Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

The Angel And The Imp: The Duncan Sisters’ Performances Of Race And Gender, Jocelyn Buckner

Theatre Faculty Articles and Research

From 1923 to 1959 Vivian and Rosetta Duncan performed the show Topsy and Eva in front of thousands of audiences in the United States and abroad. This essay examines how the Duncan Sisters’ appropriation of blackness through a yin and yang performance of black and white womanhood, their sexualized but ultimately infantilizing routine as young girls, and their take on anarchistic comedy resulted in a particular spin on age, gender, race, and sexuality that reinforced their privilege as white women even while it pushed the boundaries of acceptable femininity in the swiftly shifting American culture of the first half of …

The Myth Of Choice: The Cultural Shift In Cosmetic Surgery, Kelly Neyer

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

What comes to mind when you hear the words cosmetic surgery? The majority of the population would think of breast augmentations, liposuction, or rhinoplasties; but what about vaginal rejuvenation, labiaplasties, or pubic liposuction? In the United States, cosmetic surgery is undergoing a major cultural shift concerning the types of procedures done on women. Moving away from the outer, visible parts of a female body, cosmetic surgery is advancing to the inner and more private domains of a female body. Known as female genital cosmetic surgery (FGCS), these procedures are part of the larger cultural shift in the trends and practices …

Anthropologists And Two Spirit People: Building Bridges And Sharing Knowledge, Sandra Faiman-Silva

Anthropology Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Jeanette Winterson's Love Intervention: Rethinking The Future, In "Sex, Gender And Time In Fiction And Culture", Abigail Rine

Faculty Publications - Department of English

No abstract provided.

The Feathered Hand: Installation, Drawings, Prints By Alison Derby Hildreth, University Of New England Art Gallery

Exhibition Catalogues

The Feathered Hand: Installation, Drawings, Prints is the catalogue from the University of New England Art Gallery’s January 5 –April 3, 2011 exhibition of work by Alison Hildreth.

Hildreth described the work as: “… an installation and a group of drawings and prints that I have been working on over the past 2 years. The drawings and prints I think of as walks through a changing landscape of associative ideas; each carries something from the previous image but moves on to a new interpretation. They continue end to end: divided cities, natural and manmade terrains, maps of investigations inspired as …

When Predator Becomes Prey: The Gendered Jargon Of Popular Culture, Melissa R. Ames

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

Throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century the vernacular of popular culture has been bombarded by sexualized terminology. Although these terms are often formed with humorous intent, their staying power and use as cultural descriptive categories is both intriguing and disturbing. Also troubling is the fact that the majority of these new terms, such as puma (a thirty-something female “dating” a younger male), cougar (a forty-plus female “dating” a younger male), and MILF (“mother I’d like to fuck”), are restricted to the female gender alone. This article analyzes the etymology of these terms, their use in popular culture (ranging …

Imperial Domesticity: Native American Gender Ideology And Conformity In The Late Nineteenth And Early Twentieth Centuries, Christina Moehrle

American Studies Senior Theses

This project is informed by the history of Native American removal across Western lands, and the sociological and economic strategies that forced the assimilation of distinct native tribes into a mass, dominant white culture. Considering this assimilation through the imposition of domesticity and European gender ideology, this project aims to explore the political over and undertones of the cult of domesticity, and to analyze how domesticity and domestication were used to construct gender, social, and economic conformity. Post-bellum American politics regarded the women’s experience and domestic ideals as prototypes for national values. The importance of home production for the …

Beauty And The Barbie Doll: When Life Imitates Plastic, Alexandra Gaudio

American Studies Senior Theses

My project will consist of three major parts. I want to take a brief look at how the hegemonic ideals of feminine beauty in the United States have evolved over the past fifty years, since Barbie was introduced in 1959. Also, I will go through a history of Mattel’s Barbie doll, including the development of the doll and some of its many different manifestations over the years. Then I will use these two components to investigate the relationship between exposure to the doll and young women’s perception of beauty, as well as other potentially subconscious ideals they may internalize from …

Peter The Nurse And Teresa The Politician: Exploring Gender Norms And Discrimination In The Workplace, Alex Filippo

American Studies Senior Theses

Due to gender socialization, people of today’s society expect males and females to be intrinsically different. Thus, many careers are dominated by a single gender. In my thesis I explore the consequences that those who are employed in professions that defy gender expectations, i.e. a male nurse and a female politician, deal with. It is common for a man in a female dominated profession to face discrimination. The converse is also true. However, the discrimination each person suffers differs according to his or her gender. The negative discrimination that for instance, a male secretary experiences is most strongly generated by …

Performing Femininity: Rae Bourbon And Christine Jorgensen Onstage, Taylor Riccio

American Studies Senior Theses

Drag performers and transexuals exist on the margins of the two gender binary. By existing on these margins these performers use both their physical bodies and humor to lampoon and subvert the gender binary and broaden the understanding of how gender is performed. Two performers, Rae Bourbon, a female impersonator, and Christine Jorgensen, a transexual who became a performer, placed their marginalized bodies on the stage and by doing so they heighten the subversion and critique of gender inherent in their performances.Gender is a normalizing force that dominates human interactions. Kessler and McKenna open their work on gender with the …

There’S No Crying In Baseball: Feminization, Sport, And Spectacle In The All American Girls’ Professional Baseball League, Dan Murphy

American Studies Senior Theses

My thesis focuses on the All American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL). Specifically, I explore aspects of femininity within the league and why Phillip Wrigley, the league’s first owner, and other league owners chose to accentuate femininity. In my research, I focus on certain features of the league, such as the league’s beauty school, player’s uniforms, sexuality, and race. I believe these and other factors played a role in how the league decided to market itself to Americans. Additionally I focus on how different members of the media wrote about the league. In writing about the AAGPBL, journalists from local …

Family Affairs Newsletter 2011-01-01, Zack Paakkonen

Family Affairs newsletter (2004-2016)

FAMILY AFFAIRS was a free, twice-a-month, social activities newsletter for the GLBTQI (gay/lesbian/bisexual/trans/queer/intersex) community, sent out around the 1st and 15th of each month. It covered the State of Maine only. The list was begun and maintained for many years by Jean Vermette in Bangor, and later operated by Zack Paakkonen of Portland. Over the years it evolved from a social activities newsletter into a business directory, classified ad service, and community bulletin board.

An Equal Rights Amendment To Make Women Human, Ann Bartow

Law Faculty Scholarship

[Excerpt] “I can state with some authority that two times fourteen is twenty-eight, flouting the stereotype that women are inept at mathematics and simultaneously framing my argument in favor of an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Though the Fourteenth Amendment' provides women with partial legal armament (a dull sword, a small shield), equal protection requires something twice as powerful in the form of a Twenty-Eighth Amendment that would expressly vest women with equal rights under the law. The Fourteenth Amendment has completed only half of the job.”

The Intricacies Of M.F.K. Fisher: Discovering A Kaleidoscopic Hybridity, Elizabeth Lee Sleeper

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to analyze M.F.K. Fisher's socio-historic role and the components of her texts as a means to interrogate the categorization of her writing, to identify her authorial voice, and to see how it all contributes to and proves that Fisher is a `kaleidoscopic' hybrid writer. I utilize theoretical positions such as New Historicism, Feminism, Genre Theory, and Everyday Theory to help me identify and explain the hybrid tendencies of Fisher's writing. It is not a comprehensive study of her texts in light of these theories, but rather, it is a broad overview in order to demonstrate alternative readings …

Performing An Embodied Feminist Aesthetics: A Critical Performance Ethnography Of The Equestrian Sport Culture, Dawn Marie D. Mcintosh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While this research appears to be about horses and riding, it is really a project about the conditions of White women, White femininity, and feminist futurities. Driven by my investment in imagining possibilities of dismantling Whiteness and heteropatriarchy, this research begins to mark the dominant performances of White femininity and those fleeting moments of disruption by White women. My intentions for this project were to stage performances of feminist futurities that imagine feminist aesthetics as relational probabilities towards feminist alliances.

The research was drawn from a six month critical performance ethnography of a local Hunter/Jumper barn. This critical performance ethnography …

Love Through A Wide-Angle Lens: A Mythic Narrative And Feminist Critique Of The Reality Competition Dating Show More To Love, Amy Leann Zsohar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Obesity is on the rise in the United States and reality television has also risen to the charge of representing fatness. More to Love was the first reality competition dating show to afford fat women a chance at reality show love. The purpose of the study was to look at how fat women are portrayed on reality competition dating shows. The purpose of this study is to understand how the mythic narrative of love through a feminist lens informed by LeBesco, Bordo, Hill Collins, and hooks are in conversation with each other in More to Love. This study found that …

Gloria Anzaldua And Alanis Morisette: The Untangled Flavors Of Conocimiento, Audrey Nathalie Romero

Theses Digitization Project

This paper explroes the notion that the human body plays a predominant role in the act of writing, and examines how Gloria Anzaldua's concept of writing from the body, which she calls conocimiento (Spanish term for consciousmess), is manifested in Alanis Morissette's lyrics.

Fevered Desires And Interracial Intimacies In Jungle Fever, Ronald Sundstrom

Philosophy

Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever centers on a sexual affair between a black man, Flipper, and a white, Italian American woman, Angela. This pairing centers on the type of interracial relationship and pairing (black man plus white woman) typically obsessed about in discussions of interracial romances. It is also the pairing offered by Left radicals, such as Frantz Fanon in Black Skins, White Masks (1952), as the prototype of racial revolution. The title of Julius Lester’s black nationalist classic Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gonna Get Your Mama! (1969), dramatically illustrates this view. Lee’s Jungle Fever upsets this radical stance by …

Caring Work: Opening A Space Of Possibility For Exploring Transnational Feminist Solidarity Between Privileged And Marginalized Women, Beverly Romero Natividad

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Neoliberalism, through its emphasis on personal responsibility and individual freedom in accelerating economic development globally, has only pushed women further into the margin of society. Structural adjustment programs (SAPs), which impose state budget cuts on healthcare and welfare programs, particularly have kept poor women and women of color in poverty and generally, have exploited women's labor. However, in this age of neoliberalism, women's solidarity becomes more significant. Because neoliberalism is founded on individualism, its downfall rests on alliance-building. Against this backdrop, I explore the possibility of fostering transnational feminist solidarity between privileged and marginalized women engaged in formal caring work. …

A Preliminary Investigation Of Worry Content In Sexual Minorities, Brandon J. Weiss, Debra A. Hope

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

This preliminary study examined the nature of worry content of lesbians, gay men, and bisexual individuals and the relationship between worry related to sexual orientation and mental health. A community sample of 54 individuals identifying as sexual minorities was recruited from two cities in the Great Plains to complete a packet of questionaires, including a modified Worry Domains Questionnaire (WDQ; Tallis, Eysenck, & Mathews, 1992) with additional items constructed to assess worry over discrimination related to sexual orientation, and participate in a worry induction and verbalization task. The content of self-reported worries was consistent with those reported in prior investigations …

Ua41 University College Connection, Dennis K. George, Dean, Wendi Kelley

UC Publications

No abstract provided.

Ua98/2 Potter College For Young Ladies Administration, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Administrative records related to Potter College. The series includes grade books, textbook list and a receipt.

Engendering Injustice: Drug Laws, Drug Economies, And The Marginalization Of Women In New York State, Kate Mcgee

American Studies Senior Theses

On November 8, 1983, Elaine Bartlett left her apartment in Harlem, and headed to Grand Central Station. There, she met her boyfriend, Nate. They were headed to the Monte Mario Hotel in Albany. To any bystander, they may have looked like any other couple. But Elaine Bartlett knew different. That’s because she had a four-ounce bag of cocaine stuffed down the front of her pants. In 1983, Bartlett was a twenty-six year old woman with four children. A male friend, George Deets—although she knew him as Chris at the time—told her that if she delivered the drugs, she could earn …

Ua19/16/1 Volleyball Media Information Guide, Wku Athletic Media Relations

WKU Administration Documents

Athletic media guide for volleyball team.

Willa Cather [From Blackwell Encyclopedia Of Twentieth-Century American Fiction], Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Willa Cather is known primarily for her novels representing the experiences of women immigrants on the Nebraska prairies in the late nineteenth century, but Cather’s 10 novels and scores of short stories’ produced over a career spanning 50 years actually range widely over space and time, from seventeenth-century Quebec to twentieth century New York. A social conservative who proudly identified herself as one of the backward-looking, her experiments with fictional form and her approach to culture nevertheless ally her with modernism. It is, perhaps, the depth and diversity of Cather’s body of work and the impossibility of reducing her achievement …

Human Rights And Literature (Fall 2011), Robert D. Tobin

Syllabi

In this class, we will be reading literary and cultural documents to contemplate the concept of “human rights.” What rights do all humans have, simply by virtue of being human? Who counts as human? Do current understandings of human rights exclude some people? Do humans have more rights than other species? How do questions of gender and sexuality fit into the discussion of human rights?

As we seek to answer these questions, we will trace the development of human rights discourses from the Enlightenment to the present, looking at literature from a variety of cultures and human rights documents from …

Immigrant Women Organize For Justice: A Listening Project, Sandra Catalina Nieto

Capstone Collection

Over nineteen million immigrant women live in the United States. Each one of those nineteen million women carries with her a powerful history. Immigrant Women Organize for Justice: A Listening Project is an attempt to capture a breath of those histories, in particular the histories of four mujeres luchadoras: immigrant women who are organizing communities surrounding them and devoting much of their life and their work to the lucha (struggle or fight) for a more just and equal society. Immigrant Women Organize for Justice: A Listening Project is a two-part project. The first section is devoted entirely to remembering the …

Film Review: Gulliver's Travels, Karen Gevirtz

Department of English Publications

No abstract provided.

Women & Language: Essays On Gendered Communication Across Media, Melissa R. Ames

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

The present volume of essays examines women's communication as it has evolved historically across multiple mediums. Part I explores how women became "gossip girls" and the important role of gossip in the perception and practice of female communication. Essays in Part II cover the convergence of oral and written communication in women's literature. Gendered performance in such arenas as salsa dance, Dr. Phil and the Internet is examined in Part III, and essays in Part IV discuss women's communication in the technology-rich 21st century. This excerpt features the introduction and one essay from the co-editor.

Women & Language: Essays On Gendered Communication Across Media, Melissa R. Ames

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

The present volume of essays examines women's communication as it has evolved historically across multiple mediums. Part I explores how women became "gossip girls" and the important role of gossip in the perception and practice of female communication. Essays in Part II cover the convergence of oral and written communication in women's literature. Gendered performance in such arenas as salsa dance, Dr. Phil and the Internet is examined in Part III, and essays in Part IV discuss women's communication in the technology-rich 21st century. This excerpt features the introduction and one essay from the co-editor.