Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Gender-Informed Features Of Film Reviews: A Statistical Linguistic Analysis, Matthew Kadish

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The project analyzes how language is used differently in movie reviews based on both the gender of the author of the review as well as the gender of the director of the reviewed film. In doing so, it aims to gain a better understanding of what contexts evoke a typically “masculine” use of language vs. a typically “feminine” use of language within the genre of film criticism, and what implications this has for the state of the film criticism with respect to gender. The results of this study seem to indicate that a critic’s language use takes on the characteristics …

Virility And Defeat: Masculinities In Italy Between Fascism And The Sexual Revolution, Davide Giuseppe Colasanto

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is the history of how masculinity evolved in a postfascist western European country. Militaristic virility was a core tenet of fascist Italy. World War Two weakened it profoundly, as men’s and women’s conceptions of their own sexual identities were fundamentally reshaped by violence and defeat. At the same time, consumer culture, exemplified by American GIs and expanding continuously through the 1950s and 1960s, encouraged the emergence of a new kind of man, only for this type, too, to be contested in turn in the wake of the New Left rebellions of 1968 and through the tumultuous 1970s. In all …

Queer And Trans Prison Voices: A Podcast Archive On Prison Abolition, Josefine Ziebell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project is located at the intersection of Critical Prison Studies, Gender Studies, Sound Studies, and American Studies. It highlights the importance of sonic modes of anti-carceral resistance by featuring the recorded voices of incarcerated people through the creation of a sonic archive of prison writings. By integrating that sonic archive into the podcast medium, this project functions as a digital archive for incarcerated voices, consisting of two tracks: a collection of short-spoken readings by queer and transgender incarcerated authors, and podcast-style interviews with activist scholars, organizations, and sound artists working towards prison abolition. In this paper, I establish …

Surveilling The Fat Disidencia: Policing The Bodies Of Plus-Size Black Women On Instagram, Daniela V. Verdejo Salazar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Instagram has shaped how we network and share content with others, making interactions far more accessible for everyone who uses this platform daily. Unfortunately, it has also given space to some surveilling mechanisms that tend to police and norm how users and their bodies should present themselves to the rest of the world.

The body can be understood as a manifestation, a presence, and a performance. As Judith Butler argues, the body is also a political space where ideas of resistance and vulnerability take place, and I will understand the body as a combination of the physical manifestation of it …

Girl Friends, Camila Santander

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Friendships between women are common and essential parts of women's lives; however, they are often overlooked. This capstone project titled Girl Friends is a film on which eight women are interviewed and asked about their friendships with other women. They discuss the importance of having female friends and how they create love, support, and companionship. The interviewees also talk about female friendships and romantic partners coexisting, the pressures to find a romantic partner to find fulfillment, as opposed to good friends. Additionally, they describe how friendships between women can be competitive and catty, and how female relationships can change as …

Getting To Yes: The Makings Of Paid Leave In Massachusetts, Christa Kelleher, Laurie Nsiah-Jefferson, Priyanka Kabir, Lillian Hunter, Cassandra M. Porter, Center For Women In Politics And Public Policy, University Of Massachusetts Boston

Publications from the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy

Considered one of the strongest paid family and medical leave laws in the nation, the paid leave law adopted in Massachusetts in 2018 was notable for the depth and range of robust caregiving supports and protections for workers. But just as notable is how the law came to be. After all, paid leave bills had been filed for years in Massachusetts. Decades in fact. Yet until 2018, there had been limited movement in the legislature to establish a statewide program. What led to the passage of paid leave legislation in Massachusetts with approval from a Republican Governor? What factors influenced …

From Abortion Rights To Reproductive Justice: A Call To Action, Erica Goldblatt Hyatt, Judith L.M. Mccoyd, Mery Diaz

Publications and Research

As aggressive cultural and legislative attacks on abortion rights and access continue, we call upon social workers to pursue the liberatory aims of the reproductive justice (RJ) movement. We argue that the RJ framework, rooted in feminist theory, aligns with social work’s social justice ethos and goals, appropriately guiding advocacy and intervention. After outlining the central aims and tenets of the RJ movement, we consider policies that impair RJ and those that could promote RJ, focusing on enhancing body sovereignty, childbearing, and parenting. We conclude with concrete recommendations for how social workers can pursue RJ professionally and personally.

A History Of The Center For The Study Of Women And Society, 1975–2015, Clarisa Gonzalez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the early 1970s, New York City was experiencing an extreme fiscal crisis, with a reported debt of at least $600 million. In CUNY, students were protesting admissions policies that favored the white middle class and hikes in tuition. At the same time, the women’s movement was in the midst of the “second wave,” focusing on women in the workplace and in education. It’s in the midst of these tumultuous times that the first motions to create what was then called the Center for the Study of Women and Sex Roles began in 1975 by Graduate Center faculty Joan Kelly, …

A Girl Is A Thing: Dramaturgies Of Objects And Nature In Contemporary Choreography, Fidan Akinci

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the expansion of performative possibilities toward and through nonhumans in contemporary choreography as a feminist inquiry. I research the upsurge of performing objects and natural matter in contemporary choreography by questioning what kind of bodies other than humans can move, and what kind of affects and expressions they offer beyond more familiar and anthropocentric possibilities. I link this challenge to the humanistic limits of performance with the feminist interrogations on agency and objectification to fully explore the political stakes of mobilizing with the nonhuman. To that end, I put the feminist trajectories in posthumanism, new materialism, and …

A House Of One’S Own: Challenges And Re-Definitions Of Female Subjectivity And Domestic Space In Italian Women Writers From The 1950s To The Early 2000s, Nicole Paronzini

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With an in-depth analysis of selected Italian novels written by female writers from the 1950s to the early 2000s, this dissertation addresses and discusses the challenging relationship between female identity and the home, perceived both as constraining space and metaphor of human interiority. The projects aim to show that these characters, as representative of the female individual, are capable to use the domestic space as a privilege universe in which re-defining themselves, modifying their own and other perception as passive objects of patriarchal society to the one of subjects in fieri.

If, on one hand, the house has been …

Armored Feelings: Romantic Love, Sexual Consent, And Gender-Based Violence In French First World War Narratives (1914–1956), Angélique Ibáñez Aristondo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Armored Feelings examines how the First World War reconfigured how the French thought and wrote about romantic love, sexual consent, and gender-based violence. It posits this devastating event as a critical juncture during which the misogynistic and racist notion of amour à la Française took its modern shape as a rhetoric buttressing the nation’s brittle sense of cultural superiority while obscuring diverse forms of gendered aggression – especially those perpetrated by its citizens against women. This dissertation also establishes that the notion of women’s sexual consent coalesced during the period under examination as a troubled and troubling response to the …

Historical Sisters: Black Feminist Actions Across History And Literary Studies, Jazz A. Milligan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis seeks to understand how the actions of Black women from the past have inspired the modern Black female literary movement. This thesis focuses on three historical women: Phillis Wheatley, Elizabeth Freeman, and Cathay Williams, and their literary sisters: bell hooks, Barbara Smith, and Patricia Hill Collins. By viewing the lives of these historical women through a modern-day lens, we can understand how their actions created a ripple effect that Black women are still discussing today. Black feminism did not start in a vacuum, and the actions of everyday Black women have pushed us forward to being more accepting …

Women's Safety In Nevada, Tsion Mekonnen, Aika Dietz

Research Briefs

43.8% of Nevadan women experience domestic violence in their lifetime (2020).

Women's Research Institute Of Nevada Newsletter, Women's Research Institute Of Nevada

Newsletters

Director's Message: After two years of juggling remote work and loss of daily contact, we are happy to be back in our offices with a busy spring schedule ahead.

Neither Invisible, Nor Silenced: The India-Maghreb Connections In Female-Authored Cinema, Chandra Balkaran

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Third-World” women have long been excluded from center screen space, and positioned as stereotypical characters in liminal, coded spaces—such as harems, brothels, convents, ashrams, zawiyas or in domestic space. Yet, spatial organization is integral to the production of the social, not merely its result, and is fully implicated in both history and politics. Space is thus a crucial category of analysis in any cinema. My thesis examines how spaces, from the domestic to the virtual, socio-religio-cultural are reclaimed, redefined, and reformulated by women in politically engaged films made by Third-World women directors focused on women. Their struggles for space are …

Bi-Phasic Dissonance In Some Pinoy Boys’ Love Series, Gary C. Devilles

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

The growing fascination with Pinoy Boy’s Love (BL) series, such as Gameboys, Hello Stranger, and Quaranthings can be construed as part of the long struggle of LGBTQI community for more inclusivity as most of its fans were also fans of Thai Boy’s Love series called “lakhon,” according to scholar Thomas Baudinette who studied that Pinoy fan sites actively appropriate or “creatively misread” these series. My paper now would like to follow up on the efficacy of these reparative readings in Pinoy BL series, if the creative misreading in Thai BL series can be carried over to their Pinoy …

The Writing Of State Of Happiness: Writing The Archipelago, Clarissa V. Militante

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

A novelist’s main task is to re-imagine and re-present worlds, re-construct time and space, create new novel forms. But there are three things that a novelist resists as much as they can. A novelist would rather not talk about their own work, as it should not be upon them to interpret what they wrote. For this writer, it should be intentions, not meanings, that should matter. Second, to tell the story of how one began and wrote their novel is also something to be avoided if one can, unless as Umberto Eco said it could help enlighten others in terms …

Womanunulat: Popular Critical Writing As Performance, Katrina Stuart Santiago

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

This essay discusses the exclusionary principles of the literary establishment in the Philippines using the lens of labor, given critical writing as practice, and gender as performance. It maps out a personal and professional history of writing that is intricately tied to the various voices of other women writing, across different forms, and throughout Philippine history, where women have shown that at the heart of this practice, and at the core of this performance, is freedom.

Precarity And Motherhood In Philippine Trans Cinema, Mikee Inton-Campbell

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

In this short essay, I reflect on representations and themes in trans cinema in the Philippines. I examine the emerging and intersecting themes of precarity and motherhood in two recent films –Rod Singh’s Mamu and a Mother too (2018), and Isabel Sandoval’s Lingua Franca (2020). I look at how economic and social precarity tends to pervade the lives of trans women, and how transness itself becomes a form of precarity under the legal system’s lack of accommodation to trans rights. I also examine trans motherhood and make the argument that while it destabilizes biology as the root of motherhood, it …

Lesbian-Essaying Through Textual In(Ter)Ventions In Memoir, Jhoanna Lynn B. Cruz

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

In this exegetical essay, I show how I have deployed linguistic and non-linguistic strategies in the writing of my memoir in order to make my lesbian identity as a writer visible on the page without explicitly stating it. Using the theoretical ideas of Teresa de Lauretis and Nicole Brossard, I assert that a non-conventional approach to the writing of memoir is how a lesbian writer can challenge heteronormative writing standards, particularly in the Philippine literary system, within which I had allowed myself to be molded in my past writing practice. Some of these textual in(ter)ventions—both inventions and interventions—are narrative structure, …

Ang Boys’ Love Bílang Papausbong Na Telebiswalidad (Boys’ Love As Emerging Televisuality), Louie Jon A. Sánchez

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

Sa sanaysay na ito, pinahahalagahan ang sandali ng pag-usbong ng mga boys’ love webserye sa panahon ng pandemya. Sinusulit nito ang telebiswal na penomeno sa pamamagitan ng pahapyaw na pag-uugat sa mga minumulang tradisyon o impluwensiya; sa pagsasakonteksto ng paglaganap nito; sa pangkabuuang pagbása sa nagkakaisang salaysay ng mga serye; at sa pagtukoy sa mga transgresyong tinutupad nito sa anyo at kagawian ng panonood ng teleserye, at sa pangkalahatan, sa telebisyong patuloy na umaagapay sa mga hámon at pagbabago ng kalakaran. Sa kasaysayan ng teleserye at ng telebisyong Filipino, pinangangatwiranang mahalaga ang sandali ng BL sa gitna ng pandemya dahil …

Reflection On The Implementation Of Children's Participation Rights (Based On Lundy's Participation Model), Roganda Sadani Ukur Solin, Ida Ruwaida

Journal of Strategic and Global Studies

Child participation is the involvement of children in actions and decision-making processes regarding issues that affect their lives. This study reflects the results of a study on the implementation of children's participation rights, based on four meaningful elements of participation based on the Lundy model, including Voice, Space, Influence, and Audience (Lundy, 2007). So far, studies on participation have focused on the space and forms of child participation. The research used a qualitative approach with the case of the Children's Forum in East Jakarta. The main informants of the research were the members of the Children's Forum. Based on the …

Shattering Your Own Glass Ceiling: The Self-Sabotaging Behaviors Of Secondary Female Principals And Strategies Used To Overcome Them, Ashley Sandor

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this explanatory mixed methods study was to identify and describe self-sabotaging behaviors experienced by female secondary principals and to explore the impact these behaviors have on their career development. A secondary purpose of this study was to identify strategies used to overcome self-sabotaging behaviors.

Methodology: An explanatory mixed methods design was used to uncover the perspectives of 10 female secondary principals in Northern California who have experienced career impacting self-sabotaging behaviors and to examine strategies that exemplary female secondary principals use to overcome their internal barriers. The quantitative phase included a 51-item online survey about self-sabotaging …

3rd Annual Cedar Valley Women's March [Poster], University Of Northern Iowa. Women's And Gender Studies Program.

Women’s and Gender Studies Program Documents

No abstract provided.

Women's March Prep & Poster Making [Poster], University Of Northern Iowa. Women's And Gender Studies Program.

Women’s and Gender Studies Program Documents

No abstract provided.

“We Are Doing The Absolute Most That We Can, And No One Is Listening”: Barriers And Facilitators To Health Literacy Within Transgender And Nonbinary Communities, C. Riley Hostetter, Jarrod Call, Donald R. Gerke, Brendon T. Holloway, N. Eugene Walls, Jennifer C. Greenfield

Graduate School of Social Work: Faculty Scholarship

Transgender and nonbinary (TNB) individuals face disparities in nearly every aspect of health. One factor associated with poor health outcomes in other marginalized populations is health literacy, yet no identified studies examine health literacy in TNB samples. Moreover, most health literacy frameworks focus primarily on the capacities of individual patients to understand and use healthcare information, with little attention given to provider literacy and environmental factors. In partnership with a statewide LGBTQ advocacy organization, we recruited 46 transgender and nonbinary individuals to participate in seven focus groups conducted in urban, suburban, and rural locations throughout Colorado. TNB participants consistently engaged …

Notation That Considers The Body: The Glyphs Of Nancy Stark Smith, Margarita Delcheva

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

No abstract provided.

Elgin's "Native Tongue": A "Me Too" Universe?, Amir Barati

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

Suzette Haden Elgin’s novel Native Tongue (1984) provides a fascinating critique of the ideologies inscribed into patriarchal language and evokes an extremely valuable linguistic and political awareness. This article will examine the liability of the ways the novel revolts against the patriarchal society via the introduction of a gynocentric linguistic intervention. I claim, Elgin’s novel showcases an invaluable instance of how it is possible for women to revolt against the pillars of patriarchy through manipulations at the gestalt and schematic level of language and most specifically, the bodily metaphoric quality of the English. This proposed transformation of the schematic and …

Witnessing And The Gaze In Barbusse’S Hell, Rebecca Stobaugh

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

Stripped down to its most basic plot summary, the premise of Henri Barbusse’s 1908 novel Hell, or L’enfer, sounds like the plot of a cheap porno: a man discovers a peep hole in his hotel room and proceeds to spy on the private lives of the people next door. Indeed, the novel obsesses over the erotic; yet, this obsession is often just as unsensual as it is pleasurable, as descriptions of sex become increasingly disillusioning, and the characters, unsatisfied. Moreover, the narrator does not spy on others for a strictly sexual thrill, but because he believes seeing people …

The Sensible Body Of The Female Reader, Anoosheh Ghaderi

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

No abstract provided.