Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Reading Latinx And Lgbtq+ Perspectives: Maya Christina Gonzalez And Equity Minded Models At Play, Elena Avilés

Chicano/Latino Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Through an equity-minded model, this essay addresses the work of Maya Christina Gonzalez and the new visions of gender she offers in children’s literature with My Colors, My World (2007). This essay frames the presence of Chicana/Latina feminist non-conforming perspectives on gender as chillante aesthetics and analyzes Gonzalez’s advancement of Latinx and LGBTQ+ standpoints in the following texts Call Me Tree/Llámale árbol (2014), I Am Free to Be Me: Gender Now Activity Book (2011) and Claiming Face: Self-empowerment Through Self-Portraiture: An Educator's Guide to Building the Powerful Link between Creativity and a Sense of Self (2010).

Shapeshifting And Sexuality: A Critical Autoethnography Of A Selkie, Sophie Jones

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Shapeshifting lore has provided a rich and evocative way to explore human experiences across many different cultures. This author utilizes the mythology of selkies to unpack the perspective of a white queer woman who is dealing with issues of racial privilege, heteronormativity, and patriarchal oppression. Utilizing performative writing and autoethnographic method, the author creates an argument for the integration of intersectional practices within the work of queer theorists, as well as for resistance against assimilation.

A Theory Of Veteran Identity, Travis L. Martin

Theses and Dissertations--English

More than 2.6 million troops have deployed in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, surveys reveal that more than half feel “disconnected” from their civilian counterparts, and this feeling persists despite ongoing efforts, in the academy and elsewhere, to help returning veterans overcome physical and mental wounds, seek an education, and find meaningful ways to contribute to society after taking off the uniform. This dissertation argues that Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans struggle with reassimilation because they lack healthy, complete models of veteran identity to draw upon in their postwar lives, a problem they’re working through collectively …

Women Of The Apocalypse: Afrospeculative Feminist Novelists, Bianca L. Spriggs

Theses and Dissertations--English

“Women of the Apocalypse: Feminist Afrospeculative Writers,” seeks to address the problematic ‘Exodus narrative,’ a convention that has helped shape Black American liberation politics dating back to the writings of Phyllis Wheatley. Novels by Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler, and Alice Walker undermine and complicate this narrative by challenging the trope of a single charismatic male leader who leads an entire race to a utopic promised land. For these writers, the Exodus narrative is unsustainable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because there is no room for women to operate outside of the role of …

American Culture Of Servitude: The Problem Of Domestic Service In Antebellum Literature And Culture, Andrea Holliger

Theses and Dissertations--English

My dissertation argues that domestic service alters a culture’s relationship to the laboring body. I theorize this relationship via popular literary and cultural antebellum texts to explore the effects of servitude as a trope. Methodologically, each chapter reads a literary text in context with social and legal paradigms to 1) demonstrate that servitude undergirds myriad articulations of antebellum power and difference; 2) show how servitude inflects the construction of these paradigms; and 3) trace Americans’ changing relationship to the concept of servitude from the Early Republic through the Civil War.

I begin with James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823), exploring …

The Male Mentor Figure In Women's Fiction, 1778-1801, Jessica R. Evans

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation follows the development of the mentor figure from Frances Burney’s Evelina published in 1778 to Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda in 1801. The mentor becomes a key figure for exploring women’s revolutionary ideas on female education and women’s roles in society. My dissertation contributes to discussions on mentoring, development of the Gothic mode, and debates over sensibility and sentimental fiction. It considers how the female mentee paradoxically both desires and criticizes her male mentor and his authority. Each author under discussion employed the mentor figure in a way that addressed their contemporary society’s issues and prejudices toward the treatment of …

Body Image And Sex: How Women's Body Image Influences And Impacts Sexual Experiences, Sarah E. Christian

Theses and Dissertations--Family Sciences

Body image, the subjective view about one’s own body and how others perceive it, has been shown to have numerous impacts on women in multiple facets of their lives, including sexual experiences. This study seeks to examine the specific impact that body image has on women using sexual relationships for self-validation. Findings suggest that the more likely a woman is to perceive herself as overweight, the higher the chance that she seeks out sex in order to validate her feelings with regards to her body. Parental involvement and comments about the participant’s body were also shown with the woman seeking …

[Not] Buying It: Prostitution As Unwanted Sex, Rebecca Whisnant

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Noting the relative invisibility of prostitution buyers, or Johns, in discussions of the morality of prostitution, this article criticizes Johns’ behavior on the grounds that they are culpably involved in causing the typical harms of prostitution in the lives of the women whom they pay for sex. Those harms are, at bottom, the result of being habitually subjected to unwanted sex, and they are exacerbated rather than mitigated by such sex being bought and paid for. Efforts to normalize and legalize sex-buying should therefore be resisted.

Feminist Futures, Julia Nicole Court

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

No abstract provided.

Drag Performance And Femininity: Redefining Drag Culture Through Identity Performance Of Transgender Women Drag Queens, Cristy Dougherty

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Viewing gender as a performance reveals how gender identity is shaped and formed. There is currently tensions associated with drag queen performance as an act of subversion and transgression from the heteronormative definition of gender and drag as a perpetuation of heteronormative definitions of gender. There is also a tension between the affirmation of femininity and transgression from gender binaries of womanhood. In order to address these tensions, this thesis project examined the reasoning behind how transgender women and gay men drag queen performers navigate the world of femininity. Specifically, this study explored the varied reasons behind performing femininity through …

More Than “Sluts” Or “Prissy Girls”: Gender And Becoming In Senior Secondary Drama Classrooms, Kirsten Lambert, Peter R. Wright, Jan Currie, Robin Pascoe

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

This article examines the relationships between the embodiment of dramatic characters, gender, and identity. It draws on ethnographic data based on observations and interviews with 24 drama teachers and senior secondary drama students in Western Australia. We explore how student becomings in year 12 drama classrooms are mediated and constituted through socially overcoded gender binaries in a dominant neoliberal culture of competitive performativity. We ask the questions: What constructions of femininity and masculinity are students embodying from popular dramatic texts in the drama classroom at a critical time in their social and emotional development? Are these constructions empowering? Or disempowering? …

How Mobile Learning Initiatives Can Empower Women, Helen Crompton

Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications

The Sustainable Development Goal 5 provides a call to action to promote gender equality and to empower women. This article responds to that call by providing insight into how mobile learning initiatives have been used to support that aim. A critical analysis is conducted of studies in the past decade to review what strategies have been effective in empowering women. The analysis revealed that initiatives were targeted towards three areas: Education, health, and financial empowerment.

Findings show that in certain topics women should play an active role to further the empowerment process. This article also aligns with Objective 4 of …

Performing Gender: An Exploration Of The Relationship Between Expression And Identity, Allegra Barnes

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper discusses the relationship between gender expression and gender identity. It recounts my personal exploration of the two through the process of photographing two fellow AFAB individuals to create visual representations of their gender expressions while interviewing them to examine how these expressions relate to the gender with which they identify. Following this, I engage in self-reflection taking into consideration both the narratives of my peers as well as Judith Butler's insights on gender. The project culminates with a series of self portraits and a conclusion on how I came to understand both facets my gender.

Leisure/Crime, Immaterial Labor, And The Performance Of The Teenage Girl In Harmony Korine’S Spring Breakers (2012) And Sofia Coppola’S The Bling Ring (2013), Maryn Wilkinson

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012) and Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013) introduced audiences to girls exploring criminal behavior both for and as leisure. The films introduce an idea of leisure/crime: criminal acts that appear to develop as natural, fruitful extensions of leisure activities, circumnavigating conventional laws of capitalism, yet still allow its actors to access, attain, and consume goods, money, value, and status. Through close analysis of the films’ style and character performances, this article proposes that the films and their enactments of leisure/crime in fact offer complex critical commentary on contemporary relations between the representation of teenage girls, …

The Transgressive Girl, Nicole Killian

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This paper imagines the Internet as a potentially utopian girl-space by looking at how girls, and pop-cultural depictions of girls, use the language, signs, and symbols of the Internet, an inherently patriarchal system, in transgressive ways. I propose the 1990s media representations as the touchstone moment when the conditions of possibility for imagining the hacker as a weaponized girl emerged visually in popular culture. The girl, exemplified by various figures within popular television and film culture, is a precursor to and postulates an entry point into the ways Internet today is used in transgressive nature.

The Effects Of Gender-Aware Leadership-Development Training On The Leadership- Behavioral Competencies Of Women Software Engineers In California’S Silicon Valley, Leann Pereira

Doctoral Dissertations

This study was conducted to investigate the effects of a leadership-development training workshop on leadership behaviors among women software engineers in a California Silicon Valley engineering community with a two-phase, mixed-methods research design. The training workshop was developed using a framework for developing leadership-behavioral competencies among women (LBCW), which was congruent with theoretical principles for women’s leadership development.

LBCW was comprised of four competencies: self-advocacy, social networking, psychological capital, and goal orientation. A pretest–posttest comparison-group design was used to assess the effects of the training on LCBW among 70 participants with four instruments: the Leadership Development and Activities Instrument, the …

At The Edges Of Queer: Navigating Ambiguity In Identity, Community, And Politics, Madeline Mccray Batzli

Honors Papers

When queer took the world of AIDS activism and the academy by storm in the late 20th century, activists and academics leapt to understand and define this reclaimed word and predict its trajectory. Some academics claimed that queer would avoid obsolescence, remaining an anti-assimilationist beacon for activists, while others worried that lumping anyone with non-normative sexualities or lifestyle practices under the same umbrella would inaccurately homogenize disparate groups and detract from specific causes. This study aims to understand the meanings of the word queer among students at Oberlin College today, over a quarter century after the beginning of the word’s …

Empowering Women For Economic Growth: A Measurement Of Social And Demographic Impacts On Afghan Women In Business, Tracy Taylor

MPA/MPP/MPFM Capstone Projects

Non-governmental organizations working in conflict-prone, resource-deprived developing countries face a very unique set of challenges. Like with other non-profits, program dollars and other resources must be allocated carefully and thoughtfully so the maximum output is achieved with the inputs allotted. Unlike other non-profits, however, the political, social, and economic environment is constantly changing in developing countries like Afghanistan. Basic human needs are not being met, leaving the path to NGO program success fraught with seemingly impossible challenges. This is the case for Peace Through Business, a training and development program serving women entrepreneurs in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Peace Through Business seeks …

“I Exist To Resist”: Navigating The Gender Non-Conforming Identity At Humboldt State University, Lizbeth E. Olmedo

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

While transgender research is educating and reforming schools, politics and wider society, there is little work on a gender spectrum that disrupts the gender binary of (trans) men/women. This research is an attempt to fill in the gaps of people, significantly students who do not fit under the “transgender umbrella,” as this term has tended to clump an array of gender and sexual identities together. This qualitative research explores students who go beyond the gender binary and how they navigate non-binary, genderqueer, and gender non-conforming identities within Humboldt State University (HSU). With this present qualitative study, I examined the lived …

The Long And Unconventional Road: Stories Of Financial Challenges And Systemic Barriers In College Completion For Adult Women Undergraduate Students, Michele Anne Tyson

Higher Education: Doctoral Research Projects

The following doctoral research studies the experiences and stories of adult post-traditional undergraduate women through a feminist narrative inquiry. The study focuses on the financing of a college degree and will be explored through understanding the educational journey of each participant to highlight personal struggle and system barriers. Currently literature about the importance of institutional and federal assistance for this population is absent from higher education. Using a feminist theoretical framework and narrative inquiry, this study describes the importance and value of educating women to both individual families and societal good.