Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Resisting The Neoliberal Postfeminist Sexual Objectification Matrix: A Critical Autoethnography Exploring Sexual Objectification, Mental Health, Relationship To Self, And Reclaiming Subjectivity, Ildiko Archer

ETDs from 2020-2029

Over the past two decades, women’s subjectivity and sexual experience have been dramatically reshaped by the rise of dating apps, the normalization of hookup culture, the popularization of BDSM, and the dominance of neoliberal postfeminist sexual discourses. In the South, this all unfolds in the lingering residues of purity culture, creating a perfect storm of sexual objectification. This autoethnographic dissertation examines a defining period of my life shaped by the mental health consequences of sexual objectification and self-objectification. During this time, I experienced two brief marriages, many sexual relationships, posed on social media, dating apps, sexted, and performed sexual ‘agency’, …

A History Of The Underground Comix Scene: The Seriousness Of An Unserious Genre, Harris Darcie Shugart

Master's Theses

The Underground Comix Scene of the 1960s and 1970s was born out of an age of censorship. The Comics Code Authority, a regulatory body created by the Comics Magazine Association of America in 1954, established guidelines requiring publishing houses to self-regulate following a recommendation from the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in 1953. Comix with an X, for their X-rated nature, represent an emerging counter-culture in the latter half of the 1960s and the 1970s, with an epicenter of San Francisco. These comix and their artists were not interested in obtaining the looming ‘Seal of Approval’ from the …

A Northwest Perspective: A Comprehensive Survey Of Sally Haley's Life And Career, Mary Timbrook

University Honors Theses

Sally Haley is a successful artist who built a long career in the second half of the 20th century as a painter in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been part of several solo and group exhibitions within museums and galleries across the country and she was awarded the Oregon Governor's Award for the Arts in 1989. She is best remembered for her unique still life paintings, frequently painted in egg tempera, which sold immensely well during her lifetime and after. Haley trained at the Yale School of Art in the late 1920s and early 30s, where she learned to paint …

A Twilight World Of Unspeakable Horror: Lesbian Camp And The Vampire Lovers (1970), Mirielle Lemay

University Honors Theses

From the late 1960s through the early 1970s, a wave of lesbian vampire themed exploitation films proliferated through UK, US, and Western European cinemas. In critical literature on this subgenre, camp reading is often dismissed, unacknowledged, or understood as circumscribed by authorial intent and/or intended audience. With this alternating lack of attention to and dismissal of camp, the interpretive agency of the queer spectator is constrained, their spectatorship implicitly subordinated to that of the "conventional" horror audience—the voyeuristic-sadistic male spectator. Through a reading of The Vampire Lovers, a 1970 British production from Hammer Studios, I seek to explore how …

An Investigation Of The Impact Of Privacy On Sexual And Reproductive Health Using Reports On The 2010 Earthquake In Haiti, Jillian E. Myers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 2010, a massive 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit the capital city of Haiti, Port-au-Prince, causing great destruction of infrastructure and the devastating loss of about 316,000 lives and over a million homes. The earthquake destroyed agricultural production and clean water sources, causing severe resource scarcity along with the overcrowding in the relief camps. Following the earthquake, international aid organizations flooded into Haiti in an effort to help provide immediate relief. The relief efforts were unprepared and lacked coordination among each other to efficiently implement the needed aid services. Without strategic planning to ensure all people’s needs are met, women and …

Kitchen Table Press: A Case Study Of Regression To The Neoliberal Mean, Alaina Disalvo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the idealistic founding of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1980 and its slow downfall, culminating in the cession of ownership of the Press to a university in 1992. It traces the ideological development of Kitchen Table Press’s key founders, Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde, and their respective relationships to the ideologies of other renowned feminist figures of the era, specifically June Jordan and Adrienne Rich. It examines the history of the Press through historical, intersectional, affective, and socialist lenses. This thesis argues that neoliberal pressures can bend even the most radical organizations away from their …

Old Crimes, New Eyes: Recent Findings From The Scottish Witch Hunts, Carol Lee Campbell

Inquiry: The Journal of the Virginia Community Colleges

^Abstract

^{Most discussions about the Scottish witch trials have been shrouded in a category of superstition, primarily from historians postulating from the era of the Enlightenment one hundred years afterward. Some have distanced themselves from the witch hunts by universalizing the cases within a monolithic framework. But the data shows that the Scottish witch “panic” was disproportionately more intense than other hunts in Early Modern Europe and England.}

^{In the last generation, however, scholars utilizing interdisciplinary approaches have revisited trial records and their supporting documents- such as confessions and testimonies - which appear to reveal more than just trial outcomes. …}

The Disconnect In Female Labour Force Participation Policy In Egypt: Design And Implementation Gaps, Miral Mohamed Omran

Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates the disconnect between Egypt's ambitious female labor force participation (FLFP) policy goals in the National Strategy for the Empowerment of Egyptian Women 2030 and the declining indicators since its launch. Applying Van Meter and Van Horn's implementation framework, it analyzes the full policy process using qualitative interviews across government, civil society, and private sector actors involved in the national policy’s design and execution. Findings reveal structural failures, resource shortages, coordination gaps, leadership turnover, and donor-driven fragmentation, intensified by cultural norms and frontline resistance. Recommendations prioritize short-term administrative tweaks leveraging public sector downsizing for harmonization and rethinking the …

Mothers On The Ballot: Gender And Partisan Dynamics In The Evaluation Of Maternal Political Candidates, Jimena Sanchez

DU Undergraduate Research Journal Archive

While scholarly research on the interaction between gender and political candidacy has grown, there is limited research on the way mothers are perceived in politics when they choose to run for office. The goal of the paper is to answer the following research question: how do partisanship and gender influences public perceptions of mothers running for political office, and to what extent does social desirability shape these attitudes? Through a list experiment, I surveyed individuals in the United States to capture the beliefs of the public toward mothers running for political office. Specifically, I analyze the opinions of survey participants …

Du Undergraduate Showcase Abstracts: Research, Scholarship, And Creative Works, Sophia Wismar, Henry Staats, Allison Metzler, Chloe Puckett, Rachel Levine, Christa Kilpatrick, Scott Wolf, Joe Walsh, Grace Doolittle, John Engebreston, Zoe Lopez, Christopher Aaby, Audrey Duff, Timothy Sisk, Katelyn Lamberton, Angela Narayan, Gilkah Argueta, Habiba Samir, Girena Tesfazghi, Genet Kenore, Sinit Tesfamariam, Effley Brooks, Abi Newell, Megan Doherty, Natalie Baer, Lexi Blood, Talya Riciputi, Jessica Jimenez, Devin Hernandez, Lynn Clark, Taj Kumar, Sunil Kumar, Allen Rutman, Mira Pronobis, Tess Carson, Anna Sher, Frankie Stroud, Tamra Pearson D'Estree, Alyssa Wilson, Emily Melnick, Jenalee Doom, Yihang Gao, Gwendolyn Geiger, Noah Gettle, Scott Nichols, Clare Ayoub, Cara Dienno, Sunny Walker, Zoe Hansen, Maya Wheeler, Addison Rice, Patrick Martin, Sanjana Acharya, Daniel Mcintosh, Amanda Mckellips, Calli Cain, Justin Blake, Peter Sokol-Hessner, Natalie Miller, Max Weisbuch, Sophia Dellota, John Macikas, Charlotte Snow, Mark Siemens, Zoe Lynch, Alex Huffman, Prachi Shah, Jason Roney, Halcyon Levi, Nicole Herzog, Andrea Koly, Daniel Linseman, Annie London, Xi Yang, Avery Zwisler, Jane Smith, Chaz Contag, Michael Kerwin, Lucy Rand, Grace Schroeder, Michelle Rozenman, Nissa Tapper, Guiming Zhang, Mateo Mazariego-Halpern, Keith Meyer, Julie Do, Dakota Park-Ozee, Travis Herink, Kara Neu, Jonathan Plomin, Eve-Odine Duchaufour, Debbie Gale Mitchell, Tennyson Anderson-Stricklin, Lily Treitz, Samantha Rosenberger, Sierra Griffith, Finley Joseph, Daniel Sampson, Emmy Davis, Skyler Kasnoff, Evon Lopez, Vivian Nguyen, Cassy Young, Franklin Sellner, Martin Tobon, Ila Graham, Zach Billings, Holden Hedit, Decatur Boland, Paul Kosempel, Cory Chandler, Jay Mahoney, Sam Dragan, Susan Dagget, Yarrow Ator, Heidi Vuletich, Owen Weber, Andrew Kloeppel, Petersen Gray, Mandi Schaeffer-Fry, Razleen Bassra, Bryanna Rodriguez, Christina Blue, Taubie Sanders, Rachel Epstein, Luke Milburn, Camryn Evans, Ezra Martinez, Mary Westwood, Gabri Notov, Robin Tinghitella, Lilou Cabrol, Eli Barbour, Juliet Mendik, Selma Myers, Zac Wise, Noah Fahlin, Michelle Knowles, Abigail Hopper, Michael Greenberger, Romi Laclair, Sarah Watamura, Sabrina Efroymson, Casey Barker, Sydney Seltzer, Bryn Yehle, Jennifer Hoffman, Sara Garcia, Ryuka Nagamine, Trevor Briggs, Remy Le Boeuf, Elena Krone, Eileen Farrell, Regan O'Rourke, Elena Roel, Greg Mortimer, Ali Ayoub, Stefani Langehennig, Caitlin Turk, Logan Scmid, Stefan Chavez-Norgaard, Karen Kim, Tatiana Peccedi, Courtney Cassidy, John Sebesta, Rhianna Lewis, Janice Bening-Lacek, Vivian Lawless, Mckenna Hanson, Jeffrey Amidon, Riya Joshi, Ram Ambre, Brady Worrell, Perrin Schneider, Ali Azadani, Brooke Agulnek, Lyndsie Salvagio, Elise Siemanowki, Yan Qin, Andre Allen, Melodie Nguyen, Megan Livengood, Abby Reams, Saffron Hartreeve, Bri Wylie, Sarah Brookman, Mariah Loiacono, Green Russo, Abhia Lodhi, Gabrielle Welsh, Nika Spehar, Shahked Levin, Evrim Baykal, Kimberly Chiew, Jocelyn Torres, Kailey Hicks, Mykaela Tanino-Springsteen, Audrey Bellows, Akam Chahal, Madeline Tepper, Shannon Murphy, Alexa Fonseca, Deborah Han, Cassandra Perez, Oluwatoyin Alaba, Julia Roncoroni, Vy Nguyen, Nana Burn, Sarah Sasse, Rubin Tuder, Anthony Gerber, Nancy Lorenzon, Christine Vohwinkel, Camryn Gunter, Tristan Weber, Sam Rommel, Brian Michel, Muskan Fatima, Alannah Oleson, Kira Frey, Edward Garrido, Beckett Morris, Kerstin Haring, Drew Middleton, Abigail Walpert, Liam Dee, Gabby Ishaw, Cole Carnes, Maddie Weiser, Claire Fox, Valeriia Vlasenko, Kateri Mcrae, Riley Smith, Abigail Templin, Kushani Rajapaksha

DU Undergraduate Research Journal Archive

Abstracts from the DU Undergraduate Research Showcase.

Intersectionality And Insurgent Citizenship: Women Of Color Feminism In 1970s New York City, Genevieve Bonner Davis

Dissertations and Theses

Not since the phrase "Ain't I a Woman" has African American women's intellectual leadership and insight been as visible and influential as the contemporary concept of intersectionality. Like Sojourner Truth's iconic intellectual intervention in the anti-slavery movement, intersectionality has experienced a similar trajectory of dissolution, distortion, appropriation, and popularization. Since its articulation by Black legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, intersectionality theory has had a bumpy road to its buzzy, if controversial, status in the firmament of twenty-first-century political thought.

This thesis traces the origins of intersectionality theory through three distinct but intertwined phases. Phase one is the genealogy of …

All But The Death Penalty: Incomplete Protection For Civilian Internee Mothers, Minju Kwon

Political Science Faculty Articles and Research

How did unrecognised gender biases impact the codification of international humanitarian law (IHL)? While recent studies on IHL have highlighted historical lawmaking processes, little research has examined gender biases behind the codification of the “Protection of Women” in the Geneva Conventions and additional protocols. This study examines gender biases and state interests reflected in the codification process by focusing on Article 76§3 of the 1977 Protocol Additional I, which incompletely protects civilian women internees who are pregnant or have dependent children by prohibiting execution but leaving room for pronouncement of the death penalty. Referring to the theory of benevolent sexism, …

Tùn-Scene And A-Futurism: Biomythography, Opacity, And Posthuman Imagination, Minglu Du

Masters Theses

Grounded in the author’s position as a Chinese feminist, this thesis examines how East Asian women, as well as East Asian-coded femininity more broadly, are objectified and othered within futurist visual culture in the age of artificial intelligence. Through an engagement with ornamentalism, techno-Orientalism, and posthumanism1 , it argues that the persistent figure of the feminized humanoid cyborg continues to reproduce colonial and patriarchal structures of desire, rendering marginalized bodies as fetishized and violable surfaces. In response, the thesis develops Tùn-Scene, a biomythographic artistic framework and the first experiment in what the author provisionally names A-Futurism. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s …

How To Make A Jumpsuit, Xue Huang

Masters Theses

Through interdisciplinary artistic research combining illustration, embroidery, garment construction, and installation, this thesis investigates how patriarchal narratives become internalized within the female body and disconnect women from embodied forms of feminine knowledge and vitality.

Drawing from Michel Foucault’s theories of disciplinary power, Jungian psychology, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and feminist writings by Audre Lorde and Karina Blancarte, the project examines how systems of productivity, control, and gendered ideology shape both psychological experience and bodily perception.

The thesis culminates in a large-scale textile installation titled How to Make a Jumpsuit, consisting of embroidered silk panels, commercial jumpsuit pattern pieces, meridian imagery, sculptural …

The Body Has Its Own Time, Wen Zhang

Masters Theses

In embodied practice, the artist’s experience and body become the medium through which thought and expression take form, not as illustration, but as primary material. Performance art has long occupied an unstable position within contemporary art: celebrated in retrospect, underfunded in practice, and selectively institutionalized. Its marginality has never been evenly distributed. Certain bodies, female, racialized, aging, non-normative, have remained further outside the archive than others, their work harder to collect, harder to value, and easier to forget. To work in performance, particularly as a woman, is to work within that contradiction.

For me, performance is less a form than …

Auxiliary Damage, Aiyi Cheng

Masters Theses

AuxiliarY DamagE asks what happens to pain when it is moved outside the body and given material form. Pain is not treated here as an image to be represented, but as something processed through repetition, pressure, exposure, and care. It is handled. Washed. Arranged. Pulled out. Swallowed back in.

Hair became the material that allowed this question to stay unstable. While attached to the body, it is intimate and ordinary. Once detached, it becomes residue, evidence, discomfort, value, and loss. In the studio, I washed collected hair, untangled it, threaded it through metal, placed it near flame, held it in …

Her Body Broken: Wrestling And Reconciling With Judges 19 Through A Feminist Lens, Elisabeth Edmonds

Honors Projects

Nestled within the story of Israel in the Christian Old Testament, lies the events of Judges 19 - one of the most violent, disturbing, and traumatic stories of the Christian sacred text. Employing a feminist lens, this paper engages with Judges 19 in three sections by 1) discussing the events of Judges 19, 2) overviewing general Christian responses to the text historically, and 3) featuring specific ideological responses to Judges 19 (feminist theology, intertextual and structural biblical responses, and reconciliation studies). By highlighting a wide array of responses and ideological readings of Judges 19, this paper defends a holistic approach …

Menstrual Muses: Art, Storytelling, And The Care-Based Communication Of Menstrual Justice, Burcu Koleli

Masters Theses

Menstrual Muses is an artistic research project comprising a written thesis and a body of work developed across soft sculpture, ceramics, illustration, graphic memoir, digital media, and participatory workshops. The written component operates alongside the studio practice, outlining the project’s theoretical framework, methodology, and context while engaging questions of communication, accessibility, embodiment, and stigma. It situates menstruation within feminist discourse, examining how it has been culturally silenced, regulated, and shaped through systems of power.

The artistic work functions as research materialized through practice, responding to the central question of how my art can facilitate conversations around menstrual justice. It explores …

破酆都 Calling Her Through The Gates, Yuqi Liu

Masters Theses

My practice centers on papermaking, printmaking, and artist books to explore fiber as both image and language. I treat paper not simply as a surface, but as a living material through which memory, labor, and history can be held. By making my own sheets from plant fibers, fungi, and other organic matter, I create works in which material and meaning are inseparable. Shaped by my engagement with the natural world, women’s history, and overlooked vernacular forms of knowledge, my work moves through cycles of life and death, presence and disappearance, fragility and resilience. My projects with mushrooms and mycelium led …

Archives Of The Future, Ka Oskar Ly

Masters Theses

Archives Of The Future is a practice-based thesis that invokes the archive and the future as simultaneous.

This research insists on the recentering of HMong Indigeneity and its own rooted traditions of HMong Queerness and HMong Feminism as ancestral knowledge systems.

They are the medicine. To recover their cosmological capacity is to traverse centuries of systematic eradication by empires and patriarchy.

I treat artistic making, community encounter, memory, and materials as equally valid ways of knowing and as collaborators. Field research from 2020 to 2026 moves through kinship and artisan teachings. It spans Southeast Asia, France, the United States, and …

Sex And Stigma: The Cisgender Woman’S Experience, Regin Dean, Kara Schneider, Lucas M. Perez, Tae Joon Kim, Ryan G. Carlson

Journal of Counseling Sexology & Sexual Wellness: Research, Practice, and Education

This study examines how sexual stigma and societal expectations affect the self-esteem of college-aged women within the context of casual sex. Using a qualitative, thematic design, participants were recruited through purposive sampling and interviewed using semi-structured protocols. Thematic analysis revealed three overarching domains: Identity & Self-perception (empowerment, femininity and body image, fluidity), Social Factors (familial and cultural expectations, shame and comparison, formative relationships), and Developmental Influences (social media, scrutiny, knowledge gaps). Findings demonstrate how stigma is internalized and reinforced through interpersonal and media influences, underscoring the need for counseling practices that address both individual wellness and systemic advocacy.

Book Review Essay: City Of Men: Masculinities And Everyday Morality On Public Transport, Simiran Lalvani

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Rearranged: An Opera Singer’S Facial Cancer And Life Transposed, Jainab Tabassum Banu

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

Book Review: #Metoo And The Politics Of Transnational Feminism, Muhammad Umer Azim

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

Reimagining The Shōjo Across Cultures: Gender Performativity, Cosplay, And Self-Presentation Of Indian Women In Digital Space, Ashonshok Kachui, Samyukthah Anandhasayanam

Journal of International Women's Studies

The image of the shōjo (adolescent girl) in Japanese popular culture has long functioned as a dynamic site for negotiating gender identity and the divide between vulnerable innocence and empowerment. Anime and manga have historically provided evolving portrayals of adolescent girl and young woman characters who have embodied subversive potential while also being constrained by idealised notions of girlhood. This paper extends the discourse on the shōjo by situating it within the Indian digital landscape, where anime fandom, cosplay culture, and social media platforms are reshaping self-presentation and gender performance among young girls and women. Grounded in feminist theoretical perspectives, …

Cyberfeminism And The Digital Divide: A Study Of The #Metoo Movement In Assam, India, Uddipana Kalita

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article examines how cyberfeminist politics in India are shaped by a layered digital divide, focusing on the #MeToo movement in Assam (Northeast India) as a regionally situated site of feminist voices, exclusion, and contested recognition. While digital visibility has enabled new forms of public naming and solidarity, this paper argues that visibility does not automatically translate into justice, as participation and audibility are structured by uneven access, device control, language hierarchies, and policing of credibility. This study is guided by two research questions: 1) How does the digital divide shape who can participate and be recognized within the #MeToo …

Reading Indian Newspaper Reports To Uncover Cinematic Misrepresentations Of Rape In Mom (2017) And Guilty (2020), Samikhya Dash, Soumya Jose

Journal of International Women's Studies

Hindi cinema has witnessed a transformation in the portrayal of rape narratives subsequent to India’s Nirbhaya rape case in 2012 and the global #MeToo movement in 2017. The rape narratives released after the #MeToo movement are characterised by a departure from the stereotypical depiction of rape victims as forlorn and vulnerable figures; instead, they are depicted as assertive and empowered survivors that challenge entrenched power dynamics. Hindi films such as Mom (2017) and Guilty (2020) exemplify this paradigm shift by featuring women characters who defy gender stereotypes and resist patriarchal constraints, experience rape trauma syndrome and post-traumatic growth, and embody …

Deconstructing Feminist Perspectives On Work: Insights From Uchoi Indigenous Tribal Women’S Worldview In Northeast India, Linda Uchoi, Biswaranjan Tripura

Journal of International Women's Studies

Women’s work is commonly conceptualized through an economic lens that prioritizes the valuation of paid and unpaid labor and assesses women’s status and empowerment primarily in monetary terms. Such approaches are limiting as a means of understanding the lived realities of Indigenous Tribal women. In contrast, this article adopts a sociological and anthropological perspective to examine the multifaceted meanings of work among Uchoi Indigenous Tribal women in Tripura, Northeast India. The Uchoi community is a recognized Scheduled Tribe (ST) under Article 342 of the Constitution of India. By situating work within its sociocultural, ecological, and communal contexts, this article demonstrates …

Gender And Stress: Challenges Faced By Women Principal Operators In Agriculture In The United States, Bernadette Marson, Roxanne Bruce

Journal of International Women's Studies

Working in agriculture is demanding and complex, which can lead to stress-induced health and mental health problems, including suicide. There is limited scholarly literature on the topic of women and stress in the agricultural industry, so this research study aims to fill this gap by reporting on the challenging lived experiences of women working in agriculture—a frequently overlooked population. We used a phenomenological design to perform semi-structured interviews exclusively with women (at least eighteen years old) who work in agriculture as principal operators—the primary decision-makers of their enterprise. A thematic analysis was conducted with the data from the twenty-five women …

Negotiating Desires For Capital Through Culinary Expression In Balli Kaur Jaswal’S Sugarbread, Ira Gore, Aruni Mahapatra

Journal of International Women's Studies

Balli Kaur Jaswal’s Sugarbread (2016) illustrates how race and class are negotiated through culinary practices in a lower-middle-class Sikh family living in Singapore. Through acts of shopping for groceries, cooking local Singaporean cuisine, and rejecting the communal temple food associated with shame and social discrimination, the novel highlights the family’s aspirations of social mobility shaped by the character Jini’s childhood experiences of food and economic scarcity. While the characters in the novel have access to food, their culinary practices are marked by memories of charity and discomfort as a South Asian diasporic family negotiating racialized hierarchies and gendered vulnerability in …