Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Gendered Virtue: A Study Of Its Meaning And Evolution In Early Modern France, Mariela Saad

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Virtue in early modern France was a broad concept considered by clergymen, philosophers, and moralists as an instrument for measuring and implementing human ethics. This unprecedented research seeks to track the development of the notion of virtue from a gendered and dichotomous notion to a unique and undivided term. The word virtue is constantly present in French texts such as manuels de conduite1 , since the medieval period. Thus, it can be regarded as one of the most significant concepts defining genders in Western civilization. However, it is difficult for modern readers to grasp the complexity of the debate unless …

Five Degrees: A Short Story, Cassia E. Hinds

Honors Undergraduate Theses

An interwoven fiction piece representing four perspectives and its effects on self-awareness. The most effective way to blur the line of self in this structure is to braid the minds, voices, and stories, of each perspective. With a focal point where all the voices eventually drift to being the frame of the story, there will be a unique distance between the stories. This thesis explores the effects of different types of mental and physiological illnesses through fiction, highlighting the effect of perception on fact and the perspective of the mentally ill.

The Direction His Eyes Are Facing: An American Geography, Amelia R. Gramling

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

This paper tracks the archetypical figure of the conquistador across the historical impressions and canonical depictions left in his wake since European “explorers” like Columbus sailed into an unidentified land mass five hundred years ago and ushered the New World into the Imperial age. Through diverse and disparate set of sources--from pop culture to Columbus' log books--this paper maps conquest across the mythology of the American nation, weaving school shooters manifestos in with fictionalizations of the American West in with personal interviews and memoir to complicate and challenge the American understanding of nation—our gendered mappings of power and identity then …

"Their Shadows Still Walk With Us": Mapping A Decolonial Cartography Of Struggle With Ingrid Washinawatok El-Issa, Sandra Álvarez

Political Science Faculty Articles and Research

This paper maps a cartography of struggle to document the dynamic, living legacy of Menominee leader Ingrid Washinawatok El-Issa and her contribution to the decolonial possibilities of transnational Indigenous feminism. I propose that mapping a cartography of struggle is a useful way for movements to consider how the past informs the present and future possibilities of resistance and decoloniality.

Este artículo traza una cartografía de las luchas que llevó a cabo la líder Menominee Ingrid Washinawatok El-Issa con el fin de documentar su legado dinámico y vivo y su contribución a las posibilidades decoloniales del feminismo indígena transnacional. Propongo la …

Sticking To The Script: Sexual Scripts In The Slasher Sub-Genre, Jennifer L. Clay

Theses and Dissertations--Communication

The “slasher” sub-genre has been immensely popular, even spawning television shows that invoke the familiar slasher conventions. This sub-genre has simultaneously become vilified by media researchers over the years. The slasher has received particular criticism for allegedly reinforcing regressive attitudes regarding female sexuality. This study applies sexual script theory to better understand the messages about sex found throughout the sub-genre. This study utilizes content analysis to study the more recent iterations of the slasher sub-genre including the re-make, the modern slasher film and the slasher television show. This analysis uncovered that the slasher sub-genre has evolved over time. While slasher …

Locating Gendered Resistance: Interethnic Conflict, Environmental Disaster, And Feminist Leadership In Sri Lanka, Allison A. Donine

Pitzer Senior Theses

In geographically vulnerable and politically unstable regions such as Sri Lanka, I argue that linking natural hazards and climate-induced disasters to existing social issues is more pressing than ever. In the case of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, it was impossible to dissociate the two. Looking though the lens of distress, in conflict and environmental disaster, this thesis explores how women have transformed moments of victimization into opportunities for resistance and agency. This thesis examines the following questions: Within the geo-political context of Sri Lanka, how does social stress (human-made or environmental) produce conflict and resistance to patriarchal traditions along …

Strong, Independent, And In Love: Fighting Female Fantasies In Popular Culture, Allison P. Palumbo

Theses and Dissertations--English

During the late 1970s and 1980s, feminist critics like Janice Radway began to reconsider so-called women’s genres, like romance novels and soap operas and melodramas, in order to address the forms of subversion and expressions of agency they provided female audiences. However, in spite of greater willingness to consider the progressive potential in romance narratives, there has been little such consideration given to stories of romance for the fighting female character—defined as a protagonist who uses violence, via her body or weapons, to save herself and others. The fighting female has received a good deal of attention from critics like …

Understanding The Role Of Women As Leaders In Mexican Politics: Looking Back And Moving Forward, Rafael Tovar Y Lopez-Portillo

Dissertations

The constant changes that occur in a globalized world have pushed gender equality to the forefront of many debates in the western world. Nevertheless, cultural values continue to influence the way in which governments, societies, and individuals behave in regard to the roles that men and women play. In Mexico, despite the cultural values that are embedded in society, women have been able to succeed in areas where, until a few decades ago, it would have been unimaginable. During the last forty years, the Mexican government has gone through a gradual transformation that has allowed women to become an active …

In His Image: A Content Analysis Of Evangelical Youth Books For Their Representation Of Gender Roles And Ideals, Taryn Renee Vis

Honors Projects

This content analysis discusses the results of the analysis of twelve major Evangelical books for young adults and their representation of gender roles and gender ideals. The background of the Evangelical church’s handling of gender, particularly in relation to media beginning in the 1970s is established and discussed at length in order to situate this analysis amongst previous discussion of Evangelical gender roles. This analysis found that each of the books discussed four main themes of gender roles and relations: biological essentialism, complementarianism, counter-cultural branding of gender, and sexual purity (especially for young women).

Thecla Penetrates The Popular Perception, Leah Jo M. Shelton

Audre Lorde Prize

This paper analyzes The Acts of Paul and Thecla, an early Christian writing, within the framework of gender in antique Rome. Roman gender was based on performance, which is the basis of each character's gender construction in this story. Thecla undergoes a radical transformation from a passive female, preparing to be wed, to an active, ideal male who controls her independence and performs public oratory. In contrast, Paul, who appears as an ideal male at the beginning of the story, is "unmanned" by Thecla when she ultimately defies her female categorization. The Acts of Paul and Thecla exhibits the …

Sweaty Mother Slow Groove, Devin Kylie Harclerode

Theses and Dissertations

Sweaty Mother Slow Groove is an engagement in magical thinking that proposes a displacement of swamp methodologies into the virtual realm, existing during the fourth wave. In doing so the cyborg and goddess are united in a re-routing of essentialism and the neo-liberal domination of technology. The metaphorical swamp is the possibility of a mushy danger zone that harnesses the absorption of an unwanted space: a disintegration of the binary and the soft-coded awareness of the body as a process, not a site.

Maya Women Organising In The Margins: A Post Decolonial Feminist Approach, Jennifer Manning

Doctoral

The work and lives of marginalised indigenous women in the Global South are located outside of the dominant Western discourse of management and organisation. There is limited empirical engagement with marginalised indigenous women in the Global South within the organisation studies discipline. As a result, we know little about how they construct their identity as women and their organisation/organising experiences in the context of their social, cultural and historical location. My ethnographic research takes us into the lives of Maya women community weaving groups in the rural Highlands of Sololá, Guatemala, and explores the everydayness of their work and lives …

What Do You Think I Am?: On Perceiving Unintelligibility In The Nonbinary Gender Experience, James Warwood

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

What does it mean to be “retired from gender,” and what role does such an identity play in daily life? Engaging with the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Judith Butler, this project attempts to elucidate the experience of nonbinary – that is, external to the male/female gender binary – gendered individuals, and the ultimate unintelligibility of that experience. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to perception allows for an exploration of the social norms and regulations that determine how gender is defined in Western culture; combined with Butler’s significant work on gender and its performativity, phenomenology proves a useful tool for revealing the …

Toward An Ontology Of Exhaustion: On The Affective Structures Of Masculinity In The American Oilfield, John W. Jepsen

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

What is the significance of the oil encounter in the lives of men living and working in the modern oilfields of the United States? Engaging with both literary examples of the lives of men in the Interior West and the personal experiences and reflections of the author, this essay seeks to examine the connections between ideology and place as it works to shape the identity and affect of men in America's oilfields, ultimately ending in them identifying with the very resources their activities seek to exploit and exhaust. Utilizing Theodore Adorno's Minima Moralia as its moral touchstone, this essay works …

Personas: A Strategy For More Inclusive And Usable Reproductive Health Tracking Technologies, Anna R. Paul

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

In this report, I argue for the inclusion of personas in the development process of technologies that are designed to allow users to collect and track their health information. Personas provide a profile of a user and their needs, goals, and contexts. This tool can help designers to better understand their users, in order to create better, more usable end products. I examine one particular self-tracking technology, smartphone applications that allow users to record information about their menstrual cycles. Many of the most popular period tracking applications available today only meet the needs of a narrow user group, resulting in …

Animal Welfare And Animal Rights, M.E. Rolle

Animal Sentience

This overview of Broom’s book, Sentience and Animal Welfare (2014), considers the role the book could play in the animal rights debate. In a thoroughly researched and objectively presented text, Broom lays out information that could place doubt in the minds of decision-makers. By highlighting not just the ways animals resemble humans, but also the ways humans resemble animals, Broom shines a light on a solidly grey area in the animal rights debate.

Creating Trans-Inclusive Schools: Introductory Activities That Enhance The Critical Consciousness Of Future Educators, Kris T. De Pedro, Christopher Jackson, Erin Campbell, Jade Gilley, Brock Ciarelli

Communication Faculty Articles and Research

The Lawrence King murder and other tragedies surrounding transgender youth have prompted a national discussion about the need for schools to be more supportive and inclusive of transgender students. In this multi-authored reflection, the authors describe a series of three introductory activities in an undergraduate educational studies course aimed at cultivating critical consciousness about transgender students. The instructor and students discussed their viewing of televised interviews featuring transgender individuals and participated in a gallery walk and a role-playing activity. These activities cultivated students’ critical awareness of the experiences of transgender students and strategies for creating trans- inclusive classrooms and schools.

Characters Through Time, Alyssa Venezia

Honors Thesis

T. S. Eliot once wrote that we “often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of [an author’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously” (Eliot 37). By focusing on character adaptations, one comes to understand how authors of children’s books are able to adapt classic literature into age-appropriate texts that retain the merits of the original. Five sets of characters shall be analyzed to demonstrate the success of the adaptations presented in children’s literature. In the first, Sir Bedivere from Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur …

"It's No Life Being A Steer": Violence, Masculinity, And Gender Performance In The Sun Also Rises And In Our Time, Brock J. Thibodaux

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Nearly all discussions of Hemingway and his work touch on the theme of masculinity, a recurrent theme in all of his works. Examinations of Hemingway and his relationship to masculinity have almost unanimously treated the author as a misogynist and a champion of violent masculinity. However, since the posthumous publication of The Garden of Eden in 1986, there has been much discussion of Hemingway’s uncharacteristic use of androgynous characters in the novel. Critics have taken this as a clue that Hemingway possessed a complex attitude regarding gender fluidity, but have failed to examine the constructions of gender and identity in …

Gender, Othering, And Loki 2015, Amanda Munson

Master's Theses

With many enigmatic characters and engaging stories, Norse literature and mythology have had a formative impact on English literature from the early Middle Ages in poetry like the Edda and many Icelandic sagas. A lot of scholarship has been done on Nordic myth and literature, including character studies on many figures, especially Odin and Thor. However, it is difficult to find studies of the figures who make up the "other" in Nordic tales, such as the trickster Loki. While Loki plays a significant role in many tales, his position as the "other" in general Norse mythology and folklore is perhaps …