Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Queer And Shear Moroccan Societal Norms Impact On Queer Women, Catherine Pendry

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This paper examines how Moroccan societal norms and values hinder the recognition of queer women. Within this paper, family dynamics, language, and perceptions of homosexuality are discussed in order to highlight the lack of recognition that queer women receive in Morocco. Social norms in Morocco draw upon the conservative and traditional values, therefore queer women face societal persecution because they stray from the heteronormative culture and exist in a resilient patriarchal system. I will draw upon six personal interviews from queer women as they share their experiences and how they operate within their Moroccan families and Moroccan social norms. Throughout …

Impacts Of Migration On Mosuo Cultural Identity: A Case Study Of The Mosuo People In Lijiang, Isabel Ullmann

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

China is currently in the midst of the largest labor migration in human history and yet we know very little about the cultural impact on the migrants themselves. For many ethnic minorities, like the Mosuo, who have been isolated from urban, if not Han, influence for much of their history, this migration is sure to result in some cultural disruption. As a matrilineal culture defined by large extended families traced by the matriline, a distinct, non-exclusive sexual-reproductive system, a housing layout that reflects religious beliefs and social structure, and a fluid interplay of the local ddaba religion and Tibetan Buddhism, …

Creating Safe Spaces In A Homonormative Society: A Study Of The Hang-Out 010, Taryn Urban

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

During the month of April 2017, I interned with The Hang-Out 010, a nonprofit organization in Rotterdam that serves as a community center for LGBTQ youth. During this period, I assisted the volunteers and staff by attending events, writing blog posts, helping to plan future activities, and developing a feedback survey to be completed by visitors. My main objective was to gain a better understanding of the organization through immersive observation, feedback from visitors, and interviews with the volunteers and director of The Hang-Out 010. I analyzed the role of the organization in the context of a society characterized by …

Being Transgender And Seeking Healthcare In The World’S Most Liberal City, Nicole Sharpe

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The right to the highest form of healthcare is one of the most essential rights a person should have. It should be accessible to all human beings, and it appears this is not the case when it comes from the transgender population in the Netherlands and the U.S. In addition to transitional health care needs like hormonal treatment and surgery, transgender people require the same variety of general health care needs as many other groups of individuals. When obstacles create stigma within health care providing facilities, transgender individuals may be less inclined or discouraged to seek the care they need. …

Regulating The Reguliers: How The Normalization Of Gays And Lesbians In Dutch Society Impacts Lgbtq Nightlife, Laura Jacobs

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This Independent Study Project explores how LGBTQ nightlife is impacted by the changing position of gays and lesbians in Dutch society. Specifically, this project seeks to explore how the normalization and popularization of certain subcommunities of LGBTQ individuals in Amsterdam, lauded as one of the most progressive and gay-friendly cities in the world, influences how people navigate LGBTQ bars, clubs, and parties. Data was obtained by conducting 10 in-depth, semi-structured interviews. This data was then analyzed using Judith Butler’s theory of normalization, recognition, and regulation and Gert Hekma’s theory of homonormativity. The research revealed that despite apparent advancements in LGBTQ …

“Todas Las Comunidades Tenemos Solo Un Espíritu:” Un Análisis Del Reciente Surgimiento En Activismo Político Y Social De Las Mujeres Indígenas De La Argentina Y El Discurso Sobre Si Existe Un “Feminismo Indígena.” / “All Of The Communities We Have One Spirit:” An Analysis Of The Recent Rise Of Political And Social Activism Of Indigenous Women In Argentina And The Discussion Of Whether An “Indigenous Feminism” Exists., Larissa Peltola

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

En el siguiente trabajo, intento de presentar e identificar cuál es, en mi opinión, el movimiento social más reciente en la Argentina y estudiar el activismo de las mujeres Argentinas nativas, de comunidades indígenas y pueblos originarios[1] y las formas en que se encuentran participando en este movimiento social. El primer objetivo de este ensayo es identificar brevemente la manera en que las mujeres de estas comunidades han sido históricamente excluidas de las posiciones tradicionales de poder y las diversas formas de discriminación basadas en la raza, el género y el estatus socioeconómico. En segundo lugar, examinaré las formas …

La Resistencia Cultural A Través Del Teatro De Las Oprimidas Para La Cultivación De La Subjetividad De La Mujer En Un Contexto De Violencia De Género: Un Estudio De Caso Del Colectivo De Mujeres Osadía / Cultural Resistance And The Cultivation Of The Subjective Through Theatre Of The Oppressed For The Woman In A Context Of Gender Violence: A Case Study With Colectivo De Mujeres Osadía In Jose Leon Suarez, Province Of Buenos Aires, Lela Biggus

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Hay en este momento en la historia una ola de movimientos feministas barriendo la vida política de Buenos Aires. Movimientos como Ni Una Menos busca, en una variedad de métodos, para interrumpir el discurso destructivo de la cultura machista que produce la violencia de género y hace que el acto de femicidio, el asesinato de una mujer por su género, sea común.

En mis investigaciones exploro cómo el Teatro del oprimido, una práctica teatral de Augusto Boal, puede transformarse en una experiencia de resistencia cultural y subjetivación de la mujer en un contexto de violencia de género. Yo pasé tiempo …

Tourism And The Vrankrijk As A Safe(R) Space, Megan Adams

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This is a practicum-based study on the impact of tourism on the creation and maintenance of a safe(r) space at the Vrankrijk. The Vrankrijk is a former squat and current volunteer-run community center and café, which hosts WTF Wednesday, a weekly safe(r) queer night of a voku dinner and performances. This research explores the current definitions of safe space as applied to the Vrankrijk. The study’s main focus is the impact of tourism on the Vrankrijk as a safe(r) space.

The study finds its roots in four experiential interviews with members of the community including a visiting band member whose …

"We Control It On Our End, And Now It's Up To You" -- Exploitation, Empowerment, And Ethical Portrayals Of The Pornography Industry, Julie E. Davin

Student Publications

Documentaries about pornography are beginning to constitute an entirely new subgenre of film. Big Hollywood names like James Franco and Rashida Jones are jumping on the bandwagon, using their influence and resources to invest in a type of audiovisual knowledge production far less mainstream than that in which they usually participate. The films that have resulted from this new movement are undoubtedly persuasive, no matter which side of the debate over pornography these directors have respectively chosen to represent. Moreover, regardless of the side(s) that audience members may have taken in the so-called “feminist porn debates,” one cannot ignore the …

Sexy Robots: A Perpetuation Of Patriarchy, Ashlyn Des Roches

Communication Studies

This feminist critique looks into the way that gender, specifically females, are portrayed in some of Hollywood's top films involving Artificial Intelligence: Blade Runner, Her, and Ex Machina. These movies work as a perpetuation of patriarchal ideologies while maintaining the objectification and hypersexuality of women as normalized behaviors. Additionally, while some forms of empowerment are conveyed, the features illustrate women merely on a spectrum of extreme behavior; due to Heuristics and Cultivation Theory, these misrepresentations can be associated with women outside the surrealist realm of the depicted artificially intelligent worlds.

A Visit To The Doctor: Preparation For Activism, Simone Watson

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

The Fantastic Manifesto: Monstrosity Of Memory And Epiphany Of Selfhood In The Spirit Of The Beehive (1973), Layla Blodgett Carrillo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Spanish culture of storytelling suffered under the nearly forty-year dictatorship of Francisco Franco. The government-regulated cinema welcomed propaganda and melodrama, and denied the fantastic, the legendary, and the magical. These carefully manipulated histories, which served to romanticize the ideologies of the regime, also served to eulogize the delinquent and the depraved. In the early 1970s, at the heels of the collapse of Franco’s reign, the people of Spain bore witness to a new national cinema. The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), the feature debut from Victor Erice, exists at the threshold between a storied history of Spanish dictatorship and …

“The Monster They've Engendered In Me”: Gothic Strategies In African American And Latina/O Prison Literature, 1945-2000, Jason Baumann

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent scholarship on American prison literature, such as Caleb Smith’s pivotal study The Prison in the American Imagination, has uncovered the power that the terrifying realities of the modern prison have had as an inspiration for the development of Gothic literature, as well as the ways that prison writers have in turn drawn upon these Gothic images. However, these scholars have considered prison writers as passively trapped by Gothic discourses that ultimately objectify them as monsters. In contrast, I will argue that African American and Latina/o prison writers in the post-war period have consciously transformed these Gothic themes in …

By Beauty Damned: Millennial Feminism And The Exploitation Of Women's Empowerment In Pop Culture And Corporate Advertising, Maria L. Carreon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Feminism has become a trendy cultural identity, leaving it open to exploitation by capitalists. Notions relating to “women’s empowerment” are used by capitalists to sell products to women, and yet many of those capitalists fund political campaigns that directly seek to quash or inhibit the advancement of women’s rights. With a little effort, any consumer can find out who their big purveyors are supporting politically. For example, Procter Gamble, who makes many products bought by women, gives the majority of its political contributions to republicans who oppose women’s reproductive rights. The same is true of McAndrews & Forbes, the parent …

El Spill De Jaume Roig. Estudio De Relaciones Semióticas Con La Picaresca, Raul Macias Cotano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Spill is a literary work written in the Catalan dialect of Valencia in 1460 by Jaume Roig, a prestigious doctor whose personal and public life is well known. The book presents numerous parallels with Lazarillo de Tormes, the 1554 novel written in Spanish (or “Castilian”) that has traditionally been considered the start of the picaresque genre in Spain. These similarities are so striking that it makes critics wonder if Spill may be a precedent of Lazarillo de Tormes. This dissertation studies the possible relations between those two books. The similarities are mostly thematic, for which the lens …

Empirical Reflections On Women Students In Usa Nonprofit Academic Programs And Realizations About Ideological Influence, Norman A. Dolch

Journal of Ideology

This research reports on the beliefs of a select sample of women and men faculty across the USA regarding women in nonprofit organization academic programs. The main differences were on professional orientation among graduate students, difficulty with quantitative oriented courses, and portrayal of women in coursework. To eliminate these differences, beliefs (ideologies) among faculty and students need to be altered. Sanberg’s book Lean In is especially informative about changing beliefs about career orientation for both men and women to what she calls a belief in sustainable and fulfilling positions. Another valuable resource for faculty concerned about these issues is Creating …

Interpretations Of Hagar: Pathway To Healing In The Wake Of Sexual Assault, Kelsey West

Religion: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Christians’ Cut: Popular Religion And The Global Health Campaign For Medical Male Circumcision In Swaziland, Casey Golomski, Sonene Nyawo

Anthropology

Swaziland faces one of the worst HIV epidemics in the world and is a site for the current global health campaign in sub-Saharan Africa to medically circumcise the majority of the male population. Given that Swaziland is also majority Christian, how does the most popular religion influence acceptance, rejection or understandings of medical male circumcision? This article considers interpretive differences by Christians across the Kingdom’s three ecumenical organisations, showing how a diverse group people singly glossed as ‘Christian’ in most public health acceptability studies critically rejected the procedure in unity, but not uniformly. Participants saw medical male circumcision’s promotion and …

The Rhetoric Of Transgression: Reconstructing Female Authority Through Wu Zetian's Legacy, Rachael Rothstein-Safra

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This study examines representations of Wu Zetian in the biographical tradition of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, as well as within the subsequent vernacular literature of the Ming and Qing periods. I analyze the traditional use and construction of female stereotypes (and female-oriented flaws and vices) in the rhetoric of official histories and fictional narratives and their application to representations of Wu Zetian. I argue that authors, anxious of discord engendered and caused by women occupying positions of political authority, sought to delegitimize Wu Zetian’s reign and subsequently cultivated a “rhetoric of female transgression.” I further argue that the …

Reading The Romance: Throught The Eyes Of A Millennial Feminist, Jessica English

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

The consumption of romance novels is vast, far leading the literary industry, with millennial readers being the second largest consumer group. Similarly, we continue to see an ever-increasing embrace of feminist ideology, even if that does not always translate to self-identifying as feminists. This paper seeks to examine the interrelationship between these two popular parts of American culture, with particular regard to the millennial generation. This research is a quantitative analysis of participants that either identify as feminists or have, either in the past or currently, read romance novels, and their thoughts on the intersection of these two things. The …

Narrative Pleasures And Feminist Politics: Popular Women’S Historical Fiction, 1990-2015, Victoria Kennedy

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This dissertation contributes to a developing body of work on women’s historical fiction and its significance to feminist discourse. Building from Diana Wallace’s 2005 study The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900-2000, I offer a modified definition of “the woman’s historical novel” and a transatlantic consideration of several of the most popular titles in the contemporary period, including The Other Boleyn Girl (2001), Outlander (1991), A Great and Terrible Beauty (2003), and Scarlett (1991). Several studies have followed Wallace’s, notably Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn’s Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women’s Writing (2007) and Katherine Cooper and Emma …

Walking In The City: Koji Nakano’S Reimagining And Re-Sounding Of The Tale Of Genji, Isabella Ramos

Scripps Senior Theses

Imagined Sceneries is a work written by composer Dr. Koji Nakano of Burapha University, Thailand for two sopranos, koto, light percussion, narrations, soundscapes recorded in Kyoto, Japan in December 2015, and digital projections of Ebina Masao’s 1953 print series Tale of Genji. Imagined Sceneries’ reimagining and “re-sounding” of Heian Kyoto relies on a balance between what is imagined and what is experienced in performance. Its many elements collectively explore multiple layers of Japanese histories, soundscapes, environments, and sensibilities. Using Michel de Certeau’s concepts of the city, this thesis journeys through Nakano’s imagined spaces.

A Generation Of Katnisses: The New Power Of Female Protagonists In Young Adult Dystopian Literature, Mckenzie K. Watterson

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Considering emerging heroines in young adult dystopian fiction, this project first examines them in a literary review. Using feminist ethics of care as a baseline, the review considers their unique worlds, agency, and motivation

[Not] Buying It: Prostitution As Unwanted Sex, Rebecca Whisnant

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Noting the relative invisibility of prostitution buyers, or Johns, in discussions of the morality of prostitution, this article criticizes Johns’ behavior on the grounds that they are culpably involved in causing the typical harms of prostitution in the lives of the women whom they pay for sex. Those harms are, at bottom, the result of being habitually subjected to unwanted sex, and they are exacerbated rather than mitigated by such sex being bought and paid for. Efforts to normalize and legalize sex-buying should therefore be resisted.

Reader's Guide: A Foray Into Violence, Trauma And Masculinity In In Our Time, Sara-Rose Beatriz Bockian

CMC Senior Theses

Modernism has been called “a reaction to the carnage and disillusionment of the First World War and a search for a new mode of art that would rescue civilization from its state of crisis after the war” (Lewis, 109) Hemingway attempts this rescue by re-thinking aspects of the novel that were taken for granted in earlier periods, just as the conventions of modern life were taken for granted pre-WWI. Furthermore, his work tries to rectify the dissonance between a pre and post-war self through the exploration of social conventions relating to violence, trauma and masculinity.

Performativity And Domestic Fiction In Antebellum America: The Power Dynamics Of Class And Gender Performance, Blair Hedigan

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis analyzes the role of performativity within the domestic novel during antebellum America; specifically, the ways in which E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand and Louisa May Alcott’s Behind a Mask subverted cultural and societal norms by exploring the performative nature of class and gender. Through their respective protagonists, the two authors sought to question the power dynamics of an overwhelmingly patriarchal society. By granting their protagonists agency through performance, Southworth and Alcott explored the ways in which women might alter existing power structures to reject the restrictions gender essentialism placed upon antebellum women, and to advocate for women’s rights, …

Reproducing The Capitalist Patriarchy In The Evangelical Christian Sexual Purity Movement: A Feminist Christian’S Concern And Hope, Hannah K. Griggs

Audre Lorde Prize

Through a feminist lens, this essay will explore modern expressions of the conservative evangelical Christian purity movement, including Christian sex manuals, abstinence-only education programs, and purity balls. To begin, I will explain the most important facets of my own feminist theory, which draws from existentialist, socialist, and postmodern feminisms. Using this unique combination of theories, I will attempt to reconcile my deeply held Christian and feminist beliefs about sex. Finally, I will propose a solution that honors both of these important parts of my identity. I assert that the Christian purity movement Others women reinforcing a gender binary, bending to …

"The Mouth Of The Void," "Hum", Hannah L. Comeriato

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project presents two distinct pieces of short fiction, linked through intentional stylized language, grammatical patterns, and a sectionalized narrative structure. Each individual piece of short fiction functions independently – as separate and distinct from the other, with no explicit connection in content (i.e. recurring characters, parallel timelines etc.). However, each narrative also displays a kind of complex interaction with the other, each crafted to produce, when read alongside one another, a shared indistinct aesthetic and emotional experience. This aesthetic and emotional experience is crafted, specifically, by the use of stylized verbs, the em-dash, and alternating dialogue-based and image-based sections. …

Intersectional Value? A Pilot Study Exploring Educational Outcomes For African American Women In Historically Black Sororities Versus Non-Historically Black Sororities., Donald Mitchell Jr., John A. Gipson, Jakia Marie, Tiffany Steele

Education Faculty Publications and Presentations

The purpose of this pilot study was to initially explore if there is value added in terms of educational outcomes for Black women involved in historically Black sororities by comparing them to Black women involved in non-historically Black sororities, given the racial-gender support historically Black sororities offer. Main findings suggest Black women involved in historically Black sororities were more socially involved than Black women involved in non-historically Black sororities. The article closes with implications for practice and future research.

The Institute Of New Feelings: Plastic Identities And Imperfect Surfaces, Weijian Zhou

Theses and Dissertations

Digital media are moldable spaces where an image is simultaneously a thought. This instance and flexibility enables digital existences to be malleable, transformative, situational, and unstable. They are plastic images. Video games generate digital bodies that are a fusion of subjectivities and cybernetic simulations, in a perceivable and ambiguous process. Such bodies are extensions of ourselves, being girlish, imperfect, unfinished and happening—digesting and emitting clusters of feelings, regardless of our biological gender and age. The performative experience of play is progressively departing from spectacle, gambling and competition, and increasingly shifting towards an emotional journey of alternate realities, spreading subjectivities into …