Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

They Have Names, Too: A Case Study On The First Five Victims Of The Green River Killer: Examining The Construction Of Society And Its Creation Of Victim Availability, Natalie V. Castillo

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Undergraduate Honors Theses

This case study follows the example of Rubenhold (2019) to examine the lives of the first five women killed by the Green River Killer, to give the victims a voice to tell their stories that Ridgway robbed from them, and to identify the social constructs that influence victim availability. To explore this issue, the study analyzed multiple sources of information: archival sources, monographs, articles, websites, and newspapers. In analyzing the effects of their upbringing—family history, educational backgrounds, and personal lives—this research will clarify the role that these factors played regarding where they spent their last day alive.

Using an intersectional …

'Tis Pity She’S A Man: Cross-Cast Prospero In Shakespeare’S The Tempest, Leah Dooley

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Undergraduate Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

“Who Wants To Live Forever?” Andrew Holleran, Garth Greenwell, And The Gayest Decade That Never Ended, John C. Hawley

English

James Baldwin’s remarkable second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956) influenced all subsequent gay writing—not only in its themes, but also in its tone. Paying frequent homage to that book, Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance and other fiction of the Eighties taught gay men how to be gay, and the melancholic tone these novels created persisted for decades to come, exemplified most recently in Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You (2016). An unexpressed loss imbues the work of David Leavitt, Edmund White, Larry Kramer, Michael Cunningham, and Alan Hollinghurst, but the argument here is that more recent protagonists are, if anything, …

The Power Of Artistic Activism, Julio Hanson

Theses and Dissertations

This phenomenological study highlights the ability of artistic activists to utilize art for political, creative, and social change. Artistic activism is a tool that can be used to mobilize people from different backgrounds to achieve a goal or challenge injustices (Mouffe, 2007). The best practices of artistic activists can be shared with others to positively transform society and address sensitive issues. Increased access to the internet and social media has facilitated the proliferation of art, politics, and culture which has caused a greater influence on people on local, national, and worldwide levels. This influence can have profound effects on the …

Occupied Land Is An Access Issue: Interventions In Feminist Disability Studies And Narratives Of Indigenous Activism, Jess L. Cowing

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Native/Indigenous narratives of health and environmental activism often engage with feminist disability issues to center the connections between land, health, sovereignty, and historical legacies of settler militarized colonialism. Within the context from which Native women and youth act as key leaders in health and environmental activism, expanded modes of feminist disability inquiry could interrogate how transformative justice issues require historicizing concepts of ableism through ongoing legacies of settler colonialism. Considering the work of Native writers such as Winona LaDuke, feminist disability studies scholars might critically examine how key tenets of feminist disability issues such as access require attention to Native/Indigenous …

Towards Sickness: Developing A Critical Disability Archival Methodology, Gracen Brilmyer

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Although archival records on disability—such as medical, institutional, and freak show records—can facilitate in telling one side of disability history, these records often omit the voices of disabled people. Considering the abundance of such documentation as well as how sick and disabled people may be difficult to locate in historical records, this article trains a critical lens on archival absences and partialities. By foregrounding the experiences of sick and disabled writers, activists, artists, and scholars alongside critical disability studies, this article conceptualizes “sickness” to develop a critical disability archival methodology. By illuminating the various ways in which sickness and disability …

Vulvodynia, It’S In My Head: Mad Methods Toward Crip Coalition, Renee Dumaresque

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This article employs a mad transdisciplinary approach to autoethnography to detail vulvodynia — or chronic vulvar pain — within the system of (dis)ability. Through autoethnography, the self operates as a mobile orientation from which to identify and disrupt the colonial rationalities that differentially construct and narrate vulvodynia across sites of madness and disability. Through historical, discursive, and autoethnographic analysis, I locate vulvodynia’s role in various processes of subject, race, and settler-state formation from the nineteenth century up to the neoliberal present.

Benevolent Feminism And The Gendering Of Criminality: Historical And Ideological Constructions Of Us Women's Prisons, Emma Stammen

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis aims to connect and analyze primary sources that contain untold histories and experiences of people incarcerated in women’s prisons in the US and Britain, from the Victorian period to the modern era. By exploring, compiling and sharing various secondary and primary texts as evidence, I hope to contribute to a better understanding of the historical and ideological constructions of the American women’s prison as we know it today. In this thesis, I argue that analyzing and understanding the historical and ideological constructions of the modern women’s prison are critical practices for theoretical and activist frameworks that seek prison …

Trajectory Of Trauma: The Experiences Of Black Girls In The School-To-Prison Pipeline, Heather Nicholson-Bester

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This critical ethnographic research utilizes participatory action research (PAR) and case studies to explore the impacts that zero-tolerance policies have had on the lives of Black girls and women. This work contributes to a small but growing body of work on the intersectional struggles faced by Black girls within the School-to-Prison Pipeline. An aim of this research was to work with the participants to amplify their voices and center them as experts on their own lives. Working with a small sample of three girls and women enabled the creation of detailed narratives of their experiences. These narratives point to the …

Tap For The Times: A Study Of Contemporary Tap Dance, Elise Wilham

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Tap dance is an American art form that began with the blending of traditional dance styles from English and Irish immigrants and African slaves. Throughout the 20th century, tap dance developed many styles in response to cultural changes that took place. Contemporary tap dance emerged in the latter half of that century and continues developing today with the fusion of other dance genres and new technologies. This research examines tap dance history to create an understanding of how it developed through a historical lens and analyzes the current approaches applied to the artform along with the characteristics and creative processes …

The Power Of Coptic Women Saints: Historical And Analytical Study Of Coptic Women Saints As Spiritual Models For Coptic Women In The Usa And Egypt, Trevena Adeeb Eskandar Hanna

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This study addresses the lack of research concerning Coptic female experience and Coptic female saints through the use of in-depth interviews of 21 Egyptian Coptic women living in Southern California and 21 Egyptian Coptic women living in Egypt. The interviews explore women’s relationships with, and knowledge of their female saints, as well as their gendered experiences within the Coptic Church, as it relates to gender and the relative importance or honor of female saints. Results show that Coptic women have a special and unique relationship with the female saints of their tradition, who act as role models, intercessors, and friends. …

Pants, Not Petticoats: Transgressive Female Characters In Literature, Sarah Bott

Literary and Intercultural Studies | Senior Theses

Female character development in literature can be revolutionary, especially for protagonists that bend the rules and replace a socially-based image of classical femininity with their own gender non-conforming expressions. In Pants, Not Petticoats: Transgressive Female Characters in Literature, comparative analysis is used to study the non-conforming aspects of three gender rebels: Jo March from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1980 Illustrated Junior Library Edition), Scout Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (2002 First Perennial Classic Edition), and Eliza Sommers from Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende (2006 First Harper Perennial Edition). Through a close reading …

“We’Re Here, We’Re Queer, We Will Not Live In Fear!”: A Content Analysis Exploring Gender Disparity In The Public Reappropriation Of Lgbtq+ Slurs, Nicolas Hall

Capstone Showcase

As minorities, members of the LGBTQ+ community have faced many hardships throughout history, such as the use of language as a weapon against them. However, this research explores the public display of linguistic reappropriation of LGBTQ+ derogatory language and terms within the community. Throughout history, the use of slurs (e.g. faggot and dyke) and their social definitions have shifted from having no connection to the community to directly affected these individuals. These terms have been used to demonize members of the LGBTQ+ community for decades. Despite this reality, there are some scholars who suggest that these terms are being reappropriated, …

Centring Lgbt2qia+ Subjects In Knowledge Organization Systems, Julia Bullard, Amber Dierking, Avi Grundner

Scholarly Papers and Articles

This paper details two interdependent knowledge organization projects for an LGBT2QIA+ library. The authors, in the context of volunteer library work for an independent library, redesigned the classification system and subject cataloguing guidelines to centre LGBT2QIA+ subjects. We discuss the priorities of creating and maintaining knowledge organization systems for a historically marginalized community and address the challenge that queer subjectivity poses to the goals of knowledge organization. The classification system features a focus on identity and physically reorganizes the library space in a way that accounts for the multiple and overlapping labels that constitute the currently articulated boundaries of this …

Chupa Chuparosas Y Chupacabras, Ruben U. Rodriguez

Theses and Dissertations

A Rascuache Nahual that uses therianthropy on the border between the US and Mexico border.

A Century In Uniform: Military Women In American Films, Introduction, Stacy Fowler, Deborah A. Deacon

Faculty Articles

From silents of the early American motion picture era through 21st century films, this book offers a decade-by-decade examination of portrayals of women in the military. The full range of genres is explored, along with films created by today's military women about their experiences.

Laws regarding women in the service are analyzed, along with discussion of the challenges they have faced in the push for full participation and of the changing societal attitudes through the years.

(In)Equities In The Publishing Industry: The Politics Of Representation, Hallie R. Lepphaille

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project contains an overview and key introductory sections of an intersectional, equity-based literary publishing course textbook. The full-length edited collection, currently under external review for publication, seeks to rectify long-held disparities of the publishing industry in regard to hiring, acquisitions, developmental editing, and considerations in audience, readerships, and marketing. Each chapter examines the ways that racism, ableism, heterosexism, and cisnormativity, operate in the industry, limiting who is represented at an editor’s desk and in the pages of published books. The collection is intended to be utilized in upper-division and graduate-level literary publishing courses. This project is a response to …

From Libertine To Incel: How The "Manosphere" Has Fostered The Continuation Of Gender Violence In Western Culture, Lauren Ziolkowski

Honors Theses

In this thesis, I examine the similarities between the ideologies of the Restoration libertine and the present-day beta-male, the social and cultural forces that shape those ideologies, and the practices of flirtation and seduction shared by the libertine and beta-male. This thesis addresses the expansion of female agency and power in the mid-eighteenth century and twenty-first century, as well as how this expansion of power threatens the social, cultural, and economic privilege held by the Restoration libertine and beta-male respectively. In the eighteenth century, this expansion of power manifests in the emergence of the bourgeoisie class and the development of …

Love And Loss In Willa Cather’S Novels, Sara Abbazia

English Honors Papers

Past scholars of Willa Cather, the American writer known for her novels describing life on the frontier, go to great lengths to explore how colonial settlement, loss, and queerness play their separate parts in her narratives. This analysis seeks to go further and examine how these elements intermingle under the influence of nostalgia. The two works that are analyzed, A Lost Lady and The Professor's House , feature main characters who experience the loss of a queer relationship and who try to regain their lost happiness through a nostalgic indulgence in pastoral memories. These memories, however, are inaccurate, and often …

Las Líderes En Las Calles: Una Investigación De Las Madres De Plaza De Mayo Y #Niunamenos En Argentina, Brooke M. Seigars

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

The Morphology Of Sex: Tracking Change In The Sex Discourse At Augustana College, Robert E. Burke

Audre Lorde Prize

Here, I track how the criteria for deeming sex as acceptable or unacceptable have changed over time at Augustana College. To do so, I apply two critical lenses to archived issues of the Augustana Observer. The first lens involves Rubin's concept of the "sex hierarchy," a variety of categories by which we may judge sex as good or bad. The second lens is related to Berlant and Warner's "national heterosexuality," a concept that claims that sexual norms are intrinsically elastic but politically, culturally, and economically firm under capitalism. Making use of a localized "snapshot" approach, I use recent Augustana history …

Exploring The Challenges Of Social Integration Within An Upper-Level Public Relations Classroom, Tabitha Hayley Dyer

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Despite three decades of literature that has explored the gender imbalance of public relations at a professional level, there is a dearth of information addressing if or how these experiences are informed at a collegiate level. Accordingly, this study examines if the gender imbalance impacts students in the upper-level public relations classroom, and the similarities and differences exist between other single-gender dominant programs including nursing and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) using three dimensions (i.e., role strain, teamwork, and overall social environment) as a comparison. Using qualitative in-depth interview data collected from 13 junior- and senior-standing public relations students …

A Legacy Of Community And Mourning: Aids & Hiv In Central Florida, 1983-1993, Andrew Weeks

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Given the primacy of Florida, and in particular Orlando, as an urban center with an above average rate of AIDS and HIV, this study examines how the outbreak of a deadly disease can affect a community. Complicating the response to this scourge, those who were most at-risk were marginalized groups such as those in the LGBTQ community, drug users, and often people of color. As a result, those who occupied positions of political power felt little incentive to curb the epidemic and mocked it by deeming it "the gay disease." As a result of neglect and the lack of investment …

A Story To Tell… How To Integrate The Three Modes Of Communication Through A Story Time Program In French, Frederique Grim

The Coastal Review

Bilingual story time programs found in local community libraries not only benefit children, they can also serve a need for L2 college students: the development of their communicative skills in an authentic environment. In addition to linguistic benefits, experiential learning has proven to prepare students for real-world skills, such as networking, mock professional experience and a sense of community engagement. This paper recounts how a world language story time program supports L2 learners’ three modes of communication, as articulated by ACTFL, and necessary for language development. Based on students’ perceptions, this study highlights their increase in motivation and confidence in …

Knowledge Of Breast Cancer And Screening Methods Among Rural Women In Southwest Nigeria: A Mixed Method Analysis, Rowland Edet, Oluwayimika Ekundina, Obasanjo Afolabi Bolarinwa, Julianah Babajide, Juliet Amarachukwu Nwafor

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

The objective of this study was to assess the awareness of rural women on breast cancer and its screening methods in Southwest Nigeria. Descriptive cross-sectional survey design with the aid of a semi-structured questionnaire was used to generate data among 422 rural women in selected communities in Egbeda local government area of Ibadan. The qualitative data was generated through in-depth interviews among rural women and key informant interviews among health workers in the communities. The study revealed that only 63.7% were aware of breast cancer screening methods compared to 31.6% who were not aware of it. The commonly known screening …

Introduction To Special Issue “Geographies Of Sexualities” [Journal Of Lesbian Studies], Emily Kazyak

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

In this foreword to the special issue “Geographies of Sexualities,” I provide a review of the scholarly discussions about place and sexuality that have occurred in the past 20 years. I highlight five major themes in my synthesis of this scholarship: (1) how narratives about geography and sexuality are co-constitutive; (2) a critical interrogation of these narratives to demonstrate how more nuances exist than these narratives suggest; (3) assessments of the spatial distribution of women in same-sex relationships, comparisons to the spatial distribution of men in same-sex relationships, and analyses of the experiences of women in areas with high concentrations …

Rethinking Early Modern Sexuality Through Race, Mario Digangi

Publications and Research

When English Literary Renaissance launched in 1971, early modern sexuality studies did not exist. Then again, neither did the feminist, new historicist, post-colonialist, or other “political” approaches that have significantly reshaped early modern literary studies (and the humanities) over the last forty years. Yet whereas feminist and new historicist essays began thickly to populate the pages of Renaissance journals in the early 1980s, studies of sexuality—and of lesbian, gay, or queer sexualities in particular—were slow to arrive. During the 1980s, ELR published only a handful of essays that centered on sex or eroticism. The first explicit treatment of homoeroticism in …

Through Her Eyes: The Gendering Of Female First-Person Shooters, Elizabeth Renshaw

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

While the video game industry has attempted to address their years of mistreatment towards women, within games and how they are produced, by hiring more women and including more female characters as playable options, these fixes have been superficial at best. Not only are there still few females as main characters in video games, but that there are so few female video games. By this I refer to the fact that video games told through the eyes of female characters often do not feature a gendered narrative, unlike multiple games with male POVs in which the storyline directly reflects their …

Minority Women Leaders' Experiences Of Shattering The Glass Ceiling In Public Administration, Trina N. George

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Little research explores the experiences of women who have successfully attained careers in the highest echelons of federal service. Using Gregory-Mina's conceptualization of the great man theory as the foundation, the purpose of this general qualitative study was to understand the experiences and achievements of 7 women who advanced in the federal leadership hierarchy. This study used secondary data that is part of the Public Administration Genome Project holdings and these data were analyzed using inductive coding followed by a thematic analysis procedure. Data analysis revealed common experiences including that all of the women experienced a lack of mentors and …

Bridging The Expertise Of Advocates And Academics To Identify Reproductive Justice Learning Outcomes, Charisse M. Loder, Leah Minadeo, Laura Jimenez, Zakiya Luna, Loretta Ross, Nancy Rosenbloom, Caren M. Stalburg, Lisa H. Harris

Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality: Faculty Publications

Phenomenon: Reproductive justice (RJ) is defined by women of color advocates as the right to have children, not have children and parent children while maintaining reproductive autonomy. In the United States, physicians have been complicit in multiple historical reproductive injustices, involving coercive sterilization of thousands of people of color, low income, and disabilities. Currently, reproductive injustices continue to occur; however, physicians have no formal RJ medical education to address injustices. The objective of this study was to engage leading advocates within the movement using a Delphi method to identify critical components for such a curriculum. Approach: In 2016, we invited …