Digital Commons Network^™

Hiv/Aids-Related Human Security Risks For Young Women In Rural Uganda, Shelley Jones

Institute for Educational Development, East Africa

Structural inequities, violence and oppression render young women in rural Uganda highly vulnerable to HIV/AIDS. Their decision-making powers, control over their bodies and sexuality, and access to sexual health resources are critically limited or wholly absent. Yet, prevailing HIV/AIDS programming, notably the President's Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), emphasizes individual behaviour change to combat HIV/AIDS at the expense of wider societal considerations. This study explores the life experiences of a group of young Ugandan women and argues that the political and ideological battle of ownership (national as well as global) over the HIV/AIDS prevention discourse not only disregards these …

Drag Kinging In Amsterdam: Queer Identity Politics, Subcultural Spaces, And Transformative Potentials, Michael Korcek

Lawrence University Honors Projects

In this ethnography of the drag king subculture in Amsterdam I locate the transformative and subversive potential of drag king performances on the larger queer community. Based upon four months of fieldwork spent interviewing drag king performers and queer community members while also attending queer parties, I will show how the burgeoning community of drag kings in Amsterdam work to reconfigure structures of domination within and outside of the LGBTQ community. Despite the history of Dutch tolerance and the sexually liberal atmosphere of Amsterdam, many members of the queer community, including but not limited to lesbian, bisexual, trans, and queer …

Gloria E. Anzaldúa’S Decolonizing Ritual De Conocimiento, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s work makes up one of the many Chican@ works that contribute another history, a history repressed by the national discourses on both sides of the border. Influenced by antecedents of U.S. Hispanic Literature who superposed “official” history with another history, Chicano activists had already enacted a retrieval of pre-conquest histories to revive their people’s historical consciousness. As Saldívar-Hull states in “Mestiza Consciousness and Politics: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/ La frontera,” the publication of Borderlands/ La Frontera distinguished itself from the Chicano movement’s as it unveiled the curtain that hid the Aztec goddesses and kept aspects of pre-conquest history …

The New York State Public School Superintendency : The Effects Of Personal, Career And District Factors On Perceptions Of Job Satisfaction For Women In Superintendent Positions, Eileen L. Camasso

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Women have entered the New York State public school district superintendency in increasing numbers over the past two decades. Traditionally a male dominated field, these women have successfully addressed various personal, career and district factors to obtain these positions. In this study, 121 actively employed women superintendents were surveyed regarding factors that may be contributing to their job satisfaction. Thirty independent variables related to access to the superintendency were analyzed relative to job satisfaction variables. Job satisfaction was measured through overall experience, the likelihood that one would rechoose the superintendency as a career goal, and overall satisfaction with specific responsibilities …

Phallus/Phallocentrism, Abigail Rine

Faculty Publications - Department of English

Excerpt: "In psychoanalytic theory, the phallus serves as the supreme symbol of masculine power and, concurrently, of feminine lack. “Phallocentrism” is a term used primarily by feminist theorists to denote the pervasive privileging of the masculine within the current system of signification."

Antigone's Nature, William Robert

Religion - All Scholarship

Antigone fascinates G.W.F. Hegel and Luce Irigaray, both of whom turn to her in their explorations and articulations of ethics. Hegel and Irigaray make these re-turns to Antigone through the double and related lenses of nature and sexual difference. This essay investigates these figures of Antigone and the accompanying ethical accounts of nature and sexual difference as a way of examining Irigaray's complex relation to and creative uses of Hegel's thought.

Feminism, Cultural Violence Of, Danielle Poe

Philosophy Faculty Publications

For most, if not all, self-defined feminists, feminism means support for equality between women and men. The difficulty with this definition, though, is determining what one means by "equality," by "women and men," and by "sex" and "gender." For some feminists, equality requires that differences between women and men be acknowledged and valued. For other feminists, equality means that the category "human" encompasses women and men and that the differences within a sex are greater than differences between the sexes.

Feminists also differ on what they mean by "women" and "men"; these terms can be defined biologically, genetically, culturally, religiously, …

Portrayal Of Women And Clothing In Domestic Housework Commercials, Julie Brady Ramaccia

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

5✸`‰©5❷O";">There are over 90 million televisions in the United States, serving roughly 98% of the United States’ population. An average American will watch 30,000 commercials in a year, which results in a total of over 2,000,000 commercials in a lifetime (Allan and Coltrane, 1996; Bretl and Cantor, 1988). An American will end up spending about three years of his or her life watching commercials (Kilbourne, 2001). Since the media and particularly commercials are so pervasive in American society, it is imperative that the effects of this advertising be studied and understood. It is also important to analyze the clothing …

Forget Burial: Illness, Narrative, And The Reclamation Of Disease, Marty Melissa Fink

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Through a theoretical and archival analysis of HIV/AIDS literature, this dissertation argues that the AIDS crisis is not an isolated incident that is now "over," but a striking culmination of a long history of understanding illness through narratives of queer sexual decline and national outsiderhood. Literary representations of HIV/AIDS can be read as a means of resistance to the stigmatization of people of color, women, immigrants, and queers, debunking the narratives that vilify these subjects as threats to national security and health. In drawing connections between illness, history, and the African diaspora, my work adopts a queer theoretical approach to …

But This Is What I See; This Is What I See: Re-Imagining Gendered Subjectivity Through The Woman Artist In Phelps, Johnstone, And Woolf, Heather Wayne

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since the publication of Laura Mulvey's influential article 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,' in which she identifies the pervasive presence of the male gaze in Hollywood cinema, scholars have sought to account for the female spectator in her paradigm of gendered vision. This thesis suggests that women writers have long debated the problem of the female spectator through literary depictions of the female artist. Women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries'including Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Edith Johnstone, and Virginia Woolf'recognized the power of the woman artist to undermine the trope of the male gazing subject and a passive female object. …

Political Repression And Islam In Iran, Amy Kirk

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Signs with the slogan, ‘I am Neda’, flooded the streets of Tehran in the violent aftermath of the 2009 presidential elections and assassination of Neda Agha-Soltan. The internationally publicized video of Neda’s death became an iconic rallying point for the reformist opposition in Iran. Stringent clampdowns since the 1979 revolution have signified a sociopolitical change that has endured for three decades. President Khatami’s reform efforts of the late 1990s were stifled by Ahmadinejad’s election of 2005. Since Ahmadinejad’s appointment there has been little official tolerance for political and fundamental Islamic dissent, leading to serious human rights violations against the reformist …

Disorienting The Furniture: The Transgressive Journalism Of Alfonsina Storni And Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mariela Méndez

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

Drawing on the journalistic prose of two major literary figures of early-twentieth-century Argentina and the U.S., this article breaches cultural, national, and geographical frontiers by comparing the discursive gestures through which Alfonsina Storni and Charlotte Perkins Gilman re-appropriate for themselves the canonical genre of essay-writing to advance their feminist agendas. By undermining the presuppositions underlying so-called feminine publications of their time, both women carry out an intriguing disarticulation of the classic private/public divide that empowers their female readers to conceive of female subjectivity in new and innovative ways. Almost a mythic figure in the world of Latin American letters, Alfonsina …

The Social Dimensions Of Fiction: On The Rhetoric And Function Of Prefacing Novels In The Nineteenth-Century Canadas, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven. The Social Dimensions of Fiction: On the Rhetoric and Function of Prefacing Novels in the Nineteenth-Century Canadas. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher (Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn), 1993. ISBN 3-528-07335-7 188 pages, bibliography, index. Data and analyses of nineteenth-century English- and French-Canadian prefaces to novels with theoretical and methodological frameworks for the study of rhetoric, the sociology of literature, audience research, and genre studies. Copyright of the book was released to Tötösy de Zepetnek by Westdeutscher Verlag in 2003.

South Asian Muslim American Girl Power: Structures And Symbols Of Control And Self-Expression, Marcia Hermansen, Mahruq F. Khan

Journal of International Women's Studies

South Asian Muslim American (SAMA) girls studied ethnographically in Chicago and more broadly in the United States negotiate these three components (South Asian, Muslim, and American) of identity across the spheres of home, Islamic institutions, and the public “American” realm. Drawing on interviews and fieldwork at an Islamic school and within South Asian families and mosques, the authors illustrate how nascent “girl” power is evidenced in these contexts drawing on media representations, academic sources, and data drawn from participant observation. Sources of SAMA girls’ expressions of confidence and power are selective use of identity markers, increased mastery of Islamic knowledge, …

Engendering The Nation: Women, Islam, And Poetry In Pakistan, Anita Anantharam

Journal of International Women's Studies

In this essay I offer some examples of reading feminist agency in Pakistan through an analysis of the poems of two of Pakistan’s preeminent feminist poets, Fahmida Riaz (b.1946) and Kishwar Naheed (b.1940). Rather than gesture to their poetry in a strategy of recuperation I contend that their powerful narratives compel us to reevaluate the parameters of contemporary feminist historiography and discourses of nationalism in South Asia. The poems of Fahmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed are informed by a different set of paradigms about self and community (Islam) and at the same time reflect an archive (poetry) as crucial to …

Book Review: Velvet Jihad: Muslim Women’S Quiet Resistance To Islamic Fundamentalism, Stephanie Chaban

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of Velvet Jihad: Muslim Women’s Quiet Resistance to Islamic Fundamentalism by Faegheh Shirazi

Designing A Woman-Friendly Workplace: A Prognosis And Prescription For Institutional Health At The University Of Guam, Helen Thompson, Andrea Sant Hartig, Diane Thurber

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article explores the campus activist and research efforts made possible through a Campus Action Project grant awarded by AAUW (2006-2007) to the University of Guam (UOG). Faculty-student researchers developed a workshop series addressing women's workplace concerns and conducted research investigating the health of UOG through selected key indicators of a woman-friendly institution. This article focuses on the research findings, the impact of the grant efforts, and recommendations for institutional changes.

Speech, Silence And Female Adolescence In Carson Mccullers’ The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter And Angela Carter’S The Magic Toyshop, Catherine Martin

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper examines the relationship between adolescent female characters and silence in Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) and Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop (1967). The established body of criticism focusing on McCullers’ and Carter’s depictions of the female grotesque provides the theoretical framework for this paper, as I explore the implications of these ideas when applied to language and speech. In a white Western society, where a woman’s sexuality, appetite and articulation are controlled and suppressed, this paper asks: what options for expression are there, for women whose speech is always limited to their body, and …

‘Seeing Through A Glass Darkly’: Wollstonecraft And The Confinements Of Eighteenth-Century Femininity, Naomi Jayne Garner

Journal of International Women's Studies

This essay applies Luce Irigaray’s theories of the speculum and subversive mimesis to Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman. I argue that Wollstonecraft reveals the limitations of eighteenth-century femininity by using her text as a mirror that distorts and also reflects the image of womanhood at the men who have prescribed an idealised version of femininity. Anticipating Irigaray, Wollstonecraft exposes and undermines this male ideal through mimicry of the masculine position. I begin by assessing modern interpretations of Wollstonecraft’s feminism, her characterisation as a masculine writer and how this can be viewed as a deliberate feminist tactic …

The Search For An African Feminist Ethic: A Zimbabwean Perspective, Fainos Mangena

Journal of International Women's Studies

In the field of ethics, women have been portrayed as inferior to men due to androcentric attitudes (male-dominated ethics) that seems to define men as custodians of what is right or wrong. This andro-centric ethic has taken women out of the academic limelight as they are portrayed as less able to make valuable contributions in philosophy (ethics) and other fields of academic inquiry. It is encouraging to see feminist movements emerging, in the twenty-first century, to challenge this misplaced kind of thinking. This challenge is laudable and in this paper, I make an attempt to show that while women in …

Book Review: Liberating Shahrazad: Feminism, Postcolonialism, And Islam, Sanaa Benmessaoud

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of Liberating Shahrazad: Feminism, Postcolonialism, and Islam by Suzanne Gauch

Cuando Te Pierdes En Mí, Carolina E. Alonso

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

En esta tesis se presenta una coleccion de veintiseis poemas de mi autoria que tienen como base una tematica lesbica. En estos se abarcan subtemas como la sensualidad femenina, el amor, y el desamor. Ademas del poemario, se incluye un ensayo referente al desarrollo de la literatura homosexual, enfocandose en la poesia lesbica contemporanea en Mexico a manera de ars poetica. De igual forma se adentra en la importancia de los movimientos sociales y politicos que iniciaron en el siglo XX, los cuales ayudaron al desarrollo y propagation de la literatura lesbica.

Mapping The Global Landscape In Women's Diasporic Writing, Martha Addante

Dissertations

As a contribution to the theory of cognitive mapping, the dissertation examines the ways in which contemporary novels by women writers of diasporic literature offer new conceptual maps of the present global space. This study argues there is a need for alternative mapping strategies that locate the female diasporic subject within the new global political economy. Fredric Jameson's theory of cognitive mapping and Arjun Appadurai's model of global flows provide a useful framework for mapping global space, yet each must be filtered through a feminist critique and modified by a feminist politics. Ultimately, the dissertation argues for a feminist theory …

The Passions And Self-Esteem In Mary Astell's Early Feminist Prose, Kathleen A. Ahearn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the influence of Cambridge Platonism and materialist philosophy on Mary Astell's early feminism. More specifically, I argue that Astell co-opts Descartes's theory of regulating the passions in his final publication, The Passions of the Soul, to articulate a comprehensive, Enlightenment and body friendly theory of feminine self-esteem that renders her feminism modern. My analysis of Astell's theory of feminine self-esteem follows both textual and contextual cues, thus allowing for a reorientation of her early feminism vis-a-vis contemporary feminist theory. An entire chapter in the dissertation is devoted to Astell's use of Descartes's theory of regulating the …

Woman Has Two Faces: Re-Examining Eve And Lilith In Jewish Feminist Thought, Diana Carvalho

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the religious history of American feminism, Jewish feminist biblical interpretation shifted attention away from Eve as a viable example of women's identities. Instead, Lilith, the independent, "demon" and "first wife" of Adam is praised as a symbol of female sexuality for "Transformationist" Jewish feminists. Re-claiming Lilith as the "first Eve," "Transformationist" Jewish feminists turn scripture on its head. Eve's creation and her actions in Genesis are interpreted as a product of patriarchy and male dominance, while Lilith in the midrashic narrative, the Alphabet of Ben Sira, is used by Jewish feminists to reclaim their identities on religious and …

Soleil, Sexe Et Vidéo: La Comédie Populaire Aux Antilles, Françoise Naudillon

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The comedy of manners presented in the form of play or in the form of sketches or playlet by the medium of videos and DVDs is a phenomenon that develops in Guadeloupe, Martinique and Guyana, but also in France. These productions are the link between communities in the Creole area (Guadeloupe, Martinique and Guyana) and the outside (metropolitan France and diaspora). They will be analyzed for their popular and scholarly features between erudite comedy and farce, between traditional and postcréolitaire cultural affirmation, between Creole and French, between Italian theatre and yardplay, between creole comedy and vaudeville, between negropolitan diaspora and …

The Nomadic Experiment Of A Steppe Land Flâneuse, Dianne Chisolm

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

Imagine the flâneuse in Ulaan Bataar, with its streets unnavigable for pedestrians, and its ever-shifting ger neighborhoods that abut onto crumbling Gulag architecture, not to mention its fierce resurrection of Genghis Khan whose portrait engraved into the overlooking hills declares the city’s imperious nomadic autonomy. This paper investigates the mobilization of the 21st-century flâneuse by the contrary material forces of nomadism and urbanism that confront and transform her as she stumbles, drifts and speeds through Mongolia's city and steppes. The focus of investigation concerns the (im)possible conjunction of nomadism and flânerie on the frontier of the urban and the edge …

Walking The Wall: Global Flâneuse With Local Dilemmas, Kinga Araya

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

In the essay I will critically introduce and discuss some of my key “walking” performance artworks that emphasize the phenomenon of walking and talking in-between different countries, cultures and languages. More specifically, since my infamous walking away from Poland, while on a student trip in Florence, Italy in 1988, I have been trying to exercise my freedom of movement and speech while living in Italy, Canada, Germany, and currently, in the USA. The desire to make artworks that would express some of the walking ideas was very important to me.

Petticoat Government: Poems And Essays, Tiffany Ann Noonan

Dissertations

Petticoat Government is a collection of poems and essays that draw upon the varied lexicons of science, mythology, sports, literature, travel, art, fashion, and popular culture in an attempt to understand what deliminates womanhood. Using a mix of traditional and contemporary forms, these texts seek to complicate the myriad—and often conflicting—models of femaleness and the female body.

Designing A Woman-Friendly Workplace: A Prognosis And Prescription For Institutional Health At The University Of Guam, Helen Thompson, Andrea Sant Hartig, Diane Thurber

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article explores the campus activist and research efforts made possible through a Campus Action Project grant awarded by AAUW (2006-2007) to the University of Guam (UOG). Faculty-student researchers developed a workshop series addressing women’s workplace concerns and conducted research investigating the health of UOG through selected key indicators of a woman-friendly institution. This article focuses on the research findings, the impact of the grant efforts, and recommendations for institutional changes.