Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

How The Catholic Church Came To Oppose Birth Control, Lisa Mcclain

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the landmark “Humanae Vitae,” Pope Paul VI’s strict prohibition against artificial contraception, issued in the aftermath of the development of the birth control pill. At the time, the decision shocked many Catholic priests and laypeople. Conservative Catholics, however, praised the pope for what they saw as a confirmation of traditional teachings.

A Motherwork Challenge To Dominant Discourse: A Review Of Immigration, Motherhood, And Parental Involvement: Narratives Of Communal Agency In The Face Of Power Asymmetry, Katie D. Scott

The Qualitative Report

In Lilian Cibils dissertation-turned-book, Immigration, Motherhood and Parental Involvement: Narratives of Communal Agency in the Face of Power Asymmetry (2017), the stories of seven Mexican immigrant mothers provide insight into what motherhood looks like outside the mainstream ideology of parental involvement. Using a critical feminist lens, Cibils employs the concept of motherwork as an alternative to a cultural deficit approach for understanding Mexican immigrant motherhood.

Affirmative Consent Endorsement And Peer Norms Supporting Sexual Violence Among Vulnerable Students On College Campuses, Alyssa Marie Glace

Dissertations and Theses

Understanding how students endorse affirmative consent in their sexual relationships is essential to sexual violence prevention. Some research has indicated that LGBT students and students with disabilities may negotiate and endorse consent uniquely because of socially constructed traditional sexual scripts. Research indicates gender differences may exist as well. The proposed research examines differences based on gender, LGBT status, and disability in affirmative consent endorsement and peer norms around sexual violence. Results indicated that women, nonbinary students, LGBT students, and students with disabilities were significantly less likely than their privileged counterparts to indicate low endorsement of affirmative consent. Results also indicated …

Sex And Gender Diversity Is Growing Across The Us, Georgiann Davis

Sociology Faculty Research

Christine Hallquist, a transgender woman from Vermont, in 2018 made history as the first openly trans person to ever win the nomination of a major political party for governor. Sex and gender diverse people were once only able to be their authentic selves in gay and lesbian spaces. Today, from Danica Roem in Virginia to Betsy Driver in New Jersey to Hallquist in Vermont, they are running and winning major political posts throughout the United States.

On Working From Within: Understanding Self And Story, Bruce Parker

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Curriculum theory explores teaching and learning both in and out of schools. This research continues to engage with teachers and students as complex individuals whose identities and experiences influence their education and their approaches to teaching and learning. This research examines questions of self and story using autobiographical and autoethnographic methods. The project begins with an overview of some of the challenges public education and teachers have met with in the past two decades. One outcome of those challenges is control of the curriculum and classroom time has increasingly been taken away from students and teachers and given to administrators …

July 2018; Buffalo-Niagara Lgbtq History Project Minutes, Buffalo-Niagara Lgbtq History Project

Buffalo-Niagara LGBTQ History Project Minutes

The Buffalo-Niagara LGBTQ History Project is a collective network of peers documenting LGBTQ history in the Buffalo-Niagara Region. This page maintains archival copies of all meeting minutes and is a part of the Dr. Madeline Davis LGBTQ Archives of WNY, E. H. Butler Library, SUNY Buffalo State.

Queer Lives In Archives: Intelligibility And Forms Of Memory, Gina Watts

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

Exploring queer archives through a variety of texts and case studies, this paper seeks to understand three primary themes: the departure of traditional archival theory in queer archives, the absence of records and what they might mean for queer history, and a conception of queer time and space contributed to by archival records. Together, these suggest a specific form of intelligibility and memory available to people identifying as queer through the existence of these communal archives, one which reaffirms a history that some were determined to bury and which challenges and expands typical understandings of activism in the archival profession. …

On The (Male) Fringes: How Early Religious Women Remain “Subordinate” In World History Textbooks, Erica M. Southworth

Faculty Creative and Scholarly Works

Second Wave feminist researchers identified male-dominated curriculum formats in late twentieth century curriculum materials. This study builds off their work and advances the conversation of women’s inclusion by current United States secondary world history textbook content via a feminist lens to determine the extent of women’s agency in the accounts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The purpose was to determine if textbooks portrayed these patriarchal religions as exclusively male, thereby presenting inaccurate portrayals of the religions and the agents involved, which directly violates NCSS Standards. This study used critical discourse analysis to identify patterns of female marginalization and omission, indicating …

Run Me Dusk, Zane Truman Dezeeuw

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This is a full-length novel with a critical afterward. Run Me Dusk is a falling-out of love narrative about twenty-seven-year-old Milo who, after being broken up with by his boyfriend Red, flees from Illinois back to his hometown in southwestern Colorado to meditate on his place and purpose in life. The themes covered in this book are gay relationships, family relationships, mortality, and the natural world.

Curriculum Vitae: Transsexual Life Writing And The Biofictional Novel, Pamela Caughie

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The complex relation between bio and fiction, life and writing, is central to the project I am currently working on, a comparative scholarly edition of Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex (1933), the life narrative of Lili Elbe, formerly Einar Wegener, the Danish artist who became Lili Elvenes (her legal name) through a series of surgeries in 1930. In chapter six, Andreas Sparre (the fictional name used for Wegener in the narrative) offers to tell his life story to his friends, Niels and Inger, on the night before his first surgery, his last night as …

2017-18 End Of The Year Report, Jody Clarke-Midura, Katarina Pantic

Faculty Research

What the Issue is

In addition to recruitment, retention or persistence of women through graduation in Computer Science (CS) education has been one of the biggest challenges for the CS education field. Currently, women represent only about a quarter of the labor force (BLS, 2015) and earn only about 18% of the baccalaureate degrees (NSF, 2012) in CS. Attrition rates are highest in the first two years of CS programs (Biggers, Brauer, & Yilmaz, 2008; Miliszewska, Barker, Henderson, & Sztendur, 2006). At Utah State University, the situation is even more dire as women represent only about 10% of the CS …

Introduction: Does It Have To Be About Women?, Carolynn Van Dyke

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The six essays on medieval texts in the "Gender and Species" cluster (or Special Issue) demonstrate the power of combining feminist analysis with critical animal studies.

La Femme Bisclavret: The Female Of The Species?, Alison Langdon

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Conventional humanist readings of Bisclavret approach the lai from an anthropocentric perspective, in which animal nature is merely an allegory for human nature. In such a reading, the werewolf protagonist is a foil for his much more beastly if wholly human wife, with the underlying assumption being that animal nature is something to be rejected. That the marker of Lady Bisclavret's bestial nature—her noselessness—is transmitted through the generations of only female descendants seems to echo medieval antifeminist truisms about female perfidy. However, approaching the lai from a critical animal studies perspective can help dismantle conventional assumptions about the privileged status …

Questioning Gynocentric Utopia: Nature As Addict In “Description Of Cookeham”, Liberty S. Stanavage

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

In her 1610 “The Description of Cookeham,” Amelia Lanyer presents Cookeham as a space in which women and nature exist in poetry-inducing harmony until the intervention of man. Lanyer’s poem highlights the deference of both the animals (who “sport . . . in her eye” and “attend”), and the landscape to Clifford: the hills “descend” to meet her footstep and then raise themselves again at her whim. This alignment frequently leads critics to describe Cookeham as a utopian feminist landscape that aligns women and nature against an antagonistic masculine influence.

However, this utopian vision dramatizes a landscape that is not …

Women And Other Beasts: A Feminist Perspective On Medieval Bestiaries, Carolynn Van Dyke

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Gender and species intersect in the subject-matter, readership, and authorship of medieval beast-books. First, androcentric norms result in inconsistent gender references to species: the grammatically feminine eagle (Aquila) is represented as a stern father, the masculine turtledove (Turtura) as a clinging wife. More broadly, male exemplars represent nearly all species regardless of grammatical gender.

Second, both discursive norms and bibliographic practice presumed an exclusively male readership for the bestiary, but external and internal evidence suggest that bourgeois mothers used bestiaries in educating their children.

Third, a more radical intervention in androcentric bestiary norms is an instance …

Ncaa Fbi Probe, Candace N. Means

Student Publications

The article discusses the FBI probe as well as a list of other scandals that have risen from the investigation such as the debate as to whether to pay student athletes, the NCAA's aim to stress academics over athletics, the NCAA's transfer rules, and the one-and-done rule. The article also emphasizes the lack of emphasis on female athletes in the media and unfair treatment in relationship to Title XI.

Queering The Archive: Transforming The Archival Process, Lizeth Zepeda

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

The purpose of this work is to recognize the lack of queer of color lens within the archival profession that determines the appraisal, preservation, and impeding access. Queering the archive transforms the institution with possibilities of inclusivity for social justice and the rewriting of histories. Traditionally, the archival institution has reaffirmed hegemonic power structures by erasing and ignoring histories of marginalized communities. A way to disrupt this is to queer these archival institutions to confront these power dynamics and make interventions against the racist, sexist, classist and heterosexist structures that maintain them. Thus, this paper focuses on how processing through …

Flying, Hunting, Reading: Rethinking Falcon-Woman Comparisons, Sara Petrosillo

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This paper assesses structures of power through the medieval practice of falconry, offering two considerations about how feminist studies and animal studies fruitfully converge: first, assessing a human-animal relationship helps dismantle patriarchal control when human handler stands for patriarch and subjugated animal stands for domesticated woman. Second, this particular human-animal relationship represents a feminist poetics. In addition to overturning misogynous comparisons between falcons and women, something more pointedly self-representational occurred when women were themselves depicted as falconers. Rather than a human-animal relationship standing in for a man-woman relationship, men seem to be out of the foreground, or even out of …

Belligerent Mothers And The Power Of Feminine Speech In _The Owl And The Nightingale_, Wendy A. Matlock

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The Middle English poem The Owl and the Nightingale famously records the dispute between a hostile Nightingale and a bellicose Owl. Within that dialogue the birds reproduce themselves in word and egg, in rhetoric and body. Their digressions on bodies and scatology and on childbearing and childrearing become fertilizer that expands maternal authority into public, intellectual discourse. In addition to calling forth their own communicative powers, both characters aggressively recount narratives best known from the work of Marie de France, a voice feminist scholars have successfully restored to the canon, to condemn their foe. In this light, I argue, The …

“Compassion And Benignytee”: A Reassessment Of The Relationship Between Canacee And The Falcon In Chaucer’S “Squire’S Tale”, Melissa Ridley Elmes

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Among its many elements, Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale” includes an emotionally-charged dialogue between two aristocratic female figures: the human daughter of a king, Canacee, and the wounded falcon she meets in the wood. Scholars have debated the nature of this relationship in interspecial, gendered, and specifically feminist and ecofeminist terms. This essay provides a brief retrospective on some of the most recent scholarship examining their relationship—van Dyke (2005); Kordecki (2011); Crane (2012); and Schotland (2012 and 2015)—leading into a reassessment in two parts: first, that the affinity- and experience-driven bond these female figures develop supports a reading of this scene that …