Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Our Stories, Our Voices: The Lived Experiences Of Black Families With Young Children During Covid-19, Devalin Jackson

Master's Theses

The purpose of this study was to explore the lived experiences of Black families raising young children during shelter in place orders and distance learning due to Covid-19. The study was conducted virtually through Zoom and Google form due to county shelter in place orders. Participants were recruited from the school in which the researcher worked. Through the use of virtual interviews, the five participants highlighted themes of reconnections, isolations, empowerment, family values and conversations. The families shared experiences of resilience and hope and brought thoughts of how these experiences could be highlighted in instructional and curriculum designs; especially during …

Isaac Gottesman's The Critical Turn In Education: From Marxist Critique To Poststructuralist Feminism To Critical Theories Of Race, Aaron A. Baker

Intersections: Critical Issues in Education

Isaac Gottesman's historiography, The Critical Turn in Education: From Marxist Critique to Poststructuralist Feminism to Critical Theories of Race, aspires to Illuminate the historical context in which critical educational theory evolved. To his credit, he seems to achieve that goal, and more: he establishes that the relationship between the history of critical educational theory and society’s reliance on education is a key to social justice. This book review, describes and evaluates each chapter of Gottesman's text, focusing on his successes and challenges.

Exploring The Rhetorical Power Of Speculative Fiction Through Jewelle Gomez’S The Gilda Stories And Octavia Butler’S Fledgling, Monique Dixon

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

There are apparent similarities between Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories and Octavia Butler’s Fledgling. However, this thesis will demonstrate that they share more than similar subject matter and yet differ in substantial ways. Utilizing Black feminist theory and alternative rhetoric this thesis examines how Gomez and Butler harness the potential of speculative fiction to critique the world around them and imagine an alternative world for those who are intersectionally marginalized.

Animals In Drama And Theatrical Performance: Anthropocentric Emotionalism, Peta Tait

Animal Studies Journal

This article outlines how nonhuman animals are framed by the emotions of drama, theatre and contemporary performance and considers a distinctive tradition in western culture of enacting animal characters who function as surrogate humans. It argues that, contradictorily, while animal characters confirm anthropocentric emotionalism, drama also contains pro-animal values and concern for animal welfare. Animals embodying emotions in theatrical languages are part of the way animals are used in the traditions of western culture and to think and philosophize with, but they also indicate thinking about the emotions in theatrical performance. The article considers if, however, staging living animals can …

“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 …

The Resilience Of Female Survivors Of Intimate Partner Violence In Southwest Nigeria: An Interdisciplinary Analysis, Tobi F. Oloyede

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Female survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) in Nigeria endure harsh and traumatic experiences that affect their rights as women and their well-being. As the phenomenon of IPV persists in Nigeria, it is not only a family problem but a critical social and psychological problem. This study examined Nigerian female survivors’ hidden strength, agency, and resilience, rather than their powerlessness and vulnerability. Analysis of survey questionnaires, interviews, and secondary scholarship reveals that some Nigerian female survivors of IPV are able to cope whilst navigating stressful and traumatic experiences. The results also show that survivors’ ability to thrive and cope under …

The Evolution Of Defining Rape In The United States, Sophia Rhoades

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

An Examination Of The Relationship Among Social Services Support, Race, Ethnicity And Recidivism In Justice Involved Mothers, Ne’Shaun Janay Borden

Counseling & Human Services Theses & Dissertations

Historically, women have been ignored and minimized in criminology research and theory, leading to gaps in the literature on justice involved women. In recent years, there has been more focus on women as their rates of involvement in the justice system have increased. Previous studies have found that pathways to justice involvement are different for women and men, with women experiencing higher rates of victimization, sexual abuse and mental health concerns. Further, justice involved women are unique in that over 80% are mothers or primary caregivers for minors. General Strain Theory is used to assert that receiving support should reduce …

Examining The U.S. Wars On Vietnam, Laos, And Cambodia As The Production Of Neo-Colonialism, Aiden Gregg

University Honors Theses

I interrogate the colonial and neo-colonial histories of the U.S. wars on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos within the context of racialized and gendered labor accumulation, the production of difference through violence as a legitimation of colonial extraction, and ongoing neoliberal economic coercion. I examine genocide and ecocide as interdependent processes in the production of dependency and underdevelopment. I reject a common narrative of temporal and spatial disconnection which separates the wars from current economics and examine the violences which both produce and result from an economy based on growth.

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? …

Fronteras Hispánicas: Identidades Fronterizas Y Diálogo Intercultural En La Literatura Y El Cine Contemporáneos, Claudia Battistel

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Border-crossings —both geographical and metaphorical— are a fertile territory for critical and fictional discourses that explore the forging of gendered personal, social, and cultural identities. The notion of the border becomes a political, material, discursive or symbolic limit, a space of conflict, resistance and negotiation, where power relations are articulated. In this dissertation I analyze the following border-crossing narratives and films: The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros; Jo també soc catalana and El último patriarca, by Najat El Hatchmi; Retorno a Hansala, by Chus Gutiérrez, and Sin dejar huella, by María Novaro. My study …

Heavy Is The Head That Wears The Crown: Black Men’S Perspective On Harmful Effects Of Hair Product Use And Breast Cancer Risk, Dede K. Teteh, Marissa Chan, Bing Turner, Brian Hedgeman, Marissa Ericson, Phyllis Clark, Eudora Mitchell, Emily Barrett, Adana Llanos, Rick Kittles, Susanne Montgomery

Health Sciences and Kinesiology Faculty Articles

Racial disparities in breast cancer are well-documented, and Black women assume a disproportionate burden of breast cancer mortality. Black women also commonly use hair products containing endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) more often at an increased rate, as compared to other racial/ethnic groups. Emerging findings have reported the use of hair and other personal care products containing EDCs may contribute to breast cancer risk. While some sociocultural perspectives about hair and identity have been explored, the role of beauty expectations upheld by males has not been studied. Through a community-based participatory methodology, we explored perceptions and beliefs held by Black men …

Veronica Porumbacu’S ‘Return From Cynthera’ (1966): A Conceptual Manifesto Of Socialist Feminism, Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu

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

Veronica Porumbacu (1921-1977) was a Romanian poet and translator who has been unjustly forgotten today due to her proletcultist poems of the 1950s. Yet her work was widely published and well-known during the socialist regime, and is especially relevant for the two decades of growth and ideological innovation of the 1960s and 1970s. In my article I analyze a remarkable volume of hers published in 1966, situating it in the context of her work and in the wider frame of the political context of Romania. I argue that Return from Cythera can be considered a conceptual manifesto of socialist feminism, …

The Return Of Jugoslovenka: An Unrequited Love Affair, Jasmina Tumbas

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

This essay considers women’s emancipation in Socialist Yugoslavia as central to the socialist project. I focus on the feminist art of the 1970s and 1980s, aswell as contemporary engagements with the question of Yugoslavia. I put in conversation performance works by Sanja Iveković, Vlasta Delimar, Marina Gržinić, and Šejla Kamerić. The title of this essay, “Return of Jugoslovenka: An Unrequited Love Affair” points to how contested the position of Yugoslav women was during socialism, and how much it remains so today, albeit for very different reasons. As I show in the article, Yugoslav women in the arts embraced socialism as …

Review Of Gender In 20th Century Eastern Europe And The Ussr, Edited By Catherine Baker. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, Katharina Wiedlack

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

The anthology Gender in 20th Century Eastern Europe and the USSR is a collection of fourteen essays on a wide range of gender-related topics, from motherhood to concepts of masculinity, sexuality, and professional work.

Kristen Ghodsee. Second World, Second Sex. Socialist Women’S Activism And Global Solidarity During The Cold War. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2018. Isbn 978-1-4780-0181-2 (Pbk), 328 Pp., Renata Jambrešić Kirin

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

While most recent feminist studies on the socialist heritage are preoccupied with the conjunctures of postcolonial and postsocialist conditions of the 1990s and beyond, Kristen Ghodsee’s book Second World, Second Sex (2018) evokes the most vibrant decade of women’s global activism marked by joint initiatives of women from both socialist and decolonized societies from the Global South.

The Revival Of Scott Joplin’S Treemonisha In A Black Feminist Context, Alec Larner

Musicology and Ethnomusicology: Student Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Editorial: Gender Relations And Women’S Struggles In Socialist Southeast Europe, Dijana Jelaca, Nikolay Karkov, Tanja Petrović

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

For readers versed in the tradition of North Atlantic feminist theory, the intersection of “socialism” and “feminism” is relatively uncomplicated. As a rule, the theory proffers a critique of the “double oppression” that women experience under patriarchy and capitalism, with the exact relationship between these two systems then up for debate. While often not explicitly thematized, the theory’s geographical roots in North American and Western European struggles and contexts inform its epistemological practice and organizational protocols.

Biljana Jovanović, A Rebel With A Cause Or: On ‘A General Revision Of Your Possibilities’, Tijana Matijević

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

By analysing Yugoslav writer Biljana Jovanović’s early novels, the essay follows her possible literary speculations on the capacity of the Yugoslav society to fulfill the promises of the revolution, together with her imagining of an alternative form of sociability, as that which could result in universal, human emancipation. Offering a peculiar portrait of the urban society of the late seventies in Yugoslavia, in her novels Jovanović tests if and how the problem of women’s emancipation is connected to the problems of class. Yet, a failure of class emancipation, an ‘impossibility to revise’ the society is antagonized from the scrupulous and …

Towards Women’S Minor Cinema In Socialist Yugoslavia, Dijana Jelaca

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

This essay theorizes the concept of women’s minor cinema in socialist Yugoslavia, conceptualized through examples of cultural texts that circulate within the so-called women’s genres: romance films, “chick flicks,” and TV soap operas. Women’s cinema is here not defined solely as films made by women, but rather, films that address the spectator as a woman, regardless of the spectator’s sex or gender. I argue that, in the context of Yugoslavia, such works frequently articulated emancipatory, feminist stances that did not demarcate a dichotomous opposition to the socialist state as such, but rather called for the state to fulfill its original …

Agency, Biography, And Temporality: (Un)Making Women’S Biographies In The Wake Of The Loss Of The Socialist Project In Yugoslavia, Tanja Petrović, Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc

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

This essay seeks to deepen our understanding of women’s agency in socialist societies. Focusing on socialist and post-socialist Slovenia, it explores the ways agency reveals itself in interviews with and biographical portraits of the socio-politically active women – or “political workers” (politične delavke), as they were called during Yugoslav socialism – Mara Rupena Osolnik and Aleksandra Kornhauser Frazer. In these texts, agency unfolds as a mosaic of multiple, naturally intertwined activities and engagements aimed at the common good and at improving the position of women and other socially marginalized groups. This kind of agency – understood as the ability to …

The Other Side Of Everything, Dir. Mila Turajlić (Hbo Europe, 2017), Dragana Obradović

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

The Other Side of Everything is a documentary about an apartment in Birčaninova 20, a leafy street in Belgrade, Serbia. It is the family home of Mila Turajlić, the film’s director (known for her much-lauded film Cinema Komunisto from 2010), who uses this well-appointed interior to explore the intimacy of history.

General, Dir. Antun Vrdoljak (Hrvatska Radiotelevizija, 2019) The Diary Of Diana B., Dir. Dana Budisavljević (Pff, 2019), Sanjin Pejković

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

Ideologically charged arguments about truth, often linked to fabrications of the past, have been discussed for decades in post-Yugoslav countries. They have also contributed to memory conflicts in different discourses. In addition to relativizing historical facts, marginalization of one’s own crimes and enlargement of others have also contributed to fragmentation of the truth and the emergence of parallel stories about the historical past.

Lilijana Burcar, Restavracija Kapitalizma: Repatriarhalizacija Družbe [Restauration Of Capitalism: Re-Patriarchization Of Society], Sophia, Ljubljana 2015, Iva Kosmos

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

In her book Restavracija kapitalizma: repatriarhalizacija družbe (Restauration of capitalism: Re-patriarchization of society), Lilijana Burcar compares the systemic and structural conditions of women’s position in socialism and capitalism.

Chiara Bonfiglioli, Women And Industry In The Balkans. The Rise And Fall Of The Yugoslav Textile Sector. (I.B.Tauris 2019, 230 Pages, 1st Ed.), Agata Zysiak

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

“For us it was much better, for us personally, for people it was much better during socialism than it is today, in any case.” (p. 1) This quote from a textile worker opens Chiara Bonfiglioli’s book, but the story presented is by no means a nostalgic tour exploring collapsed factories or reproducing homo-sovieticus stereotypes.

Stray Thoughts And Desire Paths—A Dialogue, Jenna Butler, Yvonne E. Blomer

The Goose

In this dialogue, authors, teachers, and environmentalists Yvonne Blomer and Jenna Butler discuss the ways in which our desire paths—our intents for our lives—have changed since the start of the pandemic. Covering women's writing, feminism, daily life during the pandemic, environmentalism, and race, this dialogue is an act of allyship from two women of different backgrounds writing together.

Ugandan Adolescents’ Gender Stereotype Knowledge About Jobs, Flora Farago, Natalie D. Eggum-Wilkens, Linlin Zhang

Faculty Publications

Ugandan adolescents ages 11- to 17-years-old (N = 201; 48% girls; M _age = 14.62) answered closed- and open-ended questions about occupational gender segregation, allowing researchers to assess their gender stereotype knowledge. Adolescents answered 38 closed-ended questions such as ‘who is more likely to be a doctor?’ and were asked to list masculine, feminine, and gender-neutral jobs. Data were analyzed via descriptive statistics, chi-square tests, t-tests, and thematic coding. Findings indicated that adolescents were fairly egalitarian about jobs and there were no differences in occupational stereotype knowledge between males and females. Findings present reasons for hope and for continued …

Watching And Talking About Aids: Analog Tapes, Digital Cultures And Strategies For Connection, Alexandra Juhasz, Theodore Kerr

Publications and Research

This paper is a conversation between activist videomaker Alexandra Juhasz and writer and organizer Theodore (ted) Kerr that explores the contemporary role of AIDS activist videos from the past.. Key to the text are ideas around history, technology, time, and community. Together they discuss and enact intergenerational dialogue, what to do with the imperfection of archives, and strategies for shared looking at the history of HIV through epochs. Their conversation is focused on a community created tape from, Bebashi — Transition to Hope, a Philadelphia non-profit.

Girl Talk: How Friendships Between Moravian And Native Women Sustained The Moravian Mission At Shamokin Pennsylvania, 1742–1749, Lindsay R. Richwine

Student Publications

From 1742 to 1755, Moravian missionaries attempted to establish a mission at the Indian town of Shamokin. While the Moravians failed to convert any native peoples, they succeeded where other missionaries failed by maintaining a continued presence. By using evidence from sources such as the Shamokin mission diary, this project asserts that it was the friendships forged between Native and Moravian women in the early years of the mission that integrated the Moravians into the community at Shamokin. Through an examination of the lives of the women present at Shamokin in this period, this project situates itself within existing research …

A New Twist On The “Un-African” Script: Representing Gay And Lesbian African Weddings In Democratic South Africa, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

This essay examines the media coverage surrounding two African weddings of lesbian and gay couples in South Africa, as a lens onto the evolving cultural politics of black queerness in that country. Two decades after South Africa launched a world-leading legal framework for LGBTI protections, I argue that these media representations depict the growing inclusion of black LGBTIQ people as a process of bridging the supposed “gap” between homosexuality and African culture. This new “bridging the gap” script seemingly rejects the older, dominant script portraying homosexuality as intrinsically “un-African.” But I argue that it instead reproduces the “un-African” script in …