Digital Commons Network^™

Review Of Fawaz, Queer Forms, Axelle Demus

Journal of 20th Century Media History

Review of Queer Forms, by Rams Fawaz.

Calling In Antiracist Accomplices Beyond The Writing Center, Hillary Coenen

The Writing Center Journal

A reflective, ethnographic study of a grassroots, antiracist educational workshop (The Conversation Workshops, TCW) reveals that writing center (WC) pedagogy and feminist invitational rhetoric’s (FIR) influence on TCW enables participants to recognize their own and their partners’ expertise, meaningful experiences, valuable perspectives, and their need to be listened to, accounted for, and understood. In an invitational model, particularly one based on a one-with- one, interpersonal dynamic, participants are more like collaborators than audiences, an approach that can be applied in diverse educational settings, and which reflects the WC’s model of one-with- one pedagogy. This dynamic also reveals one of TCW’s …

Leighton-Cory, Jocelyn, Bella Shannon

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Jocelyn identifies as a Queer woman but also aligns with the label Gender-Queer. They are 40 years old and currently live in the city of South Portland where they serve as a member on the City Council and also work as a managing director at Space Gallery in downtown Portland. Jocelyn was born in Bangor, Maine, and lived there for a year before moving briefly to South Princeton, Maine, and eventually settling in Princeton, Maine, where they grew up. Jocelyn was raised by their single mother along with their older brother and younger sister. They received their B.A. in Arts …

Revisiting Marriage And Motherhood: Celebrating Choices In Tribhanga, Meenakshi Jha, Katyayani

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

Natchathiram Nagargirathu (The Star Is Moving): Challenging The Stereotypes Of Dalit Women In Film, Chandrakant Kamble

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

We Deliver: The Condition Of The Woman Academic In India Today, Ananya Dutta Gupta

Journal of International Women's Studies

This auto-ethnographic essay draws upon Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge to discuss the condition of Indian women in the Humanities in academia today. While acknowledging the encouragingly gender-inclusive projections in India’s National Education Policy vision statement from 2020, I argue for more probing engagement with the concrete reality of being a woman teacher and researcher in the increasingly competitive and corporatized milieu of higher education. My methodology has been a close reading of the NEP’s vision statement to analyze recurrences of terms and concepts as pointers to its discursive field. I argue that this policy statement implicitly envisions an empowered new-age …

International Relations From Below: Teaching Absences In International Relations, Tamara Soukotta

Feminist Pedagogy

For four years (2017-2022) I was part of a teaching team to teach the subject of International Relations (IR) to second-year Bachelor International Studies students. The course was structured to have twelve lectures; these lectures were to be delivered by the course leaders to an audience of 500-800 students. In addition to the lectures, students had four tutorial classes, where the rest of the teaching team worked with smaller groups of students (12-15 students in each group). These classes were designed to help the students link theories and practices. As a woman of colour teaching IR in a Dutch university, …

On Gary Snyder’S Tradaptation Of Cold Mountain Poems And Its Spiritual Salvation And Literary Enlightenment In Postwar America, Hu Anjiang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Cold Mountain Poems (CMPs), which have been neglected in the history of Chinese literature for ages, captured the attention of most Americans immediately after its being translated into America by the American poet Gary Snyder in 1950s, however. It is Snyder that reconfigured and recreated a sagacious Chinese Chan Buddhist poet Han-shan (literally, Cold Mountain), the acknowledged author of Cold Mountain Poems, in his translation for the postwar Americans in the midst of varied social problems and cultural identity crisis after World War II. Snyder eventually found in his translation of Cold Mountain Poems a back-to-nature remedy of …

Topological Tropology Of V.S. Naipaul’S Islamic Travelogues And Daniel Pipes’ Islamic History: Ahistorical Historicism, Md. Habibullah

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul’s (1932-2018) first Islamic travelogue Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) contains his experience of a visit from August 1979 to February 1980 to the four non-Arab Muslim-majority countries – Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Similarly, his last Islamic travelogue Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998) has a description of another visit to the same countries for five-month in 1995. Concurrently, Daniel Pipes (1949-), an American historian, published his doctoral dissertation, Slave Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System (1981), which represents Islamic culture as the first instigator of …

Public Pedagogy, Autotheory, And Egyptian Female Podcasters, Yasmeen Ebada, Kim Fox

Faculty Journal Articles

This research examines six Egyptian female podcasters whose work sits at the theoretical intersection of public pedagogy and autotheory, loosely defined as a first-person narrative form of feminist expression used to challenge hegemonic discourses as a means of activism. The two theories supplement each other, especially since feminism aims to abolish sexism, and public pedagogy is a means to obtain that result. The researchers adopted American-Canadian cultural critic Henry Giroux’s (2004) theory of public pedagogy because it allows for critical dialogue to address discrimination and push for egalitarian transfiguration. Autotheory was chosen for its relation to the podcasters' life experiences …

From Patriarchal Stereotypes To Matriarchal Pleasures Of Hybridity: Representation Of A Muslim Family In Berlin, Rahime Özgün Kehya Dr

Journal of Religion & Film

Sinan Çetin’s blockbuster Berlin in Berlin (1993) is a Turkish-German co-production. In contrast to certain representational tendencies with German orientalism or Turkish occidentalism, it deconstructs the intersectional structures of migration, religion, and gender. The portrayal of religion in films about Turkish-German labour migration is a kind of cultural narcissism often projected into national cinema by denigrating the faith of the other and glorifying one’s own religion. However, perspectives at such intersections are critical and require sensitivity in filmmaking, as films can create prejudice or help build peaceful relationships around these sensitive issues. The paper employs discourse analysis in linking Derrida’s …

'Poor Unfortunate Souls': Acculturation And Reception Of Womanhood In Fairy Tales, Dalton C. Whitby

Fall Showcase for Research and Creative Inquiry

This essay examines traditional fairy tales, symbolized by Perrault’s “Blue Beard,” and contemporary ones, illustrated by Disney’s animated film Brave (2012), with the implementation of ideas from theorists Marcia Lieberman and Hans Robert Jauss, to demonstrate that dated conceptions of womanhood prevail in these stories and continue to be received and acculturate children today. Although it is reasonable to assume social changes brought on by feminism would echo in twenty-first-century fairy tales, an investigation of Disney's animated fairy tale films, the modern storyteller aimed at acculturating children, reveals that these stories subversively persist in presenting traditional ideas of womanhood, depicting …

Ambiguous Identities: Gesturing Towards An Intersectional Conception Of Freedom, Shaun Soman

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

Writing in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948), existential philosopher and feminist theorist Simone de Beauvoir declared that each individual’s freedom depends upon that of others. This claim was meant to motivate others to not remain complicit in the oppression of others; however, when considering the xenophobic rhetoric within Western feminists’ rhetoric about “liberating” Muslim women, one realizes that this demand warrants further scrutiny. In this paper, I apply Alia Al-Saji’s work on Western feminists’ approaches to liberating “other” women to de Beauvoir’s “we” in order to strengthen this latter concept. Overall, my aim with this work is to demonstrate that …

La Negra Tiene Tumbao: Multimodal Resistance Strategies Of Afro-Latinxs And Other Queer Constructions, Kassandra Colón Cisneros

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

The importance of sound in Afro- diasporic communities hearkens back to the slave cry on the plantation field, a sound that showed there is social life within social death. These survival and resistance strategies still exist today, and are not limited to music; they can also be traced through aesthetics, as well as routes and history that connect Afro-Latinxs to the diaspora. The deployment of diasporic resistance through what Juan Flores calls “baggage,” show the possibility and radical potential for survival in white spaces. Recognizing the necessity to dismantle white heteronormative spaces, my research will analyze how Afro-Latinxs—especially those who …

Genres Of Labor: Wageless Work And The Aesthetics Of Stagnation, Martin A. Jensen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Genres of Labor identifies and explores a little-acknowledged fact about labor—that it appears to us in highly conventionalized forms that are subject to evaluation, appraisal, and interpretation. I call this appearance the “aesthetic” dimension of labor, and I show how it increasingly comes into view in the period since 1973, as a contracting economy pushes off work onto unwaged realms of human activity. In chapters on Andy Warhol’s The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), and Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days (2001), I demonstrate that literary texts participate in …

Narratives In, On, And Around Contemporary Queer Film: A Study Of Adam And Its Paratexts, Jeremy Stoller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Film’s ability to present and inspire desire, and to realize alternate worlds, render it a uniquely potent medium for expressing queerness. Because of this potency, and because films are among the most prominent ways that LGBTQ+ people are represented in society, queer film can feel both deeply personal and highly political for LGBTQ+ identifying audiences. But movies do not merely offer statements about political systems, they are also made within and reflective of those systems.

Scholars have thoroughly investigated films and our relationships to them for productive ways of seeing gender, sexuality, desire, and oppression. But the conversations about how …

Havens And Covens: Pregnancy, Witchcraft, And Female Power In Cotton Mather’S “Retired Elizabeth”, Brittney A. Hatchett

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Over the decades, scholars have been holding two adjacent conversations about witchcraft and gender in Cotton Mather’s works that surprisingly have not been put in dialogue. On the one hand, they have examined Mather’s witchcraft ideology and motivations for involving himself in the Salem witch trials. On the other hand, scholars have discussed how Mather seeks to exert control over women spiritually and physically. However, no one has yet explored how these conversations might converge. I suggest that we can see how Mather intertwines discourses of witchcraft and gender in the section titled “Retired Elizabeth” in The Angel of Bethesda. …

“My Flesh Was Its Own Shield” Eroticism In Aids Activism, Jake Whitney

History Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity

The most enduring images of the HIV/AIDS crisis are pictures of ACT UP members being arrested and staging die-ins or men huddled together in hospital beds. These images and the historical narrative accompanying them espouse unity, a coming together of the queer community. No one manufactured this unity. Gay men came together to fight AIDS with force stronger than that which had fought back at Stonewall. Although the gay community saw increased unity during the AIDS Pandemic, the benefactors of this unity, the mainstream gay movement, marginalized men practicing radical sex through a rhetoric of anti-eroticism, a negative, rather than …

Feminist Fat Activist Pedagogy Beyond The Classroom, Carey Jean Sojka, Rachel K. Huey

Feminist Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

Navigating Cultural Crossroads: Exploring Fictional And Interview Narratives Of Nigerian Immigrant Women Living In The Southern United States, Tolulope Adeusi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Nigerian immigrant women undergo constant navigation of their personal identities when conflicting cultural dynamics sometimes engender a balancing act between their personal beliefs and the ongoing process of acculturation. Their new Southern environment offers its own traditional mores, as well as greater opportunities for economic advancement. This places Nigerian Immigrant Women in a position where they must reconcile their desires for personal independence and empowerment with societal expectations that emphasize more traditional gender roles. This study explores the interview narratives of Nigerian immigrant women, reinforced by fictional accounts from prolific African women writers, which provides a more nuanced discussion of …

Queer Crises: Movements From Queerness And Feelings Of White Religion In The United States, Austin Williams Miller

Communication ETDs

Anchored by contemporary crises surrounding queer and trans people in the United States, I employ movements from queerness within an affective queer phenomenological framework to understand how arrangements of “white religion” (Schaefer, 2015, p. 63), a process whereby U.S. American Christian forms escape ideology into religious affective economies in the United States, relegate queer people “to the background… to sustain a certain direction” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 31). I assemble a queer rhetorical context analyzing white religious space in documentary film, secular sexual regulation through contemporary U.S. legal contexts around marriage, and settler colonial Christian nationalist political imaginations to critique how …

The Changing Contours Of The Indian Public Sphere: Courtesans, Culture, And The British Invasion Of Oudh In Kenizé Mourad’S In The City Of Gold And Silver, Anurag Kumar, Isha Malhotra, Rishav Bali

Journal of International Women's Studies

The article explores the role of women in the Indian freedom struggle, particularly Begam Hazarat Mahal of Lucknow through Kenizé Mourad’s In the City of Gold and Silver (2010). The text explicitly and implicitly foregrounds the role of tawaifs (courtesans) in the culture and the literature of the public sphere prior to 1857 or the first Indian freedom struggle. Their participation in the freedom struggle was a response to the British attempt to reduce their role to strictly economic and sexual purposes. The article imbricates the issues of nationalism, gender, and sexuality by mining the invisible contributions of various groups …

Excavation Of Silenced Voices: (Re)Visiting Menka Shivdasani’S Frazil Through The Modern Feminist Discourse Of Indian Writing In English, Rangnath Thakur, Binod Mishra

Journal of International Women's Studies

The postmodernist phase of Indian English writing is characterized by the voices of many strong women expressing a feminist exploration of alternative discourses in women’s writing which are distinguished from the patriarchal framework of literary discourse. Along with Kamala Das, Meena Alexander, Imtiaz Dharkar, and Eunice de Souza, Menka Shivdasani is an active voice in contemporary Indian English poetry. Shivdasani is a prolific poet who has written poetry on various social, cultural, religious, and personal issues. Her four poetry collections include Nirvana at Ten Rupees (1990), Stet (2001), Safe House (2015), and Frazil (2018). Through her poetry, she has endeavored …

Assertion Or Transgression: A Critical Study Of Surpankha As An Unwelcomed Girl Child In Kavita Kané’S Lanka’S Princess, Nancy Sharma, Smita Jha

Journal of International Women's Studies

Kavita Kané’s Lanka’s Princess is the retelling of Ramayana3 from the perspective of the often misrepresented and misunderstood character of Surpankha,4 the daughter of rishi (sage) Vishravas and rakshasi (monster) Kaiskesi. Kavita Kané uses myths as a pretext to defy the idea of an ideal femininity in her book. Kané’s representation humanizes the character of Surpankha (translation: woman with sharp fingernails) who was born as the beautiful princess Meenakshi, but her defiant demeanor caused her brother Ravan to give her the name of Surpankha. Kané’s work exhibits the inner thought process of an unwelcome girl child in the family who …

Women's Interracial Friendships: Cultivating Coalitional Possibilities Across Difference Through Dialogue, Akie Fukushige Wenk

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In my dissertation, I thread through the macro-structure as well as micro-operations of hegemonic ideologies, namely white-supremacist capitalist cis-hetero patriarchy (hooks, 1995, Valdes, 1996), that has historically plagued the United States, eventually gaining a global reach over time. I center interracial friendship between Black and White cis-women, where I locate coalitional possibilities that begin at the grassroots level. I situate this interracial relationship within the socio-ecological system where the personal meets the social (including racialized backgrounds). I use a series of analogies to equate these ideologies as toxins in the air, water, and soil. Soil is where we can work …

Finding The Why: Trauma's Origins And Effects In Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Hope Lopez

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the effects of Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, on its readers and the public discourse surrounding the central issue of systemic racism and incest. The central focus of the analysis is trauma in the novel: how Morrison captures that trauma in writing, how the reader encounters and interprets that trauma, and the effects of that trauma on the narrative and the reader. To construct this argument, I apply the lenses of reader response criticism, psychoanalysis, and trauma studies to the novel.

Morrison expressed concern that readers would miss the crucial message of why the …

Back Pages

CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives

No abstract provided.

Editors’ Introduction, Aurora Matzke, Louis M. Maraj, Angela Clark-Oates, Anyssa Gonzalez, Sherry Rankins-Robertson

English Faculty Articles and Research

"When we proposed this special issue, we sought to illuminate the conceptual and embodied contact zones we discuss above. Tensions that, for us, were centered by scholars and attendees who participated in any of the three CCCC Feminist Workshop between 2021-2023 when the majority of the editors of this special issue co-chaired. During that time frame, CCCC’s shifted from in-person to fully online to hybrid due to COVID-19 and attempted to move toward more national and international attendance inclusivity. With this organizational backdrop, it was during the 2021 CCCC Feminist Workshop that we grappled with coalition as a commonplace."

From Aura To Awra: Toward A Tropical Queer Decolonial Performativity In The Philippines, John Paolo Sarce

English Faculty Publications

If datíng is to literary texts, awra is to queer decolonial performances. From the works of Bienvenido Lumbera and Walter Benjamin, this paper discusses the queering of the term aura and how it operates in tropical performances and discourses, through beki (gay language), as awra. The sign “awra” is resuscitated from the imperial lexis and queered by the topical imagination in the Philippine media. Three media texts expound these claims: Awra Briguela’s song “Clap, Clap, Clap, Awra”; Maymay Entrata’s dance “Amakabogera”; and the noontime TV game show “Beklaban,” a portmanteau of Beki (gay) …

Daughterly Narratives In Search Of Voice: Fadwa Tuqan, Latifa Al-Zayyat, And Samar Attar, Rania Bedeir

Theses and Dissertations

A myriad of pressures and struggles affect Arab women as they are coming of age due to the familial and societal constructs they face. As daughters, they yearn for a voice amidst a plethora of generational boundaries, transmissions, and ideals. The intricacy of the psychological and interconnected structural factors is augmented by their gender in societies that are motivated, and often governed by, the implications of gender roles. While multiple layers of influence such as familial and sociocultural institutions affect how consciousness is formed, generational transmission, through the maternal figure, is paramount. Daughters, therefore, cannot narrate their personal stories without …