Digital Commons Network^™

Saved Babies, Dead Doctors: Settler Colonial Anxiety And Strategic Rhetorics Of/In The Anti-Abortion Cultural Narrative, Cassidy Ellis

Communication ETDs

In this dissertation I identify and analyze the rhetoric that creates the anti-abortion cultural narrative and locate its toxic secrets by exposing the logics and ideologies the secrets obscure and sustain, and finally, ascertaining the strategic rhetorics that enable the narrative’s power and centrality. There are two primary arguments proposed in this dissertation. First, I argue that settler colonialism is the primary toxic secret nestled just beneath the surface of the anti-abortion cultural narrative. It is the secret that animates and sustains the narrative in service of maintaining settler colonial social order via control and maintenance of the population. Second, …

I, Discomfort Woman: A Fugue In F Minor, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Low Electability Of Women Legislative Candidates In Gender-Friendly Constituencies In Banten, Amilia Ulfaningrum, Sri Lestari Wahyuningroem, Anwar Ilmar

Jurnal Politik

Tulisan ini mengkaji fenomena rendahnya elektabilitas perempuan di Daerah Pemilihan Banten III pada Pemilihan Umum Legislatif tahun 2019. Daerah ini memiliki karakter pemilih rasional dan ramah gender, namun karakter tersebut ternyata tidak memberi pengaruh terhadap elektabilitas perempuan untuk menjadi anggota parlemen. Kajian-kajian tentang elektabilitas perempuan umumnya menggunakan pendekatan supply-demand untuk menjelaskan elektabilitas perempuan untuk meraih posisi-posisi politik. Kami menemukan bahwa pendekatan ini saja tidak cukup untuk menjelaskan permasalahan yang kami angkat. Hal ini karena analisis suppy-demand hanya memotret kondisi obyektif yang, dalam analisis gender, terjadi di banyak tempat di seluruh dunia saat perempuan tidak selalu dalam posisi lemah. Dengan menggunakan …

Eldest Daughter Or Third Parent? An Exploration Of Eldest Daughters In The Egyptian-American Diaspora, Fatima Abdel-Gwad

Theses and Dissertations

Egyptian-American first-born daughters in the diaspora women cope with the pressures of immigration by improvising processes of identity-making and preserving ethnicity. This group is subject to complex systems of gendered, classed, and racialized tensions that become relevant in their attempts to preserve cultural formations in the diaspora. This work seeks to showcase the various tensions present in diasporic existence and explore the methods with which these diasporic daughters participate in processes of cultural and ethnic preservation. Through the ethnographic accounts of six eldest daughters in the New York City and Northern New Jersey areas, this research explores the connections between …

Magical Girls: Queer Identity In Japan, Keira Mcdevitt

CAFE Symposium 2023

Queer themes have long been interlaced with feminist ideals and "magical girls" within Japanese anime culture. The subject is explored within two iconic magical girl anime, "Madoka Magica" and "Revolutionary Girl Utena", as well as the history of queerness in Japan and its relevancy to modern ongoing franchises.

“I Feel Like I’M More Likely To Get Triggered, I Guess?”: A Poetry Cluster About Safety In Rape Culture Research, Amber Moore

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This paper offers and explores a poetry cluster of found list poems written from data collected in a feminist literacy education research study. The larger project examined secondary English teacher candidates’ responses to teaching and learning about sexual assault narratives from a trauma text set, as well as pedagogy for addressing sexual violence, rape culture, and Tarana Burke’s MeToo movement, in the literature classroom. The selected poems are raw, much like the subject matter they collectively speak to, and function together as micro collection that carry a particular politics: exploring what it means to resist rape culture as a witness …

Under G-D, Dereck Daschke

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Under G-d (2022), directed by Paula Eiselt.

Book Review Essay: Dreams Of Flight: The Lives Of Chinese Women Students In The West, Zeyi Liu

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

Book Review: No Nation For Women: Reportage On Rape From India, The World’S Largest Democracy, Gorky Sinha, Pushpinder Singh

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

Women Suffering From Multiple Sources Of Oppression In Upper Egypt: A Case Study Of Intersectional Targeting And Integrated Development Interventions As The Way Out, Laila El Baradei, Passant Elwy

Journal of International Women's Studies

Scholars in the field of gender and development are strong advocates of the concept of “intersectionality,” first coined by Crenshaw in 1989, as a way of thinking about how marginalized groups may be subjected to oppression from various sources. The main purpose of this research is to make a case for how intersectional targeting, together with integrated development interventions, can be useful in helping vulnerable individuals, specifically women, suffering from multiple sources of poverty and oppression. A case study, coupled with in-depth field interviews, was the method employed for assessing the application of an intersectional lens by a nonprofit development …

Unraveling Milk And Honey: Women’S Voice, Patriarchy, And Sexuality, Renidia Audinia Siva, Ida Rosida, Muhammad Azwar

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article discusses patriarchy and sexuality portrayed in Milk and Honey; a poetry collection written by Canadian author Rupi Kaur. Kaur is an amazing poet, artist, and performer who touches on trauma, feminism, migration, love, and loss in her works. Milk and Honey is a unique book of poetry as it combines written poetry with line art images. The collection is split into four chapters: “the hurting,” “the loving,” “the breaking,” and “the healing.” This research aims to show how the illustrations that appear alongside the poems have amplified the speaker’s voice in response to patriarchy and sexuality. This study …

“Who Hears The Cry Of The Wailing Women?”: Discourses On Livelihood Activities And The Challenges Of Internally Displaced Women In Nigeria, Seun Bamidele, Innocent Pikirayi

Journal of International Women's Studies

In this paper, we examine the livelihoods and daily challenges of internally displaced women (IDW) in the New Kuchingoro Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camp in Abuja, Nigeria. We discuss strategies that have the potential to help create successful livelihoods, and we listen to the views of displaced women on how effective they think these strategies might be. We also examine the social and economic factors forcing IDW to develop resilience and highlight the dire social burdens which these women carry with them. Previous studies concerning livelihood activities of IDW in IDPs camps have emphasized distress, hardship, neediness, deprivation, and general …

Autonomy, Post-Puberty Bacha Posh And Third World Feminism In Selected Afghan Fiction, Asma

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper examines the fictional representation of the ways in which Afghan girls attain autonomy in their post-puberty stage through the tradition of bacha posh despite the traditional constraints to switch back to their gender at birth. This analysis of bacha posh characters in Ukmina Manoori’s I Am a Bacha Posh and Zarghuna Kargar’s Bakhtawara’s Story attempts to demonstrate how the bacha posh tradition develops the potential for transgression in Afghan girls, fostering a resistance to traditional gender roles. In doing so, this paper challenges and rebuts Western feminist views regarding Afghan women, who are stereotyped as incapable, voiceless, and …

Gender Politics And Zimbabwe Universities: Facets, Contexts, And Consequences, Efiritha Chauraya

Journal of International Women's Studies

This study explores the perceptions of female middle managers of academic faculties at three universities in Zimbabwe to ascertain their lived experiences, feelings, opinions, and views regarding gender equality in the discharge of their duties. Open-ended, semi-structured, and in-depth interviews were employed for data collection. This method enabled the female deans to describe and reflect on their experiences. Engagement with the female deans of academic faculties revealed that: a) Promotion of women into deanship positions did not translate into eradication of gender-based discrimination against them; b) A lack of a broader vision of gender equality was observed which limited conscious …

Deconstructing “The New Indian Woman”: An Analysis Of The Sleuth Heroines Of Indian English Women’S Detective Fiction, Somjeeta Pandey, Somdatta Bhattacharya

Journal of International Women's Studies

Feminist discourses on the “New Indian Woman” focus on the woman's body as a surface upon which modernity is inscribed. Sexual transgression has been the only lens through which the New Woman has been usually studied and analyzed until now, thus offering a superficial definition of modernity by women being defined only by the corporeal. This is problematic not only because it offers a reductionist view of modernity but also “constructs a boundary around the notion of modern womanhood that excludes woman whose bodily autonomy has been compromised, for example through sexual assault” (Daya, “Embodying Modernity” 97). This paper will …

The Heart Is Not Hopeless: Pakistani Television Drama, Patriarchy, And Activism, Neelam Jabeen

Journal of International Women's Studies

A Muslim society that interprets feminism as anti-Islamic may not accept overtly feminist maneuvers to challenge patriarchy. However, there are subtle ways of steering out of the Islam vs. feminism dichotomy. What triggers anti-feminists are phrases like women’s rights, female emancipation, and women’s freedom since all these are interpreted as the agenda of the West and hence are considered anti-Islamic. In this paper, I argue that since feminists are fighting against all forms of oppression and have joined forces with other forms of activism such as child protection, human rights, animal rights, rights of the underclass and minority groups, and …

Dignity, Life-Affirming Advocacy And Compassionate Solidarity, Nyambura J. Njoroge

Journal of International Women's Studies

In “Special Issue: Overcoming Violence against Women and Children” in the Journal of Theology for Southern Africa (No. 114, Nov. 2002), the guest editors Tinyiko Sam Maluleke and Sarojini Nadar wrote:

Given the great cloud and intricate network of witnesses and conspirators who subscribe to the covenant of death, standing up against this covenant of death and violence is costly. It often results in the isolation and rejection of those who dare to speak. Therefore, the voices of those who dare to stand up against the covenant are often like voices in the wilderness (7).

In this essay, I will …

Healing Justice As Intersectional Feminist Praxis: Well-Being Practices For Inclusion And Liberation, Sharon Doetsch-Kidder, Kalia Harris

Journal of International Women's Studies

Since at least the 1830s, Black feminists in the US have spoken of how oppression harms the spirit and have also expressed the need for Black people to respect themselves in the face of anti-Black racism (Guy-Sheftall, 1995). The recognition that oppression negatively impacts well-being continues today. Research in community health and psychology has demonstrated how Black Americans, Native Americans, and Latinx people have been victims of mass incarceration, state-funded and state-sanctioned violence, and systemic discrimination in schools, workplaces, healthcare, and housing. Due to these conditions, racial and ethnic minorities in the US suffer disproportionately from mental and physical illnesses …

Migrant Academic/Sister Outsider: Feminist Solidarity Unsettled And Intersectional Politics Interrogated, Maria Tsouroufli

Journal of International Women's Studies

Feminist sisterhood has been heavily criticized by Black feminists and others as installing a false sense of equality among women and being overly ambitious in disrupting the models and boundaries of the neo-liberal university. This paper draws on the autobiographical account of a White-other, female European migrant academic in the United Kingdom to consider how intersectional disadvantage and privilege shapes feminist sisterhood with profound implications for academic identities, careers, and belonging in the internationalized university and the wider socio-political British context. I draw on my professional trajectory to demonstrate how othering and violence in the form of verbal abuse, microaggressions, …

The Agenda (February 2023): Newsletter For The Lincoln Lgbtq+ Resource Center, Lincoln Lgbtq+ Resource Center, Gonzaga University

Lincoln LGBTQ+ Resource Center Publications

The quarterly newsletter from the Lincoln LGBTQ+ Resource Center at Gonzaga.

Unsung Heroines In Black And White: Sixties Girl Groups As Sonic Rock Rebellion, Hilarie Ashton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Before the Beatles arrived in America, exploding open the intersection between pop music and the emerging genre of rock and in so doing, drawing heavily on the work of Black music and musicians, girl groups were powerfully enacting a kind of cultural rebellion in both of those genres. In contrast to the historical impulse to privilege a breathlessly incomplete white male lineage, "Unsung Heroines" examines in closer, more connected spotlights the subversive creative work of the Black and working-class teenage girls in the Ronettes, the Chiffons, and the Shangri-Las. Across four chapters, "Unsung Heroines" shows how these singers subversively tucked …

How The U.S. Mainstream Media Perpetuates Cis White Masculine Hegemony, Yelena Dzhanova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The news is important because it helps individuals understand their place in the world and make the best decisions for themselves. Throughout its strong history and presence in the United States, the journalism industry has prided itself on delivering fact-based news using an objective framework, meaning that there is an expectation that journalists communicate the news impartially and without bias. Through an examination of gendered language and visual representations published in and by recent mainstream U.S. digital and print media outlets, this paper explains how the media plays a major role in the perpetuation of cis white masculinity. This paper …

Ornamentalism: Costuming And The Portrayal Of The Chinese Woman In Film, 20th-21st Century, Andrea Yepez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis aims to analyze the concept of “Ornamentalism,” a term created by Anne Anlin Cheng. In Ornamentalism (2019), Cheng proposes the term—a combination of Orientalism and ornament—as a new way to study Asiatic femininity. Cheng applies the term to a case study of the career of Anna May Wong, the first Asian-American actress to feature in Hollywood films. Throughout her career, which began in the 1920s, Anna May Wong held the status of it-girl and muse to designers such as John Galliano. However, Wong was also subjected to playing stereotypical Asian roles in films and was consistently the victim …

Naming Venus: An Exploration Of Goddesses, Heroines, And Famous Women, Kavya Beheraj

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Humans have been observing and romanticizing Venus for more than 5,000 years. However, mapping its surface has nearly always been impossible, since the planet is shrouded in thick clouds. A breakthrough came just fifty years ago with the invention of radar imaging, leading to the discovery (and naming) of hundreds of new features in a relatively short length of time.

The rapid naming of Venus is a case study on the impact of planetary nomenclature — the process of naming features on other worlds. While the act of naming streamlines communication and humanizes alien landscapes, it is subject to bias, …

“Tell Them About The Dream Martin!”: The Retelling, Reframing, And Re-Examination Of The Civil Rights Movement Through A Black Feminist And Postmodern Lens, Damele Elliott-Hubbard

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research seeks to explore the intersectionality of race, gender, and class that existed during the Civil Rights Movement, and the tensions that were a result of that intersectionality. This is accomplished through a re-examination of The Movement through a post-modern and Black feminist lens. Post-modern theorist Jean Francois Lyotard proposes the necessity of throwing off the grand narratives or metanarratives of well-known historical events, with the intention of creating micronarratives that depend heavily on the experiences of those who lived during those times. The aim of this research is to conduct a gendered study of the CRM, while investigating …

Women’S Agency And Resistance To Cyber Flashing On Twitter, Shafa Athirah, Irwan M. Hidayana

Masyarakat: Jurnal Sosiologi

This article explores the specific forms of online sexual harassment that has been on the rise since Covid-19 pandemic, namely cyber flashing, and how women respond to such practice on social media. Digital ethnography. which included in-depth interview with victims of cyber flashing, was conducted to dive deep into women’s cyber flashing experiences on Twitter. Authors argue that women make sense of their cyber flashing experiences, including tangible impacts on women, and exercise their agency through the acts of public and quiet resistance. The results showed that women carry out various acts of resistance such as ‘spill’ tweet, ‘warning’ tweet, …

“For The Moment, I Am Not F*Cking,” I Am Tweeting: Platforms Of / As Sexuality, Jacob Johanssen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article develops the argument that digital platforms are significantly infused with originary (and unconscious) residues of the sexual. Drawing on Laplancheian conceptualizations of sexuality, I argue that the digital has always been sexual(ised) in itself – a process that precedes and exceeds the erotic or pornographic. For Laplanche, sexuality is constitutive of the human subject as such. Infantile sexuality is shaped and transformed in an enigmatic relation with the caregiver. Drawing on this model as an analogy, I claim that users are drawn to platforms because they (unconsciously) desire to return to infantile sexuality and a holding environment but …

Community Despite Connection: Resisting The Digital Logics Of Optimization And Failure, Irina Kalinka

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

If a certain brand of aspirational tech-utopian discourse is to be believed, those privileged enough to be plugged into digital information technology are living through a golden age of connection. Platforms claim to facilitate sharing and partaking, bring people together, and bestow upon them new and improved spaces to gather and build communities. While reality differs decidedly from such idealized conceptions, it is nonetheless crucial to ask what kind of guiding vision is being instituted through such representational efforts: namely, the figure of community made operational and optimizable. This project will reject such idealized visions of coherent communities drawn together …

The Social Sinthome, Ryan Engley

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Much of the critical discourse on social media misidentifies its problematic features as bugs, or problems to solve. Supposed solutions to these problems tend to focus on individual actions. We should delete the apps, own our own data, never click on recommended videos, and realize that we are the product. But if predatory algorithms succeed by individuating people—selling people “choice” and “options” as it harvests user data—then an entire online ecosystem arranged through the logic of that design can neither be meaningfully challenged nor effectively understood at the level of the individual alone. Transformative action addressing social media can only …

Everybody Wants To Be A Fascist Online: Psychoanalysis And The Digital Architecture Of Fascism, Anthony Faramelli, Imogen Piper

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Félix Guattari and Franco Berardi have both argued that media ecologies and psychic ecologies are intimately intertwined and as such, any exploration of the collective unconscious must engage with how the mind is formed with and through media. This understanding of networks of interdependence necessitates an exploration of how platformization has impacted users” collective psyche. Drawing from psychosocial theory, psychoanalysis and the work of Félix Guattari, this article analizes the micropolitics of desire of digital platforms, with an explicit focus on how algorithmic structures amplify extreme Right content, allowing fascisms to metastasis throughout digital spaces. It will first examine the …