Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Racism, Heterosexism, Depression, And Hiv Risk Behaviors Of Native Men Who Have Sex With Men: Findings From The Honor Project, Matthew Alan Town

Dissertations and Theses

Racial minority men who have sex with men (MSM) experience greater levels of discrimination and higher rates of HIV infection. However, little is known about the associations between racial and heterosexist discrimination and HIV risk behavior. Further, little is known about the mechanisms of the association between racial and heterosexist discrimination and HIV risk behavior. There is some evidence to suggest that depression may be a mechanism that mediates the relationship between racial and heterosexist discrimination and HIV risk behavior. Thus, one purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which discrimination based on both race and sexual …

Exploring Connections Between Efforts To Restrict Same-Sex Marriage And Surging Public Opinion Support For Same-Sex Marriage Rights: Could Efforts To Restrict Gay Rights Help To Explain Increases In Public Opinion Support For Same-Sex Marriage?, Samuel Everett Christian Dunlop

Dissertations and Theses

Scholarly research on the subject of the swift pace of change in support for same-sex marriage has evolved significantly over the last ten years. The shift has gone beyond the scholarship's initial description amongst demographic groups on how opinion has changed on gay rights issues, like same-sex marriage, to an examination of why the change has occurred. A great deal of the initial research on the topic seemed to focus on demographic traits that suggested a greater propensity toward support for same-sex marriage as time went on. Is the existent literature sufficient to explain why such a dramatic change in …

Spirituality And Religion In Women's Leadership For Sustainable Development In Crisis Conditions: The Case Of Burma, Phyusin Myo Kyaw Myint

Dissertations and Theses

This research focuses on women's leadership roles for sustainable development in crisis conditions with particular attention to the foundations of the leadership roles of women based in spirituality and religion. The research question for this study ask: How do religious and spiritual traditions contribute to the leadership roles of women that can be effective in building sustainable development in crisis conditions? The study uses a content analysis of a key body of women's writings from Burma. The findings from the data explain some of the ways in which spirituality and religion have played significant roles in promoting the leadership of …

A Habitable Madness: Inclusion Of Feminist Thought In The Development Of Mad Theory, Casadi "Khaki" Marino

Student Research Symposium

Objectives: Mad theory is in the early stages of development. This paper draws on disability studies and feminist thought in theorizing models of madness.

Methods: This paper explores the available literature in order to explore the contribution of feminism to mad theory.

Results: Disability studies have challenged hegemonic concepts of normality and the definition of disability as individual deficit. Disability becomes framed as a social construction involving power relations. Feminist perspectives on disability honor lived experience and human variation. In feminist thought, different ways of being are valued and people are recognized as equal in terms of …

Gender Representations In U.S. Ed.D. Dissertations: A Feminist Content Analysis, Debora Kay Nelli

Dissertations and Theses

Educational access, achievement and opportunity for students and educators in U.S. educational institutions is influenced and often limited by gender. Although the U.S. Glass Ceiling Commission reports that the gender equity values, beliefs and commitments of institutional leaders are a key factor in reducing institutional gender inequities (U.S. Dept of Labor, 1995), very little is known about the current preparation or evaluation of educational leadership values, especially at the doctoral level (Hess & Kelly, 2007, Grogan & Andrews, 2002; Levine, 2005; Murphy & Vriesenga, 2004).

This study utilized feminist content analysis as a conceptual framework and research methodology to examine …

Reviews Of Thunder: A Film About Ferron, Sarabah, And The Punk Singer: A Film About Kathleen Hanna, Sarah Dougher

University Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Sarah Dougher reviews three films in this issue of Films for the Feminist Classroom: Thunder: A Film about Ferron. Directed by Bitch and Billie Jo Cavallaro; Sarabah. Directed by Maria Luisa Gambale & Gloria Bremer; and The Punk Singer: A Film About Kathleen Hanna. Directed by Sini Anderson.

Learning To Read (Gender): Children’S Animation And The New Heterosexism, Kaelyn Flowerday

Anthós

This paper examines and compares two American animated productions targeting elementary and middle school children, and in doing so aims to elucidate the handling of gender in similar television programs and feature films of the past three decades. These animated works are treated here as a Foucauldian apparatus, one predicated on the force of systematically structured observation, which functions to manipulate power relations in the favor of hetero- and cis-male order. The Disney feature Beauty and the Beast supplies a case for investigating the heterosexist discourses of these contemporary animated media. However, as will be shown, comparatively feminist animated works …

Identity Development Of Adolescent Gay Black Males, Miles James Allen Crumley

Dissertations and Theses

During adolescence, self-identified gay black males may develop their identities differently than their gay white male counterparts. This may be attributed to the reconciliation of stressors when developing gay, black, and male identities within certain environmental contexts. To investigate this, twelve qualitative interviews were conducted of gay black males from which developmental themes were extracted. While many of the developmental processes are similar to their white homosexual counterparts, some differences were noted regarding racism, objectification by the white gay community, and use of the internet to develop particular identities. A new theory using dynamic systems theory that includes many complexities …

The Significance Of A Distinction Between A Sexual Act And A Sexual Identity, Nirvana Fairbanks

Student Research Symposium

This paper describes the distinction between a sexual act and a sexual identity as seen in different cultural contexts with regard to male homosexuality. It describes differences in how homosexual behavior is interpreted culturally. It discusses how more value is placed on certain sexual acts while there is less focus on a sexual identity and vice versa. For example, in Latin American culture, if two men are sexually involved with one another, it is the acts they perform that dictate how they are viewed, rather than the fact that they are two men engaging in sex together. In Western culture, …

Family And Social Roles In Queer Children's Literature, Nicolas Toscana Brouhard

Student Research Symposium

This research investigates family and social roles in queer children's literature. It provides a thematic analysis of popular titles published during the last decade. It argues that heteronormative and queer-identified protagonists in these stories have identical values concerning family and society. The analysis includes "In Our Mother's House" by Patricia Polacco, "And Tango Makes Three" by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, "King & King" by Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland, and "Donovan’s Big Day" by Leslea Newman. The analysis focuses on how characters relationships and their commitments to each other such as weddings. It also explores how they take …

Transgressing Sexuality: An Interdisciplinary Study Of Economic History, Anthropology, And Queer Theory, Jason Gary Damron

Dissertations and Theses

This interdisciplinary thesis examines the concept of sexuality through lenses provided by economic history, anthropology, and queer theory. A close reading reveals historical parallels from the late 1800s between concepts of a desiring, utility-maximizing economic subject on the one hand, and a desiring, carnally decisive sexological subject on the other. Social constructionists have persuasively argued that social and economic elites deploy the discourse of sexuality as a technique of discipline and social control in class- and gender-based struggles. Although prior scholarship discusses how contemporary ideas of sexuality reflect this origin, many anthropologists and queer theorists continue to use "sexuality" uncritically …

Toward A Culture Of Healing: Why Alternative Therapies And A Feminist Framework Are Needed In The Care Of Pregnant Women And Treatment Of Postpartum Mood Disorders, Angela Leonardo

Anthós

Pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood are areas of human development that have systematically migrated away from their roots as a series of natural life events to a highly, and perhaps unnecessarily, medicalized arena. This shift has been detrimental for women, especially for poor, socially isolated, single, and/or ethnic minority women. In this paper, I outline my concerns with the increased medicalization of birth and postpartum care, as well as with the status of mothers in the United States, and critically examine the patriarchal context in which this shift has occurred. My focus is on maternal health and mortality, including depression …

Dazai's Women: Dazai Osamu And His Female Narrators, Jamie Walden Cox

Dissertations and Theses

Dazai Osamu (born Tsushima Shûji) was a post-WWII writer who wrote a number of works using a female narrator. This thesis research focused on the reasons as to why Dazai may have written using female narratives, taking into consideration the time period and social milieu in which he was writing, as well as his own personal history with women. In addition, the history of male authors utilizing female narratives was explored, as well as the ideas of gender in the Japanese arts. Dazai works were also compared with Tankizaki Junichirô's to see how the roles of women in their works …

Public Policy And Sexual Geography In Portland, Oregon, 1970-2010, Elizabeth Morehead

Dissertations and Theses

Drawing on the concept of sexual geography, this study examines the social and political meanings of sexualized spaces in the urban geography of Portland, Oregon between 1970 and 2010. This includes an examination of the sexual geography of urban spaces as a deliberate construct resulting from official and unofficial public policy and urban planning decisions. Sexual geographies, the collective and individual constructions of sexuality, are not static. Nor are definitions of deviant sexual practices fixed in the collective consciousness. Both are continuously being reshaped and reconstructed in response to changing economic structures and beliefs about sex, race and class. Primary …

The Epistemology Of Ignorance, Olaf Dana Thomas Stockly

Anthós

Nancy Tuana explores the nature of the epistemology of ignorance in her essay titled, "Coming to Understand: Orgasm and the Epistemology of Ignorance". She describes our current epistemologies as too narrow, lacking in scope and truth because they focus only on the knowledge we have and ignore the knowledge we don’t have. If we want to more fully understand how our culture produces information, “we must also understand that practices that account for not knowing, that is, our lack of knowledge about a phenomena or, in some cases, an account of the practices that resulted in a group unlearning what …

Interdisciplinary: Feminist Teaching, Research And Activism, Jamie P. Ross

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Feminists' interdisciplinary work is a critical response to claims that disciplinary expertise provides real knowledge. Interdisciplinary teaching, research, and activism emerge in opposition to claims that only certain kinds of ideas are valuable. This paper will briefly delineate those concepts that have created an intellectual tradition that does not recognize the political and strategic elements entailed by all knowledge formation. Feminist activism is a reaction to the narrowly defined boundaries of what counts as a good idea. The distinction between passive and active knowledge acquisition allows us to view feminist teaching, research, and activism as active, ongoing engagements that emerge …

Congress And The Era, Emily Yoder

Anthós

The Equal Rights Amendment was a constitutional amendment that guaranteed that the "equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." In this paper I will analyze the policy process in the critical years from the ERA's discharge from committee in 1970 to its passage through Congress in 1972 through both primary documents and scholarly opinion. By thoroughly examining the controversy over the ERA through the views and strategies of those advocating and opposing it, I will show how the momentum for social change characterized …

Subordinate Saints : Women And The Founding Of Third Church, Boston, 1669-1674, Melissa Ann Johnson

Dissertations and Theses

Although seventeenth-century New England has been one of the most heavily studied subjects in American history, women's lived experience of Puritan church membership has been incompletely understood. Histories of New England's Puritan churches have often assumed membership to have had universal implications, and studies of New England women either have focused on dissenting women or have neglected women's religious lives altogether despite the centrality of religion to the structure of New England society and culture.

This thesis uses pamphlets, sermons, and church records to demonstrate that women's church membership in Massachusetts's Puritan churches differed from men's because women were prohibited …

What Do Bras Have To Do With Puberty? Educating Boys About Girls Bodies, Jamie P. Ross

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Teaching puberty to 10-11 year olds and teaching sexuality to 13-18 year olds should be fun. Yet fun is not ordinarily associated with teaching puberty and sex in polite secular American society, let within religious arenas. It may not be polite and there are parental fears that formal sex education has a causal relationship with promiscuity. Yet, when I have asked over the years in my Sexualities class, in my most informal of polls, whether parents have taken a large and/or productive role in teaching sex to their children, the percentages are always very small. Many parents do not know …

Advertising 'The New Woman': Fashion, Beauty, And Health In Women's World, Pelin Basci

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study aims to re-examine Women's World, (a Middle Eastern women's publication that was active between 1913 and 1921), from a gender aware, but broadly constructed, interdisciplinary perspective that integrates women's studies with studies of advertising and consumption. A feminist journal with a relatively long publication life, Women's World contained a substantial number of advertisements encouraging the consumption of modem goods and services. Many of these notices promised to address the beauty, health and fashion needs of modem women, thus constructing in effect the public image of "the new woman." of that image, in turn, should facilitate our understanding of …

Love, Marriage, And Motherhood: Changing Expectations Of Women In Late Ottomanistanbul, Pelin Basci

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study examines the early work of famous novelist Halide Edip Adıvar against the background of public discussions on women and gender in late-Ottoman society. Gender relations and women's issues constituted a fertile ground for the debate about social transformation. Edip and her feminist peers wrote about passionate love, companionship in marriage, the significance of motherhood, and women's legal rights in their works. This reflects women's vision of new gender relations and provides evidence for their contributions to the forging of Turkish modernity prior to the founding of the Turkish Republic. It also illustrates the hybrid nature of culture, which …

Gay Bars, Vice, And Reform In Portland, 1948-1965, Beka Smith

Dissertations and Theses

The city of Portland adopted different policies toward gay bars between 1948 and 1965. Portland's conservative mayors, generally uninterested in changing the city or promoting growth, ignored gay bars. Reform mayors instigated campaigns against gay bars to gain public, political, and business support for their broader economic and social goals. They were able to use crackdowns on gay bars as popular components of their reform initiatives because Portland, in comparison to other cities, professed conservatism and morality and had little economic or cultural incentive to tolerate gay bars. Blaming Portland's vice on outsiders, reform mayors argued that their actions protected …

Trends In Women's Sex-Role Attitudes Concerning Work And Familial Roles, 1977-1996, Andria F. Howell

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis examines changes in women's sex-role attitudes concerning work and familial roles during the years of 1977 to 1996. Using a secondary data analysis of a General Social Survey data set, the attitudes of 3302 women during the years 1977, 1985 and 1996 are examined.

One area of focus of this research is the relationship between work force participation and women's sex-role attitudes. Demographic variables relating to family status and socio-economic status are also examined, as well as the effects of mother's out-of-home experiences on daughter's sex-role attitudes. Finally, this thesis identifies the rate of attitude change in the …

An Analysis Of Sex Trafficking In The Asian Region In An Era Of Globalization, Corie J. Hammers

Dissertations and Theses

Globalization, spurred on by capitalist principles, seeks the integration of countries and their economies into a single global market. Global integration has impacted countries in many ways, often negatively. Phenomena such as the illicit trade in weapons, drugs, and people for their sexual and/or physical labor, have also been facilitated by globalization. Specifically examined in this study were a) patterns of sex trafficking of women and girls in four countries: India, Nepal, the Philippines, and Thailand, and b) the various ways globalization has both impacted women's status within these countries and facilitated the sex trade.

One manifestation of globalization has …

Philosophy In The Wilderness, Jamie P. Ross

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

An analysis of the team-taught course, Knowledge, Art & Power: The Social Construction of Knowledge. It critically analyzes and rejects both of the following claims: 1. Knowledge consists of eternal truths, 2. Knowledge is relativistic. In so doing, we focus on an understanding that knowledge serves selective interests; knowledge has a teleology (purpose)- i.e. power.

In this course we examine and analyze the relationships among and between knowledge, power and art. That means we must first understand what counts as knowledge. One way of understanding what counts as knowledge is to understand the way in which power is defined …

Harrowing Heroines And Communist Plots: Krest'ianka And Rural Policy, 1946-1949, Rachael Preiss Susman

Dissertations and Theses

After World War II, women became very important to the Soviet plan to reassert control over the countryside and reestablish agriculture in those areas hard hit by war. This happened because long term migration trends to the city and wartime casualties had made women the majority in the countryside. There was a need for them to exceed their previous contributions to agriculture, even as they struggled to cope with wartime losses.

State propaganda encouraged rural women to regard employment in agriculture as their patriotic duty. This study analyzes one publication aimed at rural women, Krest'ianka, and examines the following …

Pregnancy Outcomes: A Study Testing A Model For Predicting Health Outcomes In Pregnancy, Tamera Ann Hart-Johnson

Dissertations and Theses

There is a persistent relationship between socioeconomic status and physical health outcomes found in the literature; however the variables mediating this relationship are many, and ways that they interact with each other are complex. The goal of understanding this relationship is to decrease the disparity in health by socioeconomic status.

This study tested a biopsychosocial model proposed by David Williams (1990) to explain the relationship between socioeconomic status and physical health outcomes. The model included the following latent factors: demographics, socioeconomic status, biomedical risk, medical care, psychosocial variables, and health outcomes. The model was tested through a secondary data analysis. …

Le "Devenir Féminin" Dans La Sociéte Moderne Occidentale À Travers Les Deux Romans De Virginie Despentes, Nadia Louar

Dissertations and Theses

Les deux premiers romans de Virginie Despentes, Baise-moi (1995) et les Chiennes Savantes (1996), attestent de la mutation socio-culturelle qui affecte la societe contemporaine. Son style insolent, son langage corrosif et volontairement Prosaïque confirme et signe I 'évolution dans le monde occidental des valeurs, des désirs et aspirations de 1'homme, et plus crucialement de la femme des années 90. Plus qu'une révolution des moeurs, on assiste dans ses deux premières oeuvres á une véritable mutation culturelle qui bouleverse les rôles et modéles traditionnels des individus dans la société. Ce bouleversement qui s'exprime dans la vie banale, mais définitivement violente de …

James Baldwin's Search For A Homosexual Identity In His Novels, Nadia Abdel Fattah

Dissertations and Theses

James Arthur Baldwin (1924-1987) is one of the two major writers who have dared write about black gay men and from a black gay perspective. However, his fame as a racial spokesman and his insightful analyses of race relations in America tend to distract attention from the fact that he has been one of the most important homosexual writers of the twentieth century. Intolerance and homophobia among black and white Americans often led to a misinterpretation or misevaluation of James Baldwin's novels.

James Baldwin was very courageous to come out as a black homosexual writer during the period of the …

The Effect Of The Ideology Of Motherhood On Women, Shari A. Burke

Dissertations and Theses

The ideology of motherhood in the United States makes it seem as though motherhood is a natural role for women. The ideology holds mothers solely responsible for the well being of their children. Combined with the ideology of blaming the victim, the ideology of motherhood causes a great deal of guilt in women as mothers cannot possibly live up to the unrealistic expectations set up in the culture.

In this study, I have used two case studies to illustrate the impact of the ideology of motherhood on the lives of these particular women. Utilizing the theories of Michel Foucault and …