Digital Commons Network^™

"Queen Of The Mother-Tucking (Western) World": Authenticity And Nationality On Drag Race, Zane A. Willard

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Against the backdrop of legislation across the United States regulating drag performances, I turn to the reality television (RTV) franchise Drag Race as a popular media site where queer identities are represented. More specifically, I analyze the series RuPaul’s Drag Race: UK vs The World (UKVTW) which is the first series in the franchise to feature participants from different countries competing for the title “Queen of the Mother-Tucking World.” Furthermore, the series suggests it represents “global” drag. Understanding that no singular RTV series can represent a singular global drag identity, I ask: how does the series represent global drag? Turning …

Relationship Dissatisfaction And Partner Access Deficits, T. Joel Wade, Maryanne Fisher, James Moran

Faculty Contributions to Books

In this chapter, we discuss how partners’ feelings about relationship inequity (i.e., unequal access to relationship resources, such as sex, emotional investment, finances, and family-size decisions) can cause relationship dissatisfaction. Individuals may initiate a romantic relationship with the desire to create a long-term committed relationship that is emotionally and sexually fulfilling. However, romantic relationships do not always fulfill both partners’ needs and desires, and couples often experience conflict and dissatisfaction when this happens. In this chapter, we explore both the proximate and ultimate reasons for why individuals experience dissatisfaction in their relationships. Proximate reasons include issues such as finances, cultural …

“All The Evil Music Has:” Musical Representations Of The Vamp In Interwar American Popular Media, Martha Schulenburg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the vamp as a symbol of sociosexual deviance in film and American popular music of the 1910s and ‘20s. Abbreviated from vampire, “vamp” came to be used as a term for sexually voracious and predatory women in the early 20^th century. Following the unprecedented success of the 1915 film A Fool There Was, vamps then became a staple in American popular media. My project examines the process of remediation and cultural dissemination at the dawn of mass media via the vamp in music. Vamps were pervasive in cinematic accompaniment, vaudeville, jazz, and Tin Pan Alley …

Queer Ecologies: A Final Syllabus/Zine Product Of Our Independent Study, Yeh Seo Jung, Ray Craig

Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal

This zine is the product of our independent study course Queer Ecologies, which is an exploration of bio-social systems using a queer and feminist theoretical lens. We aim to look critically at knowledge formation and construct alternative visions for more just and sustainable relationships between science, nature, and ourselves. While queer theory most directly interrogates the normative structure of heterosexuality both in humans and in biology more broadly, these studies include analyses of hierarchy, power, and value. Queer Ecology can be used to examine phenomena such as climate change, extinction, pollution, species hierarchies, agricultural practices, resource extraction, and human population …

Chronotropics: Caribbean Women Writing Spacetime, Odile Ferly, Tegan Zimmerman

Language, Literature, and Culture

This book deconstructs androcentric approaches to spacetime inherited from western modernity through its theoretical frame of the chronotropics. It sheds light on the literary acts of archival disruption, radical remapping, and epistemic marronnage by twenty-first-century Caribbean women writers to restore a connection to spacetime, expanding it within and beyond the region. Arguing that the chronotropics points to a vocation for social justice and collective healing, this pan-Caribbean volume returns to auhthonous ontologies and epistemologies to propose a poetics and politics of the chronotropics that is anticolonial, gender inclusive, pluralistic, and non-anthropocentric.

Table of Contents:

1 Introduction: Chronotropics, co-authored by Odile …

Interfaith Communities: Relationships In Thirdspace, Jessica Spence Moss

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Contending with, and expanding the understanding of, diverse interfaith relationships, this project presents a nuanced awareness of interfaith action and the dialectic of lived religion with interfaith engagement. Arguing that interfaith is a type of thirdspace in which engagements have affective impacts on individuals within interfaith communities, as well as orientation towards religious communities. While there are common struggles, interpretations, and socializations that hinder the participation of women and non-binary individuals in institutional interfaith spaces, observing organic interfaith relationships as occurring in thirdspace allows for the recognition of radical inclusion and dedication to diversity.

The Feminization Of Mexico City In The Late Twentieth Century: Polvo De Gallina Negra, Pola Weiss, And Lourdes Grobet, Alexis N. Corral

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis centers on select artworks in public intervention, photography and video as an exploration of female's relationship to Mexico City's social landscape and urban space during the late 1970s into the early 1990s. In three case studies, I explore historical urban planning, gender relations, and the effects of modernization.

Sex And The Superman: Gender And The Superhero Monomyth, Christopher Maverick

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since the 1938 introduction of Superman, superheroes have been ever-present in American popular culture. Indeed, with the modern preponderance of comic book movies dominating the American cinematic box-office, superhero fantasy is arguably the most important genre of fiction being produced in the contemporary moment. Peter Coogan, Kurt Busiek and many other scholars have discussed the prominence and relevance of the superhero fantasy as a genre. Still others, including Umberto Eco and Marco Arnaudo, have asserted that the superhero is not so much a genre and as it is the evolution of mythology. In Sex and the Superman, I argue …

The Relationship Among Learners’ At-Risk Indicators And Ninth Grade Algebra I Achievement, Sara E. Tudon

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to examine the relationship between at-risk indicators including socioeconomic status, English language learners (ELL), and gender to student performance in the Algebra I End of Course assessment. The research questions presented in the non-experimental quantitative research design were: (1) What is the impact of socioeconomic status on the Algebra I EOC exam? (2) What is the success rate of ninth grade students identified as English Language Learners (ELL) compared to non-identified ninth grade students in Algebra I? and (3) What is the difference in ninth grade Algebra I achievement between males and females? (4) …

Streaming Gender, Masculinity, And Race: Luke Cage's Impact On The Marvel Cinematic Universe, Samual Madison Mcmillen

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Streaming Gender, Masculinity, and Race: Luke Cage’s Impact on the Marvel Cinematic Universe analyzes gender, masculinity, and race in Marvel’s transmedia universe. The analysis examines streaming television’s role in confronting social issues related to gender, masculinity, and race, such as systemic racism, white supremacy, and toxic masculinity. This study examines the impact of three Netflix series on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, and The Defenders, as these series were Marvel’s initial use of streaming television. The character, Luke Cage, appears in each of these Netflix series, and while each series tells a story of its own, the …

Everything’S Gonna Be Kinda Queer: Autistic Gender & Sexuality In Everything’S Gonna Be Okay, Jinx Mylo

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

This paper analyzes the representations of autistic characters in the television show Everything’s Gonna Be Okay in relation to gender and sexuality. In contrast to previous screen representations, the four autistic characters provide a variety of gender expressions and sexual orientations, challenging the stereotypes that perpetuate the idea of autism being limited to heterosexual men. Issues explored include attitudes toward autistic sexual consent and agency, sexual experimentation, and the impacts of communication norms on romantic relationships.

Running Up Against A Brick Wall: U.S. Metajournalistic Discourse Of Gender Equality In Newsrooms, Margaretha Geertsema-Sligh, Tim P. Vos

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

Drawing on institutional theory, feminist critiques of three popular stances on gendered workplaces, and previous research about women in newsrooms, this study considers the metajournalistic discourse about gender equality in newsrooms through a discourse analysis of more than 500 online articles and blog posts in American journalism industry publications from January 2002 until September 2019. The findings confirm that the status of women journalists remains problematic. Journalists recognize that women remain underrepresented in terms of numbers and face a pay gap, glass ceiling, and various forms of harassment. Solutions are sometimes presented in terms of women’s individual empowerment. Arguments in …

Symbolic Annihilation And Stereotyping Of Native American Women In News: A Content Analysis Of Health, Safety, And Economic Status Related News, Shreyoshi Ghosh

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Professional Projects

This is an exploratory study on the safety, economic, and health challenges of Native American women who constitute about 1.5% of the American population. With the symbolic annihilation and stereotyping of Native American people and women of color, there was a need to study the portrayal of Native American women in news. The findings indicated there was a growth in news coverage during 2018-19 and safety, including missing and murdered, emerged as a key topic. But symbolic annihilation in health and economic status including pay gap news was significant. Health news mostly covered maternal health and deaths but excluded most …

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 …

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.

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 …

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 …

(Re)Fashioning Gender: Dress As Embodied Feminist Critique In Modernist Women’S Writing, Lauren Elizabeth Sperandio Phelps

English Dissertations - Archive

In this dissertation I examine early twentieth century women writers’ use of fashion as a mode of critiquing gender, race, and class oppression. Through close reading of the novels of Nella Larsen, Edith Wharton, Anzia Yezierska, Radclyffe Hall, and Virginia Woolf, I explore how fashion in these works functions to emphasize elements of identity formation and conditioning. I argue that by taking up fashion as a tool for critique women writers were able to simultaneously challenge oppressive social structures as well as appraisals of women as unfit for serious analysis or literature. If fashion is considered trivial, then using it …

Anger In The Overlooked: A Gendered Analysis Of The January 6, 2021 Capitol Hill Breach, Elizabeth Bender

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

The violence seen at the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021 has sparked concern at the threat of domestic violent extremism (DVE) within the United States. Over 700 individuals have been federally charged in connection with the events of January 6 including almost 100 women. Women’s involvement in DVE is underestimated and understudied. This project utilized a corpus of over 1,000 court documents to content code variables relating to violence and DVE affiliation for the individuals who have been federally charged in relation to January 6th. The results of the coding process were then used to compare the rates …

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 …

Wonders In The Deep: Faith And Religious Practice In The Shipboard Writings Of American Sailors, 1810-1859, Valerie Sallis

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

While stereotypes of sailors as immoral, godless ne’er-do-wells flourish in mainland historical accounts, little attention has been paid to the records left by sailors that document their own faith and religious practices. This thesis examines the logbooks, journals, and diaries written by American sailors while at sea, sounding the depth of sailors’ religious beliefs through their own words. While American seamen certainly drank, swore, and caroused, sailors also frequently captured in their writing a much more religious nature than the mainland expected of them. Sailors’ position as highly mobile laborers on the ultimate borderlands—the sea itself—impacted their religious practice and …

From Handmaids To Princesses: How Identity And Politics Impact Definitions Of Biblical Rape, Gabrielle R. Isaac-Herzog

Classical Mediterranean and Middle East Honors Projects

The politics of sex in the Bible are complex. They are impacted and limited by the time of the stories, as well as the political landscape and laws of the region. However, since many modern religions have emerged from the text of the Hebrew Bible, it is important for scholars to continue the work of critically examining the texts in the contemporary context. This paper offers a textual analysis of several biblical stories through a feminist and decolonial lens. Through the generation of a taxonomy by which these stories can be categorized, this paper posits that the biblical definitions of …

The Effect Of Creative Art Therapy On Trauma Victims Suffering From Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Sophia Swiatek

Senior Honors Theses

When confronted with a traumatic situation, individuals’ brains often face difficulty in storing and/or processing such experiences. Unfortunately, this presents challenges for accessing those memories later in life, especially if the individuals are solely using speech-based techniques to do so. This fact has spurred research on whether various other therapeutic techniques, such as Creative Art Therapy (CAT), can produce better results in improving the mental health of a trauma victim suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This study attempts to uncover whether age, gender, and/or type of therapy play a significant role in the improvement of CAT clients’ mental health …

‘Could The Subaltern Speak?’ Patriarchy And Gender-Based Violence In Ben Okri’S Dangerous Love, Francis Etsè Awitor

Journal of Gender, Ethnic, and Cross-Cultural Studies

In a patriarchal society, women are, on the most part, the least representative in socio-political and economic spheres. They are frequently considered as second-class citizens, and live in the shadow of their male counterparts. They are portrayed as commodities, objects that satisfy men’s needs while being used as sex toys, cooks, servants, housewives and housemaids. They face various forms of violence and abuse as far as they are seen as sub-humans. In a society trapped in a web of traditional, cultural and religious beliefs, women’s plights and sufferings are often overlooked and ignored. By utilizing a feminist lens, the violation …

Decentering The Gendered Whiteness Of The Iconic American Cowboy: Media, Performance, And Race In The Rodeo World, Louise A. Blair

Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities

Throughout American history, cowboys have been a cultural fascination and iconic symbol of strength and masculinity. To this day, cowboys are readily present in popular culture and imagery, but are nearly always portrayed as an exclusively white character. This paper explores the historical inaccuracies of this portrayal, while decentering the whiteness of the cowboy by discussing media, performance, and race. Through this, case studies such as the Bill Pickett Rodeo, 21st century popular images of black cowboys, and the presence of horses in recent protests come to light as alternative images for a new American cowboy emerging in American culture. …

The Mundane Female Space: Re-Evaluating The Dynamics Of Women In The Transnational Kitchen, Kashyapi Ghosh, V. Vamshi Krishna Reddy

Journal of International Women's Studies

The kitchen space has often been read as the ultimate arena for women’s manifold repression, discomfiture, and gendered labour. This article aims to evaluate the nature of the kitchen space through the analysis of movies, which give a significant amount of visibility to the kitchen space. The arguments investigated in this article are laid out in two ways: one, to re-assess the stereotypical notions about the mundane space as prevalent in the literature, and two, to problematise the space and understand it from multiple perspectives and dimensions. We consider these two arguments while conducting a textual analysis and thematic network …

Male And Female Interactions: A Multimodal Analysis Of Shonen Manga, Alexandria Perez

The Montana English Journal

A qualitative multimodal content analysis of popular manga examined how female and male character interactions represented gender roles. An analytical tool was developed using multimodal, semiotic, social semiotic, gender, and feminist theories to understand representations of males and females in this popular media. This study showed that traditional gender norms are still present in manga, but there are some that break stereotypes. Also, in using both textual and visual elements to interpret multimodal texts, understanding of character interactions were enhanced because the intermodal interactions created new meaning. Implications suggest positive outlooks for manga being used as an educational tool by …

What Does It Mean To Be A Female Character In “Indie” Game Storytelling? Narrative Framing And Humanization In Independently Developed Video Games, Mildred F. Perreault, Gregory P. Perreault, Andrea Suarez

School of Advertising & Mass Communications Faculty Publications

Video games have long held a spotty history in their narratives regarding women. Most research has examined large budget games and identified issues of simplification, oversexualization, and a general lack of agency among female characters. The present study explores the gaming niche of “indie”—or independent game developer—video games in their representations of women in particular with Never Alone, Gone Home, and Her Story. These games were released around the time frame of the GamerGate controversy—a controversy which drew attention to the treatment of women in gaming culture—and hence, the games are used to reflect on a potential shift in games …

Carnivalizing The Nation: Reassessing The Trinidad And Tobago Carnival As An Inclusive Platform For Local And Diaspora Cultural Identity, Shari Bissoondatt

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Trinidad and Tobago's 2020 National Cultural policy ostensibly seeks to build the twin islands’ cultural confidence through the development of a unifying and empowering national cultural identity. However, this research asserts that the current policy undermines these national goals by approaching its community through problematic colonial, nationalist frameworks and through centralizing the annual carnival festival. This positioning poses several key problems. First, it reinscribes the colonial cultural identity of the island. Second, this nationalist, Christian colonial approach reinforces a binary of belonging and non-belonging that excludes minoritized, diasporic, and non-conforming gender communities. Third, by centralizing carnival in cultural policy, the …

Technology, Gender And Organizations: A Systematic Mapping Study, Gonzalo Valdes, Bobbi Thomason, Andrea Bentancor, Isidora Jeria, Constanza Troncoso

All Faculty Open Access Publications

In this article, we employed a systematic mapping methodology to examine the existing literature at the intersection of technology, gender and organizations. While much has been written about gender in organizations, the research has not consistently considered that modern organizations are increasingly technology-driven - in technology may lie an underexplored lever that could help expand our understanding of gender issues at the workplace. By analyzing a final sample of 168 research papers, we found that two main forms of conceptualizing technology emerged: technology as culture and technology as tools. Papers in the first category are concerned with environments in which …