Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

The Feminine Way Of Campaigning: How Female Politicians Navigate Gender Bias, Jordan V. Pruitt

2025 Fall Honors Capstones Projects - Archive

Women are rapidly taking over the world of politics, holding more elected positions than ever before. With the increase of women in politics, we begin to question how gender stereotypes and bias affect female politicians. There are numerous studies examining the public's perception of female candidates and how they are framed differently from their male opponents in the media; however, the main objective of this project is to learn how gender affects women’s campaign strategies or public personas, and how this differs from their male counterparts. Through interviews with women in locally elected positions, this study examines these issues through …

An Analysis Of Narratives Representing Women’S Agency And Role In The Public Space In Najd In The Nineteenth And Early Twentieth Centuries, Hanan Alazaz

Journal of Middle East and Islamic Studies

This paper is a review and analysis of historical narratives and poems to propose a framework of the agency of women in one of the most conservative regions in Arabia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Najd. These narratives include examples of recorded historical oral accounts and poems by women that exhibit women’s contribution to the public life and participation in the decision-making within their tribal communities. The narratives and literature discussed in the paper reflect these women’s involvement in the fields of education, politics, trade and military activity. Moreover, a reading of poetry that broadcasts their resistance to …

Gender Dynamics In Quadball: Making Space On The Pitch, Emily X. Mcnally

Culture, Society, and Praxis

Quadball is a sport based on Quidditch, the fictional sport born from the book series, Harry Potter, minus the flying. The introduction of this paper provides an overview of the sport and why gender plays such a significant role in it. Twelve players were brought together for a study and were put into three focus groups to discuss and hear other player’s perspectives on gender dynamics within the sport. There was a non-binary, women’s and men’s group. Overall, it was found that players are working toward making the sport more gender inclusive, but the sport has not achieved full gender …

The Making Of Jewish-American Progress In Gertrude Stein’S, The Making Of Americans: Being A History Of A Family’S Progress, Rochel L. Gasson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation provides a comprehensive reading of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (TMOA), situating the novel at the intersection of literary modernism, Jewish American identity, and feminist thought. It argues that Stein reconceives American progress not as linear advancement but as a recursive, relational, and culturally grounded process. Through experimental form, repetitive syntax, and a sustained present tense, TMOA dramatizes the psychological and social complexities of immigrant families navigating assimilation while maintaining heritage. Characters such as the Old Man, his son, and the Dehning and Herland families reveal generational tensions, moral labor, and the ambivalences of upward …

Accepting Vs Understanding, Transgender Aliens And Alienation, Reyna G. Aliah

English

Trans people have been the subject of intense discrimination in recent years, suffering dehumanization from right-wing and conservative groups. This dehumanization (and the fear resulting from it) parallels common attitudes in science fiction about actual aliens. Orson Scott Card’s Hierarchy of Foreignness classifies individuals and species into five categories, depending on their sentience; whether they are from the same city, nation, or planet; and whether communication is possible. This paper examines how transgender people can be classified according to this system on a societal level, with said class depending on the lens used to view them as well as the …

Article Title: Deconstructing Power And Gender: A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis Of Biopolitics, Necropolitics, And Sexual Scripts In Feminicide In Puerto Rico., Migdalia Marrero-Lafontaine

The Scholarship Without Borders Journal

Feminicide and gender violence cases in the last several decades in Puerto Rico have continuously increased, suggesting that this problem becomes worse as time passes. This study, therefore, focuses on identifying actionable insights that paint a picture of the impact it has on women over the age of 18 in Puerto Rico. In order to achieve this objective, the study relies on a strong theoretical framework that is made up of Foucauldian discourse analysis, necropolitics, and sexual scripts theories. One of the core findings of this research is that Puerto Rico’s colonial history and cultural norms sustain a cycle of …

Etymolgy And Phallocentrism, Renae Redling

Student Scholar Symposium

Historically, linguists view etymology as a distorted and frivolous practice. In the past, Etymology was used irresponsibly to devalue current usage. Etymology reveals the formation of words over time, providing context for language’s current meaning. The history of words, their etymology, has created the words we use today, curating present usage. Words are not simply signs but formed symbols with significance and history. The association of the English language with structures of power, and its firmly rooted context in a patriarchal culture has resulted in limited access to linguistic study for women. A history of patriarchal influence does not make …

Domination, Limitation, And Liberation In Gilman's Herland, Ella Cauley

Student Scholar Symposium

No abstract provided.

Harmony Of The Swine: An Analysis Of Circe In Homer’S The Odyssey, Layla Al Sadoon

Student Scholar Symposium

Homer’s The Odyssey has remained significant for readers in dissecting the introspective attributes of Odysseus and the characters he meets throughout his journey. One character in particular has sparked much conversation in exploring the symbol of the woman in mythology. Circe, the enchantress who infamously turns Odysseus’ men into swine, has faced thousands of years under the microscope as scholars have questioned her role in the myth and the importance of her character. Circe’s actions directly derive from her goddess background; however, that is often overlooked when scholars discuss the progression of the myth after Circe’s episode, focusing instead on …

Gamergate And The Woke Mind Virus, Gavin Graves

Undergraduate Research Symposium

This text concerns the formation of beliefs that would shape the 2014 harassment campaign of GamerGate. Specifically, how GamerGate was perpetuated by stereotypes and ideas in Geekdom that spanned from the 60’s Disco Demolition to the Internet’s Wild West that ended in 2013. These include ideas like simulated ethnicity, geek melodrama, nerd determinism, and nerd fatalism. It also discusses the views and beliefs on anonymity, critique, and social capitals of the Wild West Internet and how the changing views of these led to resentment that started the movement. Drawing from historical research, I studied the history of moral panics like …

Objects Of Power: Female Instrumentalists In Medieval To Early Modern Europe, Emma Scherrer

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Women are difficult to locate in traditional histories of western music, especially performers and particularly instrumentalists. The relationship between a female performer, the instrument she played, and her audience was especially fraught, constituting a complicated web of gendered relations and power dynamics. An examination of the contexts in which women played instruments in medieval to early modern Europe elucidates how women in these societies interacted with music and musical institutions. While women were generally excluded from musical institutions and discouraged from playing most musical instruments, many women nevertheless chose to take up an instrument outside of professional contexts. From the …

Best Integrated Writing Fall 2025 - Complete Edition, Wright State University School Of Humanities And Cultural Studies, Tracy Smith, Kristie Mckiernan

Best Integrated Writing

Best Integrated Writing includes excellent student writing from Integrated Writing courses taught at Wright State University.

"The Yellow Wall-Paper": Decoding Medical Patriarchal Structures (A Common Theme Within Gothic Literature/Horror), Yvonne T. Samuels

Masters Theses (Archived)

This paper makes the claim that Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” encoded the medical system as part of the patriarchy used to control and harm women, especially within the 19^th Century, and how this is a common theme within gothic literature and modern-day horror. Through the Feminist Literary Criticism framework and the methodology of textual analysis, certain literary devices Gilman uses, including the Gothic trope of the narrator’s environment in “The Yellow Wall-Paper” is analyzed to reveal women living in a patriarchal society during the 19^thCentury and the medical system being a source of power. “The …

"Be Like Water": Practicing Abolition On The Ground, Katie R. Horowitz, Taryn Johnson

Feminist Pedagogy

This Social Justice Strategy asks students to immerse themselves in abolitionist waters by learning abolitionist perspectives, strategies, and practices from a local abolitionist, transformative justice, or mutual aid organization while providing them a service or fulfilling one or more of their needs. This is a self-paced, term-long project scaffolded by abolitionist histories and best practices for working in community. The instructor uses a student survey as a basis for forming groups and matching them up with local organizations, then students create plans for working together, including how to address conflict restoratively. Groups research their organizations and collaborate with them to …

Strategies For Seeding Police Abolition In A Minefield, Kaden Paulson-Smith

Feminist Pedagogy

A major challenge for abolitionist teaching is uprooting the assumption that carceral systems are natural and inevitable. This essay describes strategies for teaching about the colonial capitalist origins and white cisheteropatriarchal development of the police, and the critical theorization and abolition of policing, in a hyper-politicized minefield. These strategies emerged from teaching, “The Global Politics of Policing,” after the Summer of 2020 in the Midwest, where abolitionist critiques were frequently met with burning resentment. Three overarching strategies to facilitate learning about police abolition include: 1) consistent engagement with learning materials; 2) critical analysis as a learning objective and theoretical framework; …

Star Wars: Andor – An Abolitionist Study Guide, Marcelo Garzo Montalvo, Isaac Ginsberg Miller

Feminist Pedagogy

This study guide provides a set of activities for teaching abolition through Season 1 of the speculative fiction TV series Star Wars: Andor (2022). Through the practice of critical literacy (viewing, reading, and analysis), we offer various ideas on how to engage Andor as a relevant pedagogical tool for studying and teaching abolitionist movement histories and methodologies. By guiding students through a critical analysis of this widely-circulated, mainstream cultural text, we seek to activate an abolitionist pedagogical lens that can be applied across various genres and media – making tangible connections between popular culture and political struggles writ large. These …

Being Radical Community: “Pleasure Activism” In Higher Education, Misty D. Saribal, Taisha Mcmickens Dr.

Feminist Pedagogy

This paper argues for the necessity of pleasure in abolitionist pedagogy as a condition for sustaining movements toward collective liberation. Grounded in abolition feminism and radical pedagogy, it introduces the “Pleasure Activism Lineage” (PAL) as a tool for cultivating campus movement communities through joy, care, and collective resistance. Drawing on adrienne maree brown’s framework of pleasure activism, the PAL assignment invites students and educators to trace transformative influences, reclaim subversive forms of joy, and build solidarities rooted in liberatory traditions. By centering pleasure as a site of resistance, this project disrupts the pitifully punitive logics and pessimistically professionalizing ethos of …

Critical Prison Studies In Dialogue: Abolition-Feminist Pedagogy Within And Beyond The Classroom, Laura Ciolkowski

Feminist Pedagogy

“Critical Prison Studies in Dialogue: Teaching and Learning” is a multi- week, undergraduate project that combines critical thinking, collaboration, and an analysis of the social relations and material logics of carceral systems in the U.S. It consists of a series of carefully scaffolded activities that create space for students to imagine a world in which incarceration is not the logical answer to the political and social problems that plague us. It also asks students to theorize, experience, and reflect on the process of abolition-feminist movement building on multiple scales within and outside the classroom.

To My Fellow White Women, With Love..., Hailey N. Otis

Feminist Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

Midlife, Michael Sevcik

Poetry MFA Theses

Abstract

Midlife by Michael James Sevcik is a collection of poetry that explores issues of age, gender, sexuality, identity, desire, family, and loss within a predominantly domestic space while addressing broader social, cultural, and philosophical issues using a phenomenological poetics grounded in everyday experience. The collection is organized into three distinct yet interrelated “movements:” the first movement, “Anchored,” establishes an existential yearning amidst professional and amorous stasis and familial pressures. The second movement, “Liminal,” explores temporality and its relationship to place and memory. The third movement, “Renewal,” incorporates travel, family history, and art, transforming them into critical modes of aesthetic …

Documenting Hiv/Aids Through Rural Voices: Oral Histories As Sites Of Mutual Aid, Siena Kuehn

Feminist & Queer Praxis

This essay is part of the WGSS Capstone class and focuses on utilizing oral histories of HIV/AIDS in Winona as a method of mutual aid. This work includes two contributions to the HIV/AIDS Winona Oral History Project, the interviews with Joan Schwinghammer and Dr. Anne Vande Berg. This research was done in conjunction with Dr. Mary Jo Klinker.

In Their Words: Building A Wgss Community, Temki Newell

Feminist & Queer Praxis

In this series, WGSS students share how the program shapes their activism, academics, and sense of self. Through storytelling, community, and critical reflection, they’re challenging systems, building coalitions, and imagining new futures, one class, one project, one voice at a time.

Opening The Door Of The Celluloid Closet, Melissa Hernandez

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

While watching the documentary, The Celluloid Closet, I was instantly intrigued by how queer people and cinema mixed. Going as far back to the black and white, silent films era, queer people have been used as comedic relief, but not in an appealing way. Constantly being the butt of the joke, disregard for queer people became so normalized that certain tropes started popping up in cinema. One trope that we can still see be used frequently in today’s films is the “bury your gays” trope (also known as the “dead lesbians syndrome”) where queer characters in cinema are not …

A Burlesque: The Shimmering Body Of Revealing, Lola Montgomery

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

A Burlesque: The Shimmer Manuscript is a hybrid critical–creative work that examines burlesque as an embodied methodology and a mode of knowledge production. Drawing from my two decades as a performer–scholar, the work reframes glamour, desire, and adornment as epistemological practices rather than theatrical ornamentation. The project is significant in that it expands understandings of performance studies, autotheory, and feminist aesthetics by foregrounding the performer’s body as an intelligent, sensing, world-making apparatus.

The methodology is creative practice research and archive-driven, integrating backstage documentation, AI-assisted photomontage, and theoretical reflection. The work draws from poststructuralist and feminist frameworks (Irigaray, Deleuze & Guattari, …

Sex, The Body, And Learning Gender: Demons In The World Of The Five Gods, Erin E. Mcbrien

Mythopoeic Society Seminar Proceedings

“Sex, the Body, and Learning Gender” analyzes the relationship between the physical body, sexual orientation, and gender as characterized within Lois McMaster Bujold’s World of the Five Gods series, with a particular emphasis on her Penric and Desdemona novellas. Using the framework of Bussey and Bandura’s social learning theory, and a close reading of Bujold’s text, this paper explores how the demonic characters within this series are an example of gender as a learned concept rather than a biological imperative. This is further developed by examining how the demonic characters both imprint on and contrast against the more societally-bound sorcerers …

The Important Of Female Coaches: What Barriers They Face, Why They Stay, And What Can Be Done To Attract More., Hayley E. Yourous

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

After the passage of Title IX, there has been an increase in the number of females participating in sports; however, the same cannot translate to women in coaching or leadership positions (Acosta & Carpenter, 2014; Hart et al., 1986; LaVoi & Baeth, 2018). The purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenological study was to explore the lived experiences of females who had served as head coaches in the high school setting with at least eight years of experience as a head coach. The NCAA (2022) reported in 2020 that female coaches accounted for 41.3% of female teams' head coaches, both intercollegiate and …

Prostitution In Video Games: Stigma, Violence And Male Pleasure, Laura Aguilera-Ávila, Lara Escobar Hernández

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

Prostitution has traditionally been framed in society as a space significantly determined by patriarchal hierarchies, in addition to being affected on many occasions by stigmatisation and violence. The representation of prostitution and of those who practice it in the media is a topic of special interest, since the discourses and messages disseminated by the media play a fundamental role in socialisation. Video games are not exempt from this debate: with millions of players worldwide and a special reach among young people, they are among the most influential media outlets today. This qualitative research analyses a series of titles, both AAA …

Anatomy Of Authority: Dissecting The Rare Species Of Women Deans, Marlana K. Beck

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the lived experiences of women physician medical school deans, aiming to understand the factors that influence their career pathways and the challenges they face in achieving and maintaining leadership roles in academic medicine. Despite the increasing number of women entering the medical profession, there remains a significant gender disparity in leadership positions, particularly in the role of medical school dean. This study addresses the gap between the growing number of women physicians and the disproportionately low number of women in senior academic leadership roles. The research is grounded in feminist and role congruity theories, which provide a …

All Things Equal: Uncovering The Extent Sexism Influences Higher Education Through Faculty Perceptions Of The Inner Workings Of The Academy, Jonathan Yorkowitz

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The history of critical systemic issues in higher education has been well documented in recent literature (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017, Freire, 2018, and Wilder, 2013). Among the critical issues noted, sexism has remained a significant influence suppressing opportunities for women within higher education in the United States. bell hooks (1981, 2003, 2014) shared research about the specific systemic challenges encountered by Black women in the academy, providing a key connection between sexism and racism. The lack of significant proposed solutions to address sexism in higher education scholarship, along with the need for an updated and more comprehensive understanding of faculty …

Maria Gaetana Agnesi And The Proto-Feminist Movement, Katherine D. Wahnsiedler

Honors College Theses

Maria Gaetana Agnesi, a mathematician and scholar from the 18 th century, is an important historical figure who received a position at the University of Bologna. She is the second woman ever to be appointed to a University professorship, laying the foundation for other women in academia later to come. Many historians interpret Agnesi’s life to be representative of early feminist ideas and would therefore be an example of a proto-feminist. However, this is not accurate, nor is it an ideology Agnesi likely would have subscribed to. Analyzing primary sources written by Agnesi and her contemporaries helps provide insight into …