Digital Commons Network^™

Wishing For The Watch Face In Jonathan Swift’S “The Progress Of Beauty”, Jantina Ellens

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This article illuminates the technological underpinnings of Jonathan Swift’s satire, “The Progress of Beauty” (1719), by exploring how eighteenth-century poetics of beauty and scientific progress pit human against automaton. This article ranges from the ego of masculine technological display to women’s self-identification with the automaton to suggest that Swift’s speaker blazons the aging prostitute’s body with the hope that it might resurrect a lost ideal, the beautiful watch face. Instead, readers are confronted with the vision of Celia who, with her chipped paint, greasy joints, and faulty mechanisms, reminds them that humanity continues to break through its enamel. When readers …

Representations Of Mainstream And Marginalized Subjects In The Work Of Diane Arbus, Grace Short

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

This thesis considers the photographs of the twentieth-century photographer, Diane Arbus. In America during the 1950s and 60s, Arbus photographed both marginalized and mainstream subjects including dwarfs, giants, transvestites, nudists, debutants, socialites, and celebrities. At one point in her career, she expressed an interest in family portraiture and, indeed, a number of her images depict families.

Scholars who have written about Arbus, such as Susan Sontag, Carol Armstrong, Anthony W. Lee, and John Pultz, have formulated theories about Arbus’s motivations, although their findings focus on individual features of her work. Sontag argued that Arbus exploited her unorthodox sitters whereas Armstrong …

Insurgent Knowledge: The Poetics And Pedagogy Of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, And Adrienne Rich In The Era Of Open Admissions, Danica B. Savonick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Insurgent Knowledge analyzes the reciprocal relations between teaching and literature in the work of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, and Adrienne Rich, all of whom taught in the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) educational opportunity program at the City University of New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drawing on archival research and analysis of their published work, I show how feminist aesthetics have shaped U.S. education (especially student-centered pedagogical practices) and how classroom encounters with students had a lasting impact on our postwar literary landscape and theories of difference. My project demonstrates how, …

Emerging Discourses Of Gender And Women In The National Park Service: An Ecofeminist Analysis Of Ranger Newsletter From 1979 To 1999, Emily Sapp

Honors Projects

The key focus of this research is based in ecofeminism, the worldview that the oppression of women is connected to the oppression of nature. This research studies the National Park Service, through the Association of National Park Ranger’s newsletter/magazine Ranger. The study attempts to answer the questions how do issues about gender equality emerge throughout the history of the National Park Service, as looking through the newsletter Ranger? How do ideas of femininity and masculinity emerge and are represented in Ranger throughout time? The study is significant in that it is representative of the NPS, and by revealing …

Imaging The Woman Through Tanzanian Women’S Maxims, Shani Omari, Fikeni E. M. K. Senkoro

Journal of International Women's Studies

Women’s maxims, as well as other forms of oral literature in Tanzania, are a popular genre. They are verbal arts that can be self-addressed or addressed to a fellow woman among womenfolk. This paper intends to examine the role of these maxims in imaging women in Tanzania. This study was prompted by the findings of previous studies regarding the portrayal of women in Kiswahili literature where, generally, women are depicted as inferior beings compared to men, partly due to the fact that most authors are men. Hence, we found it imperative to investigate women’s maxims that are created and uttered …

The Pedagogy Of Difference: Co-Producing Feminist Consciousness Across Borders, Patricia Mohammed

Journal of International Women's Studies

How has a movement built on the consciousness of sisterhood become so fragmented between the end of the 20th and into the second decade of the 21st century? As different political tendencies, widely varying economic conditions and cultural dissimilarities emerged in global struggles to achieve diverse visions of women’s and gender equality, the current feminist movement appears to be characterized by chasms between the east, west, north and south rather than viewed as a movement whose basic tenets are parallel across racial, geographic and social barriers. By looking at lived examples of confrontations, and through a deliberate process of self-reflexive …

Wwe: Redefining Working-Class Womanhood Through Commodified Feminism, Janice M. Sikon

The University Honors Program

World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) is the largest professional wrestling promotion in the world (Bajaj & Banerjee, 2016). Their programs air in 20 languages in over 180 countries, and in the United States approximately 11 million people watch their programs each week (“FAQ,” n.d.). These programs include six hours of televised weekly events and 16 annual pay-per-view events (“WWE Reports,” 2017). In the first quarter of 2017 the company grossed $188.4 million (“WWE Reports,” 2017). They have close ties with the current presidential administration, as Small Business Administrator Linda McMahon was the CEO of the company from 1980 to 2009 (Reuters, …

Beyoncé As A Semiotic Resource: Visual And Linguistic Meaning Making And Gender In Twitter, Tumblr, And Pinterest, Addie L. Sayers China

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

At the intersection of digital identities and new language and social practice online is the concept of searchable talk (ST). ST describes the process of tagging discourse in a social networking service (SNS) with a hashtag (#), allowing it to be searchable by others. Although originating in Twitter, ST has expanded into other SNS, and is used therein not only to mark language-based posts, but also multimodal posts and images. While scholars have elucidated the structure and function of ST, their studies have primarily examined ST within language-based posts; few have researched ST with respect to images and other types …

The Victorian Body, Peter J. Capuano

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The nineteenth century is extremely important for the study of embodiment because it is the period in which the modern body, as we currently understand it, was most thoroughly explored. This was the era when modern medical models of the body were developed and disseminated, when modern political relations to the body were instantiated, and when modern identities in relation to class, race, and gender were inscribed. While questions about the distinctions between personhood and the body were studied by the ancients, nineteenth-century developments in technology, economics, medicine, and science rendered such categories newly important for Britons who were the …

Feminist Voice In The Works Of Indonesian Early Woman Writers: Reading Novels And Short Stories By Suwarsih Djojopuspito, Aquarini Priyatna

Journal of International Women's Studies

Suwarsih Djojopuspito is among the most important early Indonesian women/feminist writers. This research intends to emphasize her rightful position among the first Indonesian feminist writers. Focusing on her very important novel Manusia Bebas (published originally in Dutch as Buiten het Gareelin 1940), one collection of short stories, Empat Serangkai (1954), and a novel written in Sundanese, Marjanah (1959), I argue that feminist spirits and ideas have actually been existing and elaborated in works by women writers in the era prior to the Indonesian New Order (1966-1998) as exemplified by Suwarsih’s works. What is important in these works is that …

Women Nationalists In Nineteenth And Twentieth Century Ghana And Zimbabwe: Case Studies Of Charwe Nehanda Nyakasikana And Yaa Asentewaa, Abdul Kuba

Journal of International Women's Studies

Nation and nationalism have been associated with masculinity. Nations and states are often envisioned through heroic narratives. According to these narratives, nations are formed through the blood and toil of fore-fathers not fore-mothers. Women’s roles in nation-building are regarded as supportive, relegating them to the background as supporters of their male counterparts. Heroines receive little or no attention in the historiography of national struggles. Pedagogically, heroines are understudied in most African school systems. It is easier for one to encounter names of nationalists like Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), Nelson Mandela (South Africa), Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), Thomas Sankara (Burkina Faso) among other …

English Women At Home During The Second World War: Anderson Shelters As Domestic Spaces, Stephanie Butler

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article examines representations of Anderson shelters in English women’s Second World War epistolary correspondence, arguing that both the adaptation of shelters and the representation of these changes—as depicted in women’s correspondence—evidences wartime resilience. The article argues that the domestication of these spaces designed for protection, rather than comfort, resonates with pervasive wartime discourses articulating the cultural value of the home.

The Merits And Limits Of A Gendered Epistemology: Muslim Women And The Politics Of Knowledge Production, Farhana Rahman

Journal of International Women's Studies

At their essence, feminist epistemologies argue that traditional male epistemologies have systematically removed the voice of women from knowledge production, effectively barring women from being “knowers”. How does the gendering of knowledge affect those with a particular perspective of viewing the world? This article explores the merits and limitations of a gendered epistemology by employing standpoint theory as a tool of analysis. Through the lens and context of the intersection of religion, gender, and Western academia, I trace the politics of knowledge production as it relates to Muslim women working within an Islamic paradigm. This article first explores gender as …

Transnational Nationalists: Cosmopolitan Women, Philanthropy, And Italian State-Building, 1850-1890, Diana Moore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Transnational Nationalists: Cosmopolitan Women, Philanthropy and Italian State-Building, 1850-1890” is a study of Protestant and Jewish transnational reforming women who took advantage of a period of fluidity to act as non-state actors and impact Italian unification and liberation, a process known as the Risorgimento, and subsequent Italian state-building. Inspired by Giuseppe Mazzini’s spiritual brand of romantic cosmopolitan nationalism, as well as Giuseppe Garibaldi’s military campaigns, and believing that women had a god-given duty to provide education, morality, and uplift to oppressed groups, they worked to provide Italy not only with physical unification but also moral regeneration. Through an examination of …

What Is My Role In Changing The System? A New Model Of Responsibility For Structural Injustice, Robin Zheng

Women's and Gender Studies Program: Faculty Publications

What responsibility do individuals bear for structural injustice? Iris Marion Young has offered the most fully developed account to date, the Social Connections Model. She argues that we all bear responsibility because we each causally contribute to structural processes that produce injustice. My aim in this article is to motivate and defend an alternative account that improves on Young’s model by addressing five fundamental challenges faced by any such theory. The core idea of what I call the Role-Ideal Model is that we are each responsible for structural injustice through and in virtue of our social roles, i.e. our roles …

Away From The End Of Motherhood: Sites Of Haunting In The Social Imaginary In Lemonade And The Handmaid's Tale, Julia Michele Fleming

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the television series adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale, specifically the episode "A Woman's Place," and Beyoncé's Lemonade: A Visual Album. I argue that these cultural texts leverage representations of women's lived experiences to scrutinize contemporary American anxieties about motherhood and reproductive justice. Lemonade, a celebration of Black womanhood, presents a counterpoint to The Handmaid's Tale's preoccupation with white motherhood in way that speculates on the utopian potentials of a woman-centered society.

Using bell hooks' film analysis, Avery Gordon's "haunting," and Luce Irigaray's "mimicry," I examine two interconnected themes: feminist aesthetics and generational haunting. …

Las Hijas De Violencia: Performance, The Street, And Online Discourse, Madison M. Snider

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores street harassment as a contentious practice in the rhetorical spaces of the street and social media posting through a case study of the performance group Las Hijas de Violencia. Through anarchistic direct action resistance tactics, the group confronted harassers in the streets of Mexico City and their recordings launched global media interest which led to viral online sharing. Widespread sharing of their performance led to the creation of public discursive space, through comments sections, which was utilized to measure attitudes toward street harassment and feminist direct action protest. Contextualized in a growing call for an end to …

Radical Black Drama-As-Theory: The Black Feminist Dramatic On The Protracted Event-Horizon, Jaye Austin Williams

Faculty Journal Articles

In this essay, I elaborate my present project, grounded in what I call drama theory, the critical theoretical dimensions of dramatic writing, and address the deeply troubling intramural tensions across Black Studies, between those who read blackness, and black cultural production, through largely futurist, celebratory lenses; and those who apply a structural analysis to blackness as the site against, upon, and through which the world coheres its soci(et)al apparatuses and machinations. I situate myself within the latter constellation, and sample here two plays by Suzan-Lori Parks to demonstrate how I translate the analyses of antiblack violence by black feminist …

Women And Gender In The French Revolution, Alyson Handelman

History - Master of Arts in Teaching

I. Synthesis Essay………………………………3

II. Primary Documents and Headnotes……….23

III. Textbook Critique……………………………28

IV. New Textbook Entry………………………...30

V. Bibliography…………………………………..41

Bodylore And Dress, Amy K. Milligan

Women's & Gender Studies Faculty Publications

Bodylore includes the ways in which the body is used as a canvas for inherited and chosen identity. Bodylore considers the symbolic inventory of dress and hair, addressing a range of identities from conservative religious groups like the Amish and the Hasidim to edgy goth and punk devotees. The body is scripted in portrayals of race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, and politics, including such topics as tattoos, piercing, scarification, hair covering and styling, traditional and folk dress, fashion, and body modification. The central bodylore questions are whether individuals choose consciously or subconsciously to engage with their performative body, as well …

Midwifery And Rhetoric: The Power Of Rhetoric In Influencing Social Attitudes About Authority In Female Reproductive Care, Mei Chan Lund

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

Nowhere are the effects of that rhetoric on the practice of midwifery more evident than in the reactionary works of midwives themselves, such as those of Justine Siegemund and Jane Sharp in the seventeenth century. This paper will explore how the strategies and allusions used in Siegemund's The Court Midwife of the Electorate Brandenburg and Sharp's Midwives Book allow for the conclusion that gendered literary rhetoric was the primary cause of the shift from female to male authority in the practice of midwifery.

Tracing Writer/Reader Identity In, And In Response To, Queer Latinx Autohistoria-Teorìa, Corrina Wells

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project examines how diverse representation changes the discourse around queer latinx identities. This project extends theories of representation that show how a text changes the imaginary of the reader through a two-part methodology. First, through explicating Spit & Passion and A Cup of Water Under My Bed, this project examines how these texts construct a readers’ imaginary. Then, through a corresponding qualitative assessment on readers’ responses to the texts, this project identifies the extent to which the texts change the beliefs and understandings of a small group of students. Articulating an ecology of identity using the texts under examination, …

Wonder Woman: A Case Study For Critical Media Literacy, Adriana N. Fehrs

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

To better grasp the messages Wonder Woman is sending to its audience, a Critical Media Literacy (CML), ideological, and feminist framework is used to examine whether, and if so how, Wonder Woman succumbs to stereotypes that are often portrayed in the media. These theories will be used in the ensuing project to build a curriculum aimed at high school students.The curriculum positions students to examine the hegemonic ideologies that are represented in pop culture, specifically Wonder Woman.

Resist School Pushout With And For Black Girls, Joanne Smith

Occasional Paper Series

Girls for Gender Equity (GGE) is a Brooklyn based, intergenerational organization committed to the optimal development of girls of color. GGE centers the experiences of young women of color, in particular, Black cis and trans young women, LGBTQ and gender nonconforming youth within advocacy campaigns, participatory action research and programming.

Young women of color disproportionately experience a continuum of violence ranging from verbal, physical and psychological abuse, to sexual assault and rape, homophobia, transphobia, racism, classism, poverty, state sanctioned and institutional violence. Forty percent Black and 37% Latina female students don’t graduate from high school, compared to 22% of white …

(Dis)Appearing Subjects: Managing Violence Through The Discourse Of Bullying, Rachel E. Levitt

American Studies ETDs

In the early 2000’s, “bullying” became the new center of LGBTQ justice organizing. As part of this development a bullied subject emerged. This bullied person on whose behalf liberation was being sought took various forms from the bullied school shooter, to the cyberbullying victim, to the bullied suicidal queer. As the subtitle of my dissertation suggests, I focus on “managing violence through the discourse of bullying.” This marks a two part process: how the discourse of bullying manages to do violence and how it manages populations biopolitically. This study tackles one of the core paradoxes that inform the formation of …

Performing (Female) Masculinity In The Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World: An Analysis Of The Mujer Varonil In Gender And Genre, Nathaniel L. Redekopp

Spanish and Portuguese ETDs

The following dissertation on the trope of the mujer varonil^[1] employs bibliographical research in literary criticism and historiography to identify and describe socio-historic attitudes about gender. In particular, this dissertation examines gender as communicated by texts that use the mujer varonil, or “masculine woman”, characterization to either praise or vilify exceptional female subjects in ways that highlight normative limits for masculine and feminine gender expression. Four texts are examined: a male author writes each and each represents a literary genre that was significant in early modern Spain and Spanish America. These genres are the hagiography, the relación, the …

Rand, Erica, Danella Demary

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Erica lived in Chicago for many years, but relocated to Maine because of her teaching position at Bates College. She is a Professor of Art and Visual Culture and of Gender and Sexuality Studies, and is acting interim chair of the Gender and Sexuality Studies department. She discussed her coming out process as well as her experiences as a budding activist in ACT UP and a branch of ACT UP, called The Pissed Off Dyke Cell. Erica talked significantly about her previous relationships and how those connections shaped her activisim as well as how her activism shaped her relationships. She …

Sexual/Textual Politics In The Women Of Ophelia A. Dimalanta’S Poems, Ma. Socorro Q. Perez

English Faculty Publications

The study attempts to show that while Ophelia A. Dimalanta’s excellent New Critical training and education have rendered her a quintessential poet conscious of form, technique, and craftsmanship, which in turn, has been foregrounded by her equally New Critical-trained colleagues, this New Critical tradition has limited the study of her oeuvre to artistic structure and form, glossing over myriad concerns that the poems may have. The present study, in turn, has recuperated form, technique, and genre to encode the feminism that undergirds her poetic vision. Foregrounding Dimalanta’s vision enfleshed in art, the study recuperates the sexual/textual politics in Dimalanta’s Lady …

Sex Wars Revisited: A Rhetorical Economy Of Sex Industry Opposition, Alison Phipps

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper attempts to sketch a ‘rhetorical economy’ of feminist opposition to the sex industry, via the case study of debates around Amnesty International’s 2016 policy supporting decriminalisation as the best way to ensure sex workers’ human rights and safety. Drawing on Ahmed’s concept of ‘affective economies’ in which emotions circulate as capital, I explore an emotionally loaded discursive field which is also characterised by specific and calculated rhetorical manoeuvres for political gain. My analysis is situated in what Rentschler and Thrift call the ‘discursive publics’ of contemporary Western feminism, which encompass academic, activist, and public/media discussions. I argue that …

Beauty And The Internet: Old Wine In A New Bottle, Piyali Sur

Journal of International Women's Studies

In the consumer culture of late modernity, young women are obsessed with their physical appearance and attempt to conform to socially constructed beauty standards. Adolescent girls are surrounded by images of beauty through advertising, television, films, magazines and the recent beauty blogs that have burst forth on the worldwide web. This paper is on the use of beauty blogs by adolescent girls of the age group 15 to 19 years living in Kolkata, whereby depicting that there is no escape from feminine embodiment even in the digital world. The researcher has compiled the beauty/fashion blogs that adolescent girls regularly visit …