Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons^™

Perhaps Discomfort Is The Answer: Refusing Liberal Feminism And Imperial Cartographies Of Thinking/Feeling, Saida Hodzic

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs is an unsettling feminist ethnography that traces the movements of three objects: the endings of female genital cutting in Ghana, their relationship to anti-cutting campaigns and the forms of governance they instantiate, and the role anthropology and feminism have played in this governance since colonial rule. It makes the case that the three objects must be studied together: namely, that we need to understand the practice of female genital cutting alongside its endings; that cutting does not exist outside of anti-cutting campaigns; and that anti-cutting campaigns are entangled with both …

Review Of Saida Hodzic. The Twilight Of Cutting: African Activism And Life After Ngos. Oakland: Univeristy Of California Press, 2017., Tobe Levin Von Gleichen

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

With considerable fanfare, in Adieu !'Excision. Histoire et fin d'une tradition (Raymond Hounsa, 2009), Christa Muller rejoices in having saved Benin from FGM, the French text lauding eradication. The effort instigated by a Saarbrucken-based NGO, it has banned blades from the vicinity of vulvae. In 1996, on a state visit, Muller, then married to Saarland's governor Oscar Lafontaine, was asked by Benin's First Lady Rosine Vieyra Soglo¹ to assist her Inter-African Committee (IAC) chapter by creating an association. This she did, launching I(N)TACT, e.V. and securing 300,000 Euros for the movement, a sum with strings, however. Berlin insisted on …

Review Of Walaa Alqaisiya. Decolonial Queering In Palestine. London: Routledge, 2023, Ankita Chatterjee

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Decolonial Queering in Palestine by WalaaAlqaisiya offers an in-depth study of the conquest of Palestine with respect to the variegated power structures of settler colonialism and underscores the political significance of a reformulated mode of decolonization. It argues for the need to interweave queer into the native Palestinian positionality termed as 'decolonial queering', so as to challenge the (hetero) sexualizing and gendered discourses embedded within both the Israeli/Zionist settler colonial regime and the Palestinian Nationalist visions of liberation. By the 'ethnographic' engagement with the works of Palestinian artists and activists from one of the prominent queer groups, alQaws, the book …

Lg Ms 107 Karen Bye Papers, Katelynn Paul

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Biographical Note

Karen Bye was born and raised in Stonington, Maine on Deer Isle in 1952. Karen enrolled at the University of Maine’s Orono campus, joining the class of 1975. Karen was a member of the queer community and went on to join Gay Support and Action (GSA), a community organization located in Bangor, Maine. Karen advocated for GSA to start a group at the university, but was initially denied. Nevertheless Karen persisted and continued to advocate, and eventually formed a group of students that would soon become the Wilde-Stein Club. Karen held the role of secretary, and had been …

A History Of Ecofeminist: Socialist Resistance To Eco-Crisis In India, Gowri Parameswaran

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This article traces the history of women's environmental activism in India after independence. The earliest organizing efforts came from women from indigenous communities who wanted to collectively push back against government and private encroachments into communal lands. From the 1970s to the late 1980s, ecofeminism became a dominant paradigm to analyze and respond to environmental issues globally. Indian feminists adapted the model to analyzing ecological issues locally while also pushing back against its essentialism and its blindness to social and economic inequities. Indian eco(feminist) socialists demanded a centering of the voices of the most vulnerable communities in environmental movements. In …

Productivity To Precarity On Instagram: Digital Feminism In India During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Anhiti Patnaik

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This paper examines how digital feminism deconstructed neoliberal ideals of technological productivity in India during the Covid-19 pandemic. By creating a productivity scale, I delineate new social disparities and risk factors brought on by the unprecedented shift to a work-from-home digital economy. Through theories of biopower, I argue that technology is not neutral, apolitical, or unequivocally in favour of equal access and human rights. The creation of a new social group termed the 'technoprecariat' during lockdown is discussed using a 'cripqueer' approach to digital feminism. I extend Judith Butler's early work on gender performativity to the neo-liberal ideal of gender …

Women's Agency And Pastoral Livelihoods In India: A Review, Aayushi Malhotra, Sailaja Nandigama, Kumar Sankar Bhattacharya

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

The role of women in promoting and sustaining pastoral livelihoods remains an under-researched area across the world. Often, studies discuss pastoralism as a male-oriented enterprise, thus overshadowing or ignoring the part played by women in such livelihood practices. In India, where pastoralism itself is essentially a neglected area of research, such discussions remain even sparse. Pastoral communities depending on migratory livestock rearing practices for their livelihoods exhibit gender-based differences in their everyday life in terms of division of labour, mobility patterns, and rights over resources. Women play different roles and responsibilities at the household and community levels that remain intertwined …

Reflections On Queer Literary Representations In Contemporary Indian Writing In English, Aakanksha Singh

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This reflection piece explores the importance of thinking beyond labels and categories for queer desires and queer expressions of love. Knowability and visibility of these desires through labels and categories has the potential and indeed does create awareness. This visibility, however, can inadvertently also create borders and perpetuate rigidity about queer desires, confining them to certain norms and limitations. The piece then reflects on mass media's role in creating these borders, particularly through the coverage of Pride Parades in India. Then by examining contemporary texts such as Amruta Patil's Kari (2008), Himanjali Sankar's Talking of Muskaan (2015) and Parvati Sharma's …

South Asian Feminisms And Youth Activism: Focus On India And Pakistan, Nilanjana Paul, Namita Goswami, Sailaja Nandigama, Gowri Parameswaran, Fawzia Afzal-Khan

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

No abstract provided.

The Indian Mission Of The Institute Of Blessed Virgin Mary (Ibvm) Nuns: Convents, Curriculum, And Indian Women, Nilanjana Paul

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This study focuses on the Indian mission of IBVM nuns, and the role played by them in the spread of female education in India. While acknowledging that missionaries were part of the imperial process, this study analyzes the work of Catholic nuns in India, their convents, and curriculum to show how their work advanced women's educational opportunities in India. In the process the study examines how Catholic nuns resisted the dominating attitude of the Catholic Church in India. The last section of the article examines how Christian influence under missionaries not only prepared good mothers and wives but also trained …

Networking Voices Against Violence: Online Activism And Transnational Feminism In Local-Global Contexts, Sutanuka Banerjee, Lipika Kankaria

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Contemporary feminism manifests itself in the form of blogs, hashtags, e-magazines, and digitally planned protests through online communities that address the prevailing concerns of feminists in the digital age. This feminist approach to digital activism aims to reclaim the power of technology which is inherently hegemonic and masculinist by creating alternate spaces and modes of protest. Transnational feminism is increasingly being shaped by online discourses and the new digital space enables social movements in shaping feminist solidarity and complex netizen identities. This paper adopts discourse analysis of online contents that question the prevalent patriarchal system in South Asia and thus …

Visiting The House Of Bad's Mother: Queering Saadat Hasan Manto's “Thanda Gosht”, Namita Goswami

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This essay reads Saadat Hasan Manto's short story, “Thanda Gosht” (1950), depicting women's experience of sectarian brutality during the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, to delineate the postcolonial significance Gayatri Spivak's concept of originary queerness. Manto's synecdoche (“cold meat”) for an unnamed and raped female corpse, her Sikh abductor and violator, as well as for the story's readers, (re)figures reproductive heteronormativity as a process of unknowing that emplaces a gendered taxonomy, even when its victims are silent. Rather than reinforce sexual difference as a finished itinerary, however, Kulwant Kaur's repeatedly piercing question—who she is—queers “Thanda Gosht” by …

Dissenting Bodies, Disruptive Pandemic: Farmers' Protest And Women's Participation In Mass Mobilisation In India, Paromita Chakrabarti

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

While authoritarian states promoting neoliberal forms of governance have taken advantage of COVID-19 to weaken the foundations of civil society, there has also been a significant rise in contemporary struggles for a more democratic society during and around the pandemic. From December 2019 to November 2021, India has seen a significant number of protests. The timeline of collective resistance against the state and its divisive, violent and neoliberal agenda represents a critical juncture in Indian politics. This paper focuses on the farmers' protests that started from last November and recently ended in a stunning, hard-earned victory. In a sector that …

Review Of Lipstick Under My Burkha By Prakash Jha Productions., Urusha Silwal

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

How do ordinary women find ways to exercise their personal and sexual rights in a society full of restrictions? To what extent they must go to live and breathe freely? All these questions and more are answered by Alankrita Shrivastava's second directorial film Lipstick Under My Burkha. This movie shows how sexual desires and fantasies of four women are suppressed by men both verbally and behaviorally in a small town of India. It is a conversation starter about gender equality, freedom and women's identity.

Review Of Translocational Belongings: Intersectional Dilemmas And Social Inequalities By Floya Anthias, Orly Benjamin

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Social inequalities create violence and threaten to reduce democratic features of contemporary political lives. People are excluded, exploited, and discriminated against and easily left exposed to both state violence and (politically encouraged) sporadic violence. On what basis? On a long list of oppressive bases: class, gender, race/religion/ ethnicity/nationality/ religion/citizenship status, sexuality, age, ability, language, body shape, culture, sexuality, education, accent and many others.

Double Bind Of Muslim Women's Activism In Pakistan: Case Of Malala Yousafzai And Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, Naila Sahar

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

A majority of Western2 feminist studies has dealt with women from the third world as a homogenous entity of poor and passive victims without agency, who need saving and thus need to be spoken for. Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have both underscored the urgency of seeing and dealing with third world feminism in terms of a genre that is different in socio-cultural background from Western dynamics, and they emphasize the importance of being wary of the ways in which Western feminism creates the 'discursive homogenization and systematization of the oppression of women in the Third World' (Mohanty, …

Feminists As Cultural ‘Assassinators’ Of Pakistan, Afiya S. Zia

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Pakistan’s annual Aurat March (Women’s March) signifies a milestone in the culture of feminist protest, but a tense impasse follows a series of encounters between sexual and religious politics, and this has serious implica- tions for rights-based activism in the Islamic Republic.

The Fundamentalist Nexus Of Neoliberalism, Rentier Capitalism, Religious And Secular Patriarchies, And South Asian Feminist Resistances, Fawzia Afzal-Khan

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In two case studies from Pakistan, which I then link to Afghanistan (under the Taliban before and after the Soviet/ US proxy war there) as well as the Farmer’s Movement in India—I wish to proffer an intersectional analysis of debates around the issue of women’s rights in the global south. Feminist artivism (art-as-activism), can help build solidarities to mount resistances against globally-inflected state repression in our age of neoliberal economic and religious fundamentalisms, which, working in tandem, seek to roll back the rights of women and minorities in and across South Asia, as elsewhere.

Performing Dalit Feminist Youth Activism In South India: Rap, Gaana, And Street Theater, Pramila Venkateswaran

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Young Dalit men and women are changing the narrative of casteist oppression in India. Youth activists perform protest songs in the genre of rap and gaana, using elements of slam poetry and rap from African American artists and blending them with local musical innovations. The performances have deliberate messaging, signaling particular caste and gender injustices, both current and historical. This paper will analyze Dalit youth performances of rap, gaana, and street theater (koothu) in South India, particularly in Tamil Nadu, to understand the poetics of protest against caste and gender oppression. It will look at the notion of space in …

Looking At The Nation Through A Lover's Eye: N. Padmakumar's Film, A Billion Colour Story, Shreerekha Pillai Subramanian

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Cinematic response in India to social justice movements, even when aimed at rectifying communal violence and tensions, reifies entrenched orders separating Hindu from Muslim, citizen from the 'Other,' native from the diasporic. To the polyphony of films focused on interfaith love, a recent indie film adds a new 'look'. Narasimhamurthy Padmakumar's, A Billion Colour Story (2016) focalizes on a child's point of view in a black and white filmic narration to dismantle old hatreds and re-ignite love of culture and nation for the very diversity that has become pixelated, walled, entombed and reactionary. More like Nollywood in its reliance on …

Setting Up Shop Down South: Gay Visibility And Identity Formation At A New Orleans Bookstore, Katelyn N. Spencer

LSU Master's Theses

Looking specifically at the South’s first gay bookstore, Faubourg Marigny (FM) Books, this thesis will connect the existence of gay literature and space as impetuses of gay community identity within New Orleans. It will use the political, social, and cultural histories of the 1970s through the 2010s to contextualize the gay bookstore as a microcosm of its time and location. In doing so, it will examine how FM Books’ New Orleans location affected its function and its relationship with its community. It will also analyze how the bookstore fit into the city’s history of social tradition and aversion to flagrant …

“Fiery Sparks Of Change”: A Comparison Between First Wave Feminists Of India And The U.S., Shoba Sharad Rajgopal

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

The celebration of the centenary of the 19th Amendment in 2020 has seen the resurgence of interest in the struggles of the Suffragette/Suffragist movement. This article examines the representation of first wave feminism in the developing world, with a focus on the Indian Subcontinent, from a postcolonial feminist perspective. As such, it critiques the colonialist perspective regarding women's movements of resistance in the developing world and links it to the critique of racism within the women's movements in the West. It discusses early feminists from India such as Tarabai Shinde whose spirited exposé of the double standards women were subjected …

Subverting Patriarchal Interpretation Of The Ramayan Through A Feminist Lens: A Critical Study Of Sita's Ramayana, Shruti Chakraborti

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

“Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival”, writes Adrienne Rich in her seminal essay, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision”. Rich firmly advocates that women authors should create spaces for subversion of patriarchal values and ideals through their literary works. Revisionist mythmaking, from a feminist literary perspective, evolves through challenging a preceding text which predominantly manifests androcentric ideas. The present paper aims to examine a female reinterpretation …

The Still Unfathomed Trans+Oceanic, Daze Jefferies

The Goose

For centuries, violence against mermaids has coexisted alongside slippery sexualizations in much of Newfoundland’s folk and popular cultures. This is demonstrated most grievously in colonist Richard Whitbourne’s 1620 text, A Discourse and Discovery of Newfoundland. The fishy reality of simultaneous disposability and desirability also mirrors the life histories of trans women and sex workers in the capital port city of St. John’s. Imagining mermaids as trans and sex-working ancestors in a province that has been structured by ecologies of fish trade, this work of research-creation drifts through precarious survival in the North Atlantic.

Queering Faith In Fantasy Literature: Fantastic Incarnations And The Deconstruction Of Theology By Taylor Driggers, C. Palmer-Patel

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Review of Taylor Drigger's Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature: Fantastic Incarnations and the Deconstruction of Theology, the first publication in Bloomsbury Academic's new 'Perspectives in Fantasy' series

Lost Between Worlds: Gay Men In World War Ii, Braydon Conell

Great Plains Graduate Review

While some queer World War II soldiers, like Christine Jorgensen, returned from war to become pioneers in the field of gender and sexuality, not all had the same support and experience. Anti-sodomy laws had a long history in the United States and its military, but no specific provision barred homosexuals from service until World War II. At the center of this change was the transition from a policy considering homosexual acts as a crime to a psychiatrist-controlled policy that homosexuality was an illness that made gay men unfit to fight. For those not excluded, the threat of an other-than-dishonorable discharge, …

The Impact Of Facial Feminization On Qol In Transgender Patients, Odette Rosales, Zane Sejdiu, Justin Michael Camacho, Ali Yasback, Caroline E. Quindlen, Sanjeev Herr, Amir Behnam Md

Tower Health Research Day

No abstract provided.

Sense Of Belonging Of Lgbtq+, Racial Minority, And Religiously Affiliated College Students At Binghamton University, Nusrat Islam, Leah Cingranelli

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

Binghamton University and institutions alike have put forth certain rules and efforts to ensure that students of the LGBTQ+ community, people of color, and students who are religiously affiliated feel safe. The reality is that many of these students feel unwelcome and ostracized due to their social identities (Blakmon et al., 2020). The aim of this non-experimental study was to investigate if there was a significant difference in sense of belonging among minority groups of undergraduate students who attend Binghamton University, as well as those who are not part of minority groups. We hypothesized that the sense of belonging amongst …

Hacia Un Contra-Archivo Radical Y Queer: El Archivo De La Memoria Trans Y La [Re]Construcción De La Memoria Colectiva Sobre La Violencia Institucional En Argentina, Valeria Bula

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Esta investigación analizará algunos procesos vinculados a la producción de la memoria travesti y trans* en Argentina a partir de la experiencia del Archivo de la Memoria Trans (AMT). Reconociendo el espacio de la memoria en Argentina como un espacio de lucha política, compuesto por diferentes interpretaciones y narrativas, el relato ofrecido por el AMT se estudiará como la adición de una nueva dimensión de complejidad al campo de la memoria en torno al terrorismo de Estado, específicamente en relación con la identidad de las víctimas. En este trabajo, propongo un análisis de la manera en que el AMT se …

A Photo Documentary: Exploring Queer Identities In Kwazulu-Natal, Nicholas Graves

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Media can be a powerful tool in examining the structures of power that both hinder and advance LGBTQIA+ representation and subsequently, lived experiences. Therefore, being able to understand the varying feelings that everyday South Africans feel towards queer people, will be measured through the media that people consume. For the vast majority of South Africans, this would look like movies, TV soap operas, and discussions that take place on the radio. Understanding the role media plays within the country is vital to understanding the overall progress that has been made.

The media’s ability to reflect lived experiences within gay and …