Women's Studies Commons^™

Sartorial Semiotics: Constructs Of Gender And Female Sexuality In Post Wwii American And European Cinema, Patricia Cabral

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cinematic costume design functions as a system of visually-perceived, material and indexical signifiers, an effective and compelling language further informed by styling and embodiment. Sartorial semiotics support and inflect role characterization, while equally underpinning or subverting tropes generated by ideological paradigms. The following methodological approaches were adopted in scrutinizing this topic: Roland Barthes’ application of semiotic theories to the domain of fashion in The Language of Fashion, and Laura Marks’ discussion of the dialectics of optical and haptic visualities in apprehending film images in The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses.

By examining the costume …

Feminist Geographies Of Online Gaming, Orlando Woods

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper identifies opportunities and pathways through which feminist digital geographies can expand into the realm of online gaming. Whilst research at the nexus of gender and online gaming has come a long way in the past two decades, geographical perspectives are noticeably lacking. They can contribute to the discourse by emphasising the contingent nature of online gamespaces, and how a gendered subject position might be redefined through, and help to redefine, the (in)distinctions between “online” and “offline”, “gaming” and “non-gaming” spaces. I identify four directions in which feminist geographies of online gaming can unfold: aesthetic-affective spaces of the “virtually …

Fantasies Of Representation: Methods Of Feminist Literary Analysis, Alexandra Johnson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The push for diversity in media and literature has resulted in an increase in representation, at least on the surface. While the range of representation may have broadened in terms of subject identity – gender, sexuality, race, ability, etc. – the way this diversity has occurred has not necessarily encouraged ethical or allied development. The aim of my thesis is to develop and deploy five methods of feminist critique and analysis of representation in popular media. I begin by laying out the five methodologies, in a manner that allows for the use of these methods on other examples. Then, I …

No Hair! Don't Care! Resistance And Empowerment Of Bald And Low Shaved Black Women, Monica Rivers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No Hair! Don’t Care! Resistance and Empowerment of Bald and Low Shaved Black Women is an invitation to discuss the experiences of Black women who choose to wear bald and low shaved haircuts. The project examines standards of beauty, femininity, sexuality, sexual harassment, self- acceptance, and self-expression through the voices of Black women: Because sometimes the biggest statement you can make with your hair is by having none.

On The Woman Question: A Defense Of Alexandra Kollontai Against Liberal Critics, Nicole Baltzer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Alexandra Kollontai envisioned a world in which all women and their proletarian comrades were liberated from subordination under capitalism. She served as People’s Commissar in the Bolshevik government and established the Zhenotdel, the government’s department for women. Under the Bolsheviks, women were granted equal legal status to men, divorce rights, access to birth control, and were the primary benefiters of the nationalization of domestic work (i.e., communal childcare, dining, and laundry halls). Kollontai and the Soviet Union provide us with one of the few examples of Marxist feminism in action. Liberal critics of Kollontai and her Marxist comrades and contemporaries …

(In)Hospitable Modernity: Hospitality And Its Discontents (1920–1953), Daniel A. Hengel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation discusses the tacit forms of political activity operating through the performance and space of hospitality in modern fiction. I read the habitus, praxis, and dissemblages of hospitality in modern fiction as conduits that reveal dialectics of submission and resistance to Victorian and Edwardian markers of normativity. This is ultimately an infrapolitical work. I locate fulcrums of dissent, cloaked in a guise of hospitality, in the domestic sphere and the politicization of formerly private spaces into sites with the potential to reorder legitimated forms of agency. This project attempts to uncover veiled forms of sociopolitical resistance in and through …

Poems Of Debate And Praise: Women As Published Authors In Sixteenth-Century France, Anna Soo-Hoo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Non-fictional, published poetic exchanges between men and women in sixteenth-century France provide new perspectives into how women writers operated in a literary culture whose main producers and dominant voice were male. Contrary to the notion repeated by many critics that women of that period were supposed to stay out of the public sphere, my study finds that publishing a woman’s poems did not destroy her reputation, and there appears to have been no major backlash when a man decided to include poems by a female contemporary in his book. My study takes as its point of departure the notion that …

Pierce And Pine: Diane Di Prima, Mary Norbert Korte, And The Meeting Of Matter And Spirit, Iris Cushing

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Diane di Prima (1934-2020) and Mary Norbert Korte (b. 1934) are two poets whose contributions to postwar American poetry are vitally important, and yet their status on the margins of mainstream literary culture has left their work largely unstudied. Di Prima, the granddaughter of Italian Anarchist Domenico Mallozzi (with whom she shared a close relationship) grew up in an Italian-American community in Brooklyn and bore witness to the cultural schizophrenia of WWII as a child. Korte was raised in an affluent Bay Area family, and encountered hardships (including the death of her father when she was 12) that affected her …

Data Analysis And Visualization To Dismantle Gender Discrimination In The Field Of Technology, Quinn Bolewicki

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the United States, a significant population is facing an uphill battle trying to thrive in an industry that has seen exponential growth in recent years. Women, who account for approximately 50.8% of the U.S. population are statistically underpaid and underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Despite women-led technology teams establishing a 21% greater return on investment than teams who don’t, and young women largely outperforming men in math according to a 2015 study, there are only three fortune 500 companies led by women, and they comprise only 10% of internet entrepreneurs. Research generates hundreds of articles, infographics, …

Review Of Women, Performance, And The Material Of Memory: The Archival Tourist, 1780-1915, By Laura Engel, Leslie Ritchie

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

No abstract provided.

Sisterhood & Scholarship While Black, Stephanie R. Anckle

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

No abstract provided.

Feminist Theory And Interorganizational Collaboration: An Ethnographic Study Of Gendered Tension Management, Rebecca M. Rice

Communication Studies Faculty Research

Building on feminist theories in organizational communication, this study investigated gendered tension management strategies in interorganizational collaboration. I analyzed data from a 2-year ethnographic study and semi-structured interviews within a collaboration. Findings showed that collaboration members engaged with gendered discourses across levels of the collaboration, including in tensions related to collaborative structure, professional identities, and goals and outcomes. I proposed that collaborators engage in gendered tension management to indicate how gender and difference, particularly the unspoken cultural norms of white masculinity, constitute collaborations. Tension management prioritized tactical, control-related goals over more holistic, care-related goals. This study brought feminist theorizing into …

'A Deadly Menace To All Young Womankind': Seduction And Protective Legislation In America, 1850-1923, Elissa Michelle Isenberg

Dissertations - ALL

"A Deadly Menace to All Young Womankind": Seduction and Protective Legislation in America, 1850-1923 looks at sexual harassment before it was an actionable offense. Although female domestic servants have endured unwanted sexual attention for most of American history, the entry of women into wage labor in factories and offices during the late nineteenth century dramatically increased the number of girls and women that were subjected to what we today call harassment. Careful examination of American newspaper archives, court records, and reformers' personal papers have uncovered cases of unsolicited sexual advances toward women, and have demonstrated that sexual harassment was considered …

Self-Compassion Integrated Art Therapy For Mothers During A Pandemic, Shannon Dover

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

This thesis reviews literature related to parental mental health and the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). COVID-19 is a collective trauma in which individuals experience the trauma differently depending on race, gender, and class. Women’s experience of living during COVID-19 related to changes in the workplace, caretaking, and more. The pandemic influenced parents and notably mothers with increased stress, depression, grief, and anxiety. The practice of self-compassion reduces shame and self-criticism which are common experiences during parenting and trauma. Self-compassion and art therapy can aid in resiliency and make living during COVID-19 more comfortable. With a literature review, results yield the following …

‘A Deadly Menace To All Young Womankind’: Seduction And Protective Legislation In America, 1850-1923, Elissa Michelle Isenberg

Dissertations - ALL

“A Deadly Menace to All Young Womankind”: Seduction and Protective Legislation in America, 1850-1923 looks at sexual harassment before it was an actionable offense. Although female domestic servants have endured unwanted sexual attention for most of American history, the entry of women into wage labor in factories and offices during the late nineteenth century dramatically increased the number of girls and women that were subjected to what we today call harassment. Careful examination of American newspaper archives, court records, and reformers’ personal papers have uncovered cases of unsolicited sexual advances toward women, and have demonstrated that sexual harassment was considered …

Women Entrepreneurs In China: Dialectical Discourses, Situated Activities, And The (Re)Production Of Gender And Entrepreneurship, Zhenyu Tian

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Despite the number of women entrepreneurs on the rise globally, the business world and the identity of the entrepreneur remain to be normed masculine and male gender stereotyped. This male gender stereotyping situates women who practice entrepreneurship in disadvantages, limiting their access to resources on which they depend to make meaning of their activities and identities. This imbalanced masculine gender order also manifests in China’s economy. Women entrepreneurs in China face complex contradictions and challenges when navigating an arena that privileges men and masculinity. However, not much is known about the micro-dynamics of Chinese women’s entrepreneurial experiences in light of …

Noisy Transgressions: Gendered Noise, Female Voices, And Noisy Narration In Anne Bronte's The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall, Brianna Phillips

English MA Theses

This thesis re-evaluates Anne Brontë’s critically undervalued novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) through its noisy women. By joining the fields of narratology and noise studies, I argue for the subversive noisiness of a novel that has been overwhelmingly dismissed by critics as a text of female silence, subjugation, and subordination. However, by offering a soundscape of gendered noise and proliferating female voices, Brontë privileges the sounds of women’s voices in such a way that female noise “re-voices” the masculine origins of the novel (Gilbert Markham’s frame narrative). Contrary to traditional readings of Brontë’s heroine, Helen Huntingdon proves subversively …

«Cuida Tu Alma Y Tu Cuerpo Por Dios Y La Falange»: Women’S Education And La Sección Femenina In Franco’S Spain, Madeleine Fontenay

College Honors Program

My thesis exploration is on La Sección Femenina and its diffusion of female cultural guides and shaping of female education in the early francoist period, from 1939 to 1959. The Sección Femenina and its field offices published work in many facets of women's lives to influence and reeducate women or their values and place. The contrast of rhetoric and reality gives insight into the values and upbringings of generations of Spaniards. By setting the female figure as the foundation of their francoist society, the Sección Femenina held immense cultural power. I am approaching the topic from an educational perspective, focusing …

Gender And Violence In Spanish Culture: From Vulnerability To Accountability Edited By María José Gámez Fuentes And Rebeca Maseda García (Review), Angela M. Acosta

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

No abstract provided.

María Teresa Ramírez Nieva: La Griot De Los Ancestros Y Las Ancestras, Catalina Rojas

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

María Teresa Ramírez Nieva: La Griot de los Ancestros y las Ancestras

La poesía de María Teresa Ramírez es una poesía de resistencia y cimarronaje, de reafirmación de la vida y la libertad, de “recuperación y defensa de los territorios ancestrales” que han sido históricamente amenazados y usurpados en un Pacífico colombiano de abandono, guerra territorial, desplazamiento y muerte. Es a través de sus obras La noche de mi piel (1988), Flor de Palenque (2008), Abalenga (2008), Mabungú Triunfo (2013), Mabungú Triunfo: Cosmogonía Africana Tomo II (2016), como se eleva la voz poética de la ancestralidad Pacífica alrededor de la …