Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

"A" Is Not For Ally, Ellen I. Henry

SURGE

Most people can recall their first crush. They think fondly back to age ten or eleven when they first “went boy-crazy” or couldn’t focus on sixth-grade English because that cute girl was in their class.

This did not happen for me. I do, however, vividly remember it happening for everyone around me. [excerpt]

Gender Differentiation And Gender Hierarchy In C. S. Lewis, Alicia D. Burrus

Honors College Theses

This thesis explores the evidence of sexism in the literary works of C. S. Lewis. Lewis’s relationships with women in his personal life were often estranged, and his works frequently display a predominant view of women as inferior. Each of Lewis’s major fictional works shows evidence of sexism, though such evidence lessens in frequency and prominence with each subsequent work. Lewis’s opinion and portrayal of women did change with his marriage to Joy Davidman Gresham, though his fiction never achieved a complete lack of prejudice against women.

Lg Ms 031 Dale Mccormick Papers Finding Aid, Christina E. Walker

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Description:

Dale McCormick was the first woman in the country to complete a carpentry apprenticeship with the carpenter’s union and is a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters local 1996, having been a carpenter and contractor for 30 years. In 1988, McCormick founded Women Unlimited, a program that successfully trains women on welfare to compete for high-paying jobs in trade and technical occupations. In 1984, McCormick helped found and became the first President of the Maine Lesbian/Gay Political Alliance (now called EqualityMaine), which advocates statewide for civil rights and better treatment for lesbian/gay/bi/transgender/and questioning people. She was a co-founder …

Lg Ms 027 Diane Elze Papers Finding Aid, Elizabeth Sistare, Nicholas Martin

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Description:

A 1978 graduate of the University of Maine, Orono, Diane Elze began her volunteer career working for the YWCA Fair Harbor Shelter in Portland, Maine. She was an activist in the LGBT community in the Portland area in the 1980s and 1990s. Among other activities, she was a founding member of the Maine Lesbian Gay Political Alliance, worked on the AIDS Project, and founded the LGBT youth group, Outright. She also edited the newsletter Moving, The Newspaper of the Maine Association of Handicapped Persons and founded the statewide gay and lesbian newspaper, Our Paper. Elze earned a Master’s Degree …

Teaching Equality: An Analysis Of The Treatment Of Gender In A Popular High School, Hana Hartman

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The system of popular education in Argentina consists of community based- schools affiliated with social movements that seek to subvert the power structures that dominate the state-run education in order to promote a new generation of activists. Although the schools receive government funding, they exist more or less outside the regular educational system, which gives them a unique opportunity to form their own community norms in order to create an educational environment that reflects their leftist ideals. The present work seeks to explore the definitions of respect and equality between the genders within the community of the school “Vientos del …

Love For Sale: Prostitution And The Building Of Buffalo, New York, 1820-1910, Rachel V. Nicolosi

The Exposition

Generally referred to as “the oldest profession in the world,” prostitution often earns nothing but derision when spoken about in mainstream media. Women who find themselves in this line of work are often thought to be classless, uneducated, and sexually promiscuous outside of their occupation, and are generally considered to be an example of morally unfit behavior. Despite evidence pointing otherwise, this view of prostitution is one which has unfortunately prevailed since the 1800s. On the American Frontier, prostitution was one of the only legal means a woman could survive, and in east coast cities like Buffalo, New York, one …

Lg Ms 030 Allen Bernstein Collection Finding Aid, Elizabeth Sistare

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Description:

Allen Bernstein was born on June 19, 1913 in Nashua, New Hampshire. He holds a MA in Economics from the University of Chicago. Bernstein enlisted in the Army in 1940 and fought in WWII, doing clerical work in the U.S., until 1944 when he was dishonorably discharged for being openly gay. After the war he married a woman– who knew he was gay – and had two sons. He then moved to Maine to work for the Maine State Labor Department as a Labor market analyst. After retirement in 1978 he became involved in providing volunteer services to the …

"Purple People": "Sexed" Linguistics, Pleasure, And The "Feminine" Body In The Lyrics Of Tori Amos, Megim A. Parks

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The notion of a “feminine” style has been staunchly resisted by third-wave feminists who argue that to posit a “feminine” style is essentialist. Yet, linguists such as Norma Mendoza-Denton and Elinor Ochs discuss indexicality and shifting through salient variables, a process called entextualization. Further, French feminists such as Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva use the linguistic concept of intertextuality to explain certain poetic uses of language that might cause what Luce Irigaray calls “irruption of the semiotic chora”—moments within language where boundaries in the semiotic chain of signification are “blurred.” Thus, while current feminism has moved strictly away …

From The Inside Out, And Through., Dominique Ovalle

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

These photographs describe “Science” born of consumerism, hijacked by me, economically disenfranchised, or rather—temporarily embarrassed, artist. I was putzing around Malibu—my old college stomping ground, looking for free food; maybe a sample of some gourmet $5 chocolate, and all I got were these photographs.

Sex, Power, And Women: Female Viewers’ Perceptions Of Popular Music Video Themes, Whitney Stefani, Ralf R. Greenwald

Student Published Works

Research has linked viewing highly sexual music videos with increased gender role acceptance, and concern over personal physical appearance. However, very few studies have assessed individual differences in how music video sexual content is perceived, and no studies to date have addressed non-objectifying sexual content. In the present study, fifteen college women were exposed to 21 pop music videos and asked to categorize each video on the basis of whether it depicted women a) as sex objects, b) using sex as a source of power, or c) non-sexually. At least one video achieved perfect consensus amongst the participants for each …

Examining The Theoretical Consequences Of A Post-Feminist Media Culture, Jedidiah N. Bailey

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Since the early 1990s, feminist scholars have declared that a post-feminist media culture has arisen throughout the Westernized world to attack the ideas and values promoted by feminists and the second-wave feminist movement that became established in the late 1960s and 70s. Consequently, this study is designed to gauge the influence that these media have in shaping the attitudes of young college women (in the 18-25 year old demographic) toward feminism and key women‟s rights issues. In order to better understand whether post-feminist media are able to detract support from the feminist movement, this study attempts to quantify the relationship …

Lg Ms 029 Margaret Cruikshank Papers Finding Aid, Christina E. Walker, Anthony Marvullo

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Description:

Margaret Cruikshank (b. 1940) has not only led a distinguished career in academia but is also the author of numerous works. Cruikshank’s earliest writings include reviews, essays and articles that have appeared in a variety of periodicals. Other publications include The Lesbian Path (1980), The Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement (1992), and Learning to Be Old: Gender, Culture, and Aging (2003). After earning her Ph.D., Cruikshank began teaching English at colleges and universities throughout the Midwest. In 1975, Cruikshank moved to Minnesota where she continued to teach university level English and also helped establish Mankato State University’s first women’s …

Strategic Deployments Of ‘Sisterhood’ And Questions Of Solidarity At A Women’S Development Project In Janakpur, Nepal, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

Linguistic uses of ‘sisterhood’ provide a window into disparate understandings of relationality among virtual and actual interlocutors in women’s development across vectors of caste, class, ethnicity and nationality. In this essay, I examine the trope of ‘sisterhood’ as it was employed at a women’s development project in Janakpur, Nepal, in the 1990s. I demonstrate that the use of this common signifier of kinship with culturally disparate ‘signifieds’ created a confusion of meaning, and differential readings of the politics of relationality. In my view, ‘sister,’ as used at this project, was a multivalent, strategically deployed, and divergently interpreted term. In particular, …

Incongruent Premodern And Modern Beauty Ideals: A Case Study Of South Korea And India's Reconciliation Of Current Beauty Trends With Foundational Religious Ideals, Minger Bropleh

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis is an in-depth analysis of beauty ideals in South Korea and India. These two countries have recently turned to skin lightening and cosmetic surgery in order to achieve their new beauty standards. Not only do these two countries share a propensity for those two trends, but they also have an overwhelming majority of the population that identifies with a specific religion; Hinduism in the case of India and Confucianism in the case of South Korea. However, it is not clear that the current beauty ideal in each country aligns with the beauty ideal set out in the respective …

What Experience Can’T Tell: How To Show Reality In Young Adult Fiction, A Female Warrior’S Story, Jessica A. Walker

Departmental Honors Projects

Young adult literature is a medium that catapults our youth into fictional realms, gives them courage, and prepares them for realities of our world. As a female warrior, having served as a soldier in Afghanistan, I learned firsthand what a female warrior must be. While there are many YA novels written with women warriors as main characters, there’s a significant lack of female warrior representation that resembles our modern day military and the trials female warriors face in a primarily male-dominated field.

I have examined four authors who have tackled the issue of strong female warriors. While each author depicts …

The Power Of Multiplying: Reproductive Control In American Culture, 1850-1930, Virginia B. Engholm

Theses and Dissertations--English

Prior to the advent of modern birth control beginning in the nineteenth century, the biological reproductive cycle of pregnancy, post-partum recovery, and nursing dominated women’s adult years. The average birth rate per woman in 1800 was just over seven, but by 1900, that rate had fallen to just under than three and a half. The question that this dissertation explores is what cultural narratives about reproduction and reproductive control emerge in the wake of this demographic shift. What’s at stake in a woman’s decision to reproduce, for herself, her family, her nation? How do women, and society, control birth?

In …

In Idi Amin’S Shadow: Women, Gender, And Militarism In Uganda, Alicia C. Decker

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

In Idi Amin’s Shadow is a rich social history examining Ugandan women’s complex and sometimes paradoxical relationship to Amin’s military state. Based on more than one hundred interviews with women who survived the regime, as well as a wide range of primary sources, this book reveals how the violence of Amin’s militarism resulted in both opportunities and challenges for women. Some assumed positions of political power or became successful entrepreneurs, while others endured sexual assault or experienced the trauma of watching their brothers, husbands, or sons “disappeared” by the state’s security forces. In Idi Amin’s Shadow considers the crucial ways …

Amongst Women”: O’Brien, Beckett, And The Magdalen “Réamhscéal, Tiffany N. Manning

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

It is hard to escape the portrayal of what twentieth century life might have been like for a penitent living in one of Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries. With its saturation in contemporary pop culture, the morality of these Irish Institutions has been called into question through blockbuster films and best-selling books. However, some believe that the many public representations of the Magdalen Laundries fail to tell the whole story. As tension surrounding Magdalen Laundries, as well as Church and State involvement in them, has continuously grown over the last couple of decades, many citizens of Ireland and, indeed, the world have …

Does Monogamy Harm Women? Deconstructing Monogamy With A Feminist Lens, Ali Ziegler, Jes L. Matsick, Amy C. Moors, Jennifer D. Rubin, Terri D. Conley

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

In this paper, we utilize a critical feminist lens to analyze the advantages and disadvantages found within two different romantic relationship configurations: monogamy and polyamory. While visibility of polyamorous relationships has increased in recent years, there is still a lack of information and a plethora of misinformation concerning non-monogamous romantic relationship dynamics (Conley, Moors, Matsick, & Ziegler, 2012; Conley, Ziegler, Moors, Matsick, & Valentine, 2012). One such notion is that polyamory is differentially damaging to women vis-à-vis men. From a phenomenological perspective, sociocultural values dictate that women, unlike men, are prescribed to be dependent upon monogamy in order to define …

It’S Not Just A Gay Male Thing: Sexual Minority Women And Men Are Equally Attracted To Consensual Non-Monogamy, Amy C. Moors, Jennifer D. Rubin, Jes L. Matsick, Ali Ziegler, Terri D. Conley

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Concerned with the invisibility of non-gay male interests in alternatives to monogamy, the present study empirically examines three questions: Are there differences between female and male sexual minorities in a) attitudes toward consensual non-monogamy, and b) desire to engage in different types of consensual non-monogamy (e.g., sexual and romantic/polyamory versus sexual only/swinging), and c) schemas for love? An online community sample of lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals (n = 111) were recruited for a study about attitudes toward relationships. Results show that sexual minority men and women hold similar attitudes toward CNM and similar levels of desire to engage in …