American Studies Commons^™

A Guide For The Everyday Woman Surfer: How Surf Culture's Patriarchy Marginalizes Ocean Lovers, Alexis S. Di Stefano

Women's, Gender and Queer Studies

Humans are naturally drawn to the water by wind and tide. It is a place of solace that we have a desire to know deeply, yet we have kept one another from experiencing it through biases that perpetuate inequality. White-supremacist hegemony has historically kept communities of color from coastlines, women from lineups, and queer communities from participating in surf culture. As more people from all social groups return to the water through surfing in the 20th century, surf culture needs to adapt to become more inclusive. This paper outlines surf culture's historical transition into whiteness and how female beauty standards …

The Voice Of One Crying In The Wilderness, Megan Kenyon

MFA in Visual Art

I am a Midwestern, Christian, and feminist artist. I make work about the beautiful, broken, and absurd ways in which American evangelical culture influences lives, especially women’s lives. I’m dragging everything into the light by deconstructing and critiquing the world in which I live, move, and have my being. I do this by harnessing prophetic imagination and incarnational space to shine a light on how patriarchy infects evangelical Christian theology and practice. Using prophetic imagination through photographic self-portraiture and text (my own and found texts using the Bible), I seek to make plain the effects of white, Christian patriarchy on …

Tejedoras Y Madres: Las Mujeres En El Códice Madrid, Manuel Alberto Morales Damián

Tejiendo imágenes. Homenaje a Victòria Solanilla Demestre

Se reflexiona sobre el papel social de la mujer durante el postclásico en la península de Yucatán; se utiliza como testimonio el Códice Madrid a partir de la información que ofrecen las figuras femeninas que aparecen representadas en 27 almanaques y en el cosmograma de las páginas 75-76. El porcentaje de figuras femeninas (10,15%), así como las funciones que desempeñan en las distintas escenas, indican que la mujer tiene un papel secundario, incluso pueden ser sustituidas por varones. Se muestran evidencias de un patriarcado de baja intensidad.

This paper analyses the social role of women at Postclassic Yucatan; the Madrid …

“Fetch M’Dear”: Healers, Midwives, Witches, And Conjuring Women In Select Ya And Toni Morrison Novels, Diane Mallett-Birkitt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Accusations and persecution of witchcraft have been embedded in global culture for centuries. For as long as these persecutions have occurred, women have found themselves accused most frequently. Older women with herbal knowledge were often called on to assist with childbirth or termination of pregnancies and this “secret knowledge” often led them to be suspected of supernatural abilities, often of a satanic nature. Intrigued by these wise women who appeared to have mysterious powers and a penchant for arousing the ire of men in the legal, medical, and religious communities, I began to notice their frequent appearance in novels. Does …

Show Her It's A Man's World: How The Femme Fatale Became A Vehicle For Propaganda, Leann Bishop

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

During World War II women joined the workforce in droves due to propaganda such as Rosie the Riveter. When Soldiers began returning from the war they wanted stability and normalcy. They wanted to return to the America they left where women ran the household and men went to work. Women, however, experienced a new sense of freedom from working and wanted to continue their liberation. It was during this time that femme fatales, the sultry women of film noir became popular. They represented the liberated women of the 1940s. The film industry saw an opportunity to use these women found …

The Heart Of K'E: Transforming Dine Special Education And Unsettling The Colonial Logics Of Disability, Sandra Yellowhorse

American Studies ETDs

This paper takes up the roles of ideology and spatiality as they impact Diné students and learners in understanding conceptions of normativity, neuro-diversity and bodily variance. I am concerned with how the movement and creation of Indigenous schools and their praxis still maintain and often times produce settler colonial ideologies of being, personhood, difference and ability. I illustrate the challenges that Diné planners and educators face in entrenching cultural knowledge and language into their educational initiatives, while some of the problematic manifestations and expressions of normativity present themselves through state polices, federal law and mainstream curriculum.

I focus on the …

"He Didn't Mean It": What Kubrick's, Kelley O'Brien

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With Second Wave Feminism and the Women’s Rights Movement, 1970’s Americans began to see a shift in gender norms affecting how we relate to one another, particularly within a family structure. Scholars have noted an anxiety permeating the decade over the potential negative ramifications of such a drastic cultural shift. We see these issues of gender politics played out in numerous popular films from the 1970s and into the 1980s. Kubrick’s The Shining, like many horror films of the time, preys upon the societal fear for the family, due to these shifting gender norms, by featuring a crumbling patriarch (Jack), …

"Tell Nobody But God": Reading Mothers, Sisters, And "The Father" In Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Cheryl Hopson

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

In my reading of The Color Purple, I make several interconnected arguments, the first being that “The Father,” that is any male, sanctioned by patriarchy, and in the context of a patriarchal, sexist male order, disrupts what would otherwise be a powerful and sustaining relationship, that of the mother-daughter relationship. I continue that sisterhood that is multifaceted and intergenerational serves as a corrective to the disrupted maternal and filial relationship. It is sisters in the novel and not mothers who step in to “mother,” that is nurture, protect, support, as well as challenge one another, even in the most harrowing …

"The Best Bad Things": An Analytical History Of The Madams Of Gold Rush San Francisco, Sophie Breider

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis analyzes the differences between the fictionalized madam of the American West and the historical madam are analyzed to understand how racial and gender hierarchies normalized themselves in the American West and disempowered women and people of color. This thesis uses Gold Rush San Francisco, and two madams, as a case study of this phenomenon.

Uncommon Convergences: A Hemispheric And Comparative Approach To The Great Gatsby And Pedro Páramo, Ariel Jade Santos

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Over the past thirty years, American literary scholarship has shifted focus away from a national approach centered on the United States to a hemispheric methodology that includes all of the countries within this hemisphere. As scholars begin to break down the once iron-clad borders that stood between the American canon and the authors of our hemispheric neighbors, new opportunities have arisen for literary exploration. As an original contribution to this field of scholarship, my thesis project uses a hemispheric and comparative methodology to identify and examine the manifestations of reification and patriarchy in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) …

Redefining Blackness In The Age Of Whiteness: Mimicry, Ancestry, Gender Performance, And Self-Identity In Afro-Caribbean And Afro-American Literature, Brandon Marcell Erby

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

The elements associated with mimicry and colonialism are found in Elizabeth Nunez’s Prospero’s Daughter (2006), as the novel reveals how colonized subjects use mimicry to survive their colonized spaces. Keeping in mind the ideologies of Homi Bhabha and Wumi Raji, the novel also suggests how a subject’s pre-existing condition before being colonized develops agency. Comparably, while Elizabeth Nunez’s novel illustrates how imitation is used by black and native Caribbeans, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1958) contextualize and exhibit W.E.B. Du Bois’s double-consciousness theory and the struggles that black Americans experience while mimicking …

A Divine Inequality: Contextualizing Gender And Authority In Contemporary Mormon Feminism, Taylee Robinson Pardi

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

This project traces the decline of authority for Mormon women coupled with the rise of defined gender roles within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in order to contextualize contemporary Mormon feminism. Using a radical feminist analysis, this project will explore how contemporary Mormon women relate to their early Mormon sisters and the ways in which the culture and doctrine of Mormonism often converge, lending itself to a unique feminist perspective. This project argues that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, as currently practiced, is not just inherently patriarchal, but un-egalitarian, and that contemporary …

Inheritance Of The Past: Patriarchy, Race And Gender In Faulkner's And Chopin's South, Therese D. Osborne

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

The death of the Confederacy sealed in white southern memory a lost world of beauty that denied the cruelty of its “peculiar institution.” Southern writers have seemed haunted by this conflict between the cherished past of their ancestors and the reality of the devastated region, with its legacy in slavery. Through the commentary of women diarists who mourn their crumbling society, and selected works of William Faulkner and Kate Chopin, this paper examines the myth and reality of the southern past. It reveals the enduring impact of the all-powerful white patriarchy that gave order to the antebellum South, destroyed it, …

What Of The Cosmopolitan? Or Approaching The Absent Patriarch In Transnational Theory, Sophia Basaldua

All Theses

In this essay I will argue that there are embodied, privileged cosmopolitans, that merely masquerade as ghosts in order to avoid border detainment and a critical inquiry into their status. I will, further, argue that it is in the best interests of these cosmopolitans to avoid detection. Transnational discourse allows these cosmopolitans to exercise this privilege by dwelling on the ideal versions of cosmopolitanism. The discourse further obscures the embodied cosmopolitan by focusing upon already excessively embodied exorbitant citizens, which has the double effect of increasing the embodiment of exorbitant citizens while obscuring the privileged cosmopolitan. In order to conduct …

Re-Masculating The Vampire: Conceptions Of Sexuality And The Undead From Rossetti's Proserpine To Meyer's Cullen, Emily Schuck

LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University

This paper explores the relationship between sexuality and the undead from Victorian England to present day vampire narratives. Specifically, I examine the shift in the vampire narrative from the frightening Dracula to the extremely sexualized nature of vampires in the early twenty-first century. My results are concerned with the nature and exchange of fluids between vampire bodies and their victims (or lovers) and the power associated with that exchange. My conclusion implies that re-masculating the vampire is a return to a patriarchal dominant discourse promulgates the heteronormative status quo, unlike their early predecessors, which tend to undermine heteronormative sexuality.

Mothers At Work: Reconstruction And Deconstruction Of Patriarchy In Gone With The Wind, Catherine Willa Staley

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

In this thesis, I explore the performances of motherhood in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and how those performances conflict with culturally constructed expectations of that role. An analysis of Scarlett O’Hara and Melanie Wilkes, and how each woman compares to the South’s model for motherhood, reveals implications that extend beyond the novel’s Civil War setting to reveal the ongoing negotiation of modern readers still living within patriarchal conceptions of mothering. In Chapter 1, I outline the novel’s spectrum of motherhood, which is composed of characters who nurture and manage others. Each individual on that spectrum contributes to or …

Small Flowerings Of Unhu: The Survival Of Community In Tsitsi Dangarembga's Novels, Dana Rine

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the presence of unhu, a process of becoming and remaining human through community ties, in Tsitsi Dangarembga‟s Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not. Dangarembga interrogates corrupt versions of community by creating positive examples of unhu that alternatively foster community building. Utilizing ecocritical, utopian, and postcolonial methodologies, this thesis postulates that these novels stress the importance of retaining a traditional concept like unhu while also acknowledging the need to adjust it over time to ensure its vitality. Both novels depict the creativity and resilience of unhu amid toxic surroundings.

"Something Begins Its Presencing": Negotiating Third-Space Identities And Healing In Toni Morrison's Paradise And Love, Kristen King

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Toni Morrison’s Paradise deconstructs the pathology of patriarchy and its oppressive nature, which limits language and knowledge. Patriarchal language silences female voice as they unknowingly adopt male definitions of gender and femininity. As long as the women are denied access to a language that allows them to define themselves, their existence is marked by a perennial state of self-destruction and stasis. As the women, specifically Consolata, begin to reject patriarchal limitations, they gain agency and with it an access to words and ideas that allow them to identify and articulate their own definition of self.

Morrison’s Love illustrates the individual’s …

Refusing To Go Silently: Female Wit As Combating A Culture Of Silence In Frances Burney And Elizabeth Inchbald's Texts, Megan M. Weber

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the hands of two prominent authors, Elizabeth Inchbald and Frances Burney, a critical paradox concerning female silence arises: while both authors operate very successfully in the publishing world, both do so while subverting impositions of silence, exhibiting a clear breach of propriety. An examination of Inchbald's novel A Simple Story and play Wives as they Were, Maids as they Are and Burney's novel Cecilia and play The Witlings, elucidates how each author adapts literary genres to portray female wit, exposing eighteenth-century impositions of silence in the process. By engendering female characters with the ability to employ humor as …

The Female Colonizer And Othered Woman In Isak Dinesen's Out Of Africa, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, Tayeb Salih's Season Of Migration To The North, And Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, Lindsay L. Sloan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The central issue of this thesis is the complicated relationship between the colonized individual and the constitutive as well as emblematic female colonizer in Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North, and Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, The Timeless People. Each of these novels displays colonization by a female (or females) and relates back to historical colonialism, but each characterizes the relationship between the oppressors and oppressed differently. Dinesen's and Rhys's works stem from historical colonization in which European colonizers conquered and ruled other territories; …

Imagined Realities, Defying Subjects: Voice, Sexuality And Subversion In African Women's Writing, Sarah Namulondo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The privileging of man in African societies has involved an erasure of identities and subjectivities of many women, holding them to an assumption of female inferiority. To counter the injustice, African women writers have engaged in rhetorical and performative strategies designed to reconstitute the cultural erasure as they try to claim status as individuals. But in the process, various cultural expectations such as their maternal roles act as constant bottlenecks to return them back to their prescribed roles as subordinate beings. This dissertation, “Imagined Realities, Defying Subjects: Voice, Sexuality and Subversion in African Women’s Writing” explores the methodologies of cultural …

Girl Empowerment And Unspoken Discourses On Girl Sexuality In Stephanie Meyer's Twilight Saga, Caitlin Gulliford

Honors College Theses

In this paper, I explore how Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight saga employs a form of girl sexual citizenship that recognizes girls as sexualized, but maintains unspoken structures of compulsory heterosexuality, regressive gender norms, and hyperconsumerism in order to police girls as a protection of patriarchy.

Reconstructing Women's Identities: The Phenomenon Of Cosmetic Surgery In The United States, Cara L. Okopny

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The popularity of cosmetic surgery in the U.S. has increased dramatically over the last ten years - particularly for women, who make up the largest group of cosmetic surgery consumers. Cosmetic surgery can include relatively simple procedures such as permanent hair removal or Botox to more complicated procedures like breast augmentations and face-lifts. The rise in popularity of cosmetic surgery exalts only one kind of beauty and excludes many women from ever attaining this ideal, so while women may feel empowered, surgery acts as a form of assimilation, because the act of cosmetic surgery reifies an exclusionary beauty norm. With …

Women Animal Foster Care Workers: An Ecofeminist Critique, Denise L. Roemer

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As with other forms of animal rights activism, animal foster care also appears to be dominated by women. In this paper I explore the role of animal foster care in, and its implications for, a Patriarchal society based on hierarchical dualisms. I argue that through their work as animal foster care workers and adoption facilitators these women do create positions of power for themselves, but that those positions remain subordinated to, and in some ways embrace, existing structural power relations--Patriarchy. More specifically, I argue that by constructing and assuming a social role that includes a culturally accepted power differential--the human-animal …

Sins Of The Father: Patriarchy And The Old South In The Early Works Of William Faulkner, John Easterbrook

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Father Knows Best, Judith Roof

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In his essay, "Althusser's Mirror," Carsten Strathausen reveals the paternal politics inherent to any gesture of appropriation. Molding Lacan to an Althusserian mirror, Strathausen demonstrates parallels between Lacan's mirror stage and Althusser's interpellated subject. The resemblance, created through what Strathausen suggests is Althusser's mis-reading of Lacan, reveals their mutual influence. The question of influence, however, becomes an issue of tradition Althusser links to a politics of legitimacy and right he associates with a figure of paternity. While the process of filiation would seem to extend from Lacan to Althusser in the logic of the mirror employed by Strathausen to renew …