Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Through The Mouth: An Essay On Appetite And Ecocide, Iemanja Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an exploration of mourning and resilient joy in the midst of ecocide. Resisting the pervasive classification of the human as inherently destructive, I look to appetite as an aesthetic procedure that includes a material desire for intimacy with the more-than-human. My study considers the intersections of aesthetic production (primarily twentieth-century poetry and visual art), climate science, geology, cultural studies, theory within the contemporary nonhuman turn, and Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. I employ an interdisciplinary approach, which helps me explore the various ways that literal and figurative appetite can be a way of sensing and exploring …

Feminist And Anti-Feminist Discourses On Abortion In Haiti From 2010 To 2019, Katia Henrys

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While women in Haiti obtained important changes in discriminatory laws after the end of the Duvalier era, other issues remained unresolved. Haiti is amongst six countries in the Caribbean and Latin America that criminalize abortion. This does not prevent women from practicing abortion at very high risks: it is estimated that a third of the maternal deaths are due to abortions in the country. The January 2010 earthquake killed thousands of people and feminist leaders were also victims. How did feminist activists continue the work to legalize abortion after this event? How are they perceived in the media? This paper …

Gendered Subjectivity And Resistance: Brazilian Women’S Performance-For-Camera, 1973–1982, Gillian Sneed

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation considers the work of a group of women artists in Brazil during the period of the military dictatorship (1964–1985), working in the genre of “performance-for-camera” (i.e., performance for film and video, rather than for a live audience). The artists are Lygia Pape (1927–2004), Letícia Parente (1930–1991), Anna Bella Geiger (b. 1933), Sonia Andrade (b. 1935), Anna Maria Maiolino (b. 1942), and Regina Vater (b. 1943). Some of these women were friends and colleagues who collaborated with each other; all of them contributed significantly to the development of film and video art in Brazil. Their works share an impulse …

Getting Located: Queer Semiotics In Dress, Callen Zimmerman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The body, a long contested site of identity construction, has been used by historically by queers to convey desire, build affinity and transgress norms. Looking at the fashioned queer body, this capstone takes the form of a proposal for an art exhibition at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Seeking to engage with objects, performance and film which approximate, provide proxy for or depart from the body as a site, it explores the social and political quagmire of getting dressed. Comprised of contemporary art that looks at the rupture of legible bodily semiotics, this show wonders what …

“Let’S Call Painful Sex Disorders Sexual Disabilities Instead”: A Feminist Disability Critique Of Feminist Representations And Medical Representations Of Sexual Disorders Of Pain, Oyku Akin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Historically, gender and sexuality have been privileged sites of analysis in feminist theory. Critical feminist engagements with “sexual dysfunction” employ gendered analysis’ of medical and pharmaceutical interventions to sexuality in capitalist modernity in order to underscore the ideological dimensions of modern sexuality. Although sexual disorders of pain received little attention from feminist academics until recently, contemporary feminist work on sexual pain disorders mimic the previous work on sexual dysfunctions in terms of analysis. Analysing recent major feminist contributions employing different epistemological orientations to the study sexual disorders of pain, I show that gender continues to be the privileged common category …

Little Egypt: A Critical Biography, Katherine Vecchio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Structured as a biography, this thesis investigates the origins of Little Egypt—a stage name assumed by multiple women performing either the danse du ventre or the hoochie-coochie—and considers the character’s cultural legacy. The work draws on nineteenth and twentieth century newspapers, advertisements, photographs, and official publications and archival records from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Chapter one takes a new look at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and shows how the presence of dancers performing the danse du ventre on the Midway Pliasance was turned into a flashpoint of controversy by the popular press. This controversy would be key …

The Ends Of Plot: Rupture And Entanglement In L’Amica Geniale, Victor X. Zarour Zarzar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation employs narrative theory to contextualize Elena Ferrante’s successful saga, L’amica geniale, within the larger tapestry of European novelistic discourses. It engages with conceptions of narrative structure put forth by critics like Ortega y Gasset, Brooks, and Winnett to understand how L’amica geniale offers cutting commentary on our exegetic practices and advances a geometry of narrative entanglement. I contend that Ferrante recuperates and italicizes nineteenth-century modes of storytelling, displaying a form of epistemological tension rooted in a movement away from a belief in plot’s semantic potentialities and into the postulation of a poetics of smarginatura or rupture. I …

Words Are Found Responsible: Poetry's Jurisdiction And The Transformation Of Equal Rights, Talia Shalev

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Across various academic fields and from a range of political orientations, scholars note that a pervasive rights discourse shapes the imaginable horizons of identity, politics, and social life in the United States. Many critiques of rights since the 1970s highlight a particular conundrum of this rights culture: existing rights law and ubiquitous rights invocations fail to guarantee equal conditions for thriving across racialized and gendered axes of identity. Words Are Found Responsible: Poetry’s Jurisdiction and the Transformation of Equal Rights emphasizes and complicates elements of these critiques by reading poetry of the 1970s and 1980s in relation to shifting rights …

In Her Own Hands: How Girls And Women Used The Piano To Chart Their Futures, Expand Women's Roles, And Shape Music In America, 1880–1920, Sarah F. Litvin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

American girls and women used the parlor piano to reshape their lives between 1880 and 1920, the years when the instrument reached the height of its commercial and cultural popularity. Newspapers, memoirs, biographies, women’s magazines, personal papers, and trade publications show that female pianists engaged in public-facing piano play and work in pursuit of artistic expression, economic gain, self-actualization, social mobility, and social change. These motivations drove many to use their piano skills to play beyond the parlor, by studying in conservatory, working as classical and popular music performers and composers, founding and teaching at schools, working as department store …

Love And Revolution: Queer Freedom, Tragedy, Belonging, And Decolonization, 1944 To 1970, Velina Manolova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines literary works by U.S. writers Lillian Smith, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry written in the early part of the postwar period referred to as the “Protest Era” (1944-1970). Analyzing a major work by each author—Strange Fruit (1944), The Member of the Wedding (1946), Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Les Blancs (1970)—this project proposes that Smith, McCullers, Baldwin, and Hansberry were not only early theorists of intersectionality but also witnesses to the deeply problematic entanglements of subjectivities formed by differential privilege, which the author calls intersubjectivity or love. Through frameworks of queerness, racialization, performance/performativity, tragedy, and …

When Good Girls Go Bad (Or Do They?): Nymphomania And Lycanthropy In Verga’S “La Lupa”, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

At some point during early development, most children are afraid of the imaginary wolf under the bed or the wolf that hides in the closet at night. Traditional bedtime stories such as Little Red Riding Hood certainly do not help assuage such fears: these are atavistic dreads, similar to being scared of the dark or of death.1 In childhood culture, the wolf represents the “other,” the “furry non-human,” and almost always the viciously violent. Later, as adults, the occasional dream of wolverine violence, or of human transformation into a wolf (a lycanthropic aversion) might very well create anxiety and apprehension.2 …

Needed But Neglected: Women Activists As Vote Getters In Elections At The Local Level, Laila Kholid Alfirdaus, Rosihan Widi Nugroho

Jurnal Politik

In the study of female activists in politics, the role of women seen from the perspective of women’s representation tends to revolve in political recruitments and decision making process after the elections. This perspective assumes that political process works in a more advanced level by providing channels for female activists to articulate their political interests and thus help with their future endeavors. However, this assumption can be misleading in the society that political process is dominated by political elites. This has made recruitment and policy more central and salient for publicity and render activists at the grass-root level less significant. …

Confronting Wartime Sexual Violence: Public Support For Survivors In Bosnia, Douglas D. Page, Samuel Whitt

Political Science Faculty Publications

Existing research on conflict-related sexual violence focuses on the motivations of perpetrators and effects on survivors. What remains less clear is how postconflict societies respond to the hardships survivors face. In survey experiments in Bosnia, we examine public support for financial aid, legal aid, and public recognition for survivors. First, we find a persistent ethnocentric view of sexual violence, where respondents are less supportive when the perpetrator is identified as co-ethnic and survivors are perceived as out-groups. Second, respondents are less supportive of male survivors than female survivors, which we attribute to social stigmas surrounding same-gender sexual activity. Consistent with …

Violence, Suffering, And Social Introspection: James Baldwin's Another Country, Hollis Druhet

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

This research examines and expands on the critical outlook concerning the scope and function of identity in the literature of James Baldwin. Looking at Another Country specifically, the essay expounds on the universality of oppressive conditions shown to operate across factors of race, gender, and sexuality. Critical discussion has largely focused on Baldwin’s construction of male identities and sexual experiences; this essay argues for the importance of the novel’s female psychological depictions and how these character profiles operate in relation to male profiles. A significant universal aspect considered is the visibility of trauma: how its appearance communicates repressed pain and …

"The Traps Started During My Childhood": The Role Of Substance Abuse In Women's Responses To Adverse Childhood Experiences (Aces), Breanna Boppre, Cassandra Boyer

Criminal Justice Faculty Research

The gendered pathways perspective seeks to identify the biological, psychological, and social realities that lead to women’s law-breaking behavior. Prior research in this area demonstrates the link between women’s adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and involvement in the criminal justice system later in life. The current study fills an important gap in the literature by providing a phenomenological description of the impacts ACEs had upon 19 community supervised women’s lives. Their stories illuminate the need to consider multiple forms of ACEs, from physical and sexual abuse to the death of a loved one. Interviewees’ most prevalent response to ACEs was substance …

Nailing Jell-O To A Tree, Jayson Lozier

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio contains papers addressing writing instruction, women's studies, queer theory, and literary analysis. “Mr. L 2.0 or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love English Composition” details the implementation of more effective techniques to teach writing in the secondary English classroom. “Educating Women in Afghanistan: Power, Revolution, and Rebellion” examines the feminist struggles around education and the efforts of the Afghan Institute of Learning to bring about change. “Out of the Closet and into the Classroom: Introducing Queer Reading Strategies to the Secondary English Classroom” examines the importance of queer theory and queer reading techniques in high school …

How Fashion And Beauty Advertising Negatively Effects Women, Olivia Free

WRIT: Journal of First-Year Writing

In today’s society consumers are constantly exposed to advertisements throughout their day to day lives, whether they realize it or not. The influence advertising has had over the last ten years has grown because of the materialistic society. It is important to realize the extent in which advertisings are thrown into the hustle of every day lives. One of the most problematic industries is fashion and beauty. The subject of most fashion and beauty ads are women and they are being objectified and dehumanizing causing a drastic decline in self-esteem and in increase in overall body shaming from the unrealistic …

On Her Own: A Qualitative Study On The College-To-Career Transition Of Black Second-Generation Alumnae, Ladessa Y. Mitchell

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe the college-to-career transition of Black second-generation alumnae in the development phase of emerging adulthood using Schlossberg’s (2011) Transition Model. As the researcher, I collected data from Black second-generation alumnae of predominantly White public universities in Florida to examine how their intersecting identities (i.e., race, gender, and educational status) and use of metaphorical capital (i.e., social, cultural, and human capital) influence their transition. The conceptual framework for this study is based on the 4 S’s of Schlossberg’s Transition Model as well as emerging adulthood, forms of capital, and the intersecting identities of …

Kink In Flux: Bdsm Theory And Sexual Praxis, Celeste Pietrusza

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The opening decades of the 21^st century have seen a veritable explosion of representations of bondage, discipline and sadomasochism (BDSM) and kink practices in mainstream media and American culture. Along with this, empirical researchers working in sexuality studies continue to show, contrary to the history of stigmatizing accounts in the history of clinical psychology, no evidence of increased pathology and, in some studies, better outcomes on measures of mental health.

Given the legacy of psychoanalysis in foregrounding considerations of sadomasochism and sexuality for the human psyche, it seems particularly well positioned to approach the complexities of dynamic fantasies involved …

Just Between Us Girls: Discursive Spaces From America's First Gay Magazine To The World's Last Website For Queer Women, 1947-2019, Josie Rush

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Just Between Us Girls charts the diffusion of queer theory outside of the academy, using convergence theory to examine communication technologies like periodicals and the Web to argue for a conception of queer theory that includes discourse between queer women about queerness. In making this argument, this project creates a lineage of discursive spaces by, for, and about queer women, putting content from these spaces in conversation with canonical queer theorists like Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, and Jack Halberstam. Analyzing and contextualizing discursive spaces like Vice Versa (1947-1948), The Ladder (1956-1972), The Furies (1972-1973), AfterEllen, and Autostraddle demonstrates not …

Planning & Partnerships: Obtainable Opportunities For Increasing The Intercultural Competencies Of All Library Employees, Miranda Wisor, Meggan D. Smith

All Musselman Library Staff Works

To expand the inclusivity and diversity of the library’s environment, Musselman Library offers a variety of training and educational opportunities for staff and student employees. Using a variety of formats and partnerships with other departments, these efforts have led to intentional changes in library space, services and equipment available, and hiring practices. Practical examples include highlighting events on campus, hosting short film and reading discussions, and utilizing campus speakers.

Dynamis Of Healing, Pia Sophia Chaudhari

Religion

This book explores how traces of the energies and dynamics of Orthodox Christian theology and anthropology may be observed in the clinical work of depth psychology. Looking to theology to express its own religious truths and to psychology to see whether these truth claims show up in healing modalities, the author creatively engages both disciplines in order to highlight the possibilities for healing contained therein. Dynamis of Healing elucidates how theology and psychology are by no means fundamentally at odds with each other, but rather can work together in a beautiful and powerful synergia to address both the deepest needs …

Once Upon A Time On Mango Street, Drake Deornellis

Montview Journal of Research & Scholarship

This paper examines how the use of fairytale allusions in Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street critiques and recreates standard constructions of female identity. Narrated by the young main character Esperanza, the novel explores the experiences of a variety of Latina women living on Mango Street. As Esperanza retells these stories, she frequently compares these women to fairytale characters, such as Cinderella and Rapunzel. These fairytales often define women as either “angels” or “monsters”: either they are perfect, or they are evil. Furthermore, this perfection for women is associated with dependence and passivity. As the women in the novel …

Developing A Model Of Sexism-Based Traumatic Stress, Marcus Cherry

Doctoral Dissertations

In contemporary society, women regularly endure sexist microaggressions—messages that convey aversive, demeaning sexist slights toward women. Sexist microaggressions have been associated with anger, depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, job stress, increased risky health behavior and trauma. Additionally, sexist microaggressions effects are cumulative and can result in the internalization of sexist beliefs and undermine selfcompassion. Research suggests that these distortions of self-views and self-regard can in part contribute to the development of trauma symptoms. Notably, research has found that prolonged exposure to sexism, in general, has been associated with trauma symptoms. However, the traumatic effects of sexist microaggressions have remained largely theoretical. …

Academic Feminists Analyses Of Female Celebrities From The 1980s To Today, Brittany A. Carey

Honors Theses

This thesis examines the history of academic feminists and their changing debates over race, class, sexism, and sexual preference from the 1980s to the present. In the 1980s, white feminists tended to focus on sexism in the workplace and class discrimination, while black feminists focused instead on the racism and classism that black women faced both inside and outside of academia. More recently, millennial feminists, in both third- and fourth-wave feminism, have continued to focus on racial discrimination within feminism (and broader society) while also examining women’s sexual preferences. However, they have stopped focusing on sexism in the workplace and …

Gender In Apocalyptic California: The Ecological Frontier, Marykate Eileen Messimer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Climate change is the consequence of ideologies that promote human reproduction and resource consumption by sacrificing human justice, nonhuman species, and the land. Both biology and queer ecologies resist this notion of human separation and supremacy by showing that no body is a singular, impermeable entity, that all beings are biologically and inexorably connected. My dissertation demonstrates that fiction writers use this knowledge to locate a utopian vision that can counteract the dystopian impotence of living within climate change. This argument is founded on novels written by women and set in California, a state that uniquely inhabits a utopian and …

Mothers Of Intention: Women In The Ku Klux Klan And Massive Resistance, 1954-1968, Michele R. Johnson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines women in the Massive Resistance movement and the Ku Klux Klan of the classic Civil Rights period, 1954-1968. Specifically, it illustrates the way in which these women used their assigned gender roles as women, and specifically as mothers, to further white supremacist goals. White women have been an integral part of white supremacy in the United States from the beginning, yet are rarely portrayed as such. White supremacist movements are most often viewed through a male lens and gender in white supremacy is most often focused on how white men perform gender within the movements. While that …

Job Satisfaction And Turnover Intention In Higher Education: A Study Of Information Technology Professionals In The California State University System, Brooke Ferrier Banks

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to survey perceived job satisfaction and turnover intention of information technology professionals in the California State University (CSU) system. Employee satisfaction facets (work, pay, opportunities for promotion, supervision, and co-workers), overall satisfaction, and turnover intention were measured. Further, the study identified whether there was a significant difference in perceived job satisfaction or turnover intention based on years of service in the CSU system, gender, or campus in the CSU system. The study also examined the uniqueness of information technology professionals at campuses in the CSU system. This study utilized a mixed-methods methodology with two …

Queering Black Greek-Lettered Fraternities, Masculinity And Manhood : A Queer Of Color Critique Of Institutionality In Higher Education., Antron Demel Mahoney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Drawing heavily on Roderick Ferguson’s (2012) theory of institutionality, this dissertation constructs a counter-historical genealogy of racialized gender in higher education and U.S. society through the formation of black Greek-lettered fraternities. Ferguson argues that with the insurgence of minority resistance globally and domestically during the mid-twentieth century, hegemonic power took a new form. Instead of rejecting minority difference, power’s new network attempted to work through and with minority difference in an effort to absorb and restrict these radical formations within state, capital and academy frameworks—producing narrow or one-dimensional minority subjectivities. Established at the turn of the twentieth century, black Greek-lettered …

Healthcare Access And Utilization By Transgender Populations: A United States Transgender Survey Study, Axenya Kachen

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Transgender communities in the United States are highly marginalized and have been systematically and infrastructurally ignored due to the widespread fundamental belief that gender exists as a binary classification. The dichotomous theoretical framework of sex and gender prevented public recognition of this community as a population of interest for public health research and targeted intervention. Sexual and gender minority (SGM) populations have fought for basic human rights, including access to affordable healthcare. The National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) was founded in 2003 to advocate for the advancement of equality for transgender people. In 2015, the NCTE conducted the United …