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The Indian Empire And Its Colonial Practices In South Asia, Yubraj Aryal

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The India, Empire and its Colonial Practices in South Asia" Yubraj Aryal claims that Bharatiya discourse supports colonization in South Asia. This discourse justifies oppression of institutions, practices, of the non-Bharatiya colonized. The article examines Indian Empire's colonialism toward the weaker, smaller nations along its border and the Bharatiya ideology at the heart of the repressive empire, which is taken to represent the South Asian subcontinent. The article looks at the way in which Bharatiya is perhaps a more oppressive ideology than Orientalism and gives a glimpse into how society, culture, history, and textuality work around power …

Literary Theories Of Circumcision, A. W. Strouse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Literary Theories of Circumcision” investigates a school of thought in which the prepuce, as a conceptual metaphor, organizes literary experience. In every period of English literature, major authors have employed the penis’s hood as a figure for thinking about reading and writing. These authors belong to a tradition that defines textuality as a foreskin and interpretation as circumcision. In “Literary Theories of Circumcision,” I investigate the origins of this literary-theoretical formulation in the writings of Saint Paul, and then I trace this formulation’s formal applications among medieval, early modern, and modernist writers. My study lays the groundwork for an ambitious …

Folding Time, Places That Linger And Other “Queer” Modes Of Representing Sense Of Place, Karen A. Lambert

The Qualitative Report

The notion that place and identity are mutually constitutive suggests that attachments to place forge attachments to self that linger over time. In order to consider the ways in which sexual identities and places influence the development of a “queer sense of place” over time I returned to an autoethnographical experience from 2002 to write about it in 2015. Then something unusual happened - time showed itself and folded to reveal the lingering affect of place, loss and identity. By drawing upon insights from then (2002) and now (2015), with sense making in between, I create an assemblage of moments …

Lust And Lineage: The Complex Politics Of Chaucer’S The Clerk’S Tale, William Arguelles

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale is one of the more perplexing stories in The Canterbury Tales, filled with paradox and resulting in a cacophony of fiery criticism. The difficulties posed by Griselda’s unwavering submission, the opaque ambitions behind Walter’s actions, the unclear moralistic ending and contradictory epilogue form the very paradoxes that force the reader to investigate their own reading of Griselda’s suffering. By examining one facet in particular, the political allegory underpinning the tale, The Clerk’s Tale’s contradictions immediately and immovably appear, creating a confounding yet arresting narrative about the interrelation between ruler and subject, husband and wife, king …

The Sounds Of Silence; Or, Isabella’S Counter Discourse In Measure For Measure, Gina Vivona

Theses and Dissertations

This argument reshapes the thinking about masculine dominance in Measure for Measure, and considers the patriarchy as a series of socially constructed, hence artificial, rules and regulations. It also explores how Isabella’s discourse and celibacy empower her to defy the constraints of early modern paradigms and achieve individual freedom.

The Feminization Of Violence, Caitlin Logan

Theses and Dissertations

Grounded in the necessity of upending the economic base as it is defined by Louis Althusser, this paper seeks to express a possibility for the creation of a feminine voice, that when expressed as itself, independent of the pervasive nature of patriarchal power and significance, could be the very event that engenders the first real “violent” attack on the base. Using Zora Neale Hurston’s, Their Eyes Were Watching God, as an example of a uniquely feminine voice, this paper also seeks to empower the experience of the Black female aesthetic as a perspective capable of tapping the multiplicity of human …

End Matter

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

"What To Inspect When You're Expecting" : Critically Examining Constructions Of Women In What To Expect When You're Expecting., Kirsi Lancaster

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

This paper critically analyzes and draws out harmful implications of the language used around pregnancy and women's bodies in the 2016 edition of What to Expect When You're Expecting, using a close reading of the text and multiple interdisciplinary sources. Themes include gender norms and essentialism, heteronormativity, surveillance of women's bodies, and the reduction of women to mere fetal environments.

Cultural Reimagining And Literary Voice: Southeastern Tribal Women Negotiate Cultural, Social, And Political Identity Through Literature, Linda Sue Shaffer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines literature written by women who identify with Native tribes that originally inhabited, and in some cases continue to inhabit, the southeastern area of what is now known as the United States. The analysis presented in each chapter applies tribally specific methods used for creating knowledge within the particular discourse community being represented through literature. The project also employs the perspectives of Native literary scholars to consider the ways in which the roles and lives of Native women have been influenced by Euro-American values and to analyze the ways in which these female authors engage literature as a …

On Growing Up Finnish In The Midwest: A Family Oral History Project, Ingrid Ruth Nixon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study explores what oral history interviews with my mother reveal about the familial and community dynamics that influenced Finnish-American children growing up on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula between 1930 and 1950. Close to four hours of oral history interviews were conducted with Viola Nixon, who is second and third-generation Finnish-American on her father’s and mother’s sides, respectively. After conducting a narrative analysis of the interviews, five themes emerged as significant to community function: family, language, education, work and church. I grouped some of these themes together to create three stories informed by materials drawn from the interviews, a cookbook, and …

Women In Leadership: A Comparative Case Study On Successful Leadership, Christine Newcomb

Honors College Theses

The purpose of this report is to understand what makes a successful female leader. Since there are so few women in executive level positions, especially chief executive officer positions, I became interested in analyzing how successful leaders act in contrast with how unsuccessful leaders act. To analyze, I will focus on the leadership of two prominent businesswomen, one who has been successful in their tenure, and one who has been unsuccessful. Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors, Inc. has been successful throughout her tenure, while Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo has been unsuccessful in turning the company around. I will …

The Two-Sided Coin: Madness And Laughter As Subversion In Alice’S Adventures In Wonderland And The Sandman, Tessa Starr Swehla

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mad female characters in Western literature have traditionally represented attempts by dominant patriarchal discourse to subjugate women’s discourse: these characters are usually pathologized in both their dialogue with other characters and in their physical bodies. This subjugation by representation of mad female characters in dominant discourse parallels similar attempts to portray women as lacking in humor. This thesis studies the intersections between madness and humor and the ability of female characters that embody both to challenge and subvert dominant discourse. By examining the characters of Alice from Lewis Carroll’s novel and Delirium from Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel series The Sandman …

Journal's Genesis, María Corral-Ribordy, Carlos Molina

CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives

No abstract provided.

Full Issue

CouRaGeouS Cuentos: A Journal of Counternarratives

No abstract provided.

"Revealing Reality": Four Asian Filmmakers Visualize The Transnational Imaginary, Stephen Edward Spence

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation posits that four Asian filmmakers engage in “revealing reality” in unique but interconnected ways that employ innovative narrative and cinematic/visual techniques, including a direct address to the senses and an augmenting of their vision with fantasy or surrealism. My study argues that Hou Hsiao-hsien (Taiwan), Jia Zhangke (China), Tsai Ming-liang (Taiwan), and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand) mobilize this visual and narrative strategy to participate in debates about globalization and to comment on the state of their respective nations, the concept of the nation, and the transnational. The films of each artist are examined in detail; I investigate their stylistic …

Frida's Daughter, Myrta Vida

Theses

The purpose of my creative writing is to highlight a group of U.S. citizens still woefully underrepresented in literature proper: the Latinx middle class. I’m keenly interested in exploring Puerto Rican and first- and second-generation Latinx immigrant stories. Even though some of the experiences from these groups have been elegantly visited by writers such as Giannina Braschi, Sandra Cisneros, Junot Diaz, Julia Alvarez, and others, there are nuances to the Latinx middle class experience that are yet to be uncovered. Being stuck in the cultural, linguistic, socio-economic, and political middles in a country that has recently taken a largely nationalist …

Images, Speech Balloons, And Artful Representation: Comics As Visual Narratives Of Early Career Teachers, Julian Lawrence, Ching-Chiu Lin, Rita Irwin

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

The ways in which teachers adjust to challenges in the process of becoming professionals are complicated. Teacher mentorship, however, is an important step to creating and sustaining a strong professional career. This article discusses new understandings from a Canadian research project: Pedagogical Assemblage: Building and Sustaining Teacher Capacity through Mentoring Programs in British Columbia. Through our use of an a/r/tography informed methodology in teacher mentorship, we have come to understand how the use of comics permits an unfolding of visual narratives as a unique way of contextualizing the complex stories of teaching and learning. Our motivation in employing comics as …

Teaching Critical Looking: Pedagogical Approaches To Using Comics As Queer Theory, Ashley Manchester

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Given the challenging depth of queer theoretical concepts, this article argues that one of the most effective ways to teach the complexities of queer theory is by utilizing comics in the classroom. I focus on how college-level instructors can use the content, form, and history of comics to teach students how to enact and do queer theory. By reading and making comics, students learn concrete and theoretical tools for combatting oppressive discourses and modes of meaning making. Teaching comics as queer theory promotes both innovative critical thinking and critical looking skills by centralizing both the rich history of queer comics …

Practical Theology In An Interpretive Community: An Ethnography Of Talk, Texts And Video In A Mediated Women's Bible Study, Nancie Hudson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study of social interaction in a small religious group used ethnography of communication as a research method to collect and analyze data from 20 months of fieldwork. As a long-term participant-observer in a women-only interdenominational Bible study, I investigated the group’s patterned ways of speaking, how print and electronic learning materials influenced the practical application of Scripture to daily life, and how the contemporary format for women’s Bible study alters the traditional Bible study experience. Patterned ways of speaking in this setting included group discussions and conversational narratives about religion, motherhood and lack of time. Using affirmations of faith, …

Two-Spirit Mexica Youth And Transgender Mixtec/Muxe Media: La Mission (2009), Two Spirit: Injunuity (2013), And Libertad (2015), Gabriel S. Estrada

Journal of Religion & Film

Independent directors Peter Bratt, Adrian Baker, and Avila-Hanna create differing trans-border queer Indigenous media that resist Eurocentric cic-heteropatriarchy. While Bratt’s feature-length narrative film La Mission (2009) features a masculine Mexica gay teenager who survives fused homophobic and trans*-phobic violence, Baker’s short animation Two Spirit: Injunuity (2013) makes stronger trans* and two-spirit Mexica youth identity affirmations. Avila-Hanna’s short documentary Libertad (2015) offers the clearest transgender narrative of the three films as it focuses on a California transgender Mixtec immigrant activist who is coming of age as a woman with the aid of hormones and gender affirming surgery. This article’s trans*- and …

The Model Minority Myths: Racism And Sexism Against Asian-American Community, Yingda Guo 17

Honor Scholar Theses

This project aims to investigate the negative influences of the model minority stereotypes to Asian Americans. The model minority myth is the idea that members from a minority group with Asian heritages are considered to achieve a higher degree of educational and socioeconomic success than the average population. Asian Americans are usually perceived as model minorities who achieve high educational and socioeconomic success without many negative experiences in the U.S. However, a closer examination of the model minority myth indicates that this idea is quite generalized and misleading, which cannot stand for the diversity and complexity of Asian American experiences. …

Intersexion, Cynthia Davis

English Theses & Dissertations

A combination of memoir, reportage, and opinion writing, Intersexion explores the realities of growing up intersex while also examining the conservative mindset that caused the narrator—a happily married suburban mother—to lose a tenure-track position at a Christian university for being unwilling to label Danny’s intersex condition as “repugnant” and “offensive to God.”

Developed Toast, Modern Laundry: Nepali Household Appliance Discourses, Maureen Mccord

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This project investigates discourses of modernity, globalization, class identity, and social change in Kathmandu, Nepal, through the lens of ten Nepali women’s purchase and usage of home appliances. Four weeks of ethnographic research sought to identify prevailing practices and attitudes toward household appliances in the city, situating them in broader discourses of globalization, modernity, class identity, and social change. The project is composed of participant observation in Nepali homes, including informal interviews, with project participants sourced from my own social network. My collaborators’ practices and opinions on appliances engage discourses of the developmentalist and modernizing South Asian state, fluid and …

Queer And Shear Moroccan Societal Norms Impact On Queer Women, Catherine Pendry

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This paper examines how Moroccan societal norms and values hinder the recognition of queer women. Within this paper, family dynamics, language, and perceptions of homosexuality are discussed in order to highlight the lack of recognition that queer women receive in Morocco. Social norms in Morocco draw upon the conservative and traditional values, therefore queer women face societal persecution because they stray from the heteronormative culture and exist in a resilient patriarchal system. I will draw upon six personal interviews from queer women as they share their experiences and how they operate within their Moroccan families and Moroccan social norms. Throughout …

Sibling Affection And Domestic Heterosexuality In Lodovick Carlell’S The Deserving Favorite, Mario Digangi

Publications and Research

Lodowick Carlell’s play The Deserving Favorite (1629) deploys the ideological strategy of using erotic “likeness” to validate marital unions as consensual and erotically compatible. In an era before the normalization of heterosexuality, the play suggests that sexually passionate marital relations earn legitimacy to the degree that they emulate the affectionate relations between women and between siblings. Although eroticized female friendship approaches the ideal of a consensual and sensual partnership, intimate relations between women seem best to thrive in a separatist environment removed from courtly social and economic exchanges, including the marital negotiations crucial to cementing dynastic and political alliances. Brothers …

“Ya I Have A Disability, But That’S Only One Part Of Me”: Formative Experiences Of Young Women With Physical Disabilities, Victoria Peer

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Amidst our ableist social world, there are people with disabilities who are living the lives they want to be living and are, so-to-speak, “doing their own thing.” This project focuses on what a few young adult women attribute as having helped them get to where they are today. There were two overarching open-ended research questions guided this project: (1) what opportunities and experiences have influenced the four women with physical and mobility disabilities in terms of getting to where they are today? And (2) how have these opportunities and experiences helped and/or challenged them along their journeys? The study analyzes …

Landay As The Voice Of Pashtun Women's Passion And Social Life, Fahim Rahimi

Journal of Research Initiatives

This paper explores Landay a form of folk poetry and consist of couplets; the first one consists of nine syllables and the second thirteen. This format of poetry is described by some to consist of one and one half verses. The author of such couplets is generally unknown. Some of them have names of authors or national figures and heroes attached.

In the study of a society various aspects of society can be discussed like historical background, cultural elements, cultural heritage, which are main points of a society. Furthermore, it gives importance to fundamental values and customs along with life …

Post/Feminist Impulses: Neoliberal Ideology And Class Politics In Annie Wang’S The People’S Republic Of Desire (2006), Kelly Yin Nga Tse

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper critically examines post/feminist imperatives in relation to neoliberal ethos and class dynamics in The People’s Republic of Desire (2006) by transnational Chinese women writer, Annie Wang (b. 1972). While the novel positions itself as a transnational satire of the Western-styled consumptive furor in post-socialist China, its textual focus on a class-based commodity culture demands a critical consideration of its neoliberal investments. In probing Wang’s text, this paper adopts a feminist reading that attends to how neoliberal ideology and class politics operate together to corroborate a postfeminist stance. The awareness of feminist ethics notwithstanding, the text’s overall postfeminist disposition …

Nymphs And Nymphomania: Mythological Medicine And Classical Nudity In Nineteenth Century Britain, Isabella Luta

Journal of International Women's Studies

The concept of women being overwhelmed by excessive sexual desire had been present in medical discourse for a long time, but the nineteenth century saw a shift from describing this using the term ‘Furor Uterinus’ to ‘Nymphomania’. In this paper I will investigate the significance behind this change and explore how myth influenced medicine to tackle the question of why ‘Nymphomania’ became the preferred term for excessive female sexuality in the 19th century. I will consider the connections between artistic depictions of nymphs and medical descriptions of nymphomaniacs, whilst exploring the etymology of ‘Nymphomania’ and ambiguous uses of Latin and …

Feminist Epistemology And The Question Of Difference Reconfigured: What Can Wittgenstein Tell Us About "Women"?, Jana Cattien

Journal of International Women's Studies

Feminist standpoint theory is an important tool of many a feminist activist. It provides us with the epistemological justification to take women’s experiences seriously – not as an obstacle to “objectivity”, but as a form of epistemic privilege. This paper takes postmodern and intersectional critiques of feminist standpoint theory as a critical point of departure to re-examine the debate around the relevance of the signifier “women” in feminist epistemology. Its aim is two-fold: first, it seeks to shed new light on these criticisms by using the lived experiences of mixed-race women as an innovative lens through which to examine the …