Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Thomas Mann’S Unbound Bodies: A Formal Analysis Of Disease In The Magic Mountain, Julia Shi

Student Theses and Dissertations

My senior thesis argues that disease is a formal element in Thomas Mann’s novel, The Magic Mountain, through the lens of a newly theorized genre: the “Bindungsroman” (“binding-novel”). The scholar Jonas Rosenbrück proposed the Bindungsroman as the successor genre to the Bildungsroman after the latter fell out of public favor after World War I.  Whereas the Bildungsroman narrates its hero’s maturation as a process of integration into society, the Bindungsroman’s hero is ontologically unstable and does not achieve normative resolution. This paper examines The Magic Mountain’s protagonist’s development as defined by the doubled play of binding and …

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 …

Introduction To Women And Gender Studies (Syllabus), Karen Weingarten

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Race, Sex Work, And Spatial Segregation In Storyville, New Orleans, Paige M. Magoto

All Theses

Storyville, New Orleans, operated as a legalized vice district from 1897 to 1917. This 38-block area facilitated sex work and prostitution “across the color line,” perpetuating and encouraging the practice of white men seeking sexual acts from Black women and women of mixed-race descent. I engage with multiple interacting subsections of historiography within this thesis project. The historiography spans Southern history from the early nineteenth century in the Old Antebellum South until the early twentieth century in the Progressive Era. The broader historiographic dimensions of labor and sexuality were also influential in curating this research project, engaging with the evolving …

Seeing Her, Wanting Her: Postfeminist Desire And Its Contradictions In Zendaya’S Magazine Covers, Sophia Shelley

International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities

This article examines Zendaya’s modelling evolution as a case study to explore how a postfeminist critique and psychoanalysis can illuminate the contradictory nature of women’s advertising. My analysis compares Zendaya’s covers in Seventeen (2012) and Essence (2020), emphasizing the stark differences in aesthetics, where Seventeen conforms to ideals of (white) femininity, and in opposition, Essence centres around Black femininity and desire. By situating Zendaya as both a gendered and racialized ‘other,’ the intricate dynamics of femininity, race, and age in media portrayals are made visible. I argue that Zendaya’s image is sold through postfeminist ideals of empowerment, choice, and sexuality …

Señoritas On And Off The Silver Screen: How Chicana Women Organized For Equality And Challenged The Cultural Prison Of Sexualized Media Representations In The First Half Of The Twentieth-Century, Rossandra Paloma Martinez

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This research is personal for me due to lived experience and day-to-day situations where I have felt the pressures of unattainable beauty standards and society’s fluid definition of beauty and femininity surrounding Chicana, Latinas, Mexican, and Mexican-American women. What inspired me to pursue these issues and topics was the work of Dr. Vicki Lynn Ruiz in her book From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. This research focuses on rival and contested images of Chicana, Mexican, Mexican-American and Latina labor advocates and activists from the early twentieth as opposed to sexualized and eroticized packaged caricatures that Hollywood …

Utilizing Existing Postfeminist Framework To Explore A Sexualized Media Test Case: “Man Needs A Woman” By Maty Noyes, Nicole Doris

DU Undergraduate Research Journal Archive

Postfeminism is simply referred to as the most recent wave of feminism, but feminist scholars have failed to reach a standardized definition that recognizes the nuances of sexuality, media, and culture present within the field. This paper utilizes the postfeminist framework of two prominent feminist scholars: Rosalind Gill and Feona Attwood. Specifically, this paper draws from Gill’s interpretation of postfeminism and Attwood’s interpretation of the sexualization of culture and the overlap between the two theories. Rather than attempt to offer a concrete definition in such a rapidly evolving field, this paper offers a music video from a lesser-known pop artist, …

Gentleman Death In Silk And Lace: Death And The Maiden In Vampire Literature And Film, Emily Wilson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis contains an examination in the psychosocial significance of Hans Baldung Grien’s “Death and the Maiden” art motif, created during the Renaissance period following the Black Death, and its resurgence in the vampire fiction genre of both literature and film. I investigate the motif in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) as well as their film adaptations by Francis Ford Coppola (1992) and Neil Jordan (1994), respectively. By examining the presence of the motif in art, literature, and film, I found that the common threads across all investigated works were the dominant social …

Exploring The Stereotypes Of Gender And Sexuality In Ballet And Its Impact On The Dance Community, Ava Jackson

Audre Lorde Prize

Ballet has been deemed a feminine sport for hundreds of years. The famous words of choreographer George Balanchine, “Ballet is Woman,” remind us of this. While some may see classical ballet as a feminized birthplace of dance for queer men and women, the art form as a whole denies more flexible roles of masculinity. For men, the majority of roles are limited to strong princes, played by cis-gender men who fit the model of hegemonic masculinity. Dance is not exempt from oppression with intersectionality between dancers. An intersectional approach is imperative for understanding the exclusion dancers face, by challenging these …

Incorporating Sex-Diverse And Gender-Inclusive Perspectives In Higher Education Biology Courses, Breanne N. Harris, A Kelsey Lewis, Sam L. Sharpe, Teri J. Orr, Christopher T. Martine, Chloe C. Josefson

Faculty Journal Articles

Inclusive teaching is teaching in a way that reaches all students in the classroom; this is beneficial for everyone, particularly for those with minoritized identities. Instructors play a critical role in scaffolding how students are exposed to and learn science content in the classroom. In this manuscript, we discuss how biology instructors can make their classrooms more inclusive with regard to sex and gender diversity content. Many topics in biology are based on androcentric, heteronormative, and oppressive framing, even though those lenses are more reflective of our own history and culture than they are of the diversity we see in …

Sharp Stick Grasps At Autistic Women’S Liminal Vulnerability, Meaghan Krazinski

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

This film analysis of Sharp Stick by Lena Dunham critically explores how the film uptakes representations of the ideas around the vulnerabilities of Autistic women in popular culture, and yet does not explicitly name them as such. This liminality is critical and plays into the intersectional analysis that the author engages around the way vulnerability and Autistic identity is interpreted and read. The author draws upon McDermott's (2022) "neurotypical gaze" in an analysis that shows how traditional tropes around Autistic women’s vulnerability are social constructions that are brought into relief by stereotypes around race, gender, and ability. The author uses …

Keeping And Challenging Familial Attachments: The Bakla Within Contemporary Mainstream Filipino Film, Abraham James A. Mata

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Throughout Filipino television and film, it is difficult to ignore the almost always apparent bakla. The bakla, often portrayed as either an effeminate gay man or a trans woman, largely appears as a side character in many Filipino films. Many depictions of this queer figure in the past have cast them as merely comedic relief or perverted figures. However, within the past two decades of the 21st century, many Filipino films have been produced with a central bakla character. Through an analysis of five mainstream films from the years of 2013-2023, this project is seeking to answer how mainstream depictions …

Vainuku, T., & Duffy, R. (Directors). (2022). Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’T Exist [Documentary]. Netflix., Ashley P. Ferrell

Feminist Pedagogy

Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist (2022) revisits the complicated fame and misfortune of former college football player Manti Te’o. The documentary traces the arc of Te’o’s athletic career at the University of Notre Dame alongside his relationship with his girlfriend that resulted in intense public scrutiny and gendered ridicule in 2013. Untold offers feminist pedagogues a catalyst for engaging students in critical discourse around the relationships between collegiate sport and race, gender, and sexuality. In this review, I provide a summary of the documentary’s main points and framing, and then discuss at least two ways in which this media …

Fluidity And Inconstancy: Australian Bush Tomatoes As An Exemplar Of Non-Normative Sex Expression, Christopher T. Martine

Faculty Journal Articles

Solanum, a genus of ~1500 global species, is one of the more interesting plant groups in which to study reproductive biology and ecology. Overwhelmingly, species in this group express full cosexuality, where individual plants have flowers containing both fully-functioning “male” (staminate) and “female” (carpellate) organs. However, there have been multiple and widespread evolutionary transitions within the genus to non-normative variations on this ancestral condition. Australian bush tomatoes (ca. 40 species) are especially diverse in this regard, with uncommon variation and combinations of unisexuality and cosexuality -- including, most notably, two sexual systems known as dioecy (unisexual male or female …

Post-Racism As Ideology: Character Construction And Placement, & Narrative Structure In Dear White People, Mphatso Kaufulu

Dissertations

My project looks at post-racism as ideology. Through my chosen text – the Netflix streamed television series called Dear White People – I examine the ways in which post-racism is persists through representational abstractions which reformulate race as largely sets of interpersonal and intercultural, person-to-person social problems rather that a more general condition rooted in institutional or structural social, political and economic arrangements which organize society and produce its cultural dispensation.

To do this, I applied some of Stuart Hall’s ideas – on identity, ideology and commodification – and Bonilla-Silva – specifically in the area of obfuscations or abstractions of …

The Dark House And Its Inhabitants, Emily Bielski

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

From the inception of the genre, Gothic horror has been fixated on the domestic space in distress. This essay explores domestic archetypes and roles of the Gothic novel, serving as a “tour of the house”, analyzing the iconography of the dark castle, and how it externalizes and exacerbates the fears and behaviors of its inhabitants. The power dynamic of the household is starkly divided by the expectations and authority of masculine and feminine figures. In turn the “house” becomes a vehicle for the anxieties of the inhabitants—both experienced and inflicted—regarding gender, sexuality, isolation, and abuse. Exploration of the visual and …

When Sexuality Becomes Healing: An Interview With Elsbeth Fraanje On Her Documentary Sexual Healing, Johan Roeland

Journal of Religion & Film

This is an interview with Elsbeth Fraanje, the director of Sexual Healing.

Sexual Healing, Johan Roeland

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Sexual Healing (2022) directed by Elsbeth Fraanje.

Unpure: Serving The Purity Culture Deconstruction Community, Julia Capizzi

Capstones

Unpure: Serving the Purity Culture Deconstruction Community is an in-depth understanding of how engagement journalism can serve those who are deconstructing, or unlearning, harmful religious beliefs around sex and sexuality.

Theorizing Autistic Sexualities As Collective Poetic Experiences, Anna Nygren, Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

This article is a palimpsest emerging as part of a project of collective autoethnographic writing on the theme of sexuality. It draws on the intensification of friendly writing, friendly as in friends with benefits. We write as autistic and neuroqueer subjects, writing until our textualities becomes sexualities. We write until the text becomes a room – call it Earth or call it Body, call it Brain or call it Heart – in which one could crack meanings―but these are not the most important ones. Instead of meanings and positions, we want to write about movements in time. The time it …

Anti-Pornography Feminism, Kinktok, And Consent: What We Can Learn From The Sex Wars And Leather/Sadomasochistic History, Nic Cloyd

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Sex education and LGBTQA+ history have long been censored and removed from curriculums across the United States. As this information has disappeared from our education systems, important values like consent and boundary setting have become increasingly obsolete despite the modern body autonomy movement. Leather and SM culture, which began post-WWII and reached their peak in the 1970s during the sexual liberation, have become increasingly important as their ethical and moral codes have been lost over time to the HIV/AIDs epidemic and censorship from second and third wave feminsism. Two prominent movements, anti-pornography and sex-work exclusionary radical feminism, have worked to …

“She Too ‘Omanish’”: Young Black Women’S Sexuality And Reproductive Justice In Bluefields, Nicaragua, Ishan Elizabeth Gordon-Ugarte

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Most never-married young “Creole” (Afro-Caribbean) women in Bluefields, Nicaragua are raised in fundamentalist Protestant families and institutions that emphasize sexual abstinence before marriage. In this context, abstinence is required to maintain social standing and “respectability.” Nevertheless, women in Bluefields, the administrative center of Caribbean Nicaragua, exhibit what Creoles themselves understand to be high rates of sexuality and pregnancy among post-menarche unmarried teenaged women (USAID, 2012; Mitchell et al. 2015). Such young women’s pregnancies occur at an important developmental stage of their lives and have long been associated by social scientists with adverse social, emotional, and health situations. These scholars have …

A Dumb Mouth From Which The Teeth Have Been Pulled, Anna Sofie Jespersen

Theses and Dissertations

This paper consists of a series of scenes in which various narratives with proximity to the truth plays out. within it I aim to articulate the dispersed subjectivity and forensic aspects to my work, as well looking at the perverseness in the desire for proximity to the fantasy, utilizing the self as a vehicle of desire.

Pornography, The Lgbtq+ Community, And The Queer Alternative, Rebekah Gredler

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

Pornography is a complicated and controversial topic. Much has been said about how porn may or may not affect individuals, but very little has been done in the academic community on how pornography affects the LGBTQ+ community. In debates of censorship and regulation of porn, their voices are often ignored in public debate in favor of straight, feminist, or puritanical, religious discourses. This is problematic because pornography, particularly queer pornography, has done much for the evolution and self-affirmation of the LGBTQ+ community. It would be remiss if such positive effects of such a controversial exploit were to go unacknowledged. In …

Welcome To The New Dignity, Donna M. Hughes

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Making Space For Themselves: Lesbian Separatism In Western Australia, Amber-Lia Van Aurich

Theses : Honours

This study documented and reconstructed the stories of lesbians who experienced separatism during the 1970s and 1980s in Western Australia. This era of history has received little attention, particularly the Western Australian context, therefore sharing these marginalised women’s stories addresses the knowledge gap and provides a sense of place and identity in the past. I aimed to explore Western Australian examples of lesbian separatism in addition to aspects of identity, connection, community, and culture. The research involved a narrative study of stories by six informants who self-identify as lesbian, collected in multiple one-hour interviews in situ and reconstructed into a …

Brand Personality And Sexuality Levels Of Luxury Advertisements, Alyssa Dana Adomaitis, Diana Saiki

Publications and Research

This study examined perceived brand attractiveness of and identification with fashion luxury brands given different levels of sexuality in advertisements. Sex in advertisements has become increasingly more common to generate attention and interest in fashion luxury products with limited research on its influence on the consumer. A sample of 1266 males and females completed a survey on brand attractiveness and identification after examining an advertisement of a luxury fashion product. Participants were assigned an advertisement that featured a same-gendered model at one of four levels of sexuality (fully clothed to nude). The results indicated less sexuality in luxury advertisements was …

Consent Around The Globe: Sexual Violence Prevention Programming That Responds To The Needs Of International Students, Michael Blackman

College of Education Theses and Dissertations

International students are a growing presence on college campuses across the United States. However, despite their increased numbers on college campuses, they have been overlooked in analyses regarding subgroups and sexual violence prevention. This qualitative, phenomenological study sought to describe the lived experiences of East Asian international students as they travel to the United States and learn about sexual violence. Interviews were conducted with eight East Asian international students studying at a public university in the Midwest. Themes emerged from the interview data describing the lived experiences of these students. These themes were (1) navigating a more open society without …

Desexualizing Queer Identities: Methods To Validating Non-Sexual Romantic Attraction And Relationships, Unnati Patel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is an increase in the negative views of queer and LGBT+ people in America, and I argue that it is, in part, due to the sexualized connotations of, and sexual association with, queer and LGBT+ identities. Innocuous acts by queer or LGBT+ people, such as being an out school teacher or holding hands in a public space, is enough for non-LGBT+ people to become uncomfortable to varying degrees and, sometimes, even cause verbal abuse or violence. When we look at queer or LGBT+ representation through the possibility of queerness, and by reading representations of queer and LGBT+ romantic attraction …

“We’Re Here, We’Re Queer, We Will Not Live In Fear!”: A Content Analysis Exploring Gender Disparity In The Public Reappropriation Of Lgbtq+ Slurs, Nicolas Hall

Capstone Showcase

As minorities, members of the LGBTQ+ community have faced many hardships throughout history, such as the use of language as a weapon against them. However, this research explores the public display of linguistic reappropriation of LGBTQ+ derogatory language and terms within the community. Throughout history, the use of slurs (e.g. faggot and dyke) and their social definitions have shifted from having no connection to the community to directly affected these individuals. These terms have been used to demonize members of the LGBTQ+ community for decades. Despite this reality, there are some scholars who suggest that these terms are being reappropriated, …