Digital Commons Network^™

Reimagining The Shōjo Across Cultures: Gender Performativity, Cosplay, And Self-Presentation Of Indian Women In Digital Space, Ashonshok Kachui, Samyukthah Anandhasayanam

Journal of International Women's Studies

The image of the shōjo (adolescent girl) in Japanese popular culture has long functioned as a dynamic site for negotiating gender identity and the divide between vulnerable innocence and empowerment. Anime and manga have historically provided evolving portrayals of adolescent girl and young woman characters who have embodied subversive potential while also being constrained by idealised notions of girlhood. This paper extends the discourse on the shōjo by situating it within the Indian digital landscape, where anime fandom, cosplay culture, and social media platforms are reshaping self-presentation and gender performance among young girls and women. Grounded in feminist theoretical perspectives, …

Cyberfeminism And The Digital Divide: A Study Of The #Metoo Movement In Assam, India, Uddipana Kalita

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article examines how cyberfeminist politics in India are shaped by a layered digital divide, focusing on the #MeToo movement in Assam (Northeast India) as a regionally situated site of feminist voices, exclusion, and contested recognition. While digital visibility has enabled new forms of public naming and solidarity, this paper argues that visibility does not automatically translate into justice, as participation and audibility are structured by uneven access, device control, language hierarchies, and policing of credibility. This study is guided by two research questions: 1) How does the digital divide shape who can participate and be recognized within the #MeToo …

Reading Indian Newspaper Reports To Uncover Cinematic Misrepresentations Of Rape In Mom (2017) And Guilty (2020), Samikhya Dash, Soumya Jose

Journal of International Women's Studies

Hindi cinema has witnessed a transformation in the portrayal of rape narratives subsequent to India’s Nirbhaya rape case in 2012 and the global #MeToo movement in 2017. The rape narratives released after the #MeToo movement are characterised by a departure from the stereotypical depiction of rape victims as forlorn and vulnerable figures; instead, they are depicted as assertive and empowered survivors that challenge entrenched power dynamics. Hindi films such as Mom (2017) and Guilty (2020) exemplify this paradigm shift by featuring women characters who defy gender stereotypes and resist patriarchal constraints, experience rape trauma syndrome and post-traumatic growth, and embody …

Negotiating Desires For Capital Through Culinary Expression In Balli Kaur Jaswal’S Sugarbread, Ira Gore, Aruni Mahapatra

Journal of International Women's Studies

Balli Kaur Jaswal’s Sugarbread (2016) illustrates how race and class are negotiated through culinary practices in a lower-middle-class Sikh family living in Singapore. Through acts of shopping for groceries, cooking local Singaporean cuisine, and rejecting the communal temple food associated with shame and social discrimination, the novel highlights the family’s aspirations of social mobility shaped by the character Jini’s childhood experiences of food and economic scarcity. While the characters in the novel have access to food, their culinary practices are marked by memories of charity and discomfort as a South Asian diasporic family negotiating racialized hierarchies and gendered vulnerability in …

Girls On Screens And Boys In The Streets: Afrobeats Dance, Gender, And Waithood In Lagos, Nigeria, Gali Kinkulkin, Moshe Morad, Lynn Schler

Journal of International Women's Studies

The global success of the musical genre of Afrobeats has generated substantial scholarly interest in the experiences of singers and musicians within the industry. Scholars of this genre have examined an array of topics, including cultural identity, gender disparities, socioeconomic impact, and the global music industry. However, few studies focus on the experiences of Afro dancers despite the critical role of dance in the genre’s international popularity; those that do centralise dance concentrate primarily on how women dancers navigate an industry that both empowers and objectifies women. This study departs from these earlier studies by examining the lived experiences of …

Special Issue Editors’ Introduction: 11th World Conference On Women’S Studies, Jyoti Rupa Deka, Jaypee S. Yongco, Noma Mguni

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

Asia Pacific Perspectives Vol. 19 No. 1, 2025, University Of San Francisco

Asia Pacific Perspectives

Articles

Think Pieces

Photo Essay

Book Reviews

Does Climate Finance Empower Or Exclude Women? Evidence From Bangladesh, Sofia Castelo, Lia G. Antunes, Md. Ashrafuzzaman

Journal of International Women's Studies

Despite the formal adoption of gender policies by significant climate funds and international agreements aimed at promoting equity, only 2.3% of global climate finance is explicitly allocated to gender equality, and women remain significantly underrepresented in climate-related decision-making processes. Although several climate funds, such as the Green Climate Fund and the Adaptation Fund, have successfully integrated gender components, implementation often remains symbolic rather than transformative. Drawing on a critical ecofeminist framework, this article examines how climate finance mechanisms, particularly in the Global South, can inadvertently reinforce existing gender inequities. Using Bangladesh as a case study, this analysis synthesizes existing literature …

Beyond The Ban: Chhaupadi Abolition And The Governance Of Menstrual Autonomy In Western Nepal, Nikita Paudel

Master in Public Policy Theses

This thesis examines how two decades of efforts to abolish chhaupadi have shaped the everyday conditions under which women and girls experience menstruation in western Nepal. Chhaupadi, commonly understood as menstrual seclusion, has been addressed through Supreme Court directives, national policy, criminal law, municipal implementation instruments, hut demolition campaigns, public health programming, and rights-based advocacy. Yet the practice has persisted, adapted, and in some cases moved into less visible spaces. Rather than treating this as a simple gap between law and practice, this thesis asks how abolition efforts themselves have become part of the regulatory regime through which menstruation is …

Evangelical Influences On The Prevalence Of Homophobia In 21st Century Brazilian Politics, Griffin M. Bilello

Senior Theses

In recent decades, Brazil has seen a large influx of Evangelical identification among its population, and this religious group has become a prominent political group that has occupied different positions of power in government. This Evangelical prominence has led to the blocking of LGBTQ+ legislative protections, the protection of homophobic governmental policies, and the perpetuation of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric that has threatened the well-being of Brazil’s queer community. This thesis analyzes the social media presence of prominent political figures in Brazil to understand the ongoing discourse regarding homosexuality from different perspectives. Three representatives with varying influences and perspectives were chosen and …

Re-Painting Motherhood: A Community-Based Expressive Arts Project Exploring Motherhood’S Myths, Realities, And Hopes Through A Narrative Therapy Lens, Lauren Grignaffini-Morris

Expressive Therapies Theses

This thesis examines how socially constructed ideals of motherhood shape maternal identity, distress, and isolation, and explores the potential of addressing these experiences through a community-based expressive arts project. Drawing on motherhood studies, expressive arts therapy, and narrative therapy, the project highlights the potential benefits of utilizing expressive arts in a community setting to ease the tension between romanticized cultural narratives and the lived realities of mothers. Conducted with a support group for mothers in rural Vermont, the project used visual art, movement, creative writing, and collaborative mixed-media painting to examine problem-saturated motherhood stories, connect through embodied experience, and explore …

Racial Identity In Horror: The Fear Of Black Female Sexuality, Charniece D. Bacon

Honors College Theses

The Jezebel stereotype is a racial stereotype with biblical ties that portrays black women as seductive, sexually insatiable beings. The horror genre explores humanity’s biggest fears and anxieties by looking at subgenres such as blaxploitation and vampirism. In this essay, I'll explore the intersectionalities of race, gender, and religion through the portrayal of black female sexuality in the horror genre. In films such as Ganja & Hess (1973), Abby (1976), and Def by Temptation (1990), they all depict the Jezebel stereotype. In an in-depth analysis of these films, I'll go over the ways in which they reinforce the Jezebel stereotype, …

Read The Fine Print, Kayla Lockwood

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

read the fine print is a two-floor art installation that investigates how midcentury domestic ideology structured bodies, behavior, and perception through visual, spatial, and material systems. Rather than recreating a home interior, it examines how domestic order was engineered across the United States through color coding, planning diagrams, model environments, controlled decoration, and institutional messaging. The two-floor arrangement mirrors the operation of these systems across registers, moving from overt structures of order to quieter, often obscured consequences. By rendering policy, hierarchy, and expectation materially, the installation invites viewers to consider domesticity as a designed system: a set of practices, forms, …

Addressing Sexual Health For Older Veterans By Healthcare Providers: A Mixed Method Study, Andrew James White

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Background: Older adults remain sexually active, yet sexual health is frequently under-discussed in healthcare settings, particularly within veteran populations. Sexual health is essential to overall quality of life, and prior studies have shown that older patients value these conversations. However, veterans often face unique factors such as military-related trauma, including military combat exposure and post-traumatic stress disorder, in addition to compounded stigma from these topics in regards to open discussions about sensitive health issues to their healthcare providers. This study is significant in its potential to uncover systemic, cultural, and interpersonal influences that shape these dynamics, with a particular emphasis …

Queerscape: Transcending Urban Division, Alex Blake

Hospitality Design Graduate Student Capstones

The project seeks to demonstrate how infrastructure can act as a symbolic anchor, offering a framework for queer urban design that simultaneously addresses safety and cultural visibility. While site-specific, the methodology is intended to inform future interventions in districts for queer and other marginalized communities.

From Beirut To Montreal, En-Camp-Ment-S On The Fringes Of Society, But What Society, Soñar Soñar

Gatherings

This text is a prose that retraces my experience as a researcher and activist in three camps, between April 2024 and July 2024 : the Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, Bourj El Barajne, and the pro-Palestine encampments in Montreal, Al-Aqsa and Al-Soumoud. The text is a continuation of writings of different genres, particularly creative, which relate facts and lived experiences around liberation struggles. This writing constitutes “a method of inquiry”, “a way of “knowing” – a method of discovery and analysis. By writing in different ways, we discover new aspects of our topic and our relationship to it” (Richardson 516).

Knock To Disrupt, Knock To Make Visible: Writing And Teaching About Architecture And Palestine Amidst The Ongoing Genocide, Nama'a Qudah

Gatherings

In his seminal novel Men in the Sun (1970), Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani poses a haunting question: “Why didn’t they knock on the walls of the water tank?”.  This paper reflects on that question and how it became the compass guiding my writing and teaching about Architecture and Palestine amidst the ongoing genocide. Knocking here is more than an act of refusal; it is a demand to rupture domination, insisting on justice and on noise against the enclosures that prefer quiet compliance. Kanafani’s question echoes beyond fiction, exposing the asymmetry between oppressor and oppressed, and the violence embedded not only …

Confronting The Storm: Dispatches From The Night Watch At The People’S University For Palestine, Leslie Quintanilla

Gatherings

As a strategy for transterritorial freedom and dialogic world-building, the People's University for Palestine across campuses became a seedbed for exchanging knowledge, tactics, and strategies, with clear goals to "disclose, divest, defend, and declare" for a free Palestine. At San Francisco State University, the student encampment achieved divestments from four corporations — Lockheed Martin, Leonardo, Palantir, and Caterpillar — all supporting Israel's genocide in Gaza. This article highlights the feminist space, politics, and pedagogies of gathering that created the infrastructure of the People's University for Palestine—the watchtower (EZLN 2015) of analysis that students, faculty, and community members created together. The …

Against Genocide: Feminist Dissent, Palestine Solidarity, And The Neoliberal University, Azza Basarudin, Sabrina Alimahomed-Wilson, Araceli Esparza

Gatherings

In the context of the increasing nationwide repression of free speech and academic freedom, this article emerges from the collective scholarly and activist commitments of three women of color feminist faculty teaching at a large public university. Amidst our participation in anti-genocide organizing, we have been targeted by our university’s administration for our critiques of settler-colonial and genocidal violence in Palestine. Our intervention foregrounds an anti-war feminist ethic that insists on integrity and justice in confronting the university administration’s power to discipline faculty dissent, as well as our support for students’ political activism. Within this repressive context, we articulate a …

Introductory Remarks On Gendered Anti-Palestinian Racism And Colonial Solidarities, Wafaa Hasan

Gatherings

This piece introduces a critical framework for understanding how feminism — particularly Western and settler-colonial feminisms — operates as both a site of solidarity and a mechanism of domination in relation to Palestinian women. Delivered at the inaugural Palestinian Feminist Conference at the University of Toronto (Oct. 10, 2025), the address examines how Palestinian feminist scholars and activists center epistemic resistance and collective feminist self-determination. Through the notion of Gendered Anti-Palestinian Racism (Gendered APR), the work extends analyses of Orientalist and imperial feminisms to describe a trinity of how Palestinian women are simultaneously hyper-visible — as dangerous mothers and divisive/disruptive …

Introduction Of Palestine And Campus Movements: Sites Of Transnational Feminist Solidarities, Besan Jaber, Asmaa Malik

Gatherings

Amid a genocide, Gaza called on the world to witness and to act for justice in Palestine. The world responded. A historic mobilization of global campus movements has emerged, generating far more than public protests. This issue of Gatherings documents and analyzes this moment of transnational solidarity and aims to center the voices and experiences of those who organized, resisted, and refused.

Gatherings 3.1 (Complete Issue), Besan Jaber, Asmaa Malik

Gatherings

Acknowledgement / Besan Jaber and Asmaa Malik, guest co-editors -- p. i: Table of Contents -- p. ii: Editorial Board -- p. 1: Introduction of Palestine and Campus Movements: Sites of Transnational Feminist Solidarities / Besan Jaber and Asmaa Malik, -- p. 10: Introductory Remarks on Gendered Anti-Palestinian Racism and Colonial Solidarities / Wafaa Hasan -- p. 24: Against Genocide: Feminist Dissent, Palestine Solidarity, and the Neoliberal University / Azza Basarudin, Araceli Esparza, and Sabrina Alimahomed-Wilson -- p. 46: Confronting the Storm: Dispatches from the Night Watch at the People’s University for Palestine / Leslie Quintanilla -- p. 61: Knock …

There's Nothing Tragic About Being Fifty: An Introduction To Hagsploitation, Kayla Brabant

COD Library Student Research and Award Symposium

A brief introduction to Hagsploitation, a subgenre of Exploitation film both established and popularized by the release of Robert Aldrich"s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Notable examples of these films will be discussed, as well as historical context, and the potential for a feminist reading on the subgenre.

Faculty Sponsor:  Professor Dylan Simons

Fighting Like A Girl: The Trauma, Power, And Resistance Of Heroines In Young Adult Fantasy, Sara L. Chappell

ATU Theses and Dissertations 2021 - Present

This thesis examines the evolution of female rage in young adult fantasy literature, focusing primarily on Sarah J. Maas’s Throne of Glass series while drawing comparisons to other contemporary heroines. It argues that female rage is not a sign of instability but a politically meaningful response to trauma and systemic oppression. Using trauma theory, affect theory, and narrative identity theory, this project traces how Aelin Ashryver Galathynius’s rage develops from a physiological survival response into protective care, political resistance, and ultimately reclaimed agency. Early in the series, her anger emerges as dissociation and emotional shutdown shaped by trauma and institutional …

Art In An Apocalypse: Aids, Activism, And Abolition In Work Of Essex Hemphill And Alternative Video Production, Sydney E. Guntharp

Honors Theses

This thesis is an exploration of Black, POC, feminist, and queer art in the late twentieth century, examining both the AIDS crisis and the increasing privatization of the prison industrial complex as key factors in the development of Essex Hemphill’s poetic, expressive works and the filmmaking activism of various videotape collectives. Through employing the lens of critical prison studies, this work seeks to understand how Black and POC art emerged as a site of political resistance to a carceral state as well as the broader social punishment doctrine that influenced the public health response to AIDS in the United States. …

Hi Friend! Msw Portfolio Of Community Building And Advocacy, River Gerard Segar

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

This MSW Portfolio emphasizes the importance of being rooted in community and demonstrates how to engage in community building in a way that helps center marginalized voices. This portfolio also highlights advocacy in the United States for transgender people and asserts the need for increased cultural competency in clinical practice with people in non-monogamous and/or kink relational structures.

Akan Proverbs And Social Media Commentary: The Representation Of Women In Ghanaian Society, Richard Ayertey Lawer

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study examines how gender ideologies embedded in Akan proverbs are reproduced, negotiated, and contested within contemporary Ghanaian digital discourse. Drawing on feminist rhetorical analysis and digital discourse studies, the research analyzes a purposive sample of 25 Akan proverbs and 36 social media posts and comments from Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok (2022–2025) focusing on women in public roles. The study demonstrates that Akan proverbs function as enduring ideological resources that construct women’s agency as conditional, subordinate, and morally regulated. These ideological patterns are recontextualized in digital spaces through both explicit citation and implicit proverbial reasoning, where users mobilize cultural logics …

The Weight Of The Unknown: Xenophobia In Lucía Puenzo’S Xxy, Daylen Motamed

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

This project examines how Lucía Puenzo’s film titled XXY critiques societal responses to unique identities (specifically intersex as an example), asking how xenophobia and normative gender expectations shape the marginalization of bodies that exist outside the binary. Situating the film within scholarship on queer adolescence and intersex representation, the analysis of this poster will argue that XXY exposes how institutions such as medicine and family reinforce harmful notions of “normalization.”

Drawing on close textual analysis of key scenes and engagement with critical sources, including Guillermo Olivera’s work on space and visibility and testimonies from intersex individuals, this study investigates how …

Between Authenticity And Exploitation: Rethinking The Intended Audience Of Sean Baker's Tangerine, Ava Brandt

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Sean Baker's Tangerine (2015) has generated genuinely divided responses among trans critics, and for good reason. This paper takes that division seriously, using two reviews published on Autostraddle within six weeks of each other to frame a central question: who is Tangerine actually for? Existing scholarship on trans cinema has tended to evaluate films on a spectrum from exploitative to affirming, but this paper argues that framework is insufficient for a film like Tangerine, which operates as both simultaneously. Through close reading of the film alongside its production history, paratexts, and reception, and drawing on Paige Macintosh's scholarship on trans …

Predator Or Prey: The Analysis Of Gender And Race On The Perception Of Black Men As Sexual Assault Victims, Jordyn Livingston, Dr. Florencia Cornet

Caravel Undergraduate Research Journal

Men sexual assault victims have gained more attention in recent years. Despite the growing sociological literature on violence against men, previous research provides little acknowledgment of Black men sexual assault victims. In this manuscript, I analyze emerging literature in the socio-medical sciences to explore how gender and race affects the perceptions of Black men as sexual assault victims. Specifically, I utilize intersectionality as a theoretical framework to synthesize literature on blackness and masculinity in sexual assault victims to conclude that there is an intersectional point that disadvantages Black males, portraying them as sexual predators. In so doing, I provide research …