History of Gender Commons^™

Acknowledging Our Past: Race, Landscape And History, Alea Harris, Kaycia Best, Dieran Mcgowan, Destiny Shippy, Vera Oberg, Bryson Coleman, Luke Meagher, Rhiannon Leebrick Ph.D., Phillip Stone

Student Scholarship

This book is the product of nearly a year's worth of student research on Wofford College's history, undertaken as part of a grant by the Council of Independent Colleges in the Humanities Research for the Public Good initiative. The research was supervised and directed by Dr. Rhiannon Leebrick.

"Guiding Research Questions:

How did Wofford College and its early stakeholders support and participate in slavery?

How is the legacy of slavery present in the landscape of our campus (buildings, statues, names, etc.)?

How can we better understand Wofford as an institution during the time of Reconstruction through the Jim Crow era? …

Women’S Suffrage Is “Nothing Less Than Treasonable:” An Analysis Of Rural Women And Their Group Activism In The Women’S Suffrage Movement In The Jackson Purchase Area, 1838-1940, Ashleigh Deno

Honors College Theses

The 1910s was a decade characterized by technological advancement, World War I, and a global movement for women’s suffrage, which would eventually culminate with legislation, most notably the 19th Amendment in the United States. In the United States, women staged protests throughout the country and were known to stand outside of the White House with taunting signs for President Woodrow Wilson to read. This movement came to the United States from other parts of the globe, particularly Britain, and suffragists from other countries were known to travel to the States to give presentations and provide guidance to suffragists on this …

Biljana Jovanović, A Rebel With A Cause Or: On ‘A General Revision Of Your Possibilities’, Tijana Matijević

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

By analysing Yugoslav writer Biljana Jovanović’s early novels, the essay follows her possible literary speculations on the capacity of the Yugoslav society to fulfill the promises of the revolution, together with her imagining of an alternative form of sociability, as that which could result in universal, human emancipation. Offering a peculiar portrait of the urban society of the late seventies in Yugoslavia, in her novels Jovanović tests if and how the problem of women’s emancipation is connected to the problems of class. Yet, a failure of class emancipation, an ‘impossibility to revise’ the society is antagonized from the scrupulous and …

Veronica Porumbacu’S ‘Return From Cynthera’ (1966): A Conceptual Manifesto Of Socialist Feminism, Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Veronica Porumbacu (1921-1977) was a Romanian poet and translator who has been unjustly forgotten today due to her proletcultist poems of the 1950s. Yet her work was widely published and well-known during the socialist regime, and is especially relevant for the two decades of growth and ideological innovation of the 1960s and 1970s. In my article I analyze a remarkable volume of hers published in 1966, situating it in the context of her work and in the wider frame of the political context of Romania. I argue that Return from Cythera can be considered a conceptual manifesto of socialist feminism, …

Agency, Biography, And Temporality: (Un)Making Women’S Biographies In The Wake Of The Loss Of The Socialist Project In Yugoslavia, Tanja Petrović, Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This essay seeks to deepen our understanding of women’s agency in socialist societies. Focusing on socialist and post-socialist Slovenia, it explores the ways agency reveals itself in interviews with and biographical portraits of the socio-politically active women – or “political workers” (politične delavke), as they were called during Yugoslav socialism – Mara Rupena Osolnik and Aleksandra Kornhauser Frazer. In these texts, agency unfolds as a mosaic of multiple, naturally intertwined activities and engagements aimed at the common good and at improving the position of women and other socially marginalized groups. This kind of agency – understood as the ability to …

Editorial: Gender Relations And Women’S Struggles In Socialist Southeast Europe, Dijana Jelaca, Nikolay Karkov, Tanja Petrović

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

For readers versed in the tradition of North Atlantic feminist theory, the intersection of “socialism” and “feminism” is relatively uncomplicated. As a rule, the theory proffers a critique of the “double oppression” that women experience under patriarchy and capitalism, with the exact relationship between these two systems then up for debate. While often not explicitly thematized, the theory’s geographical roots in North American and Western European struggles and contexts inform its epistemological practice and organizational protocols.

Towards Women’S Minor Cinema In Socialist Yugoslavia, Dijana Jelaca

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This essay theorizes the concept of women’s minor cinema in socialist Yugoslavia, conceptualized through examples of cultural texts that circulate within the so-called women’s genres: romance films, “chick flicks,” and TV soap operas. Women’s cinema is here not defined solely as films made by women, but rather, films that address the spectator as a woman, regardless of the spectator’s sex or gender. I argue that, in the context of Yugoslavia, such works frequently articulated emancipatory, feminist stances that did not demarcate a dichotomous opposition to the socialist state as such, but rather called for the state to fulfill its original …

The Return Of Jugoslovenka: An Unrequited Love Affair, Jasmina Tumbas

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This essay considers women’s emancipation in Socialist Yugoslavia as central to the socialist project. I focus on the feminist art of the 1970s and 1980s, aswell as contemporary engagements with the question of Yugoslavia. I put in conversation performance works by Sanja Iveković, Vlasta Delimar, Marina Gržinić, and Šejla Kamerić. The title of this essay, “Return of Jugoslovenka: An Unrequited Love Affair” points to how contested the position of Yugoslav women was during socialism, and how much it remains so today, albeit for very different reasons. As I show in the article, Yugoslav women in the arts embraced socialism as …

The Other Side Of Everything, Dir. Mila Turajlić (Hbo Europe, 2017), Dragana Obradović

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

The Other Side of Everything is a documentary about an apartment in Birčaninova 20, a leafy street in Belgrade, Serbia. It is the family home of Mila Turajlić, the film’s director (known for her much-lauded film Cinema Komunisto from 2010), who uses this well-appointed interior to explore the intimacy of history.

General, Dir. Antun Vrdoljak (Hrvatska Radiotelevizija, 2019) The Diary Of Diana B., Dir. Dana Budisavljević (Pff, 2019), Sanjin Pejković

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Ideologically charged arguments about truth, often linked to fabrications of the past, have been discussed for decades in post-Yugoslav countries. They have also contributed to memory conflicts in different discourses. In addition to relativizing historical facts, marginalization of one’s own crimes and enlargement of others have also contributed to fragmentation of the truth and the emergence of parallel stories about the historical past.

Review Of Gender In 20th Century Eastern Europe And The Ussr, Edited By Catherine Baker. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, Katharina Wiedlack

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

The anthology Gender in 20th Century Eastern Europe and the USSR is a collection of fourteen essays on a wide range of gender-related topics, from motherhood to concepts of masculinity, sexuality, and professional work.

Lilijana Burcar, Restavracija Kapitalizma: Repatriarhalizacija Družbe [Restauration Of Capitalism: Re-Patriarchization Of Society], Sophia, Ljubljana 2015, Iva Kosmos

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In her book Restavracija kapitalizma: repatriarhalizacija družbe (Restauration of capitalism: Re-patriarchization of society), Lilijana Burcar compares the systemic and structural conditions of women’s position in socialism and capitalism.

Chiara Bonfiglioli, Women And Industry In The Balkans. The Rise And Fall Of The Yugoslav Textile Sector. (I.B.Tauris 2019, 230 Pages, 1st Ed.), Agata Zysiak

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

“For us it was much better, for us personally, for people it was much better during socialism than it is today, in any case.” (p. 1) This quote from a textile worker opens Chiara Bonfiglioli’s book, but the story presented is by no means a nostalgic tour exploring collapsed factories or reproducing homo-sovieticus stereotypes.

Kristen Ghodsee. Second World, Second Sex. Socialist Women’S Activism And Global Solidarity During The Cold War. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2018. Isbn 978-1-4780-0181-2 (Pbk), 328 Pp., Renata Jambrešić Kirin

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

While most recent feminist studies on the socialist heritage are preoccupied with the conjunctures of postcolonial and postsocialist conditions of the 1990s and beyond, Kristen Ghodsee’s book Second World, Second Sex (2018) evokes the most vibrant decade of women’s global activism marked by joint initiatives of women from both socialist and decolonized societies from the Global South.

The Inequalities Women Face In Stem: From Their Education To The Workplace, Sophie Rhodes

Women's and Gender Studies: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Medieval Futurity: Essays For The Future Of A Queer Medieval Studies, Will Rogers, Christopher Michael Roman

New Queer Medievalisms

This collection of essays asks contributors to take the capaciousness of the word "queer" to heart in order to think about what medieval queers would have looked like and how they may have existed on the margins and borders of dominant, normative sexuality and desire. The contributors work with recent trends in queer medieval studies, blending together modern concepts of sexuality and desire with the queer configurations of eroticism, desire, and materiality as they might have existed for medieval audiences.

Homosexuality During The Transition From Weimar Republic To Third Reich, Abigail Minzer

Student Publications

Homosexual communities successfully formed prominent subcultures during the Weimar Republic for a multitude of reasons: scientific research and educational outreach to the public about the inborn nature of homosexuality, less strict media censorship laws, and a vague anti-sodomy law that was difficult to enforce led police to often prefer tolerance over prosecution. The Third Reich brought about a deep cultural shift that would prove incredibly harmful to the homosexual communities. While at first, homosexuals had not been a targeted group largely thanks to Hitler’s personal friendship with a gay Nazi named Ernst Röhm, the latter’s sexuality became the center of …

Review Of Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds Of Womanhood: Woman’S Sphere In New England, 1780-1835, Merritt A. Morgan

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

Historian Nancy Cott has produced an important work that explores the dialectic between the women’s work and their changing status in reference to the new rhetoric of democracy in the antebellum period. Cott shows us how women perceived themselves and what they said that she expects will lead to a new framework for the interpretation of the concept of womanhood.

“The New American Woman”: The Legal And Political Career Of Clara Shortridge Foltz, Marissa Swope

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

This article analyzes the life and career of Clara Shortridge Foltz, a California attorney and suffragist of the latter decades of the 19th Century and the early 20th Century who was an early developer of the concept of the public defender, leaving an important legacy in the advancement of women's rights.

Mccormick, Dale, Wendy Chapkis

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

In this interview, Dale McCormick discusses her early life in New York City and in Iowa City. She describes a college era lesbian relationship that, when discovered by her mother, led to several years of failed psychiatric conversion therapy. McCormick describes the vibrant second-wave feminist community in Iowa City of the 1960s and 1970s and the role anti-(Vietnam)war activism played in her life. She discusses in detail the process of becoming a union carpenter apprentice and the harassment she faced as the only woman on construction crews. With the publication of her book “Against the Grain, a Carpentry Manual for …