Women's Studies Commons^™

Gender, Money, And The Charity Organization Society: 1900-1919, Sarah H. Arnold

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project looks at the work of the Charity Organization Society of New York from 1900 until 1919. Using reports, case histories, meeting minutes, and fundraising material, it concentrates on the ways in which the performance of gender intersected with definitions of expertise and access to money in the lives of both the social workers themselves and their clients. It begins with an overview of the Charity Organization Society's evolution from a largely volunteer charity organization focused on the morality of the poor to an organization that would become key to the development of social work as a profession. Then …

Because Nothing Is Sufficient, We Must Use Everything, Danica Savonick

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

All Consuming Self-Destructiveness: Images Of Female Attractiveness In Fashion Advertising And The Impact On Women's Body Satisfaction, Self-Presentations On Social Networks, And Beauty-Related Consumption Behavior, Maria Christoforou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sociocultural stereotypes of feminine beauty are widespread in almost every form of popular media, but most pervasively in fashion advertising. The fashion advertising industry overwhelms women with images that represent what is considered to be the "ideal beauty." In reality, for most women such stereotypes of beauty are almost totally unachievable, as the ideal beauty portrayed in advertisements is based on absolute perfection. Advertisers' use of such extreme and unrealistic role models implies that in order for a woman to be considered beautiful she must be perfect, which makes it difficult for her to achieve any level of contentment with …

The Journal Of Mother Studies: A Peer Reviewed, International, Interdisciplinary, Open-Acess, Digital Humanities Hybrid Project, Martha Joy Rose

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Academic Journals are an established forum for educators and researchers to disseminate information within their field. Journals act as mediators of knowledge, advancing the canons within specific areas of study. There are currently two journals that focus on motherhood from an interdisciplinary perspective and one that focuses on fathers. However, none of these determine a specific foundational definition of what the field is, what it hopes to study, and how it will advance itself. Rather, these journals are general collections of a great number of things that touch on varying subjects regarding motherhood and fatherhood. This thesis argues for the …

Lost In Translation: Regressive Femininity In American J-Horror Remakes, Matthew Ducca

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the ways in which the representation of female characters changes between Japanese horror films and the subsequent American remakes. The success of Gore Verbinski's The Ring (2002) sparked a mass American interest in Japan's contemporary horror cinema, resulting in a myriad of remakes to saturate the market. However, the adaptation process resulted in alterations of the source material to better conform to gender stereotypes and conventions associated with the American conception of the horror genre. Valerie Wee and Steven Rawle's research regarding cultural and gender differences between Ringu and The Ring is expanded to also include similar …

The Pulitzer Prize And Women: An Investigation Into Three Decades Of Winning Plays By Female Dramatists (1981-2009), Kathleen Potts

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dramas by women had won the Pulitzer Prize six times in the years spanning from 1921 to 1958, followed by an unexplained absence of female winners from 1959 to 1980. Then in the 1980s three women won and women continued to win up until the present day. Covering three decades - the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s - this dissertation investigates these Pulitzer Prize-winning plays by female dramatists: Crimes of the Heart by Beth Henley; 'night, Mother by Marsha Norman; The Heidi Chronicles by Wendy Wasserstein; How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel; W;t (a.k.a. Wit) by Margaret Edson; …

Affecting Neoliberal Public Health Care: Interdependent Relationality Between Disabled Care Recipients And Their Care Providers, Akemi Nishida

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I trace the neoliberal turn of a public health-care program, Medicaid, and its effects on those who are involved in it: disabled care recipients and their care providers. Also examined is the emergence of an affective relationality between these individuals through their daily practices of care. In 1993, Medicaid went through a neoliberal turn that accelerated its privatization. I investigate the ways in which this turn--in company with the neoliberal transition of other welfare programs and the rise of a transnational care industry--further deployed a gendered, raced, classed, and immigration-based division of care labor that commodified and …

Wsq: Child Editor's Note, Cynthia Chris, Matt Brim

Publications and Research

This Editor's Note introduces the WSQ issue "Child," co-edited by Sarah Chinn and Anna Mae Duane, which takes a kaleidoscopically interdisciplinary approach to childhood studies, focusing on the legibility and autonomy of children.

Being A Lesbian Librarian, Collection Development In Lesbian Librarianship, And Archives As Lesbian Spaces, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Publications and Research

Edited talk From Pratt SILS Gender LIS Panel curated by Dinah Handel on March 27th, 2015
Co-presenters include: Sian Evans; #artandfeminism Wikipedia Editathon & Jen LaBarbera; Filling in the Margins: The use of Queer Theory, Feminist Standpoint Theory, and Critical Race Theory to build inclusive archival collections
This talk remarks on the role of the librarian to provide lesbian-specific content.

Tape-By-Tape: Digital Practices And Cataloguing Rituals At The Lesbian Herstory Archives, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Publications and Research

This essay will outline the digital collections of the Lesbian Herstory Archives with an emphasis on process and workflow. The paragraphs below will describe the efforts put forth by the all- volunteer collective, and their dedication toward making materials accessible through the use of digital technology to preserve, catalog, and exhibit lesbian herstory. Interviews with Archive Coordinators, called “Archivettes”, Rachel Corbman on the Online Public Access Catalog, Saskia Scheffer on Photos, and Maxine Wolfe on Audio, will provide examples of LHA digital practices in the creation and maintenance of the Photo Collection, OPAC, and Audio Tape Digitization projects. Additional mention …

More Than Objects: Understanding Female Slaves In Barbados In The Early Modern Period, Phoebe Martine Downes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis will focus on representations of African women in the British colony of Barbados in the early modern era, using travelers' accounts, planters' records and the writings of abolition-minded reformers. The topic is significant because most scholars have focused on British colonial life during the nineteenth century, examining the planter class or the region's colonial commodities.

The period from 1600 to 1700 was an era of beginnings in the British colonial world, with England establishing its first Caribbean colonies and experimenting with different economic strategies to gain wealth. This period was also significant due to the emergence of slavery …

Dark Matter: Susan Howe, Muriel Rukeyser, And The Scholar's Art, Stefania Heim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Instead of describing poetry as a set of constraints or history of practices, Muriel Rukeyser calls it "one kind of knowledge." Dark Matter heeds Rukeyser's call, theorizing a poetics of the "scholar's art," in which documentary investigation, autobiographical exploration, and formal innovation are mutual, interwoven concerns. The dissertation pairs American poets Susan Howe (b. 1937) and Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), reading their hybrid works not through the received categories of American poetry, or through common generic and disciplinary divisions, but using an inductive methodology that takes its lead from the poets. Understanding Howe and Rukeyser's literary experiments as serious interventions in …

The American Aspasia: The Woman Lecturer In American Women's Rights Fiction, 1839-1915, Angela Ridinger-Dotterman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is the first comprehensive study of the figure of the woman lecturer/speaker that appeared in American women's rights fiction in the period between 1839 and 1915. I argue that examining the figure of the woman lecturer/ speaker in a wide variety of texts and over an extended period of history reveals that the figure served as a dynamic vehicle for women writers to advance a broad range of social and political interests; writing in a social and historical context that discouraged women's participation in public speech, women authors used fiction as a rhetorical space to articulate different visions …

The Sadistic Reader: Gender And The Pleasures Of Violence In The Novel, Pamela Burger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project seeks to explain the prevalence of narratives that feature sexual violence against women in the tradition of the Anglophone novel. To this end, it posits the existence of a sadistic reading practice that coincides with readers' sympathetic identification. A sadistic reader takes pleasure in the bodily violation of the woman at the center of a novel; such a reader enters the text expecting violence, and experiences a sense of narrative gratification when the inevitable violation plays out. These expectations emerge from repeated interactions with a literary tradition in which victimized heroines are routine. To explore such sadism, I …

La Construcción Del Androide: Maniquiféminas En La Narrativa De Javier Tomeo, Almudena Vidorreta

Graduate Student Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Re-Considering Female Sexual Desire: Internalized Representations Of Parental Relationships And Sexual Self-Concept In Women With Inhibited And Heightened Sexual Desire, Eugenia Cherkasskaya

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: Psychoanalytic and sociocultural thinkers and researchers suggest that the etiology of low female sexual desire, the most prevalent sexual complaint in women, is multi-determined, implicating biological and psychological factors, including women's early relational experiences and sexual self-concept that stem from gender dynamics of a patriarchal culture. Further, recent studies indicate that highly sexual women exhibit heightened sexual desire, and high levels of sexual agency and sexual esteem. The study evaluated a model that hypothesized that sexual self-concept (sexual subjectivity, self-objectification, genital self-image) explains (i.e., mediates) the relations between internalized representations of parental relationships (attachment, separation/individuation, parental identification) and sexual …

Straight Record And The Paper Trail: From Depression Reporters To Foreign Correspondents, Magdalena Bogacka-Rode

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Straight Record and the Paper Trail: From Depression Reporters to Foreign Correspondents engages with Martha Gellhorn's The Face of War (1959), Virginia Cowles' Looking for Trouble (1941) and Josephine Herbst's The Starched Blue Sky of Spain and Other Memoirs (1991) as documentaries of struggle. Documentary as a mode of writing and image making reveals dissonance, contradictions and varied perspectives which undermine the official historical record. The three writers, I argue, by republishing their Spanish Civil War (SCW) journalism in book form intended to set their record straight. This was motivated by their commitment to the 1930s struggle and the need …

Queen Of The Underworld: The Biography Of Sophie Lyons (1848-1924), Barbara M. Gray

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sophie Lyons was a nineteenth-century American pickpocket, blackmailer, con-woman, and bank robber. She was raised in New York City's underworld, by Jewish immigrant parents who were criminals that trained their children to pick pockets and shoplift. "Pretty Sophie" possessed a rare combination of skill at thievery, intellect, guts and beauty and became the woman Herbert Ashbury described in Gangs of New York as, "the most notorious confidence woman America has ever produced." Newspapers around the world chronicled Sophie's exploits for more than sixty years, because her life read like a novel. Her mentor was another forgotten woman who held a …

Our Day Has Finally Come: Domestic Worker Organizing In New York City, Harmony Goldberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation tells the story of Domestic Workers United (DWU), an organization of Latina and Caribbean nannies, housecleaners and elder care providers based in New York City. I trace DWU's efforts from its campaign to win basic employment protections for domestic workers in New York State through its efforts to enforce those new rights and to raise working standards above the minimum.

The driving motivation behind this work is the search for new paradigms for worker organizing that respond to the political and economic challenges of our times. I argue that domestic workers and other low-wage workers of color are …

The Kids Are All Right Online: Teen Girls' Experiences With Self-Presentation, Impression Management & Aggression On Facebook, Alison Michelle Hill

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Online social network participation is widespread among American adolescents. Prolific creators, consumers and curators of content, they write themselves into being (boyd, 2007) on social network sites like Facebook. Drawing on Erving Goffman's study of symbolic interaction in the form of dramaturgical perspective and The Third Person Effect, this research explores how young women ages 14-17 craft their self-presentations, engage in impression management, and experience aggression and bullying on Facebook. I propose that the majority of this age cohort craft online self-presentations that are consistent with their offline selves, yet they believe that other girls their age use their profiles …

"Women Have The Right To Fight!": The Contested Legacy Of Second-Wave Feminism And Anti-Rape Politics In The Trials Of Inez Garcia, 1974-1977, Megan Elizabeth Feulner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My paper takes as its central focus the trials of Inez Garcia, a woman who was charged with the murder of a man who helped rape her in Soledad, CA in 1974. Garcia's trial in 1974, in which she was convicted of second-degree murder, and her retrial in 1977, in which the ruling was reversed, is often remembered as a cause célèbre of the second-wave women's movement that united diverse activists and yielded a major feminist legal victory. However, I argue that close examination of the trial and the feminist activism around it reveals a more paradoxical legacy. First, I …

Mapping Italian Women's Filmmaking: Urban Space In The Cinema Of The New Millennium, Laura Di Bianco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation lies at the intersection of Italian studies, film studies, women's studies, and urban studies. Applying gender studies and feminist theoretical perspectives, I trace a thematic map of contemporary Italian women's cinema (2000-2012) that investigates female subjectivity in urban contexts. Examining the works of the filmmakers Marina Spada, Francesca Comencini, Wilma Labate, Roberta Torre, and Alice Rohrwacher, I identify a common tendency to treat locations like characters, apply similar modalities of incorporating city-views into the narration, and recurrently construct parallels between physical journeys through cities and inner journeys of the self. As a prism through which to look at …

Aging Out Of The Spectrum Of Cultural Visibility, Darthea M. Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I argue that the valorization of youth and the subsequent quest for agelessness has caused such an explosion of ageism that the elderly have been relegated to a culturally invisible status. The intersection of age and gender is doubly problematic for women due to sexism and the perennial objectification of the female body. Thinking of visibility as a measure of social acceptability, the consequences of cultural disappearance for the aging woman is an important site for investigation and theorizing. This thesis depicts the erasure of aging women from the cultural landscape as an effect of media representation and self-care work …

How Silently Sheela-Na-Gig Speaks: Memory, Mythos, And The Female Body, Amber C. Snider

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How and why do we destroy female agency, still today? Focusing on some of the mythical foundations and formations found in ancient Celtic and Greek imaginings, the "bodily" aspects in particular, this thesis traces the ways in which some of the modern women intellectuals receive or reject the typical feminist or female elements found in mythologies; the elided nature of the female trinity and the life giver-destroyer circularity inherent in goddesses and archetypes, for instance, appears to mirror our cultural impulse to destroy the female body. It is then not enough to create a new mythology by and for women--we …

The Advance Of The Mobile Woman: Representations Of British Women's Physical Mobility, 1660-1820, Amanda Booth Springs

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Britain's long eighteenth century (1660-1820) underwent an infrastructure and transportation revolution. Over the same period of time, scholars argue, the ideology of "the domestic woman" grew increasingly prevalent. This dissertation explores the improvements to roadways and representations of the various ways in which British women of the period increasingly utilized transportation, equestrianism, and pedestrianism to traverse the nation, which was also reflected in the development of traveling clothing for women. It argues that these literary and pictorial representations depict the tensions around women's increasing capacity for physical movement, contending that the ideology of the domestic woman was largely reactionary rhetoric …

Blogging Through Motherhood: Free Labor, Femininity, And The (Re)Production Of Maternity, Kara Mary Van Cleaf

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Drawing from a thematic analysis of 47 North American mommy blogs over a 2-year period, I situate the genre in critical discussions of feminism, media, and labor, exploring both the technological and cultural shifts that turn mothers into cultural producers and that turn the experience of motherhood into a commodity. I situate the content of such blogs, or what gets said therein, within theories of media, gender, and labor. Examining the blogs within and against such academic discussions allows me to develop an intersectional analysis of feminism, media, and labor studies.

"She Said Plain, Burned Things": A Feminist Poetics Of The Unsayable In Twentieth Century Literary & Visual Culture, Leah Souffrant

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the way silence, blank space, and other forms of creative withholding attempt to translate the unsayable, or to convey the unsayability of language in artistic form. Through a study of the works of Sylvia Plath, Jean Rhys, Rachel Zucker, Marguerite Duras, Anne Carson, and visual images, this work observes the connection between women's writing in the 20th century and the communication of painful subject matter through attention to absence. This study attends explicitly to how formal qualities in artistic works attend to ontological concerns through an examination of the intersection of concerns with phenomenology, feminism, and formal …

Neoliberalism And The "Obesity Epidemic", Dianne Rubinstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Neoliberalism has been described as a political and economic theory that proposes "human well-being can best be advanced by liberating... freedoms...within an institutional framework [of]...strong private property rights [and] free markets.... [I]f markets do not exist (...such as in... health care) then they must be created, by state action if necessary." I would argue that the "Obesity Epidemic" is just such a created Neoliberal market, and in fact does not actually exist as an "epidemic." By changing the computation of BMI (Body Mass Index) in 1998, the federal government created the "Obesity Epidemic" by definitional fiat, despite myriad contradictory evidence

The Representation Of Nonmonogamy On Feminist Blogs, Caitlin M.

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When young women look to enhance their understanding or knowledge about sexuality and relationships they often seek out internet resources. Young women, who are looking for knowledge that challenges norms surrounding relationships and sexuality, can go to feminist blogs to discuss and discern these topics. Therefore, it is important to note what these blogs are offering the women who read them and how the blogs challenge compulsory norms in our society.

This thesis will combine a study of content pertaining to nonmonogamy on feminist blogs and a literary analysis of cyberfeminist theories. Through these findings I will determine what information …

"La Feminista Nuyorquina" Contextualizing Latina Experience In The Space Of Radical U.S. History: Dominican, Puerto Rican, And Cuban Presence In New York City, Maribi Henriquez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

International migrations of women to the United States had a pronounced urban bias because cities offered women the best chances to work for wages, whether they came alone or in family groups. Immigrant women were more likely than men to arrive in East Coast ports, especially New York - Donna Gabaccia

Latino immigrants have been entering the United States through New York City since before the inception of the country's history. Political history on the Caribbean islands of Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and Cuba includes influential interference from the United States. Latinos began mass migration to the U.S. in the …