Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

"We Are Bad Feminists!": Understanding Genre And Rhetoric In (Post)Feminist Dramedy Television, Cailin Rolph

All HCAS Student Capstones, Theses, and Dissertations

Centered on Lena Dunham’s Girls (2012) and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag (2016) this thesis examines the use of genre conventions in dramedy to facilitate feminist critiques of postfeminist ideals. In conducting a case study of feminist rhetoric present in the shows Girls and Fleabag, this thesis addresses a gap in genre studies concerning the social and political potency of the dramedy genre. The thesis utilizes rhetorical critique, through generic methods, to identify the specific techniques used by Dunham and Waller-Bridge. Through its analyses, this thesis argues that dramedy can uniquely operate as a work of social action and critique, using …

Indigenous And Tribal Women: Indian And Filipino Alangan-Mangyan Perspectives On Happiness, Hazel T. Biana, Melvin Jabar

Journal of International Women's Studies

Research on happiness focuses on urban dwellers, and studies done in rural areas leave much to be desired. Existing scholarship also overlooks how women’s economic and socio-cultural roles contribute to happiness levels in relation to health, education, and safety issues. To address such a gap, this study examines and evaluates the perspectives of indigenous and tribal women on happiness, specifically those who belong to Indian rural communities and Filipino AlanganMangyan indigenous peoples. We argue that while happiness is considered a mental state, it is still a very social concept. In other words, social forces may make or break one’s happiness. …

Do Resources Create Empowerment?: A Study Of Tribal Women Farmers In Madhya Pradesh, India, Sudarshan Thakur, Simran Malkan

Journal of International Women's Studies

As of late, there has been debate about the importance of recognizing women in agriculture as farmers. The demand to be recognized is backed by women’s significant contribution to the household economy. Scholars have attempted to establish a correlation between land ownership and women’s empowerment in agriculture. This is an oversimplification of the situation of women farmers and their empowerment, especially in the context of tribal society where women have better access to and control over community and forest resources. We undertook this study to examine if having land and other resources is a prerequisite for the empowerment of tribal …

Subjugation Of Adivasi Women And The Role Of Ngo Pradan In Holistic Development, Mohosin Mandal, Sahina Khatun

Journal of International Women's Studies

Adivasis are the original inhabitants of India, and their history has been plagued by suffering and deprivation. From the Aryan invasion of 1400 B.C. to the British colonial period, Adivasis have been subjected to domination, displacement, organized loot of resources, and suppression. They are still experiencing forced displacement and other forms of injustice and inequalities in the name of capitalist development. The Indian government took many positive steps to change the condition of Scheduled Tribes (the constitutional term for Adivasi), but despite these governmental actions, no significant changes have been witnessed in their livelihood. A vast majority of the Adivasi …

Mainstreaming Northeast Tribal Women In India Through Financial Education: A Systematic Review, K. Katini, Kaikho Hriizhiinio, S Amalanathan

Journal of International Women's Studies

Financial education is required to enhance financial literacy for socio-economic development. This paper aims to understand the financial literacy level among the Scheduled Tribes of India, specifically the Mao-Naga tribe women of Northeast India. The current paper is based on secondary data and adheres to the steps and process of a systematic review. Prominent authors, times, tribes, countries, journals, and keywords have been identified for the comprehensive analysis. Since the goal of this paper is to review the existing literature regarding financial literacy among tribals, the findings indicate that financial education intervention, socio-cultural practices, social affinity, and early life financial …

Educational Migration And Agency Among Tribal Young Women, Deepika Kumari Meena

Journal of International Women's Studies

In this paper, I examine the understanding of agency among the tribal young women attending college in Pratapgarh (Rajasthan), India. Particularly in light of this shift in their living and academic spaces, I look at how they interpret and perform their agency when it comes to being in a romantic relationship and getting married. It is not uncommon for tribal members to engage in romantic relationships and to seek love marriages. The number of young women migrating for education is increasing. As a result of educational migration, the practice of live-in relationships, romantic relationships, and love marriages has also increased …

Sisterhood And Solidarity In The Netarhat Field Firing Range Movement: A Study Of Indian Tribal Women’S Struggle And Activism, Sunita Purty

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article examines the understanding of collectivism and sisterhood among Oraon tribal women in the Netarhat Field Firing Range movement. Further, this study discusses tribal women’s consciousness of repressive operations of the state and of their experiences of triple oppression as a tribal group, as women, and as activists. Tribal women’s goals, however, are much more than women’s liberation; they demand tribal autonomy and the right to forest resources so that tribal people can live peacefully in their regions. This study also looks at how a group of women shared their gender-based grievances as well as their everyday struggle under …

Theorizing Adivasi/Tribal Feminism: Decoding Voices From Chotanagpur And The Northeast Region Of India, Kanchan Thomasina Ekka, Pheiga Amanda Giangthandunliu

Journal of International Women's Studies

The Adivasi people, termed Scheduled Tribes in India, have a lifeworld entwined with nature, land, and resources. Their relationship with the land produces a particular form of lived experience. This interface between land and culture that shapes the body of knowledge is not written or recorded like other practices and traditions. Adivasi/Tribal women play an important role in articulating this knowledge and contributing to its formation. However, this particular lived experience, especially concerning women, has not received the recognition it deserves within the context of mainstream feminism, which has not paid attention to Adivasi/Tribal women as victims of colonial and …

Writing Adivasi Women: Widening The Research Canvas, Shashank Shekhar Sinha

Journal of International Women's Studies

Adivasis have become visible in debates around indigeneity, identity politics, conversion, development, and displacement, and more recently on climate change. However, gender remains a comparatively marginalized theme and Adivasi women or tribal women remain marginalized subjects. This article explores the broad themes and conceptual frameworks around which Adivasi women have gained maximum visibility in colonial and postcolonial India. It analyzes the trends in available research on Adivasi women and the problems involved. The article underlines the need to widen our research canvas, ask more questions, and consider more layers and complexities in research pursuits.

Editorial Introduction: Tribal And Indigenous Women In India, Parijat Ghosh, Dibyendu Chaudhuri

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

“Éowyn It Was, And Dernhelm Also”: Reading The ‘Wild Shieldmaiden’ Through A Queer Lens., Sara Brown

Journal of Tolkien Research

The Éowyn we first meet in 'The Two Towers' is a woman who has been traumatised by the loss of her parents at a young age, the recent loss of her cousin Théodred, the apparent weakening of her uncle Théoden, and her inability to escape the lascivious gaze of Wormtongue. Marginalised by her gender and by social expectation, her desire to find purpose in her life as a shieldmaiden is repeatedly thwarted. Seeking to reclaim control over her life and to make her own choices, she rides out with the Rohirrim not as Éowyn, but as Dernhelm.

Past scholars have …

The “Fruit” Of Success: Christina Rossetti’S “Goblin Market” As An Allegory Of The 19th Century Literary Marketplace, Priyodarshini Ghosh

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” is probably her most critically acclaimed literary masterpiece. It has been accepted undoubtedly as an allegory of something, but critics have not been able to come to a unanimous conclusion as to what. Some have tried to establish it as a Christian allegory of Fall and Redemption, while others as an allegory of sexual temptation. Certain critics have hinted that this poem could be an allegory of the literary marketplace during the 19^th century, which was wholly dominated by men, women’s entry into that marketplace being either restricted or marked by insurmountable obstacles. Following the …

Make It Funky For Me: Black British Women’S Explorations Of Britishness, Womanhood, And Artistry Through 2000s Music, Monique Charles

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

2000s Britain was an interesting and expansive time musically for Black Britain (Bradley 2013), as underground music gained traction in mainstream spaces. This article examines the context in which Black British women were able to cross over into the British mainstream and explores how U.K. garage and U.K. funky artists expressed their creativity, autonomy, womanhood, Blackness, and Britishness. Female U.K. garage artists set a precedent in the creation of “new” diverse identities for Black British women artists, but artists in both underground and mainstream music scenes were also forced to contend with restrictive and harmful misogynoir.

Casar Student Debate#4:"Should Men Be Allowed To Vote On Abortion Legislation?", The Prince Alwaleed Center For American Studies And Research Casar, Yasmeen El Ghazaly, Mark W. Deets

Performances, Events, and Presentations

Every semester, CASAR AUC holds miscellaneous student debates discussing the hot controversial topics in the US, Egypt and from around the world in hopes of raising awareness about these topics & broadening the perspectives of our students as they learn to engage in fruitful discussions as they share different opinion on the topic being deliberated.

At this CASAR Student Discussion event #4 in celebration of International Women's Day, an introduction was given about the historical context for enacting laws on abortion in Egypt & the US, then we watched a brief video where men in the US answered this very …

My Gender In The Closet, Aspen Balducci

Student Sequential Art and Comics

This book details the transitioning and rediscovery of gender from a single person's perspective. Gender is not linear or binary, something all people should be free to study and discover.

Queer Rural Youth Online: A Digital Ethnography, Joseph Robert Burns

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis is based on digital ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2023 within Queer subcommunities on the social media sites Reddit and Twitter (now known as X) and data collected from interviews with Queer rural youth members of these communities. The data reveal that social media use directly influences the lives and actions of Queer rural youth, who use the space to build social connections, shape their personal identities, and seek advice pertaining to their in-person lives and decisions. By using these spaces, Queer rural youth build both bonding and bridging social capital, learn to subvert restrictions to their Internet access, …

“You Take My Place; Let’S Switch!” What It Means To Be A Woman Powerlifter In Parasport, Aaron Carl S. Seechung, Maria Luisa M. Guinto

The Qualitative Report

Gendered disability in elite sport has emerged as a pertinent area of inquiry in sport psychology. However, qualitative research aimed at amplifying the voices of marginalized subgroups is notably sparse. Employing a phenomenological approach, we examined the lived experience of a Filipina para powerlifter, probing the intersection of gender, disability, and socioeconomic status in shaping how the participant made sense of life and identity, both within and outside the realm of sport. Three personal experiential themes were generated from the interview data's interpretative phenomenological analysis: “survival of the fittest,” “the voices in my head did not allow me to give …

Religious Queer Trans-Nationalism: A Zine And Theory, Eli Butler

Student Zines

From the author:

The relationship between religion and its institutions, sexuality, and gender is both historically and personally complex, and the intricacy and discourse between these constructs disproportionally affects religious queer and transgender communities.

The "Divine Transgender" concept, embraced by a growing community of proudly religious trans and gender non-conforming people, views bodies that identify with these categories as enlightened to break down restrictive gender binaries and undergo a spiritual self-realization process in the form of transition, becoming closer to God during the journey. This zine aims to creatively and imaginatively manage these relationships and educate about the ways religions …

1. Beyond Pink And Blue: A Zine Celebrating Trans Childhood, Eli Butler

Student Zines

From the author:

Trans childhood has long been infantilized, positioning trans children as passive and powerless beings in need of adult (and governmental) supervision and political intervention – an infantilization which is grounded in cisnormative and heteronormative beliefs about childhood innocence and purity.

Trans children are often seen as disruptive to the social order, and their existence is met with fear, hostility, and punishment. Against this backdrop, trans childhood has become a site of resistance, a space where trans children can challenge and subvert normative understandings of gender and sexuality.

As a former trans child turned trans adult, I created …

“Guard Your Virtue With Your Life”: Purity Expectations And Dynamics Of Purity And Gender-Based Violence For Latter-Day Saint (Lds) Girls And Women, Reilly H. Brady

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Senior Honors Papers

This study investigates purity expectations directed towards girls and women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), approaching a largely underresearched topic and establishing findings such as the mutual embeddedness of purity and gender-based violence for girls and women in the LDS Church. Through a discourse analysis, this study creates a historical timeline of over 100 years of documents, including church-produced media as well as separate writings by LDS women, focusing on how purity has changed and has been politicized over time within various historical moments. While most survey participants in this study described never having heard …

Championing Voices: Honoring Alumnae Authors During Women's History Month Display, Isabella Piechota, Arianna Tillman, Kalea Brown

Library Displays and Bibliographies

A bibliography created to accompany a display about alumane authors during Women's History Month 2024 at the Leatherby Libraries at Chapman University.

Narratives Of Reproductive Control In The American Eugenics Movement, Cassandra M. Provost

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

In this paper, I will explore the eugenics movement as a pseudo-scientific political, social, and legal phenomenon which had a devastating historical impact on America’s most vulnerable women, as well as briefly discuss its residual effects on contemporary reproductive rights conversations, through the lens of literature. Using an interdisciplinary discourse and narrative analysis approach, I identify two distinct themes within the explored narratives: (1) the importance of a government’s attempt to override a person’s autonomy by destroying the person’s ability to reproduce, and (2) the impropriety of actions based on a negative attitude toward disabled or undesirable persons. In my …

Bibliography For "Women's Fashion From India Display", Arianna Tillman, Isabella Piechota, Kalea Brown

Library Displays and Bibliographies

A bibliography created to accompany a display about women's fashion from India in March 2024 at the Leatherby Libraries at Chapman University.

The Romani People In The European Cultural Imagination: Alexander Pushkin, Prosper Mérimée And Virginia Woolf, Nadya Siyam

Theses and Dissertations

Scholarly literature on Roma is scarce compared to other racial groups as a lack of academic interest, financial limitations, and other social and political factors has constrained it. This resulted in a cross-cultural circulation of misinformation about Romani people and the reproduction of Romani myths and stereotypes in fiction. This project aims to analyze selected literary works on Gypsies from three Eastern and Western European countries and two periods to unpack the cultural and political roots of Romani literary misrepresentation. This research employs a range of theoretical frameworks chosen to put the Gypsy protagonists under maximum spotlight without unnecessary repetition, …

Abundant Bodies In Times Of Excess: A Critical Exploration Of Fatness From Cairo To Tokyo, Sarah Aly

Theses and Dissertations

This work is an autoethnographic exploration of the social construction of fatness in contexts of existing and emerging neoliberal state control through the embodied experiences of fat people, following the tradition of ‘fat epistemology’ promoted by the emerging 'critical fat studies' field. It is a comparative study of the experiences of fatness as an unstable embodied category of being, rather than a liminal undesirable state or medical condition, in Cairo, Alexandria, and Tokyo, paying particular attention to the gender, racial, and class dynamics surrounding the construction (and marginalization) of fatness across various spatial and temporal contexts. These experiences are considered …

Swipe For More: Digital Sex Education, The Emergence Of Femtech And The Neoliberal Subject In Cairo, Egypt, Marisa Breathwaite

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I approach digital sex education in Cairo, Egypt and how it is navigated by Cairo’s urban elite. The way digital sex education in Cairo is consumed via social media and online courses is touted as “new” by popular media coverage. The content, products and services boast the first of their kind by the creators of the platforms themselves. That middle and upper class Cairene women are talking about sex online and consuming digital sex education content, in visible public forums, is portrayed as a completely novel phenomenon—in other words, platforms like Cairo’s first femtech company, Motherbeing, are …

A Queer Chinese Pilgrimage: Encountering Catholic Life In Manila, George Wu Bayuga

Journal of Global Catholicism

Starting in the late 1990s, Chinese Catholic priests, sisters, and seminarians began journeying to the Philippines to undergo religious and spiritual formation. This paper documents this journey and characterizes it as a kind of queer pilgrimage. Recognizing the queer theoretical parallels between minoritized populations under hegemony and Catholic life under socialism, this paper calls for attention to the queer work of imagining futures that emerges through processes of movement, encounter, and reflexivity across new political and social spaces. Specifically, this paper highlights how state-religious relations under socialism can differentially shape how Chinese Catholics think of themselves, faith formation, and how …

What Would It Take To Prepare Critical Spanish Heritage Language (Shl) Instructors?, Gabrielle Yocupicio

11th National Symposium on Spanish as a Heritage Language (Archived)

In the last decade, prominent scholars (Beaudrie & Loza, 2021; Leeman & Serafini, 2016; Martinez, 2016; Parra, 2016) have called for the adoption of critical language awareness (CLA) as a primary framework for carrying out Spanish heritage language (SHL) instructional goals. Thus, research on preparing SHL instructors for critical teaching continues to necessitate the opinions and advice of current practitioners engaging in CLA efforts. This presentation hopes to contribute to this research by honing into the recommendations of five educators working in a well-established SHL program at a U.S. Southwest university. Drawing from my dissertation, I employed qualitative semi-structured interviews …

Actitudes En Pro Y En Contra Sobre El Uso Del Lenguaje Inclusivo Y Su Enseñanza En El Salón De Clases De Shl., Brisa Del Bosque, Mica Boh

11th National Symposium on Spanish as a Heritage Language (Archived)

Con esta investigación, buscamos predecir si la enseñanza del lenguaje inclusivo en español en los salones de clase de español como SHL y como L2, provocará que su uso continúe en la lengua española o pase como una moda efímera.

Encuestamos a 75 instructores de Español K-12 en los Estados Unidos, que compartieron sus opiniones sobre la enseñanza y el uso del lenguaje inclusivo. La mayor parte de los instructores que respondieron nuestra encuesta, han enseñado a estudiantes de SHL y L2.

Como instructores de español, se puede ignorar la propuesta del lenguaje inclusivo y seguir enseñando de la forma …

“En El Corazón De Texas: La Necesidad De Profesionales Bilingües Y Un Análisis De Los Servicios Para Hispanohablantes En La Comunidad Local”, Karla Gonzalez, Danica Komlofske, Logan Stankard, Taegan Hendricks

11th National Symposium on Spanish as a Heritage Language (Archived)

No abstract provided.