Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

A British Health Seeker In Southern California: Beatrice Harraden (1864-1936), Molly Mcclain

History: Faculty Scholarship

In the late nineteenth-century, health tourists travelled the globe in search of relief for tuberculosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and other ailments for which the medical profession had no cure. Some sought the mountain air of the Swiss Alps while others headed to the French and Italian Riviera. A smaller, more eclectic group made their way to San Diego, an up-and-coming tourist destination that promised plenty of sunshine, fresh air, and a mild, dry climate thought to be well-suited to damaged lungs and aching joints. Among them was the best-selling British novelist Beatrice Harraden who wrote several books about Southern California, including …

Fight Like A Girl: Diversity In The Womens Rights Movement, Rachel Boch

Spring Showcase for Research and Creative Inquiry

This presentation will focus on the music video "Fight Like a Girl" by Zolita. Written the day after Donald Trump became president of the United States, this song discusses how necessary it is for the women in our country to stand up for our own rights. The music video features a variety of women, from businesswomen to pole dancers, from Muslim women to transgender women. In this presentation I will discuss how the music video for "Fight Like a Girl" emphasizes the fact that all women are equally deserving of rights and respect, and we all must stand together if …

Black Femininity And Masculinity And Its Relation To Sexuality In Spike Lee's "She's Gotta Have It", Rebecca Chung

Spring Showcase for Research and Creative Inquiry

Spike Lee's 1986 American Film "She's Gotta Have It" challenges the stereotypical portrayal of Black feminity and masculinity by portraying a wide variety of expressions in sexuality. My approach will be to look at how race and sexuality impact the characters in the movie and Lee comments on the actual world today. The intersectionality of race and sexuality is highly prevalent in the movie and will be explored in my research. My thesis is Spike Lee uses the intersectionality of race and sexuality to critic the stereotypical roles of femininity and masculinity.

"Blessed Be The Fruit"- Female Representation In The Handmaids Tale Season 1, Joanna Glenn

Spring Showcase for Research and Creative Inquiry

The show The Handmaid's Tale on the television network Hulu, created by Bruce Miller, depicts the struggle of a woman named June who is serving as a handmaid to a powerful commander and his wife to bear their child. This society is a futuristic version in which fertility and birth rates have plummeted. They have an extreme, twisted version of gender norms. A woman's only purpose is to bear children. Fertile women are forced to carry children for powerful couples, their only worth is being fertile. In this project I will present how the show, specifically focusing on the first …

"Faggot": Gods Own Country - Directed By Francis Lee, Leah Richardson

Spring Showcase for Research and Creative Inquiry

God's Own Country, directed by Francis Lee, stars Josh O' Connor as Johnny Saxby, a gay Yorkshire farmer, and Alec Secăreanu as Gheorghe Ionescu, a Romanian migrant. The film immediately establishes Saxby as frustrated with the incredible responsibilities of the farm now on his shoulders because of his father's sudden medical issues. The story follows Johnny’s journey, supported by Gheorghe, who teaches him acceptance, tenderness, and vulnerability. This presentation will evaluate the physicality of the characters, as well as different settings and props, as their relationship develops. Examining the intersectional identities within this film will compel the audience to question …

Intersectionality In Hidden Figures, Aasiya Slaughter

Spring Showcase for Research and Creative Inquiry

This poster focuses on the intersectionality in the movie Hidden Figures. The main identities that are the focal point of the movie are race and gender. Being a black woman in the 1960's was not an easy feat, however Katherine Johnson and her companions overcame the many struggles of such, while also being the minority not only in society but also working in the STEM field. Ireland et al. says that the bodies of education research focused on the experiences of Black students and female students in STEM fields often render Black women and girls "hidden figures" in that they …

Life Satisfaction: Aging Female Informal Caregivers Of Persons With Dementia, Deborah Ann Monson

Dissertations

Purpose/Aims

The purpose of this study was to describe the relationship between aging female informal caregivers of persons with dementia (PWD) and care recipients’ PWD demographic factors, aging female informal caregivers of PWD social support factors, positive and negative feelings, a sense of flourishing, stress, and life satisfaction.

Background/Rationale

Older adults with dementia are living longer and the majority are receiving care by aging female informal caregivers. Dementia incrementally worsens over time impacting informal caregiver life satisfaction. Most studies have focused on negative aspects of informal caregiving. Therefore, this study investigated both positive and negative aspects of caregiving.

Conceptual Basis …

The Car Ride Home, Jonathan Rivera

English Honors Theses

The Car Ride Home explores the coming of age of a young boy into a queer man, searching and sifting through the trauma of home life, and realizing his mother’s addiction affects more than just herself, but an entire family. This realization coincides with views of masculinity, as he carefully watches the men around him. He internalizes these depictions of masculinity when exploring his own confusion and investigation of his own sexual identity and queerness. The poetry collection is broken up into two connected parts. Part one explores the illusion of childhood and nostalgia while introducing subtle glimpses and secrets …

Naming And Re(Claiming) Feminism In Orthodoxy: Voicing The Gender And Religious Identities Of Greek Orthodox Women, Anne Marie Adams

College of Education Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a qualitative study of the effects of Greek Orthodoxy on the gender and religious identity meaning-making of five Greek-American women. The emergent themes from this study indicate that participants’ gender and religious identities were heavily influenced by the dueling tensions and contradictions between patriarchy and feminism, conservative traditionalism and modernity, and secular life and the religious community (i.e., family and church). Underpinning this study are Narrative Identity Theory and Feminist Standpoint Theory. Portraiture methodology was employed across three semi-structured interviews, as well as three written/video reflection journals to reveal how women, as articulated through their own perspectives, …

Narratives From Appalachia: The Current Stories Of Lgbtq Community College Students, Todd A. Cimino-Johnson

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Theses & Dissertations

LGBTQ students are ubiquitous on community college campuses across the United States. The exact number of LGBTQ students is unknown and often their needs are ignored. LGBTQ students face harassment and discrimination at higher rates than other minority groups. This study was conducted to gather the current narratives of LGBTQ students attending community colleges in the Appalachian Region. This study aimed to determine what LGBTQ students are experiencing on community college campuses across Appalachia. Fifteen students took part in a one-on-one semi-structured interview for this qualitative study. All students were currently enrolled in a program of study when the interviews …

Rescripting Father-Daughter Dynamics: New Masculinities And Relational Possibilities In Post-Apocalyptic Video Games, Sarah Mortazavi Brooks

English Theses & Dissertations

The Last of Us and The Walking Dead video games deploy father-daughter relationship pairings between their main characters in ways that disrupt the hegemonic patriarchal understandings of those very roles, though in different ways. The Last of Us and The Walking Dead utilize paternal mentorship in ways that subvert patriarchal ideology’s established patterns for gendered behavior through role-switching and alternative models of masculine care respectively. Where video games too often still cater to an audience that is heterosexual, white, and male, these games feature narratives that challenge the heteropatriarchal messaging common to this medium. The Last of Us does this …

'Wait, Twilight Is A Thing Again?': Examining The Ways In Which Different Social Groups Navigate The Complex Cultural Issues In Twilight, Veronica Buchanan

Undergraduate Research Symposium Podium Presentations

The four books and five movies in the extremely popular Twilight series give readers and viewers a lot to unpack, in both good ways and bad, and have led to fierce debates over the place the series should have in our culture, especially in regard to gender politics. However, most of the discussions of these texts and their cultural impact have tended to lack a robust, intersectional feminist perspective, one that attends to issues not only of gender, but also race, class, and sexuality. This research draws on both fan studies and feminist media studies to examine the various ways …

Bostock’S Paradox: Intersections In Lgbtq Employment Rights And Private, Religious Businesses, Christopher Smith

Brigham Young University Prelaw Review

Thanks to the recent opinion of Bostock v. Clayton County by the United States Supreme Court regarding the protection of LGBTQ employees in the workplace, discussion has turned to how this protection relates to religious employers. Religious organizations such as churches and mosques are afforded protections thanks to an exemption found in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The role and scope of these protections in regards to private, religious (but not religion-owned) businesses has been debated as recently as 2014 in the Supreme Court. In this paper I address this issue and determine that, underneath current ruling …

Women’S Advocate Or Racist Hypocrite: Gertrud Scholtz-Klink And The Contradictions Of Women In Nazi Ideology, Mary C. S. Frasier

Student Publications

The Reichsfrauenführerin, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, led the National Socialist Women’s League from 1934 until she went into hiding in 1945. During her career in the Nazi Party, she created a female focused sector of the party that promoted pronatalist propaganda, discouraged women from engaging in politics, and urged women to only perform gender-suitable work. In contradiction to her message, Scholtz-Klink was the highest-ranking female political figure and a divorcee, who regularly chose her political career with the Nazi Party over her duties in the private sphere. Although she had little to no political power in the inner circle because of her …

Exploring The Associations Between Femininity, Burnout, And Health Behaviors Among Middle Age Women, Adelaide Brown

Senior Honors Projects

To date research on how traditional feminine traits and gender role ideology may impact burnout and health behaviors in women is limited. This paper examines how the aforementioned may be associated with higher burnout rates in a community-based cohort of middle-aged women (40-65 years). This study focuses on western traditional feminine traits and gender role ideology, which describe an individual's attitude regarding their assigned role in society and the strength of association with their role. Women who report a stronger connection to more traditional traits or ideology were expected to report higher rates of burnout.

This study also assesses whether …

Candidates For L’Ecriture Feminine: Analyses Of Austen’S Pride And Prejudice, Woolf’S Night And Day, And Morrison’S Sula, Brooklyn J. Jongeling

Honors Thesis

This thesis discusses Hélène Cixous’ ideas on feminine literature, as expressed in her article, “The Laugh of Medusa,” and attempts to apply the goals that she sets out for what feminine literature must look like in order to develop the literary cannon to the novel. In an attempt to pull away from traditional patriarchal images and expectations of feminine lifestyles, I join Cixous’ call for the marginalized to inscribe their voices into the cannon for themselves, and argue that representation of such images in literature is necessary to the development of our biased perceptions to more authentically represent typically marginalized …

Colonial/Modern Gender System & Femicides, Melanie Pangol

Student Publications

The research paper addresses how a decolonial feminism framework has been applied to the anti-femicides movement that are happening in Ciudad Juarez. Furthermore, the paper argues that due to the cheap and exploitative labor force status that has been imposed upon black and brown female bodies, such women have been disproportionately impacted by gender violence.

Place Me In Gettysburg: Relating Sexuality To Environment, Kylie R. Mandeville

Student Publications

This project links sexuality and environmental issues in the context of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It considers how I, a queer student at Gettysburg College, can be in “right relations” with this environment. While queer ecological scholarship defines “right relations” as relationships where all beings—people of all identities, as well as animals, plants, and the land—can flourish through their interactions, I inquire whether such flourishing is possible for me, and others like me, here in this place. To answer this question, the project links queer ecological scholarship with environmental history scholarship specific to the Gettysburg battlefield and civil war. It also involves …

In France, Michelle Is A Man's Name, John Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a review of the short film, In France, Michelle is a Man's Name (2021), directed by Em Weinstein.

Uswnt And Twitter: Resistance And Activism In The Equal Pay Campaign, Mia Manney 21

Honor Scholar Theses

Research for this study of the “equal pay campaign” centers around the following overarching question: how does the USWNT use Twitter as a performative mechanism for expressing and enhancing social activist causes? In particular, my research explores how members of the USWNT, both individually and collectively use social media in the pursuit of gender equality and equal pay provisions. In what specific ways have the women engaged social media and why do they rely upon Twitter in particular? How does the rhetoric that the women use accentuate their motivations and advance their social activist cause? Is the women’s use of …

Asexual Protagonists: What Their Patterns Reveal About The Representation Of Asexuality In Current Literature, Jaclyn Hernandez

Audre Lorde Prize

This paper analyzes the most popular books with asexual protagonists and what patterns concerning their gender, race, and romantic orientations reveal about the state of asexual representation in current literature.

Treatise, Scripture, Manifesto: Reckoning With "Love Cake", Lalini Shanela Ranaraja

Audre Lorde Prize

This essay was written in response to Sri Lankan-American writer and activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha's poetry collection Love Cake, as part of a directed study I undertook in Spring 2021. A goal of the directed study, titled "The Empire Writes Back" was to engage with and build upon work by writers from South Asia and the diaspora, of which Piepzna-Samarasinha is a vocal member. In this essay, I explore not only the sense of connection I feel with this poet and her body of work as a result of shared experiences of otherness, trauma, and nationhood, but also …

"Queer Even In Safe Spaces: Homeless, Shelter Failures, And The Queer Community", Kara West

Audre Lorde Prize

Privileged groups consistently expect marginalized group identities to provide comfort, be it in the way the members actually showcase their identities, the work they do for society, or their general respect for the status quo. The queer community, specifically, has long been subject to prejudice and violence, and while tolerance is slowly increasing in the United States, the present day is no exception. Queer folks in the US are even much more likely to be homeless or in domestic violence situations than their heterosexual counterparts. Furthermore, once in vulnerable housing situations, queer folks are dangerously less likely to receive the …

Englishness Within: Navigating The Colonial And Patriarchal Motives In Prospero's Daughter And Wide Sargasso Sea, Zainab A. Saleh

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

With the arrival of postcolonial theory and studies surrounding culture and identity, the increased awareness of English cultural identity found itself rooted in the attempts to set the narrative of how identity is a mere checklist of qualifications that presumably leads one to be deemed as one of the “English.” Fixating on the spaces formerly colonized by the British, Englishness has come around to define and establish a discourse of Otherness. From language and dress to food and environment, Englishness finds itself present in postcolonial retellings of colonial texts that set the tone for what is presumably and hegemonically filled …

On Being Seen Or For Those Who Break Like Me, Shanisha K. Branch

English Theses & Dissertations

The nature of truly seeing is something I’ve had a hard time grappling with. If you understand the difficultly of seeing and wanting others to see you that same, then these pages are for you.

A Commentary On The Interpretation Of Dreams, Kayla J. Baur

Publications and Research

Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams explains the role of the theory of psychoanalysis as it pertains to dreams. Freud then leads into the idea of how psychoanalysis as a theory applies to literature. Along with Oedipus Rex, Freud uses William Shakespeare’s Hamlet to exemplify the way in which literary texts express the desires, emotions, and/or memories of the unconscious mind, just as dreams-thoughts (unconscious desire) display themselves in dreams. Hamlet experiences troubling emotions upon the death of his father as he finds himself referring back to his childhood feelings about him, and thus finds it difficult to exact …

Arteletra: The Sixties In Latin America And The Politics Of Going Unnoticed, Jason A. Bartles

Purdue University Press Book Previews

ArteletrA analyzes the Sixties in Latin America in order to revisit the core claim of literary and cultural studies to political relevancy in the contemporary world: the task of making visible the invisible. Though visibility can secure rights for the disenfranchised, it also risks subjecting them to the biopolitical and capitalist arrangements of space. What is at stake in this book is a series of aesthetic and ethical tools for engaging in politics—defined here as the potential to disagree—without first passing through visibility. These tools cohere around a practice Bartles calls “the politics of going unnoticed,” which he derives from …

Queer Even In Safe Spaces: Homelessness, Shelter Failures, And The Queer Community, Kara West

Tredway Library Prize for First-Year Research

No abstract provided.

Husserl And Merleau-Ponty: A Feminist Critique Of The Phenomenological Body, Jasmin M. Makhlouf

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the phenomenological notion of embodiment, to explain the objectification and coercion that women and their bodies experience on a daily basis. I build the philosophical foundation of this thesis on Husserlian and Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, as well as, their work’s receptions in feminist philosophy of the early 20th century, mainly Simone de Beauvoir, as well as, more contemporary thinkers like Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler. Moreover, the thesis argues for a return to the traditional phenomenological notion of embodiment while incorporating elements of sexuality and sexual difference.

Meridians 20:1, Ginetta Candelario

Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism

I write this in mid-November of 2020, after one of the most contentious presidential elections in my lifetime. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many states began allowing and even encouraging the use of absentee voting/mail-in ballots to reduce the risk of infection during in-person voting. Although he himself votes by mail, the outgoing president began a systematic and sustained campaign of maligning the legality and validity of absentee ballots, claiming without evidence that they were more vulnerable to “illegal voting” and fraud, and encouraging his constituent base to vote in person on election day....