Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Dating Apps As An Outlet To Promote Sexual Autonomy Among Disabled Individuals: An Intersectional Approach To Change, Sarah Marrs

Sexual Ethics

As disabled individuals are forced into the social other and an asexual narrative, dating apps provide an outlet for this demographic to engage in their sexuality in a format that is more easily accessible. In an age of rising technology, the destigmatization and usage of dating apps highlights the self-expressive potential of an underrepresented and misunderstood demographic. This issue is addressed through historical perspectives of “crip sex,” a comparison between the disabled dating experience and the able-bodied dating experience, and a description of the significance of a dating app designed for individuals with disabilities.

Dancing Mi Cultura: The Production Of Ethnic And National Identity In Midwestern Mexican-Americans Through The Performance Of Ballet Méxicano Folklórico, Katrina J. Frank

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies how Mexican Americans living in the northwest suburbs of Chicago produce connections to their Mexican heritage and culture through the performance of ballet Mexicano folklórico. Through ethnographic interviews of current and former folklórico dancers, as well as participant observation of adult folklórico dance practices, I contextualize the experiences of the interviewees using the anthropological theories of habitus, continuous and discontinuous selves, double-consciousness, liminality, and collective effervescence, as well as the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Frantz Fanon, with the discussion of folklórico as an art, and the concept of institutional use of dance as …

Umaine Crime Alert, University Of Maine Police Department

Social Justice: Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

Examples of how safety alerts are communicated to members of the University of Maine community including email notification, individual campus portal pages for community members, and a notification posted across all pages of the university website. This safety alert describes the assault of an unnamed female by an unknown male who "briefly choked her, yelled a slur at her for wearing a pride shirt..." before running away.

Aids Normalization, Alexandra Juhasz, Theodore Kerr

Publications and Research

Review of On Our Backs: The Revolutionary Art of Queer Sex Work, curated by Alexis Heller for New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, which was on view from September 2019 to January 2020, and other contemporary AIDS culture.

What Would A Covid 19 Doula Do Zine, Alexandra Juhasz, Theodore Kerr, Pato Hebert, Jih-Fei Cheng

Publications and Research

This zine is a snapshot of a time from the WHAT WOULD AN HIV DOULA DO? (WWHIVDD) community, responding in words, actions and images to the unfolding, unprecedented, global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic. The first half of the zine is rooted in the exhibition, Metanoia: Transformation through AIDS Archives and Activism curated by WWHIVDD for the ONE Archives Foundation (ONE) . The second half are responses from our Metanoia and WWHIVDD communities responding to the prompt: What Does a COVID-19 Doula Do? Many of the entries were submitted the second week of March as people in the US were …

Aids And The Distribution Of Crises: Foreword, Preface, And Introduction, Alexandra Juhasz, Nishant Shahani, Jih-Fei Cheng

Publications and Research

AIDS and the Distribution of Crises engages with the AIDS pandemic as a network of varied historical, overlapping, and ongoing crises born of global capitalism and colonial, racialized, gendered, and sexual violence. Drawing on their investments in activism, media, anticolonialism, feminism, and queer and trans of color critiques, the scholars, activists, and artists in this volume outline how the neoliberal logic of “crisis” structures how AIDS is aesthetically, institutionally, and politically reproduced and experienced.

Disrupting An(Other): Sexuality As Political Resistance, Emma C. Downey

Master’s Theses

If sexual knowledge can threaten social and political institutions and their control, how do the contents and subjects of literature and publications in the interwar period make that legible? Moreover, if female sexuality–represented or real–was seen as something disruptive to the normal functioning of society, did sexuality offer a useful entry point for social, political, or ideological critiques of the interwar period? My project responds to these questions by analyzing the lives and writings of two female authors of the interwar period: Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) and Katharine Burdekin (1896-1963). In my analysis, I focus on two major points of connection. …

Zoë Charlton: The Domestic, Shannon Egan

Schmucker Art Catalogs

Zoë Charlton’s grandmother, Everlena Bates, was a domestic worker in Northern Florida. Charlton pays homage not only to her grandmother in her recent body of work, but also to the long history of African-American women’s labor in white families’ homes throughout the South. Although her grandmother did not speak often or directly about the conditions of her employment, Charlton nonetheless is keenly aware of the injustices, possible abuses, and intimate labor endured by black maids, housekeepers, and nannies who worked endlessly long hours and with little pay through the twentieth century. The collages and large-scale installation in Charlton’s exhibition The …

A Black Feminist Content Analysis Of Gender And Sexuality In Living Single, Amarri J. Smallwood, Ayana Weekley

Student Summer Scholars Manuscripts

Between the 1980’s and 1990’s there were many female-centered sitcom television shows like The Golden Girls, Designing Women, and Sex in the City that explored women’s sexuality from an autonomous perspective. However, Black women’s sexuality and the way that gender roles are challenged in sitcoms has yet to be examined as both oppositional and equally significant. This research focuses on the importance of resistant sexual and gender representations in the 1990’s sitcom Living Single. This content analysis is drawn from four episodes in seasons one, two, and three. The study uses a Black Feminist theoretical framework to analyze …

The Representations Of Gender And Sexuality In Contemporary Arab Women’S Literature: Elements Of Subversion And Resignification., Rima Sadek

Theses and Dissertations

Arab women’s literature continue to receive considerable critical attention by scholars in East and West. However, through my focus on three novels in this dissertation, The Cinnamon’s Aroma (2008) by Samar Yazbek, Brooklyn Heights (2011) by Miral al-Tahawy and It’s Called Passion (2009) by Alawiya Sobh I hope to contribute a more holistic understanding of these works by highlighting features not fully explored in previous scholarship. I concentrate on the creative means of struggle and resistance to the entrenched structures of oppression locating sights of potential hope and emancipation. I point out the ways in which these texts subvert and …

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice Of Black Uplift, 1890–1905, Timothy M. Griffiths

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice of Black Uplift, 1890-1905 situates the queer-of-color cultural imaginary in a relatively small nodal point: the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Through literary analysis and archival research on leading and marginal figures of Post-Reconstruction African American culture, this dissertation considers the progenitorial relationship of late-nineteenth century black uplift novels to modern-day queer theory. Bricolage Propriety builds on work about the sexual politics of early African American literature begun by women-of-color feminists of the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Hazel V. Carby, Ann duCille, and Claudia Tate. A new wave of …

T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars Of Wisdom And The Erotics Of Literary History: Straddling Epic., Václav Paris

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Desire And Fantasy Between Commercialism And Personal Room, Yukimi Otagiri

Theses and Dissertations

I apply two aspects of my life history to my art; my childhood experiences and my advanced studies in sociology. My work therefore combines a highly personal reading of my experiences of social interactions and my ongoing analysis of the nature of capitalism and socialism, commodification and media, especially in regard to the experiences of women in particular and consumers in general.

Lg Ms 041 Jean Vermette Papers, Anthony Marvullo

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Provenance: The Jean Vermette Papers were donated by Jean Vermette in 2009. Ownership & Literary Rights: The Jean Vermette Papers are the physical property of the University of Southern Maine Libraries. Literary rights, including copyright, belong to the creator or her legal heirs and assigns. For further information, consult the Head of Special Collections. Cite as: Jean Vermette Papers, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer+ Collection, Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine, University of Southern Maine Libraries. Restriction on Access: Some materials are restricted until the year 2061 to protect privacy rights.

For further information, consult the Head of …

Wearing Makeup Is Not An Indicator Of Being Anti-Feminist, Kim Crowley

Social Justice: Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

Modern feminist discourse has struggled with a certain dilemma: the paradoxes of makeup and fashion. These two topics pose questions from both viewpoints. One may ask: are we meant to support makeup as an industry and hobby, to take pride in our skillfully groomed brows and pretty dresses that make us feel more beautiful? Or are our cultural notions of beauty something to fight against--another means of control, forcing us to force more on appearances than we should?

The Falsified Face Of Feminism Pushes Us Away From Progress, Kim Crowley

Social Justice: Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

If the internet has taught me one thing, it's that feminism is bad.

Lengua Latina: Representations Of Sex And Gender In Latina Literature, Jessica L. Harris

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

An exploration of the influence of Spanish language on gender, sexuality, and sisterhood in various aspects of Latina/o literature. In Chapter I, I examine Spanish director Pedro Almodovar’s film, Chicana playwright Josefina Lopez's Real Women Have Curves, and Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera as a tool for analyzing conceptions of “Other” and the ways these issues intersect with one another. In Chapter II, I look at La Virgen and La Malinche dichotomy and the ways stereotypes appear in Latina poetry. In Chapter III, I discuss hermanas and comadres and their importance outside the intimacy of romantic relationships. Throughout this project, I …

Preposterous America: The Language Of Inversion In Thoreau, Melville, And Hawthorne, Rasmus R. Simonsen

Rasmus R Simonsen, PhD

This dissertation stages a series of readings that activate the inherent pull towards a queer aesthetic of “preposterousness” in the American Renaissance. In the introduction, I claim that American Studies and Queer Studies have been mutually implicated ever since F.O. Matthiessen’s seminal work American Renaissance. In this way, I bring to light the nascent strands of homoeroticsm and “deviant” practices that disrupt the teleology of normative masculinity in the nineteenth century. My intervention develops a queer heuristic through an exploration of the classical figure of hysteron proteron—the rhetorical inversion of the order of things. As a master-trope for my investigation, …

Tea And Conversation With Women Student Leaders, Emily Haddad, Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center, Division Of Student Life

General University of Maine Publications

A Women in Leadership Week event. Highlights from the panel discussion, 'Perspectives from UMaine Student Leaders,' moderated by Emily Haddad, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The event was sponsored by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center and the Division of Student Life.

Click the blue download button for an unedited, machine-generated English language transcript for this recording.

Leadership Unplugged: A Women In Leadership Week Event, Susan J. Hunter, Division Of Marketing And Communications

General University of Maine Publications

A Women in Leadership Week event. Guest speaker UMaine President Susan J. Hunter on “Preparing the Next Generation of Women in Leadership.” The event was sponsored by the Maine Development Foundation.

Click the blue download button for an unedited, machine-generated English language transcript for this recording.

Women In Leadership Panel Discussion, Carol Kim, Emily Cain, Elizabeth Sutherland, Meredith Jones, Division Of Marketing And Communications

General University of Maine Publications

A Women in Leadership Week event. Highlights from the discussion based on “Centered Leadership” by Joanna Barsh with panelists Emily Cain, Elizabeth Sutherland and Meredith Jones. The panel was moderated by Carol Kim, UMaine vice president for research and dean of the graduate school.

Click the blue download button for an unedited, machine-generated English language transcript for this recording.

Eros The Man, Eros The Woman: Conflicting Identities And Gender Construction In The Catullan Corpus, Rebecca F. Boylan

Classical Mediterranean and Middle East Honors Projects

The Catullan corpus is filled with widely varying and often incompatible constructions of gender. These contradictions reveal latent tensions between the poet’s masculine persona and personal pleasure, the latter of which often results in feminine modes of expression. Catullus’ poetic voice frequently transgresses traditional Roman boundaries between gender spheres, emphasizing the nebulous nature of ancient sexuality. Through an analysis of the gendered paradigms that inform the Catullan corpus, this paper examines these tensions between traditional masculine and feminine roles and ways in which these roles are reversed, especially in Catullus’ relationship with Lesbia. This paper analyzes Sapphic influences in Catullus …

Preposterous America: The Language Of Inversion In Thoreau, Melville, And Hawthorne, Rasmus R. Simonsen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation stages a series of readings that activate the inherent pull towards a queer aesthetic of “preposterousness” in the American Renaissance. In the introduction, I claim that American Studies and Queer Studies have been mutually implicated ever since F.O. Matthiessen’s seminal work American Renaissance. In this way, I bring to light the nascent strands of homoeroticsm and “deviant” practices that disrupt the teleology of normative masculinity in the nineteenth century. My intervention develops a queer heuristic through an exploration of the classical figure of hysteron proteron—the rhetorical inversion of the order of things. As a master-trope for my …

Destabilizing Tradition: Gender, Sexuality, And Postnational Identity In Four Novels By Irish Women, 1960-2000, Sarah Nestor

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation examines four novels that represent Irish women and girls confronting the typical narrative of Irish national identity in the twentieth century. The post-independence construction of Irish national identity depended upon prescriptive roles that aligned with its founders’ beliefs about the nation’s ethnic homogeneity and moral superiority. Irish women’s identity and roles as wives and mothers were imperative to upholding this idea of the nation, particularly its morality. Irish women were therefore charged with maintaining well-defined gender roles and the nuclear family in an effort to define a distinctive Irish identity. Thus, when women’s roles are challenged or changed …

University Of Maine Diversity Action Plan 2003-2005, University Of Maine President's Office

Social Justice: Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

This Plan is divided into four parts: diversity within the context of the University's Strategi Plan, assessment of progress toward goals in the 1999 Diversity Action Plan, the process of developing the 2003-2005 Diversity Action Plan, and the 2003-2005 diversity goals, action steps, and financial commitments.

The Tournament Careers Of Top-Ranked Men And Women Tennis Professionals: Are The Gentlemen More Committed Than The Ladies?, Douglas Coate, Donijo Robbins

Bureau of Labor Education

We ask whether top-ranked male tennis professionals are more dedicated or committed to their careers than the top-ranked female professionals. We find no evidence that this is the case in the 1979-1994period. Despite substantially lower real earnings, the women pros competed for as many years as did the men and just as intensely in terms of annual number of tournaments played.

Sex Role Identity And Relationship Factors As Correlates Of Abusive Behavior In Lesbian Relationships, Grace A. Telesco

CAHSS Faculty Theses and Dissertations

The recognition of partner abuse between lesbian intimates has gained attention in the literature only within the last few decades. The current research indicates that physical and psychological abuse is occurring between lesbian partners at about the same rate as their heterosexual counterparts. The theoretical explanations for lesbian partner abuse share similarities with the heterosexual paradigm. However, significant differences in gender make-up and the patriarchal issues of power and control do not fit within the lesbian framework and the unique issues of attachment in lesbian relationships and the issue of homophobia are cause for another perspective.

This study shifts the …

Coming Out Week, October 1999, Wilde-Stein Alliance For Sexual Diversity

Social Justice: Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

Display advertisement from the Maine Campus newspaper providing a schedule of events for the celebration of Coming Out Week, October 4 through 7, 1999.

Wic Recognizes Role Models, Elizabeth Beaulieu

Social Justice: Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

Every year, the Women in the Curriculum and the Women's Studies Program honor three women with the Maryann Hartman Award for contributions and accomplishments. It is the groups' intent that the recognized women serve as a source of inspiration for all women.

Women Gain Confidence Through Self-Defense Courses, Krista Marrs

Social Justice: Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

With the ongoing concern for student safety on campus, two public safety officers are offering a women's self-defense class and both say participants are making great progress.