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Cooking, Language, And Memory In Farhoud's Le Bonheur À La Queue Glissante And Thúy's Mãn, Simona Emilia Pruteanu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Cooking, Language, and Memory in Farhoud's Le Bonheur à la queue glissante and Thúy's Mãn" Simona Emilia Pruteanu discusses two moments in the evolution of (im)migrant writing in Québec. Abla Farhoud's 1998 novel shows the struggle of Dounia, a Lebanese immigrant living in Montréal, who in her seventies finds a voice with the help of her daughter's writing and starts to reflect on her identity. Themes of language and cooking overlap and reinforce one another and offer a new perspective on memory and the act of remembering. Language, cooking, and memory also intertwine in Thúy's 2013 …

Patent Law, Copyright Law, And The Girl Germs Effect, Ann Bartow

Law Faculty Scholarship

[Excerpt] "Inventors pursue patents and authors receive copyrights.

No special education is required for either endeavor, and nothing

precludes a person from being both an author and an inventor.

Inventors working on patentable industrial projects geared

toward commercial exploitation tend to be scientists or engineers.

Authors, with the exception of those writing computer code, tend

to be educated or trained in the creative arts, such as visual art,

performance art, music, dance, acting, creative writing, film

making, and architectural drawing. There is a well-warranted

societal supposition that most of the inventors of patentable

inventions are male. Assumptions about the genders …

Mad Men Of Letters: Advertising, Masculinity, And The American Postmodern Novel, Jennifer Chancellor

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I account for the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of the American postmodern novel that has long puzzled scholars by arguing that the genre must be understood as an expression of dominant masculinity threatened, not by women or people of color, but rather changes in postwar business and consumer culture. I support this claim by examining works by some of the founding American postmodern novelists—Joseph Heller, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon—through the lens of historicism and biography. As advertising and publicity professionals in the postwar period, these men were positioned to offer a “complicitous critique” of …

Help-Seeking Latina Victims Of Domestic Violence And The Programs That Serve Them In New York City, Yolanda Ortiz-Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Domestic violence has impacted, and continues to impact the lives of many women. Although impacted by domestic violence, all women may not experience domestic violence in the same way.

The purpose of this research was to explore differences that may exist between help-seeking foreign-born Latina and help-seeking U.S-born Latina victims of domestic violence. Using a purposeful sample of 32 help-seeking Latinas who were actively receiving services in one of the many domestic violence programs in New York City, the researcher set out to explore differences in use of services, experiences with domestic violence, perceptions of domestic violence, and satisfaction with …

How To Be A French Jew: Proust, Lazare, Glissant, Paul J. Fadoul

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In my dissertation I use Auerbach's insights developed in his Mimesis to demonstrate that in A la recherche, Proust captures the political and racial concerns of his times, proposing as a solution a heterogeneous French society where cultural, ethnic, and religious groups live together in mutual respect and understanding. In his novel, Proust echoes ideas developed by Bernard Lazare in Le Nationalisme Juif (1897) as well as in the literary output of the first French Jewish Renaissance (early1900’s to the mid1930’s). These authors responded to the portentous mix of Nationalist and anti-Semitic politics by urging the creation of a separate …

‘Mony Prowde Wordez’: Pronominal Speech Acts, Identity And Community In Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, Katharine Jager

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This paper examines distinctions between Middle English second person pronouns thou and you and argues that such distinctions provide an important measure by which to understand late medieval chivalric masculinity.

Genres Of Feminist Lives: Autobiography, Archives, And Community, 1970-1983, Meredith A. Benjamin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The desire to record lives and the conviction that such recordings would serve an important purpose for other women were the motivations behind much of the autobiographical writing in U.S. feminist writing of the 1970s and 80s. In Genres of Feminist Lives: Autobiography, Archives, and Community, 1970-1983, I argue that feminist writers in this period used autobiographical writing to create a sense of community among their readers: a new feminist public. Realizing the inadequacy of a sense of identification, these writers encouraged their audiences, in the words of Audre Lorde, to transform silence into language and action. While scholars …

‘Open, And Always, Opening’: Trans- Poetics As A Methodology For (Re)Articulating Gender, The Body, And The Self ‘Beyond Language’, Lizzy Tricano Kaval

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Poetry is a useful medium for exploring the fluidity and possibilities in language beyond the everyday terms of normative language. For trans- and genderqueer subjects, whose identities cannot be articulated within the linguistic boundaries of binary gender, and whose outward appearance challenges the cultural logic of gendered visibility, poetry becomes a valuable and necessary tool for survival, disruption, activism, and personal and public empowerment. Through syntax, word choice, semantic and non-semantic qualities of language, poetry helps articulate the inexpressible, complex, and unstable gender identities and subject positions, even as they change or multiply. It gives names to felt ideas, which …

Discourses Of "Cruelty-Free" Consumerism: Peta, The Vegan Society And Examples Of Contemporary Activism, Andrea Springirth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper draws upon the principles of critical discourse analysis in order to examine the production of capitalist and consumerist discourses within contemporary nonhuman animal rights activism. The analysis presents evidence to suggest that the discourses being produced via the websites of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and The Vegan Society are consistently being constructed through market-centric ideologies that treat activists mainly as middle-class consumers. This paper argues that the consistent presence of neoliberal discourse signals an instructive entanglement with broader sociopolitical issues. Specifically, there are concerns as to how this discourse relates to what is thought …

“Straight” Acting: Changing Image Of Queer-Masculinity In Media Representation, Zheng Zhu

Publications and Research

In this essay, I critically examine media representation of Welsh rugby legend Gareth Thomas, with a specific focus on the construction of his masculinity as an outing gay celebrity. The existing critical scholarship has studied various forms of media representation of queer images. But they did not examine how unconventional queer representation interacts with the normative gender performance. This paper investigates mainstream media’s discursive construction of masculine gay male. The findings call our attention to the emergence of macho gay characterization, which supports the hegemonic domination of heterosexual normativity. The stigmatization of gay-ness as the deviated other is rationalized through …

Contributors To Indian Catholicism: Interventions And Imaginings, Mathew Schmalz

Journal of Global Catholicism

Contributors to Indian Catholicism: Interventions and Imaginings, the inaugural issue of the Journal of Global Catholicism.

The Tying Of The Ceremonial Wedding Thread: A Feminist Analysis Of “Ritual” And “Tradition” Among Syro-Malabar Catholics In India, Sonja Thomas

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article presents a feminist analysis of patriarchy persisting in Catholicism of the Syro-Malabar rite in Kerala. The article specifically considers the impact of charismatic Catholicism on women of the Syro-Malabar rite and argues that it is important to interrogate this new face of religiosity in order to fully understand how certain rituals are allowed to change and be fluid, while others, especially concerning female sexuality, are enshrined as “tradition” which often restricts the parameters for women’s empowerment and may reinforce caste and patriarchal hegemonies preventing feminist solidarity across different religious- and caste-based groups.

Making The Mark : Gender, Identity, And Genital Cutting, Miroslava Prazak

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Why do female genital cutting practices persist? How does circumcision affect the rights of girls in a culture where initiation forms the lynchpin of the ritual cycle at the core of defining gender, identity, and social and political status? In Making the Mark, Miroslava Prazak follows the practice of female circumcision through the lives and activities of community members in a rural Kenyan farming society as they decide whether or not to participate in the tradition.

In an ethnography twenty years in the making, Prazak weaves multiple Kuria perspectives—those of girls, boys, family members, circumcisers, political and religious leaders—into a …

Editors' Introduction, 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.

Performing, Sensing, Being: Queer Identity In Everyday Life, Justin J. Rudnick

Communication Studies Department Publications

Drawing from performance, affect, and queer theories, I explore how queer identity is storied, performed, and sensed in everyday life. I access performance and sensory ethnographic practices to examine how queer persons “do” their identities on a daily basis. I draw from data collected through ethnographic participation in a queer-friendly district of Columbus, Ohio in addition to in-depth interviews with fourteen self-identified queer persons I met through my fieldwork. My approach privileges observations and reflections of mundane moments of everyday life to position queer identity as a routine, repetitive, habitual, and otherwise performative practice. I question the emphasis on verbal …

Pedagogy And Profit: Multiethnic Literature, Gender And Young Adult Publishing, Allison S. Layfield

Open Access Dissertations

This project argues that the adult/young adult division has the effect of maintaining social difference—especially along the lines of race and gender—while simultaneously ignoring the process of maintaining social hierarchies that occurs during the publication, reviewing and educational selection processes. Chapter One brings together the history of YAL as a pedagogical tool with its publishing history in order to show that both forces have redefined the genre in response to changing notions of social responsibility tied to American citizenship. There were five major eras within the history of young adult literature, each of which responded to changing notions of citizenship. …

Negotiating The Politics Of Representation In Iranian Women’S Cinema Before And After The Islamic Revolution, Alshaatha Sultan Al Sharji

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

From Mahvash, the Iranian entertainer who sang and danced coquettishly in numerous Iranian films that were produced before the Islamic revolution of 1979, to the skateboarding vampire girl who makes a feast out of abusive men in Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, the representation of Iranian women on screen has changed drastically. This comparative study focuses on the politics of representation of Iranian women in the cinema before and after the Islamic revolution, with the aim of deconstructing the readily-available notions of women’s oppression in Iran. It analyzes the works of female Iranian directors Forough …

Book Review: We Are Our Language: An Ethnography Of Language Revitalization In A Northern Athabaskan Community, Haley Albano

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of We Are Our Language: An Ethnography of Language Revitalization in a Northern Athabaskan Community by Barbra A. Meek. University of Arizona Press, 2011.

Book Review Essay: Not A Choice, Not A Job: Exposing The Myths About Prostitution And The Global Sex Trade, Tran Truong

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of Not a Choice, Not a Job: Exposing the Myths about Prostitution and the Global Sex Trade, by Janice G. Raymond. Potomac Books, 2013.

Empowering The Subaltern In Woman At Point Zero, Saddik Gohar

Journal of International Women's Studies

In the context of Western feminist theory, this paper critically explores Nawal El Saadawi's celebrated novel, Woman at Point Zero. The aim of this analysis is to establish a dialogue and outline the benefits of comparative feminist discourse with regard to patriarchal policies in the Middle East. The paper argues that El Saadawi challenges the hegemony of a traditionally phallocentric society empowered by religion and masculinity. In Woman at Point Zero, the author has effectively reinterpreted culturally dominated canons and deconstructed regressive traditions affiliated with patriarchal hegemony. Relying on her experience as a prison psychiatrist, El Saadawi interrogates a …

Taking Care In The Digital Realm: Hmong Story Cloths And The Poverty Of Interpretation On Hmongemboridery.Org, Corey Hickner-Johnson

Journal of International Women's Studies

This essay examines Hmong story cloths exhibited on the HmongEmbroidery.org virtual museum in order to consider 1.) transnational Hmong diasporic experience post-Vietnam, 2.) the problems with interpretation as a critical mode of scholarship seeking mastery, and 3.) the work of digital archives in accounting for displacement and loss. The Hmong, an indigenous group originally living in East Asia, created many of the story cloths exhibited on HmongEmbroidery.org in Thai refugee camps following the Vietnam War, during which they assisted the United States CIA against the Viet Cong and Pathet Lao. Displaced by enemy forces from their homes through violent means …

Domestic Violence And The Implementation Of The Hague Convention On The Civil Aspects Of International Child Abduction: Japan And U.S. Policy, Sawako Yamaguchi, Taryn Lindhorst

Journal of International Women's Studies

Around the world, an increasing number of married couples have at least one person who is not a citizen of their spouse’s country. The global growth in transnational families has necessitated the development of international legal agreements to address issues that have arisen upon the dissolution of these relationships. Of particular note to feminist scholars has been the issue of domestic violence in these relationships and how these circumstances are addressed under international agreements such as the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. In 2013, Japan became the last of the major industrialized countries to sign …

(Re)Imagining Haiti Through The Eyes Of A Seven-Year-Old Girl, Iliana Rosales Figueroa

Journal of International Women's Studies

Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat’s new novel Claire of the Sea Light (2013) explores themes of love, loss, and death. The first character that is presented to us is Claire of the Sea Light, a seven-year-old girl, whose mother died giving birth to her and who is missing. It is at the intersection of this little girl’s loss that all the other characters and topics unfold. Madame Gaëlle, an upper class woman who has a fabric shop in Ville Rose, decides to adopt Claire in order to give her a better life. In this essay I demonstrate that Edwidge Danticat articulates …

Claiming The Politics Of Articulation Through Agency And Wholeness In Two Afro-Hispanic Postcolonial Narratives, Silvia Castro Borrego

Journal of International Women's Studies

Following a context-based approach and the tenets of post-positivist realist theory, this paper will analyze two post-colonial Afro-Hispanic novels immersed in their articulation of moving towards Caribbeanness within the phenomenon of Diaspora Literacy: María Nsue Angüe’s Ekomo (1983) and Michelline Dusseck’s Caribbean Echoes (1997). As part of the Diaspora Literacy, these texts will be read employing the search for wholeness as a theoretical tool, towards an epistemology of anti-colonial feminist struggle. These texts take active part in a decolonizing process that fosters a definition and vision of agency which makes wholeness possible, becoming an active expression of black women’s spirituality …

Carving Caribbean Spaces In Between: The Life Of Ruth Gourzong In 20th Century Puerto Limon, Costa Rica, Natasha Gordon-Chipembere

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper attempts to make visible the community and their descendants of free Jamaican blacks who immigrated into the Atlantic Coast of Costa Rica (specifically Puerto Limon) at the turn of the twentieth century to help build the American owned Northern Railway and work on the banana plantations owned by the American owned United Fruit Company. I illustrate the life of my great grandmother, Ruth Gourzong as an example of a woman from this community who managed to thrive against the odds of racism and sexism during her life time in Costa Rica. In order to fully appreciate the context …

Julia Alvarez And Haiti: Transgressing Imposed Borders In In The Time Of The Butterflies, A Wedding In Haiti, And Protests Against Ruling 0168-13, Ellen Mayock

Journal of International Women's Studies

Throughout her writing career Julia Alvarez has been examining definitions of the “Americas” and rethinking conceptualizations of the nation. Her multiperspectivist literary works have given voice to women of the Dominican Republic, Haiti, the United States, and to those who, as Alvarez says, “shift from foot to foot.” This article looks at Alvarez’s recent activism along the Haiti-Dominican Republic border and calls upon Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) to establish how the author uses the feminist and activist transgressions of the Mirabal sisters to speak against the Dominican legacy of anti-Haitian sentiment and political action, so firmly …

Introduction: Women And Gender: Looking Toward "Caribbeanness", Allyson S. Ferrante, Diana Fox

Journal of International Women's Studies

In this special issue of the JIWS, fourteen authors explore varying iterations of “Caribbeanness” and what it means to identify its specific cultural unity through diversity in literature, various forms of activism, and constructions of feminism, identity, femininity, masculinity, and sexuality.

Witnessing The Power Of El Sistema In Urban Communities: Sister Cities Girlchoir, Erika M. Kitzmiller

Occasional Paper Series

Explores the powerful role of an after-school girls’ choir in the lives of urban youth.

A Woman's Voice And Identity: Narrative Métissage As A Solution To Voicelessness In American Literature, Kali Lauren Oldacre

MA in English Theses

The objective of this thesis was to analyze the progression of a woman’s voice in literature looking particularly at three American women writers spanning the 20th and into the 21st century—Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Edwidge Danticat. In conjunction, these three novels show a progression through the history of American women’s literature, demonstrating the successes and failures of voice and silence in their works and the ways in which creating an identity through voice is necessary, even if one must create it complexly. Ultimately, the authors establish a voice in their works that lays the foundation for writers who …