Digital Commons Network^™

Gender Dynamics Of Missionary Work In India And Its Impact On Women’S Education: Isabella Thoburn (1840- 1901) - A Case Study, Marthal Nalini

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article is a cross-cultural study of the work of the first North American single woman missionary educator Isabella Thoburn who was sent overseas by the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The objective of this article is to examine the motives of Isabella, her career in India, and the impact of her work on women’s education. It also highlights the facts that Isabella was an extra-ordinary woman and carved spaces for herself as professional, administrator, mentor, and matriarchs, first in her parent society and then in cross-cultural contexts, for which there was no precedent. The early …

Connections And Complicities: Reflections On Epistemology, Violence, And Humanitarian Aid, Kiri Gurd

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper explores the relationship between power/knowledge and violence. It attempts to connect epistemological constructions and discursive practices to conflict and humanitarian aid operations by deconstructing the narrative of ‘Development’. The paper also attempts to tease out the way seemingly transparent and humanitarian actions, even within the academy, are complicit in reiterating hegemonic representations that reproduce systems of inequality and injustice. The paper draws on feminist methodologies that are primarily deconstructive in nature in order to highlight these connections and complicities, making clear that the way certain knowledges become centralized, while others are subjugated, reflects the functioning of the global …

Uneasy Transvestism? Fashioning A Space For The Single Woman In Sex And The City, Nicola Rodie

Journal of International Women's Studies

‘Uneasy Transvestism? Fashioning a Space for the Single Woman in Sex and the City’ is essentially an exploration of the ways in which fashion is used within the programme to explore the parameters of the female body, and in particular, to define a sexually fluid space for the single woman. I approach the material from a cultural studies methodology, trying to especially decipher the meanings inherent in the visual language of the programme, and its use of clothing to costume its four female protagonists. Intrigued and influenced by theorists such as Butler, Hollander and Garber, but largely relying on …

The Example Of Barbara Johnson, Pamela Caughie

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Memory-Craft: The Role Of Domestic Technology In Women's Journals, Tammy Powley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The term "memory-craft" refers to arts and crafts media where personal memorabilia and journaling are combined and assembled into book form. Examples of memory-crafts include scrapbooks, art journals, and altered books. Traditionally, women have been the primary assemblers of memory-crafts, using this form as a method of autobiography and genealogical archiving. Memory-crafting is often associated with the amateur home-crafter, and while historians have long understood its cultural significance, academia has not properly considered memory-craft as a type of alternative discourse. The purpose of this study is to examine the use of memory-crafting as a non-traditional method of writing, especially among …

Weight Control Behavior And Women: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, Jacqueline A. Walcott-Mcquigg

Journal of International Women's Studies

The objective of this study was to seek directly from culturally diverse women information on their weight control behavior. Specific questions were: What types of weight control behavior are practiced by women? 2) What factors influence participation in weight control behavior? and, 3) what are the cultural influences on women’s motivation and ability to participate in weight control behavior? Face-to-face in-depth interviews were conducted with a convenience sample of 135 middle-income women (African American, Caucasian, Mexican American, Puerto Rican) in their homes, offices, and at other places in their neighborhoods. Additional data collection included measuring body weight and height. The …

Women In Educational Leadership Finding Common Ground, Kathleen Murphey, Glenda Moss, Susan Hannah, Roberta Wiener

Journal of Women in Educational Leadership

The purpose of this research project was to engage in self-reflective analysis of leadership development as an ongoing process of social action towards democratizing education. Four White women connected by their work as educational leaders, teachers and administrators, engaged this topic by conducting a dialogical analysis of their experiences in leadership. They dialogued from what were technically different positions in the hierarchy at their University and implemented a research process to speak across or marginalize those technical differences to produce a text that explored the rich terrain of leading in which they shared experiences of growth, the conceptual frameworks that …

Oy Science Fiction: On Genre, Criticism, And Alien Love: An Interview With Marleen S. Barr, Marlene S. Barr, Ximena Gallardo C., C. Jason Smith

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph of Abstract]

Marleen S. Barr is a pioneer of feminist science fiction criticism and a leader in the fight against the ghettoizing influences of genre-labeling in literary criticism. While the noteworthy Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction (University of Iowa Press, 1992) has been praised as Barr's seminal work in feminist science fiction criticism and theory, it is in Genre Fission: A New Discourse Practice for Cultural Studies (U of Iowa P, 2000) where she takes on literary critics' discriminatory practices against genre fiction in general and fantasy and science fiction in particular.

What’S So Special About Women’S History; Next Steps Facing Historians And Archivist Documenting Regional Women’S History, Danelle L. Moon

Faculty and Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Missy ‘Misdemeanor’ Elliott: Rapping On The Frontiers Of Female Identity, Eliza Sellen

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper provides an analysis of Missy Elliott as a contemporary icon, using the innovation and creativity of two of her music videos (One Minute Man and She’s A Bitch), as media texts that both illuminate and disrupt feminist frameworks of identity. This paper begins with a discussion of the ways in which Elliott subverts and revises cultural signifiers; particular attention is paid to female embodiment and sexuality, blackness and power. The paper moves to discuss the visual landscape created through this cultural play, and explores this terrain through the theoretical frameworks of science fiction and technology.

This …

Introduction: Volumes, Valerie Begley, Olga Gershenson

Journal of International Women's Studies

This special issue of the JIWS seeks to examine the topic of gendered constructions of space(s). How does space structure our understanding of gender? How does it participate in cultural constructions of race, class, and sexuality? What are the political and economic dimensions of the spaces that we construct and that construct us? In this issue we wanted to explore the role(s) that space plays in shaping and maintaining identities and power relations. Far from being neutral or self-evident, we take space to be a site and a means of cultural power, informed by a set of historically and culturally …

Dirty Spaces: Communication And Contamination In Men’S Public Toilets, Ruth Barcan

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper examines the spatiality of men’s public toilets in Australia. It considers public toilets as cultural sites whose work involves not only the literal elimination of waste but also a form of cultural purification. Men’s public toilets are read as sites where heteronormative masculinity is defined, tested and policed. The essay draws on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of homosociality and on Mary Douglas’s conception of dirt as a destabilizing category. It treats the “dirtiness” of public toilets as a submerged metaphor within struggles over masculinity. The essay considers a range of data sources, including interviews, pop culture, the Internet …

Researching Female Public Toilets: Gendered Spaces, Disciplinary Limits, Barbara Penner

Journal of International Women's Studies

I have always been drawn to study intimate yet public spaces – most notably Victorian ladies’ public lavatories and American honeymoon suites. Such research raises larger questions concerning the legitimacy of certain objects of inquiry and of feminist and interdisciplinary work in general. This paper aims to go behind the curtain of academic research and to think about the challenges one faces “back-stage” when investigating spaces or objects connected intimately to sexuality and the gendered body.

Your Humble Servant Shows Himself: Don Saltero And Public Coffeehouse Space, Angela Todd

Journal of International Women's Studies

In 1695, James Salter, who fashioned himself as “Don Saltero,” opened a coffeehouse on a respectable corner in Chelsea. The chief attraction of the coffeehouse, from Salter’s point of view, was the array of natural science detritus and colonial souvenirs displayed on the walls and ceiling. For the price of a cup of coffee, patrons could view the immensity of England’s global grasp, and ponder the bizarre workings of far-away lands and the earth’s creatures. What is noteworthy about Salter’s collection, however, is not the oddities on display—and there were many—but that his collection overlapped considerably with that of the …

Book Review: Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, And The Modern Metropolis, Delano Greenidge-Copprue

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis, edited by Amy Bingaman, Lise Sanders and Rebecca Zorach

Book Review: Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place And Irish Women (Gender, Racism, Ethnicity), Helen Thompson

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women (Gender, Racism, Ethnicity) by Bronwen Walter

Film Review: Performing The Border, Writing Desire, Remote Sensing, And Europlex, Pamela C. Rosi

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of Performing the Border, Writing Desire, and Remote Sensing (Ursula Biemann, filmmaker) and Europlex (Ursula Biemann, filmmaker, in collaboration with Angela Sanders)

A Study Of The Southern Appalachian Granny-Woman Related To Childbirth Prevention Measures., Harriet P. Masters

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Documented as serving in the midwife capacity from the 1880s to the 1930s, the “granny-woman,” often was the only line of defense regarding childbirth support practices for many childbearing age women living in the region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The early twentieth century saw the granny-women discredited and subject to elimination as a result of a purposeful campaign conducted by the male-dominated medical profession. Using knowledge of herbal remedies, the granny-woman played an integral part in the survival of the inhabitants of the region, especially related to childbirth. These centuries-old, herbal-based ministrations have been explored to …

As Filhas De Oyá: Warriors In The Eye Of The Storm, Sheela Bringi

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This study follows the trail of Oyá, a black feminine Orixá, or goddess, within the Afro-Brazilian spiritual tradition of Candomblé, through her elemental forces as the winds, storms, tornadoes, the river Niger, and buffalo. I unearth the influence of Oyá on the lives of three black female followers as she is manifested in the world as a black woman, a mother, a warrior and a lover.

I interviewed three black followers of Oyá and found that she is primarily a motherly force which provides protection, guidance and security for her followers. As a warrior, her energy inspires perseverance, determination, and …

Book Review, Oscar G. Chase

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Beyond The Pale: Women, Cultural Contagion, And Narrative Hysteria In Kipling, Orwell, And Forster, Alan Blackstock

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

History Of Clcweb: Comparative Literature And Culture, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Specters Of The Subaltern : A Critique Of Representations Of Rural Women In Contemporary China, Tsui Sit

Lingnan Theses

China has speeded up modernization since the reform and open-door policy was introduced in 1978. After accession to the World Trade Organization in 1999, China has been further incorporated into the global track. The national policy of economic development requires a continuing exploitation of natural resources and intensive labor from the rural sector, and over the last few decades, there has been a ceaseless wave of rural women going to the cities and working mainly as assembly-line workers, domestic helpers and sex workers.

Developing a subaltern and feminist perspective, this thesis examines representations of rural women in academic research and …

Investigating The Dilemmas Of Ethical Social Research, Helen Johnson

Journal of International Women's Studies

The author’s work with a university ethics committee and field research in Pacific New Caledonia is used as a basis to problematise the biomedical research models used by universities in Australia for assessing social research as ethical. The article explores how culturally specific Western emotional bases for ethical decisions are often unexamined. It expresses concerns about gaps in biomedical models by linking the author’s description of field interactions with research participants to debates about the creation of knowledge.

A Cross-Cultural Test Of Nancy Jay’S Theory About Women, Sacrificial Blood And Religious Participation, Virginia S. Fink

Journal of International Women's Studies

I examine the theoretical insights of Nancy Jay’s 1992 investigation of patrilineal sacrificial rituals and their role in the restriction of women in religious rituals. I use the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, a representative sample of preindustrial societies, to test the strength of patrilineality and other factors identified as subordinating women in preindustrial societies. A societal pattern of male inheritance of property and patrilineal descent are the strongest predictors of women being restricted or excluded from major public religious rituals. The implications of this pattern for modern societies are discussed.

Female Workers In Japan: Opportunities & Challenges, Rajindar K. Koshal, Yuko Yamada, Sasuke Miyazima, Manjulika Kosha, Ashok K. Gupta

Journal of International Women's Studies

This study is based on a survey of male and female workers in organizations in and around Nagoya, Japan. It provides insights into gender issues within Japanese business organizations. The study finds that the female managers in Japan assess the managerial skills of women more positively than do their male counterparts. Business organizations in Japan are male-dominated and little is done to help women fit into the business culture. This is especially true when one considers the number of females in management ranks. Female workers in Japanese businesses perceive that they make many positive contributions to the workplace, such as …

Empowering Women? Engaging A Technology Grant For Social Change, Erica Meiners, Laurie Fuller

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper examines and exposes the writing and implementation of a project, funded by a federal government grant that worked to increase the technological literacy levels of women at an urban working-class university in the Midwest. This three-year study/intervention clearly reveals that disrupting the ‘digital divide’ for working-class women at our university, particularly women of color, requires engagements with the material and practical realities of their everyday lives. In addition to findings in relation to gender, race, low-income communities and technology, participation in this study/intervention illuminated for the authors—anti-racist, feminist academics and organizers—the consequences and costs of moving epistemological frameworks …

En-Gendering Critical Spatial Literacy: Migrant Asante Women And The Politics Of Urban Space., Epifania Adoo-Adare

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

The power of spatial configurations in our everyday social practices and ideological constructions of place and identity cannot be denied. As an architect and an Asante woman who has always lived in African and diasporic cities, I am particularly interested in how Black women’s socioeconomic lives have been constituted, situated, and enacted in western urban spatiality. I believe that Black women the world over are disproportionately represented in unsuitable and inadequate urban spaces and are also underrepresented in urban development decision-making processes. Also, as a Black female architect intent on imagining and constructing radical architectural counter-narratives within hegemonic spatial politics, …

Motivation To Manage And Status Of Women In Library And Information Science: A Comparative Study Among The United States, India, Singapore And Thailand, Sarla R. Murgai

The Southeastern Librarian

In most non-western societies, the self-system (personal standards of judging and guiding one’s actions) is much more inter-dependent on family and society, whereas in western societies, especially in the U.S., it is dependent on the individual self. Cross-cultural studies suggest that a person’s behavior should be understood in the context of their social experience and social roles. In all the cultures and countries studied, however, the status of women is universally lower than men; consequently there is a need to explore the causes. Professional women have made some strides in penetrating managerial ranks in the library and information science profession, …

Gender Bias In Internet Employment: A Study Of The Effects Of Career Advancement Opportunities For Women In The Field Of Itc, Andra Gumbus, Frances Grodzinsky

WCBT Faculty Publications

Women as individuals experience subtle discrimination regarding career development opportunities as evidenced by research on the Glass Ceiling. This paper looks at the ramifications of technology, specifically the Internet, and how it affects women's career opportunities.