Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Feminist Futures, Julia Nicole Court

Joyce Durham Essay Contest in Women's and Gender Studies

No abstract provided.

Drag Performance And Femininity: Redefining Drag Culture Through Identity Performance Of Transgender Women Drag Queens, Cristy Dougherty

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Viewing gender as a performance reveals how gender identity is shaped and formed. There is currently tensions associated with drag queen performance as an act of subversion and transgression from the heteronormative definition of gender and drag as a perpetuation of heteronormative definitions of gender. There is also a tension between the affirmation of femininity and transgression from gender binaries of womanhood. In order to address these tensions, this thesis project examined the reasoning behind how transgender women and gay men drag queen performers navigate the world of femininity. Specifically, this study explored the varied reasons behind performing femininity through …

More Than “Sluts” Or “Prissy Girls”: Gender And Becoming In Senior Secondary Drama Classrooms, Kirsten Lambert, Peter R. Wright, Jan Currie, Robin Pascoe

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

This article examines the relationships between the embodiment of dramatic characters, gender, and identity. It draws on ethnographic data based on observations and interviews with 24 drama teachers and senior secondary drama students in Western Australia. We explore how student becomings in year 12 drama classrooms are mediated and constituted through socially overcoded gender binaries in a dominant neoliberal culture of competitive performativity. We ask the questions: What constructions of femininity and masculinity are students embodying from popular dramatic texts in the drama classroom at a critical time in their social and emotional development? Are these constructions empowering? Or disempowering? …

Performing Gender: An Exploration Of The Relationship Between Expression And Identity, Allegra Barnes

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper discusses the relationship between gender expression and gender identity. It recounts my personal exploration of the two through the process of photographing two fellow AFAB individuals to create visual representations of their gender expressions while interviewing them to examine how these expressions relate to the gender with which they identify. Following this, I engage in self-reflection taking into consideration both the narratives of my peers as well as Judith Butler's insights on gender. The project culminates with a series of self portraits and a conclusion on how I came to understand both facets my gender.

Leisure/Crime, Immaterial Labor, And The Performance Of The Teenage Girl In Harmony Korine’S Spring Breakers (2012) And Sofia Coppola’S The Bling Ring (2013), Maryn Wilkinson

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012) and Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013) introduced audiences to girls exploring criminal behavior both for and as leisure. The films introduce an idea of leisure/crime: criminal acts that appear to develop as natural, fruitful extensions of leisure activities, circumnavigating conventional laws of capitalism, yet still allow its actors to access, attain, and consume goods, money, value, and status. Through close analysis of the films’ style and character performances, this article proposes that the films and their enactments of leisure/crime in fact offer complex critical commentary on contemporary relations between the representation of teenage girls, …

The Transgressive Girl, Nicole Killian

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This paper imagines the Internet as a potentially utopian girl-space by looking at how girls, and pop-cultural depictions of girls, use the language, signs, and symbols of the Internet, an inherently patriarchal system, in transgressive ways. I propose the 1990s media representations as the touchstone moment when the conditions of possibility for imagining the hacker as a weaponized girl emerged visually in popular culture. The girl, exemplified by various figures within popular television and film culture, is a precursor to and postulates an entry point into the ways Internet today is used in transgressive nature.

Femme Fatales And The Shifting Gender Norms Of The 19th Century, Esther M. Stuart

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This project seeks to explore female monstrosity, specifically the femme fatale, in Gothic literature and its reflection of the shifting gender norms of the nineteenth century. The late 1790s experienced a distinct narrowing of female gender roles. While authors like Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays publish during the eighteenth century, a backlash against such feminist voices took hold as a resurgence of spheres ideology and more traditional gender norms came into vogue. This particular shift in attitudes towards female gender norms is reflected in Scottish poet Anne Bannerman’s work as well as English novelist Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya. Both authors’s works …

The Effects Of Gender-Aware Leadership-Development Training On The Leadership- Behavioral Competencies Of Women Software Engineers In California’S Silicon Valley, Leann Pereira

Doctoral Dissertations

This study was conducted to investigate the effects of a leadership-development training workshop on leadership behaviors among women software engineers in a California Silicon Valley engineering community with a two-phase, mixed-methods research design. The training workshop was developed using a framework for developing leadership-behavioral competencies among women (LBCW), which was congruent with theoretical principles for women’s leadership development.

LBCW was comprised of four competencies: self-advocacy, social networking, psychological capital, and goal orientation. A pretest–posttest comparison-group design was used to assess the effects of the training on LCBW among 70 participants with four instruments: the Leadership Development and Activities Instrument, the …

At The Edges Of Queer: Navigating Ambiguity In Identity, Community, And Politics, Madeline Mccray Batzli

Honors Papers

When queer took the world of AIDS activism and the academy by storm in the late 20th century, activists and academics leapt to understand and define this reclaimed word and predict its trajectory. Some academics claimed that queer would avoid obsolescence, remaining an anti-assimilationist beacon for activists, while others worried that lumping anyone with non-normative sexualities or lifestyle practices under the same umbrella would inaccurately homogenize disparate groups and detract from specific causes. This study aims to understand the meanings of the word queer among students at Oberlin College today, over a quarter century after the beginning of the word’s …

Empowering Women For Economic Growth: A Measurement Of Social And Demographic Impacts On Afghan Women In Business, Tracy Taylor

MPA/MPP/MPFM Capstone Projects

Non-governmental organizations working in conflict-prone, resource-deprived developing countries face a very unique set of challenges. Like with other non-profits, program dollars and other resources must be allocated carefully and thoughtfully so the maximum output is achieved with the inputs allotted. Unlike other non-profits, however, the political, social, and economic environment is constantly changing in developing countries like Afghanistan. Basic human needs are not being met, leaving the path to NGO program success fraught with seemingly impossible challenges. This is the case for Peace Through Business, a training and development program serving women entrepreneurs in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Peace Through Business seeks …

“I Exist To Resist”: Navigating The Gender Non-Conforming Identity At Humboldt State University, Lizbeth E. Olmedo

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

While transgender research is educating and reforming schools, politics and wider society, there is little work on a gender spectrum that disrupts the gender binary of (trans) men/women. This research is an attempt to fill in the gaps of people, significantly students who do not fit under the “transgender umbrella,” as this term has tended to clump an array of gender and sexual identities together. This qualitative research explores students who go beyond the gender binary and how they navigate non-binary, genderqueer, and gender non-conforming identities within Humboldt State University (HSU). With this present qualitative study, I examined the lived …

MaríA De Zayas And The Art Of Breaking Free, Erin Cygan

Audre Lorde Prize

This paper analyzes a short story by the 17^th-century Spanish author María de Zayas. In Her Lover’s Slave, Zayas’s protagonist Isabel Fajardo is raped and decides to transform into a Moorish slave woman in order to pursue her rapist throughout the Mediterranean and avenge her honor. I examine the effect of this transformation on Isabel, a Christian noblewoman who is subject to the restrictive honor code of early modern Spain, as well as the effect on her Spanish audience. I argue that Isabel’s tale sends didactic messages to early modern and contemporary readers, messages that promote solidarity among …

From Weak Woman To New Woman And Back: The Long Struggle To Legitimize Women Athletes In The U.S., Rashaun Debord

Audre Lorde Prize

This paper details the complicated history of women in sport by looking at the changing popular image of women athletes from the late 19th century to today.

Where Do Women Stand? Attitudes Towards Female Political Participation In India And The Us, Grace Anne Carlson

Audre Lorde Prize

This paper aimed to study attitudes towards gender inequalities in politics, both in the United States and India. Using original survey research and World Values Survey data, American and Indian attitudes towards women in politics were analyzed and compared. Ultimately, the project found that respondents in both countries still hold distinctly unequal views on women in the political sphere.

Reproducing The Capitalist Patriarchy In The Evangelical Christian Sexual Purity Movement: A Feminist Christian’S Concern And Hope, Hannah K. Griggs

Audre Lorde Prize

Through a feminist lens, this essay will explore modern expressions of the conservative evangelical Christian purity movement, including Christian sex manuals, abstinence-only education programs, and purity balls. To begin, I will explain the most important facets of my own feminist theory, which draws from existentialist, socialist, and postmodern feminisms. Using this unique combination of theories, I will attempt to reconcile my deeply held Christian and feminist beliefs about sex. Finally, I will propose a solution that honors both of these important parts of my identity. I assert that the Christian purity movement Others women reinforcing a gender binary, bending to …

The Whole World To Please, Elena Leith

Audre Lorde Prize

This is a fictional piece derived from stories of women who have experienced abortions for different reasons.

The Educational Dimensions Of Filipina Migrant Workers’ Activist Identities, Rowena Magdalena Tomaneng

Doctoral Dissertations

There are 10.4 million Filipino/a migrant workers worldwide, with the large majority of Filipina migrants working in traditional gendered labor such as domestic work, care giving, nursing, teaching, and factory work (Ruiz, 2013). Because of the private nature of household work, Filipina migrants are vulnerable to mental and physical abuses from their employers in addition to labor exploitation. While researchers recognize migrants’ agency and acknowledge migrants as political and social actors, few studies connect Filipina migrant workers’ activist identities to the political education they receive from grassroots organizations in the Philippines, United States, and other countries. Consequently, the purpose of …

The Construction Of A Transatlantic Subject: Family And Nation In "Sola" By María José De Chopitea, Valeriya F. Fritz

The Coastal Review

This article explores the articulation of exile identity in the novel Sola by María José de Chopitea published in Mexico in 1954. Until now, critics have approached this text as lacking ideological argument. I propose an alternative reading of the novel as an ideologically charged narrative that articulates the nation beyond state borders and in terms of a transatlantic bond between Mexico and the Spanish Republic. Sola creates space in the nation for Catalan female writers who were previously excluded due to both their gender and their status as political exiles and cultural minorities.

Educación, Escritura Y Memoria: Las Armas De La Alteridad Frente Al Discurso Oficial Y La Desmemoria En "Por El Cielo Y Más Allá", Emilio L. Ramon

The Coastal Review

Por el cielo y más allá invites the reader to reflect upon populist discourses paving the way for discrimination and marginalization; especially those aimed at a different gender, ethnic group, national origin or even an academic sub-specialty. Those who were persecuted in the past are now the ones harassing, and use the ambiguity of words as their tool. Words, in turn, enslave but also help set the others free. The memories of those marginalized are perpetuated through education, letters, poems and songs. They oppose the official discourse and invite the reader to avoid monolithic discourses and embrace tolerance and diversity.

Bringing Meaningful Grade Aligned English Language Arts To The Classroom: Bridging Research And Practice, Pamela J. Mims, Carol Stranger

ETSU Faculty Works

Instruction in meaningful grade aligned English Language Arts (ELA) content for students with moderate to severe intellectual and developmental disabilities provides a full educational experience that can lead to increased quality of life. Many teachers, however, face barriers in how to teach meaningful, grade aligned ELA. This article bridges research to practice by describing effective strategies for teaching a wide range of strands that fall under ELA, such as comprehension, writing, and student-led research. In addition, a framework is offered as a model of how to put it all together when teaching grade aligned ELA.

Shaping The Body Of Grief: Converging The Personal, Academic, And Visual In Memoir To Create A Broader Way Of Mourning, Hilarie Ashton

Publications and Research

I have been writing a memoir of my mother’s death since before she died. It began with a piece I started after she moved to hospice care, on the cusp of 2013. I began at my grief’s beginning: writing about the spring of her diagnosis the previous year. I currently have over 100,000 words that trace her life, her illness, her death, my grief, and my (ongoing) healing; the first chapter begins with that first piece, which I will excerpt later on. As I edit, I’m shaping the body of the text, as though it’s a person, as though it’s …

How The Climate Of Opinion In States And Countries Influences Gay Rights, John Poe

Theses and Dissertations--Political Science

This dissertation examines attitudes on same-sex marriage and how personal predispositions toward support and the climate of opinion interact to help create attitudes. Over the past few decades, support for gay rights has increased dramatically in the United States and many other countries around the world. I argue that, while the set of basic personal determinants of attitudes toward homosexuality and gay rights stays roughly the same, the impact of such determinants changes over time and space. The framework used in this dissertation draws on attitudinal and political psychology, political sociology and theories of contextual effects. I argue that over …

"That Irate Pornographist": Gender And Nature In Mina Loy's "Songs To Joannes", Margaret Konkol

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Kirin Narayan, Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses In The Himalayan Foothills (Kirin Narayan), Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

La Transgresora Fetichista: Los Efectos De La Dictadura Franquista En La Evolución Del Discurso Sexual Español, Marisa Lee Iola Yerkes

Senior Independent Study Theses

Para una perspectiva teórica del feminismo interseccional, analizo tres obras subversivas sobre la época franquista/posfranquista hacía la transición hacia la democracia en España. Este análisis interseccional toma en cuenta la variedad de factores que contribuyen a la discriminación que afronta una persona. Las obras analizadas son dos novelas (Las hogueras de Concha Álos y Las edades de Lulú de Almudena Grandes) y una película (El Calentito de Chus Gutiérrez). Estos tres trabajos revelan las expresiones de la sexualidad de las mujeres que vivieron durante estos períodos y demuestran un cambio significativo en el discurso sexual español.

La primera …

Poison In Pink, Sydney V. Cook

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Humans slather, spray, mist, and cleanse their bodies with personal care products like lotion, hairspray, cologne, and shampoo every day. Our cupboards are stocked full of them, but few of us understand what is in those jars and bottles. We trust that if it’s on the shelf at the store, it’s safe. However, this is not always the case, and many personal care products contain chemicals that are harmful to human and environmental health.

My multi-disciplinary Environmental Studies thesis project combines evidenced-based research, interviews, nonfiction narrative, and science communication to create part of a book manuscript intended to educate general …

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow: Upsherin, Alef-Bet, And The Childhood Navigation Of Jewish Gender Identity Symbol Sets, Amy K. Milligan

Women's & Gender Studies Faculty Publications

In this essay, I introduce the theoretical framework of hairlore, discussing its challenges when applied to the hair of infants and very young children. I contextualize the ritual of upsherin, reviewing its history, describing contemporary applications, and discussing variations of the practice. Finally, I offer an analysis of upsherin, considering its role in the shifting relationship between mother and son, as well as in the maintenance of a gendered Orthodox symbol set, and discuss the possibility of egalitarian parallels for young girls. I ultimately argue that upsherin is ripe for adaptation by liberal Jewish communities in its celebration of …

Performativity And Domestic Fiction In Antebellum America: The Power Dynamics Of Class And Gender Performance, Blair Hedigan

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis analyzes the role of performativity within the domestic novel during antebellum America; specifically, the ways in which E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand and Louisa May Alcott’s Behind a Mask subverted cultural and societal norms by exploring the performative nature of class and gender. Through their respective protagonists, the two authors sought to question the power dynamics of an overwhelmingly patriarchal society. By granting their protagonists agency through performance, Southworth and Alcott explored the ways in which women might alter existing power structures to reject the restrictions gender essentialism placed upon antebellum women, and to advocate for women’s rights, …

Letting In The Night: The Moon, The Madwoman, And The Irrational Feminine In Jane Eyre And Wide Sargasso Sea, Sophia Rosenthal

Scripps Senior Theses

This analysis examines Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea through the lens of lunar imagery and the irrational feminine, arguing that both texts are aspects of an extended, collective narrative in which both heroines rescue and reclaim their feminine essence from the construction of a masculine idealism.

Developmental Measures: The Zika Virus, Microcephaly, And Histories Of Global Northern State Anxieties, Eden Noa Amital

Scripps Senior Theses

This project seeks to understand anxious and fearful responses to the Zika virus and microcephaly that began circulating widely in February, 2016. My project works to uncover racial histories embedded in the contemporary scientific and medical practice of measuring head circumference. By arguing that microcephaly is a racialized metric of civilizational and human development, I show that responses to Zika’s proliferation invoke state security because Global Northern states imagine microcephaly as a developmental, economic, and cultural lag. Dominant scientific and medical characterizations of microcephaly constitute modern, developed states as such by making political conceptions of normalcy and capacity seem natural: …