Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Muslim Women And Girls: Searching For Democracy And Self-Expression, Theresa Renee White, Jennifer Maria Hernandez

Journal of International Women's Studies

This project captures the stories of Muslim women and girls, and the individual ways in which they construct female identity and exercise religious freedom as a form of democracy and self-expression. Much has been written about Muslim women, their dress, hijabs, veils and more recently burqas (Shirazi, 2001; MacDonald, 2006; Haddah & Smith et al., 2006; McLarney, 2009), in the wake of the 9/11 events. Scholars have noted the increasing construction of hate, fear, and misunderstanding, as well as increasing incidences of “Islamophobia” through the construction of Muslims as “the other”. Others have focused on Muslim women’s negotiations of religious …

Women In The Second Egyptian Parliament Post The Arab Spring: Do They Think They Stand A Chance?, Laila El Baradei, Dina Wafa

Journal of International Women's Studies

Egyptian women were very active on the streets during the 25 January Revolution, both in the demonstrations and in the subsequent elections, showing very high rates of participation as voters, yet surprisingly, very low rates of representation in the 2012 parliament. The current study seeks to explore different views, expectations and perceptions of Egyptian women regarding women’s role in the forthcoming 2013 parliamentary elections, and to identify what alternative measures are needed to strengthen women’s representation in parliament, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

The methodology utilized relied on a literature review in addition to a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the …

Sex And Selfhood: What Feminist Philosophy Can Learn From Recent Ethnography In Ho Chi Minh City, Mathew A. Foust

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article explores the connection of class dynamics to the moral agency of sex workers and their clients. It revisits the analyses of several contemporary feminist theorists, placing these analyses in dialogue with a recent ethnographic study of the sex work industry in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. In light of this comparative analysis, it is argued that accurate understanding and assessment of the moral agency of sex workers and their clients requires attunement to the complex and evolving class dynamics within which each is situated. Thus, while traditional frameworks for approaching this subject are useful, they are ultimately inadequate.

Changing Status Of Women And The Phenomenon Trafficking Of Women For Transactional Sex In Nigeria: A Qualitative Analysis, Clementina A. Osezua

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper examines the changing status of Bini women occasioned by the upsurge and endemic nature of the phenomenon of trafficking of women for the purpose of transactional sex. It engaged ethnographic methods of data collection with the use of family based interviews, focus group discussions using vignette stories, life histories, and key informant interviewing. Data were analyzed based on emerged themes. Findings revealed that “successful” trafficked Bini women enjoyed high socio-economic status in their families of procreation especially where family members were the direct recipients of the proceeds from transactional sex. Most mothers of “successfully” trafficked victims wielded greater …

Quality Of Life Among Thai Sex Workers: How Important Are Work, Educational And Personal Characteristics In Shaping Subjective Well-Being?, Elizabeth Monk-Turner

Journal of International Women's Studies

Little work explores subjective well-being (SWB) differences among unique populations. This study rests on a data from commercial female sex workers (CFSW) that was collected in Thailand during January and February 2007. Past research in SWB indicates that women who have more formal education, those who feel positively about their income rank and working conditions, and those who feel connected to others in their community report greater well-being compared to others. Moreover, Biswas-Diener and Diener (2006) found that sex workers in Calcutta were generally satisfied with their personal domains. Most Thai sex workers, in our sample, were generally satisfied with …

Family Affairs Newsletter 2013-08-15, 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.

Brooks Better Not Come Back, Helena E. Yang

SURGE

Every time a new season of the Bachelorette starts, I tell myself that I won’t watch this season—that I won’t give in to the trashiness and the petty drama which is the Bachelor. But I can’t help it. Season after season I’m hooked and 17 seasons later… here I am. [excerpt]

Fearless: Professor Janet Powers And Linnea Goebel, Janet M. Powers, Linnea C. Goebel

SURGE

This week we would like to recognize Professor Janet Powers and recent graduate Linnea Goebel ’13 for their work in Bosnia this summer helping to set up a group of female embroiderers with an Amazon Marketplace account to sell their wares on the internet. [excerpt]

Family Affairs Newsletter 2013-08-01, 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.

"Wee Women's Work": Women And Peacebuilding In Northern Ireland, Amanda E. Donahoe

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

International norms on intrastate conflicts, such as United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, call for women to participate in peace processes in countries emerging from conflict and civil strife, including those divided by identity-based conflict. However, scholars of post-war recovery in international relations and comparative politics have raised questions about the extent and effect of women’s participation in peace processes, and in politics more generally, in divided societies given underlying social, economic, and political barriers that impeded access to decisive or authoritative political decision-making. A critical question in the literature on women’s participation in post-conflict reconciliation-related dialogue and joint action …

Plain & Simple: The Will To Live Sustainably In An Unsustainable World, Brandi Nichole Button

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Sustainability is a buzzword covering a variety of fields and subjects. For the purposes of my research sustainability is “the ability to keep going over the long haul. As a value, it refers to giving equal weight in your decisions to the future as well as the present” (Gilman 1). The sustainability movement refers to activists, educators and researchers who are dedicated to finding high quality ways of living in the world that are environmentally benign for all who are now living as well future generations to come (Gilman 1). This research focuses on three women who engage in voluntary …

Being The Beautiful Fool, Ashley N. Gore

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Ernest Hemingway wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald that “The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life — and one is as good as the other” (305). With that, I created a collection of short stories that analyzes my generation of women’s struggles. Framing the thesis are two stories involving three women, Lindsey, Jenny, and Sarah, “The Generation of Discontent” and “Revisions,” with the characters attempting to sort through love, success, and happiness in society. The piece “The Bachelor” has Amanda …

Diurnal And Nocturnal Avian Antipredator Behavior In Thermally Challenging Conditions, Jennie M. Carr

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Diurnal avian antipredator behavior has been the focus of much past research, yet the influence of the thermal environment on such behaviors is often overlooked. Far less is known about nocturnal avian antipredator behavior, including how these behaviors are influenced by challenging thermal environments. The first portion of my research focused on how the thermal environment influences the diurnal antipredator behavior of wintering birds while (i) exposed to high wind speeds, (ii) foraging in sunlit and shaded microhabitats, and (iii) when using thermoregulatory postures to conserve body heat. In addition to increasing convective heat loss, high wind speeds increase the …

Ni Putes Ni Soumises: Unveiling Women’S Voices Through Feminism And Social Media In The 21st Century, Lilianna K. Deveneau

Honors Theses

Ni Putes Ni Soumises (NPNS; English translation: “Neither Whores Nor Submissives”) is a French, largely Muslim, feminist political organization that aims to promote laicité (secularization), mixité (the ability for women to fraternize with men), and gender equality. I have conducted an organizational case study including the triangulation of data comprised of critical analyses of the NPNS website, Facebook group, and other documentation and publications, to identify whether and how this organization has been successful in igniting social change. Findings indicate NPNS has grown its movement from one location (Paris) to forty-eight chapters throughout France, seven international headquarters, and has obtained …

Decoding Literary Aids: A Study On Issues Of The Body, Masculinity, And Self Identity In U.S. Aids Literature From 1984-2011, Alexander Shimon Abrams

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Rather than waiting decades to respond, novelists of nearly every literary genre began conceptualizing the AIDS epidemic shortly after the first documented case of the virus in the United States in 1981. Writers, feeling a sense of urgency, wasted little time constructing didactic texts that differ from much historical fiction in that they were written as the tragedy they are commenting on occurred. However, AIDS literature has changed as the disease has spread well beyond the gay communities of San Francisco and New York, causing people to reexamine their longstanding beliefs on masculinity, sexuality, and body politics.

My Master's thesis …

“All Things Forget The Forest:” The Convergence Of The War And The Pastoral In Edward Thomas’S Body Of Work, Nicole Trobaugh

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Edward Thomas, often identified as a war poet, eludes definitive characterization despite the fact that his poems are often anthologized as war poems. However, unlike other widely-known war poets, such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, the imagery present in Thomas’s poetry contains much subtlety and features dominant usage of nature themes. This project attempts to navigate the multi-faceted world of Edward Thomas through consideration of his love for nature, his melancholic predispositions, and his preoccupations with the looming Great War in order to study Thomas’s use of natural imagery in the context of grief, melancholy, and traumatic experience. To …

Running On Fumes The Destabilization Of The World’S Interconnected Systems As A Result Of Unsustainable Human Proliferation On A Finite Planet, Eduardo Fradin

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the global interconnectivity of critical and complex societal systems. Today, if consumption patterns continue to rise to unsustainable levels in concert with a soaring global population, these social and technological systems may begin to buckle, which will threaten the advancement of modern human civilization in the 21st century and beyond. The first globally-stressed system that is addressed in this paper is the global economic system. The second system I discuss is the global energy system and how it directly impacts the global economy. The following chapter looks at unsustainable population growth, freshwater scarcity, and food stresses. In …

The Military–Masculinity Complex: Hegemonic Masculinity And The United States Armed Forces, 1940–1963, Brandon T. Locke

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The military-industrial complex grew rapidly in the build up to the Second World War and continued to expand in the decades that followed. The military was not only much larger, but had also changed their relationship with American citizens, impacting their lives in new and complex ways. The defensive needs of World War Two and the Cold War made the military an imperative and prestigious institution in the United States, and the Selective Service Draft, beginning in 1940 and running continuously until 1973, gave the military unfettered access to the young men of the nation.

During the same time, government …

A Matter Of Regionalism: Remembering Brandon Teena And Willa Cather At The Nebraska History Museum, Carly S. Woods, Joshua P. Ewalt, Sara J. Baker

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

In 2010–2011, the Nebraska History Museum featured two temporary exhibits: “We the People: the Nebraskan Viewpoint” and “Willa Cather: A Matter of Appearances.” We argue the public memories of Brandon Teena and Willa Cather contained in the exhibits are distanced from regional politics when articulated alongside the nostalgic regionalist rhetoric of the Nebraska History Museum. Specifically, both exhibits not only discipline the memory of trans* performance within problematic material and symbolic contexts, but also place these memories within a rhetoric of regional optimism that has critical consequences for restricting counter-public formation. In performing this reading, the essay argues that critical …

The Taste Of Mathematics: Caroline Herschel At 31, Laura Long

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

The poem brings to life how Caroline Herschel (1750-1848) learned mathematics from her brother William as they began to work as professional astronomers.

The Role Of Gender In Scholarly Authorship, Jevin D. West, Jennifer Jacquet, Molly M. King, Shelley J. Correll, Carl T. Bergstrom

Sociology

Gender disparities appear to be decreasing in academia according to a number of metrics, such as grant funding, hiring, acceptance at scholarly journals, and productivity, and it might be tempting to think that gender inequity will soon be a problem of the past. However, a large-scale analysis based on over eight million papers across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities reveals a number of understated and persistent ways in which gender inequities remain. For instance, even where raw publication counts seem to be equal between genders, close inspection reveals that, in certain fields, men predominate in the prestigious first …

Summer Of Shrew, Part 4: Which End’S Up?, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

In the last of a four-part series on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner explores how expanding the range of the titular Shrew to include male characters is actually a return to its original meaning. Pollack-Pelzner focuses on a long-forgotten Renaissance sequel to Shrew (John Fletcher's The Tamer Tamed) that takes the taming of men even further and turns its gender roles upside down.

Summer Of Shrew, Part 2: Tamed? Really?, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

In the second of a four-part series on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner argues that Shakespeare’s play raises challenging questions about the way we define gender roles, and the answers aren’t as obvious as they might seem.

Theoris, Jeanne. The Rebellious Life Of Mrs. Rosa Parks., Carol Shelton

Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought

No abstract provided.

Osborn, Tracy L. How Women Represent Women: Political Parties, Gender, And Representation In The State Legislatures., Arlene Violet

Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought

No abstract provided.

Does My Hair Bother You? Part 2, Adrienne M. Ellis

SURGE

I stopped shaving my legs in May. The decision to quit shaving was part social experiment, but a lot of it had to do with NOT HAVING TO SHAVE MY LEGS ANYMORE.

Honestly I didn’t make the decision to stop shaving my leg hair as some sort of feminist statement. I really just found it stupid how society pressures women to have smooth “sexy” legs. How did this pressure begin? Historically women didn’t shave their legs or underarms in the United States; however, hair removal was a common cultural practice in many other parts of the world such as …

Salary Differentials Based On Gender And Deafness At The Pennsylvania School For The Deaf 1840 To 1900, Brittany Turner

Undergraduate University Honors Capstones

Salary differences based on gender are generally known to exist and particularly within the educational workplace; however, deafness can also be a factor in pay difference. This study investigates the stereotype of white, hearing male dominance as well as the assumption of increased discrimination after the triumph of oralism at the Milan Congress of 1880 so that deafness resulted in a greater salary discrimination than gender. Sources include archival documents of financial records and annual reports from the school to Congress of the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf (PSD) from 1840 to 1900. The surprising results of the study add …

Justice Florence Kerins Murray: The Legacy Of A Pioneer In The Rhode Island Courts, Marian M. Desrosiers Ph.D.

Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought

This essay discusses the professional and personal life of Florence Kerins Murray (1916-2004), a senator and judge, whose career had a profound effect onRhode Islandgovernment, public service, and the judiciary. The author uses twenty oral history interviews conducted by the author from 2007-12 with men and women working in the courts, in state and local governments, in public service organizations, and in the media. The research was funded by a scholar grant from the Rhode Island Council on the Humanities.

The Respectability Trap: Gender Conventions In 20th Century Movements For Social Change, Georgina Hickey

Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought

An analysis of how a variety of women in 19th and 20th century movements for social change in the United States negotiated normative gender expectations in both their activism and their personal lives. While challenging norms or using traditional norms as a part of a movement tactic are both common in social movements, women leaders still sometimes found themselves in a ‘respectability trap’ when they reflexively applied the dictates of respectable behavior. In these moments, the often invisible privileges attached to the social recognition of a woman’s respectability – and implied morality – become visible. Women who eschewed traditional norms …

Daigler, Mary Jeremy. Incompatible With God’S Design: A History Of The Women’S Ordination Movement In The U.S. Roman Catholic Church., John Rok

Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought

No abstract provided.