English Language and Literature Commons^™

I Am Commanded To Love You: The Journey Of Three Women College Presidents, Carey Monroe

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This was a phenomenological study of the lived experiences of women who serve as college presidents. Three women, who serve as current college presidents, participated in this study. The first was a president at a two-year community college in the upper Midwest for twelve years and served as president in another Midwestern community college for nine years prior. The second woman was a first-time president who had served for three years at a Catholic four-year college established to provide nurses for a health system. The third was a first-time president who served at a Research I institution in the upper …

With Great Power: Examining The Representation And Empowerment Of Women In Dc And Marvel Comics, Kylee Kilbourne

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Throughout history, comic books and the media they inspire have reflected modern society as it changes and grows. But women’s roles in comics have often been diminished as they become victims, damsels in distress, and sidekicks. This thesis explores the problems that female characters often face in comic books, but it also shows the positive representation that new creators have introduced over the years. This project is a genealogy, in which the development of the empowered superwoman is traced in modern age comic books. This discussion includes the characters of Kamala Khan, Harley Quinn, Gwen Stacy, and Barbara Gordon and …

A Refuge For Jae-In Doe: Fugues In The Key Of English Major, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

"A Refuge for Jae-in Doe: Fugues in the Key of English Major"

Author(s):

Seo-Young Chu (see profile)

Date:

2017

Subject(s):

Feminism, Creative nonfiction, Asian American literature, Sonnets, Social justice, Trauma

Item Type:

Essay

Tag(s):

#MeToo, Stanford, women in academia, early american

Permanent URL:

http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/cp82-8f39

Writing And Women's Retention In Engineering, Jennifer C. Mallette

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Engineering disciplines have focused on recruiting and retaining women, assessing factors that contribute to decisions to enter or exit the field at every level. While many studies have examined writing in engineering disciplines, few have looked at writing’s role in women’s decisions to remain in or leave engineering. Using a case study of a professional civil engineer, Katy, this study examines the role that writing played in her dissatisfaction with engineering and her ultimate decision to leave the field. The author analyzes two genres of writing, meeting minutes and a preliminary engineering report, to explore how Katy’s writing practices often …

Irene Adler, Just Another Damsel, Sarah Litteral

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

As someone who identifies as a feminist, I was very excited to discover that my English class, which focused on the topic of Sherlock Holmes, had a whole entire section dedicated to the interactions of women within the series. Once we were able to choose what our final research paper would be on, I knew exactly what I wanted to talk about. My whole life I have love mystery novels, especially the Holmes series, however, I was always a little unsatisfied at the lack of prominent female characters within it. I felt that this paper would be the perfect format …

From Subject To Cyborg: Reframing Identity Within Female Spaces In Neil Gaiman's Black Orchid And A Game Of You, Mary A. Ruge

Masters Theses

Whether they are secret or whether they are household names, identities are paramount in superhero comics. Yet those that create these identities do so from a place of privilege in a hierarchy which results in inauthentic characters and repetitive plots. For the superhero genre, the misrepresentation of female characters (perhaps related to a severe underrepresentation of female creators) has resulted in highly patriarchal storylines that are reductive, stereotypical, and often violent toward women. To combat this trend, one must consider the ways in which a more complex female character violates the current framework and offer a solution. For superhero comics, …

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 …

Lesbian Love Sonnets: Adrienne Rich And Carol Ann Duffy, Robin Seiler-Garman

Senior Theses

Our conceptualization of sexuality is rooted in gender. Modern, western society defines sexuality as which genders one is and is not attracted to—often appearing as a binary between homosexuality and heterosexuality. Recently, however, queer theorists have begun to push against the idea of binary sexuality altogether.

The interplay between gender and sexuality additionally manifests in the history of literature. Because the two are so intimately intertwined, writing about sexuality necessitates writing about gender. Twenty-One Love Poems by Adrienne Rich and Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy are two poetry collections where, as lesbian poets, gender and sexuality play an important role. …

Not So Revisionary: The Regressive Treatment Of Gender In Alan Moore's Watchmen, Anna C. Marshall

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

While Alan Moore’s comic book Watchmen is often hailed as a revisionary text for introducing flawed superheroes and political anxiety to the genre, it is also remarkably regressive in its treatment of gender. Some critics do argue that women are given a newfound voice in Watchmen, but this interpretation neglects to examine character Laurie Jupiter adequately, or the ways in which other female characters' appearance and dialogue are limited and/or based on their sexuality and relationships with male characters. Watchmen's main female characters, mother and daughter Sally and Laurie Jupiter, lack autonomy and their identities are completely intertwined …

“Without Stopping To Write A Long Apology”: Spectacle, Anecdote, And Curated Identity In Running A Thousand Miles For Freedom, Anjelica La Furno

Theses and Dissertations

Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom unapologetically challenges traditional nineteenth-century notions of race and gender by way of its treatment of spectacle, anecdotal use, and assertion of authorial choices that contradict the expectations of a white abolitionist audience. Its most challenging feature is what I will call Ellen’s “curated identity.”

Flesh In Line With The Mind : Gender In Caitlin Kiernan’S The Drowning Girl., Sarah Buckley

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

This paper analyzes how Caitlyn R. Kiernan in her novel The Drowning Girl characterizes gender identity, particularly in regards to women, both transgender and cisgender. The book's characterization of gender roles for cisgender men, cisgender women, and transgender women, while seeming on the surface to subvert sexist stereotypes, reproduces the pitfalls of feminist literary criticism popularized in the 1970s and 1980s. Notably, such themes include viewing women's madness as a method of transcending masculine rationality, a dichotomized essentialism of masculinity and femininity, and universalizing women's experience without regards to race, class, and nationality. Transgender autobiographical and literary archetypes employed in …

Ironic Deference : An Inquiry Into The Nineteenth-Century Feminist Rhetoric Of Kesiah Shelton., Melissa Rothman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project examines the works of Kesiah Shelton, a writer for popular magazines in the late nineteenth century who used irony in interesting ways to critique the social norms of the period. Although, scholars have noted that female authorship was a an expanding field during this period, there were very specific gendered expectations limiting what female authors wrote about; women were primarily limited to writing about domestic matters and were discouraged from taking up other topics associated with the male public sphere such as politics. Many scholars have noted how the cult of domesticity valorized women as superior moral beings, …

Ethics Of Care On The Narrative Margins Of Willa Cather’S The Professor’S House And Death Comes For The Archbishop, Jeannette E. Schollaert

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Willa Cather’s Southwestern novels feature cultured male protagonists as the driving sources of action. The male characters explore the natural world and advance the plot, but Cather positions female figures, particularly spinster figures, on the sidelines of the protagonists’ plots to offer support and connection with the natural world. Using an ethic of care framework and ecofeminist Val Plumwood’s master model, this thesis examines the ways in which Cather marginalizes female figures even as they serve crucial roles in the male protagonists’ development. While the male protagonists link spinster figures and sexualized feminine bodies with the natural world, they imbue …

The Formation Of The Autonomous Woman Through A Hegelian Lens: A Comparative Study Of The British Fin De Siecle "New Woman" And The Post-Mao "Amazing" Woman, Robyn L. Buro

English Department Theses

This thesis utilizes the Hegelian concept of self-consciousness development to explore the formation of the autonomous woman within the New Woman movement of the British fin de siècle and the literature of women writers in 1980s Post-Mao China. The sexual figuration of the New Woman via an unremitting male gaze as well as the absence of individual awareness due to limited reflective self-assessment lead to a misrepresentation of the female figurehead in fin de siècle Britain. Through an in-depth study of literature by Charlotte Mew, Victoria Cross, George Egerton, and Thomas Hardy, the reader can identify key points of failure …

Postmodern Puzzles: Creating Versions Of The Truth And Identity In Margaret Atwood’S The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, And The Blind Assassin, Maggie Raymond

English Department Theses

Although difficult to universally characterize Margaret Atwood as a feminist postmodern writer, three of Atwood’s novels (The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, and The Blind Assassin) use postmodern techniques to build a conversation with readers about how female identity is created by having readers co-create meaning, consider the influence of intertexts, and question discourses. By emphasizing the role of the reader and the construction of text through storytelling, the traditional roles of author and reader are questioned, and Atwood develops a conversation with readers over their respective roles in creating and interpreting text. In The Robber Bride, Tony, Charis, …

Consciousness Engendered Throughout Lena Dunham's "Girls" : Female Subjectivity Vs The Problem Of Post-Feminism, Heeyeon Kim

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The inequality between genders is an idea still endorsed in everyday life throughout media, political discourse, and relationships. Gender discrimination spurs feminists to strive for equity and has become the motivation for the changing and progressive message in their writings and artworks. Lena Dunham’s HBO TV series Girls is such a work and is distinctly unique when compared to Hollywood’s presentation of the standard image of women, and thus, has been used as an initiation into the study of post-feminism and the contemporary media. Dunham’s attitudes and ideas shown in Girls has the same vigorous feminist movement resembling the rebelliousness …

When Worlds Collide: Feminism, Conservatism And Twentieth Century Authors, Madison Cooney

Honors Theses

Two streams of literary narratives appearing during the Great Depression grew from personal and historical experiences of their women authors with overlapping but very different perspectives on American cultural history. These were: 1) The accounts of rural frontier Midwestern regional experiences of Laura Ingalls Wilder, as edited and shaped in part by her daughter and writing partner Rose Wilder Lane, in retrospect during the New Deal era; and 2) the 1920s urban African-American experience of Zora Neale Hurston in the context of an emerging national black artistic and intellectual scene. Through a shared feminism emphasizing freedom for women, these authors …

Living Subversive Narratives: Shahrazad’S Stories Of Women, Caleb Nicholas

Honors Projects

Though scholars have examined The 1001 Nights’ Entertainments or The Arabian Nights, few have thoroughly explored the function of Shahrazad’s tales as they relate to her position as a woman. Closely reading the stories of the Nights reveals that there are chiefly two types of female characters who emerge in her stories: the heroic, who have no apparent autonomy, and the villainous, who have overflowing autonomy. These depictions of women are problematic from the viewpoint of present-day feminism, but are understandable, and even genuinely subversive, in Shahrazad’s context. Although some scholars have dismissed questions about the function of the …

Navigating Women's Cultural Representation Through Video Games In The Obama Era, Mark Stephen Reeder

English Theses - Archive

While the representations of women in video games have remained disappointingly negative since the 1980s, America’s political shift from the presidencies of George W. Bush to Barack Obama in 2007 had important cultural implications, particularly impacting the representation of women in popular culture. This thesis will examine the cultural depictions of women from 2002-2011, providing a particular focus on the unique cultural factors prevalent during this time period—including the expansion of pornography, a conservative cultural backlash to Obama, and the rapid deterioration of ‘political correctness’—that impacted how images of women in video games were received. Analyzing the cultural atmosphere of …

Barrie's Traditional Woman: Wendy's Fatal Flaw, Charlsie G. Johnson

Oglethorpe Journal of Undergraduate Research

The primary goal of this literary critique of J.M. Barrie’s novel Peter and Wendy, with the utilization of a feminist psychoanalytical approach, is to explore issues such as: Neverland’s perpetuation of patriarchal structures under the guise of a false modernity and Wendy’s inability to achieve modernity through the societal expectations that undermine the freedom within Peter’s Neverland, as well as her inherent tendencies to gravitate to the traditional feminine role. The arguments and conversation of this topic is based upon a close reading of the Centennial Edition of The Annotated Peter Pan, Barrie’s Peter and Wendy, and articles …

Genres Of Feminist Lives: Autobiography, Archives, And Community, 1970-1983, Meredith A. Benjamin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The desire to record lives and the conviction that such recordings would serve an important purpose for other women were the motivations behind much of the autobiographical writing in U.S. feminist writing of the 1970s and 80s. In Genres of Feminist Lives: Autobiography, Archives, and Community, 1970-1983, I argue that feminist writers in this period used autobiographical writing to create a sense of community among their readers: a new feminist public. Realizing the inadequacy of a sense of identification, these writers encouraged their audiences, in the words of Audre Lorde, to transform silence into language and action. While scholars …

Split Wounds: Diverging Formations Of Trauma In The Diagnostic And Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders V, Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, And The Rat Laughed, And Once Were Warriors, Emily R. Johnston

Theses and Dissertations

Split Wounds interrogates naturalized, normalized trauma wisdom—particularly the individualization and pathologization of sexualized trauma. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of discursive formation, explicated in The Archaeology of Knowledge as a set of conditions that enables history, this dissertation elucidates differing discursive formations of trauma in contemporary medical documents, literary texts, and films. The introductory chapter explicates how founding texts in the field of trauma theory construct trauma as a preverbal, psychological experience that can only be represented through fragmented, non-linear, anti-narrative textual strategies. Chapter two exposes such Euro-American modernist ideology in the American Psychiatric Association’s clinical definition of posttraumatic stress disorder …

I Preferred, Much Preferred, My Version: Exploring The Female Voice And Feminine Identity Within Memoirs Of The 20th And 21st Centuries, Alexandra Fradelizio

Senior Theses

Memoirs have long been a valuable way in which individuals share and reflect on their past experiences. The genre of memoir writing especially had a tremendous impact on a range of American female writers. This thesis explores memoirs written by women throughout the 20^th century. With the shift in women’s roles during the 1900s and early 2000s, the memoirs examined emphasize the importance of feminine identity. The analysis provided within this thesis centers on each memoirist’s unique path in determining her sense of self. Moreover, the memoirists each use the process of writing to relay the value of personal …

Women's Rhetoric And The Romance Novel Genre, Kathryn M. O'Neil

Theses and Dissertations

Romance novel readers and authors often face shaming by those who have power/influence over them; namely the popular media and academic community, who claim the genre is sexist and formulaic. Because of this, women are made to feel guilty for enjoying romance. However, by applying Krista Ratcliffe’s rhetorical listening technique to Janet Radway’s ethnography, Reading the Romance, select romance novel texts, and interviews with ten romance authors, we discover that the romance novel genre is more complex than it gets credit for. Romance novels can be empowering and provide solidarity among readers and between readers and authors. Through the …

History Of Housewives In First-Year Composition And Effects On Students, Pay, And Pedagogy, Vera Lynn Lentini

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis paper reviews the history of women in the field of composition as a discipline, paying particular attention to the evolution of the role of the writing instructor. Today, first-year composition classrooms are staffed by a mostly contingent and female workforce, which is an ethical problem for writing programs and English departments. As in the larger workforce, service-oriented careers like teaching tend to be underpaid and characterized by deference to the experts, who are in the position of authority. While this scheme seems to have functioned for housewives and breadwinners in the 1950s, in today’s dual-earner couple it is …

How Proto-Feminist Was George Eliot?, Ellie L. Feis

UCARE: Research Products

The Mill on the Floss shows the struggle of Maggie, a woman who values education over beauty, in a judgmental society. Maggie is shamed by her society after her cousin’s fiancé, Stephen, tricks her into running away with him. Maggie is forced to live in shame and only escapes public oppression when she dies.

Romola is the story of how a young woman who is forced rely on men for a sense of purpose and safety. Her husband is conniving and has extramarital affairs. Romola finds a happy ending when she is free from patriarchal influence and relies solely on …

Always The Feminine Fool, Shelby L. Dana

Student Works

Women have often been cast as mentally unstable throughout history. It is assumed that since they are the "weaker sex," they are psychologically inept. However, many times they act irrationally because they are filling a role in which society has already placed them, not because they are insane. Author Charlotte Perkins Gilman illustrates this in her short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, as readers can watch narrator go insane after being told time after time that she already is. Some people are born mad, some achieve madness, but women have madness thrust upon them.

The Weight Of “Glory”: Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, And Women’S Issues In Middlemarch, Megan Armknecht

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Queen Of Kings: Beyoncé Politics And Pedagogy In The Juvenile Detention Center Classroom, Sarah Kahn

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In 2016, the cultural conversation around feminism and intersectionality has shifted towards new problems of inclusion and change. Feminists are beginning to ask whether the commodification of female sexuality and objectification are extricable, whether a hypersexualized mainstream identity and a feminist one are mutually exclusive, how to integrate female experiences of different socioeconomic backgrounds, races, and cultures into a new feminism, and how to define feminism as we begin to move away from binary gendering. Increased visibility of trans issues has brought genderqueerness and femmephobia into the feminist conversation, and technology and globalization have forced that conversation to open up …

Parody And The Pen: Pippi Longstocking, Harriet M. Welsch, And Flavia De Luce As Disrupters Of Space, Language, And The Male Gaze, Kelsey Mclendon

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

In opposition to a literary tradition of damsel-in-distress female characters, Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking, Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy, and Alan Bradley’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie provide examples of empowered, intelligent, and capable young girls living in a mid-20th century environment and successfully subverting patriarchal norms. Drawing on Laura Mulvey’s theory on women as spectacle, Hélène Cixous’s concept of l’ecriture feminine, and New Historicist influences, I explore the common threads within these post-World War II era texts. Pippi’s strength and humor, Harriet’s spying and writing, and Flavia’s scientific expertise and detectival work illustrate their …