Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

“Less Of The Heroine Than The Woman”: Parsing Gender In The British Novel, Susan Carlile

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This essay offers two methods that will help students resist the temptation to judge eighteenth-century novels by twenty-first-century standards. These methods prompt students to parse the question of whether female protagonists in novels—in this case, Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724), Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), and Charlotte Lennox’s Sophia (1762)—are portrayed as perfect models or as complex humans. The first method asks them to engage with definitions of the term “heroine,” and the second method uses word clouds to extend their thinking about the complexity of embodying a mid-eighteenth-century female identity.

Arabella’S Valentines And Literary Connections [Dot] Com: Playing With Eighteenth-Century Gender Online, Melanie D. Holm

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This article describes two digital assignments that ask students to imaginatively embody characters from eighteenth-century texts written by women in order to cultivate a greater awareness of the critical role of gender and gender critique in these works. The first of these assignments, “Arabella’s Valentines,” asks students to translate dialogue from Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote as humorous Internet memes. The second assignment, “Literary Connections [dot] com,” asks students to imagine how characters from the course archive might represent themselves on an internet dating site. Through creative role-play facilitated by these digital genres, students engage with the texts in stimulating …

Review Of Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, And Belief In Early Modern England, Amy Mallory-Kani

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

Review Of Teresa Barnard, Ed. British Women And The Intellectual World In The Long Eighteenth Century., Judith Dorn

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Review of Teresa Barnard, ed. British Women and the Intellectual World in the Long Eighteenth Century.

Charlotte Charke’S Gun: Queering Material Culture And Gender Performance, Jade Higa

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This essay juxtaposes readings of material culture and gender performance in Charlotte Charke’s Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke (1755). It argues that the transient relationship Charke has to the objects in her life mirrors the fluidity of her gender. The essay ultimately uses Charke’s narrative as a case study in a questioning of a binarized gender matrix. The thesis suggest that, though we lack language to fully describe it, characters and historical figures like Charke move beyond and explode gender binaries.

General Editor's Note, Laura Runge

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

“Can You Believe They Think I’M Intimidating?” An Exploration Of Identity In Tall Women, Elizabeth Joy Fuller

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the United States today, there is a dominant cultural narrative telling us that tallness is desirable and enjoyed by those who experience it. Much of the existing research on height correlates tallness with promotions, higher salaries, and general happiness. However, this research does not take into account the limitations of some of the previous research which tends to accept tall people’s vocabulary of motives at face value as the totality of their experience as a tall person. In particular, tall women tend to have much more to say about their lives as tall women than simply that it has …

Restoration Raillery: The Use Of Witty Repartee To Gain Power Within Gendered Spaces Of Restoration London, Bonnie Soper

Madison Historical Review

“Restoration Raillery: The Use of Witty Repartee to Gain Power within Gendered Spaces in Restoration London,” examines the creation of gendered spaces to gain political and social power through the use of satire and wit in poetry, theater, and the court of Charles II in Restoration London. During the Restoration period, mentions of wit and incivility in print and theatre increased over previous eras due to the heightened importance placed on wit as a tool to gain popularity within the court of Charles II. At the same time, witty repartee and well-executed satire provided political power to men within Parliament, …

Notable Women Of Portland, Tracy J. Prince, Zadie Schaffer

Curriculum and Instruction Faculty Publications and Presentations

The story of Portland, Oregon, like much of history, has usually been told with a focus on male leaders. This book offers a reframing of Portland’s history--starting from 10,000 years of Native American women, to pioneer women, to women of the Progressive Era, WWI, WWII, post-war women, and chapters on Women in the Arts and Women in Politics. Many women made their mark and radically changed the Oregon frontier, including Native Americans Polly Johnson and Josette Nouette; pioneers Minerva Carter and Charlotte Terwilliger; doctors Marie Equi, Mary Priscilla Avery Sawtelle, and Bethina Owens-Adair; artists Eliza Barchus and Lily E. White; …

Pulse - A Consultation, Barry J. Mauer

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen killed 49 people and injured 53 at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida. We may never know or understand what was in Mateen’s mind, but we can situate his attack within the history of eliminationism in America. Islamist terrorism is just part of a larger phenomenon: right wing eliminationism. But despite centuries of right wing eliminationist words and deeds in the U.S., there is little or no mainstream recognition of the phenomenon. Instead, we are treated to more denial, more distraction, more obfuscation. Until we look this problem squarely in the face, it will …

Show Us Your Omaha: Combating Lgbtq+ Archival Silences, Angela J. Kroeger, Yumi Ohira, Amy Schindler

Criss Library Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

The University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) Libraries offers a variety of unique and specialized collections in the Archives & Special Collections (ASC) for UNO and Omaha community members. In 2015, ASC began planning for preserving and providing access to Omaha’s LGBTQ+ history through the Queer Omaha Archives. Archival silences were defined by archivist Rodney Carter as the manifestation of the actions of the powerful in denying the marginalized access to archives with further definition by archivists and researchers expanding this definition. The UNO Libraries has invested in developing digital engagement as a strategic priority through building infrastructure and expanding …

Collaboration Revisited: The Performative Art Of Claude Cahun And Hannah Weiner, Phillip L. Griffith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In its most common usage in the artistic context, collaboration refers to a practice of creation in which two artists work together to produce a single artwork or object. Collaboration Revisited: The Performative Art of Claude Cahun and Hannah Weiner focuses on the nexus of photography, writing, and performance in the work of six female avant-garde artists from the transatlantic twentieth century, informed by the important place of surrealism in that history, to reconsider this understanding of collaboration. Instead of the notion of collaboration as founded in the experience of two artists working together in each others’ presence, I examine …

A Girlhood Among Ghosts, An Experimental Project, Maple Wu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“If a woman is going to write a Book of Peace, it is given her to know devastation” – Maxine Hong Kingston, The Fifth Book of Peace.

I do not believe I know devastation. I think to be devastated means one has to experience extreme pain, and live in the aftermath of trauma. I think of this in terms of war, famine, and immigration. A little self-reflection shows that in the twenty-something years of my life, I have not encountered any of the three things listed.

What I do recall, however, is the first time I picked up Maxine …

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice Of Black Uplift, 1890–1905, Timothy M. Griffiths

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice of Black Uplift, 1890-1905 situates the queer-of-color cultural imaginary in a relatively small nodal point: the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Through literary analysis and archival research on leading and marginal figures of Post-Reconstruction African American culture, this dissertation considers the progenitorial relationship of late-nineteenth century black uplift novels to modern-day queer theory. Bricolage Propriety builds on work about the sexual politics of early African American literature begun by women-of-color feminists of the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Hazel V. Carby, Ann duCille, and Claudia Tate. A new wave of …

Beyond Vulnerability: Refugee Women’S Leadership In Jordan, Widad Hassan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While both men and women are affected by conflicts and humanitarian crises, 80 percent of the world’s refugees and internally displaced persons are women and children, indicating that women experience conflict and war differently. The emphasis on women’s vulnerability during conflicts and humanitarian crises leads to their exclusion from leadership roles and decision-making on humanitarian programs and issues that impact them. Though women experience numerous socio-cultural barriers to exercising leadership in humanitarian settings, they have taken on important roles in emergency response and in refugee camps. This paper traces the progress of UN and humanitarian agencies recognition and development of …

Cruising Borders, Unsettling Identities: Toward A Queer Diasporic Asian America, Wen Liu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I challenge the dominant conceptualization of Asian Americanness as a biological and cultural population and a cohesive racial category. Instead, I consider it as a form of flexible subjectivity and an affective emergence that occurs and materializes due to the multiple sites of convergence in the neoliberal assemblage of model minority ideology, imperialist geopolitical history, racialized queer politics, and criminal (in)justices. I examine the spatial and temporal configurations of Asian American subjectivity through a queer and postcolonial lens, first by conducting a critical historical review of the category of Asian American in the geopolitical history of psychological …

“Pay, Protection, And Professionalism”: The History Of Domestic Worker Organizing And The Future Of Home Health Care In The United States, Julia R. Gruberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With a multidisciplinary approach, I analyze the socio-economic, political, and historical factors that led to the current state of home health care in the United States. The legacy of slavery and the devaluing of so-called “women’s work” explain how the field of domestic work has been historically excluded from protection and regulation in the United States. Caring for children and keeping house have been women’s work for centuries, regardless of whether women were paid to do it or it was outsourced to an employee. Domestic work is sometimes referred to as “the work that makes all other work possible,” but …

Land Of Women: Basilicata, Emigration, And The Women Who Remained Behind, 1880-1914, Victoria Calabrese

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Between 1880 and 1914, millions of Italians emigrated to all corners of the globe in hopes of earning better wages and forging a better life for themselves and for their families. This dissertation examines the role of the women left behind in the Italian region of Basilicata when their husbands emigrated, and the political, social, economic, and legal changes they experienced in their absence. During the Liberal Period, women had few political rights, and married women were dependent on their husbands, but being left on their own put them in a unique position. I argue that the Southern Italian women …

Spectral Bodies: Women's Resistance Across Time In North America, Whitney C. Evanson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project contrasts the lived experiences of feminists within the EZLN in Mexico with the historical persecution of community outsiders during the Salem witch trials. I want to explore the differences between a radical political and social movement (the EZLN), and the radical shift in history in which women were accused of witchcraft based on hysteria and rumors. There are parallels between the witch trials and the causes of the Zapatista movement in the ways that women's bodies were treated--their political usefulness to create fear and obedience from citizens by murdering them for their defiance, burying them in shallow graves. …

Black Models Matter: Challenging The Racism Of Aesthetics And The Facade Of Inclusion In The Fashion Industry, Scarlett L. Newman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The global fashion market is expanding every day, but often, the global fashion runways do not reflect that reality. On average, black models make up for six percent of models used on the runway during the fashion month calendar. This small percentage is also mirrored in advertisements and editorials featured in popular fashion magazines. In the 1970s, black models were met with great opportunities, and that success trickled down into the 1980s and the 1990s. As the 90s came to a close, top designers opted for an aesthetic that ultimately excluded models of color, but black models beared the brunt …