Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Witches And Pagans: Women In European Folk Religion, 700-1100, Melissa Ridley Elmes

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.53, No.2 2018

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Swimming In A Sea Of No's: Controlling And Managing The New York Public Pools, Mette L. Jensen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Swimming in a Sea of No's: Managing and Controlling the New York Public Pools traces the genealogy of the regulations, surveillance, and rules employed at New York public pools. The thesis discusses the intent and implications of the spatial strategies created to order and control the environment surrounding the swimming pools, and discusses how municipal public pools as specific, local landscapes manifest broader social and cultural processes. The main focus is on the transformation of the pools during the 1980s and 1990s, two decades after the fiscal crisis in 1975, when the pools had become defunded, dysfunctional spaces. By tracing …

"It's Like They're Right There Next To You": Maintaining Girls' Camp Friendships Via Mobile Media, Elise Bragard

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores how a group of adolescent girls uses mobile and computer-mediated communication as a resource for social and emotional support from their friends. In the midst of widespread public panic about teenage social media use, this study finds nuanced and positive ways that technology is being used in girl culture. Within the context of a technology-free summer camp, adolescent girls form close relationships, which continue throughout the school year. The girls construct a virtual-symbolic camp space using mobile-emotive communication to stay connected with their friends. As a result, they recreate the intra- and inter-personal benefits they experienced at …

Dolls Who Speak: Sex Robots, Cyborgs And The Image Of Woman, Victoria E. Pihl Sorensen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the emerging phenomenon of sex robots from a feminist materialist perspective. I explore the current scholarly and popular debates on sex robots, and suggest a reading of sex robots in their machinic, literary and cinematic expressions to move beyond the moral-ethical impasse that seems to dominate sex robot discussions. Employing Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Myth” on a methodological and theoretical level, I argue for an interdisciplinary approach to studying sex robots, which proceeds carefully so as to avoid contributing to sex panic, and which thinks critically about what it might mean to assess sex robots from a feminist …

Bertha Harris' Confessions Of Cherubino: From L'Ecriture Feminine To The Gothic South, Kara Russell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Inspired by her obsession with the South and informed by the liberating socio-political changes born from the 1970s lesbian feminist movement, North Carolinian author Bertha Harris (1937-2005) provides a poetic exploration of Southern Gothic Sapphism in her complex and tormented novel Confessions of Cherubino (1972). Despite fleeting second-wave era recognition as “one of the most stylistically innovative American fiction writers to emerge since Stonewall,” Harris’s innovation remains largely neglected by readers and cultural theorists alike. Nearly all academic engagements with her work, of which there are few, address her 1976 novel Lover. Instead, this thesis focuses on Confessions of Cherubino …

The Cultural Cold War And The New Women Of Power. Making A Case Based On The Fulbright And Ford Foundations In Greece, Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

When in the 1950s C. Wright Mills was writing about the emergence of the new power elites he paid no attention to the presence of women in its midsts. He was not entirely mistaken. Yet there is a particular intertwining of the ideologies of leadership and masculinity which serves to maintain the status quo, the privilege of an elite and perpetuate preconceptions about political agency and gender. In an attempt to go beyond available models and predominantly masculine images of the postwar America the present article accounts for women’s role in the postwar American efforts for cultural hegemony. It focuses …

Lauretta Vinciarelli In Context: Transatlantic Dialogues In Architecture, Art, Pedagogy, And Theory, 1968-2007, Rebecca Siefert

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation centers on the interdisciplinary work of Italian-born artist, architect, teacher, and theorist Lauretta Vinciarelli (1943-2011), a key yet relatively unknown figure who occupies a historic place in the 1970s revival of architectural drawings, Columbia University’s housing studio, Peter Eisenman’s influential Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) in New York, and architectonic trends in contemporary painting. She was the first woman to have drawings acquired by the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, in 1974), she was among the first women to teach architecture studio courses at Columbia University (hired in 1978), …

Who Is It For? Personal Writing And Antagonistic Readers, Dana Glaser

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Feminist accounts of how “the personal” is used in feminist critical nonfiction have theorized that the effect of the personal is to connect the writer with readers who share a sense of her investment in the subject matter. Looking at two recent, prominent works about gender and sexuality, and race, respectively that combine genres of criticism and narrative memoir – Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me – this paper considers how personal writing is shaped not by readers it wants to connect to, but by anxious, even dreadful, anticipation of being read by its …

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, …

Brother Outsider: Queered Belonging And Kinships In African American Men’S Literature, 1953-1971, Debarati Biswas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Brother Outsider: Queered Belonging and Kinships in African American Men’s Literature, 1953-1971 builds on the work of women-of-color feminists since the late 1960s and queer-of-color critique in the works of José Esteban Muñoz, Robert Reid-Pharr, Roderic Ferguson, and Nadia Ellis, in order to chronicle the emergence of a queer tradition in mid twentieth century African American men’s literature. Through literary analysis and archival research on marginal figures of African American culture during this period, this dissertation proposes that the black pulp novels of Chester Himes, Robert Deane Pharr, Clarence Cooper Jr., and Iceberg Slim perform a queer critique of and …

Progressive Commemoration: Public Statues Of Historical Women In Urban American Cities, Melanie D. Chin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Women who made notable accomplishments are underrepresented in commemoration. Some American cities have brought women to the forefront of becoming visible through commemoration in statues. This thesis compares the commemoration of historical women in four different American cities. Stakeholders hold the key to implementing and changing public policy to increase the visibility of women and people of color in public monuments. Cities which lack representation of women and people of color may learn from and follow the efforts of a leading city to achieve lasting and effective change in representing those who historically been underrepresented.

To Whom Occurs The Haunting: A Singular Exploration Of A Disturbed Femme Psyche, Meghan E. Addison

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

By utilizing critical experimental writing, my capstone project will be an exploration of the haunting effects of transgenerational trauma and its lasting impact on the present-day psyche of one disturbed female subject - myself. Relying on multiple formats of writing, including but not limited to: memoir, autobiography, diaries, letters, poetry, and prose, as well the incorporation of multiple disciplines including the likes of: psychoanalysis, literature, philosophy, and critical theory, I will make an attempt to utilize the micro in exploration of the macro: to explore my unconscious realm in order to understand a larger political context surrounding female madness and …

Cellist, Catalyst, Collaborator: The Work Of Charlotte Moorman, Saisha Grayson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When classically trained cellist Charlotte Moorman (1933-1991) moved to New York City in 1957, she swiftly positioned herself at the intersection of experimental music, performance, video, and the visual arts. She interpreted works by composers like John Cage, collaborated with artists such as Nam June Paik, and founded and organized the New York Avant Garde Festival from 1963 to 1980. This dissertation argues that Moorman’s career sheds new light on what it meant to be an artist in this post-medium-specific moment and proposes that Moorman’s deterritorialization of authorship exerts pressure on traditional art histories. The generative dynamics of her collaborations …

“The Childish, The Transformative, And The Queer”: Queer Interventions As Praxis In Children’S Cartoons, Heather Wright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud considers “the simplified reality of the cartoon,” establishing a definition and theory for the medium (30). McCloud believes that cartoons possess “a special power” that is tied to their unique ability to “focus our attention on an idea” (31). Put simply, there is something about cartoons that allows for an easy exchange of concepts. Cartoons can teach. Using cartoons, a general term, to refer to both comics and animation, this thesis examines the transformative power of queer world building and intervention in recent children’s cartoons and how it functions, and can …

Party On, Derrida!: A Queer, Deconstructionist Look At Wayne's World, Glam, And The Losers Of Rock And Roll, Michelle A. Arp

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What do you get when you mix a girl from Long Island, critical theory, a movie based on a Saturday Night Live sketch, David Bowie, and alternative rock of the early 2000s? A lot of losers, a lot of queerness, and plenty of room for deconstruction.

Part performance studies, part queer studies, and part memoir, this study is a cross-genre and experimental analysis of postmodern ideologies, rock and roll, and comedy. More specifically, I use Jacques Derrida’s notion of “the slash” (Of Grammatology, 1967) in relation to high and low culture via comedies, such that of Wayne’s World …

Everyday Violence And Women's Lives In Zambia: An Autoethnography, Amina Shikupilwa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Gender inequality has been a prominent feature of human societies for the longest time. Zambia, like most countries in Africa, is very conservative and patriarchal in nature. In a typical Zambian household, the male is the head of the family. I am going to talk about my experiences as a female growing in a culture that was highly patriarchal and traditional, and how those experiences have shaped me into the person that I am today. Central to my experiences, is the issue of violence in our home which I experienced from a young age. Domestic Violence is prevalent in most …

Ghostbusting Black Women And Media Representation: A Qualitative Content Analysis On Leslie Jones And Twitter, Ebonee Jackson

Honors Theses

Media representation plays a huge role in how people form their views about certain groups of people. Even when one has particular personal experiences with said group, images in the media can reinforce those views or help to shape new ones. Social media are more recent when compared to other forms of media such as television, magazines and even music videos. Social media are fast paced and always advancing, and therefore, provide more opportunities to analyze a certain group’s media representation. In this thesis, I will discuss the media representation of Black women on Twitter. Specifically, I will look at …

Woman Personified: A Theoretical Framework For The Female Gender Of Personifications In Medieval Literature, Dinah Wouters

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This article wants to provide a comprehensive answer to the question of why the majority of personifications in medieval literature are women. Especially, it seeks to refute the notion that female personifications of positive concepts would somehow escape or reverse the dominant gender ideology of its time. It brings together the different theories that have been proposed by scholars and situates them within a common framework. The article distinguish three levels to which these theories refer: these are, first, the level of the literal or the personification as a woman; second, the level of the figurative, or the idea that …

Simon De Montfort Et Le Gouvernement : Statut Des Femmes Dans Les Statuts De Pamiers (Art. 46) Avant La Magna Carta, Marjolaine Raguin-Barthelmebs

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Promulgated at Pamiers (Languedoc, France), 1^stDecember 1212 by Simon de Montfort after its first great victory during the Albigensian Crusade, those Statutes (juridical texts) are known as the introductory act for the Coutume of Paris in Languedoc, and more specifically regarding heirs rights. Redacted for the administration of newly conquest territories, the establishment of peace and to promote catholic faith against heresy and Languedocians owners of the land, theses Statutes dispose on women in their three final articles. More particularly, the article 46 concerns nobles and heirs women and decides, thanks to matrimony institution, who (and how) they …

“Ubi Et Est Habitatio Sororum Et Mansio Fratrum”: Doppelklöster Und Ähnliche Klostergemeinschaften Im Mittelalterichen Österreich (Diözese Passau In Den Ausdehnungen Des 13. Jahrhunderts), Lucy Barnhouse

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Empress Adelheid And Countess Matilda: Medieval Female Rulership And The Foundation Of European Society, Constance H. Berman

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Medicine Beyond Doctors: Aphrodisiac Recipes In Tenth-Century Medicine And Cuisine, Shireen Hamza

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Textiles, Text And Intertext: Essays In Honour Of Gale R. Owen-Crocker, Laura Diener

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

The Silk Industries Of Medieval Paris: Artisanal Migration, Technological Innovation, And Gendered Experience, Margaret Goehring

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Clare Of Assisi And The Thirteenth-Century Church: Religious Women, Rules, And Resistance, Mary Anne Gonzales

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

The Pleasant Nights, Sally A. Livingston

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Joan, The Fair Maid Of Kent, Samantha Katz Seal

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Strong Female Characters: Jane Austen's Vs. The Mashups', Rachel Mccoy

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

The comparison of Strong Female Characters in Jane Austen’s novels Pride & Prejudice and Sense & Sensibility, with the altered characters in the monster mashups by Seth Grahame-Smith and Ben Winters, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, respectively, reveals differences between the two society’s understanding and portrayal of strength and femininity. Because these texts are so closely connected – Austen is listed as a co-author of both mashups – the differences evident in the representations of women more clearly reveal the differing cultural values. Close textual analysis of the development of three primary female …

Faces Of Bg: Diverse Backgrounds, Many Stories, One Community, Holly Shively

Honors Projects

If you ask people who have been around Bowling Green State University for at least a decade, they’ll tell you the university seems more diverse, but some people find that, based on statistics, the university isn’t diverse enough. Despite BGSU having roughly 77 percent of students being between the ages of 18 and 21 years old and 78 percent being white, smaller communities flourish within the larger BGSU community. FacesofBG.com is a website that explores diversity at Bowling Green State University through the motto “Diverse backgrounds. Many stories. One community.” Through educational components like diversity in the local news and …