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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Narratives Of Reproductive Control In The American Eugenics Movement, Cassandra M. Provost Mar 2024

Narratives Of Reproductive Control In The American Eugenics Movement, Cassandra M. Provost

Honors Theses

In this paper, I will explore the eugenics movement as a pseudo-scientific political, social, and legal phenomenon which had a devastating historical impact on America’s most vulnerable women, as well as briefly discuss its residual effects on contemporary reproductive rights conversations, through the lens of literature. Using an interdisciplinary discourse and narrative analysis approach, I identify two distinct themes within the explored narratives: (1) the importance of a government’s attempt to override a person’s autonomy by destroying the person’s ability to reproduce, and (2) the impropriety of actions based on a negative attitude toward disabled or undesirable persons. In my …


Nasty Woman: An Analysis Of Women's Rage In Popular Culture, Sarah Kee Mar 2022

Nasty Woman: An Analysis Of Women's Rage In Popular Culture, Sarah Kee

Honors Theses

The goal of this senior project was to analyze the underlying cause for why certain female characters in popular culture were villainized for their behavior and generally deemed to be “nasty woman.” After reading numerous books and viewing films that contained “nasty woman”, there was a common denominator that linked their behavior and influenced their decision to enact their often-bloody retribution: the patriarchy. These women were a victim of some aspect of the patriarchy, commonly sexual assault, and could not receive the support they needed, so they decided to take matters into their own hands. The “nasty women” analyzed in …


Anti-Pornography Feminism, Kinktok, And Consent: What We Can Learn From The Sex Wars And Leather/Sadomasochistic History, Nic Cloyd Mar 2022

Anti-Pornography Feminism, Kinktok, And Consent: What We Can Learn From The Sex Wars And Leather/Sadomasochistic History, Nic Cloyd

Honors Theses

Sex education and LGBTQA+ history have long been censored and removed from curriculums across the United States. As this information has disappeared from our education systems, important values like consent and boundary setting have become increasingly obsolete despite the modern body autonomy movement. Leather and SM culture, which began post-WWII and reached their peak in the 1970s during the sexual liberation, have become increasingly important as their ethical and moral codes have been lost over time to the HIV/AIDs epidemic and censorship from second and third wave feminsism. Two prominent movements, anti-pornography and sex-work exclusionary radical feminism, have worked to …


Clash And Cooperation Of Ecofeminism And Postmodern Feminism: The Intersection Of Two Theories In Dystopic Literature, Ashton Koch Mar 2022

Clash And Cooperation Of Ecofeminism And Postmodern Feminism: The Intersection Of Two Theories In Dystopic Literature, Ashton Koch

Honors Theses

Ecofeminism and postmodern feminism are regarded as opposite theories in their attempts to solve for ecological and patriarchal oppression. This thesis argues that these two theories are not mutually exclusive, and must work together to effectively combat oppression faced by the environment and by women. It uses two works of literature, Our Life in the Forest by Marie Darrieussecq and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood to argue for the combination of ecofeminist and postmodern feminist strategies. Both works are dystopic in nature, portraying the destruction of the environment and patriarchal discourse against women. Ultimately, this thesis analyzes the strategies …


The Rise And Fall Of Gilmore Girls' Feminist Legacy, Mckenna Ahlgren Oct 2018

The Rise And Fall Of Gilmore Girls' Feminist Legacy, Mckenna Ahlgren

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the feminist legacy that the television series Gilmore Girls (2000-2007, 2016) built during its original airtime and how its later revival diminished that legacy. Gilmore Girls’ main characters are three generations of women within the Gilmore family, providing a unique opportunity to analyze their feminist identities and characterizations relative to different iterations of feminism. This paper examines how the youngest Gilmore, Rory, is influenced by her mother’s and grandmother’s embodiments of feminism. Their expressions of femininity and sexuality, their approaches to motherhood, and their behaviors in their romantic relationships throughout the series correlate with the predominate feminism …


A Reason To Daydream, Corinne Schipull Mar 2018

A Reason To Daydream, Corinne Schipull

Honors Theses

Sexism in American culture comes as no surprise. In 2017, the film industry saw an increasing number of powerful men within its ranks exposed and exiled for allegations of sexually predatory behavior. Many see this purging as a sign of changing times, but this view is optimistic: the tides of change ebb in and out, and this problem far exceeds the movie industry. Well before the onslaught of articles on the likes of Harvey Weinstein, my classmates and I resolved to craft our senior thesis film with a crew made up entirely of women: we simply saw the pool of …