Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

These Are My People: An Ethnography Of Quiltcon, Kristin Barrus

Department of Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis presents the first ethnography of QuiltCon, the annual fan and artist convention for quiltmakers who identify with and participate in a social phenomenon called the Modern Quilt Movement (MQM) within the 21st century quilt world. QuiltCon (QC) is one product of this movement. This study considers the following questions: What kinds of people attend QC, and what types of experiences and encounters do they expect at the convention? What needs are met at QC for this subset of quiltmakers who attend and for the greater community of Modern quiltmakers? What role does QC play in cementing the identity …

Book Review: Lori D. Ginzberg. Women And The Work Of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, And Class In The Nineteenth-Century United States. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990., Merritt A. Morgan

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

Lori D. Ginzberg's 1990 work, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States, focuses on the ideas and socially benevolent practices of Protestant women of the prosperous middle and upper-middle-class during the 1820s to the 1880s in the northeast region of the United States. The author analyzes how contemporaries affirmed these values in women's benevolent work, which also promoted their status and brought about significant social changes in American culture.

Andrea Revised: Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist As Revolutionary By Martin Duberman, Phyllis Chesler

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Teaching Trauma In Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, Kat Shuman

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Using Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, this thesis outlines how to ethically and effectively teach literature that deals with trauma. My personal teaching philosophy as well as the current pedagogy surrounding trauma literature preface a detailed syllabus, lesson plans, assessments, and activities that would be useful in teaching a course centered around literature that deals with trauma. This thesis highlights the merits of teaching trauma fiction in the literature classroom.

A Fat Imposter: The Embodied Intersection Between Race, Body Type And Fatness In Margaret Cho’S Comedy, Julia Cox

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Margaret Cho is a comedic goddess who, in her mockery, serves flaming hot social commentary about race, body image, and fatness. Within this thesis, I used critical discourse analysis to understand how Margaret Cho embodies Asianness, whiteness, and the body types and images prescribed respectively. While working on data analysis, I came across a common media trope of fat women: the use of indexically Southern (United States), Appalachian, and Working class indexicals in speech and lexical items. I connected the ideologies surrounding Southern and Appalachian language to the inequalities that fat women face. This voicing had not previously been written …

Uncoverings: The Research Papers Of The American Quilt Study Group, Volume 42 (2021), Joanna E. Evans, Diana Bell-Kite, Alice M. Hines, Anita B. Loscalzo, Raelana Poteat, Meta M. Van Nostran

Uncoverings Journal

Preface by Joanna E. Evans

Searching for Margaret: Race, Memory, and a North Carolina Quilt by Diana Bell-Kite and RaeLana Poteat

The Threads of Redwork: Outline Embroidered Textiles by Meta M. Van Nostran

A Tompkins County, New York, Quilt Top Mystery by Anita B. Loscalzo

Glendora Hutson’s Friendship Quilt and the Origins of a Vibrant and Innovative Quilting Community by Alice M. Hines

Contributors

Index

A Noble Duty: Ladies’ Aid Associations In Upstate South Carolina During The Civil War, Elizabeth Aranda, Carmen Harris

University of South Carolina Upstate Student Research Journal

The contributions of women during the American Civil War have been typically examined within the broader picture of a nation or state-wide mobilization of citizens during a time of war. In this paper, I seek to show the mobilization of women during the Civil War from a regionalized perspective limited to the Upcountry of South Carolina and the effect their development of aid societies had on the war as well as on their place as white women in the Confederacy. Female-run aid societies began for the purpose of gathering supplies for soldiers. Within two years they had founded hospitals and …

“Ain’T My Mama’S Broken Heart”: The Mothers And Daughters Of Hillbilly Feminism, Alyssa Dewees

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The women of country music have long defied the genre's patriarchal associations and used their music as a platform for subversive social messages about gender inequality, and in the past several decades, the country music establishment has grown more willing to alter its image and accommodate these feminist themes. Because country music is marketed and understood by many of its fans as a representation of a lifestyle, this shift in expectations for women’s social roles and possibilities in the genre has an impact on the women who identify themselves with the particular rural, down-home image country music aims to define. …

History, Activism, Erasure: Archival Paradox As Institutional Practice, Sarah H. Salter

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This essay connects the reparative assemblages of queer archiving practice to growing conversations in university studies. Tracing the fraught legal history of Penn State University’s first “Homophile” association in the 1970s, this essay theorizes how university records—and the processes of recording they index—participate in the creation of institutional identity and help establish institutional relations with their communities. Ultimately, it suggests that archivists and librarians act as mediators, unintentionally or purposefully, of the relations between vulnerable communities and the structures of power in which they are embedded.

Digital Shame, Dehumanization, And Dismissal: An Analysis Of Gender Policing, Isabella Hatch, Antonia Randolph

Pursue: Undergraduate Research Journal

Introduction: The online performance of gender provides a unique glimpse at how individuals manipulate digital settings to reflect their engagement with their own gender performance and the gender performance of others. The majority of gender performance occurs subconsciously and is learned through repeated engagement with gendered expectations. However, the performativity of gender is brought to individuals’ consciousness when they are confronted with individuals who perform in a way that contrasts with previously held gender expectations. Transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals face frequent and often harsh gender policing that attacks them for their deviation from performances that are socially “acceptable.”

Methods: An …

Sonic Femininity: The Ronettes' Transgressive Gender Performance, Hilarie Ashton

Publications and Research

Iconic sixties girl group the Ronettes are frequently (and justly) celebrated for anchoring the Wall of Sound and inspiring the Beatles, but in their own right, they transgressed social, gendered expectations in revolutionary ways. Framed by a notion I call the sonic feminine, a recuperative theoretical space for the revolutionarily transgressive work of female and femme artists, I argue that the Ronettes, and lead singer Ronnie Spector in particular, enacted a kind of cultural rebellion: they crafted their images to made-up heights that tease the boundaries of drag across the spaces of the stage, the recording studio, the bathroom, and …

The (Mis) Representation Of Racialized Minorities: Barbie Dolls As Social Problems In India, Namrata Ashvinbhai Bhadania

English Faculty Publications

The relation between commodities and consumers is directly related to the transactional relationship between kids and their interaction with the toys. The paper aims to critique how female representation through Barbie Dolls in popular culture shapes female identity. Production and consumption of Barbie dolls in India became a way of socializing mechanism to educate young Indian girls on the concept of beauty. A notion of beauty is attached to blue eyes, skinny waist, and fair skin giving rise to “American Exceptionalism” (Madsen, 2009, p. 14), where the model nation conceptualizes itself though national identity where perceiver compels to transform themselves …

The Space Between “Seen” And “Unseen:” Queer People And The 1915-1945 New Negro Renaissance, Claudia R. Campanella

Dissertations and Theses

In November 1926, a group of Black artists, writers, and activists created the first and only edition of Fire!!, edited by novelist Wallace Thurman. Fire!! was created by a younger generation of New Negroes and “devoted to the younger Negro artists” who dissented from the mainstream ideas of the New Negro Movement and used the magazine to spread their own views on the 1915-1945 New Negro Renaissance. Fire!! and other texts speaking to this dissent against a Black intellectual middle class image of the movement will be studied in reference to showcasing the multi-faceted elements of the movement touching …

Baby Boomer Female Identity In The Literature Of White Women Writers, Ashley Diedrich

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation contributes to the critical conversation on American women's fiction by examining the works of American female Boomer authors and their representations of white female identity in Boomer literature. The texts included in this study range from 2004 to 2018, offering several recent years of perspective on Boomer women. Because these books are current, few, if any, scholarly articles focus on them and their contribution to American literature, allowing this dissertation to create new theories and connect to pre-existing ideas, such as ageism. In addition, this dissertation uses some of the themes prevalent in the work of scholars who …

“Beychella:” Beyoncé’S Homecoming To A Futuristic Queer Utopian, Jolie V. Brownell

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

Beyoncé’s 2018 Coachella performance and 2019 Homecoming film set the stage for a radical Black queer reimagining. Yet, how can Beyoncé—who is straight—be located within a queer critique? In this paper, I argue that through a radical and political expansion of queer, the creative deployment of dis/identification, and the unapologetic expression of the erotic, Beyoncé performs an embodiment of queer of color critique. These creative gestures within “Beychella” invite viewers into a queer futuristic utopian and provide new creative modes to politically inhabit, resist, and reimagine interlocking systems of oppression.

Keywords: Beyoncé, queer, dis/identification, erotic, QoCC, …

Theorizing #Girlboss Culture: Mediated Neoliberal Feminisms From Influencers To Multi-Level Marketing Schemes, Frankie Mastrangelo

Theses and Dissertations

I define girlboss feminism as emergent, mediated formations of neoliberal feminism that equate feminist empowerment with financial success, market competition, individualized work-life balance, and curated digital and physical presences driven by self-monetization. I look toward how the mediation of girlboss feminism utilizes branded and affective engagements with representational politics, discourses of authenticity and rebellion, as well as meritocratic aspiration to promote cultural interest in conceptualizing feminism in ways that are divorced from collective, intersectional struggle. I question the stakes involved in reducing feminist interrogations and commitments to discourses of representation, visibility, and meritocracy. I argue that while girlboss feminism may …

"With The Commodity In The Hand": A Practical Investigation Of The Intersection Of Material Culture With Performance Theory, Katharine M. Given

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the intersection of performance theory and material culture through the practices of garment reconstruction. In chapter 1, I examine key theorists in the fields of material culture and performance studies and articulate the connections between the two fields. In chapter 2, Using practice as research, I recount the experience of building reproduction garments from the eighteenth century using historically appropriate tools and methods, as well as the experience of wearing those garments. Finally, in Chapter 3, I walk through a possible historical examination of my encounter with these reconstructed garments, and consider the way in which feminine …

Distribution, Bars, And Arcade Stars: Joe Anthony’S Entrepreneurial Expansion In Houston’S Gay Media Industries, Finley Freibert

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This article develops the concept of "gay useful media" to explore a case study of gay entrepreneurship in Houston, Texas, of the 1970s. A father and son developed a gay media empire in the city, which spanned bars, bookstores, distribution, and vending. One of the pair's key establishments was Houston's legendary gay bar Mary's at 1022 Westheimer (also known as Mary's Lounge, Mary's, Naturally, and Mary's…Naturally).

Print Culture, Digital Culture, Poetics And Hermeneutics: Discussion With J. Hillis Miller, Liyuan Zhu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper is a response to Hillis Miller’s query on the author’s essay “Hillis Miller on the End of Literature.” The author basically agrees with Miller’s view on the shift from print culture to digital culture, explaining the special cultural context under which Chinese scholars emphasize the visual turn. Based on the rapid development of Chinese online literature, the author points out that print culture does not rival but coexists with digital culture. On the other hand, drawing on Aristotle’s Poetics and insights of several leading figures of contemporary hermeneutics, the author contends that Miller’s dichotomy of poetics (form) and …

China Question Of Us-American Imagism, Qingben Li

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper investigates first the influences of ancient Chinese culture on Ezra Pound, and then Pound’s influence on the New Culture Movement of modern China (1917). It is a kind of circular journey of literary texts and theories from ancient China to the West and then back to China. This journey, or “circle model,” involves textual appropriation, variation, transformation and misunderstanding in every stage.

Western Theory And Historical Studies Of Chinese Literary Criticism, Zhirong Zhu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper examines the formation of modern historical studies of classical Chinese literary criticism in terms of its interaction with and transformation of western theory. The discipline emerged during the eastward movement of Western ideas in the early twentieth century, promoting the “scientific study” of classical Chinese learning, and instituting curriculum and textbooks in Chinese universities. The reception of Western concepts of “literature” and “literary criticism” in the early twentieth century, largely through Japan, laid the very foundation of historical studies of classical Chinese literary criticism as an independent subject of study. This paper argues that when adopting Western methods …

The Chuanyue (Traversing) Of Western Cultural Industry Theories In China, Hui Li, Naihai Zhai

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper discusses the reception and transformation of western theories of Culture Industry in China during the Reform Era (1978-present). It proposes the term 穿越 (chuanyue, traverse), rather than communication or traveling theory, in order to probe into the complexity of the interaction, modification and transformation of western theories of Culture Industry and creative industries in China. The paper focuses on 1) issues of time lag or disjunction, in that it took more than half a century for the critique of Culture Industry to enter China; 2) divergent interpretations of Culture Industry with a strong critical edge of …

Cinematic Representation Of Ethnic Minorities In Prc And Postcolonialism, Xinyu Lu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper explores the notions of “Sinophone” and “Chinese-language cinema” under the rubrics of postcolonialism in Chinese film studies both in China and elsewhere around the world. The paper argues that these postcolonial-inspired notions misconstrue Chinese national identity building as imperialist/colonialist endeavours, and dichotomize Han and Chinese ethnic minorities. The paper offers its counterargument by examining cinematic practices of people’s cinema, minority nationality films and native-language films in the PRC.

“Western Marxism” In Mao’S China, Jun Zeng, Yichen Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

China’s reception of “Western Marxism” is a critical part of the global history of Marxism. This paper examines three aspects of the reception of Western Marxism in literary and art criticism during the early years of Mao’s China (1949-65): the Western Marxist critique of surrealism, debates over Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, and Sartrean existentialism and Western Marxism. The impacts of Western Marxist literary thought upon Chinese literary studies during the early years of the PRC are discussed, along with the extensive influx of Western Marxism that began in the reform era of post-Mao China (1978- ) …

The Case Of Limbo: The Search For Identity In Sylvia Plath’S Short Fiction And The Bell Jar, Kristin Lyons

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Though Sylvia Plath’s poems and novel undergo frequent scholarly research, her short fiction is often overlooked. Plath’s journals influenced her short fiction writing, and her stories reflected Plath’s lived experiences. Plath’s short fiction, like her other works, explore themes of identity and detachment. Each of her protagonists exist in a personal limbo, and they strive to find their identities and to fit the roles in which they occupy. This thesis focuses on “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom,” stories from Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, and additional research from scholarly journals and biographies, with comparisons to identity struggles …

“9/11 And The Collapse Of The American Dream: Imbolo Mbue’S Behold The Dreamers”, Elizabeth Toohey

Publications and Research

Behold the Dreamers follows a Cameroonian couple who, as newcomers to America, harbor dreams of success unavailable to them back home. Undocumented immigration, the widening gulf between rich and poor, and the thinly veiled racism of an avowedly "post-racial" culture converge in this new generation of immigrants' painful encounter with the American dream. I consider the ways Mbue's novel shares themes with a "second wave" of post- 9/11 literature—first, in centering the disillusionment of a protagonist aspiring to the American dream; next, in its representation of New York as a space haunted by 9/11, but also of resistance to the …

“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 …

Consuming Poppy Cannon, Claire Stewart

Publications and Research

Poppy Cannon was a food writer whose prominence was most felt in post-World War II America. Within the pages of her books and syndicated food columns, she positioned the use of newly available processed foods as uniquely modern. Cannon’s recipes, featuring packaged food, were not intended for the lazy cook looking to cut corners. Her use of manufactured food was instead meant to create gourmet meals, while all the while harnessing the power of an ongoing industrial phenomenon. Cannon assumed her readers were smart and literate, and in virtually all of her many cookbooks, she prefaced her recipes with references …

Acknowledging Our Past: Race, Landscape And History, Alea Harris, Kaycia Best, Dieran Mcgowan, Destiny Shippy, Vera Oberg, Bryson Coleman, Luke Meagher, Rhiannon Leebrick Ph.D., Phillip Stone

Student Scholarship

This book is the product of nearly a year's worth of student research on Wofford College's history, undertaken as part of a grant by the Council of Independent Colleges in the Humanities Research for the Public Good initiative. The research was supervised and directed by Dr. Rhiannon Leebrick.

"Guiding Research Questions:

How did Wofford College and its early stakeholders support and participate in slavery?

How is the legacy of slavery present in the landscape of our campus (buildings, statues, names, etc.)?

How can we better understand Wofford as an institution during the time of Reconstruction through the Jim Crow era? …

Late Postmodernism, Nicholas Brown

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.