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Racism And The Political Romance Of The Browning Of America, Ronald Sundstrom

Philosophy

The browning of America promises the bodily, social, and political transfor- mation of the United States, and as with all ethno-racial threats—or promises of deliverance—browning operates through the private, intimate arenas of love, sexuality, gender, family, and friendship. As a demographic idea, the “browning of America” gathers together Native Americans, African Ameri- cans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Americans with a multiracial identity, as well as non-white immigrants. In popular culture, however, it primarily con- notes the expanding population of Latinos, and Mexican and Latin American immigrants. Secondarily, it includes the growing social and political presence of multiracial Americans, those who …

Review Essay: Janet Halley, Split Decisions: How And Why To Take A Break From Feminism, Ann Bartow

Law Faculty Scholarship

[Excerpt] “My overarching reaction to Janet Halley's recent book, Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism, can be summarized with a one sentence cliché: The perfect is the enemy of the good.' She holds feminism to a standard of perfection no human endeavor could possibly meet, and then heartily criticizes it for falling short. Though Halley's myriad observations about feminism occasionally resonated with my own views and experiences, ultimately I remain unconvinced that taking a break from feminism would, for me, be either justified or productive. But I did (mostly) enjoy reading it. Halley is well …

Autoethnography As Constructionist Project, Laura L. Ellingson, Carolyn Ellis

Gender and Sexuality Studies

In this chapter, we explore autoethnography as a social constructionist project. We want to resist the tendency to dichotomize and instead explore how autoethnography makes connections between seemingly polar opposites. Though we see it as a sign of progress that authors desire to tease out differences in autoethnographic projects, we argue that concentrating on dichotomies is counterproductive, given that autoethnography by definition operates as a bridge, connecting autobiography and ethnography in order to study the intersection of self and others, self and culture.

After further detailing in this chapter the limits of dichotomous thinking, we sketch the meanings and goals …

Innocent Initiations: Female Agency In Eroticized Fairy Tales, Jeana Jorgensen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Bawdy folktales have generated controversy and scholarship for centuries, and their literary, sexually explicit descendants, eroticized fairy tales, are also deserving of attention. Marketed in short story collections as erotica, eroticized fairy tales use fairy-tale characters, plots, and themes as the setting for sexual adventures. Some of these tales focus on a naïve heroine’s initiation into sexual pleasure without her knowing precisely what is going on. I have termed these “innocent initiation” tales. Their use of traditional fairy-tale motifs contributes to discourse about female sexuality, agency, and objectification.

Daniel Deronda: The Cultural Imperative Of Religion, Annemarie Frank

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot's last novel Daniel Deronda differs strikingly from her earlier works in the presentation of its protagonists and her innovative use of the literary genres of realism and romanticism. In her earlier novels Eliot had espoused an idea of humanism that transcended social class by fictionalizing the small but significant contributions ordinary men and women make towards England's social and cultural progress. Eliot had created realistic heroes with human frailties on the principle that 'human deeds are made up of the most subtly intermixed good and evil'.1 Furthermore, she had attacked the ideal hero type, who was the favourite …

Women Disunited : Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale As A Critique Of Feminism, Alanna A. Callaway

Master's Theses

While there is plenty of traditional feminist critique of male power structures in Atwood's works, and particularly in The Handmaid's Tale, this thesis argues that the power structure of Gilead (the biblically-inflected nation Atwood imagines) also critiques the feminine roles that support and enable the repression of other women. Placing the novel in the contexts of Atwood's career, feminism, and dystopian literature, provides a fuller understanding of how the novel functions as an expression of the disunity of women.

Thus, this thesis turns the focus of The Handmaid's Tale from the consequences of patriarchal control and "traditional" misogyny, to the …

Reading Beyond Modern Feminism: Kate Chopin’S The Awakening, Christina R. Williams

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Lgbtq Short Story, Matt Brim

Publications and Research

“The LGBTQ Short Story” is a lengthy entry in the three-volume encyclopedia LGBTQ America Today, edited by queer scholar John Hawley. The entry explores the characteristics of the genre and synthesizes the work of the top 25 living queer short story writers.

The Role Of Egyptian Film In Stereotyping Single Women, Heba Metwally Ibrahim Metwally

Archived Theses and Dissertations

Due to the increasing rates of single or still-unmarried women, also known as spinsters or Awanes, shaping the perceptions of these women is a problem facing Egyptian society. In this paper, the researcher assesses the effects of the media's depiction of these women, specifically focusing on the movie industry. By conducting a content analysis of Egyptian movies, as well as an examination of the notion of spinsters in language, history and culture, this study demonstrates the impact of movies in constructing a negative image and shaping the perception of unmarried women within Egyptian society. Through in-depth interviews, field observation in …

Marie Cardinal: New Perspectives (Book Review), Claire Marrone

Languages Faculty Publications

Book review by Claire Marrone.

Webb, Emma, ed. Marie Cardinal: New Perspectives. Bern, Switzerland; New York: Peter Lang, 2006. ISBN 9783039105442

Birds Of Freedom? Perspectives On Female Emancipation And Sri Lanka’S Liberation Tigers Of Tamil Eelam, Kim Jordan, Myriam Denov

Journal of International Women's Studies

Over the last decade, females have been an integral part of fighting forces in both international conflicts and in armed struggle in at least 38 internal conflicts. While some scholars argue that recent wars have thrust women into new roles, enabling them to transform their social situations, identities and destinies, others question whether females achieve ‘emancipation’ through active participation in warfare. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka that has been engaged in conflict with the Sri Lankan government since 1983, and actively recruits female cadres, provides an interesting context to explore issues of female empowerment in …

Reflections On Islamic Identity, Citizenship Rights And Women’S Struggle For Gender Justice: Illustration From India, Sabiha Hussain

Journal of International Women's Studies

Women’s rights face an uncertain future throughout much of the Islamic world. The fate of women’s rights throughout the Islamic world crucially hinges upon the outcome of debates on reforms of family and penal codes including new understandings of Islamic law and teaching. It requires mention that there is no monolithic trend of women’s struggle for gender justice even in Islamic countries. It varies with the cultural setting, the political structure of the state and the location of the community. In the Islamic world, the question of gender justice often becomes a struggle to be fought at two levels: against …

Beyond Caliban’S Curses: The Decolonial Feminist Literacy Of Sycorax, Irene Lara

Journal of International Women's Studies

Working from the perspective of decolonial feminism, this essay critiques works that view Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) as a symbol of resistance to eurocentrism, as represented in the character of Prospero. I focus on the literary figure Sycorax, the racialized, sexualized and witched mother of Caliban, because the celebration of Caliban as a symbol of subaltern resistance in Latin American/Latino studies has led to her discursive erasure or marginalization. I critically trace appropriations of Caliban, as well as Miranda (Prospero’s daughter), that silence Sycorax. Fundamentally urging the construction of a “literacy of Sycorax,” this essay explores the eurocentric …

The Land Of Lalla-Ded: Politicization Of Kashmir And Construction Of The Kashmiri Woman, Nyla Ali Khan

Journal of International Women's Studies

Over the years, tremendous political and social turmoil has been generated in the state of Jammu and Kashmir by the forces of religious fundamentalism and by an exclusionary nationalism that seeks to erode the cultural syncretism that is part of the ethos of Kashmir. Kashmiri women are now suffering from some of the more predictable afflictions of women caught in conflict situations: psychological trauma, destitution, and acute poverty that put them at increased risk of trafficking. The ethnographic field research, which I undertook, was a method of seeking reconnection sans condescension by simultaneously belonging to and resisting the discursive community …

Can Developing Women Create Primitive Art? And Other Questions Of Value, Meaning And Identity In The Circulation Of Janakpur Art, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

In this article, I examine the values and meanings that adhere to objects made by Maithil women at a development project in Janakpur, Nepal – objects collectors have called ‘Janakpur Art’. I seek to explain how and why changes in pictorial content in Janakpur Art – shifts that took place over a period of five or six years in the 1990s – occurred, and what such a change might indicate about the link between Maithil women’s lives, development, and tourism. As I will demonstrate, part of the appeal for consumers of Janakpur Art has been that it is produced at …

Editorial, Pushpa Parekh

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

No abstract provided.

Monsters In The Closet: Biopolitics And Intersexuality, Nadia Guidotto

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

In this paper, I focus predominantly on the hermaphrodite (intersex, in modern discourse) and its relationship to other abject bodies in history to show how biopolitics creates and regulates populations of monsters in order to establish and sustain a particular structure in society. This particular structure is based on what Judith Butler has called the heterosexual matrix, which I will extend to include racial and liberal elements.

Entremundos/ Among Worlds: New Perspectives On Gloria Anzaldúa Edited By Analouise Keating, Colleen Kattau

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

No abstract provided.

(Post)Colonising Disability, Mark Sherry

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

Disability and postcolonialism are two important, and inter-related, discourses in the social construction of the nation and those bodies deemed worthy of citizenship rights. This paper acknowledges the material dimensions of disability, impairment -and postcolonialism and its associated inequalities – but it also highlights the rhetorical connections which are commonly made between elements of postcolonialism (exile, diaspora, apartheid, slavery, and so on) and experiences of disability (deafness, psychiatric illness, blindness, etc.) The paper suggests that researchers need to be far more careful in their language around experiences of both disability and postcolonialism. Neither disability nor postcolonialism should be understood as …

Trophies Or Treasures: The Burden Of Choice For Mothers, Wives, And Daughters In Washington Square, The Portrait Of A Lady, And The Bostonians., Melissa C. Huisman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the world of Henry James's novels, characters are often placed in difficult situations where their happiness depends on their ability to make a free choice. Female characters are manipulated and diminished by a patriarchal system that not only seeks to subordinate their will, but also to objectify them, to place them on the shelf as a trophy. Fathers and husbands are typically the controlling agents, but James also presents women who appropriate the dominating role.

With varying degrees of success, each female character rejects the status of trophy. Instead, each attempts to make choices and determine her own future. …

Female Curiosities: Sarah Bernhardt, Rachilde And The Use Of Spectacle In The Gaining Of Fame In Late Nineteenth-Century France, Amy Marie Harris

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

During the late nineteenth century rapid modernization, the liberalization of the press and theatre, as well as the proliferation of photography brought about the impetus for the development of a celebrity-driven mass media. Two women who would come to fame during this era, Sarah Bernhardt and Rachilde, utilized these innovations to create spectacular public personas which emphasized each woman's idiosyncrasies while confounding notions of gender. With her dramatic performances, extravagant publicity stunts and countless world tours Bernhardt became synonymous with the promise of progress in late-nineteenth century France; while Rachilde utilized the mass media in order to create a bizarre …

The Task Of Being Content: Expatriate Wives In Beijing, Emotional Work And Patriarchal Bargain, Daniella Arieli

Journal of International Women's Studies

Based upon an ethnographic study of western expatriate (expat) wives in Beijing, this paper describes these women’s ‘patriarchal bargain’ and the emotional labor it involves. Relocation entails pressures to support the husbands’ careers in various ways, interruption of their working and social life, and increased economic and social dependency. At the same time, however, it also allows them to enjoy leisure and prestige, and to conduct a privileged life style. This bargain demands an emotional labor on the women’s part: an ongoing effort to feel good with their life in Beijing. The study focuses on the strategies the women use …

Book Review: Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, And The Public Sphere, Matthew W. Hughey

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere by Gwendolyn D. Pough

Gender-Linked Stereotypic Content In Youth Magazines, Devon Cadwell Bazata

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Theses

This study evaluates youth magazines aimed at or read by three different target audiences--boys, girls, boys and girls--and examines whether the magazines reinforce gender stereotypes, and whether the intended audience makes a difference in that reinforcement or lack of it. First, this study established a theoretical framework upon which the selection of the target age group for the sample was based. Piaget and Kohlberg's seminal work, and Gilligan and other feminist theory, is considered in the context of the results. Second, it defined stereotypic, counter-stereotypic, and gender-neutral attributes based on five previous peer-reviewed studies dating from 1957-1975, and confirmed the …

Gestures Toward Cross-Species Reciprocal Relations In Contemporary Poetics, Mary Newell

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

In this essay, I explore some embodied bases of ethical attitudes toward human/ animal exchanges in the texts of three contemporary authors: Mary Oliver, Heller Levinson, and Adrienne Rich. Since other species share with humans varieties of agency, sentience, and purposive activity, I suggest that reciprocity is a fundamental aim in cross-species relations. Phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty depicts the correlation between embodied actions and attitudes, for example, between the hand movement of grasping and an appropriative attitude toward the natural world. His concept of reciprocity, grounded in the experience of one hand touching another, provides a reference for encounters that …

Is ‘Another’ Public Sphere Actually Possible? The Case Of “Women Without” In The European Social Forum Process As A Critical Test For Deliberative Democracy, Nicole Doerr

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper presents results of a cross-national comparative research project on the case of democracy in the European Social Forums (ESFs) process over the period from 2003 to 2005. The various progressive social movements engaged in the European Social Forums process try to construct “another world” and “another public sphere” internally within their own practices of participatory and deliberative democracy in public forums. This includes fighting discriminations against women in general and women from non-western European parts of the world in particular. I take as my point of departure the case of “women without,” that is women activists who lack …

Fin De Siecle 3.0: Cybernetic Anxieties In Posthuman Science Fiction, Jessica L. Dambruch

English Theses & Dissertations

The examination of technological metaphors as pervasive descriptive structures sustained in the genre of science fiction is most apparent in an analysis of the dialogue between posthuman discourse and science fiction. The literary posthuman, jointly derived from a rich history of socio-cultural anxieties of embodiment and identity dating back to Victorian Gothic literatures, is most recently manifest within the sphere of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk fiction of the late 20th century. A third wave feminist analysis of posthuman technological metaphors is valuable for its potential to apprehend essentialist ideological constructions of gendered identity within science fiction which N. Katherine Hayles and …

The Lady In The Looking-Glass: Reflections On The Self In Virginia Woolf, Stephen Howard

Journal of International Women's Studies

This essay addresses Virginia Woolf’s exploration of the concept of the self through reference to a range of her prose writings. In these writings, Woolf questions whether the self is unitary, constant and finally knowable, or fragmented, unstable and inscrutable; whether the self is merged with other people, and constructed from interactions with the world; and whether or not a durable and fixed self-image is a necessary prerequisite for successful social interaction. Woolf’s engagement with the conventions of biography is examined primarily through the lens of two short stories: ‘The Lady in the Looking-Glass’ and ‘An Unwritten Novel.’ I argue …

The Social Construction Of Authorship: An Investigation Of Subjectivity And Rhetorical Authority In The College Writing Classroom, Johannah Rodgers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although we use the term author on a daily basis to refer to certain individuals, bodies of work, and systems of ideas, as Michel Foucault and other critics have pointed out, attempting to answer the question “What is an Author?” is by no means a simple proposition. And, starting from the position that there is no single, or definitive answer to this complex question, this dissertation seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussion of the genealogy of authorship by investigating the ways in which conceptions of the author have informed models of the writing subject in the field of rhetoric …

The Missing Rhetoric Of Gender In Responses To Abu Ghraib, Alexandra Murphy

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper explores Western responses to the torture inflicted upon Iraqi detainees by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib facility near Baghdad. More specifically, however, this paper examines responses to photographic representations of this torture, which began to surface in the April of 2004. The analysis that follows engages closely with the status of the photographs as images, arguing that existing critical interpretations fail to account for the particular issues and problems that the visual image presents. Through detailed reference work by Judith Butler and Susan Sontag, this paper will also interrogate the limitations of recent theoretical approaches to the …