Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Healing Justice As Intersectional Feminist Praxis: Well-Being Practices For Inclusion And Liberation, Sharon Doetsch-Kidder, Kalia Harris

Journal of International Women's Studies

Since at least the 1830s, Black feminists in the US have spoken of how oppression harms the spirit and have also expressed the need for Black people to respect themselves in the face of anti-Black racism (Guy-Sheftall, 1995). The recognition that oppression negatively impacts well-being continues today. Research in community health and psychology has demonstrated how Black Americans, Native Americans, and Latinx people have been victims of mass incarceration, state-funded and state-sanctioned violence, and systemic discrimination in schools, workplaces, healthcare, and housing. Due to these conditions, racial and ethnic minorities in the US suffer disproportionately from mental and physical illnesses …

Modern Articulations Of Gender Parity: The ‘New Woman’ Debate In The British Victorian Era And The Modern Muslim World, Maha F. Habib

Journal of International Women's Studies

Within the ‘New Woman’ debates within the Victorian era in Britain and the modern Muslim world (the areas of the former Ottoman Empire), one can witness a powerful feminist consciousness and astounding consistencies in the quest for gender equality, despite the difference in religious traditions, contexts, and contingencies. The debates attest to a consistency in feminist goals and challenges across time and space. The challenges include: intimate and long-standing linkages between scriptural traditions and the social order; interpretative legacies on women and their ‘nature’ that solidified cultural understandings of gender; and the relationship of these legacies to structures of power, …

Migrant Academic/Sister Outsider: Feminist Solidarity Unsettled And Intersectional Politics Interrogated, Maria Tsouroufli

Journal of International Women's Studies

Feminist sisterhood has been heavily criticized by Black feminists and others as installing a false sense of equality among women and being overly ambitious in disrupting the models and boundaries of the neo-liberal university. This paper draws on the autobiographical account of a White-other, female European migrant academic in the United Kingdom to consider how intersectional disadvantage and privilege shapes feminist sisterhood with profound implications for academic identities, careers, and belonging in the internationalized university and the wider socio-political British context. I draw on my professional trajectory to demonstrate how othering and violence in the form of verbal abuse, microaggressions, …

Editors' Introduction, Kimberly Chabot Davis, Priyanka Tripathi, Catherine Ndinda

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

The Agenda (February 2023): Newsletter For The Lincoln Lgbtq+ Resource Center, Lincoln Lgbtq+ Resource Center, Gonzaga University

Lincoln LGBTQ+ Resource Center Publications

The quarterly newsletter from the Lincoln LGBTQ+ Resource Center at Gonzaga.

Unsung Heroines In Black And White: Sixties Girl Groups As Sonic Rock Rebellion, Hilarie Ashton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Before the Beatles arrived in America, exploding open the intersection between pop music and the emerging genre of rock and in so doing, drawing heavily on the work of Black music and musicians, girl groups were powerfully enacting a kind of cultural rebellion in both of those genres. In contrast to the historical impulse to privilege a breathlessly incomplete white male lineage, "Unsung Heroines" examines in closer, more connected spotlights the subversive creative work of the Black and working-class teenage girls in the Ronettes, the Chiffons, and the Shangri-Las. Across four chapters, "Unsung Heroines" shows how these singers subversively tucked …

How The U.S. Mainstream Media Perpetuates Cis White Masculine Hegemony, Yelena Dzhanova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The news is important because it helps individuals understand their place in the world and make the best decisions for themselves. Throughout its strong history and presence in the United States, the journalism industry has prided itself on delivering fact-based news using an objective framework, meaning that there is an expectation that journalists communicate the news impartially and without bias. Through an examination of gendered language and visual representations published in and by recent mainstream U.S. digital and print media outlets, this paper explains how the media plays a major role in the perpetuation of cis white masculinity. This paper …

Ornamentalism: Costuming And The Portrayal Of The Chinese Woman In Film, 20th-21st Century, Andrea Yepez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis aims to analyze the concept of “Ornamentalism,” a term created by Anne Anlin Cheng. In Ornamentalism (2019), Cheng proposes the term—a combination of Orientalism and ornament—as a new way to study Asiatic femininity. Cheng applies the term to a case study of the career of Anna May Wong, the first Asian-American actress to feature in Hollywood films. Throughout her career, which began in the 1920s, Anna May Wong held the status of it-girl and muse to designers such as John Galliano. However, Wong was also subjected to playing stereotypical Asian roles in films and was consistently the victim …

Examination Of Korean Feminism From The Intersections Of Colonialism, Modernity, And Nationalism In Colonial Korea (1910–1945), Yae Hee Choi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis aims to investigate the politics of Korean feminism during the time of Japanese colonization (1910-1945) from the perspectives of colonialism, modernity, and nationalism. The study illustrates how Korean women perceived themselves in terms of individuals, colonial subjects, and Korean nationals during a period of significant societal changes. It also intends to broaden the boundaries of gender inquiries in colonial Korea, which often focus on binary constructions of Japanese repression versus national resistance. This study argues that a nationalist paradigm oversimplifies the intricate dynamics and varied experiences of colonized subjects, specifically women. The logic of nationalism places all forms …

A Female Pharaoh And The Emperor’S Wife: Hatshepsut, Julia Domna, And Female Authority In Antiquity, Gabriella E. Ramalho

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis analyzes how historical notions of masculinity and femininity shaped perceptions of power between the Egyptian female pharaoh Hatshepsut and Roman empress Julia Domna. Both rulers carefully created visual narratives of masculinity and femininity to leverage respect from their citizens, in accordance with what was contextually appropriate for their respective societies.

It will be shown that there are blatant disconnects between how others perceived them and how they wished to be portrayed. Hatshepsut, a rare female pharaoh, depicted herself in the regalia of a male king with a false ceremonial beard, scepters and crowns. Domna was described as the …

Naming Venus: An Exploration Of Goddesses, Heroines, And Famous Women, Kavya Beheraj

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Humans have been observing and romanticizing Venus for more than 5,000 years. However, mapping its surface has nearly always been impossible, since the planet is shrouded in thick clouds. A breakthrough came just fifty years ago with the invention of radar imaging, leading to the discovery (and naming) of hundreds of new features in a relatively short length of time.

The rapid naming of Venus is a case study on the impact of planetary nomenclature — the process of naming features on other worlds. While the act of naming streamlines communication and humanizes alien landscapes, it is subject to bias, …

“Tell Them About The Dream Martin!”: The Retelling, Reframing, And Re-Examination Of The Civil Rights Movement Through A Black Feminist And Postmodern Lens, Damele Elliott-Hubbard

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research seeks to explore the intersectionality of race, gender, and class that existed during the Civil Rights Movement, and the tensions that were a result of that intersectionality. This is accomplished through a re-examination of The Movement through a post-modern and Black feminist lens. Post-modern theorist Jean Francois Lyotard proposes the necessity of throwing off the grand narratives or metanarratives of well-known historical events, with the intention of creating micronarratives that depend heavily on the experiences of those who lived during those times. The aim of this research is to conduct a gendered study of the CRM, while investigating …

Women’S Agency And Resistance To Cyber Flashing On Twitter, Shafa Athirah, Irwan M. Hidayana

Masyarakat: Jurnal Sosiologi

This article explores the specific forms of online sexual harassment that has been on the rise since Covid-19 pandemic, namely cyber flashing, and how women respond to such practice on social media. Digital ethnography. which included in-depth interview with victims of cyber flashing, was conducted to dive deep into women’s cyber flashing experiences on Twitter. Authors argue that women make sense of their cyber flashing experiences, including tangible impacts on women, and exercise their agency through the acts of public and quiet resistance. The results showed that women carry out various acts of resistance such as ‘spill’ tweet, ‘warning’ tweet, …

“For The Moment, I Am Not F*Cking,” I Am Tweeting: Platforms Of / As Sexuality, Jacob Johanssen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article develops the argument that digital platforms are significantly infused with originary (and unconscious) residues of the sexual. Drawing on Laplancheian conceptualizations of sexuality, I argue that the digital has always been sexual(ised) in itself – a process that precedes and exceeds the erotic or pornographic. For Laplanche, sexuality is constitutive of the human subject as such. Infantile sexuality is shaped and transformed in an enigmatic relation with the caregiver. Drawing on this model as an analogy, I claim that users are drawn to platforms because they (unconsciously) desire to return to infantile sexuality and a holding environment but …

Community Despite Connection: Resisting The Digital Logics Of Optimization And Failure, Irina Kalinka

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

If a certain brand of aspirational tech-utopian discourse is to be believed, those privileged enough to be plugged into digital information technology are living through a golden age of connection. Platforms claim to facilitate sharing and partaking, bring people together, and bestow upon them new and improved spaces to gather and build communities. While reality differs decidedly from such idealized conceptions, it is nonetheless crucial to ask what kind of guiding vision is being instituted through such representational efforts: namely, the figure of community made operational and optimizable. This project will reject such idealized visions of coherent communities drawn together …

The Social Sinthome, Ryan Engley

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Much of the critical discourse on social media misidentifies its problematic features as bugs, or problems to solve. Supposed solutions to these problems tend to focus on individual actions. We should delete the apps, own our own data, never click on recommended videos, and realize that we are the product. But if predatory algorithms succeed by individuating people—selling people “choice” and “options” as it harvests user data—then an entire online ecosystem arranged through the logic of that design can neither be meaningfully challenged nor effectively understood at the level of the individual alone. Transformative action addressing social media can only …

Everybody Wants To Be A Fascist Online: Psychoanalysis And The Digital Architecture Of Fascism, Anthony Faramelli, Imogen Piper

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Félix Guattari and Franco Berardi have both argued that media ecologies and psychic ecologies are intimately intertwined and as such, any exploration of the collective unconscious must engage with how the mind is formed with and through media. This understanding of networks of interdependence necessitates an exploration of how platformization has impacted users” collective psyche. Drawing from psychosocial theory, psychoanalysis and the work of Félix Guattari, this article analizes the micropolitics of desire of digital platforms, with an explicit focus on how algorithmic structures amplify extreme Right content, allowing fascisms to metastasis throughout digital spaces. It will first examine the …

Stalking Oneself: The Fantasmatic Intersubjectivity Of Google, Alois Sieben

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay reads fictional and non-fictional accounts of digital stalking as signals of larger changes in intersubjectivity itself caused by Google. Most social media platforms trap users in imaginary relations, in which the other is encountered as a complete profile, but Google allows the searcher to locate an absence in the other in the form of a missing search result. As will be shown in an analysis of two contemporary novels whose first-person narrations center around Google-stalking, Caroline Kepnes’s You (2014) and Olivia Sudjic’s Sympathy (2017), Google’s mode of intersubjectivity amounts to an endless tunnel with no light at its …

Lacan And The Algorithm, Clint Burnham

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Exploring the development of algorithms in Lacanian theory, specifically the "R schema" in the 1950s, I argue that psychoanalysis, read through contemporary debates about the "algorithmic cult" of Netflix and other avatars of popular culture, can be said to reveal the inhuman, machinic essence of subjectivity. The etiology of algorithms, mathemes, and other formulae and diagrams in Lacan’s oeuvre has been under-studied, in part because for some readers they are not as attractive as his more bravura flourishes of word play as exegetical excess, and in part because they derive largely from the ‘hard’ structuralist moment of his work in …

Platform Psychoanalysis: What Does The Algorithm Want?, Matthew Flisfeder

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

When Sexuality Becomes Healing: An Interview With Elsbeth Fraanje On Her Documentary Sexual Healing, Johan Roeland

Journal of Religion & Film

This is an interview with Elsbeth Fraanje, the director of Sexual Healing.

Sexual Healing, Johan Roeland

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Sexual Healing (2022) directed by Elsbeth Fraanje.

Good Grief, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Good Grief (2023), directed by Rob Sharp.

The Pod Generation, Dereck Daschke

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of The Pod Generation (2023), directed by Sophie Barthes.

Plan C, Dereck Daschke

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of PLAN C (2023), directed by Tracy Droz Tragos.

Fairyland, Christopher R. Deacy

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Fairyland (2023), directed by Andrew Durham.

Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, Dereck Daschke

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (2023), directed by Anna Hints.

Divinity, Dereck Daschke

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Divinity (2023), directed by Eddie Alcazar.

Cat Person, Christopher R. Deacy

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Cat Person (2023), directed by Susanna Fogel.

Our Males And Females, William L. Blizek, Monica Blizek

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Our Males and Females (2023), directed by Ahmad Alyaseer.