Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Creative Submission: For The Androgynous, Elias Fulmer

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

No abstract provided.

Liberation’S Love-Language: The Politics And Poetics Of Queer Translation After Stonewall, Eric Keenaghan

English Faculty Scholarship

Poetry served gay and lesbian liberationists in the years following Stonewall as a mechanism for translating queer experience into a language shared amongst the members of emergent sociopolitical LGBTQ+ communities. Poetry figured prominently in the historical period's activist little magazines, newsletters, and other periodicals as means of doing this work of self-construction and world-building, a simple fact largely unappreciated by both queer studies (which overlooks non-narrative forms) and contemporary American poetry studies (which dismisses much activist poetry as identitarian agitprop). But poetry, due to its formal differences from narrativity, has been a site for queer revolutionary action and imaginaries because …

La Pasión Del Aceitunita: Variaciones Literarias Del Amor Oscuro, Fernando A. Blanco

Faculty Contributions to Books

No abstract provided.

Impact Of Sex In Luxury Fashion Advertisements On Brand Attractiveness And Identification, Alyssa Dana Dana Adomaitis, Diana Saiki, Juan Del Pozo Severino

Publications and Research

Purpose

This study examined perceived brand attractiveness of and identification with fashion luxury brands given different levels of sexuality in advertisements. Sex in advertisements has become increasingly more common to generate attention and interest in fashion luxury products, with limited research on its influence on the consumer. However, the use of sexuality in luxury advertisements may counter the ethical expectations of brands by the current consumer in the United States.

Design/methodology/approach

A sample of 1,266 males and females completed a survey on brand attractiveness and identification after examining an advertisement of a luxury fashion product. Participants were assigned an advertisement …

Poverty And Commercial Surrogacy In India: An Intersectional Analytical Approach, Sheela Suryanarayanan

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

The destination and source countries for commercial surrogacy match world patterns of inequality. India, Nepal, Thailand, Mexico, and Cambodia banned commercial surrogacy, moving the market to other less-developed countries in South Africa and South America. India had a commercial surrogacy boom until exploitative factors led to the passage of the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill in 2019, which banned the practice. This paper examines surrogacy's monetary, health, and emotional effects on 45 surrogate mothers in Gujarat State, India. The study revealed that a majority (63%) of the very poor women remained very poor post-surgery. Surrogate mothers in poor households had to do …

Academic Women's Studies: An Institutional Failure For Scholarship On Violence Against Women, Donna M. Hughes

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Overview Of The Intern Position At Sexgenlab And The Importance Of Public Scholarship, Elizabeth S. Chapin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper represents a culmination of my time interning with SexGenLab and addresses the work I did from September 2022 to July 2023. This paper discusses the work that was completed, and why it is important, indicating how it contributes to the world at large outside of academia. I discuss my motivations and intentions relating to the internship, and how I was able to carry out my goals through the work I completed. In addition, this paper discusses the nature and importance of public scholarship, and how this internship contributed to that mission.

The Confounding Body: Female Corporeality, Androgyny, And Disgust In The Work Of Virginia Woolf And Zinaida Gippius, Yelizaveta Shapiro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Confounding Body: Female Corporeality, Androgyny, and Disgust in the Work of Virginia Woolf and Zinaida Gippius examines how the discourses of degeneration, eugenics, and sexology shaped representations of women’s bodies in British and Russian modernist literature. Focusing on the writing of Zinaida Gippius (1869-1945) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), I challenge the longstanding argument that both authors attempted to escape the material body by resorting to androgynous tropes. I argue that the material female body takes center stage in both Gippius’s and Woolf’s work and functions as a powerfully paradoxical entity: one that generates disgust and enables oppression while housing …

Narratives In, On, And Around Contemporary Queer Film: A Study Of Adam And Its Paratexts, Jeremy Stoller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Film’s ability to present and inspire desire, and to realize alternate worlds, render it a uniquely potent medium for expressing queerness. Because of this potency, and because films are among the most prominent ways that LGBTQ+ people are represented in society, queer film can feel both deeply personal and highly political for LGBTQ+ identifying audiences. But movies do not merely offer statements about political systems, they are also made within and reflective of those systems.

Scholars have thoroughly investigated films and our relationships to them for productive ways of seeing gender, sexuality, desire, and oppression. But the conversations about how …

Body Check: Transgressive Body Politics Of Gina Pane, Orlan, And Deborah De Robertis, Avant-Garde Performance Artists In France, 1960s–Present, Patricia Anne Winter

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the 1960s, when Gina Pane and Orlan were trying to gain a foothold in the art world, it was very much a man’s world. This created obstacles for them, yet, at the same time, being relegated to the margins, they were free to experiment and were less visible as objects of the gaze.

The point of departure of my study is the realization that a woman’s body is what most defines her identity (Alcoff, Bordo, Butler, Gonzenbach, Mulvey, Spelman, Suleiman). The female body is the material site from which I discuss how, and to what ends, women avant-garde performance …

Politics Of Refusal: Justice And Liberation For Black Trans Lives, Quincy Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis investigates the challenges faced by Black trans people. In this thesis, I will explore how protest is used to highlight and confront the obstacles faced by the Black trans community. I will also examine the cultural work of Black trans people and what they teach us. The Brooklyn Liberation march and the TV show Pose is an important part of Black trans legacy. They both look at the complications surrounding Black trans lives and contributes to Black trans representation in protesting and fighting marginalization. This thesis will argue the importance of allyship to create safe space for Black …

Confronting The Doppelganger: Mapping The Ontological Terrain Of An Afro-Caribbean Woman As She Rebrands Diasporic, Feminine Identity Politics: An Autoethnography, Aysha E. Todd-Stone

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis seeks to interrogate the intricacies governing the intra-racial\ intra-gendered relationship of an Afro-Trinidadian woman as she commandeers professional spaces in North America. The intent is to challenge the instrument of Black sisterhood deeming it as an incomplete, social instrument, and to prove using an auto-ethnographic approach how Diasporic, feminine trauma leads to psychically induced, episodic violence that is highly suggestive but subtle to the naked eye which in turn irretrievably damages intra-interpersonal relations. Quantitative studies have produced a composite from the white\black perspective (Goosby et al., 2015, Sims et al., 2012) and others dealing with gender (Braithwaite., 1981, …

Genres Of Labor: Wageless Work And The Aesthetics Of Stagnation, Martin A. Jensen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Genres of Labor identifies and explores a little-acknowledged fact about labor—that it appears to us in highly conventionalized forms that are subject to evaluation, appraisal, and interpretation. I call this appearance the “aesthetic” dimension of labor, and I show how it increasingly comes into view in the period since 1973, as a contracting economy pushes off work onto unwaged realms of human activity. In chapters on Andy Warhol’s The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), and Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days (2001), I demonstrate that literary texts participate in …

Ambivalent Scales: Methods For Reading Scenes Of Sexual Violation, Natalie Ruby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The importance of unveiling rape in the #MeToo era has unintentionally obscured encounters that lack the clarity of “yes” or “no.” However, desire can be ambiguous even in unambiguous cases of assault. Feminist activists and scholars have started to address ambiguity by arguing for a new epistemology of rape, what Linda Alcoff calls “grey rape.” In this thesis, I interrogate the “grey” embedded in ordinary sexual encounters by looking at ambivalence as an example of everyday desire evident across the seduction plot and the novel tradition. Rather than seeking to make consent more inclusive to oppressed groups, I read between …

A Feminist Icon Or A Homicidal Coward: Medea’S Revenge On Patriarchy, Beyza Ertugrul

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Medea, the alleged epitome of sophistication, does not deserve her title of the flawless feminist icon as she is praised to be. For context, Euripides’ Medea, first performed in 431 BC, portrays a young sorceress whose abusive husband abandons her for another woman and who takes revenge by murdering her own children to spite him. Throughout the tragedy, Medea speaks out on gender inequality, and by definition, such uncommon and advanced statements can be described by the modern term of feminism as the “belief in and advocacy of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes” (Merriam-Webster). Especially …

Havens And Covens: Pregnancy, Witchcraft, And Female Power In Cotton Mather’S “Retired Elizabeth”, Brittney A. Hatchett

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Over the decades, scholars have been holding two adjacent conversations about witchcraft and gender in Cotton Mather’s works that surprisingly have not been put in dialogue. On the one hand, they have examined Mather’s witchcraft ideology and motivations for involving himself in the Salem witch trials. On the other hand, scholars have discussed how Mather seeks to exert control over women spiritually and physically. However, no one has yet explored how these conversations might converge. I suggest that we can see how Mather intertwines discourses of witchcraft and gender in the section titled “Retired Elizabeth” in The Angel of Bethesda. …

Henrietta Maria: Royalist Women’S Representations Of The French Catholic Queen, Kim Hansen

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

By the mid-15^th century, the royal marriage of King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria incited enough conflict to spark civil war, as the English struggled to reconcile between the long-established image of female English domesticity and a pervasive cultural expectation for equality between marriage partners. Any form of equality in the royal marriage called the absolute power of the king into question, as it would imply that his actions had included her direct involvement, and even at times were more representative of her, not his, views. Letters captured at the Battle of Naseby confirmed fears that the queen …

Call For Papers: Special Issue - "Beyond Borders: People, Politics, Conflict, And Recovery In Darfur And Sudan"

The Journal of Social Encounters

No abstract provided.

Solidarity In Time Of Armed Conflict. Women’S Patterns Of Solidarity In Internally Displaced Person (Idp) Camps In Darfur, Western Sudan, Mawa Mohamed

The Journal of Social Encounters

This study, a vital part of a Ph.D. thesis, delves into the prolonged armed conflict's impact in Darfur, which has resulted in severe loss of assets and lives, disrupted livelihoods, and food insecurity. Among the most vulnerable are internally displaced women, primary targets of violence due to their caregiving roles and responsibilities. Addressing the gap in existing literature, this research explores the meanings, practices, experiences, and representations of solidarity among women residing in the Abu-Shouk IDP camp. Challenging conventional perceptions, the study highlights women's competencies and strengths, empowering them to develop unique coping strategies within the conflict context. It uncovers …

Choric Sounds: The Intervention Of Women’S Soundscapes In The City And Cinema, Kelli Fuery

Film and Media Arts Faculty Articles and Research

"This paper proposes that sonic mapping of space, sensibility and power structures through cinematic representation of urban places has subsequently taken on imaginations that have become part of socio-cultural and socio-political experience. Sound and image have combined, establishing a spectoral environment that enables the viewer to engage both inner and outer worlds in embodied perception. Mary Beard notes, ‘when written evidence for Western culture starts, women’s voices are not being heard in the public sphere. … an integral part of growing up, as a man, is learning to take control of public utterance and to silence the female of the …