Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

The One-Armed Viewer: Voyeurism And Masturbation In Nudist Imagery And Film Spectatorship, Benjamin Eleanor Adam

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nudist magazines and newsletters were among the first commercial, legal, and widely-available images of nudity which circulated in the late Comstock Era. To evade censorship, producers developed framing strategies that obscured the sexualized nature of these images, even as they also enabled the viewing practices their sales relied upon. This dissertation traces these framing strategies as they evolved through nudist still-imagery, camp films, and nudie cuties, and considers the evolution of spectatorial pleasures associated with Russ Meyer's early nudie cuties.

Gender Role As A Mediating Factor In Gender Pay Equity Analysis, Jillian Ann Girard

Dissertations and Theses

The gender wage gap has been persistent despite the introduction of new laws designed to address the disparity. One of the challenges in addressing this inequity is the lack of complete understanding of the driving factors of the pay gap. One yet unexplored factor is the impact of the gender role, which is a social role based on sex/gender which provides a structure and expectations for social relationships. The purpose of this research was to explore the relationship between gender role, biological sex, and base pay. A matched, cross-sectional sample drawn from large U.S. cities was utilized to test the …

Artistic Expressions Of Vegan Women With Disturbed Eating Behavior And Body Image Distress, Lee Ann Thill

Expressive Therapies Dissertations

This research explores the experience of women who are vegan, and have disturbed eating behaviors (DEB) and body image distress (BID). Four participants completed a series of three art-making sessions. Participants were invited to visually explore their experience as a vegan woman with DEB/BID. They made a mixed media collage with an emphasis on layering in each session. They engaged in discussion about their process, and the final art piece’s meaning. Between sessions, researcher response art pieces were created for each participant piece, with accompanying journal reflections to engage with the ideas they explored. All participant sessions were video and …

Article 6.21, Tatiana Stolpovskaya

Theses and Dissertations

Article 6.21 is a short documentary film that aims to examine the state of censorship around queerness in Russia today and its effects on personal lives in the queer community.

Twenty years after Russia decriminalized homosexuality, on June 30th in 2013, President Vladimir Putin signed Article 6.21 "for the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values", also known as the "Gay Propaganda Law". Its broad and ambiguous wording allows the government significant leeway in deciding what kind of public queerness is punishable.

In 2020 Russia passed multiple constitutional amendments that affect many areas …

Giglife.Nyc: Blood, Sweat, Tears And Glitter., Erik B. Slavin

Theses and Dissertations

In New York City there's a community of artists who have rejected the obvious choices that the world has offered them and pursued a life of performance and glitter, of bright lights and fire and sensuality.

These performers are extraordinarily compelling. They're artists with lives crafted to entice and delight our gaze. GigLife.NYC: Blood, Sweat, Tears & Glitter is an observational documentary film that invites the viewer, drawn in with the promise of titillating spectacle, to discover the object of their desire is engaged in artistic, romantic, political and economic struggle.

Ophelia, The Monster: Representations Of Female Madness In The Western Horror Film, Alexandra Fitzpatrick

Theses and Dissertations

Horror, as a whole, is preoccupied with madness. How else can one characterize a genre largely based in ambiguity and potential hallucination? So it should come with no surprise that horror is also preoccupied with gender. Mental instability has been associated with femininity from the dawn of Western civilization. The Ancient Greeks coined the term hysteria from their word for uterus, subscribing to the theory that the womb could move about a woman’s body and cause her to behave irrationally. Up until the nineteenth century, hysteria was believed to be an exclusively feminine condition. With potential symptoms comprising a seventy-five …

Through Their Eyes: An Analysis Of Misrepresentation In Popular Lesbian Television Narratives, Delana Janine Price

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The purpose of this thesis is to explore lesbian television narratives that shape popular discourse. My goal is to find and expose the implications of monolithic expressions of queerness through both queer and heteronormative presenting television narratives. This exploration of the queer narrative voice addresses three distinct movements of cultural production: the proclaimed self-represented queer television narrative, the connotatively queer heterocentric television narrative, and the queer narrative produced in fan-based literature. For concision, I focus on the popular television dramas The L Word and Rizzoli & Isles, as well as the fan works produced for the latter. Through the lens …

So What, Now What? Using Social Media Activism To Inform Power-Conscious Prevention Of Gender-Based Violence, Andrea R. Thyrring

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

We will not end gender-based violence by responding to it. Experts and national organizations agree that effective primary prevention programs are essential to stopping harmful behaviors before they start (DeGue et al, 2014; American College Health Association, 2016; American College Health Association, 2018; Townsend, 2017; Schneider & Hirsch, 2018; McMahon et al, 2019), so much so that primary prevention to address gender-based violence on college campuses has been mandated by state and federal policy (SB 19-007, 2019; Institutional Security Policies and Crime Statistics, 2020). In order to be effective, primary prevention programs should be tailored to the community in which …

Fatty Fatty Two-By-Four—Can’T Get Through The Dressing Room Door?: An Examination Of Excess As Queer Failure, Miranda Dottie Olzman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Failure and fat are not linear. It is taught, learned, reminded, and internalized. Our bodies have memories that are built through repeated moments. And for me, failure has been a part of my body’s map since I was born. This project is the culmination of many failures. In this dissertation, I am examining queer failure in multiple contexts including body size, as well as religion to create a corpulent critique. I do this by examining the lineage of queer failure as well as queer temporality as it is linked to failure (Edelman; Muñoz; Halberstam; Love) with fat queer bodies serving …

Rape: A Settler-Colonial And Anti-Black Project, Cristy A. Dougherty

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

White feminist theorizations of rape privilege patriarchy as the main source of gender violence, ultimately centering white cisgender women. In doing so, white women are treated as subject in anti-rape discourse while the violence inflicted on women of color is rendered as secondary and insignificant. Conversely, Indigenous and Black feminist analytics center Indigenous and Black women’s experiences with sexual violence, ultimately pointing to the ways in which rape has been used as a tool to perpetuate heteropatriarchy, settler-colonialism, and anti- Black racism. For instance, Deer (2015) explains that Indigenous women experience disproportionately high rates of sexual violence that spans generations. …

War Of Words: A Rhetorical Analysis Of The Military's Sexual Assault Prevention Posters, Nancy Thurman Clemens

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Joining the expanding discourse surrounding language and its effects, specifically regarding the performance of gender in a hypermasculine environment, this dissertation offers a rhetorical analysis of the United States Department of Defense's sexual assault prevention and response training materials, particularly posters created between 2009 and 2012. This dissertation examines the context of sexual harassment and assault within the military from the late 1970s until the mid-2000s. Presenting scandals that led up to the development of the Department's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response (SAPR) program, I give a brief history of the establishment and scope of responsibility for the program in …

Kiss Of Love Campaign: Contesting Public Morality To Counter Collective Violence, Sonia Krishna Kurup Miss

Peace and Conflict Studies

The paper studies the immense opposition to a nonviolent campaign against the practice of moral policing in Kerala to understand the dominant spaces, collective identities, and discourses that give shape to the outrage of public morality in India. The campaign through its politics specifically targeted rightwing and political groups as well as socially embedded familial and institutional structures that exercise control over individuals through patriarchal regimes. The adverse reaction to the campaign revealed that collective aggression or violence can be used to impose majoritarian values and exert social control through the authority of public morality and everyday acts of moral …

Protest Music In Response To The United States’ Oppressive Political Culture: An Analysis Of Beyoncé'S "Freedom" And Janelle Monáe's "Americans", Jessica Torrey

HMC Senior Theses

This paper aims to study a popular musical artist’s responsibility towards the empowerment of marginalized communities in the United States through an analysis of the songs “Freedom” by Beyoncé and “Americans” by Janelle Monáe. These songs will be analyzed in conjunction with the political climate during the time of their fabrication and release as well as the political climates discussed in the songs themselves. This paper presents a thorough analysis of the lyrical and musical components of both songs as well as an analysis of a specific performance of both songs. These analyses will be presented in conversation with many …

"Everyone's Always Going Through Something, Aren't They?": J.D. Salinger, Sally Rooney, And The Desire To Connect In The Face Of Distress, Emily O'Malley

Honors Program Theses

Literature is often centered around the human desire for connection and the struggle to understand one another. This tension is heightened in novels centering adolescents and young adults, who are often insecure in their own identities. J.D. Salinger's fiction is a hallmark of this thematic exploration, yet he fails to interrogate dimensions of gender and class in a meaningful way. Sally Rooney's contemporary work subverts Salinger's within plot structure, distanced communication as a device, and self-synecdoche of distress, as well as her open engagement with class and gender. She demonstrates the power of reckoning with one's own identity, revealing how …

Andrea Revised: Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist As Revolutionary By Martin Duberman, Phyllis Chesler

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Monstrous And Beautiful: Jungian Archetypes In Wilde’S Salomé, Nayana Rajnish

English (MA) Theses

The subject of my research is the 1891 play Salomé, by Oscar Wilde and my thesis addresses the modern psychological implications of the cultural truths revealed by Wilde's re-vision of the myth of that biblical femme fatale. I argue that in fashioning a tragic heroine out of a female monster figure of “Immortal Vice”, Oscar Wilde created a document that captures two contradictory narratives: one in which Salomé plays the heroine of a tragedy and another in which she performs the role and functions of a villain. By employing Carl Jung's psychology of the archetypes, I am enabled …

Drag Artist Interviews, 2020, Destiny Baxter, Ezra Temko, Adam Loesch

SIUE Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

This public dataset contains transcripts of 8 in-depth semistructured interviews with drag artists. Destiny Baxter conducted these interviews during Spring 2020. This follows up on an available dataset of 22 interviews of drag artists conducted in Spring 2019 by SIUE students, available at https://spark.siue.edu/siue_fac/104/

All 2019 and 2020 interviews used the same instrument.

Conquering Shame: The Growth Of Virginia Woolf’S Character In Moments Of Being, Ellie Windfeld-Hansen

Global Tides

This paper details the roles that shame, guilt, dread and humiliation play in Virginia Woolf's childhood and early adult life. It examines four key instances during these times in her life in which one or more of these feelings are present. Each of these instances also involves certain distinct family members. These experiences of Woolf's discussed in the paper and the family members with which she interacts strengthen her character and contribute to her unique perception and worldview.

Híbridos, Monstruos, Cíborgs Y Posthumanos: La Hibridez Como Herramienta Ciberpunk Para Retomar El Control De Los Cuerpos, Naiara Porras Rentero

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

Rosi Braidotti warns us in her book Lo posthumano (2013) that “when the word difference implies inferiority, the connotation can be both dangerous and harmful for those marked as the other” (12). Since Michel Foucault first began his analysis of biopolitics, there have been many thinkers who have theorized how heteropatriarchal roles demand conformity at the risk of self-alienation and loss of identity. The theatrics demanded by an externally imposed social order can tax personal autonomy and diminish the resources required for individual growth and development. Judith Butler’s performance theory uses biopolitics to underscore how gender identity and sexual orientation …

The Joy Of Listening: Three Voices In The Poetry Of Wisława Szymborska, Mimi Thompson

CMC Senior Theses

One of the greatest feats that a poet may achieve in his or her lifetime is to develop a voice so characteristic of themself, it would be impossible to confuse it with that of any other poet. Polish-speaking and non-Polish-speaking scholars alike have agreed that the voice of 1996 Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska is utterly distinct, despite the fact that her poems explore a wide range of topics and are told from multiple narrative perspectives, rarely featuring herself through any personal details. How, then, is it possible for hundreds of poems, each with their own narrator, to still be “heard” …

Building The Fat Girl Table: Excavating Cultural Memory Of Queer Fat Activism In The ‘90s, Rose Gelfand

Scripps Senior Theses

When we recount the histories of social movements, there is a tendency to imagine either a steady, linear march towards progress or a slow descent from radical ideas into complacency. The feminist movement gets painted in waves, progressing from white to intersectional, while in the LGBTQ+ rights movement the contrast of the Stonewall Riots & ACT UP with late 2010s focus on gay marriage and the corporatization of Pride is understood as a watering down and betrayal of the movement’s origins. Cultural memory is a constant process of construction and revision, and of course the truth of movements’ trajectories are …

The Manifestation Of Inner-Gender Oppression In Margaret Atwood’S The Handmaid’S Tale As Results From Intentional Patriarchal Power Structures, Aliyah Browning

Capstone Showcase

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has long been studied for its cautionary warnings about sexist ideologies that exist between men and women; seldom has it been so closely analyzed for instances of inner gender oppression. Inner-gender oppression, which this thesis seeks to define and highlight through the novel’s context, offers artificial forms of power to those in oppressed classes, enough to attract women themselves to participate in the indoctrination and policing of their own sex. This essay highlights the ways in which Atwood’s dystopian society parallels sexist beliefs held by societies past and present.

"Because It’S 2015!": Justin Trudeau’S Yoga Body, Masculinity, And Canadian Nation-Building, Jennifer Musial, Judith Mintz

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

In 2015, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters he chose a gender-balanced cabinet “because it’s 2015,” a sentiment that resonated with Leftists and feminists. Trudeau showed he was a different kind of male politician through his yoga practice. Through candid yoga photographs, Trudeau represented himself as a sensitive new age guy who challenged hegemonic masculinity through wellness, playfulness, and a commitment to multiculturalism. Using discourse analysis, we examine visual, print, and social media texts that feature Trudeau’s connection to yoga, masculinity, and nation-building. We argue that Trudeau’s yoga body projects a “hybrid masculinity” (Bridges 2014; Demetriou 2001) that constructs …

Sex And The Stars: The Enduring Structure Of Gender Discrimination In The Space Industry, Bronwyn D. Lovell

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Women have much to contribute to the worlds of science and technology, and the world is poorer for women’s historical exclusion from such scientific endeavors. Although many industries exhibit gender discrepancies and continue to be shaped by sexism (e.g., banking, farming, mining, trucking, engineering, etc.), no other industry features so predominantly in our future-oriented visions for humanity as does science, and particularly space science. For women working in the male-dominated global space industry, space is a female frontier with a celestial ceiling. The United Nations (UN) reports that, in 2016, only 20% of workers in the space industry were women, …

Hettie Jones And Bonnie Bremser: Complicating Feminist And Beat Master Narratives, Nancy Effinger Wilson

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The Beat master narrative suggests that all Beats ignored racism; the feminist wave model suggests that there was no feminist activism between the first and second wave of feminism and no attention to the intersection of race and gender prior to the third wave. Both models discount and in the process erase the efforts by Beat writers Bonnie Bremser and Hettie Jones who challenged racism and sexism before the more visible civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s. Employing Milton Bennett's Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity to analyze the intercultural/interracial attitudes present in Bonnie Bremser’s Troia and Hettie Jones’ …

Peeta’S Virtue In The Hunger Games Trilogy, Gabriel Ertsgaard

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The Latin virtus literally means “manliness” (vir = man) and, by extension, the positive qualities that a man should have. During the transition from Latin to French to English, “virtue” lost its gender specificity, but retained its reference to positive qualities. Thus, by the Enlightenment period, separate standards of virtue had emerged for women and men. Suzanne Collins disrupts this gendered virtue dichotomy in her Hunger Games trilogy. Peeta Mellark is a natural diplomat and peacemaker, a gentle soul who fits the feminine model of virtue better than the masculine model. Although Peeta engages in violence when necessary, he …

“Ain’T My Mama’S Broken Heart”: The Mothers And Daughters Of Hillbilly Feminism, Alyssa Dewees

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The women of country music have long defied the genre's patriarchal associations and used their music as a platform for subversive social messages about gender inequality, and in the past several decades, the country music establishment has grown more willing to alter its image and accommodate these feminist themes. Because country music is marketed and understood by many of its fans as a representation of a lifestyle, this shift in expectations for women’s social roles and possibilities in the genre has an impact on the women who identify themselves with the particular rural, down-home image country music aims to define. …

The Poetics Of Pakistani Patriarchy: A Critical Analysis Of The Protest-Signs In Women’S March Pakistan 2019, Amer Akhtar, Selina Aziz, Neelum Almas

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The Pakistani variant of Women’s March Aurat March celebrated its second year in March 2019. The current study focuses on the issues raised by the participants during Aurat March 2019 to define patriarchy from a Pakistani-out-on-the-street feminist struggle. It analyses the protest signs, slogans, messages, and concerns raised through banners in the march. The paper attempts to offer a unique perspective on Pakistani patriarchy by analyzing the voice of the women instead of any theorization or enactment of the voice. It employs visual and textual methods to understand the view of the participants and finds that the participants of the …

Kate O’Brien: Queer Hauntings In The Feminist Archive, Naoise Murphy

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The archive of Irish writer Kate O’Brien is a notable example of how queerness haunts the mainstream of feminist literary spaces. The 2019 Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI) exhibition Kate O’Brien: Arrow to the Heart, which set out to restore this censored novelist’s place in the archive of twentieth-century Irish writing, provides a case study of these dynamics. Queer and feminist perspectives on the archive, with a focus on affect, hauntings and Sara Ahmed’s “queer use,” illuminate the conflicting epistemologies regulating the O’Brien archive. Reading this exhibition as an Irish queer, affective experience collides with entrenched structures of power …

The Ghost Town: An Autoethnographic Study On The Effects Of Loss And Trauma On A Saudi Arabian International Student’S Well-Being, Salman J. Alzowibi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

We all have fought on grief’s battleground; some of us started at early ages, while others during their developmental age, teen’s years, or later in their adulthood. All of them are valuable resources and sites of knowledge that need to be explored. Yet, recent studies reduced grief into clinical psychological well-being. However, as I lived these experiences, trauma, loss, and grief impact all well-being dimensions. Grief intersects with large structures (e.g., social, economic, cultural, locations, etc.); all these components impact our way of grief how socially displayed (mourning). This dissertation encapsulates my personal experience elevating it to an academic work …