Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Menstruation Regulation: A Feminist Critique Of Menstrual Product Brands On Instagram, Max Faust

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Much research about advertisements for menstrual products reveals the ways in which such advertising perpetuates shame and reinforces unrealistic ideals of femininity and womanhood. This study aims to examine the content of Instagram posts by four different menstrual product brands in hopes of understanding how these functions may or may not be carried out by social media posts by these brands as well. Building on the body of research about menstrual shame and advertising, I specifically ask: How do the Instagram pages for four menstrual product brands dissuade individuality; how do they prescribe femininity; and how do these functions differ …

Conduct Becoming: Good Wives And Husbands In The Later Middle Ages, Tovah Bender

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Imperial Ladies Of The Ottonian Dynasty: Women And Rule In Tenth-Century Germany, Janna Bianchini

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Fragments For A History Of Vanishing Humanism, Heather Blatt

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Her Father's Daughter: Gender, Power, And Religion In The Early Spanish Kingdoms, Jessica A. Boon

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Imagined Communities: Constructing Collective Identities In Medieval Europe, Charles-Louis Morand-Metivier

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

"Le Bone Florence Of Rome": A Critical Edition And Facing Translation Of A Middle English Romance Analogous To Chaucer's "Man Of Law's Tale", Brendan O'Connell

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Royal And Elite Households In Medieval And Early Modern Europe: More Than Just A Castle, Elena Woodacre

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Associations Of Sex, Gender, And Gender Role Beliefs With Mental Health Attitudes, Ariel Erazo

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mental health stigma is a strong deterrent for individual with mental illness utilizing mental healthcare. Individuals living with a mental illness experience shame and marginalization due to stigma. Stigma is perpetuated through stereotypes created and used by people in the majority. Studies have been done to assess individual’s attitudes toward mental healthcare seeking in regards to gender, age, race, and profession. This study aimed to look at traditional gender role beliefs, sex, and gender expression as predictors of individual’s mental health attitudes and individual’s views of mental health norms. Using a cross-sectional survey, 392 participants completed scales that included the …

Hello Girls On Strike: Telephone Operators, The Fort Smith General Strike And The Struggle For Democracy In Great War Arkansas, Kyra Schmidt

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In September 1917, Fort Smith telephone operators formed a local of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Soon after, company leaders dismissed two of the women who were instrumental in the formation of the union. After many attempts to meet and negotiate with the company leaders, the remaining operators walked out and began striking on September 19. This strike lasted almost four months and brought chaos into the city including the indictments, trials, and convictions of the mayor, J. H. Wright, and chief of police, Jim Fernandez. The election after Wright’s conviction saw the first female votes in Arkansas history. …

"No One's Gonna Say That At Church:" Women's Experiences With Infertility In Christian Faith Communities, Donna Paulsen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study explores women’s experiences with infertility in Christian faith communities. Drawing from nine one-on-one interviews, the author argues that the presence of particular religious ideologies, social interactions, and rituals within faith communities contributed to the stigmatization and marginalization of study participants. Employing Muted Group Theory, the author uncovers the communicative strategies infertile women employ to resist these oppressive practices. A qualitative analysis of participants’ narratives presents two principal categories, containing a total of four findings relating to the harmful beliefs and practices of these women’s faith communities. The author argues that the veneration of motherhood and children suggests that …

Battlefield Of Bandages: A Case Study On Sanitation Policy, Medical Reform, And Disease Prevention During The War Of Rebellion, Ashley L. Simpson

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The American Civil War was a devastating conflict costing over 750,000 lives and millions of dollars in the aftermath. However, the most urgent threat was not musket balls, cannons or grapeshot. Afflictions such as typhoid fever, malaria, smallpox, measles, pneumonia, and diarrhea contracted from crowded, unsanitary camp and hospital conditions were responsible for two-thirds of all Civil War casualties. In April 1861, a group of Union women met at church to organize a relief agency whose goal was to aid the thousands of Union soldiers dying from disease. Armed with enlightenment ideas about medical care and sanitation, the Women's Central …

Anti-Normative Women And Queer Space In Early Modern Drama, Chelsea Brooks

Theses

The most interesting oddity about the Early Modern English stage is the overwhelming presence of the female form despite the obvious lack of female performers. Male actors performed female characters and sometimes those female characters were subversive and tested the boundaries of their constructed heteronormative society. A common comedic trope followed the crossdressed crossgendered heroine, or the boy actor dressed as women dressed as a man. This trope appears in the plays discussed in this thesis: Thomas Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West, Part 1 and John Lyly’s Gallathea. By adapting Michel de Certeau’s concept of space, wherein space …

“This Is How You Navigate The World”: Impacts Of Mormon Rhetoric On White Queer Members' Identity Performances, Ben Brandley

Communication ETDs

The Mormon Church is one of the fastest growing and most conservative religious organizations in the world. The Church’s conservatism has meant that its rhetorics, doctrines, and discourses have cultivated a culture of queerphobia and anti-queer sentiments. By interviewing 15 transgender, bisexual, and gay Mormons who are active in the Church, I conducted a critical thematic analysis that yields insights and critiques into how Mormon rhetoric impacts the identity performances and relationships of queer members. Using queer theory and Whiteness as conceptual and theoretical lenses, the analysis revealed four major themes: 1) queerness as non-identity, 2) the primacy of divine …

Science Under The Microscope And Legality On Trial: How Female Authors In Latin America Confront And Challenge The Patriarchal Control Of Science And Legality In The Representation Of Women, Anna Bellum

Spanish and Portuguese ETDs

In this dissertation, I analyze a selection of works by eight Latin American female authors in order to explore how they represent the process of the social construction of women’s identities and roles in the male-dominated social, institutional, familial, and personal spaces that force women into particular positions of subordination. This analysis will focus, in particular, on how women writers represent the hegemonic systems of legality and science in order to highlight their role in the reproduction of values, practices, and institutions that maintain male control and female exploitation.

Each of the authors I analyze addresses the construction of women’s …

Why I Write In Yiddish, Karen Alkalay-Gut

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

“The Poem Is What Lies Between A Between”: Mahmoud Darwish And The Prosody Of Displacement, Ayelet Even-Nur

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish grew up in Israel as an internal refugee living under Israeli military rule, legally classified as a “present-absentee alien.” This article focuses on his 1995 volume of poetry, Limādhā tarakta al-ḥiṣān waḥīdan? (Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?), to study the manner in which Darwish’s cultivation of the musical and aural aspects of poetry serves as a means of poetically attending to the effects of dispossession and displacement. Through a discussion of the poems in the collection’s fourth section, Ghurfa l’il kalām maʿ al-nafs (A Room to Talk to Oneself …

Queering Identity Politics In Shimon Adaf’S Aviva-No, Yael Segalovitz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article offers a queer reading of Shimon Adaf’s volume of poetry, Aviva-No (2009), analyzing it in conjunction with his recent collection of essays on identity formation, Ani aherim (I am others) (2018). Adaf’s oeuvre has been primarily studied through the lens of ethnicity and race. This article demonstrates that gender plays a key role in his body of work. Aviva-No, which is a lamentation for the poet’s sister, destabilizes the boundaries between the mourning brother and the absent sister. This ontological deconstruction stimulates in Aviva-No a broader undoing of gender as an embodied identity. The volume is replete …

Poetry In Response To The “Disengagement Plan”: Identity, Poetics And Politics, Tamar Wolf-Monzon

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article will examine the corpus of poems written in the years 2004-2005, in response to the Israeli government’s Disengagement plan that unilaterally evacuated all Israeli communities from Gush Katif in the southern Gaza Strip. These poems are explored as a political speech act, whose purpose is to bring about an extra-linguistic outcome: to impact upon the feelings and thoughts of the addressees, as well as to influence them in relation to issues of identity and social affiliation. Indeed, these poems are part of a long and complex tradition of Hebrew political poetry, characterized not only by a response to …

"A Generation Of Wonderful Jews Will Grow From The Land": The Desire For Nativeness In Hebrew Israeli Poetry, Hamutal Tsamir

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article examines the ways in which the desire for nativeness is constructed in Israeli Hebrew poetry through several historical episodes: H. N. Bialik’s poem 1896 poem “In the Field”; the poets as pioneers/immigrants in the 1920s, in contrast to the “nativist” poet Esther Raab; and the “nativist” poets of the 1950s (Statehood Generation), focusing on Moshe Dor. The desire to be native—to belong to the land in a way that is natural, self-evident, and therefore absolute and unquestionable— is one of the constitutive desires of nationalism in general, and of Zionism in particular. In Bialik’s poem, written during the …

Paradoxical Feminism: Attempts At Gender Equality In The French Revolution, Maggie E. Stanton

Young Historians Conference

As French society found itself swept into a frenzied pursuit of liberty, equality, and fraternity, French Revolutionaries ironically neglected to include all citizens in their so-called “inalienable rights of man.” Most notably, the newly formed French National Assembly forgot its women. As a result, female Revolutionaries fought not only for a more equitable political system, but also for the rights and liberties of women. Yet, feminists of the French Revolution faced a paradoxical dilemma. In attempting to publish political writings, form political clubs, and wield weapons against the monarchy, women were forced out of the domestic sphere, an action that …

Catherine De' Medici: The Crafting Of An Evil Legend, Lindsey J. Donohue

Young Historians Conference

Catherine de’ Medici is commonly known and referred to by historians as an “Evil queen”. This paper aims to examine how her reputation has been built upon legend and myth rather than fact. It explores how sixteenth century Europe’s overwhelming patriarchal prejudice and bias, along with an underlying presence of Xenophobia, has influenced the conclusion many historians have made about Medici. Rather, Catherine de’ Medici was a strategic ruler whose goal was to maintain peace at all cost during a religiously trying time. Through the commentary of a sixteenth century anonymous European writer, the paper aims to show that Medici …

A Review Of Joanna Wharton, Material Enlightenment: Women Writers And The Science Of The Mind, 1770–1830, Kandice Sharren

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

A Review of Joanna Wharton, Material Enlightenment: Women Writers and the Science of the Mind, 1770–1830, by Kandice Sharren

Review Of Women’S Periodicals And Print Culture In Britain, 1690–1820s: The Long Eighteenth Century, Lisa Maruca

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

Review of Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain

Review Of Deborah Boyle, The Well-Ordered Universe The Philosophy Of Margaret Cavendish, Dustin D. Stewart

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

A review of Deborah Boyle's book The Well-Ordered Universe (2018), by Dustin D. Stewart.

Entering The Lady’S Dressing Room: Using Feminist Game Design To Look At And Beyond The Male Gaze In Swift’S The Lady’S Dressing Room., Melanie D. Holm

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

In 2017, I developed “Entering the Lady’s Dressing Room,” an Interactive Fiction game based on Jonathan Swift’s satiric poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1734) to help my students become better readers of Restoration satire, and poetry generally. I did this for two reasons: to test whether the digital mediation of game-playing could help my undergraduate students more fruitfully engage with the poem, and 2) to theorize the similarities between poetic interpretation, the multiple narrative-making experience of game-playing. This article takes seriously the idea that poetry is play. It describes the circumstances that led to the development of the game and …

Cutting Edge Courtship In Eighteenth-Century London, Margaret E. France

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

In 1759, an anonymous twenty-two year-old woman placed an advertisement for a husband in the London Daily Advertiser that inspired an unusual sequel: a pamphlet purporting to collect her responses. Exploring the context of this woman's actions and the letters themselves reveals attitudes regarding matrimony and the dangers of virtual social networks that feel surprisingly contemporary.

La Llorona In Nuevomexicana Poetic Narratives: Reflections On Writing And Memory, Sutherland Jaramillo

Spanish and Portuguese ETDs

This paper focuses on poetic narratives that consider the folklore figure of La Llorona. I argue that contemporary nuevomexicana poets are responding to regional narratives as a way of challenging traditional structures of the lore and female archetypes to reclaim the identity and voice of the figure of La Llorona. Through literature that considers structure and archetype of the lore, Chicana feminist theory, and spectral theory, this essay surveys a selection of poems: “La Llorona Speaks” (2018) by Mercedez Holtry, “Una Carta de Amor de la Llorona” (2011) by Jessica Helen Lopez and “La Llorona” (2018) by Joanna Vidaurre-Trujillo. Through …

Mind To Mirror To Life: Sexual Health From A Body Positive Lens, Kacey Richardson

Honors Theses

Body image and sexual health are inextricably linked. It is crucial for college students to understand the importance of body image within sexual health in order to capture the full scope of sexual well-being, although most existing sexuality education resources for college students fail to make this connection. This thesis demonstrates the necessity for comprehensive sexual health education that incorporates a focus on body image to promote the health and wellness of college students. Using an intersectional outlook, the thesis evaluates existing resources and presents the contents of an original workshop titled “Mind to Mirror to Life: Sexual Health from …

Metaphysics Of Gender, Natalie Chan

Global Tides

In this paper, I respond to Judith Butler's objections to the gender matrix and present issues with her theory of gender: the gender performativity theory.