Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"With The Butterfly Sleeves Naka Filipiniana": Contemporary Study Of Filipinx American Women In Popular Music, Georgette Luluquisin Patricio

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines contemporary Filipinx-American women artists and the ways in which they use their music to construct their identity against Western portrayals of the Filipinx/a woman. Unlike other Asian Americans, Filipinx Americans try to attain the status of the "model minority" because they were at one point in history considered US nationals with American training, but they also do not adhere to it in the same way that Japanese and Indian Americans do. The model minority myth is the notion that Asian Americans have to overcome a certain struggle or challenge in order to achieve the American Dream. Of …

Fortis Femina: Artemisia Gentileschi’S Treatment Of Cleopatra And Seventeenth-Century Italian Art, Rachel Shermock

Theses and Dissertations

Cleopatra is a historical figure with mythical fame; she has captivated the attention of artists over centuries and millennia. Two common themes of the myriad portrayals of her infamously purported death by asp are her sexualized figure and the masculine identities of the majority of artists. But, what about female artists? How did they depict Cleopatra? Did they similarly sexualize her figure? This paper seeks to partially address these previously little-answered questions by using the representative example of Artemisia Gentileschi’s ca. 1635 Cleopatra painting, which has not been as thoroughly examined as many of her other works featuring heroic or …

Translating The Enlightenment: Women Translators In Eighteenth-Century France, Marissa Gavin

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines women translators in Enlightenment France for their strategies to achieve publication. Elite, French Enlightenment women appropriated oppressive structures and norms, redeploying them to expand their own roles. This paper examines Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, Louise d’Epinay, and Anne LeFevre Dacier as exemplars of elite women translators who exploited gendered assumptions to gain access to print. Each of these women came from differing backgrounds, received differing levels of support from their patriarchal relations and expressed differing societal concerns through their writing. Despite such differences, Riccoboni, Dacier and d’Epinay all utilized similar strategies alongside translation to disseminate their concerns. Operating within …

O Silêncio Da Mulher Carioca Oitocentista E Sua Representação No Romance Naturalista Lar De Pardal Mallet, Jessyca Kimberly De Oliveira Zanetti

Theses and Dissertations

The 19th century represents the arrival of the Portuguese royal family in Brazil and, with it, significant changes in society and the local population. A formerly reclusive member of society begins to take shape not only in public life but also within the literature: the Brazilian woman. Despite her changing social role, prevailing hygienist and medical theories of the time pointed to the lack of vocation of the nineteenth-century woman for rational matters; which in naturalism implies that these pseudo-scientific theories would be the base to dissect and explain the social pathologies of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and society at …

Revolutionary Women, Fredgy Noël

Theses and Dissertations

Revolutionary Women is a five screen video installation that honors five women leaders of the Haitian Revolution that lasted from August 22, 1791- January 1, 1804. Women revolutionaries are almost non-existent in its historical documentation in spite of their important roles as fighters, military leaders, and spiritual guides. Revolutionary Women aims to fill this gap. It re-inserts these erased women into the history of the Revolution through telling the stories of Cécile Fatiman, Dédée Bazile, Marie-Jeanne Lamartinière, Victoria "Abdaraya Toya" Montou, and Sanite Bélair. The video installation takes an experimental mixed-media approach to tell their dynamic stories. The five screens …

Women Entrepreneurs' Work-Life Integration And Coping Strategies In China, Susan Pattis

Theses and Dissertations

This study applied a qualitative and phenomenological research methodology to interview 20 women entrepreneurs from Beijing, China. The study aims to understand how their past experiences, present expectations, and future hopes have impacted their work-life integration strategies. The 20 participants were randomly selected through an expert gatekeeper and a snowball-rolling technique. In this explorative study, the researcher used Giele's (2008) life course theoretical framework and Weber and Cissna-Heath’s (2015) coping strategy instruments by asking the twenty participants to share their sociodemographic backgrounds and answer 27 life course questions covering periods of early childhood, childhood and adolescence, current adulthood, and future …

Madwoman On The Screen: Streaming Forms Of Feminine Power, Kassandra I. Schreiber

Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores how the formal aspects of streaming platforms create a female inheritance that helps foster multiple representations of femininity and womanhood which empowers women. Building off of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic, the paper argues that because streaming platforms produce original content, are a space for multiplicity and interconnection, and act as a type of archive, they can build a female inheritance. The combination of these attributes offer a widespread emergence of multiple stories that valorize women and what is socially coded as feminine, creating a creative network that improves the representation of women …

"This Is The Way": Gender Representation In Disney's The Mandalorian, Brooke Solorio

Theses and Dissertations

When Disney released The Mandalorian, it quickly became the top show on its highly popular streaming platform. As with all media wielding this level of exposure, it is important to closely examine its content for depictions of peoples including females. In accordance with Sandra Bem's gender schema theory, the implicit messaging in this series can influence the formation of people's mental shortcuts about what it means to be female. This study employs content analysis to illuminate the portrayal of physical and non-physical attributes of the women present in the two seasons existing at the time of this study. Results reveal …

Inheritance, Katherin Machalek

Theses and Dissertations

Inheritance is a feature documentary that investigates the concept of spiritual inheritance, that which is passed from parent to child. More precisely, it examines how the experiences and struggles of an individual may be transferred and reprocessed by their children. Life experience is studied not as personal, but rather a continuous process that transcends the parent and projects onto the children. The film is a hybrid composed of experimental sequences and false starts, which all bring attention to the nuances of a not-so-straightforward story. The film begins as an essay focusing on an investigation into my parents’ divorce with the …

Freestyle's Forsaken, Sage D. Rivera

Theses and Dissertations

Freestyle is a genre of music born in the mid-1980s from Latino and Black communities in the urban epicenters of the United States. This project spotlights a freestyle music artist “Corina," and how she suffered a patriarchal construct but finally got the moment of significance she deserved.

Letters To Medusa, Maiya Redding

Theses and Dissertations

This context paper for the MFA thesis dance film Letters to Medusa connects the mythology of Medusa as a narrative of trauma. Engaging #metoo and Micaela Coel’s I May Destroy You and Misfits, Redding discusses the power of art to serve as a vehicle for healing and forgiveness.

A Gun For Every Woman, Gentë Retkoceri

Theses and Dissertations

Six centuries ago in Kosova, my home country, unmarried women known as sworn virgins, were forced to adopt a male persona and carry a gun to protect themselves. But today, guns have become tools of oppression and violence against women. And while the legal system carries penalties for domestic violence, marital rape is excluded. To shine a light on, and expose the topic of hidden violence, my thesis uses artivism to address a sensitive but provocative issue, exhibiting a large-scale sculpture of a gun, designed to provoke raw emotions; to challenge visitors to consider the terror felt by women threatened …

Embroidering Mexico: Feminine Spaces, Dechados And The National Space, Regina Perez Kamel

Theses and Dissertations

Mexican dechados consisted of pieces of cloth were women and girls would practice and record needlework. It was a practice rooted in western tradition where they were known as samplers. Given that dechados were objects that were made within feminine spaces they illuminate how gender is constructed through space, and how those gendered spaces generate different ways of knowing.

As the majority of Mexican dechados correspond to the nineteenth century, a period of national construction, this study questions the role that the domestic space played in the establishment of the Mexican nation. It proposes that although displaced and subservient to …

The Impact Of Global Crises On Women: The Case Of Covid-19 In Egypt, Nour A. Dokhan

Theses and Dissertations

Any global crisis is expected to affect every human being, but for women it is always twice as hard. In the case of Covid-19, women are more affected across every domain, from social protection to health, simply because if their gender. This research explores the impact of Covid-19 on women, both economically and socially, with the focus on the case of Egypt. It explores the systematic gender inequalities in the economic, social, and health spheres using cases from previous crises, and how this gender inequality and vulnerability has resulted in much worse consequences of Covid-19 than that of men. The …

Balance Check, Anne Louise Hilenski

Theses and Dissertations

This novel-length work of fiction seeks to explore the world of women’s elite gymnastics and the way it invites glory as much as it invites sacrifice, mental fortitude, physical pain, and suffering. When gymnast Rachel Wallerstein secures four gold medals at the World Championships a year before the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, her destiny as an American Olympic hero is preemptively written into the history books. What happens in the gym stays in the gym, but not for long, as the ever-present approach of the Olympics casts light on the cracks in her parents’ seemingly perfect marriage. On the …

Transgressive Migrations: Gender Roles, Space, And Place In American Novels, 1900-1999, Selena Gail Larkin

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I examine how gender roles combine with changes in space and place to affect women protagonists in twentieth-century American literature. I argue that as these characters migrate, the (self-)perception of their identities shift. Particularly, their outward performances as well as their internal awareness change. My analysis concentrates on the novel genre because of specific characteristics—plot, characterization, and narration. The chosen literary works on which I focus are The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Quicksand (1928), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), The Dollmaker (1954), and Under the Feet of Jesus (1996).

Concepts that I …

Foxy Ladies And Badass Super Agents: Legacies Of 1970s Blaxploitation Spy And Detective Heroines, Carlie Nicole Todd

Theses and Dissertations

The presentation of Black femininity in Blaxploitation spy and detective films like Cleopatra Jones (1973), Foxy Brown (1974), and Get Christie Love! (1974) – depicting powerful, independent, and multidimensional characters – was a sharp departure from the derogatory images of African American women in film prior. These films also included some of the first Black spy and detective film heroines – Foxy Brown, Cleo Jones, and Christie Love – that portrayed a “serious” female detective or government agent as the main protagonist and center of the film’s action. These Blaxploitation heroines were unique in how their characters departed from prior …

Ordinary Power: Frontier Sentimentalism And Cultural Perceptions Of Gender In The Nineteenth-Century West, Erin Elizabeth Hastings

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will examine nineteenth-century women and their primary role in the cultural formation of frontier sentimentalism. White, middle class women primarily moved west with their husbands and families, initially to the Midwest in the early nineteenth century, and were continuing to settle in the Great Plains and further west by the end of the century. The first generation of women who migrated west were the pioneers of frontier sentimentalism, but it prevailed in successive generations of westering women. This thesis will argue that in the formation of their own form of sentimentalism, nineteenth-century women were at the heart of …

Birdcage, Mirella Martinez

Theses and Dissertations

Birdcage is a coming of age story. It is, ultimately, a story about a young woman dealing with issues that she is now barely confronting, and with the help of positive outside influences, comes to accept herself and continues her path with a new perspective. There are prevalent themes such as mental illness, sexual and romantic identity, and the confrontation of toxic parental roles and how it can affect a child as they grow up. The purpose of this Critical Introduction of Birdcage is to explain my goals and purpose with this story, as well as to explain certain themes …

A Woman’S Portion: 5000 Years A Slave, Ann R. Glickman

Theses and Dissertations

Slavery has existed for all of recorded history. The evidence is conclusive that slave systems have almost always been majority female. I suggest that slavery originated as an attempt to control female reproductive capacity, and that this attempt to control was not limited to enslaved women.

The Deconstruction Of Patriarchal War Narratives In Svetlana Alexievich’S The Unwomanly Face Of War, Liubov Kartashova

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how the Soviet construction of womanhood resulted first in females’ active participation in World War II and then in the silencing of women’s war experiences by fabricating a reality in which women’s trauma did not exist. Such a deprivation of women’s agency led to female soldiers’ confusion of identity, experience of shame and consequential self-censorship. In The Unwomanly Face of War (У войны не женское лицо, 1985), Svetlana Alexievich acknowledges these neglected experiences and traumas, and creates a space in which women’s stories have a right to exist. Applying Jean Elshtain’s theory on the lack of attention …

Pratiquer Ou Incarner La Vertu? L'Agentivité Des Femmes Chez Marie De France Et Christine De Pizan, Kathe Blydenburgh

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies the treatment of women in Medieval literature as active agents in their roles of upholding the virtues of the societies in which they live. This study focuses on works written by the female authors Marie de France and Christine de Pizan.

Divorce As Liberation: Marital Expectations Among The Working-Class In The 1950s, Kristin M. Catrone

Theses and Dissertations

Divorce was a remedy employed by working-class Americans in the 1950s when their marital expectations went unmet. Spouses left emotionally, physically, or sexually abusive marriages. Expectations for marriage also centered around assumptions based on gender. Working-class women showed how divorce could be used as a tool of liberation and empowerment.

Judith Leyster: A Study Of Extraordinary Expression, Nicole J. Cardinale

Theses and Dissertations

Judith Leyster’s innovative application of expression in her Self Portrait serves as the focus, whereby she is shown to blend conventional painting categories, preserve a sense of innocence, and confidently flaunt her skills. In turn, Leyster challenged the male-centric art market and stood apart from her artistic predecessors and contemporaries.

The Participation Of Women Believers And The Family In Later Languedocian Catharism, 1300-1308, William Grant Edmundson

Theses and Dissertations

This master’s thesis means to contribute to scholarship on the nature of lived Catharism in later medieval Languedoc. The study uses depositions from the inquisition registers of Jacques Fournier and Geoffroy d’Ablis, as well as Bernard Gui’s Liber sententiarum (book of sentences) to examine and compare how men, women, and families who were friends, relatives, accomplices, believers, and defenders of Cathar perfecti (the Cathar spiritual elite) participated in and supported the sect during the “Authié revival” from 1300 to 1308 by means of a case study on the Benet family from Montaillou and Ax.

The study argues that although the …

Benevolent Women And An Orphan Asylum: The Case Of Rochester, New York, Joseph Resch

Theses and Dissertations

Rochester, New York typified the rapid growth towns were experiencing in the early 19th century. Benevolent women established charitable societies and institutions like the Orphan Asylum to combat the social ills brought on by that growth. Their humanitarian endeavors laid the foundation for today’s child welfare agencies.

The Tragedy Of Theresa Sturla: Murder, Insanity, And Womanhood On Trial In Nineteenth-Century Chicago, Jake Engelman

Theses and Dissertations

On the morning of July 10, 1882, a young prostitute named Theresa Sturla murdered her lover, Charles Stiles, on the sixth floor of the Palmer House in Chicago. During her trial four months later, Sturla’s attorney employed a dual argument of self-defense and insanity. He claimed that his client suffered from dysmenorrhea, or painful menstruation, and that she had gone temporarily insane at the time of the murder due to her defective reproductive system. According to the defense, Stiles’ abuse toward his mistress had exacerbated the disease and her only solution was to respond with violence. After a month-long trial, …

Women, Architecture And Representation In Mamluk Cairo, Amina Karam

Theses and Dissertations

Of the hundreds of documented religious monuments of Mamluk Cairo, known for its intense and often competitive building activity, about twenty are known to be associated with women, at least ten of which still exist in some form. This thesis discusses women's participation in the Mamluk culture of patronage and construction, looking at monuments associated with women not only as a body of work but as the architecture of individual players within the larger building context of Mamluk Cairo. Relying on architectural evidence as well as topographical literature and historical sources, this thesis offers a chronological narrative of women's architecture, …

Game On, Theresa Loong

Theses and Dissertations

Game On is a 25-minute documentary about game designer Brenda Romero, a successful woman in a male-dominated industry. Brenda, whose career spans over thirty-five pioneering years, has contributed to almost fifty game titles, developing innovative video and board games. How is her life a game space?

Seat 20d, Jill A. Campbell

Theses and Dissertations

When artist Suse Lowenstein’s son Alex was murdered in the 1988 bombing of Pan AM Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, to combat her grief, she spent 15 years creating 75 life-sized sculptures of mothers’ of the victims naked and posed in mourning. Now she needs to find them a home.