Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Fashioning Desire At B. Altman & Co.: Ethics And Consumer Culture In Early Department Stores, Tessa Maffucci

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We live in an age of fast fashion. Clothing is produced in greater volumes than ever before and the lifecycle of each garment keeps getting shorter and shorter. Many items are manufactured to be worn only one time and then thrown away—as disposable as a cup of coffee. There is much to be learned about our current fashion ecosystem by looking into the past. Beyond the garments themselves we must understand the larger historical and sociological context in which these articles of clothing were produced. How does the shopping environment shape the buying habits and fashion trends of an era? …

Archiving The '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture, Margaret A. Galvan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Archiving the '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture locates a shared genealogy of feminism and queer theory in the visual culture of 1980s American feminism. Gathering primary sources from grant-funded research in a dozen archives, I analyze an array of image-text media of women, ranging from well known creators like Gloria Anzaldúa, Alison Bechdel, and Nan Goldin, to little known ones like Roberta Gregory and Lee Marrs. In each chapter, I examine how each woman develops movement politics in her visual production, and I study the reception of their works in their communities of influence. Through studying hybrid visual …

Lgbtqia Mentoring Program, Office Of Diversity And Inclusion

LGBTQIA Archive

This document lists faculty and staff at the College of the Holy Cross who have identified themselves as members or allies of the LGBTQIA community working to create networking and mentoring opportunities for current students.

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 …

Editorial, Franziska Dubgen

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Epistemic injustice gives a name to experiences that we struggle to articulate due to the injuries of hegemonic speech. This normative grammar seeks to enable social philosophers and activists alike to name experiences of injustice that have not been previously addressed as such. This includes experiences that we cannot make sense of because the society we live in does not provide a vocabulary to make them intelligible or because we are not entitled to give them a name due to our specific identity position, which supposedly disables us from judging matters objectively. By looking at epistemic injustice in practice, this …

Heavy Expectations: Reading Pregnancy In The Victorian Novel, Livia Arndal Woods

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation articulates the tendency of Victorian novels to make legible only the pregnant bodies of immodest characters who transgress gendered ideologies while the pregnant bodies of modest characters tend to go undescribed. Tracing the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth over the course of the long nineteenth century, my chapters demonstrate the function of moralizing narrative conventions in the representation of pregnancy in mid-Victorian novels, of a self-conscious use of free indirect diagnosis in high-Victorian fiction, and a shift at the fin-de-siècle from pregnancy as a signifier of morality to a symptom of unstable minds. The novels I read closely …

The One Exhibition The Roots Of The Lgbt Equality Movement One Magazine & The First Gay Supreme Court Case In U.S. History 1943-1958, Joshua R. Edmundson

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The ONE Exhibition explores an era in American history marked by intense government sponsored anti-gay persecution and the genesis of the LGBT equality movement. The study begins during World War II, continues through the McCarthy era and the founding of the nation’s first gay magazine, and ends in 1958 with the first gay Supreme Court case in U.S. history.

Central to the story is ONE The Homosexual Magazine, and its founders, as they embarked on a quest for LGBT equality by establishing the first ongoing nationwide forum for gay people in the U.S., and challenged the government’s right to engage …

Toilet Talk, Michael Blake

Theses and Dissertations

Toilet Talk explores both formal and autobiographical themes related to desire, sexuality, and the relationship between public and private space. My work and research aims to reposition and queer the industrial object and its promotion of hyper masculine ideals.

Apocalypse & Affect: Political Passivity In Film And Television Representations Of Nuclear Holocaust, W W. Rooks

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

Within the expanding canon of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic film and television, this project studies the subgenre that makes use of nuclear holocaust as a narrative device or setting in order to understand how, rather than engaging audiences with the dire off-screen politics that inform such films, it imposes a sense of political passivity on its characters. Similarly imparted is an assumption of that same sense for the audience. In this way, the framing of modern apocalyptic narratives meet an “affective limitation,” which is a concept steeped in the examination of media as a potential tool to motivate political action (Massumi …

Selling Queer Rights: The Commodification Of Queer Rights Activism, Laurence Pedroni

Themis: Research Journal of Justice Studies and Forensic Science

With the recent Supreme Court decision to legalize same-sex marriage throughout the country, many have spoken in support of the decision, calling it a massive expansion of civil rights. While affording marriage rights to same-sex couples, these rights and expansions should be understood in the greater context of historical queer rights struggle and the economic factors that have motivated these civil rights expansions. This article will examine how the expansion of gay marriage rights was motivated not by concerns with civil rights, but out of economic concerns. This process has, in effect, commodified queer rights, weakening queer rights politics to …

Lullaby For The Burning Ear: How Intersectional Feminism Can Help Decolonize The Latino Consciousness, Donovan E. Hernandez Garcia

Senior Theses

People exist with their own religions, cultures, and practices, which illustrate the ingenuity of humanity. Yet, because of major events that altered the fate of the Americas, a certain societal structure was created to maintain power. Due to colonization, the prolonged exposure to numerous cultures, and the continuation of oppressive systems, people have been forced to band together based on similar characteristics, be it race, gender, or sexual orientation, creating divisions within society. It is because of such colonial mentality, subliminal and apparent, political and cultural movements, such as Feminism and intersectionality, have been created to combat the harmful effects …

Society’S Influence On Gender Roles, Ana Perez-Senic

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

The Civil War was a time of hardship for everyone regardless of gender. Louisa May Alcott and Stephen Crane embody the spirit and mood of the Civil War through their novels and the use of the gender lens.Through the protagonist of the novels we see the influence war has on their state of mind and on their home and social life.

The novels Little Women and The Red Badge of Courage capture the essence of the Civil War era. Louisa Alcott and Stephen Crane reflect their own experiences and thoughts through their character's mindset, personality and hardships. Gender roles and …

Family, Housing, And The Political Geography Of Gay Liberation In Los Angeles County, 1960-1986, Ian M. Baldwin

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study examines the gay liberation movement in Los Angeles County through the lens of housing rights. It illustrates how sexual justice activism evolved in tandem with the fates of the welfare state and urban politics. Like racial minorities, queers have been stymied by economic barriers. Beginning in the 1930s, federal housing agencies established “family” requirements to housing subsidies, which the state defined through biology or marriage. In L.A. County, activists worked to overcome this heteronormative barrier at the grassroots and within the political establishment. Binding gay liberation to economic and family justice, queers opened housing shelters and social service …

"Mother, I Will": Female Subjectivity And Religious Vision In The Brontës Novels, Amanda Scott

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë have long attracted sustained critical attention, in

large part because of their strong female protagonists. These strong-willed women self-assuredly reject oppression and model new paradigms for the Victorian woman to empower her subjectivity. This subjectivity serves, in turn, not only as the ability to form and express views counter to outworn social prescriptions, but it also serves as the centralized interior focus that allows their protagonists to think of themselves as the foremost subjects of their lives, rather than see themselves as pawns to be moved about in the games of patriarchal hierarchy. This study …

Gi Jane Versus Sergeant Jane Doe: How Women’S Images In War Movies Contribute To Conflicting Expectations Of Women In Combat, Sawyer Marie L. Alberi

All Theses And Dissertations

Research on women’s portrayal in media generally suggests that women continue to be sexualized and objectified as war trophies in the classic Hollywood warrior culture film. The age old question of whether life imitates art or vice versa is important to consider when examining the question of how this popular culture medium contributes to the conflicting expectations of today’s women in combat roles. What is the reality of women’s roles in the US Military compared to the roles portrayed by warrior film media? History tells us that women have been on the battlefield in one way or another since there …

Men Who Coach Women, Shannel Blackshear

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Although Title IX helped to shape athletics in educational settings, the legislation also transformed the world of coaching. Due to the growing demand for competitive female athletics at the collegiate level, the need for qualified individuals to coach women’s sports continues to grow. As colleges and universities continue to create women’s athletic opportunities, coaching collegiate female teams has become equally competitive to coaching male athletes in terms of pay, benefits, compensation packages, and national attention (Welch & Sigelman, 2007). Despite the fact that 57% (Pilon, 2015), of female collegiate athletic teams are coached by male coaches, there is a gap …

Shifting Understandings Of Lesbianism In Imperial And Weimar Germany, Meghan C. Paradis

Scholarly Undergraduate Research Journal at Clark (SURJ)

This paper seeks to understand how, and why, understandings of lesbianism shifted in Germany over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through close readings of both popular cultural productions and medical and psychological texts produced within the context of Imperial and Weimar Germany, this paper explores the changing nature of understandings of homosexuality in women, arguing that over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the dominant conceptualization of lesbianism transformed from an understanding of lesbians that was rooted in biology and viewed lesbians as physically masculine “gender inverts”, to one that was …

German Women In The Wild West: Contradiction In Post-Wwii Gender Roles, Romy Franks

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

While postwar German women were portrayed as gritty and strong from their lived experiences, West German newspapers articles reiterated the contradictory roles proffered to women in German society. Rather than speaking up against the genre’s masculine dominance, popular western novels, films, and the press continued to reinforce widely held opinions and norms by encouraging women to be content with the ideal female character offered them.

"In The Land Of Tomorrow": Representations Of The New Woman In The Pre-Suffrage Era, Natalie B. O'Neal

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This digital anthology explores feminism in selected short fiction by women writers from the 1911 run of the popular women’s magazines Woman’s Home Companion, Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Farmer’s Wife. This fiction furthered the women’s rights movement by allowing women to imagine a world similar to their own with a heroine who voiced their desires and enacted change. Rather than the more experimental, inaccessible literature of avant garde high modernist writers consumed by the upper class, popular fiction reached a wider, middle class audience and was more effective at producing a progressive zeitgeist following the stilted Victorian …

Daughters Of The Sun: "The Birth" (An Excerpt), Megan Lynn

Scholarly and Creative Works Conference (2015 - 2021)

“You have never heard of me before. You have never heard of me, but my name has come out of your mouth thousands of times.”

So begins my novel, Daughters of the Sun, the story of Jesus’s twin sister, Alleluia. Using the narrative framework seen in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Alleluia tells her story over one night—Saturday into Sunday morning—in an appropriated apartment facing a church. She weaves into her story another tale of women who have lived in shadows cast by the men around them, women whom history chose to vilify—Lilith, Adam’s first wife who was written out of …

The Life Of The Factory? Or The Life Of The Farm? That Is The Question., Adam C. Mcelwain, Bethany Lutwin

Migration in Global Context Symposium

Abstract: The focus of this lesson on Global Migration is the emotion behind young women’s decision to leave for the city and work in the factory, or stay in their hometown. Both have an opportunity cost for a life that may be better. The essential question is “Is it better to be a factory girl who has emigrated to the city or a country girl living and working on a farm?” Students will examine the motivation behind leaving the country for a factory job in the city or staying behind and working in a rural setting like a farm. They …

Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.51 No.2 2016

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Beyond Women And Power: Looking Backward And Moving Forward, Kathy M. Krause

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Powerful Women And Misogynistic Subplots: Some Comments On The Necessity Of Checking The Primary Sources, Tracy Adams

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Many women formerly regarded as harridans, vixens, or worse by historians throughout the ages have been rehabilitated in recent years. It is therefore discouraging to find old narratives of female promiscuity, intriguing, incompetence, frivolity, cupidity, obesity) continuing to circulate, in the form of what we might think of as female "subplots" in larger histories. When the woman in question is not the star of the study she is often subject to outdated stereotypes gleaned from old studies. This essay, focusing on a number of very recent subplots that recycle verifiably incorrect assumptions about Isabeau of Bavaria (1371-1435), queen of mad …

Mistrusting The Historiography Of Royal Mothers: Louis Of Savoy And Catherine De Medici, Kathleen Wellman

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Louise of Savoy, mother of Francis I, and Catherine de Medici, mother of the last three reigning Valois kings—Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III—were two sixteenth-century women whose maternity gave them access to power and provided the foundation for their claims to exercise it legitimately. While their contemporaries either accepted or contested those claims, some nineteenth-century critics vehemently rejected female rule, particularly by mothers. Modern scholars have left those nineteenth-century repudiations largely unquestioned.

What Do We Mean By "Women And Power"?, Marie A. Kelleher

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This essay considers the question of how we define “power” in order to best include women and gender. Queenship/lordship studies have been at the forefront of women-and-power discussions, and have advanced that discussion by moving away from the “exceptional woman” biographies to focus on the patterns of power that these women embodied. But if we extend our definition of power beyond the realm of public authority to a more general category of acts that can shape the destinies of others, we are confronted with a much broader field of action that might be considered “women’s power” — a field that …

Archives From Houses Of Cistercian Nuns And Their Evidence For Powerful Thirteenth-Century Secular Women, Constance H. Berman

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This essay examines documents from abbeys of Cistercian nuns in northern France. The documents reveal the presence of numerous women of power and authority as founders and patrons of those women's houses. Where some women were acting as widows or regents, others had access to sufficient funds for acts of patronage and foundation because they were heiresses. Here those named Matilda from the ecclesiastical province of Sens in northern France are underlined, showing the diversity of female wealth and power.

Back Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.51 No.2 2016

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Queenship Studies Comes Of Age, Lois L. Huneycutt

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Mistresses And Merveilleuses: The Historiographical Record On Female Political Players Of The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries, Christine Adams

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Modern historians have found it difficult to disrupt the narrative inherited from past scholars, who argued that even prominent women lacked any genuine political role in the early modern world. However, in many ways, the personal influence that women exercised in court and salon society was highly political, as was that of men. An examination of the power of highly visible women, for example, famous mistresses such as Madame de Montespan and Madame Tallien, suggests that historians should broaden their understanding of the “political” and more carefully interrogate the activities of female historical figures, rejecting the moralistic accounts that have …