Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Tangarra Photo Album, The Madeline Davis Lgbtq Archive Of Western New York

Photo Albums and Scrapbooks

Tangarra (John Minzer) was Buffalo's first female impersonator. Tangarra began performing as a teenager in the late 1920's. This album contains photos of Tengarra from the 1930s to the early 2000s.

An oral history interview with Tangarra can be found here: https://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/lgbtq_interviews/4/

Changemakers: Harpers Ferry History Prompts Social Awareness, Anika N. Jensen

The Gettysburg Compiler: On the Front Lines of History

The day after the mass shooting at the Orlando gay nightclub Pulse was a Monday, and I was thoroughly unable to process my emotions or ponder the repercussions of the massacre upon walking into work that morning. I oscillated between bewilderment, grief, hopelessness, anger. My heart was tender. I chose silence as a defense mechanism.

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Into The Depths Of Reflexivity And Back Again—When Research Mirrors Personal Experience: A Personal Journey Into The Spaces Of Liminality, Katherine Janzen

The Qualitative Report

The context of this paper surrounds my Master’s thesis which was written in 2010 related to recovering crack cocaine addicted mothers who had lost custody of their children. Every qualitative thesis has a story attached to it—an impetus for engaging in the research. When the research combines sensitive topics and the research mirrors the experience of the researcher, decisions must be made considering the research processes and methods. This paper explores the reflexive processes that were employed in the 10 months preceding taking my first thesis course. Using the preface of my reflexive journal as data, three themes arose from …

Do Ask, Do Tell: The Exclusion Of Gay Men From Universal Male Conscription In The Republic Of Turkey, Barrett Greenwell

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

What are the implications of the Republic of Turkey’s paradoxical policies of universal male conscription and exclusion of gay men from military service? To answer this question, this project draws on four months of research in Turkey where interviews were conducted with prominent lawyers and activists as well as with gay men who personally experienced the inhumane exemption process of the Turkish military. This project first analyzes the historical reasons for the military’s pervasive influence in Turkish society. Next, it explores the many issues inherent in a policy of universal conscription without the right to conscientious objection. The project then …

Family Affairs Newsletter 2016-08-15, 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.

Family Affairs Newsletter 2016-08-15, 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.

Exposing The “Shadow Side”: Female-Female Competition In Jane Austen’S Emma, Melissa M. Lyman

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Many critics have examined the shifting nature of female friendship in Jane Austen’s Emma from cultural and historical angles. However, a comprehensive scientific analysis of female-female alliance and competition in the novel remains incomplete. The Literary Darwinist approach considers the motivations of fictional characters from an evolutionary perspective, focusing primarily on human cognition and behaviors linked to reproductive success, social control, and survival. While overt physical displays of male competition are conspicuous in the actions of the human species and those of their closest primate relatives, female aggression is often brandished psychologically and indirectly, which makes for a much more …

Outliving Love: Marital Estrangement In An African Insurance Market, Casey Golomski

Anthropology

Marital estrangement and formal divorce are vital conjunctures for married women’s kinship relations and life course, where a horizon of future possibilities are revalued and negotiated at the interstices of custom, law, and social and ritual obligations. In this article, after delineating the forms of customary and civil marriage and the possibilities for divorce or estrangement from each, I describe how some married women in Swaziland and South Africa mediate this complex social field for their children and families through pensions and continuing to pay for their partners’ insurance coverage. This was not solely out of avarice to reap future …

Performing, Sensing, Being: Queer Identity In Everyday Life, Justin J. Rudnick

Communication Studies Department Publications

Drawing from performance, affect, and queer theories, I explore how queer identity is storied, performed, and sensed in everyday life. I access performance and sensory ethnographic practices to examine how queer persons “do” their identities on a daily basis. I draw from data collected through ethnographic participation in a queer-friendly district of Columbus, Ohio in addition to in-depth interviews with fourteen self-identified queer persons I met through my fieldwork. My approach privileges observations and reflections of mundane moments of everyday life to position queer identity as a routine, repetitive, habitual, and otherwise performative practice. I question the emphasis on verbal …

Pedagogy And Profit: Multiethnic Literature, Gender And Young Adult Publishing, Allison S. Layfield

Open Access Dissertations

This project argues that the adult/young adult division has the effect of maintaining social difference—especially along the lines of race and gender—while simultaneously ignoring the process of maintaining social hierarchies that occurs during the publication, reviewing and educational selection processes. Chapter One brings together the history of YAL as a pedagogical tool with its publishing history in order to show that both forces have redefined the genre in response to changing notions of social responsibility tied to American citizenship. There were five major eras within the history of young adult literature, each of which responded to changing notions of citizenship. …

Negotiating The Politics Of Representation In Iranian Women’S Cinema Before And After The Islamic Revolution, Alshaatha Sultan Al Sharji

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

From Mahvash, the Iranian entertainer who sang and danced coquettishly in numerous Iranian films that were produced before the Islamic revolution of 1979, to the skateboarding vampire girl who makes a feast out of abusive men in Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, the representation of Iranian women on screen has changed drastically. This comparative study focuses on the politics of representation of Iranian women in the cinema before and after the Islamic revolution, with the aim of deconstructing the readily-available notions of women’s oppression in Iran. It analyzes the works of female Iranian directors Forough …

Ann Radcliffe's Superpaternal: A Study Of The Supernatural In The Romance Of The Forest And The Mysteries Of Udolpho, Lynn Kramer

English Theses

This study proposes a new way to examine the supernatural being in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Romance of the Forest. Critics have argued that the supernatural being is used in these novels to remind the heroines to think rationally; however, I argue that his purpose is more complex than that of a figment who instills reason. Rather, his role is to make the females realize their sexual vulnerability within the imprisoning, Gothic house. He is able to show the women they are in sexual danger by creating sexually explicit situations with the heroine that occur …

Shaken, Not Stirred: Espionage, Fantasy, And British Masculinity During The Cold War, Anna Rikki Nelson

Master's Theses

This project seeks to define and explore the development of Cold War British masculinity and national identity in response to decolonization. Following World War II, Great Britain experienced a time of political and cultural rebuilding. This project argues that following World War II, Britain had to renegotiate gender and national identity within the context of decolonization, the rise of the welfare state, and Britain’s diminished role in global politics, and the tensions within gender and national identity were expressed in Britain’s interest in espionage narratives both real and fictionalized. British spy novels by Ian Fleming, Desmond Cory, and John Le …

Women In Gaming: A Study Of Female Players’ Experiences In Online Fps Games, M Allison Mcdaniel

Honors Theses

Existing literature has long been divided over whether the gaming world fosters violence and misogyny or provides a space for people to explore diverse identities. Not enough is known about how women experience videogames, especially the hypermasculine environment of first-person shooter (FPS) games. Competition, violence, and war, are dominant features of these games. The following thesis explores what harassment and discrimination women playing FPS games face, how they respond, and in what ways they find games to be empowering. A survey was distributed online to an international sample of 141 female FPS gamers. This research finds that women who play …

Verbing History: A Textualist Approach To Gendered Politics In U.S. History Curriculum, Ginney Patricia Norton

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Using three curricular interventions from World War II, I employ an alternative rhetorical history to understand how Social studies curriculum has become a space for the simultaneous deliberation of both national identity and gender politics. In working through the propaganda of Rosie the Riveter, the stories of the women of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the experiences of gay men and women in the military during the war, I suggest that Social studies curriculum normalizes and reifies gendered, racial, and queer citizenship in relationship to white, masculine, and heteronormative citizenship. It also utilizes epideictic rhetoric to rhetorically and historically construct problematic …

The Lived Experiences Of Women In The Information Technology Field As They Transition From One Leadership Level To The Next: A Phenomenological Study, Marilyn Delmont

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

There is an increasing disparity of women in the IT field, when compared to men, specifically within IT executive leadership roles. The number of women in IT executive leadership lags drastically behind men IT executives and has gone down by five percent since 2008. Despite significant growth in the IT field women are not growing with it. IT jobs are expected to increase by 1.5 million in the next decade. The purpose and central question of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore the lived experiences of women and how they develop as IT leaders. Beginning with 19 broad questions, …

Book Review: Women In Southeast Asian Nationalist Movements: A Biographical Approach, Madhavi Venkatesan

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of Women in Southeast Asian Nationalist Movements: A Biographical Approach, Susan Blackburn and Helen Ting, editors. National University of Singapore Press, 2013.

Book Review: We Are Our Language: An Ethnography Of Language Revitalization In A Northern Athabaskan Community, Haley Albano

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of We Are Our Language: An Ethnography of Language Revitalization in a Northern Athabaskan Community by Barbra A. Meek. University of Arizona Press, 2011.

Book Review: Thinking Sex With The Early Moderns, Renee Somers

Journal of International Women's Studies

Book review of Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns by Valerie Traub. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

Book Review: Sex, Slavery And The Trafficked Woman: Myths And Misconceptions About Trafficking And Its Victims, Jennifer A. Fallas

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of Sex, Slavery and the Trafficked Woman: Myths and Misconceptions about Trafficking and its Victims by Ramona Vijeyarasa. Ashgate, 2015.

Book Review: The Kaleidoscope Of Gender: Prisms, Patterns, And Possibilities, Cynthia J.W. Svoboda

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of The Kaleidoscope of Gender: Prisms, Patterns, and Possibilities by Joan Z. Spade and Catherine G. Valentine. Sage, 2014.

Book Review: Big Pharma, Women, And The Labour Of Love, Nayantara Sheoran

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of Big Pharma, Women, and the Labour of Love, by Thea Cacchioni. University of Toronto Press, 2015.

Book Review Essay: Not A Choice, Not A Job: Exposing The Myths About Prostitution And The Global Sex Trade, Tran Truong

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of Not a Choice, Not a Job: Exposing the Myths about Prostitution and the Global Sex Trade, by Janice G. Raymond. Potomac Books, 2013.

Book Review Essay: My Life On The Road, Diana J. Fox

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem. Random House, 2015.

Discovering My Own African Feminism: Embarking On A Journey To Explore Kenyan Women's Oppression, Glory Joy Gatwiri, Helen Jaqueline Mclaren

Journal of International Women's Studies

All Black women have experienced living in a society that devalues them. The scholarship of bell hooks submits that the control of Black women ideologically, economically, socially and politically functions perfectly to form a highly discriminative but effective system that is designed to keep them in a submissive and subordinate place. As a Ph.D. student, in a reflective journey with my research supervisor, I engage in a struggle to define my own feminist perspective in as I prepare to explore the oppression, disadvantage and discrimination experienced by Kenyan women living with vaginal fistulas. I examine how poor and socially disadvantaged …

Oriental Family Law: Case Study Within A Gendered-Citizenship/Inequality Perspective: From Concept To Analytical Status, Rania F. Al-Rabadi, Anas N. Al-Rabadi

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article presents key findings and empirical work of basic research in Bahrain in regards to active citizenship and gender equality where it analyses the claimed liberal citizenship. The article focuses on pre-existing inequality in the family code and also discusses a significant issue where there is a Sunni-Shi’ite division in Bahrain. This is relevant to citizenship and gender equality for how family codes are debated in regards to women’s rights within the legislative authority. Furthermore, this article analyses the parliamentary organizational structure which attributes and influences the legislation process and decision-making particularly on gender-friendly policies, where the legal system …

On The Relationship Between Gender Roles Attitudes, Religious Ideology And Familism In A Sample Of Adults In The United States, Carlos Siordia

Journal of International Women's Studies

Family and religious ideologies may influence gender role attitudes in the United States, where gender inequality persists. Research suggests that family and religious ideologies shape beliefs of how men and women should behave—where gender egalitarianism is lowest amongst those with strong family orientations and/or strong patriarchal religious ideologies. This article investigated if and how family and religious ideologies are related to gender role attitudes by using cross-sectional data from the Longitudinal Study of Generations (n=1,615; mean age=50; 61% female; 32% racial minorities). Results indicate a direct relationship between gender role ideology and the following: religious ideology and familism. Because gender …

Status Of Bahraini Women In The Banking And Financial Sector: Challenges And Opportunities, Adel Ismail Al-Alawi

Journal of International Women's Studies

The purpose of this study is to investigate the current status and the challenges of Bahraini women in the financial and banking sector; this sector is in continuous growth and needs to invest in human resources properly to attract talents. To enhance women’s access to senior positions in this sector, it must acknowledge the factors that influence women leadership, where the significance of this study stands out. The study presents how different factors affect the mainstreaming of women progressing to the top-level management. The study followed both quantitative and qualitative methods in data collection, and three different types of survey …

Which ‘Mountain’ Must Feminism Climb?: Challenges For Feminist Alliances Between Migrant And Autochthonous Women's Groups In The Basque Country, Itziar Gandarias Goikoetxea

Journal of International Women's Studies

Within a post-colonial framework, this paper explores the possibilities and difficulties of feminist alliances among feminist groups in the Basque Country. In particular, it focuses on a close reading of one metaphor that emerged in the joint meetings between the groups: “the metaphor of the mountain”. Using Nayak's (2014) methodology of the ‘political activism of close reading practice”, it examines the implications of the metaphor in the creation of political alliances. This is an active metaphor that exemplifies the dialectic between the universality of the patriarchal subjugation of women and the recognition of the specificity and diversity of women's lived …

Empowering The Subaltern In Woman At Point Zero, Saddik Gohar

Journal of International Women's Studies

In the context of Western feminist theory, this paper critically explores Nawal El Saadawi's celebrated novel, Woman at Point Zero. The aim of this analysis is to establish a dialogue and outline the benefits of comparative feminist discourse with regard to patriarchal policies in the Middle East. The paper argues that El Saadawi challenges the hegemony of a traditionally phallocentric society empowered by religion and masculinity. In Woman at Point Zero, the author has effectively reinterpreted culturally dominated canons and deconstructed regressive traditions affiliated with patriarchal hegemony. Relying on her experience as a prison psychiatrist, El Saadawi interrogates a …