Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

On Being Seen Or For Those Who Break Like Me, Shanisha K. Branch

English Theses & Dissertations

The nature of truly seeing is something I’ve had a hard time grappling with. If you understand the difficultly of seeing and wanting others to see you that same, then these pages are for you.

Narratives From Appalachia: The Current Stories Of Lgbtq Community College Students, Todd A. Cimino-Johnson

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Theses & Dissertations

LGBTQ students are ubiquitous on community college campuses across the United States. The exact number of LGBTQ students is unknown and often their needs are ignored. LGBTQ students face harassment and discrimination at higher rates than other minority groups. This study was conducted to gather the current narratives of LGBTQ students attending community colleges in the Appalachian Region. This study aimed to determine what LGBTQ students are experiencing on community college campuses across Appalachia. Fifteen students took part in a one-on-one semi-structured interview for this qualitative study. All students were currently enrolled in a program of study when the interviews …

Courageous Endurance: The Lived Experiences Of Trans Folx And The Criminal Legal System, April Carrillo

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

The field of criminology and criminal justice have widely ignored the experience of being a trans person and interacting with the criminal legal system, despite the reality that trans folx experience discrimination and harm at the hands of criminal legal practitioners. This dissertation explores these experiences, as well as how trans folx navigate a myriad of other issues to include their identity and institutional discrimination. Trans folx are not guaranteed many protections or rights in the United States which leaves them at an especially vulnerable position when entering the criminal legal system. Essentially, trans folx are forced to navigate a …

Uswnt And Twitter: Resistance And Activism In The Equal Pay Campaign, Mia Manney 21

Honor Scholar Theses

Research for this study of the “equal pay campaign” centers around the following overarching question: how does the USWNT use Twitter as a performative mechanism for expressing and enhancing social activist causes? In particular, my research explores how members of the USWNT, both individually and collectively use social media in the pursuit of gender equality and equal pay provisions. In what specific ways have the women engaged social media and why do they rely upon Twitter in particular? How does the rhetoric that the women use accentuate their motivations and advance their social activist cause? Is the women’s use of …

Asexual Protagonists: What Their Patterns Reveal About The Representation Of Asexuality In Current Literature, Jaclyn Hernandez

Audre Lorde Prize

This paper analyzes the most popular books with asexual protagonists and what patterns concerning their gender, race, and romantic orientations reveal about the state of asexual representation in current literature.

Treatise, Scripture, Manifesto: Reckoning With "Love Cake", Lalini Shanela Ranaraja

Audre Lorde Prize

This essay was written in response to Sri Lankan-American writer and activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha's poetry collection Love Cake, as part of a directed study I undertook in Spring 2021. A goal of the directed study, titled "The Empire Writes Back" was to engage with and build upon work by writers from South Asia and the diaspora, of which Piepzna-Samarasinha is a vocal member. In this essay, I explore not only the sense of connection I feel with this poet and her body of work as a result of shared experiences of otherness, trauma, and nationhood, but also …

"Queer Even In Safe Spaces: Homeless, Shelter Failures, And The Queer Community", Kara West

Audre Lorde Prize

Privileged groups consistently expect marginalized group identities to provide comfort, be it in the way the members actually showcase their identities, the work they do for society, or their general respect for the status quo. The queer community, specifically, has long been subject to prejudice and violence, and while tolerance is slowly increasing in the United States, the present day is no exception. Queer folks in the US are even much more likely to be homeless or in domestic violence situations than their heterosexual counterparts. Furthermore, once in vulnerable housing situations, queer folks are dangerously less likely to receive the …

A Commentary On The Interpretation Of Dreams, Kayla J. Baur

Publications and Research

Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams explains the role of the theory of psychoanalysis as it pertains to dreams. Freud then leads into the idea of how psychoanalysis as a theory applies to literature. Along with Oedipus Rex, Freud uses William Shakespeare’s Hamlet to exemplify the way in which literary texts express the desires, emotions, and/or memories of the unconscious mind, just as dreams-thoughts (unconscious desire) display themselves in dreams. Hamlet experiences troubling emotions upon the death of his father as he finds himself referring back to his childhood feelings about him, and thus finds it difficult to exact …

Arteletra: The Sixties In Latin America And The Politics Of Going Unnoticed, Jason A. Bartles

Purdue University Press Book Previews

ArteletrA analyzes the Sixties in Latin America in order to revisit the core claim of literary and cultural studies to political relevancy in the contemporary world: the task of making visible the invisible. Though visibility can secure rights for the disenfranchised, it also risks subjecting them to the biopolitical and capitalist arrangements of space. What is at stake in this book is a series of aesthetic and ethical tools for engaging in politics—defined here as the potential to disagree—without first passing through visibility. These tools cohere around a practice Bartles calls “the politics of going unnoticed,” which he derives from …

Queer Even In Safe Spaces: Homelessness, Shelter Failures, And The Queer Community, Kara West

Tredway Library Prize for First-Year Research

No abstract provided.

Husserl And Merleau-Ponty: A Feminist Critique Of The Phenomenological Body, Jasmin M. Makhlouf

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the phenomenological notion of embodiment, to explain the objectification and coercion that women and their bodies experience on a daily basis. I build the philosophical foundation of this thesis on Husserlian and Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, as well as, their work’s receptions in feminist philosophy of the early 20th century, mainly Simone de Beauvoir, as well as, more contemporary thinkers like Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler. Moreover, the thesis argues for a return to the traditional phenomenological notion of embodiment while incorporating elements of sexuality and sexual difference.

Meridians 20:1, Ginetta Candelario

Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism

I write this in mid-November of 2020, after one of the most contentious presidential elections in my lifetime. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many states began allowing and even encouraging the use of absentee voting/mail-in ballots to reduce the risk of infection during in-person voting. Although he himself votes by mail, the outgoing president began a systematic and sustained campaign of maligning the legality and validity of absentee ballots, claiming without evidence that they were more vulnerable to “illegal voting” and fraud, and encouraging his constituent base to vote in person on election day....

Spaces For Becomings? Heterotopic Fictions In Preciado’S Testo Yonqui, Caroline King

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

This article examines the possibilities and limits of gender becomings in Paul Preciado’s book Testo yonqui (Testo Junkie). A genre-fluid “body-essay,” his text theorizes a departure from gender through contemporary medicine. Following Preciado in his self-administration of testosterone, the book labels today’s reality a “pharmacopornographic era,” a new iteration of Foucault’s biocapitalism. After designating Preciado’s self-generated transformations as becomings, I explore how the book’s heterotopic spaces––including its genre––facilitate Preciado’s forward-moving gender identity. A Foucauldian term, heterotopia has not yet been applied to Testo Junkie, however it offers insight into the book’s potential to motivate individuals to …

Grassroots On Common Ground

DePaul Magazine

This article looks at various student organizations at DePaul that work with outside agencies, other universities and within various disciplines to achieve social justice and understanding. The organizations are Community Peacemakers, Students Against Incarceration, Chicago Area Peace Action-DePaul, The Women's Center and the DePaul Alliance for Latinx Empowerment.

Community Engagement In Tpc Programs During Times Of Crisis: Embracing Chicana And Latina Feminist Practices, Nora Rivera, Laura Gonzales

English Faculty Articles and Research

Drawing on lessons gathered while teaching community engagement in technical communication courses during the COVID-19 pandemic, two Latina instructors, one in New Mexico and one in Florida, highlight the value that Chicana and Latina feminism can bring to technical communication pedagogies. The authors share course assignments and student examples that demonstrate their applications of Chicana/Latina feminist practices in technical communication. Through pláticas and testimonios, methodologies and methods grounded in Latina/Chicana feminism, the authors demonstrate how they navigate the challenges of the pandemic while also creating spaces for students to share, heal, and contribute to the activist work taking place in …

Sacrificial Bodies And Hegemonic Femininity: The Creation Of The Heroine In The Twilight, The Hunger Games, & Divergent Series, Tiffany R. Boyles

Senior Theses

Within this thesis, I analyze The Twilight Saga, The Hunger Games Trilogy, and The Divergent Trilogy and how the portrayal and treatment of the protagonists’ bodies within these texts uphold tenets of white, hegemonic femininity. I discuss first how their bodies are feminized, in part by their whiteness and smallness, but also through the comparison to the bodies of male characters. While the men are strong and physically capable, the protagonists are weak and physically incapable. As a result, the protagonists cannot act in the way a traditional hero might, using offensive action for self-preservation. Instead, the protagonists …

Institutional Stretching: How Moroccan Ngos Illuminate The Nexus Of Climate, Migration, Gender And Development, Shelby Mertens

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

The global migration crisis the world has experienced thus far is only the tip of the iceberg. As the earth’s temperature continues to warm and extreme weather conditions worsen, millions of people across the globe will be displaced, and women in particular will face more difficult challenges. What the climate migration literature fails to study is these longer-term impacts beyond sudden onset disasters. Governments and institutions will be forced to respond and adapt to the new reality resulting from the climate crisis. This research provides a case study of Morocco and, by using institutional ethnography, investigates how NGOs working in …

Syllabus: Equity, Elitism, And Public Higher Education, Katina Rogers, Matt Brim

Open Educational Resources

This is a syllabus for a mixed MA/PhD level course, "Equity, Elitism, and Public Higher Education," taught in Spring 2021 at the Graduate Center by Matt Brim and Katina Rogers.

Higher education can be a powerful engine of equity and social mobility. Yet many of the structures of colleges and universities—including admissions offices, faculty hiring committees, disciplinary formations, institutional rankings, and even classroom pedagogies and practices of collegiality—rely on tacit values of meritocracy and an economy of prestige. For public universities like CUNY this tension can be especially problematic, as structurally-embedded inequities undermine the institution’s democratizing mission and values. It …

Life Satisfaction: Aging Female Informal Caregivers Of Persons With Dementia, Deborah Ann Monson

Dissertations

Purpose/Aims

The purpose of this study was to describe the relationship between aging female informal caregivers of persons with dementia (PWD) and care recipients’ PWD demographic factors, aging female informal caregivers of PWD social support factors, positive and negative feelings, a sense of flourishing, stress, and life satisfaction.

Background/Rationale

Older adults with dementia are living longer and the majority are receiving care by aging female informal caregivers. Dementia incrementally worsens over time impacting informal caregiver life satisfaction. Most studies have focused on negative aspects of informal caregiving. Therefore, this study investigated both positive and negative aspects of caregiving.

Conceptual Basis …

In France, Michelle Is A Man's Name, John Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a review of the short film, In France, Michelle is a Man's Name (2021), directed by Em Weinstein.