journals. In …

On The Woman Question: A Defense Of Alexandra Kollontai Against Liberal Critics, Nicole Baltzer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Alexandra Kollontai envisioned a world in which all women and their proletarian comrades were liberated from subordination under capitalism. She served as People’s Commissar in the Bolshevik government and established the Zhenotdel, the government’s department for women. Under the Bolsheviks, women were granted equal legal status to men, divorce rights, access to birth control, and were the primary benefiters of the nationalization of domestic work (i.e., communal childcare, dining, and laundry halls). Kollontai and the Soviet Union provide us with one of the few examples of Marxist feminism in action. Liberal critics of Kollontai and her Marxist comrades and contemporaries …

Feminist Theory And Interorganizational Collaboration: An Ethnographic Study Of Gendered Tension Management, Rebecca M. Rice

Communication Studies Faculty Research

Building on feminist theories in organizational communication, this study investigated gendered tension management strategies in interorganizational collaboration. I analyzed data from a 2-year ethnographic study and semi-structured interviews within a collaboration. Findings showed that collaboration members engaged with gendered discourses across levels of the collaboration, including in tensions related to collaborative structure, professional identities, and goals and outcomes. I proposed that collaborators engage in gendered tension management to indicate how gender and difference, particularly the unspoken cultural norms of white masculinity, constitute collaborations. Tension management prioritized tactical, control-related goals over more holistic, care-related goals. This study brought feminist theorizing into …

Space-Praxis: Towards A Feminist Politics Of Design, Mary C. Overholt

Masters of Environmental Design Theses

Outside of the academy and professionalized practice, design has long been central to the production of feminist, political projects. Taking what I have termed space-praxis as its central analytic, this project explores a suite of feminist interventions into the built environment—ranging from the late 1960s to present day.

Formulated in response to Michel de Certeau’s theory of spatial practices, space-praxis collapses formerly bifurcated definitions of ‘tactic’/‘strategy’ and ‘theory’/‘practice.’ It gestures towards those unruly, situated undertakings that are embedded in an ever-evolving, liberative politics. In turning outwards, away from the so-called masters of architecture, this thesis orients itself toward everyday practitioners …

Encountering Feminism: Freeing Borders In A Conservative Society, Bassmah B. Altaher

Journal of International Women's Studies

What made Feminism the core of my academic and spiritual journey was the multiple questions that yearned for answers. I craved to feel the warmth of echoes created by various women with their tales. I needed assurance that women were not left powerless, and that they did have a silenced voice suppressed somehow, and somewhere, which was emerging gradually in time with a sense of pride and achievement. Above all, I wanted to know if that was all there was for me? I asked myself: As an Arab woman, is yielding to the norms and laws of a patriarchal society …

Perspectives On Consciousness-Raising: A Modernist Intersectional Feminist Agenda, Ariana Cacoulidis

MA Theses

My thesis objective is to extend women's understanding of the impalpable second-wave feminist term, "consciousness-raising," and its applications through curating a fictitious exhibition. My fabricated exhibition "Great Women Artists: Consciousness-Raising among Intersectional Feminists" will juxtapose the works of iconic feminist artists who practiced consciousness-raising with emerging and iconic female artists to advocate consciousnessraising's applicability for practicing women artists. Curating "Great Women Artists" will support the idea of raising a female class consciousness via mass consciousness-raising. I will utilize the voices of iconic second-wave feminists, such as Kathie Sarachild, who have discussed consciousness-raising’s impacts and supported the founding female class consciousness …

Examining The Career Pathways For Women Administrators At A Land-Grant University, Meridith A. Balas

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

This feminist-centered, narrative study focuses on the troubling gender gaps in higher education leadership by exploring the career paths and lived experiences of current women administrators at a large, public land-grant institution. This research identifies specific supports and barriers women face throughout their careers that might enable or prevent them from attaining or accessing high-level leadership roles in academic and non-academic administration. The study leans on feminist theory to position perceptions of women in leadership roles across many disciplines in the university setting while observing it as a critical lens to analyze gender inequality in the career pipeline for women …

"She Believes She Is Herself, Which Isn't Complete Madness:" Becoming The Female Subject Through Womanhood As Relation, Isabel Rudner

Senior Projects Fall 2020

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

“More Free Than He Is Jealous”: Female Agency And Solidarity In The Winter’S Tale, Stacey K. Mooney

The Review: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Research

No abstract provided.

Structural Justice: A Critical Feminist Framework Exploring The Intersection Between Justice, Equity And Structural Reconciliation., Camille Burnett, Michael Swanberg, Ashley Hudson, Donna Schminkey

Journal of Health Disparities Research and Practice

Violence against women is a human rights violation (UN, 2006). It affects the health of women globally (UN, 2009) and its elimination is at the heart of many international and national goals. Intimate partner violence (IPV), one of the most common forms of gender-based violence, affects one in three women worldwide (WHO, 2013). The consequences of IPV create negative health outcomes for women that diminish their quality of life and their overall well-being. Abused women access community supports such as shelters to seek safe refuge from the abuse and restore their lives. While shelters play an extensive role in helping …

Marxist Feminism Meets Postcolonial Feminism In Organizational Theorizing: Issues, Implications And Responses, Prajna Seneviratne

Journal of International Women's Studies

In this paper I discuss the issues and implications of simultaneously drawing upon Marxist and Postcolonial feminist approaches to organizational theorizing in developing a theoretical/analytical framework for exploring the multiple interactions of productive and reproductive labour roles of female plantation and apparel workers of Sri Lanka. The paper aims firstly to look at different feminist perspectives to organizational theorizing—laying special empathies on Marxist and Postcolonial approaches—their origins, epistemological and methodological positions, contributions and shortcomings. Secondly it aims to compare and contrast the feminist theoretical approaches of Marxism and Post colonialism along each of these aspects with a view to identifying …

Women’S Human Rights And Migration: Sex-Selective Abortion Laws In The United States And India, Rangita De Silva De Alwis

All Faculty Scholarship

Sital Kalantry’s Women’s Human Rights and Migration: Sex Selective Abortion Laws in the United States and India addresses a long-existing gap in feminist theory at the intersection of a migrant woman’s experience and culturally motivated reproductive decisions. By recognising the possibility that ‘practices that are oppressive to women in one country context may not have a negative impact on women in another country context’ Kalantry takes an important step in creating a framework for evaluating competing human rights interests within the complex cultural contexts that arise in migrant-receiving countries. Her proposed framework rejects the decontextualisation and politicisation of the migrant …

Feminist Theory And Technical Communication, Olivia Duffus

Channels: Where Disciplines Meet

This essay explores feminism, socially-constructed norms, and the relationship between feminism and technical communication. It argues that undergraduate technical communication programs should include courses that study feminist history and theories as related to the field, claiming that studying feminist theory will improve user-centered design and broaden students' spheres of influence as professionals.

The Glass Ceiling Is Not Broken: Gender Equity Issues Among Faculty In Higher Education, Jillian Wood

Educational Studies Dissertations

Gender discrimination is an ongoing topic, including discrimination that occurs in higher education. Previous studies have shown female faculty experience a variety of workplace discrimination including sexual harassment/bullying, salary disparities, and lack of worklife balance. This dissertation aimed to analyze equity issues for female faculty at a private university. The researcher utilized a narrative inquiry methodology, conducting interviews with five full-time female faculty. The purpose of this dissertation was to understand the participants’ everyday stories and lived experiences. The researcher utilized critical feminist theory and leadership theory to examine the notion of equity at this campus. The findings, shown through …

Family Continuity And Multiple Incarcerations Among African American Women, Dorenda Karen Dixon

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Scholars have studied incarceration among women in the United States of America for more than a decade, but few studies have explored the influence of repeated incarcerations among African American women and their family relationships. The research question for this study examined how African American women describe the effects of multiple incarcerations on family trust relationships and their ability to reintegrate into the family system and society. This multiple case study was conducted in Chicago, Illinois, and drew a sample of 4 African American women released from prison with histories of multiple incarcerations. The study explored their perspectives through a …

Stand Strong, Stand Proud: Alternative And Pariah Femininities In San Diego's Punk Rock Community, Steve Moog

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since its inception nearly 40 years ago, punk rock has often been understood as a Social space for rebellion and resistance to dominant cultural norms. As such, punk rock culture becomes fertile ground for explorations of subversive constructions of genders. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the San Diego punk rock community, this thesis unpacks the construction, embodiment and enactment of alternative and pariah forms of femininities and examines their impact on gender dynamics within the scene. Ultimately, this thesis argues that (1) the San Diego punk rock community is a space where alternative and pariah femininities can be embodied …

Weaving A Tapestry, Compassionately: Toward An Understanding Of Young Women’S Feminisms, Ruth Lewis, Susan B. Marine

Education Faculty Publications

The article challenges representations of so-called third-wave feminist politics that have over-simplified the complex, multifaceted nature of young women’s feminism, and that, by relying upon written accounts, have overlooked the empirical realities of “everyday” feminisms. While much scholarly attention has been paid to the “new femininities”—that is, how young women negotiate the contemporary gender order—as well as to the published work of relatively high-profile third-wave feminists, there are surprisingly few empirical examinations of young feminists’ politics, views, and activism despite an exciting and heartening resurgence of feminist activity in the United States and United Kingdom—the two countries in which this …

"She Said Plain, Burned Things": A Feminist Poetics Of The Unsayable In Twentieth Century Literary & Visual Culture, Leah Souffrant

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the way silence, blank space, and other forms of creative withholding attempt to translate the unsayable, or to convey the unsayability of language in artistic form. Through a study of the works of Sylvia Plath, Jean Rhys, Rachel Zucker, Marguerite Duras, Anne Carson, and visual images, this work observes the connection between women's writing in the 20th century and the communication of painful subject matter through attention to absence. This study attends explicitly to how formal qualities in artistic works attend to ontological concerns through an examination of the intersection of concerns with phenomenology, feminism, and formal …

An Autoethnographical Tapestry Of Feminist Reflection On My Journey Of A Fitness Model Physique, Stephanie A. Paplinskie

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Weight training and fitness competitions are increasingly popular activities for many women seeking an aesthetically fit body. This thesis entails a critical reflection of the various factors surrounding my personal decision to partake in body sculpting, examining how these factors parallel the experience of other women in the fitness industry. Using a feminist theoretical framework and autoethnography, a history of feminist theory is incorporated to demonstrate some of the various perspectives surrounding women bodies. Two challenges for women are discussed in this paper: i) the fear of fat, and how it is connected to a woman’s initial decision to attend …

Feminist Theory And The Right-Wing: Shiv Sena Women Mobilize Mumbai, Tarini Bedi

Journal of International Women's Studies

Feminist scholars engaged in the study of women and religion often grapple with the problem of how to theorize the phenomenon of women’s attraction to, and active involvement in politico-religious movements characterized by strongly “patriarchal” authority structures, and by ideologies that either seem to denigrate women or assign them to subordinate social and symbolic roles. This paper looks at some of the approaches that have been taken by feminist scholars to this issue. It reviews some key adaptations of feminist theory to the rising phenomena of women’s public participation in religious, right-wing agendas. It specifically explores the relevance of feminist …

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 …

Sex, Work, And The Feminist Erasure Of Class, Brooke M. Beloso

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

In this essay, I trace the contemporary feminist debate on prostitution to the period in which Catharine MacKinnon and Gayle Rubin deemed Marxism inadequate to the task of theorizing women’s oppression. In seeking to surmount this perceived inadequacy, both thinkers counterposed alternative theoretical frameworks for analyzing women’s oppression that nonetheless relied upon certain of Marxism’s central tenets. In a reliance that took the form of strikingly similar translations of Marxism foregrounding what came to be known as radical feminism (in the case of MacKinnon) and queer theory (in the case of Rubin), both theorists problematically render class as, respectively, gender …

The Epistemology Of Ignorance, Olaf Dana Thomas Stockly

Anthós

Nancy Tuana explores the nature of the epistemology of ignorance in her essay titled, "Coming to Understand: Orgasm and the Epistemology of Ignorance". She describes our current epistemologies as too narrow, lacking in scope and truth because they focus only on the knowledge we have and ignore the knowledge we don’t have. If we want to more fully understand how our culture produces information, “we must also understand that practices that account for not knowing, that is, our lack of knowledge about a phenomena or, in some cases, an account of the practices that resulted in a group unlearning what …