Digital Commons Network^™

Perils Of Passion In 1918: The Letters Of Helen Schechter [Poster], University Of Northern Iowa. Women's And Gender Studies Program.

Women’s and Gender Studies Program Documents

No abstract provided.

The Legacy Of British Rule On Lgbt Rights In Jamaica And The Cayman Islands, Zachary Stewart

Master's Theses

This thesis explores the relationship between British colonial influence and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) rights in the Caribbean. Comparing the Cayman Islands, a British Overseas Territory, and Jamaica, an independent former colony of the United Kingdom, the situation for LGBT people is evaluated. While Jamaica has serious abuses and a concerning situation for the human rights of LGBT people, the Cayman Islands’ LGBT community’s position is far less concerning. Owing to its continued connection to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Cayman Islands’ LGBT rights situation is much less dire. Through British influence via …

Black Australia ‘Writes Back’ To The Literary Traditions Of Empire, Danica Čerče

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

I In her article "Black Australia 'Writes Back' to the Literary Traditions of Empire" Danica Čerče discusses the verse of Australian Indigenous authors Romaine Moreton and Alf Taylor, notable for the overt objection to the institutional and historical processes. These have enabled and maintained the dominant position of those identified as white on the one hand, and the concomitant political, economic, and cultural subordination of Indigenous Australians on the other. Focused on strategies and poetic devices used by the two poets to engage non-Indigenous readers in the experience of their writing, the article examines how the rhetoric of their critique …

Network Analysis And Feminist Artists, Michelle Moravec

Artl@s Bulletin

This article examines the benefits and drawbacks of using social network analysis to study feminist artists’ networks. Looking at two of the author’s digital humanities projects, it explores the systemic and structural barriers that limit the utility of social network analysis for feminist artists. The first project on the social network of artist Carolee Schneemann analyzed her female circles through a correspondence network. The second project attempted to trace the circulation of feminist art manifestos in American feminist periodicals. Three factors are identified as constraining network analysis in these case studies, the lack of feminist artists’ archives, an insufficient amount …

Producing "Fabulous": Commodification And Ethnicity In Hair Braiding Salons, Sylviane Ngandu-Kalenga Greensword

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Black women wearing fabulous braids are a striking feature of the Afro-diasporic cultural landscape. However, the braiders and salon owners who enable this aesthetic engineering are seldom acknowledged. This dissertation investigates the experience and role of Caribbean and West and Central African women in the hair braiding industry, a rapidly growing business in the U.S. I address the complexity of these women’s multiple social roles and the multiple consciousness (King, 1988) associated with their demographic characteristics (color, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and immigrant status). The commonalities between the braiders and their mostly African American customers contrast vividly with their perception of …

Bunker, Lisa, Molly Roberts, Jesse Lucas

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Lisa Bunker is an author who lives in Exeter, New Hampshire and worked at WMPG at the University of Southern Maine for fourteen years during her process of coming out as transgender. She is the author of Felix Yz and an upcoming book called Zenobia July, but spent most of her life in broadcast radio before she left to pursue a full time career in writing.

Citation

Please cite as: Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer+ Collection, Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine, University of Southern Maine Libraries. …

Wwabd? Intersectional Futures In Digital History, Tonya L. Howe

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

WWABD: What would Aphra Behn—world traveler and spy, playwright and poet of scandal, innovator of novelistic forms—do, were she to imagine a future for digital humanities in period-specific scholarship? This essay outlines a vision for the DH section of Aphra Behn Online: An Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830. In particular, I see three important and interrelated places for development: theorizing the feminized labor of digital recovery, editing, and textual preparation; offering thoughtful and feminist approaches to digital pedagogy that are specific to the work we do in the period; and critically assessing the absences in existing …

Non-Binary Performativity: A Trans-Positive Account Of Judith Butler’S Queer Theory, Toby Finlay

Laurier Undergraduate Journal of the Arts

No abstract provided.

A Comparative Study Of The Barriers To Hiv Self-Management Among Myanmar Migrant And Han Chinese Women In Yunnan, China, Anna Gaden

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

HIV has transitioned from high-risk populations to the general population through sexual transmission – now the primary mode of transmission in China – and is currently the biggest public health crisis in China. Those who are not directly involved with commercial sex work (CSW) or intravenous drug use (IDU) are now vulnerable to contraction. Han Chinese women, especially young women, are generally more vulnerable to transmission than their male counterparts, both physically and socially, and the virus affects their lives more deeply. Myanmar migrant women are even more vulnerable, as their migrant status leaves them without support structures or protections …

Eating Disorders And Constitutive Absence In Contemporary Women’S Writing, Mónica Calvo-Pascual

Journal of International Women's Studies

Anorexic narratives share the thesis that compulsive behaviours like eating disorders are determined by a strong existential component fuelled by women’s paradoxical position in present day capitalist western culture. After a review of social and psychological factors that play a significant role in the development of the disorders, this essay explores the representation of anorexia nervosa in three different first-person narratives. By portraying the psychological intricacies of the illness, these texts provide valuable information regarding its aetiology and cure in the line of recent bio-medical research on eating disorders that stresses the need to treat the disease as a symptom …

Uncertainty And Resistance In Jordanian Women's Perceptions Of Their Positionings In Society, Oraib Mango

Journal of International Women's Studies

In many parts of the world, women continue to face issues of inequality and discrimination. While the plight of Arab women for gender equality has gained media attention, fewer studies have investigated the perceptions of Arab women themselves on this issue. In this study, through discourse and content analysis of face to face interviews, I investigated the meanings that Jordanian women made of how the society viewed and positioned them. While the participants were aware of the dominant Discourse that limited women and positioned them as inferior to men, their talk also expressed their resistance to this discourse. A post-structuralist …

"Der Sozialismus Siegt": Women’S Ordinary Lives In An East German Factory, Susanne Kranz

Journal of International Women's Studies

Socialism Triumphs adorned the roof of the office equipment factory (BWS) in the Thuringian town of Sömmerda until 1990. The factory became a driving economic force in the GDR. The city, called “the capital of computers,” represents a unique case of urban development and governmental support, showcasing the state’s anticipated unity of economic and social policy. This article explores the everyday lives of women working in the factory (1946 and 1991) and examines the state-sanctioned women’s policies, how they were implemented and how women perceived these policies and the officially accomplished emancipation of men and women. Sömmerda had roughly 23,000 …

Urban Nowhere: Loss Of Self In Lydia Davis’ Stories And Wang Anyi’S Brothers, Xue Wei, Kate Rose

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper focuses on how contemporary literary works by women authors in China and the U.S. reverse the individualist West/collectivist China assumption. It mainly compares the works of Lydia Davis and Wang Anyi with regards to urban women’s identities. Under the inspiration of revolutionary ideologies that characterize 20th century China, female characters are striving for meaning in their lives as individuals. In U.S.-American writings, however, the individual is becoming more anonymous and interchangeable, particularly in urban spaces. This article traces possible reasons and implications for this contrast.

Genre, Representation, And Memory In Spanish Civil War Texts By Women From Spain And The United States, Jennifer Prince

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation seeks to addresses a lacuna in the androcentric Spanish Civil War literary canon by recovering women’s voices writing about the war from the 1930s to the present. It also examines the war stories women tell and how they represent themselves and others when writing about the Spanish Civil War. All of the seven authors examined here write through the lens of some distance—either as American citizens observing the war or as the descendants of the war’s survivors—but each with an intimate connection rooted in biology or ideology. The foundation of this dissertation is close reading and textual analysis …

A Comparative Minoritarian Study Of Language Poetry Of Iran And The United States, Sama Khosravi Ooryad

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "A Comparative Minoritarian Study of Language Poetry of Iran and the United States" Sama Khosravi Ooryad analyses Language poetry of the United States (1970s) and Language poetry of Iran (1990s) through Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concepts of minor literature and rhizomic text. The argument of the article is that the two movements, in both their poems and theoretical passages, carry potentialities to be related to Deleuzian concepts. The practice of minor literature, rhizomic text and book as machine is more evident in the works of U.S. language poets. Moreover, Iranian language poetry, while being analyzed alongside …

Curricular Requirements, Critical Traditions, And Adaptation In The Paratext Of Chinese And American School Editions Of Robinson Crusoe, Haifeng Hui

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Curricular Requirements, Critical Traditions, and Adaptation in the Paratext of Chinese and American School Editions of Robinson Crusoe" Haifeng Hui analyses a Chinese new curricular edition and an American common core edition of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to reveal how the paratext can be utilized to reveal different ways of understanding in different educational cultures. He argues that the paratext powerfully exerts the publisher's authority over the text and the reader, thus shaping readers' interpretation of the story in the service of fulfilling specific national curricular needs. The Chinese edition aims more at how Crusoe's story should …

Beyond Massage Parlors: Exposing The Korean Commercial Sex Market In The United States, Youngbee Dale, Amy Levesque

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

This paper describes the Korean commercial sex market in the U.S. beyond massage parlors. Prior to this study, the U.S. anti-trafficking efforts have heavily focused on combating massage parlors to fight prostitution and sex trafficking of Korean women in the U.S. This paper introduces the shift of trends taking place within the Korean sex market as a result of changing culture and policies. It then introduces various brothel models exploiting Korean women in the U.S. It also brings a more holistic view of the Korean sex market in the U.S. by relying on primary and secondary sources available in both …

Bodies Of Knowledge: An Anatomy And Kinesiology Of The American Prison Nation, 'Human'-Making, And Twenty-First-Century Techno-Gods, Lyndsey Karr

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The social production of hegemonic knowledge has historically been legitimized in relation to the sanctioned status of the ‘Human’.[1] Beginning with the American Prison Industrial Complex and what sociologist Beth E. Richie conceptualizes as the “prison nation,” I will show the ‘human’ as a contingent and composite status appearing along a spectrum of Flesh, Body, and ‘Human’ (Flesh-Body-‘Human’) statuses and subjectivity.

Bringing this ‘Human’ continuum into conversation with twenty-first-century media, (micro)computational technologies, and contemporary knowledge and social economies, I expand the notion, reach, and scale of the American “prison nation.” Following Mark Hansen’s treatment of twenty-first-century digital media, I …

The Disperata, From Medieval Italy To Renaissance France, Gabriella Scarlatta

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Rich with morose invectives, the Italian lyric genre of the disperata builds toward a crescendo of despair, with the speakers damning and condemning their beloved, their enemy, their destiny, Fortune, Love, and often themselves. Although Petrarch and Petrarchism have been amply analyzed as fertile sources for late Renaissance poets in France, the influence of the Italian disperata in this context has yet to receive proper scholarly attention. This study explores how the language and themes of the disperata - including hopelessness, death, suicide, doomed love, collective trauma, and damnations - are creatively adopted by several generations of poets from its …

The Hollow Class: African-American Class-Passing And The Popular, Whitney Martin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My project presses to include popular fiction, television, and film for serious critical consideration. To contextualize my research, I use theories that critically examine popular literature, connecting to the work of Janice Radway and Keenan Norris, and I study the African-American focus on class as explored by E. Franklin Frazier. In focusing on the popular, I highlight the everydayness of class and race anxieties. I build on Gwendolyn Foster’s work on class passing but stress racial intersections with identity performance. I rely on New Historicism and Critical Race Theory to substantiate my examination of the literature. I look at specific …

Trans* Suicide: The Final Option, Alexander Oxner

Best Integrated Writing

Oxner researched the factors involved in the high rate of trans* suicide. Oxner determined that a strong social support system might reduce these high rates.

Best Integrated Writing 2017 - Complete Edition

Best Integrated Writing

Best Integrated Writing includes excellent student writing from Integrated Writing courses taught at Wright State University. The journal is published annually by the Wright State University Department of English Language and Literatures.

Thinking Sex With The Early Moderns / Valerie Traub, James Beaver

Early Modern Culture

No abstract provided.

“Less Of The Heroine Than The Woman”: Parsing Gender In The British Novel, Susan Carlile

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

This essay offers two methods that will help students resist the temptation to judge eighteenth-century novels by twenty-first-century standards. These methods prompt students to parse the question of whether female protagonists in novels—in this case, Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724), Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), and Charlotte Lennox’s Sophia (1762)—are portrayed as perfect models or as complex humans. The first method asks them to engage with definitions of the term “heroine,” and the second method uses word clouds to extend their thinking about the complexity of embodying a mid-eighteenth-century female identity.

Restoration Raillery: The Use Of Witty Repartee To Gain Power Within Gendered Spaces Of Restoration London, Bonnie Soper

Madison Historical Review

“Restoration Raillery: The Use of Witty Repartee to Gain Power within Gendered Spaces in Restoration London,” examines the creation of gendered spaces to gain political and social power through the use of satire and wit in poetry, theater, and the court of Charles II in Restoration London. During the Restoration period, mentions of wit and incivility in print and theatre increased over previous eras due to the heightened importance placed on wit as a tool to gain popularity within the court of Charles II. At the same time, witty repartee and well-executed satire provided political power to men within Parliament, …

Collaboration Revisited: The Performative Art Of Claude Cahun And Hannah Weiner, Phillip L. Griffith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In its most common usage in the artistic context, collaboration refers to a practice of creation in which two artists work together to produce a single artwork or object. Collaboration Revisited: The Performative Art of Claude Cahun and Hannah Weiner focuses on the nexus of photography, writing, and performance in the work of six female avant-garde artists from the transatlantic twentieth century, informed by the important place of surrealism in that history, to reconsider this understanding of collaboration. Instead of the notion of collaboration as founded in the experience of two artists working together in each others’ presence, I examine …

Land Of Women: Basilicata, Emigration, And The Women Who Remained Behind, 1880-1914, Victoria Calabrese

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Between 1880 and 1914, millions of Italians emigrated to all corners of the globe in hopes of earning better wages and forging a better life for themselves and for their families. This dissertation examines the role of the women left behind in the Italian region of Basilicata when their husbands emigrated, and the political, social, economic, and legal changes they experienced in their absence. During the Liberal Period, women had few political rights, and married women were dependent on their husbands, but being left on their own put them in a unique position. I argue that the Southern Italian women …

Lyrical Mysticism: The Writing And Reception Of Catherine Of Siena, Lisa Tagliaferri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lyrical Mysticism: The Writing and Reception of Catherine of Siena (https://caterina.io) affirms the 14th-century mystic Catherine of Siena as a writer through contextualizing her texts among the corpus of contemporary Italian literature, and studying her reception in the Renaissance period of Italy and England. Joining an increasing body of recent meaningful scholarship that has been making significant progress to recover many overlooked and peripheral female voices of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, this work serves to fully assert Catherine as a writer of work that is literarily significant and worthy of textual analysis alongside contemporary male Italian …

Not My Queer: Queer Representation In Contemporary Italian Serial Television, Julia Heim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Contemporary Italian television, like many national televisions, has entered a period in which the relationships the producers and consumers of televisual content are increasingly indistinguishable. In this age of media convergence the new participants of this medium work across platforms to actively engage, consume, create, and recreate both televisual content and our understanding of the medium. These new relationships require a new understanding of the semiotic and discursive changes taking place in television so that we may reconceptualize the contemporary interplay between media and society.

This dissertation maps out a new understanding of the televisual economy through an elaboration of …

Je Cuidoie Avoir Bien Fait: Saintré And The Rules Of The Game, Catherine Blunk

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

In Antoine de La Sale’s fifteenth-century work Jehan de Saintré, a point of rupture in the amorous relationship between Madame des Belles Cousines and Saintré is initiated when this young knight decides to organize and participate in an emprise (a late medieval tournament) without notifying her or asking for permission from the king of France. In this article I will show that that by failing to secure royal authorization before organizing an emprise, Saintré commits a more serious error than often acknowledged in the scholarship about this text. This is important, because many scholars read this scene as …