Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Oral Testimonies Of Female Emigrants From Northern Ireland: Finding The The Universal And Unique Stories Of Migration, Lisa Ahmed

Sustainability and Social Justice

The purpose of this paper is to add a nuanced understanding to the study of women and migration. By using oral testimonies to conduct this narrative research study I was able to add to growing body of knowledge on women and migration. This study focused on women who arrived in the United States from Northern Ireland, for family the migration process started in Germany. The terms migration, emigration and immigration are used in the paper to describe people in movement within and across national borders. This narrative illustrates some of the consequences when nation states use their power to facilitate …

Reflecting On The Now: Race, Gender, Socio-Economic Status And Covid-19, Ariana Montemayor, Sydney M. Scanlon

VA Engage Journal

Early in 2020, we began a project for our Women and Technology class at Old Dominion University to highlight women working in health sciences. However, our original project idea drastically changed with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 focused our attention on issues regarding societal inequalities and health disparities. Therefore, we decided to create a new project that emphasized the societal inequalities and the disproportionate impact COVID had on People of Color, women and low-income individuals. In this paper, we critically reflect on the journey of our project from conception to completion, as well as how we, and the …

Sartorial Semiotics: Constructs Of Gender And Female Sexuality In Post Wwii American And European Cinema, Patricia Cabral

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cinematic costume design functions as a system of visually-perceived, material and indexical signifiers, an effective and compelling language further informed by styling and embodiment. Sartorial semiotics support and inflect role characterization, while equally underpinning or subverting tropes generated by ideological paradigms. The following methodological approaches were adopted in scrutinizing this topic: Roland Barthes’ application of semiotic theories to the domain of fashion in The Language of Fashion, and Laura Marks’ discussion of the dialectics of optical and haptic visualities in apprehending film images in The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses.

By examining the costume …

(In)Hospitable Modernity: Hospitality And Its Discontents (1920–1953), Daniel A. Hengel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation discusses the tacit forms of political activity operating through the performance and space of hospitality in modern fiction. I read the habitus, praxis, and dissemblages of hospitality in modern fiction as conduits that reveal dialectics of submission and resistance to Victorian and Edwardian markers of normativity. This is ultimately an infrapolitical work. I locate fulcrums of dissent, cloaked in a guise of hospitality, in the domestic sphere and the politicization of formerly private spaces into sites with the potential to reorder legitimated forms of agency. This project attempts to uncover veiled forms of sociopolitical resistance in and through …

Data Analysis And Visualization To Dismantle Gender Discrimination In The Field Of Technology, Quinn Bolewicki

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the United States, a significant population is facing an uphill battle trying to thrive in an industry that has seen exponential growth in recent years. Women, who account for approximately 50.8% of the U.S. population are statistically underpaid and underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Despite women-led technology teams establishing a 21% greater return on investment than teams who don’t, and young women largely outperforming men in math according to a 2015 study, there are only three fortune 500 companies led by women, and they comprise only 10% of internet entrepreneurs. Research generates hundreds of articles, infographics, …

Pierce And Pine: Diane Di Prima, Mary Norbert Korte, And The Meeting Of Matter And Spirit, Iris Cushing

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Diane di Prima (1934-2020) and Mary Norbert Korte (b. 1934) are two poets whose contributions to postwar American poetry are vitally important, and yet their status on the margins of mainstream literary culture has left their work largely unstudied. Di Prima, the granddaughter of Italian Anarchist Domenico Mallozzi (with whom she shared a close relationship) grew up in an Italian-American community in Brooklyn and bore witness to the cultural schizophrenia of WWII as a child. Korte was raised in an affluent Bay Area family, and encountered hardships (including the death of her father when she was 12) that affected her …

The Compressed Modernity Of Legalizing Same-Sex Marriage In Taiwan: Digital Activism, Human Rights Discourse, And Intertwined Sexual, Political And National Identities, Jyun-Jie Yang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 2019, Taiwan became the first Asian country to officially legalize same-sex marriage. Remarkably, the Taiwanese queer movement achieved the goal of marriage equality in only 30 years, with the first tongzhi (同志) activist group organized in 1990. Compared to Euro-American social movements, Taiwanese tongzhi activism has experienced a “compressed modernity” (Chang, 1999, 2010a, 2010b), which accelerates cultural and social transformations. Although Taiwanese academia has been significantly influenced by queer studies as a form of western knowledge production, local scholars and activists created a new interpretation from “queer” to “tongzhi.” Entangled with complex political identifications in post-martial-law Taiwan, …

Fantasies Of Representation: Methods Of Feminist Literary Analysis, Alexandra Johnson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The push for diversity in media and literature has resulted in an increase in representation, at least on the surface. While the range of representation may have broadened in terms of subject identity – gender, sexuality, race, ability, etc. – the way this diversity has occurred has not necessarily encouraged ethical or allied development. The aim of my thesis is to develop and deploy five methods of feminist critique and analysis of representation in popular media. I begin by laying out the five methodologies, in a manner that allows for the use of these methods on other examples. Then, I …

No Hair! Don't Care! Resistance And Empowerment Of Bald And Low Shaved Black Women, Monica Rivers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No Hair! Don’t Care! Resistance and Empowerment of Bald and Low Shaved Black Women is an invitation to discuss the experiences of Black women who choose to wear bald and low shaved haircuts. The project examines standards of beauty, femininity, sexuality, sexual harassment, self- acceptance, and self-expression through the voices of Black women: Because sometimes the biggest statement you can make with your hair is by having none.

Gay For English: Postcolonial In(Queer)Ies Into Contemporary Hindi Cinema, Hardik R. Yadav

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, I study four recent Hindi-language Indian films for what I see as their queering of the English language, and, in turn, putting the Indian entity at a distance from both language and sexual orientation. The nation-making project of the Hindu political right in India today seeks an identity in distance from the English language: closer to the age-old conception of India as Hindustan (place of the Hindus). In Part I, I explore how such a resistance to English allows for the “Indian” within male protagonists of Rajat Kapoor’s Ankhon Dekhi (2013) and Aanand L. Rai’s Raanjhanaa (2013) …

On The Woman Question: A Defense Of Alexandra Kollontai Against Liberal Critics, Nicole Baltzer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Alexandra Kollontai envisioned a world in which all women and their proletarian comrades were liberated from subordination under capitalism. She served as People’s Commissar in the Bolshevik government and established the Zhenotdel, the government’s department for women. Under the Bolsheviks, women were granted equal legal status to men, divorce rights, access to birth control, and were the primary benefiters of the nationalization of domestic work (i.e., communal childcare, dining, and laundry halls). Kollontai and the Soviet Union provide us with one of the few examples of Marxist feminism in action. Liberal critics of Kollontai and her Marxist comrades and contemporaries …

Feminist Geographies Of Online Gaming, Orlando Woods

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper identifies opportunities and pathways through which feminist digital geographies can expand into the realm of online gaming. Whilst research at the nexus of gender and online gaming has come a long way in the past two decades, geographical perspectives are noticeably lacking. They can contribute to the discourse by emphasising the contingent nature of online gamespaces, and how a gendered subject position might be redefined through, and help to redefine, the (in)distinctions between “online” and “offline”, “gaming” and “non-gaming” spaces. I identify four directions in which feminist geographies of online gaming can unfold: aesthetic-affective spaces of the “virtually …

Poems Of Debate And Praise: Women As Published Authors In Sixteenth-Century France, Anna Soo-Hoo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Non-fictional, published poetic exchanges between men and women in sixteenth-century France provide new perspectives into how women writers operated in a literary culture whose main producers and dominant voice were male. Contrary to the notion repeated by many critics that women of that period were supposed to stay out of the public sphere, my study finds that publishing a woman’s poems did not destroy her reputation, and there appears to have been no major backlash when a man decided to include poems by a female contemporary in his book. My study takes as its point of departure the notion that …

The Ill-Treatment Of Their Countrywoman: Liberated African Women, Violence, And Power In Tortola, 1807–1834, Arianna Browne

Master's Theses

In 1807, Parliament passed an Act to abolish the slave trade, leading to the Royal Navy’s campaign of policing international waters and seizing ships suspected of illegal trading. As the Royal Navy captured slave ships as prizes of war and condemned enslaved Africans to Vice-Admiralty courts, formerly enslaved Africans became “captured negroes” or “liberated Africans,” making the subjects in the British colonies. This work, which takes a microhistorical approach to investigate the everyday experiences of liberated Africans in Tortola during the early nineteenth century, focuses on the violent conditions of liberated African women, demonstrating that abolition consisted of violent contradictions …

Victim Impact: The Manson Murders And The Rise Of The Victims’ Rights Movement, Merrill W. Steeg

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Announcements, Abo Editors

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

Review Of Women, Performance, And The Material Of Memory: The Archival Tourist, 1780-1915, By Laura Engel, Leslie Ritchie

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

Review Of Eighteenth-Century Women’S Writing And The Methodist Media Revolution, By Andrew O. Winckles, Rebecca Nesvet

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

Review Of Women Wanderers And The Writing Of Mobility, 1784-1814, By Ingrid Horrocks, Elizabeth Porter

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

A review of Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784-1814 by Ingrid Horrocks. Written by Elizabeth Porter.

Review Of Writing And Constructing The Self In Great Britain In The Long Eighteenth Century, Edited By John Baker, Marion Leclair, And Allan Ingram, Kelly J. Plante

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

A review of Writing and Constructing the Self in Great Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century, eds. John Baker, Marion Leclair, and Allan Ingram. Written by Kelly Plante.

Review Of The Future Of Feminist Eighteenth-Century Scholarship: Beyond Recovery, Edited By Robin Runia, Erin M. Goss

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Review of Robin Rubia, ed., The Future of Feminist Eighteenth-Century Scholarship: Beyond Recovery (Routledge, 2018)

Writing With Aphra: Solidarity, Generosity, And Fight Club Rules Beyond Summer 2020, Kirsten T. Saxton, Bethany E. Qualls

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

A short piece in praise of the summer Write With Aphra program for pandemic support of women and non binary writers and a discussion of how the program is useful beyond its original parameters

Absent Objects, Freya Purcell

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Observations on studying during the Global Pandemic in the summer of 2020, access to archives. Considering the relationship between physical objects and the digital world in studying Design History.

Covid Diary: Scholarship And Gardening, Jessica Munns

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

Nothing Is Normal And Yet Normalcy Is The Demand, Crystal L. Matey

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

The Future Of The Field: Notes From Lockdown, Sofia Prado Huggins, Susannah B. Sanford

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

Feminist Scholarly Communities Have Been A Lifeline During The Pandemic, Karen Griscom

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

I teach writing and literature at a community college, and I am a third-year Ph.D. candidate. Because I balance full-time teaching and graduate research, I am accustomed to the intensity of a heavy workload. Still, during this past year, my home and work responsibilities have multiplied and with that so has my anxiety. Stress and lack of time have made it challenging to write and research. However, two feminist organizations have helped me cope and remain hopeful about my scholarship.

Sisterhood & Scholarship While Black, Stephanie R. Anckle

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

Summary Remarks On Conversations About “Researching, Reading And Writing During The Pandemic”, Kate Ozment, Mona Narain

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Summary remarks on the Spring 2021 issue that includes Conversation essays by participants in the ABO summer 2020 writing camp #WriteWithAphra. The participants describe their experience of reading, researching, and writing during the pandemic.

A New Poem By Anna Letitia Barbauld, Scott Krawczyk, William Mccarthy

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This short discovery article presents information pertaining to a previously unknown poem of four lines by Anna Letitia Barbauld. The poem is housed at Duke University in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.