Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Too Much And Too Graphic: Dr. Ruth Westheimer And The Struggle For 1980s And 1990s Feminism, Louisa Marshall

Voces Novae

During the second wave of feminism, spanning from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s, the United States saw unprecedented levels of change regarding the status of women. However, the conservative administrations of Reagan and H.W. Bush that followed turned the tides against the feminist movement and towards re-establishing traditional gender roles. Trail blazing women, including sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer, dedicated their 20th century careers to combating traditional sentiment, thus changing gender roles forever.

“Placing Our Breasts On A Hot Kerosene Lantern”: A Critical Study Of Microfinancialization In The Lives Of Women Entrepreneurs In The Informal Economic Sector In Ibadan, Nigeria, Olubukola Olayiwola

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study uses an anthropological perspective to investigate everyday lived experience of women borrowers and entrepreneurs (in the informal economic sector in Ibadan, Nigeria) relating to microfinancialization. Study such as this becomes important given the popular Yoruba metaphor “owo komulelanta” (“Placing our breasts on a hot kerosene lantern”) women borrowers use to express their experience particularly in their attempts to make repayments of MFB loans. Hence, there is a need to pay close attention and listen more carefully to operators of the informal sector and borrowers of MFB loans. This study employs ethnographic mixed methods to generate data in various …

Aspects Of Character: Quantitative Evidence And Fictional People, Jonathan Cheng

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

“Aspects of Character” uses quantitative evidence to trace new timelines in the literary history of characterization. The guiding premise of this work is that digital libraries and mathematical perspectives can shed new light on the practices used to configure fictional people. Using texts from the nineteenth to twenty-first century, this dissertation analyzes how different aspects of characters have transformed throughout history, coordinating quantitative experiments with the critical perspectives of literary scholars. This project begins by analyzing the characterization used in works of fiction that were reviewed by prestigious publications. This first experiment pushes back on a historical truism about “well-crafted” …

Aligning Voice And Communication With Identity – A Survey On Transgender And Gender Diverse Populations, Rachel T. Chalom

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Purpose: This research has two goals. The first goal is to examine transgender (TG) and gender diverse (GD) voice and communication functioning and the impact of voice on their everyday lives. The second goal is to examine the knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs speech-language pathologists (SLP) have about the TG and GD community and to investigate the relationship between self- and listener-perception and its correspondence to quality of life (QoL).

Methods: A total of 59 participants took part in this research. The research was separated into two parts, the first included 24 TG and GD individuals who participated in a Qualtrics …

Womanism & Wellbeing: A Manuscript Dissertation Exploring The Effects Of Shame, Loss And Gender Issues, Christy Angelle-Vidrine Bauman

Education Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the research on gender issues and psychological well-being across the adult lifespan utilizing qualitative research examining factors (e.g., societal influences, sexual objectification, shame, loss, meaning-making, and internal identity) in developing resilience and mitigating mental health issues. This paper discusses the importance of addressing well-being through expression of loss, meaning-making, and social impact. This manuscript style dissertation will review publications in such areas as sexuality, spirituality, grief, shame, intimacy, social, and interpersonal relationships. The exploration of biopsychosocial impacts as it relates to meaning-making, resilience, and communal involvement. The three publications will be …

Women's Self-Definition Through Poetry, Olivia Samimy

MAD-RUSH Undergraduate Research Conference

This project looks at five female poets across history – Anne Bradstreet, Aphra Behn, Forough Farrokhzad, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath – to explore the various challenges they faced writing in their patriarchal societies. Further, it looks at the way they each used their poetry to define themselves and their own identity. This project seeks to explain why this act of self-definition is significant, and why it so often drew criticism from the writers’ respective societies. What was discovered, is that the act of a woman crafting her own self-definition through poetry is a privilege in a patriarchal society, where …

Pink And Blue Lenses: Duoethnographic Reflections On Biological Sex In Conservative Christian Education, Phillip A. Olt, Linly Stowe

The Qualitative Report

In this duoethnography, we explored how experiences in conservative Christian high schools were viewed through the different lenses of our binary-constructed, biological sexes. Our perceptions varied along the axes of gendered roles, gendered responsibilities, and romance and sexuality. Through reflecting on our own experiences, we critiqued what we were taught and the lasting repercussions those teachings left on our lives. The approach of indoctrination proved counterproductive in our schools, as graduates left unprepared to enter meaningful romantic relationships or to encounter a world outside their previously sheltered environs.

Critically And Creatively Engaging With Trauma-Informed Mental Health Research And Treatment Of Lgbtqia+ Communities As Expressive Arts Therapists: A Literature Review, Kelli Lavallee

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Expressive Arts Therapists are uniquely situated as both artists and mental health counselors working in psychological pedagogy rooted in systems of oppression. Given the arts-based approaches to the therapeutic relationship, it can be unethical to offer these approaches without acknowledgement of the ways in which the arts intersect with social justice, and justice is only viable if practitioners critically review the clinical mental health education they are consuming from the institutions they learn in, specifically trauma-informed mental health research assimilation and treatment approaches for Expressive Arts Therapists in training, practice, and education. A review of the literature in this paper …

Ua94/6/1 My Story: Wku Women's Basketball's Sherry Porter, Sherry Porter

Student/Alumni Personal Papers

My Story is a series of first-person feature articles written by WKU student-athletes. The student-athletes will be telling their own stories in their own words. This article written by women’s basketball senior Sherry Porter. Porter reflects on the state of current events going on nationwide.

“The Speechmaking Of A Girl-Orator”: Reason, Gender, And Authority In Dorothy Hunter’S Free Trade Oratory, Erinn Elizabeth Campbell

Honors Projects

Dorothy M. Hunter (1881-1977) rose to prominence during the 1906 United Kingdom general election as a markedly “girlish” yet widely respected free trade orator. While men on the Edwardian public political platform typically built a reputation for oratorical prowess through theatrical displays of “heroic” masculinity, Hunter established her authority as a speaker through two very different (and apparently contradictory) strategies. Her performance of “charming” middle-class femininity helped demonstrate her right to speak on free trade as a “women’s question,” extending women’s traditional authority over matters of domestic consumption to include questions of political economy. Trusting in the power of education …

The Reading Eye, Ruminating Body, And Regulated Gaze: ( Re ) Constructing Gender In The Old English Lives Of Saints, Thelma Trujillo

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the eleventh-century collection of Early English hagiography, the Lives of Saints; specifically, four female saints’ lives, those of Saint Agnes, Cecilia, Eugenia and Euphrosyne. Using Judith Butler’s gender performativity theory, I consider how female gender is constructed in these texts by examining gender as manifested in the late antique period when they were first written, and then, in the Early English period when they were copied and translated. This research on gender combines an array of literature, such as Latin theology, Old English laws and penitentials, Latin and Old English hagiography, and contemporary theoretical frameworks. My main …

Radical Utu : Critical Ideas And Ideals Of Wangari Muta Maathai, Besi Brillian Muhonja

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Wangari Muta Maathai was a scholar-activist known for founding the Green Belt Movement, an environmental campaign that earned her the Nobel Peace Prize. While many studies of Maathai highlight her activism, few examine Maathai as a scholar whose contributions to various disciplines and causes spanned more than three decades.

In Radical Utu: Critical Ideas and Ideals of Wangari Muta Maathai, Besi Brillian Muhonja presents the words and works of Maathai as theoretical concepts attesting to her contributions to gender equality, democratic spaces, economic equity and global governance, and indigenous African languages and knowledges. Muhonja’s well-rounded portrait of Maathai’s ideas …

Crazy Rich Asians: Exploring Discourses Of Orientalism, Neoliberal Feminism, Privilege And Inequality, Devi Vijay

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

In this review of Crazy Rich Asians (2018), I examine elements of orientalism, neoliberal feminism, privilege and inequality that layer the film. Specifically, I interrogate the film’s American inflection of orientalism, surfacing a constant duel between essentialized Asian and American values, where what is American eventually wins out. Independent, entrepreneurial women are integral to this narrative of global capitalist accumulation. Yet, as the East meets the West in the globalized consumptive spaces of the super-rich, inequalities in the United States and Singapore are either repackaged under the myth of meritocracy, or conveniently erased. While the film demarcates a new Hollywood …

Cultivating A Decolonial Feminist Integral Ecology: Extractive Zones And The Nexus Of The Coloniality Of Being/Coloniality Of Gender, Melissa Pagán

Journal of Hispanic / Latino Theology

No abstract provided.

Public Opinion In The United States And Hungary: How Trump And Orbán Have Manufactured The Debate Over Refugees, Eve Cervenka

International ResearchScape Journal

This research paper is inspired by the author’s recent experience interning with US Together – Cleveland, a non-profit refugee resettlement agency that provides services before, during, and immediately after refugees’ arrival. It will utilize a humanitarian approach to the topic of public opinion and perception of refugees in the United States. In order to put these findings in the context of world refugee response, Hungary will be considered as another case study. This will include a look into the history of refugees in both countries, as well as the recent policy changes by both the Trump and Orban administrations respectively. …

“The Torture Of Colonization And The Holocaust: Multidirectional Memory In The Nature Of Blood”, Sarah Webb

International ResearchScape Journal

In this paper, I read Caryl Phillips’s 1997 post-colonial The Nature of Blood as a novel that exemplifies Michael Rothberg’s theory of “multidirectional memory.” Rothberg’s theory, which argues against the dominant competitive model of memory in the United States, asserts that memory is a “productive, intercultural dynamic” (Rothberg 3). In other words, memories of different groups of people, specifically African-Americans and Holocaust survivors in his essay, are intertwined and inform each other in a modern setting. Phillips’s novel depicts a relationship between the Holocaust and colonization through the use of multiple narratives interwoven throughout the novel. Those narratives begin with …

I Am Fascinated By What Is Beautiful, Strong, Healthy” Leni Riefenstahl, Gender, And Absolved Guilt, Karmann Ludwig

International ResearchScape Journal

Public discourse around the Nazi regime is typically surrounded by its doctrine of hatred and violence; traditional gender roles and these traits have rendered fascism a decidedly masculine pursuit—which Nazi doctrine wholeheartedly supported. Many men are to blame for the atrocities of the Holocaust and are rightfully criticized and despised for their actions; however, though a major contributor to the fascist ideology through her propaganda, filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl has remained extremely controversial. While scholars and critics have criticized Leni Riefenstahl’s films as emblemizing a fascist aesthetic, many have nonetheless praised her as an innovative artist, arguing for a separation from …

Ua94/6/1 My Story: Wku Track & Field's Adarian Gray, Adarian Gray

Student/Alumni Personal Papers

My Story is a series of first-person feature articles written by WKU student-athletes. The student-athletes will be telling their own stories in their own words. This article written by track & field senior thrower Adarian Gray, who has represented both WKU softball and track & field during her career on the Hill.

The Danger Of Current Rwandan Gender Politics, Amani Briggs

Women's, Gender and Queer Studies

This critical analysis will investigate whether Rwanda’s glorified representation of women in government positions truly serves the women in their society or rather the agenda of the men in power. Rwanda is frequently hailed as the prime example for African feminism due to their 2008 parliamentary elections. The 2013 Rwandan Parliamentary elections ushered in a record -breaking sixty-four percent of seats for women candidates, making Rwanda the top country for women in politics. In comparison, women make up a global average of 23.8 percent of parliament members as of June 2018 (W.E. Forum, 2017). Their representation of women in government …

Centering The Black Woman As A Subject Of Portraiture In Nineteenth-Century French Art, Llyleila Richardson

XULAneXUS

Until the 19th century, artistic depictions of black women by European artists were rare. Often they were relegated to the background as domestic attendants to European noblewomen, serving as symbols of the latter’s colonial wealth and further provide contrast with the darkness of their skin against the aristocratic fairness of their white mistresses. The transition into the 19th century was a turbulent period in European history, especially for France, as the country saw multiple revolts and governmental changes at home. Simultaneously colonization overseas continued to expand, creating previously unheard-of access to foreign cultures and ideas.

Black women became an interesting …