Digital Commons Network^™

Productivity To Precarity On Instagram: Digital Feminism In India During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Anhiti Patnaik

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper examines how digital feminism deconstructed neo-liberal ideals of technological productivity in India during the Covid-19 pandemic. By creating a productivity scale, I delineate new social disparities and risk factors brought on by the unprecedented shift to a work-from-home digital economy. Through theories of biopower, I argue that technology is not neutral, apolitical, or unequivocally in favour of equal access and human rights. The creation of a new social group termed the ‘technoprecariat’ during lockdown is discussed using a ‘cripqueer’ approach to digital feminism. I extend Judith Butler’s early work on gender performativity to the neo-liberal ideal of gender …

Cross-Cultural Performativity Of Gender Communication In Heather Raffo’S Nine Parts Of Desire, Shaimaa M. Saeed

English Language and Literature

Since the mid-twentieth century, the study of gender has constituted a fundamental part of many interdisciplinary research works due to its multi-perspective nature which made it a fertile ground for analysis in diversified fields of science. Discussions over sex/gender distinction and the representation as well as perception of gender ceaselessly exist within controversially enriching, discursive frameworks. In 1990, Judith Butler (1956- ), one of the prominent feminist theorists in the field of gender studies, first coined the concept of “gender performativity,” where she challenged the conventional notions of ethnomethodologists and phenomenologists who restricted the perception and communication of gender to …

The Flow Of (Re)Memory In African American And Nubian Egyptian Literature: Morrison, Oddoul, And Mukhtar, Bushra Hashem

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to define the term rememory, which Toni Morrison coins in her novel Beloved, and explore its interplay with water imagery in the novel and in two Nubian short stories, namely Haggag Oddoul’s “The River People” and Yahya Mukhtar’s “The Nile Bride.” The three narratives have core common features: they centralize water bodies as key sites of events, they depend heavily on the retelling of history and mythology, and they are told predominantly from the perspective of women. How do the writers weave rememory, history, and mythology to produce these narratives? Are they attempting to …

Promoting Secure Attachment In Children Without Parental Care In Egypt, Manar Nada

Theses and Dissertations

In Egypt, if not living with extended family members, the majority of children without parental care are placed in care homes. Research shows that children without parental care, particularly those raised in care homes, generally receive low-quality care. This can lead to adverse effects on their mental health, physical health, developmental growth, sense of belonging, intimacy, social and behavioral competence, and academic performance. Studies also relate institutionalization to problems in attachment and caregiver-infant relationships. The Secure Base Model is a therapeutic caregiving framework that target children who were abused and neglected or experienced loss and separation. The model has five …

Navigating The Cairene Table: Food And Family Between What Is Ideal And What Is Real, Iman Afify

Theses and Dissertations

Our daily encounters with food, especially during our childhood, play a crucial role in shaping and informing our identity and our habitus. In this research, by using multimodal and auto ethnography, I argue that due to the guiding path that our senses carve for us, we make sense and contextualise our surroundings through our senses, and not only the five senses of vision, smell, taste, hearing, and touch, but also through our inner senses of time and temporality, and how time and memory play an important role in the registration of our surroundings through our bodies and senses. I am …

A New Politics Of Black Regality: Zora Neale Hurston And Alice Walker’S Monarchical Method, William Martin

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Literary critics conducting a comparative study of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple diligently tend to the relationship between the two women, particularly at an intertextual level. This paper sheds light on an important third member of this relationship: Black women readers. An articulation of Black regality, which involves the incorporation of monarchical symbols and titles in characterizations of Black people, provides these readers with political tools poised to liberate Black women from hegemonic male authority and control. Examining the significance of adornment for the self exclusively to combat invisibility, the power …

How Marlon T. Riggs Queered The Documentary Form, Anthony M. Sweeney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Marlon T. Riggs’s documentary films and their paratextual elements are rooted in his intersectional identities as a Black and gay man. His activist goal of Black gay liberation was based on what he saw as deeply engrained internal and external racist and homophobic societal structures that subjugated Black queers. In this thesis, I place research from Black cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, and film studies in conversation with one another to show how Riggs’s filmography is an example of queer form. In doing so, I attempt to redefine the focus of the scholarship on Riggs from an avant-garde filmmaker …

Cultivation, Conflict, And Consumption: Food Systems In Syria, 1920–1946, Sara Pekow

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines Syria during the French Mandate using food as a primary unit of analysis. The exploration of food pushes this project beyond the boundaries of political and diplomatic histories of Syria during the French Mandate, bringing forward the hidden voices of the nonelite. Nonelites are often not visible in archives, but their absence in most written sources permits us to ascertain their experiences in studying the materials that comprised their everyday lives. The sources consulted for this work include memoirs, print media, and state archives, to name a few.

Each chapter of this dissertation follows a different link …

Colonial Hotspots: Reflecting On My Conditional Citizenship As A ‘Coloured’ [Woman] In Post-Apartheid South Africa, Danille Arendse

Journal of International Women's Studies

The prevailing geopolitical situation has perpetuated epistemic and ontological violence against the citizens of Africa. This indicates that geopolitics have an impact on socio-spatial relations and human interactions that may affect the citizenship of oppressed persons. This paper contains reflections on the conditional citizenship of the author, who is legally identified as a Coloured [woman] in post-Apartheid South Africa. The racial classification Coloured [women], which was created during Apartheid, remains a divisive racial category in post-Apartheid South Africa, one that preserves stereotypes and negative connotations. The author draws the reader’s attention to her geographical location as a specific site of …

Addressing Gender Disparities Through Folklore: A Cultural Study Of Female Child Appellation Among The Bāsukuma Of Tanzania, John P. Madoshi

Journal of International Women's Studies

Among the Bāsukuma, folklore plays a significant role in describing different issues pertaining to their society and culture. Gender is one of the important issues emulated through female appellation. Some of the female names describe a gender tug of war which involves not only married couples but also families of the couples. In this conflict, names particularly of female children are used by each side as a means of channeling a particular message which signifies grievances of the sufferers. Nevertheless, the appellation is done in such a metaphoric way as to call for a meticulous literary examination analysis.

Book Review: Anti-Gender Politics In The Populist Moment, Didem Unal

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

"Abayomi, We Are The Revolution": Women's Rights And Samba At Rio De Janeiro, Paula Dürks Cassol

Journal of International Women's Studies

The advent of the feminist movement in the twentieth century made it possible for socially organized women to begin seeking for the recognition of their rights and the change of gender roles which were socially built. Women’s rights started to be recognized as a human right. However, criteria of race and class have always been relevant, and have provided privileged positions for white women in the pursuit and attainment of rights, while black women continue to be stigmatized, remaining in the base of the social pyramid. In this regard, this paper questions: What is the relation between feminism and the …

Gender Perspective On Tourism's Influence On The Local Community: A Literature Review, Nur Abellan Calvet, Jordi Arcos-Pumarola, Laia Encinar-Prat

Journal of International Women's Studies

The tourism industry integrates multiple actors interrelated through a variety of dynamics and characteristics. To address this complexity, tourism studies integrate different disciplines and perspectives in order to comprehend the tourism phenomenon. One of the main topics of tourism studies has been its impact on local communities. The conjunction of these research lines with the gender perspective discloses how tourism interrelates with the host territory's particular gender dynamics. In this context, the present study aims to explore and analyse the current state of academic research on tourism's influence on the local community from a gender perspective. In this way, we …

In Search Of Systemic Liberation: Black Feminist Activism Amongst French Women Of African Descent In Contemporary France, Jordan Thomas

Theses - ALL

"In Search of Systemic Liberation: Black Feminist Activism amongst French Women ofAfrican Descent in Contemporary France" examines the activisms of Isabelle Boni-Claverie, Assa Traoré, and the anti-racist and feminist collective, Lallab. In so doing, this thesis examines how the collective of each challenges France's narrative around race, belonging, and national identity. Through the analysis of the works by Boni-Claverie, Traoré, and Lallab, as well as the analysis of the responses from French media and French politicians, this thesis examines the ways in which these activists' political ideology and organizing pushes against France's national narrative of color-blind universalism in the present-day. …

What’S The Word On The Street?: Witnessing/Performing Theory, Desirée D. Rowe

Feminist Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

“But For Those Of Us Who Live Here”: Performance Of Work And Community By Women Employed In Rural, Predominantly White, Small-Town Schools, Telena M. Turner

Masters Theses, 2020-current

Rural, small towns are incredibly complex cultural centers. Although rural places are consistently portrayed as unchanging, the operation of cultural and identity within these locations is consistently on the move. Using reflexive interviewing, poetic transcription, autoethnographic writing, this project (re)presents poems on community and identity from five women employed in schools in rural, mostly White, small towns in the Central Appalachian region. Analyzing the poems through concepts in performance studies and work on space and place, this project positions movement and change at the center of small towns and examines how notions of rural place and community are performed through …

Rethinking Gender In Translation, Khaoula Jaoudi

Journal of International Women's Studies

The mediator between people all over the world is language, and translation is the means by which we can cross borders. Translation can play an important role in moving towards a common livable world of coexistence and transnationality. Feminist translation theory emerged from the shared struggle women and translation experience; it criticizes the concepts that place both women and translation at the bottom of the literary and social scale. “La liberation des femmes passé par le language” is a famous saying among women of the 1970s feminist movement which indicates that women must be first liberated from language. And since …

Students' Perceived Value Of Women's And Gender Studies And Chicana/O Studies At A Hispanic Serving Institution: A Quantitative Analysis Of "The Studies" In Higher Education, Hilda Na Ontiveros

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Previous research indicates that “The Studies” are helpful to students at both K-12 and higher education levels. Most of these studies focus on K-12 schools, fewer are at the higher education level, and few use quantitative methods to examine students’ perceptions of “The Studies.” The purpose of this study is to research students’ perceived value of Women’s & Gender Studies and Chicana/o Studies at a Hispanic Serving Institution. This quantitative study employed a feminist framework and methodology to develop a survey instrument and to analyze the survey responses from students who took courses in Women’s & Gender Studies and Chicana/o …

Il Corpo E Il Sacrificio Delle Donne; Affermazione Femminile Di Sé Attraverso Il Cibo, Katherine Sanchez

Italian Renaissance Foodways

No abstract provided.

Decolonizing Female Archetypes: Creating An Oppositional Consciousness In Contemporary Chicana And Iraqi Women’S Fiction, Semah Salih Hussein

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In dominant imperialist discourses, women, such as Iraqi women and Chicanas, have been marginalized in political, social and economic structures and have been manipulated to maintain imperialist exploitation and processes. They have been frozen within certain archetypal configurations. Iraqi women have been misrepresented as victims of their culture and traditions, and Chicanas have been represented in derogatory terms or excluded from mainstream hierarchies of representation. This study examines some counternarratives and oppositional subjectivities/ consciousnesses provided by Iraqi and Chicana women writers through their utilization of the legacy of a number of fictional and historical female figures. The primary texts analyzed …

“Who Says Lowriders Are Only For Men?”: Lowriders In Las Vegas, Nevada, Alejandra Herrera

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Since its creation, Las Vegas, Nevada, has been associated with casinos, nightlife, drinking, and neon lights. Las Vegas is not associated with Lowriders. Historically, lowrider vehicles are associated with crime, gangs, and male drivers. When lowriding comes to mind, Lowriders are associated with major cities in California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado. Lowriders are not usually visualized as having female participants or as being present in Las Vegas. This thesis highlights members of the Lowrider community (especially Christal Leyva, Ivelys Franco, and Juanita Salazar) through the use of oral interviews and personal correspondence. The Lowriders interviewed for this thesis …

Possession: The Struggle For Female Bodily Agency In Exorcism Cinema, Michelle Lynne Pribbernow

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A dominant trope of the possession genre of horror cinema is the spectacle of the white female body that extends beyond narrowly-proscribed boundaries as being too active, too loud, too sexual, and too uncontrolled. This excess is depicted as monstrous, revolting to patriarchal ideology and in need of containment. In this dissertation, I argue that the long-standing horror genre of possession narratives reveals social anxieties about a loss of control over the productive and reproductive capabilities of the undisciplined female body in U.S. patriarchal, white supremacist, late capitalist culture. This study critically examines three sets of possession films: the Paranormal …

Making A Way: An Auto/Ethnographic Exploration Of Narratives Of Citizenship, Identity, (Un)Belonging And Home For Black Trinidadian[-]American Women, Anjuliet G. Woodruffe

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this research study is to gather, convey and explore the lived experience related to transnational identity construction for Black Trinidadian[-]American women. I adopt an interdisciplinary approach to better understand what it means to live as, and be, a Black Trinidadian[-]American. Using auto/ethnography and interviews, I seek to answer the following research questions: (1) How do Black Trinidadian[-]American women describe their negotiation of cultural identity in Trinidad and the United States? (2) How do Black Trinidadian[-]American women describe “in-between” homeplaces within the intersectional context of gender, race, class, and culture? (3) How do Black, Trinidadian[-]American women describe transnational, …

Theorizing Feminism From The South: Knowledge Production Through South Africa’S Feminist Journal Agenda, Amanda Gouws

Journal of International Women's Studies

One of the important ways that feminists in South Africa have generated knowledge and theory is through an independent feminist journal, AGENDA, that was founded in 1987. In this article, I discuss the history of AGENDA and analyze the type of feminist knowledge that AGENDA produces as a feminist journal of the Global South and specifically Africa. I also show how African feminism and intersectionality have always been the two core dimensions of knowledge production in AGENDA through the analysis of two trilogies: one on African feminism and one on African sexuality to show how knowledge is used to create …

Dissident Epistemologies: Dialogues Around An Affective Research Experience, Mar Fournier Pereira

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article presents a series of situated reflections on the production of knowledge in social research and the relationships that emerge with communities and participants in the field, in dialog with the contributions of Trans* Epistemologies, decolonial feminisms, and epistemologies of the South that urge to break with the coloniality of knowledge and epistemic violence. Grounded on the process of an affective research experience and developed with a community of transgender women in the city of San José, Costa Rica, I address questions on the role of affectivity in knowledge production and present our collective reflections on a possible alternative …

Women’S Studies, Gender Studies, And Lgbt/Queer Studies: Defining And Debating The Subject Of Academic Knowledge In India, Virginie Dutoya

Journal of International Women's Studies

Women’s Studies is first introduced in Indian academia in the 1970s. There are now more than 150 centres conducting research on women and gender as well as numerous teaching programmes on these topics in India. Research on sexualities and non-heterosexual identities and practices, while less developed, also emerged in the 1990s. As in any academic field, research on Women’s Studies, gender, and sexuality has been marked by epistemic debates, in particular “terminology debates” (i.e., debates about the proper concepts for discussing gender and sexuality in India). Using a corpus of academic texts, course syllabi, and other academic documents as well …

Gender Studies In Nigeria: Growth And Institutional Contexts Of Semi-Autonomous Centres, Adedeji Adebayo

Journal of International Women's Studies

The study discussed a micro-level dimension of the institutionalization of Gender Studies (GS) in Nigeria, emphasizing the growth of semi-autonomous centres over the last two decades. It focused on a case study of one particular centre; the Centre for Human Rights and Gender Education (CHURGE), based in Tai Solarin University of Education (TASUED) in the southwest of the country, offering an analysis of how funding, institutional politics, and a dearth of specialist researchers have shaped the evolution of GS in 21st century in Nigeria. The study employed a qualitative research approach with samples purposively selected among researchers at CHURGE. Although …

Introduction: Gender Knowledge: Epistemological And Empirical Contributions From The Global South, Emmanuelle Bouilly, Virginie Dutoya, Marie Saiget

Journal of International Women's Studies

Women’s and gender studies are now accepted academic subjects in many Global South countries, whether the field is well established—even institutionalized—or still emerging. However, this phenomenon is under-studied, even though the history, ideas, and key concepts of women’s, feminist, and gender studies are becoming well documented in Europe and America (Lagrave; Brown; Bard; Clair and Heinen). This special edition therefore aims to shed light on knowledge production about women and gender in and by Southern countries, and not about these countries, as is often the case. On the one hand, this edition brings out the local, regional and global dynamics …

2022 Iggad Conference Program, Charles Joyner Institute For Gullah And African Diaspora Studies

IGGAD Conference Programs

Program of the 2022 IGGAD Conference: Who Owns This? Communities, Heritage, and Preservation.

Interview With Jenny Cavenaugh, Jennifer Jones Cavenaugh, Wenxian Zhang

Oral Histories

Growing up in New York City, Jennifer Jones Cavenaugh earned her BA in Policy Studies from Dartmouth College in 1982, and her MFA in Dramaturgy from Brooklyn College in 1992. After receiving her PhD in Theater History and Dramatic Criticism from the University of Washington in 1995, she served as Assistant Professor of Theater at the University of Denver for three years before joining the faculty of the Louisiana State University, where she earned her tenure and was promoted to Associate Professor of Theater in 2003.

In 2005, Dr. Cavenaugh was named the Winifred Warden Endowed Chair of Theater at …