Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

The Fictions Of Whiteness: Transatlantic Race Science, Gender, Nationalism, And The Construction Of Race In Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (1823-1867), Philip E. Kadish

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Fictions of Whiteness argues that political beliefs preceded and determined the race science theories which nineteenth century American white novelists applied or invoked in their work, the inverse of the current critical consensus. For issues ranging from Indian removal to slavery and Reconstruction, and utilizing theories from of Condorcet, Buffon, Camper, Louis Agassiz, James Pritchard, Johannes Blumenbach, and George Borrow these authors shifted allegiances to divergent race theories between and within works, applied those theories selectively to white, black, and Indians characters, and applied the same scientific race theories to politically divergent rhetorical ends. By analyzing shifting application of different …

A Passage From Brooklyn To Ithaca: The Sea, The City And The Body In The Poetics Of Walt Whitman And C. P. Cavafy, Michael P. Skafidas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This treatise is the first extensive comparative study of Walt Whitman and C. P. Cavafy. Despite the abundant scholarship dealing with the work and life of each, until now no critic has put the two poets together. Whitman’s poetry celebrates birth, youth, the self and the world as seen for the first time, while Cavafy’s diverts from the active present to resurrect a world whose key, in Eliot’s terms, is memory. Yet, I see the two poets conversing in the crossroads of the fin de siècle; the American Whitman and the Greek Cavafy embody the antithesis of hope and dislocation …

Empowerment From Within: Supporting Palestinian Women’S Struggle Against Violence, Ortal Bensky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent reports by the United Nations and local non-governmental organizations present a troubling increase in incidents of violence against Palestinian women in Palestine. These are cases of domestic violence, where the attackers are Palestinians, and political violence, where the attackers are Israeli settlers and soldiers. These violent incidents include attacks on body and property. Most incidents are neither dealt with by the Palestinian authorities nor by the Israeli government and judicial system. There is not sufficient international pressure to enforce justice. The purpose of this study is to offer alternative ways to prevent violent crimes, enforce relevant laws, and provide …

Ceasing To Run Underground: 20th-Century Women Writers And Hydro-Logical Thought, Annie M. Cranstoun

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Starting from two central ecopoetic convictions—the constitutive role of environment in human experience (and vice versa), and text’s ability to connect with the world—this dissertation then moves in a different direction from most ecocritical projects. Instead of looking at the ways literary representation flows back into nature in the forms of attitude, praxis, and policy, this study focuses on the earlier part of the loop: the emergence of text from environment, particularly its aquatic parts, via the faculty of the imagination. In its scrutiny of images that spring directly from matter and its faith in the concept of a personal …

South African Marriage In Policy And Practice: A Dynamic Story, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

Law forms one of the major structural contexts within which family lives play out, yet the precise dynamics connecting these two foundational institutions are still poorly understood. This article attempts to help bridge this gap by applying sociolegal concepts to empirical findings about state law's role in family, and especially in marriage, drawn from across several decades and disciplines of South Africanist scholarly research. I sketch the broad outlines of a nuanced theoretical approach for analysing the law-family relationship, which insists that the relationship entails a contingent and dynamic interplay between relatively powerful regulating institutions and relatively powerless regulated populations. …

Brooklyn-Queens Chapter Of Now, Brooklyn College

Finding Aids

The collection consists of materials dating from 1972 to 2013, with the bulk of the items dating from 1995-2003. It contains the papers of the Brooklyn (later Brooklyn-Queens) chapter of the National Organization for Women, some papers of NOW-New York State, the Equal Rights Amendment Coalition and collected documents. The collection contains primarily meeting minutes, newsletters, correspondence, as well as periodicals, newspaper clippings and collected posters and brochures.

Shirley Chisholm Collection, Brooklyn College

Finding Aids

Within this collection, researchers will find roughly 300 photographs, typed and handwritten correspondence between Chisholm's constituents and members of her campaign team (including James Pitts), magazines and newspapers, various forms of media including CD’s, video cassette tapes, DV-Cam’s, and a DVD, as well as ephemera from Chisholm's historic Presidential campaign. The bulk dates of this collection are from 1968-1982, and the inclusive dates are from 1944-2012.

The Records & Papers Of The New York State Women’S Political Caucus, Brooklyn College

Finding Aids

The New York State Women’s Political Caucus is a thriving branch of the national organization. Adele Cohen, the creator of this collection, was highly involved with the organization on the state and national level and served as the president of the New York State caucus from 1992-1994. She began her association with NWPC in the 1980s and remained actively involved after her presidency.

The documents in this collection range in date from the late 1980s to the early 2000s and include information on the governance and activities of the organization as well as correspondence, newsletters, and endorsements.

Loving The Unlovable Body In Lois Ann Yamanaka’S Saturday Night At The Pahala Theatre, Christa Baiada

Publications and Research

Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s award-winning yet remarkably neglected Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (1993) explores female adolescence and coming of age in a rich, polyphonic collection of verse novellas. “Loving the Unlovable Body” focuses on Yamanaka’s treatment of this transition as a fully embodied, fraught, and often painful experience by explicating the uses of several tropes used to express girls’ experiences of their bodies: eating, voice, eyes, fragmentation, and marking/naming. These metaphors contribute to the development of a complex range of possibilities from devastating to hopeful, presented in juxtaposition and interplay, for girls’ relationships to their culturally denigrated bodies and the …

Implementation And Evaluation Of A Pilot Training To Improve Transgender Competency Among Medical Staff In An Urban Clinic, Corina Lelutiu-Weinberger, Paula Pollard-Thomas, William Pagano, Nathan Levitt, Evelyn I. Lopez, Sarit A. Golub, Asa E. Radix

Publications and Research

Purpose: Transgender individuals (TGI), who identify their gender as different from their sex assigned at birth, continue facing widespread discrimination and mistreatment within the healthcare system. Providers often lack expertise in adequate transgender (TG) care due to limited specialized training. In response to these inadequacies, and to increase evidence-based interventions effecting TG-affirmative healthcare, we implemented and evaluated a structural-level intervention in the form of a comprehensive Provider Training Program (PTP) in TG health within a New York City-based outpatient clinic serving primarily individuals of color and of low socioeconomic status. This pilot intervention aimed to increase medical staff knowledge of …

Unworking Milton: Steps To A Georgics Of The Mind, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

Traditionally read as a poem about laboring subjects who gain power through abstract and abstracting forms of bodily discipline, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) more compellingly foregrounds the erotics of the Garden as a space where humans and nonhumans intra-act materially and sexually. Following Christopher Hill, who long ago pointed to not one but two revolutions in the history of seventeenth-century English radicalism—the first, ‘the one which succeeded[,] . . . the protestant ethic’; and the second, ‘the revolution which never happened,’ which sought ‘communal property, a far wider democracy[,] and rejected the protestant ethic’—I show how Milton’s Paradise …

Exchanges Of Identity In Prehistoric Anatolian Figurines, Ellen H. Belcher, Karina Croucher

Publications and Research

This paper examines exchange imagery and ideology of the human body manifested through figurines from prehistoric (7 th –6 th millennia BC) Anatolian contexts. These figurines document local, regional and inter-regional communication of identity, use of materials, ideologies and skills. Taking a new approach to understanding the assemblages, this paper suggests four key themes of analysis: materials and materiality; fractured bodies; gender spectrum; and ambiguities and relationships.

Queering Sugar: Kara Walker’S Sugar Sphinx And The Intractability Of Black Female Sexuality, Amber Jamilla Musser

Publications and Research

This essay analyzes the controversy surrounding artist Kara Walker’s 2014 installation, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, to unpack the pleasures and dangers that subtend discussions of black female sexuality. What Walker announced as a tribute to the labor of brown and black bodies produced myriad conversations about pleasure, danger, and black female sexuality. Most art critics argued that the piece reclaimed black female agency; many visitors criticized the work (and the public response to it) as disrespectful and problematic. In the essay, I argue that both of these responses highlight the difficulty of talking about black female …

Introduction: The 1970s, Shelly J. Eversley, Michelle Habell-Pallán

Publications and Research

Introduction to special issue, "The 1970s," of WSQ (Women's Studies Quarterly), edited by Shelly Eversley and Michelle Habell-Pallán.

The Alteration Of The Image – Women And Japanese Society (1600-2000), Frank Jacob

Publications and Research

A survey paper on the development of the female image in Japan's society from the Tokugawa period until the 2000s.

"Happily Ever After": The Tragic Queer And Delany's Comic Book Fairy Tale, Ann Matsuuchi

Publications and Research

Discusses the formulations of queer futurity and normativity in Samuel R. Delany’s autobiographical graphic novel Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York, drawn by artist Mia Wolff. This love story that is depicted via an interplay of text and imagery resists clichéd homonormative recasting of existing familial templates and questions how expectations queer happiness are bounded by a persistent set of social norms (race, class, education, and income) and their intersections. Also suggests how happy endings can function as a renegotiation of the utopian impulse into something more complex and realistic.

Wsq: The 1970s Editor's Note, Cynthia Chris, Matt Brim

Publications and Research

This Editor's Note introduces the WSQ issue "The 1970s," co-edited by Shelly Eversley and Michelle Habel-Pallan, which explores the decade of the 1970s, its dynamic social movements and radical cultural shifts, from the rapid boom in feminist publishing to the failure to pass the Equal Rights Amendment.

Recovering The Beauty Of Medusa, Alexander M. Schlutz

Publications and Research

This essay presents a close analysis of P.B. Shelley’s fragmentary ekphrastic poem “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery.” It places Shelley’s text in its aesthetic, mythological and historico-political contexts to demonstrate how Shelley aims to undo the ideological and representational structures of power that inform human language, art, and history, and which turn Medusa into the monstrous Other as which she appears. In Shelley’s text by contrast, Medusa becomes a figure for a revelatory beauty that cannot become visible in the distorting parameters of a discourse of power that informs our very perception of what …

Gender, Money, And The Charity Organization Society: 1900-1919, Sarah H. Arnold

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project looks at the work of the Charity Organization Society of New York from 1900 until 1919. Using reports, case histories, meeting minutes, and fundraising material, it concentrates on the ways in which the performance of gender intersected with definitions of expertise and access to money in the lives of both the social workers themselves and their clients. It begins with an overview of the Charity Organization Society's evolution from a largely volunteer charity organization focused on the morality of the poor to an organization that would become key to the development of social work as a profession. Then …

Revisting The Domestic Labor Debate: Toward A Critique Of Workerist Feminism, Alice Feng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The extremely high presence of housewives in Italy during the 'miracle years,' of 1950-1963, seemingly suggested that an unprecedented number of women were unemployed after their expulsion from large-scale industry. This phenomenon inspired debate among feminists on questions such as the contribution of housewives to the reproduction of labor-power, the character of reproductive labor and the relation between the participation of women in waged labor and unwaged domestic labor. In revisiting this phenomenon, this thesis argues that, contrary to the appearance of women being unemployed, a significant number of women, along with children, were irregularly engaged in undeclared forms of …

Labor Market Trajectories Of Black Women In The United States, 1980 To 2010, Danielle Jackson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In light of several trends among Black women in the U.S., including rising levels of college degree attainment, immigration, and household headship, scholars have begun to more thoroughly explore the factors impacting Black women's labor market outcomes (e.g., employment status, earnings, and occupational prestige). Focusing on the 30-year period of 1980 to 2010, this dissertation applies theories of social and cultural capital, intersectionality, and social mobility to the examination of Black women's labor market trajectories according to their nativity (U.S.- vs. foreign-born status) and level of educational attainment (college-educated vs. non-college-educated). Additionally, this dissertation examines recent national data to determine …

Because Nothing Is Sufficient, We Must Use Everything, Danica Savonick

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Effects Of Divorce Risk On Women's Labor Supply And Human Capital Investment, Kristin Mammen

Publications and Research

This paper examines the effects of the divorce law liberalization of the early 1970s on the increase in divorce rates during the same time period. A review of the evidence suggests that the law changes were not a major driver of the divorce rates; but the policy changes appear to have affected behavior even for those who did not divorce. The results here suggest that as they saw the laws changing, young women in the divorce reform states redirected some of their investments from marriage to their own human capital. The perceived increase in the probability of divorce motivated women …

Lost In Translation: Regressive Femininity In American J-Horror Remakes, Matthew Ducca

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the ways in which the representation of female characters changes between Japanese horror films and the subsequent American remakes. The success of Gore Verbinski's The Ring (2002) sparked a mass American interest in Japan's contemporary horror cinema, resulting in a myriad of remakes to saturate the market. However, the adaptation process resulted in alterations of the source material to better conform to gender stereotypes and conventions associated with the American conception of the horror genre. Valerie Wee and Steven Rawle's research regarding cultural and gender differences between Ringu and The Ring is expanded to also include similar …

The Pulitzer Prize And Women: An Investigation Into Three Decades Of Winning Plays By Female Dramatists (1981-2009), Kathleen Potts

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dramas by women had won the Pulitzer Prize six times in the years spanning from 1921 to 1958, followed by an unexplained absence of female winners from 1959 to 1980. Then in the 1980s three women won and women continued to win up until the present day. Covering three decades - the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s - this dissertation investigates these Pulitzer Prize-winning plays by female dramatists: Crimes of the Heart by Beth Henley; 'night, Mother by Marsha Norman; The Heidi Chronicles by Wendy Wasserstein; How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel; W;t (a.k.a. Wit) by Margaret Edson; …

All Consuming Self-Destructiveness: Images Of Female Attractiveness In Fashion Advertising And The Impact On Women's Body Satisfaction, Self-Presentations On Social Networks, And Beauty-Related Consumption Behavior, Maria Christoforou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sociocultural stereotypes of feminine beauty are widespread in almost every form of popular media, but most pervasively in fashion advertising. The fashion advertising industry overwhelms women with images that represent what is considered to be the "ideal beauty." In reality, for most women such stereotypes of beauty are almost totally unachievable, as the ideal beauty portrayed in advertisements is based on absolute perfection. Advertisers' use of such extreme and unrealistic role models implies that in order for a woman to be considered beautiful she must be perfect, which makes it difficult for her to achieve any level of contentment with …

The Journal Of Mother Studies: A Peer Reviewed, International, Interdisciplinary, Open-Acess, Digital Humanities Hybrid Project, Martha Joy Rose

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Academic Journals are an established forum for educators and researchers to disseminate information within their field. Journals act as mediators of knowledge, advancing the canons within specific areas of study. There are currently two journals that focus on motherhood from an interdisciplinary perspective and one that focuses on fathers. However, none of these determine a specific foundational definition of what the field is, what it hopes to study, and how it will advance itself. Rather, these journals are general collections of a great number of things that touch on varying subjects regarding motherhood and fatherhood. This thesis argues for the …

Affecting Neoliberal Public Health Care: Interdependent Relationality Between Disabled Care Recipients And Their Care Providers, Akemi Nishida

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I trace the neoliberal turn of a public health-care program, Medicaid, and its effects on those who are involved in it: disabled care recipients and their care providers. Also examined is the emergence of an affective relationality between these individuals through their daily practices of care. In 1993, Medicaid went through a neoliberal turn that accelerated its privatization. I investigate the ways in which this turn--in company with the neoliberal transition of other welfare programs and the rise of a transnational care industry--further deployed a gendered, raced, classed, and immigration-based division of care labor that commodified and …

Wsq: Child Editor's Note, Cynthia Chris, Matt Brim

Publications and Research

This Editor's Note introduces the WSQ issue "Child," co-edited by Sarah Chinn and Anna Mae Duane, which takes a kaleidoscopically interdisciplinary approach to childhood studies, focusing on the legibility and autonomy of children.

Being A Lesbian Librarian, Collection Development In Lesbian Librarianship, And Archives As Lesbian Spaces, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Publications and Research

Edited talk From Pratt SILS Gender LIS Panel curated by Dinah Handel on March 27th, 2015
Co-presenters include: Sian Evans; #artandfeminism Wikipedia Editathon & Jen LaBarbera; Filling in the Margins: The use of Queer Theory, Feminist Standpoint Theory, and Critical Race Theory to build inclusive archival collections
This talk remarks on the role of the librarian to provide lesbian-specific content.