Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Reconstructing The Surreal: Female Artists And The Transformation Of Surrealist Aesthetics, Erin Regan

MA Theses

This thesis examines the role and legacy of female artists who took part in the Surrealist visual art movement of the early 20th century. Canonical accounts have historically privileged the contributions of male artists, marginalizing women to the fringes of the movement by framing female artists as being primarily relevant as muses for their male peers. This study contests this historiographical misconception, relying upon visual analysis and archival research, as well as drawing from psychological, feminist, and postmodern theory, ultimately arguing that their artistic and theoretical innovations fundamentally restructured Surrealism’s visual vocabulary, theoretical objectives, and cultural legacy. This thesis is …

Voices Of The Silenced, Frank E. Dobson Jr., Madison Borowicz, Cedar Carden, Nick Clark, Kenneth Fischer, Selah Gitonga, Ray Harvey, Tanasia Cunningham, Max Lewis, Gretchen Schneider, Raymond Shellow, Destiny Sexton, Isaiah Siaway, Awo Warsame, Aashvi Soni

Undergraduate Publications

Voices of the Silenced is a collection of creative work produced by the students of English 1192 at Otterbein University (Fall 2025). This booklet brings together prose, poetry, visual art, and multimedia expression centered on themes of activism, self-advocacy, identity, resilience, and social change.

Table of Contents:

• Preface by Dr. Frank Dobson
• Are You Becoming Who You Want to Be? by Madison Borowicz
• Agree to Disagree by Cedar Carden
• A Seriously Unserious Nation by Nick Clark
• Closeted Courage by Kenneth Fischer
• The Philosophy of an Activist by Selah Gitonga
• The Price We Pay by Ray Harvey & TaNasia Cunningham
• The …

“Us Who Die For You”: Necropolitics Through The Historiography Of Zombies, Kazi Stanton-Thomas

Gender, Sexuality, and Intersectionality Studies Honors Papers

No abstract provided.

Blazing Turquoise And Coral Light Jewels Of Veiled Empowerment: Buddha Ye Shes Mtsho Rgyal (ཡེ་ཤེས་མཚོ་རྒྱལ) And Saint Hildegard Von Bingen In The Lotus Of Ever-Excellent Feminist Dialogue, Janice Leigh Poss

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This Women's and Gender Studies in Religion dissertation seeks to restore awareness of women's religious leadership using the actual embodied experience of Yeshe Tsogyal and Hildegard von Bingen embedded in the philosophical terms Erlebnis (German), Padartha/Bhava (Sanskrit), and srid pa (Tibetan). Brief definitions are: Erlebnis as enthusiastic, lived experience and awareness, Padarthas as categories of real things or actualities, Bhava as the act of emotional or spiritual feeling, and Srid pa as becoming in possibility. Drawing on the above four terms encapsulated in a feminist transnational and intersectional methodological framework, this project reinforces women’s authority and influence in religion as …

Ayer Y Hoy De España En Guinea Ecuatorial. Construcción De La Colonia Africana Y Sus Consecuencias En La Actualidad A Través De Las Voces Femeninas En La Literatura En Español, Jesús Ponte Bernal

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

Equatorial Guinea was a Spanish colony until 1968. Despite this, it has never received much attention from the Iberian Peninsula, so its literature and history remain unknown to much of the Spanish-speaking population. This has been due to historical factors, such as the Franco dictatorship, which classified everything related to the African colony as confidential, but also due to the racial exclusion experienced by the Black population throughout history. Generally, only some Equatorial Guinean male authors have managed to carve out a place for themselves in the cultural canon.

This study analyzes eight books whose plots take place in Equatorial …

Expressing Experiences Of Being Gender Non-Conforming In The “Ladies” Restroom Through Autoethnography-Based Research Poetics, Ellen D.B. Riggle

Gender and Women's Studies Faculty Publications

Three research poems are created as an autoethnographic response to feedback on a research article on the author’s experiences as a gender non-conforming person in women’s public restrooms. The feedback loop includes the sharing of lived experiences by others and theoretical (why?) discussions in the context of the gendered policing and politicalization of women’s restrooms. The first found poem includes words, phrases, and descriptions of images used to label spaces designated as women’s restrooms. The second prose poem recounts the author's experiences through a reframing of risk to women’s health, understanding the cultural context of male entitlement and White supremacy, …

Can Love Bloom On A Battlefield: An Analysis Of Queer Militaristic Fanfiction, Brandon Bost

Theses and Dissertations--Communication

It is noted that readers and fans hold unique and valid interpretations of texts, interpretations that become expressed in fan works like fan art, memes, or the subject of this study, fanfiction. This study performs textual analysis on queer fanfiction in Metal Gear Solid and Code Geass fandoms. It examines the unique relationship militarism holds with intimacy, and how intimacy intersects with violence and control in unique ways in these fan texts. Within these fanfics, militarism can serve as a barrier to intimacy, forcing relationships to adapt to militaristic structures within these fan interpretations.

Madness In The Mixtape: Gothic Literature And Pop Music, Nicholas Dertinger

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

In Gothic literature, madness has often been connected to the outliers of what is considered socially normal. This dissertation explores the enduring theme of madness, particularly the figure of the “madwoman,” in both women’s literature and in its “afterlife”—or continuing conversation with—contemporary pop music. Through a comparative analysis of songs including Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” (1978), Beyoncé’s “Hold Up” (2016), Lady Gaga’s “Plastic Doll” (2020), Olivia Rodrigo’s “good 4 u” (2021), Billie Eilish’ “What Was I Made For?” (2023), Paramore’s cover of “Burning Down the House” (2024), Taylor Swift’s “mad woman” (2020) and Florence + the Machine’s “Dream Girl Evil” …

“None In Velvet Gowns”: Camp Followers And White Womanhood In Eighteenth-Century Anglo-American Warfare, Angelica Labren Torres

History Theses

For over two hundred years, women who followed American and European armies during the long eighteenth century were popularly stereotyped and denigrated as prostitutes, burdens, and generally individuals of ill repute by both contemporaries and subsequent generations of historians. While recent scholarship has largely debunked this long-standing characterization as simplistic and inaccurate, the question remains: why exactly were these women so mischaracterized in their own time, particularly by commissioned officers and other members of Anglo-American middling and elite classes, when ample evidence existed of their material usefulness and comparative marital fidelity? This thesis seeks to address the ideological and cultural …

From Voice To Noise: Accented Speech, Constructed Languages, And Subtitling Practices As Markers Of Difference, Alice Alonso Limongi

Course Work

This monograph explores three main strategies of vocal exotification in Anglophone film: representations of accented speech, inclusion of constructed languages, and non-subtitling of snippets of other languages. Using Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding framework, I approach these practices as rhetorical devices that both construct and are constructed by the complexity of our social landscapes. Portrayals of accented speech, constructed languages, and subtitling practices form a gradient of abstraction, where the denotative meaning of words gradually loses importance to the sonic characteristics of the voice. Combining broader cultural scholarship from Edward Said, sound studies writings on power and language from Nina Sun Eidsheim …

"For What Do You Hunger?": Metaphors Of Consumption And The Gothic Female Experience, Olivia G. Wychock

Master’s Theses

“For what do you hunger?”: Metaphors of Consumption and the Gothic Female Experience offers a feminist-forward analysis on the female experience in Gothic literature, specifically through the lens of metaphors of consumption. This thesis examines how, from the Gothic’s inception, women have been the victims of sexual violence and misconduct, rendering them disposable by patriarchal agents. As the Gothic begins to change over the course of the nineteenth century, female protagonists gain agency and move from being completely victimized to playing the villain and, eventually in post-nineteenth-century Gothic, becoming the victor. That is to say that the Gothic both reinforces …

What Are Men Doing To Prevent Gender-Based Violence? Challenges And Resistance To Traditional Masculinities In Costa Rica, Fiorella Masís Aguilar

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Achieving gender equality and reducing violence, especially violence against women, requires men's involvement. This research focuses on understanding the actions and strategies that Costa Rican men who challenge traditional masculinities use to question or resist hegemonic traditional masculinities. Furthermore, it explores what factors influenced the development of these actions and how the participants understand that hegemonic masculinities and their actions to change them are related to gender-based violence. According to Planning Department of the Judiciary of Costa Rica, four out of five perpetrators of violent crimes are men, and eight out of ten victims are women. Using semi-structured interviews with …

Marginalizing Messages, Emotional Impacts, And Coping Strategies: Exploring The Experiences Of Bangladeshi Female Gamers In Online Multiplayer Gaming Spaces, Tahura Tabassum Tari

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This study explores the experiences of Bangladeshi female gamers in online multiplayer gaming spaces, focusing on the marginalizing messages they encounter, the emotional and social impacts, and the coping strategies they use. Although online gaming is often seen as an open and inclusive digital space, for many women it remains shaped by sexism, exclusion, and cyberbullying. In Bangladesh, these experiences are further influenced by patriarchal norms, moral policing, and gendered expectations. Using a qualitative research design, this study employed in-depth semi-structured interviews with Bangladeshi female gamers who actively participate in online multiplayer games, along with cyber-ethnographic observation of gaming-related Facebook …

Natalist Incentives And Stratified Reproduction: Framing Of Reproductive Policies Under The 2025 Trump Administration By Print News Media, Sadie K. Marsh

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

In this research, I seek to analyze the reproductive policies set forth by the Donald J. Trump Administration in the year of 2025. In this analysis, I ask, what role stratified reproduction plays in the framing of the natalist policies by the news media. Secondly, I ask the following questions: 1) What reproductive health issues were centralized in the print news coverage of the 2025 Trump Administration? 2) Does the mainstream news media identify how President Trump’s policies differentially benefit and marginalize individuals in a manner that privileges some mothers over others? To answer these questions, I conducted a qualitative …

Helena María Viramontes’ Under The Feet Of Jesus And Sandra Cisneros’ The House On Mango Street: An Exploratory Analysis Of Female Friendship In The Chicana Feminist Bildungsroman, Patrice Donnelly

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This exploratory analysis examines female friendships presented in two mid-twentieth century Chicana feminist Bildungsroman, each between a Chicana protagonist and a female friend as foil. One friendship in Under the Feet of Jesus, by Helena María Viramontes, is interracial; the other, in The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, is Chicana. Both friendships interrogate the boundaries within mainstream feminism, particularly its monolithic views and complicity with power. Each friendship offers a Chicana feminist perspective centering family and cultural community. The theoretical foundation includes classical and contemporary understandings of Bildungsroman as literary form, Toni Morrison’s American Africanism, …

The Gender Binary And Its Effects On Athletes And Society At Large As Described In Newspaper Accounts Of Competitors In The Summer 2024 Olympics, Neo Zheng

Honors College Theses

The purpose of this paper is to look at the impact of gendered language and gender rhetoric on the continued social maintenance of gender, especially as it relates to athletes. This project focuses on the patterns that arise in language of news articles on two female athletes participating in the 2024 Paris Olympics who are accused of being transgender or male, shedding light on how media outlets talk about the topic of gender in athletes specifically, and society itself more generally.

Iberoamerican Neomedievalisms: “The Middle Ages” And Its Uses In Latin America, Edited By Nadia R. Altschul And Maria Ruhlmann, Emily Francomano

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

A Convert’S Tale: Art, Crime, And Jewish Apostasy In Renaissance Italy, By Tamar Herzig, Lyn Blanchfield

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

The Hungry City: A Year In The Life Of Medieval Barcelona, By Marie A. Kelleher, Jessica Minieri

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

The Permeable Self: Five Medieval Relationships, By Barbara Newman, Laura Moncion

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Chaucer And Becket’S Mother: “The Man Of Law’S Tale,” Conversion, And Race In The Middle Ages, By Meriem Pagès, Daisy E. Black

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Eleanor Of Aquitaine, As It Was Said: Truth And Tales About The Medieval Queen, By Karen Sullivan, Lauren Wood

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Introduction: Intersections Of Gender And Genres In Medieval Judaism, Christianity, And Islam, Linda G. Jones

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The introductory essay describes the aims of this special volume, which are to analyze the intersections between religion and gender in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultures, as reflected in diverse pre- and early modern textual genres, and to explore the relationships between gender and genres. Toward these ends the authors interrogate how a given textual genre, as well as the gender of the author/compiler and the intended audience, might influence the representations of gender. The introductory essay summarizes the seven articles constituting the volume, highlights the points of contact and differences among them, and reflects upon their broader significance to …

“Be Only A Man": Authority, Dependency, And Masculinity In Geniza Letters Of Mothers To Their Sons, Oded Zinger

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

One of the most exciting discoveries among the Cairo Geniza, a rich trove of ancient manuscripts discovered in the Ben Ezra Synagogue at Fustat (Old Cairo), is women’s letters. Up until the early modern period, we have no text written by a Jewish woman preserved in traditional channels of transmission—that is, manuscripts copied by scribes and preserved in libraries or personal collections. Yet the Geniza documents preserve over two hundred letters written by women in different languages and spanning several centuries. Twenty-nine of these letters are from mothers to sons. Letters from mothers to sons have some distinctive characteristics when …

The Masculinization Of Grief In Arabic Adab Literature: Ibn ‘Abd Al-Rabbih’S Al-‘Iqd Al-Farīd, Linda G. Jones

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This article explores the relationship between masculinity and literary expressions of grief in premodern Islamic cultures based on “The Book on Women Mourners, Condolences, and Elegies,” from the adab anthology, al- ‘Iqd al-farīd (The Unique Necklace), compiled by the Cordovan belletrist Ibn ‘Abd Rabbih (d. 940). While Ibn ‘Abd Rabbih’s selection of literary specimens by female authors has been studied in depth, the far more numerous examples of male-authored bereavement literature have not been analyzed in detail. Hence this article has two aims. First, it will examine the relatively neglected genres of Arab-Islamic bereavement literature featuring grieving …

Gender And Genres In The Ādāb-I Menāzil, Özgen Felek

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Gender and gender roles routinely appear across different genres of Islamic literature. Since each genre’s handling of the subject of gender is evaluated within the borders of that genre, studies in the field have been based on specific texts or genres. The Ādāb-ı menāzil (“Manners of the Household”), written by ʿAbdü’l-Laṭīf ibn-i Ṭurmış Ḳaramānī (d. 1516), is a unique Ottoman Turkish text that brings together the perspectives of different genres. It is a book of morals, advice, and religious knowledge written for women, as Ḳaramānī explicitly declares in the preface. The work includes Qur’anic verses, hadiths, stories, and legends …

Gender And Historiography In The Construction Of The Image Of King John And Queen Violant Of Aragon, Oriol Catalán

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The reign of John I of Aragon (r. 1387–1396) and his second wife Violant de Bar has been often denigrated by Catalan historiography with political arguments but also because of ensuing gender debates associating the shortcomings of his reign with his supposed manly weakness. This article deconstructs both political and gendered representations of the Aragonese monarchs by distinguishing what is reasonably attributable to them from accusations motivated by the conflicts of the time and later contexts. Drawing upon the concepts of “hegemonic masculinity” and “multiple masculinities,” the article compares the gender representations of King John I and Queen Violant in …

“Softer Than A Woman?" Gendered Images In Odo Of Cheriton’S Anti-Judaic Sermon, Jussi Hanska, Sari Katajala-Peltomaa

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This article analyzes the intersection of the anti-Judaic and gendered motifs presented in English theologian and preacher Odo of Cheriton’s (d. 1246–1247) sermon for the tenth Sunday after the Holy Trinity. The sermon features an exemplum that is a distorted reinterpretation of a story originally found in Jewish historian Flavius Josephus’s Bellum iudaicum, which describes the siege and fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. In one memorable passage Josephus tells how a Jewish woman named Mary loses her mind because of the hardships of the siege and hunger, kills and roasts her baby boy, and eats it. Yet Odo …

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal Of Gender And Sexuality 61.2 (2026)

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Conversion And The Reconfiguration Of Religious Gender Roles: Conversas And Moriscas In Late Medieval Iberia, Ivana Arsić

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This study addresses the impact of the cultural homogenization policy in late medieval Castilian and Aragonese societies by analyzing Spanish Inquisition documents through a gendered lens. Specifically, this article illustrates how these records depict the religious experiences of Conversas and Moriscas (Christian women of Jewish and Muslim origin, respectively). Whereas recent investigations within cultural studies have engaged in descriptive analysis of female conversion, this article will provide a causal explanation through a comparative gendered perspective, arguing that women’s heightened involvement in religion was particular to the context of forced conversion. Toward this end, I first examine how Jewish and Muslim …