Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

A Sentimental Education, Hannah Mcgregor

WLU Press Books

How do you tell the story of a feminist education, when the work of feminism can never be perfected or completed? In A Sentimental Education, Hannah McGregor, the podcaster behind Witch, Please and Secret Feminist Agenda, explores what podcasting has taught her about doing feminist scholarship not as a methodology but as a way of life.

Moving between memoir and theory, these essays consider the collective practices of feminist meaning-making in activities as varied as reading, critique, podcasting, and even mourning. In part this book is a memoir of one person’s education as a reader and a thinker, and …

From Perfect Victims To Collateral Damage: How Nigerian Women Are Implicated In And Impacted By Contemporary French Anti-Trafficking Policies And Discourse, Oladunni Patricia Oduyemi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although the Nordic Model has been embraced by the international anti-trafficking movement, recent studies, and closer examinations of France’s approach to the issue of sex trafficking reveal a strong anti-migrant and anti-sex work bias. In this thesis, I use studies of the impacts of France’s 2016 anti-trafficking bill on migrant sex workers, feminist critiques of neo-abolitionism and the Nordic Model, and examples of France’s hypocritical anti-migrant position, to explore how Nigerian women are harmed by the contemporary French fight against sex trafficking. The pervasive influence of anti-sex work radical feminism on anti-trafficking protocols which define the sex industry as analogous …

The Important Role And Contradictions Of Italian Women Image In Fashion, Magazines And Cinema During The Fascist Period, Lu M. Gomezdelatorre

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper discusses the tools of propaganda used by the fascist regime in fashion and cinema, and it focuses on the sets of opposing images used within these tools, and how they contributed to shaping the identities of Italian women during the time of the fascism in Italy. Moreover, this thesis attempts to demonstrate that fashion and films that aligned with the values of the regime and were seen as models of the fascist culture were also full of contradictions. Therefore, instead of unifying the nation, increasing national pride, and eliminating social gaps, they engulfed the regime in a series …

Homotextualité Réaliste: Cryptosexualité Et Subculture Homosexuelle Masculine Chez Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Vincent Sallé

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cette thèse étudie les romans du canon réaliste français, en particulier Le Rouge et le noir et L’Éducation sentimentale, sous l’angle d’une textualité parallèle ancrée dans la langue érotique et les pratiques et les lieux de la subculture pédéraste. Principalement étudiée jusqu’ici dans des corpus identifiés comme érotiques ou dans des passages représentant l’homosexualité, cette homotextualité est ici inscrite dans la diégèse hétérosexuelle qu’elle permet de relire de manière située et historicisée.

La période de 1830 à 1870 est perçue par l’histoire et la littérature comme un hiatus sur le thème de l’homosexualité, pris entre son histoire moderne à …

Decolonizing Genderqueer: An Inquiry Into The Gender Binary, Resistance, And Imperialistic Social Categories, Lauren E. Abruzzo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines core metaphysical properties of nonbinary and genderqueer categories in dominant U.S. contexts. I address a prevailing argument that these categories, by definition, resist the gender binary and are therefore radical modes of existing. In response, I put forth a view of ‘nonbinary’ and ‘genderqueer’ that I call the Diachronic Approach, which describes these categories as yet another set of tools within an imperialistic gender system, much like ‘man’ or ‘woman.’ In other words, they are what I refer to as imperialistic social categories. While nonbinary and genderqueer people do not fall perfectly within the U.S. gender …

A Labor Of Livingness: Oral Histories Of Formerly Incarcerated Black Women, Robin Mcginty

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Anchored in the political subjectivity of formerly incarcerated Black women, “A Labor of Livingness: Oral Histories of Formerly Incarcerated Black Women” is a project situated at the intersections of Black geographies and Black Feminist thought that considers a re/imagination of the ‘living prison’ experiences of formerly incarcerated Black women. I offer the term “a labor of livingness” as the liberatory articulation and everyday practices of resistance to the prison as a site of ‘living death’ that is reflective of the carceral experiences of currently and formerly incarcerated Black women. Attentive to the prison as a repository of epistemological knowledge production, …

Téacsúil Fionnachtain, Alan Delozier

Critical Inquiries Into Irish Studies

No abstract provided.

Gothic Girlhood And Resistance: Confronting Ireland’S Neoliberal Containment Culture In Tana French’S The Secret Place, Mollie Kervick

Critical Inquiries Into Irish Studies

The Secret Place (2014) exposes a persistent Western cultural impulse to contain the emotions of teenage girls when they demonstrate control over their lives. In the Irish context, the dismissal of teenage girls is resonant of a containment culture in which controlling women’s bodies and minds has been essential to upholding heteropatriarchal ideals. Resistance to the novel’s unresolved supernatural elements by readers and critics and the lack of sustained academic scholarship also point to an unsettling complacency with the neoliberal impulse to contain female emotion and lived experience in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland.

Crime On The Periphery: Tana French’S Criminal Geography, Deirdre Flynn

Critical Inquiries Into Irish Studies

This article will analyze how Tana French conceptualizes spatiality, focusing on her use of liminal spaces, edgelands and peripheries, as the settings for her crime scenes. Instead of more traditional Irish literary urban-rural binaries, French exploits the interface of both places, reflecting a contemporary post-industrial, post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. In particular, in In the Woods (2007) the untamed woodland behind the housing estate in Knocknaree becomes an interfacial zone between the rural and urban, past and present. In The Likeness (2009), Whitethorn House sits at the edge of the village geographically, politically, and historically. In French’s first two novels peripheral spaces …

Tana French: An Interview With Brian Cliff, Brian Cliff

Critical Inquiries Into Irish Studies

No abstract provided.

Socio-Cultural Determinants Of Women’S Homelessness: A Study Of Dar-Ul-Aman, Multan, Mahwish Rasheed, Tayyaba Batool Tahir, Zahid Zulfiqar

Journal of International Women's Studies

Home is an integral element of the Pakistani family system, and the idea of home is deeply embedded in Pakistani women’s consciousness. The prime objective of this study is to explore the socio-cultural factors responsible for women’s homelessness. This study highlights various determinants that lead women to leave their homes. The issue of women fleeing from their homes is a matter of disregard in Pakistan’s culture, such an action is considered as an issue of family’s self-image, respect, and honour. In the present study, Marxist and feminist lenses have been used to indicate women’s secondary status that is responsible for …

A Review Of The Cultural Gender Norms Contributing To Gender Inequality In Ghana: An Ecological Systems Perspective, Portia Nartey, Ozge Sensoy Bahar, Proscovia Nabunya

Journal of International Women's Studies

While significant progress has been made in improving the wellbeing of women and girls around the world, a gender gap still exists between men and women which is very evident in Ghana. Gender inequalities continue to persist in Ghana because of cultural gender norms that exalt and favor men and put women in subordinate and subservient roles. These cultural gender norms hinder women’s development and widen gender inequality between men and women in different system levels of society. Therefore, there is a need to examine the influence of these cultural gender norms on women’s lives using a systems framework to …

Book Review: Hood Feminism: Notes From The Women That A Movement Forgot, Shauntey James

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

Book Review: The Education Trap: Schools And The Remaking Of Inequality In Boston, Gisselle Rodriguez Benitez

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

Film Review: Gaza Mon Amour, 2020. This Palestinian, Drama Film With Spanish Subtitles Was Directed By Brothers Arab Nasser And Tarzan Nasser And Written By The Brothers And Fadette Drouard. Produced By Rani Massalha, Marie Legrand, Michael Eckelt. Distributed By Versatile Films., Tucker Nadeau, Manal Al-Natour

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

Our Slaps, Meenakshi Verma

Journal of International Women's Studies

"Our Slaps" raises the question of whether and at all traumatized mothers, who once used to be abused daughters, can confess and escape their psychic hinterlands without being tricked into becoming abusive by subconsciously switching their role identity from a victim to a persecutor. The poem achieves this by boldly offering that rare chance to one such mother who ultimately dares to lay the first cornerstone of intention for a healthy legacy of unabused women. Despite being trapped in a hopeless vicious cycle, this mother struggles to allow her young daughter to keep her innocence intact by deliberately curbing her …

Grandma, Widowhood And Her Family, Prateeti Ghosh

Journal of International Women's Studies

The Sati Abolition Act (1829) followed by the Hindu Widow Remarriage Act (1856) could not wholly eradicate the discrimination against Bengali widows in their own families. After almost 300 years, in the 21^st century, as it is witnessed by the narrator, in a few Hindu Bengali patriarchal traditional families, widows are deprived of their basic human rights such as choice of food, clothing etc. Discrimination against widows i.e., gender inequality, as a matter of fact, originates from her own family or the in-laws’ family. To eradicate inequality, awareness education should be given to both the victims as well as …

Pakistan’S Heuristic Her-Story Via Lahore, Afiya Shehrbano Zia

Journal of International Women's Studies

Despite the reference to the ‘long Partition,’ the idea of Pakistan has a hurried history: the word originated in the 1930s, the Lahore Resolution of 1940 pledged to realize the Two-Nation Theory and shortly after, in 1947, Pakistan was created. Seventy-five years on, unresolved questions of national identities and the ‘woman question’ remain large and elusive and I propose, the palimpsest city of Lahore is deeply and symbolically representative of these irresolute matters. Regardless of the veracity of the claim that Lahore is Pakistan, the core struggles, victories and losses of the country’s her-story can easily be recalled through the …

Women And Land Snails Consumption In The Southwest Region Of Cameroon, Forka Leypey Mathew Fomine

Journal of International Women's Studies

Both marine and terrestrial species of snails are consumed in most countries worldwide, including Southwest Cameroon where it is an age-old practice among various ethnic groups. Before the introduction of snail farming in the Southwest Region of Cameroon in the 1990s, all the residents who ate snails acquired them through gathering.

There is significant internal variation in the history of land snail consumption among four ethnic groups: the Banyang, Mbo, Balung, and Bakweri. The long history of land snail consumption among the Banyang and Mbo can be attributed to their geographical proximity to the eastern region of Nigeria, where the …

Mothers And Daughters: Reclaiming The Besieged Body Of Woman In Ashapurna Debi’S Trilogy, Subhadeep Ray, Goutam Karmakar

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper offers a close reading of the intergenerational trilogy by Ashapurna Debi, one of the first-canonized women-novelists of post-independence India: Pratham Pratisruti (The First Promise), 1965, Subarnalata, 1967, and Bakul Katha (Bakul’s Story), 1974. Reconstituting a history of almost two centuries and countering the colonial/postcolonial grand narratives, these novels act as a saga of Bengali Hindu lower and middle-class women’s plight under and resistance against a patriarchal social order operating at the most intimate levels of domestic relationships. Ashapurna Debi’s treatment of the intricacies of gender inequality and a woman’s response to the violence …

The Predicament Of The Vulnerable: Dalit Lives In Keeranur Hamlet, India, Jeeva M, Bijin Philip, Vinesh Raj V

Journal of International Women's Studies

Dalit people and Dalit women especially experience deep prejudice and pressures in Indian society. This paper highlights these challenges in a specific region of India, the village of Keeranur. The authors explore how to eradicate inequality and how Dalits can live with dignity in society as human beings. Both researchers and Dalits themselves as victims also propose alternative conditions to their current lives. We have gathered first-hand information from 67 Dalit women who reside in the village of Keeranur. In India, four states account for 50% of the Dalit population, according to the 2011 census. Tamilnadu and the hamlet of …

The Voices Of The Divorced: Reasons For Early Divorce Among Emiratis In Abu Dhabi, Fakir Al Gharaibeh, Muneera Majed Al Ali

Journal of International Women's Studies

There has been a growing interest, especially among Emirati organizations concerned with family development, in the rising rates of early divorce in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The purpose of this research is to identify the reasons for early divorce among Emiratis. The authors selected 2,162 Emirati early divorcees who were registered with the Family Development Foundation (FDF) in Abu Dhabi and who received services from the (FDF) between 2012 and 2018. Among those, 200 divorcees agreed to participate in this study. Quantitative data were analyzed using SPSS. Results found that the most common reasons for early divorce were the …

“Other” And “Othering” In The Intersectionality Of Inequalities: Alevi Women’S Experiences In Private And Public Spaces, Tuğba Metin Açer

Journal of International Women's Studies

Turkey is one of those geographies where ethnic and sectarian communities live together. Ethnic and sectarian differences in social life create a fragile structure in terms of "othering" and position groups against one another. Alevis are one of the several ethno-religious communities of Turkey that are positioned against Sunni Muslims. In Turkish literature, othering experiences of Alevis are discussed within the framework of totalizing discourses by reducing this issue to the category of sects, thus creating inequality in the social space which is generally related to the Alevis’ ethno-religious identity. Furthermore, it is observed that women’s experiences are ignored in …

Representations Of Arab Women In Hollywood Pre- And Post- 9/11, Eiman A. Eissa, Hala A. Guta, Rana S. Hassan

Journal of International Women's Studies

Many scholars argue that the image of Arabs in Hollywood has always been tainted by prejudice and stereotyping. However, little attention is paid to women's representation in general or the influence of 9/11 on that representation. This paper compares portrayals of Arab women in popular Hollywood films before and after 9/11. A purposive sample of 76 Arab female characters from 40 popular Hollywood films is used to conduct a content analysis, comparing portrayals in films released before and after 9/11. Popular Hollywood films are defined as films with at least 50,000 reviews that score seven or more on the International …

“Something Over And Beyond”: Victorian Women, Marriage And Independence In Anthony Trollope’S Can You Forgive Her?, Aleksandra Tryniecka

Journal of International Women's Studies

Anthony Trollope’s novel, Can You Forgive Her? offers a profound insight into a literary portrayal of Victorian femininity. The literary heroines in the novel (including Alice and Kate Vavasor, Arabella Greenow and Glencora Palliser) not only confront their hopes and ambitions with the principles of nineteenth-century society, but also offer an apt reflection on the universal notion of womanhood as incessantly suspended between and shaped by both social expectations and individual desires. I argue that Can You Forgive Her? offers a fully-fledged, multifaceted, literary vision of the Victorian woman, with her desires, dreams, fears and longings reaching beyond the nineteenth-century …

Revisiting Masculinity And Othering In Diasporic Fiction, Shilpi Saxena, Diksha Sharma

Journal of International Women's Studies

Contemporary literary discourse has extensively deliberated upon the construction of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ that not only legitimizes the politics of othering but also gives rise to the crisis of masculinity in the context of diaspora. Against this background, this article aims to examine the aspects of masculinity in diasporic fiction with a special reference to Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen (1974), Joan Riley’s Waiting in the Twilight (1987), and Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990). Deliberating upon the intersection of othering and masculinities, the present article intends to examine the experience of ‘masculinity crisis’ among men of …

Advancing Livelihoods And Transformation Of Rural Women: The Role Of Critical Pedagogy In Bridging Gender Gap In South Africa, Sampson Tawiah, Itumeleng Setlhodi

Journal of International Women's Studies

The essence of advancing livelihoods is to heighten socio-economic transformation among the poor, especially rural women through education. The statement above suggests that locating these women as critical stakeholders and affording them opportunities to improve their skills and knowledge can advance values significantly. In the country in general, rural women generate less income as compared to men. Hence, educational practices geared toward women are to address this gap. Transformation, however, does not come cheap. It takes consented effort on educators, learners, and society to embrace educational provisions, programs, and new teaching methods for a sustainable change, especially for rural women. …

A Qualitative Exploration Of Women’S Self-Knowledge And Perception Surrounding Their Reproductive Bodies, Lauren Anderson, Marcia D. Nichols

Journal of International Women's Studies

This study examines what happens when a defined normal, in the sociocultural context of western civilization, does not align with women’s diverse experiences of their bodies throughout their reproductive lifespan. The study explores women’s frequent negative affects surrounding their reproductive bodies driven by western culture’s societal definition of normal. Using modified interview questions from Emily Martin’s 1987 study: The Woman in the Body, which help examine women’s perception of achieving womanhood through their corporeal experiences including menarche, menstruation, menopause, and pregnancy, this study strives to explore questions that women have about their bodies during their reproductive lifespan: How does …

Gender Mainstreaming Challenges And Opportunities In Government Agencies In Selected Government Offices In Fogera District, Ethiopia, Asrat Dagnew Kelkay

Journal of International Women's Studies

The main objectives of this study were to assess current gender mainstreaming practices and to identify opportunities and challenges in mainstreaming of gender issues in selected government offices in Fogera district, Ethiopia. The specific objectives of the study were to assess and analyze the practice of gender mainstreaming, to identify the existing opportunities for gender mainstreaming and to examine the major practical problems that inhibit gender mainstreaming. The study used qualitative research methods and case study research design. Consequently, purposive sampling was used to select the informants and discussants of the study. The findings showed that most participants of the …

Breaking Free From The Stringent Fetters Of Patriarchy: The Discourse Of Resistance In Vijay Tendulkar’S Silence! The Court Is In Session, Oliva Roy

Journal of International Women's Studies

For centuries, the Brahminical social order in India has endorsed hegemonic masculinity and reinforced as well as legitimized a pseudo-equal relationship between men and women in Indian traditional, orthodox society, where men exercise coercive power, authority and dominance over women. Throughout the past centuries, women have experienced marginalization, suffered exploitation, discrimination and subjugation in every sphere of life, notably in economic affairs, political activities and decision-making processes. Women have been labelled as the ‘inferior strata’, the ‘voiceless other’ and the ‘subaltern’ in our society. Vijay Tendulkar, the doyen of Marathi theatre, has portrayed women, not as weak and submissive victims …