Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Broadway Bodies: Casting, Stigma, And Difference In Broadway Musicals Since "A Chorus Line" (1975), Ryan Donovan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores how embodied identities facing social stigmatization are represented in Broadway musicals and provides histories of casting specific kinds of embodied difference. Broadway Bodies: Casting, Stigma, and Difference in Broadway Musicals since “A Chorus Line” considers the politics of representation and makes clear that casting is always a political act, situated within a power structure favoring certain bodies. Previous scholarship on casting largely centers on race and ethnicity as the central issues; this research reframes the study of casting to focus on bodies, inclusive of race and ethnicity but especially relative to ability, gender, sexuality, and size. Though …

Dance Of Exile: The Sakharoffs’ Visual Performances In Montevideo (1935–1948), Pablo Munoz Ponzo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the life-work chronology of the dancers and choreographers Clotilde von Derp (whose surname then was Sakharoff) and Alexander Sakharoff, who were exiled in Montevideo, Uruguay, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, between 1941 and 1948. During their stay in the Rio de la Plata region, the Sakharoffs stirred up the art scene by performing extremely detailed dances with great attention to costume design. This thesis begins with a review of the reception of the dancers’ performances by the artistic and cultural circles in Montevideo, arguing that the Sakharoffs’ “queer” trajectory resonated with the Uruguayan artistic community, influencing the creation …

Queer Pregnancy In Shakespeare's Plays, Alicia Page Andrzejewski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bringing together queer and feminist theory, this dissertation examines Shakespeare’s representations of pregnancy divorced from their promised duration and promised end, revealing that the pregnant body is not wholly symbolic of futurity, chastity, or even heterosexual desire. In queer readings of Shakespeare’s plays and in the methodological debates that inform them, the pregnant body has been conspicuously absent, despite being often subsumed into definitions of heteronormativity and procreative reproduction. In feminist work on Shakespeare’s pregnant characters, scholars largely conflate pregnancy with maternity instead of considering the ways in which these women might engage in non-heterosexual forms of intimacy and eroticism. …

Strict Restraints: Abstinence's Gender Problems In Measure For Measure, Joseph Makuc

History Honors Papers

Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure poses questions about sexual coercion and governmental corruption that resonate today. Recent scholarship has examined sexual abstinence in Measure for Measure in terms of its historical economic and religious context regarding Isabella. However, Angelo and the Duke, the play's other central characters, also make claims about the value of abstinence. I put these characters’ claims into dialogue with Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity and extensive scholarship on Shakespearean England. I argue that abstinence is the axis around which Measure’s main characters revolve, and that Measure locates these characters’ abstinences as competing performances of manhood and …

Subverting The Patriarchy And Its Ties To Feminism: Du Maurier And Her Adaptations, Samantha Koller

KUCC -- Kutztown University Composition Conference

This paper describes the common (mis)reading of Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca as upholding Victorian patriarchal values and attempts to demonstrate that the novel is indeed feminist and acts as a critique and subversion of those patriarchal standards; it then examines the film and stage adaptations of Rebecca, demonstrating via comparison to the original medium that feminism has begun to affect other cultural interpretations and depictions of the narrator, Mrs. Danvers, and Rebecca herself.

In Search Of National Identity: Portraits Of Motherless Women In Clarín And Galdós, Leslie I. Quezada

LSU Master's Theses

Drawing on novels by Leopoldo Alas Clarín and Benito Pérez Galdós, I will examine the portraits of women in La Regenta (1885), Tristana (1892), andLa de San Quintín (1894). By exploring how women in the works are reflected in terms of identity and nature of their role from a male-authored perspective, I will study how different aspects influence the development of their character, as well as the issues they face when searching for their identity. Galdós and Clarín unravel the women to embody the nation of Spain and the conditions it was going through before the …

"We Need To Stop Temporarily Caring: "Pulse, Spoken Word Poetry, And Audience Counter-Narrative Creation, Hannah G. Trew

Theses and Dissertations

On June 12, 2016, 49 people were killed, and 53 people were injured in a shooting at Pulse, a popular gay club in Orlando, Florida. The Pulse Nightclub shooting was the deadliest mass shooting in the United States at that time and the deadliest violent act against the LGBTQ+ community in the United States (Hancock & Haldeman, 2017; Jackson, 2017; Walter, Billard, & Murphy, 2017). The media were divided in labeling the shooting a terrorist attack or a hate crime, creating a master narrative surrounding the shooting. However, LGBTQ+ spoken word poets rejected the media’s storylines, developing counter-narratives, and instead …

She's The Jazz: An Exploration Of Dance And Society In The Age Of The Flapper, Jillian Terry

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

The 1920’s, most affectionately known as “The Roaring Twenties,” was a time of dramatic social and political change. Economic growth pushed Americans into an unfamiliar consumer society where people bought the same goods, heard the same songs, danced the same dances, and used the same slang. Prohibition laws led to the underground sale of alcohol in speakeasies where new freedoms were found through communities uniting in music and dance. Here we saw the emergence of flappers. Unlike the generations that came before, these women were seen performing unladylike actions, such as drinking and smoking, while embracing their sexuality. While not …

Performing Queerness, Jasmina Sinanovic

Open Educational Resources

This is a syllabus for a course Performing Queerness

Identi-Tea Podcast: An Original Play, Karsyn Wilson

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

Creative Works Winner for 2019:

Identi-Tea Podcast is an original play based on the word-for-word interviews of three LGBTQ+ students of color from UNLV who explore all the various facets of their identities formatted in the style of a podcast. In various moments during the play, audience members are prompted by the actors to critically engage with the ideas presented.

Critical Embodied Praxis For Social Justice And Peace Educators: A Story Of Personal Transformation Through Analysis Of My Jewish And Settler Identities, Cara Michelle Silverberg

Capstone Collection

In this paper, I examine definitions of and relationships between violence, oppression, peace, liberation, and embodiment in the context of critical pedagogy in order to construct a theory of critical embodied praxis for social justice and peace educators. Considering the body to be a tangible vessel through which narratives and mechanisms of violence are expressed and maintained, I explore the potential of the body to be a vessel through which liberatory narratives may be generated and shared. After constructing a theory of critical embodied praxis, I illustrate this framework in action through a personal narrative that explores the intersections …

Otterbein Aegis Spring 2019, Otterbein Aegis

Aegis: The Otterbein Humanities Journal

Editor's Introduction, Book Reviews and Essays including: To Keep or Not to Keep by Lindsay Lisanti, Fantastic Beasts and How to Value them by Casey Hall, Sex, Youth, and the Pill b Hannah Schneider, How Historiography is Crucial in Comprehending the Leading Circumstances of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 by Josh Wolf, Magic is no Cure by Casey Hall, The Ever-Evolving Relationship of the Supreme Court, Women and Homosexuals by Amanda Reed, Vietnam: A Love Story by Abigail Fahmi, Gender and Sex in 1920' America by Raven Manygoats.

Making Masculinity: The Performance Of Gender Onstage And In The Streets, Gillian T. Ebersole

Dance Department Best Student Papers

Drawing from dance historians and movement theorists, this paper analyzes the role movement plays in the construction and performance of gender. By deconstructing perceived stereotypes about masculinity, the argument breaks down the gender binary and its relation to movement. With research rooted in the works of Bill T. Jones and Joe Goode, the paper also looks at the intersection between masculinity and sexuality. Movement as a performance of gender is rooted in cultural and emotional contexts, heavily influenced by traditional gender roles and the persistence of homophobia. The fluidity of queer gender expression offers an alternative to the stereotypical display …

"La Llorona": Evolución, Ideología Y Uso En El Mundo Hispano, Raquel Sáenz-Llano

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis studies the evolution, ideology and use of the myth of La Llorona through time in the Hispanic World. Considering this myth as one of the most known traditional narratives of the American continent, I begin by providing visual, ethnohistorical and ethnographical insights of weeping in Mesoamerica and South America and the specific mention of a weeping woman in some Spanish chronicles to say how western values were stablished in “the new continent” through this legend. I suggest that during the postcolonialism the legend did not tell anymore about a mother that cries and search a place for their …

Innie / Outie, Josh Roach

Theses and Dissertations

My practice is focused around the characters that I become through the wearing of things that I have made, and the subsequent performances that I do in both constructed and real-world spaces. This paper outlines how my practice is framed by own experience of coming out as a queer person, how that experience relates to my love of play and materials, and how they both inform the strategies I use to relate the ideas surrounding queerness, sexuality, and gender to my audience.

Vulnerability And Resistance In Carmen Aguirre’S Mexican Hooker #1, Cinta Mesa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “Vulnerability and Resistance in Carmen Aguirre’s Mexican Hooker#1,” Cinta Mesa examines Chilean-Canadian playwright and actress Carmen Aguirre’s latest autobiographical novel, Mexican Hooker#1, to analyze Latina vulnerability in relation to exile, emigration, gender violence and stereotypes. The article relies upon Judith Butler’s definition of vulnerability (20), which is excluded from official texts. The consequences of these types of trauma, which are written on female bodies, are expressed through post-traumatic stress disorder. The author expresses the difficulty of acting because of her post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms and the challenges she meets on her way to heal herself and …

Motherhood, Vulnerability And Resistance In The Elysium Testament By Mary O’Donnell, María Elena Jaime De Pablos

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Mary O’Donnell’s novel The Elysium Testament (1999) narrates the story of Nina, an accomplished grotto restorer, but a neglectful wife and mother according to the Irish patriarchal symbolic order –the “register of regulatory ideality” (Butler, Bodies that Matter 18). Estranged from her husband, Neil, she sends him a series of letters, her “testament,” where some of the most significant aspects of her life are exposed. Readers discover that Nina’s and Neil’s marriage begins to crumble after the birth of their second child, Roland, to whom Nina attributes a frightening dual nature, which she tries to control through physical and psychological …

Chase Riboud’S Hottentot Venus (2003) And The Neo-Victorian: The Problematization Of South-Africa And The Vulnerability And Resistance Of The Black Other, Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article touches upon issues of captivity, suppression, misrepresentations and exclusion of black people from a historical and cultural point of view through the analysis of Chase-Riboud’s neo-Victorian novel Hottentot Venus (2003). It also focuses on the implications and consequences for contemporary South Africa of situations of slavery and exploitation of African descended peoples. Notions of identity and moral and legal inclusion of black women into past and contemporary societies and communities will be also discussed from the point of view of postcolonial and gender and sexuality studies. The complexities of blackness and the violation of human rights as a …

The Commodified Body And Post/In Human Subjectivities In Frears’S Dirty Pretty Things And Romanek’S Never Let Me Go, Rocio Carrasco

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Following new materialist analysis, this article takes the body as the central locus of analysis, and relates it to broader questions such as ethics, ideology, power and/or technologies. Specifically, it revolves around the idea of embodied subjectivity as articulated by scholars Rosi Braidotti, Sherryl Vint or Cary Wolfe, whereby body and subjectivity are indissolubly and interestingly connected. Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go (2010) exploit the idea of the commodified body, understood here as a vulnerable body, a disposable commodity at the service of powerful and/or wealthy people. Victims of the cruelties inflicted …

Trespassing Physical Boundaries: Transgression, Vulnerability And Resistance In Sarah Kane’S Blasted (1995), Paula Barba Guerrero, Ana Mª Manzanas Calvo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Sarah Kane’s Blasted has been analyzed from various perspectives that address the layers of destruction it exposes. From the questioning of its title and meaning, to the unravelling of the protagonists’ abusive relationship, the analyses have emphasized the depiction of vulnerability as the defining human trait that Jean Ganteau observes in contemporary British literature. However, a key aspect has been overlooked in the critical response to the play: for Kane vulnerability does not equal helplessness, but rather stands in opposition to it. Hence, this article concentrates on how Blasted formulates a new understanding of vulnerability that fits Judith Butler’s later …

Introduction, Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz, Manuela Coppola

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This special issue addresses contemporary representations of “vulnerable” bodies in transit in Anglophone literature and culture and explores their strategies of resistance. The use of the expression “bodies in transit” in this issue has to be understood both as a reference to the materiality of diasporic, exiled, migrating, trafficked bodies, and as an allusion to the metaphorical transition of these marginalized subjects from alienation to regeneration in multiple contexts. The interdisciplinary contributions in this special issue tackle vulnerability as a marginal(ized) and potentially enabling condition entailing the crossing of bodily, sexual, mental, ethical, cultural, and national borders. Ranging from literature …

The Unruly Womb In Early Modern English Drama: Plotting Women's Biology On The Stage, Ursula Potter

Late Tudor and Stuart Drama

This study provides an accessible, informative and entertaining introduction to women’s sexual health as presented on the early modern stage, and how dramatists coded for it. Beginning with the rise of green sickness (the disease of virgins) from its earliest reference in drama in the 1560s, Ursula Potter traces a continuing fascination with the womb by dramatists through to the oxymoron of the chaste sex debate in the 1640s. She illuminates how playwrights both satirized and perpetuated the notion of the womb’s insatiable appetite.

“In The Beginning Was Body Language” Clowning And Krump As Spiritual Healing And Resistance, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

In the neighborhood of HollyWatts in Los Angeles, dance allows a shift from existing as bodies presented as sites of threat and extinction to sources of spiritual empowerment. Clowning and Krump dancers—their subjectivity and their dancing bodies—negotiate survival from trauma and socioeconomic marginalization. I argue that the dancers’ performances act as embodied narratives of “re-membering in the flesh.” The performance acts as a spiritual retrieval and re-integration of traumatic memories and afflictions into memory through the body. Choreography and quotes from dancers support the claim that Krump and Clowning is “re-membering in the flesh” that enacts self-worth, self-defined sexuality, and …

Performing Desire In Times Square: Sailors, Hustlers And Masculinity, Kel R. Karpinski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From WWII to the early 1970s, New York City as a port town created a liminal space extending from the piers in the Brooklyn Navy Yard all the way to Times Square in Midtown Manhattan. In Times Square, through interactions on the street, in bars and in hotel rooms, desire and masculinity become a performance between and for men. The queerness of these performances lies in the fact that they fall outside of the norms of society both as same-sex encounters and because sex work is viewed as “deviant.” Further, these interactions eschew traditional labels and limits of desire and …

Re-Defining Gender And Sexuality In West African Theatre: Women Artists, Feminist Representations, And Same-Sex Desire In The Twenty-First Century Theatre Of Benin, Burkina Faso, And Togo, Heather J. Denyer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines French-language theatre in the West African countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, and Togo that tackles gender-related themes. Topics often considered taboo, including domestic violence, child brides, and sexual desire, are publically addressed through contemporary theatre. The study focuses on the growing presence of women artists, including playwrights, actresses, and directors. Particularly since 2010, these artists have shifted the aesthetic and thematic substance of the theatre being created. Their presence has also generated new paths for plays written by and directed by men, including gay male characters and bold women. By considering the field of African women's studies …

Photography, Visual Culture, And The (Re)Definition/Queering Of The Male Gaze, David Nicholas Martin

Theses and Dissertations--Art and Visual Studies

The traditional notion of the Male Gaze, first conceptualized by feminist film critic Laura Mulvey in 1975, focused on the objectification of women through depictions structured to gratify a male heterosexual perspective. In this chapter we will revisit this concept and investigate how that gaze may have shifted away from a primarily heterosexual perspective to a socially dominant male perspective (maleness here referring to dominance rather than specific gender, just as “whiteness” might refer to privilege rather than race). With gender roles in an increasingly global and mobile society becoming more fluid and complex, opening up visibility to LGBTQ communities, …

"Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, And Broadway Bodies, Ryan Donovan

Publications and Research

This article surveys how contemporary Broadway musicals cast fat women and focuses on Hairspray. The use of fat suits and contractual weight clauses figure into the discussion of fat stigma and casting practices. Seemingly body-positive musicals both celebrate and undermine the identities staged in them.

“The Ground On Which I Stand” Healing Queer Trauma Through Performance: Crafting A Solo Performance Through The Investigation Of Ritual Poetic Drama Within The African Continuum, Ashley W. Grantham

Theses and Dissertations

“The Ground On Which I Stand”

Healing Queer Trauma through Performance:

Crafting a Solo Performance through the investigation of Ritual Poetic Drama within the African Continuum.

By: Ashley W. Grantham

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Performance Pedagogy at Virginia Commonwealth University

Virginia Commonwealth University

April 16^th, 2019

Thesis Adjudicator: Dr. Tawnya Pettiford-Wates

Committee: Dr. Keith Byron Kirk, Director of Graduate Studies and Karen Kopryanski, Head of Voice and Speech

How does this method of Ritual Poetic Drama within the African Continuum, by extension, solo performance, …

Restaging World Literature In The Age Of Neoliberalism/Neocolonialism, Shaobo Xie

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Restaging World Literature in the Age of Neoliberal­ism/Neocolonia­­lism" Shaobo Xie argues that Goethe's notion of world literature spells a genuine universalism that contributes to resistance to neoliberal imperialism. In the age of neocolonial­ism/ne­oliberalism all conduct, and all spheres of human life are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics and neoliberalism both as a govern­ing rationality and as an economic policy is penetrating into every part of the world. The politics that is really heter­ogeneous or external to the rule of neoliberal capitalism in the neocolonial global present consists in thinking towards new possibilities of organizing …

Resistance To Neocolonialism In Contemporary Chinese Literary Theory, Zeng Jun

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Resistance to Neocolonialism in Contemporary Chinese Literary Theory" Jun ZENG claims that the introduction of Western Literary Theory in the past forty years of China's reform and opening up was carried out under the background of neo-colonialism. "Western imagination" in the discourse of contemporary Chinese literary theory was an important aspect of the strategy of cultural resistance under the overwhelming influence of Western neocolonialism. Contemporary Chinese literary theory no longer simply regards Western literary theory in the twentieth century as a bourgeois literary ideology; instead, it adopts a "de-ideological" attitude to return to the issues of literature, …