Digital Commons Network^™

Black Lives Matter: Why Black Feminism?, Analexicis T. Bridewell

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

In this essay, the author explores the inclusive nature and focal range of the Black Lives Matter movement in an effort to demonstrate how the goals of the movement are grounded in Black feminism. Ultimately, Bridewell concludes that creating inclusive spaces for the exploration of intersectional identities can help bring justice and equality not only to the Black community, but to all lives that have be oppressed or marginalized.

Lullaby For The Burning Ear: How Intersectional Feminism Can Help Decolonize The Latino Consciousness, Donovan E. Hernandez Garcia

Senior Theses

People exist with their own religions, cultures, and practices, which illustrate the ingenuity of humanity. Yet, because of major events that altered the fate of the Americas, a certain societal structure was created to maintain power. Due to colonization, the prolonged exposure to numerous cultures, and the continuation of oppressive systems, people have been forced to band together based on similar characteristics, be it race, gender, or sexual orientation, creating divisions within society. It is because of such colonial mentality, subliminal and apparent, political and cultural movements, such as Feminism and intersectionality, have been created to combat the harmful effects …

The Epistemologies They Carry: An Investigation Of Feminist Writing Assignments, Kathryn Elizabeth Navickas

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation examines feminist writing assignments as one pedagogical site that influences students’ engagement and thinking. Drawing on rhetorical genre studies, feminist pedagogy, and composition scholarship on writing assignments, I argue that because writing assignments are genres that position students in particular subjectivities and carry implicit arguments and values, they are texts that should be revised for their theoretical and pedagogical features. The dissertation examines feminist writing assignments in the history of feminist composition scholarship, in a collection of 73 feminist-oriented writing assignments contributed by teachers who self-identified as enacting or being influenced by feminist pedagogy, and in one of …

I Preferred, Much Preferred, My Version: Exploring The Female Voice And Feminine Identity Within Memoirs Of The 20th And 21st Centuries, Alexandra Fradelizio

Senior Theses

Memoirs have long been a valuable way in which individuals share and reflect on their past experiences. The genre of memoir writing especially had a tremendous impact on a range of American female writers. This thesis explores memoirs written by women throughout the 20^th century. With the shift in women’s roles during the 1900s and early 2000s, the memoirs examined emphasize the importance of feminine identity. The analysis provided within this thesis centers on each memoirist’s unique path in determining her sense of self. Moreover, the memoirists each use the process of writing to relay the value of personal …

A Rhetorical Analysis Of The Feminist And Patriarchal Themes Within Shonda Rhimes' Television Shows "Grey's Anatomy," "Scandal," And "How To Get Away With Murder", Katelyn Roshetko

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

"In The Land Of Tomorrow": Representations Of The New Woman In The Pre-Suffrage Era, Natalie B. O'Neal

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This digital anthology explores feminism in selected short fiction by women writers from the 1911 run of the popular women’s magazines Woman’s Home Companion, Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Farmer’s Wife. This fiction furthered the women’s rights movement by allowing women to imagine a world similar to their own with a heroine who voiced their desires and enacted change. Rather than the more experimental, inaccessible literature of avant garde high modernist writers consumed by the upper class, popular fiction reached a wider, middle class audience and was more effective at producing a progressive zeitgeist following the stilted Victorian …

Practicing Collective Biography, Roberta Hawkins, Karen Falconer Al-Hindi, Pamela Moss, Leslie Kern

Geography and Geology Faculty Publications

Collective biography uses researchers' written memories about a set of experiences as texts for collective analysis. As a feminist approach to research, collective biography draws centrally on the idea that significant memories are critical in the constitution of the self, and maintains that in analyzing memories collectively, researchers can begin to tap into wider social processes and structures. Though rarely used in geography, collective biography could be useful in data collection and analysis for geographers. In this paper, we provide a brief history and description of collective biography. We situate collective biography in relation to life writing methods. We then …

Resisting The Male Gaze: Feminist Responses To The "Normatization" Of The Female Body In Western Culture, Diane Ponterotto

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper attempts to present a feminist critique of the social and political promotion in Western culture of a univocal model of female corporeity imposed on women, and consequently detrimental to female subjectivity and agency. Starting from the Foucauldian position concerning social oppression determined by the disciplinary gaze of power structures, the paper discusses perspectives of resistance to the patriarchally-motivated scrutiny of the female body, and to the mass-media induced coercion of conformity to the normatized model for the female body in contemporary society.

Masculine Compromise: Migration, Family, And Gender In China (Review), Wenqing Kang

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Queen Of Kings: Beyoncé Politics And Pedagogy In The Juvenile Detention Center Classroom, Sarah Kahn

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In 2016, the cultural conversation around feminism and intersectionality has shifted towards new problems of inclusion and change. Feminists are beginning to ask whether the commodification of female sexuality and objectification are extricable, whether a hypersexualized mainstream identity and a feminist one are mutually exclusive, how to integrate female experiences of different socioeconomic backgrounds, races, and cultures into a new feminism, and how to define feminism as we begin to move away from binary gendering. Increased visibility of trans issues has brought genderqueerness and femmephobia into the feminist conversation, and technology and globalization have forced that conversation to open up …

Male Sex Work And Society By Victor Minichiello & John Scott, Harrington Press, 2014, Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette

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

Male Sex Work and Society by Victor Minichiello & John Scott, Harrington Press, 2014

Grrrls In The Underground: Punk Feminism In Composition Studies, Loren Skye Roberson

Student Theses and Dissertations

During the 1970s, Composition scholars refused to give credence to the punk movement. The field’s active shift away from music and subcultural studies meant that punk was emerging as the door was closing. Mirroring the experience of women in the punk scene, feminists broke out of their structured secondariness to claim their own agency in the field of Composition, thus beginning a new wave of scholarship. Beginning with the origin of the punk ethos in France, I trace the history of women in punk to the riot grrrl movement in the 90s, which was hugely influential to third wave feminism …

Signal Disruptions: Gendered Tropes And The Feminist Burlesque Of Martha Rosler, Jennifer Mary Kruglinski

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

My dissertation reveals the role of burlesque and humor in the feminist art of Martha Rosler. Rosler is acknowledged as a key figure in the feminist art movement, as well as a pioneer in video art, yet the fact that humor was integral to what I call her " feminist burlesque" --Rosler's parodic interpretation and re-presentation of the gendered imagery portrayed by the mass media--has been largely ignored in the literature surrounding her work. As such, this dissertation analyzes Rosler's feminist artwork from the 1970s that directly appropriated tropes of gender from the mass media and popular imagination in relation …

Intrusions: Embodied Ethics In The Films Of Claire Denis, Kristin Lené Hole

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

This dissertation develops an account of a feminist cinematic ethics through the films of Claire Denis, along with the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy and Emmanuel Levinas. Two facets of this ethics include what I term an ethics of sense and an aesthetic of alterity. I examine how Denis presents a counter cinema to dominant Hollywood film language, by centering non-mastery, opacity, and embodied relationality in her films. Arguing that the importance of her films is best understood through the lens of ethics, I locate these ethics both at the level of the film itself and also in the sensibility the …

The Coloniality Of Language: Race, Expressivity, Power, And The Darker Side Of Modernity, Gabriela A. Veronelli

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

This article presents a new framework to analyze linguistic relations of power that examines the linguistic effects of what Aníbal Quijano has theorized as “the coloniality of power.” The argument is organized in two sections. The first section introduces “the coloniality of language,” an expression the author uses to refer to the process of racialization of colonized populations as communicative agents beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing until today. This section includes an account of the language and communication paradigm being developed at the time of the Conquest, which, the author argues, contains the coloniality inside. In the second …

Masked Victims: Examining The Violence Of Femme Fatales In Contemporary Film Noir Cinema, Alexx Bonovich

College of Communication Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how depictions of femininity in both neo-noir and contemporary noir cinema challenge feminist activism, conform to post-feminist ideology and perpetuate problematic depictions of sex and violence in the figure of the femme fatale. In order to understand the textual and ideological function of sex, violence, and victims characterized by women in contemporary noir cinema, this research draws on existing discourse in film and cultural studies and analyzes depictions of violent and sexualized women across genres of film and throughout popular culture. The post-modern culture represented in Hollywood films emphasizes post-feminist notions of female empowerment through individualism, subjectivity, …

Patriarchy, Empire, And Ping Pong Shows: The Political Economy Of Sex Tourism In Thailand, Kristen Kelley

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

This project provides a postcolonial feminist analysis of the prosperity and reputation of the sex tourism industry in Thailand. It examines the ways in which Western imperialism created the space for the globalization of sex work, as well as providing a postcolonial analysis of the hegemonic structures which have existed throughout Thailand's history that enable the sex tourism industry to thrive today. This project also explores how policy making and enforcement in Thailand affects the sex tourism industry, as well as the ways in which activism works to change or support these policies, and how this affects individuals who are …

It's A Bird! It's A Plane! It's...Cultural Anxiety? Using Detective Comics' Three Biggest Heroes To Identify And Explore Cultural Anxieties As Depicted Through Television, Jonathan Vander Lugt

Media and Communication Studies Honors Papers

This collection of essays uses the mythic nature of superheroes to examine and discuss specific cultural anxieties as they’re navigated and alleviated in superhero television texts. First, I examine the way that anxiety over feminism and the women’s rights movement manifested itself in Wonder Woman, the 70s television series starring Lynda Carter. Next, I use Smallville and its depictions of a teenaged Superman to explore its handling of anxieties over the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Finally, I performed a content analysis of six different series of Batman cartoons to examine the way they respond to national concerns over …

Brave Sperm And Demure Eggs: Fallopian Gender Politics On Youtube, Pamela Hill Nettleton

College of Communication Faculty Research and Publications

A narrative analysis of videos of human conception from medical and nonmedical sources aired in the democratic space of YouTube finds that stereotypical gender roles are consistently assigned to cellular behavior. Sperm are represented as little men and embodiments of hegemonic masculinity, with heroic sperm winning the egg prize after a competitive athletic contest fraught with peril. Eggs are represented as featureless planets floating in a murky void and are without agency or action. Almost every video is about the “journey” or “adventure” of the sperm; the egg has no adventure. These videos represent a view of a persistent gendered …

Fashioning Mobility: Navigating Space In Victorian Fiction, Mary C. Jones

Theses and Dissertations--English

My dissertation examines how heroines in nineteenth-century British Literature manipulate conventional objects of feminine culture in ways which depart from uses associated with Victorian marriage plots. Rather than use fashionable objects to gain male attention or secure positions as wives or mothers, female characters deploy self-fashioning tactics to travel under the guise of unthreatening femininity, while skirting past thresholds of domestic space. Whereas recent Victorian literary and cultural criticism identifies female pleasure in the form of consumption and homosocial/erotic desire, my readings of Victorian fiction, from doll stories to the novels of Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and Marie Corelli, consider …

#Flawless: The Intersection Of Celebrity Culture And New Media In The Modern Feminist Movement, Laurel Schwartz

Scripps Senior Theses

People have organized around gender equality in modern America for the last century. However, with the advent of new technology, people largely organize in around social movements in online spaces. This thesis explores the ways in which new media expands a popular understanding of the Feminist movement.

Picturing Moral Arguments In A Fraught Legal Arena: Fetuses, Photographic Phantoms And Ultrasounds, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

This article investigates the movement in the U.S. that seeks to regulate the abortion decision by mandating ultrasounds prior to the procedure. The article argues that this reform effort is misguided not only because it is ineffective, but also because ultrasounds provide misleading information and are part of shaming practices that degrade the dignity of women. Both of these problems violate the main tenets of Planned Parenthood of Southern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992). Central to the article’s argument and novelty is that the pro-ultrasound movement’s mistake is both legal and cultural. It misunderstands the nature of visual technology by failing …

Sexuality, Desire And The Ageing Female Body: An Essay, Lauren Marsh

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis consists of a novella, ‘One Night in Hong Kong’, and an essay, ‘Sexuality, Desire and the Ageing Female Body.’ The novella tells the story of an erotic affair between the female narrator and a man in a hotel room in the neon city of Hong Kong. Told in four parts, the story shifts in time, reflecting on earlier events in the narrator’s life and a trip she made to the Sicilian city of Catania in 1954.

Older female protagonists and their sexuality are rarely depicted in contemporary Australian fiction. Where representations do exist, they act as ‘interventionist’ texts, …

Somos Familia: Family As An Organizing Trope In 20th-21st Century Latina/O Literature, Victoria Anne Bolf

Dissertations

This dissertation examines various ways that family has been employed as a model of both oppression and liberation in Latina/o literature. Working from an interdisciplinary standpoint at the crossroads of literary and cultural studies, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, Chicano/a studies, and Latino/a studies, this project seeks to uncover how representations of familia in U.S. Latino/a literary texts accomplish their discursive work, as well as complicating conventional formulations of kinship and family.

I examine Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas, in Chapter One, in terms of queer family and the counter-domestic logic of “the streets.” In Chapter Two, I …

Repositioning Art Work From Patients Suffering From Anorexia Nervosa In A Gendered, Socio-Cultural Context: A Self-Reflective Study, Dafna Rehavia-Hanauer

Journal of Clinical Art Therapy

This article, conceptualized within a post-structuralist, feminist approach to art therapy, addresses the role of visual images as a controlling constituting discourse significant to the formation of the eating disorder anorexia nervosa. As a core position this article argues for a change in the way art work created within the art therapy process by women who suffer from anorexia nervosa is interpreted and analyzed by art therapists. The article argues for an enhanced appreciation and critical analysis of gendered, social-cultural contextualization of visual images and recognition of how these forces have a role in directing women to enact behaviors of …

(Re)Vindicando A La Madre: Matriherencias, Orfandad Y Memoria Colectiva En La Narrativa Contemporã¡Nea Espaã±Ola Escrita Por Mujeres | (Re)Vindicando A La Madre: Matriherencias, Orfandad Y Memoria Colectiva En La Narrativa Contemporánea Española Escrita Por Mujeres, Maria Nieves Alonso Almagro

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

This study adds to the current discussion on the literary treatment of the mother-daughter bond as used by Spanish contemporary women writers (1945-2013). It examines a representative corpus of novels to show how Spanish cultural, social and historical idiosyncrasy has produced differing modes of representation of the mother-daughter bond. This bond responds to a historically specific, autochthonous literary tradition as presented by the narrative of women writers of different generations: the postwar, the transition to democracy, and new novelists of the transition to the XXI century. Two main topics shape the treatment of the mother/daughter bond in these works: orphanage …

The Un-Exceptional Bomb: Settler Nuclearism, Feminism, And Atomic Tourism In New Mexico, Eileen Clare Shaughnessy

American Studies ETDs

New Mexico's atomic tourism acts to render the atomic bomb simultaneously so exceptional that it is viewed as the pinnacle of Western intelligence, and yet also so un-exceptional that it is banal, as typified by kitschy atomic souvenirs. A primary way in which New Mexico's atomic tourist sites accomplish this paradoxical narrative is through gendered and racialized discourses in exhibits, gift shops, and on-site narratives. The racialized trope of the "vanishing Native" functions in these spaces to shore up the colonialist progress narrative in which white Western science and Manifest Destiny inevitably result in the creation of the "exceptional" bomb …

Encountering Metronormativity: Geographies Of Queer Visibility In Central New York, Sean H. Wang

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

This article uses metronormativity to discuss queer visibility and political organizing in central New York. It critically reviews the geography of sexuality literature and – through a vignette – illustrates how metronormative politics impacts service providers. It ends by suggesting that the Marxist concept of ordinary may offer an alternative to metronormativity.

Whovians And Directioners: Challenging The Fangirl Identity, Brianna Vancant

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

Using notions from fan blogs and fan theory, this project analyzes the inconsistencies surrounding the phenomenon of so-called fangirls in the Doctor Who and One Direction worlds. The term fangirl is usually defined as an irrational adolescent female who is only a fan of very specific types of entertainment because of factors that are perceived by other fans as superficial and irrelevant. In contemporary music and television fandom, these fangirls are often criticized and policed by other fans, many times disregarded as not ‘true’ fans. The project studies this distorted perception and how it leads to misconceptions about the wider …

A Divine Inequality: Contextualizing Gender And Authority In Contemporary Mormon Feminism, Taylee Robinson Pardi

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

This project traces the decline of authority for Mormon women coupled with the rise of defined gender roles within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in order to contextualize contemporary Mormon feminism. Using a radical feminist analysis, this project will explore how contemporary Mormon women relate to their early Mormon sisters and the ways in which the culture and doctrine of Mormonism often converge, lending itself to a unique feminist perspective. This project argues that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, as currently practiced, is not just inherently patriarchal, but un-egalitarian, and that contemporary …