Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Annie Oakley, Gender, And Guns: The "Champion Rifle Shot" And Gender Performance, 1860-1926, Sarah Cansler

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

Sharpshooter Annie Oakley’s enormous popularity provides a means of understanding how the public, through the viewpoints of reporters and commentators, discussed and understood the connection between gender and celebrity at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. As a famous woman in an era rife with discussions about women’s rights and roles in society, Oakley’s popularity was inextricably related to ideas about gender. Oakley uniquely combined her talent at shooting, which many still viewed as a “man’s” sport, with her embodiment of appropriate feminine attributes like her clothing or mannerisms. Oakley’s performance of gender in the …

The Blindness Of An Invisible Man: An Exploration Of Ellison’S Female Characters, Madison Elkins

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

Questions have long been raised about the female characters in Invisible Man who often appear to be objectified or stereotyped. Especially in light of Ellison’s professed opinions against the dangers of stereotyping as minority oppression, the depiction of his female characters seems to be fundamentally hypocritical. It is the dominant critical opinion among feminist scholars that Ellison’s treatment of female characters is not only hopelessly misogynistic, but, more importantly, undermines the telos of the novel and enervates its social claims. While it is a valid exercise to analyze Ellison’s female characters in this way, this opinion fails in two critical …

Family Affairs Newsletter 2014-06-15, Zack Paakkonen

Family Affairs newsletter (2004-2016)

FAMILY AFFAIRS was a free, twice-a-month, social activities newsletter for the GLBTQI (gay/lesbian/bisexual/trans/queer/intersex) community, sent out around the 1st and 15th of each month. It covered the State of Maine only. The list was begun and maintained for many years by Jean Vermette in Bangor, and later operated by Zack Paakkonen of Portland. Over the years it evolved from a social activities newsletter into a business directory, classified ad service, and community bulletin board.

Family Affairs Newsletter Business Directory 2014-06-15, Zack Paakkonen

Family Affairs newsletter (2004-2016)

Family Affairs Newsletter Directory of GLBTQIA Businesses.

"Is That What You Dream About? Being A Monster?": Bella Swan And The Construction Of The Monstrous-Feminine In The Twilight Saga, Amanda Jayne Firestone

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

This dissertation argues that Bella Swan is a representation of Barbara Creed's monstrous-feminine which serves to reinforce ideologies that insist women are abject, inherently dangerous to men, and threatening to a patriarchal status quo. Through close-textual analysis of The Twilight Saga, I demonstrate how the monstrous-feminine frames the hysterical teenage body, hypersexuality, and eternal motherhood as simultaneously unacceptable and unavoidable. These negative women's stereotypes continue to persist in dominant popular culture, and this doublebind is overcome only by the impossible perfection of vampirism. The monstrous-feminine invites constructions of teenage bodies as unstable and unreliable, women's sexuality as dangerous and …

Factors Influencing The Major Satisfaction And Leadership Aspirations Of Men And Women In Traditional And Nontraditional Fields, Jennifer Yeoward

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reports the results of an online survey study that examined the associations of role model influences, support/guidance, and socioeconomic status (SES) with college students' major satisfaction and leadership aspirations. Of the 558 students who responded to the survey invitation, data from 494 students who had provided responses on the main variables were included in the major analyses. Contrary to hypotheses, SES and the nontraditionality of students' majors were not significantly related to leadership aspirations or major satisfaction. The results did support the hypotheses that support/guidance and inspiration/modeling would be associated with students' leadership aspirations and major satisfaction, but …

“The Woman” And The Women Of Sherlock Holmes, Cassandra Poole

James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ)

Women appear in nearly every Sherlock Holmes novel and short story. The vast majority are victims. Against the recurring oppression of women and women’s sexuality in the Holmes canon, a few exceptional female characters escape their Victorian gender roles. One rises above all others. She is “the woman,” Irene Adler, whose strength, intelligence, and independence have made her a recurring star in extra-canonical books, television shows, film adaptations, and Sherlockian fan fiction. This essay focuses on women and women’s sexuality within and beyond the Holmes canon to explore our enduring fascination with “the only woman to ever best Sherlock Holmes.”

Cisgenderism In Gender Attributions: The Ways In Which Social, Cognitive, And Individual Factors Predict Misgendering, Erica Jayne Friedman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The current program of research investigated the ways in which social representations of gender, cognitive processes, and individual factors can be integrated to predict "misgendering," an example of cisgenderism in which people are categorized as a gender with which they do not identify. I proposed an (In)consistency Processing Model of Gender Attribution in which perceivers make a gender attribution by interpreting the stereotype-(in)consistencies of a target's gender characteristics through either a biology- or identity-based schema. Five studies were conducted to test different aspects of this model, the first of which was a secondary data analysis on a sample of students …

Yes We Can: A Dyadic Investigation Of Cognitive Interdependence, Relationship Communication, And Optimal Behavioral Health Outcomes Among Hiv Serodiscordant Same-Sex Male Couples, Kristine Elizabeth Gamarel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research suggests that couples who adopt a "we" orientation in relation to illness demonstrate greater resiliency and an increased capacity to cope with stressors. HIV serodiscordant couples (one partner is HIV-positive, the other is HIV-negative) have been identified as a critical mode of HIV transmission. The present study integrates dyadic coping models and interdependence theory to examine whether cognitive interdependence (i.e., the extent to which couples include aspects of their partner into their self-concept) and communication strategies are associated with sexual behavior, antiretroviral therapy (ART) adherence, depressive symptoms, sexual satisfaction, and relationship satisfaction. The study also tested whether the associations …

The Relative Impact Of Identity On Lgbt Api Outness: A Quantitative Analysis, Jessica Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the United States, the intersecting relationship among race, sex, gender, and sexuality plays a significant role in one's identity development and socialization. Especially for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Asian Pacific Islander (API) individuals, such interplay presents a continuous task of processing and presenting different identities. Employing a national sample of over 500 LGBT API individuals and utilizing multivariate regression analysis, this thesis explores how LGBT API individuals' sexual and racial identities affect their decisions in coming out to family, friends, co-workers, and other community members. Findings indicate that the level of discomfort in racial/ethnic and/or LGBT community …

Rendering The Unthinkable: (Un)Knowable Animality, Compulsory Recovery, And Heterosexualized Trauma In The Hunger Games, Jennifer Polish

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dystopian fiction is expected to reflect deeply on the interactions between identities, bodies, and state control. Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games Trilogy is no exception. The disturbing trilogy situated animality, disability, and trauma (both of non-humans and of humans) as being firmly controlled by the power of the state (the Capitol). Through its portrayal of hunting and genetic manipulation, the trilogy constructed a state-created animality which refused definitive labeling and insisted upon facing animal subjectivity while simultaneously disregarding the needs and desires of those considered to be non-human. Similarly, the state held sway over both the creation and elimination of …

Neoliberalism And The "Obesity Epidemic", Dianne Rubinstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Neoliberalism has been described as a political and economic theory that proposes "human well-being can best be advanced by liberating... freedoms...within an institutional framework [of]...strong private property rights [and] free markets.... [I]f markets do not exist (...such as in... health care) then they must be created, by state action if necessary." I would argue that the "Obesity Epidemic" is just such a created Neoliberal market, and in fact does not actually exist as an "epidemic." By changing the computation of BMI (Body Mass Index) in 1998, the federal government created the "Obesity Epidemic" by definitional fiat, despite myriad contradictory evidence

How Silently Sheela-Na-Gig Speaks: Memory, Mythos, And The Female Body, Amber C. Snider

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How and why do we destroy female agency, still today? Focusing on some of the mythical foundations and formations found in ancient Celtic and Greek imaginings, the "bodily" aspects in particular, this thesis traces the ways in which some of the modern women intellectuals receive or reject the typical feminist or female elements found in mythologies; the elided nature of the female trinity and the life giver-destroyer circularity inherent in goddesses and archetypes, for instance, appears to mirror our cultural impulse to destroy the female body. It is then not enough to create a new mythology by and for women--we …

"She Said Plain, Burned Things": A Feminist Poetics Of The Unsayable In Twentieth Century Literary & Visual Culture, Leah Souffrant

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the way silence, blank space, and other forms of creative withholding attempt to translate the unsayable, or to convey the unsayability of language in artistic form. Through a study of the works of Sylvia Plath, Jean Rhys, Rachel Zucker, Marguerite Duras, Anne Carson, and visual images, this work observes the connection between women's writing in the 20th century and the communication of painful subject matter through attention to absence. This study attends explicitly to how formal qualities in artistic works attend to ontological concerns through an examination of the intersection of concerns with phenomenology, feminism, and formal …

The Advance Of The Mobile Woman: Representations Of British Women's Physical Mobility, 1660-1820, Amanda Booth Springs

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Britain's long eighteenth century (1660-1820) underwent an infrastructure and transportation revolution. Over the same period of time, scholars argue, the ideology of "the domestic woman" grew increasingly prevalent. This dissertation explores the improvements to roadways and representations of the various ways in which British women of the period increasingly utilized transportation, equestrianism, and pedestrianism to traverse the nation, which was also reflected in the development of traveling clothing for women. It argues that these literary and pictorial representations depict the tensions around women's increasing capacity for physical movement, contending that the ideology of the domestic woman was largely reactionary rhetoric …

Coming Of Age In Neoliberal New York, Jennifer Hope Sugg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Thirty years of neoliberal policies have left New York a divided city, with ever-rising rates of income inequality and widening social disparity. Structural transformations associated with global capitalism have led to divergent experiences for male and female youth coming of age in the 21st century. Girls are experiencing greater social integration and social mobility whereas, boys are facing social exclusion and limited opportunities. As young men precariously forge new transitions to adulthood, young women are constructed as ideal flexible subjects, benefiting from feminist achievements, and advancing in the new service economy. Yet in reality, girls continue to face gendered base …

"For The Voices": The Letters Of John Wieners, Michael Seth Stewart

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

American poet John Wieners is thoroughly disenfranchised from the modern poetic establishments because he is, to those institutions, practically illegible. He was a queer self-styled poete maudit in the fifties; a protege of political-historical poet Charles Olson who wrote audaciously personal verse; a lyric poet who eschewed the egoism of the confessional mode in order to pursue the Olsonian project of Projective (outward-looking) poetics; a Boston poet who was institutionalized at state hospitals. Wieners lived on the "other side" of Beacon Hill, not the Brahmin south slope, but the north side with its working-class apartments and underground gay bars. Though …

Blogging Through Motherhood: Free Labor, Femininity, And The (Re)Production Of Maternity, Kara Mary Van Cleaf

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Drawing from a thematic analysis of 47 North American mommy blogs over a 2-year period, I situate the genre in critical discussions of feminism, media, and labor, exploring both the technological and cultural shifts that turn mothers into cultural producers and that turn the experience of motherhood into a commodity. I situate the content of such blogs, or what gets said therein, within theories of media, gender, and labor. Examining the blogs within and against such academic discussions allows me to develop an intersectional analysis of feminism, media, and labor studies.

Aging Out Of The Spectrum Of Cultural Visibility, Darthea M. Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I argue that the valorization of youth and the subsequent quest for agelessness has caused such an explosion of ageism that the elderly have been relegated to a culturally invisible status. The intersection of age and gender is doubly problematic for women due to sexism and the perennial objectification of the female body. Thinking of visibility as a measure of social acceptability, the consequences of cultural disappearance for the aging woman is an important site for investigation and theorizing. This thesis depicts the erasure of aging women from the cultural landscape as an effect of media representation and self-care work …

Gay And Lesbian Travel Writing: A Present In Need Of A Different Future, Michael Verdirame

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The first half of this thesis will detail the history of travel, as well as the primary reasons why people travel and why it is such a lucrative industry. This will be followed by an account of the history of travel writing, with a specific emphasis on the various types of avenues available to travel writers and the reasons why people feel compelled to write about their travels. The first half will then conclude with a content analysis of three current gay and lesbian travel publications available on different media platforms--Passport Magazine as an online magazine, Man About World as …