Women's Studies Commons^™

Criminalizing Lgbtq+ Jamaicans: Social, Legal, And Colonial Influences On Homophobic Policy, Zoe C. Knowles

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Based on colonial and neocolonial models of oppression, Jamaica has adopted many laws, policies, and systems mandated by the British monarchy. Many of these laws contain anti-LGBTQ+ policies which remain in effect today. To address the criminalization of LGBTQ+ identities, I used queer theory and queer criminology to analyse the ways Jamaica constructs LGBTQ+ people as criminals and how they are treated in the legal and criminal justice systems from a postcolonial standpoint. Using a qualitative text-based feminist and queer policy analysis, I investigated social, legal, and colonial influences on current anti-LGBTQ+ policy by looking at the Offences Against the …

Jane Anger Her Protection For Women And The Emergence Of A Radical Female Voice In Late Sixteenth Century England, Ashley M. Wessel

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores how women authors responded to masculine discourses of dominance in late sixteenth-century England. Directly, it concentrates on the pamphlet Jane Anger her Protection for Women, written in 1589 and published under the pseudonym Jane Anger. I argue Anger’s pamphlet was a radical voice within Elizabethan print culture which lends a view into gender politics of the time in which this piece was produced. I also argue that though Anger’s target audience was the gentlewomen of England, she crafted her pamphlet for a broad audience that included any literate man or woman across social station. The importance …

Bad Bunny’S Purplewashing As Gender Violence In Reggaeton: A Feminist Analysis Of Solo De Mi And Yo Perreo Sola, Dairíne Hoban

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Bad Bunny has skyrocketed to fame in the past few years, gaining worldwide recognition as one of the best reggaetoneros of his time. His self-promoted image as an ally to women’s movements and the Queer community has garnered him the recognition of being a role model for youth and as an anomaly in the misogynistic genre of reggaeton. However, few have looked beyond the assertion of allyship to see if his work truly does support women and anti-gender violence ideology. While scholarship on reggaeton has well documented the prevalence of gender violence in the lyrics, videos and overall culture of …

Review Of Women, Performance, And The Material Of Memory: The Archival Tourist, 1780-1915, By Laura Engel, Leslie Ritchie

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

Sisterhood & Scholarship While Black, Stephanie R. Anckle

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

Women Entrepreneurs In China: Dialectical Discourses, Situated Activities, And The (Re)Production Of Gender And Entrepreneurship, Zhenyu Tian

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Despite the number of women entrepreneurs on the rise globally, the business world and the identity of the entrepreneur remain to be normed masculine and male gender stereotyped. This male gender stereotyping situates women who practice entrepreneurship in disadvantages, limiting their access to resources on which they depend to make meaning of their activities and identities. This imbalanced masculine gender order also manifests in China’s economy. Women entrepreneurs in China face complex contradictions and challenges when navigating an arena that privileges men and masculinity. However, not much is known about the micro-dynamics of Chinese women’s entrepreneurial experiences in light of …

Dismantling Hegemony Through Inclusive Sexual Health Education, Lauren Wright

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the process of developing a sexual health education curriculum that is not only tailored to the unique needs of foster-engaged young women, but also those who may experience further marginalization from other mainstream programs due to their race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and/or their religious beliefs. In conjunction with the Adolescent Sexual Health Education and Research (ASHER) Program, I helped develop a sexual health education curriculum, "Choosing Myself," targeted toward foster-engaged young women and young women (ages 13-24) in the state of Florida. "Choosing Myself" is intended to be an inclusive program that empowers participants, improves their …

Peminist Performance In/As Filipina Feminist Praxis: Collaging Stand-Up Comedy And The Narrative Points In Between, Christina-Marie A. Magalona

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project documents the interdependent effort between performers, authors, and texts, through re/theorizing the role of the personal narrator in autoperformance as both an individual, and a part of a political collective. Through a scripted and staged performance, studied as the data, I critically engage with representations of first-generation women of color via comediennes (Ali Wong and Cristela Alonzo) and their personal narratives, and dialogically consider moments of dis/identification as a Filipina American.

Rooted in performance in/and communication studies, the overarching method employed is conspicuous aesthetic performance, via a scripted and staged narrative performance. I join performance and other methods …

Transfat Representation, Jessica "Fyn" Asay

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study defines and analyzes representation of transfats, those who are both transgender and fat, through the examination of two popular media texts, Jabba the Hutt from The Return of the Jedi and Pat from the Saturday Night Live tv program in the 1990’s. I analyze these two texts using a queer feminist media studies lens to reveal the media construction of a transfat representation that is rooted in racism, transnormativity, and fatphobia and that positions the transfat body as non-normative and grotesque through the use of abject horror and fear. My analysis reveals how racism, transnormativity, and fatphobia shape …

Rose-Colored Genocide: Hollywood, Harmonizing Narratives, And The Cinematic Legacy Of Anne Frank’S Diary In The United States, Nora Nunn

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

Drawing from literary and cultural studies, this paper situates U.S. adaptations of Anne Frank’s diary in the 1950s within a lineage of other films about historical genocide, including Schindler’s List, Hotel Rwanda, and The Killing Fields. Analysis of these narrative adaptations matters because it helps us better understand the danger of what critic Dominick LaCapra calls “harmonizing narratives,” or stories that provide the viewer with an “unwarranted sense of spiritual uplift” (14). Tracing the metamorphosis of Frank’s own diary from play to film adaptation, this article builds on existing scholarship to focus on how, in the wake …

Making The Case For Genocide, The Forced Sterilization Of Indigenous Peoples Of Peru, Ñusta P. Carranza Ko

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

Peru’s national health program Programa de Salud Reproductiva y Planificación Familiar (PSRPF) aimed to uphold women’s reproductive rights and address the scarcity in maternity related services. Despite these objectives, during PSRPF’s implementation the respect for women’s rights were undermined with the forced sterilization of women predominantly of indigenous, poor, and rural backgrounds. This study considers the forced sterilization of indigenous women as a genocide. Making the case for genocide has not been done previously with this particular case. Using the normative markers of the Genocide Convention, this study categorically sets forced sterilization victims from the state-led-policy as victims of genocide, …

“Placing Our Breasts On A Hot Kerosene Lantern”: A Critical Study Of Microfinancialization In The Lives Of Women Entrepreneurs In The Informal Economic Sector In Ibadan, Nigeria, Olubukola Olayiwola

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study uses an anthropological perspective to investigate everyday lived experience of women borrowers and entrepreneurs (in the informal economic sector in Ibadan, Nigeria) relating to microfinancialization. Study such as this becomes important given the popular Yoruba metaphor “owo komulelanta” (“Placing our breasts on a hot kerosene lantern”) women borrowers use to express their experience particularly in their attempts to make repayments of MFB loans. Hence, there is a need to pay close attention and listen more carefully to operators of the informal sector and borrowers of MFB loans. This study employs ethnographic mixed methods to generate data in various …

Anorexia Nervosa And Bulimia Nervosa As Expressions Of Shame In A Post-Feminist, Emily Kearns

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Anorexia nervosa and Bulimia nervosa are heavily gendered conditions affecting women to a far greater degree than men in a post-millennium Western setting. The psychologistic and medicalized approaches to studying and treating these disorders do not account for socio-cultural and epistemic preferences. This paper draws a connection between shame (as emotion and affect) and these gendered disorders. Further, this work analyzes neo-liberalism, post-feminism, and consumerism as predatory elements of Western culture especially affecting women.

La Reivindicación Del Monstruo En La Obra De Pilar Pedraza: De Las Novias Inmóviles A El Amante Germano., Lola Robles

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

Digna heredera de la narrativa de Mary Shelley, la autora española Pilar Pedraza (Toledo, 1951) ha escrito y publicado una docena de novelas, varios libros de relatos y numerosos cuentos en antologías colectivas, a lo que hay que añadir una serie de ensayos sobre el papel de las mujeres en el arte, cine y literatura, y sobre brujería. Estas publicaciones ensayísticas muestran claramente la concepción del mundo que tiene Pedraza y son un buen correlato de su narrativa, tal como veremos. Su obra de ficción se inscribe dentro de la literatura de terror fantástico o se la define también simplemente …

Cyborgs Y Frankensteins Isleños: Mirada A Dos Cuentos De Marta Aponte Alsina, Veronica E. Davila Ellis

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

En el siguiente ensayo analizo dos cuentos de Marta Aponte Alsina donde se presenta una crítica sobre las narrativas femeninas ante una realidad demasiado plagada de la cibernética y productos culturales extranjeros. “Madame Bovirtual” (2005) e “Intermedio del hombre verde (20--)” (1999) muestran un cuestionamiento hacia la producción literaria durante el comienzo de la revolución tecnológica. Ambos textos utilizan como referente obras literarias canónicas canónicas, sin embargo “Intermedio…” reformula la figura del monstruo de Frankenstein para una crítica social sobre el neocolonialismo y su representación en la ficción boricua.La literatura puertorriqueña femenina a finales del Siglo 20 se encargó de …

Examining The Effect Of Context On Responses To Social Interaction, Renee R. Hangartner

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The ambiguous nature of social interactions between coeds may lead to under reporting of sexual harassment. Sexual harassment has been studied using mostly cross-sectional methods for over 30 years. However, despite decades of research, prevalence rates of sexual harassment have been found to vary considerably across and within studies. This inconsistency in findings makes drawing conclusions about the prevalence of sexual harassment challenging. Thus, the focus of the field should shift to identifying what behaviors are perceived to be sexual harassment and how that perception may vary by context. To reduce the ambiguity surrounding the labeling of an interaction as …

Queer Authority In Old And Middle English Literature, Elan J. Pavlinich

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

I argue that select early English texts queer normative authorizing conventions to authorize Old English and Middle English literatures. During the European Middle Ages, Latin cultures and literatures were privileged with authority that extended to and subverted the cultural capital of the inhabitants of England at the edge of the known Western world. I identify four exceptional English texts that employ authorizing conventions to disrupt normative networks of power that traditionally privilege Latin and to authorize English literature instead. The Norman Conquest had altered the English language and social structures; still, these altered networks of power continued to marginalize English …

"Roll" Models: Fat Sexuality And Its Representations In Pornographic Imagery, Leah Marie Turner

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to use specific fat pornographic imagery as a means to help us understand fat tropes and fetishization. The goal is to use our understandings of masculinity and race within fatness to create a possible launching point for further study within the field of fat sexuality studies. My rationale for writing such a paper is because fat sexuality studies is a field which has very little content, but potential for incredible scholarship which can impact not only our understandings of fat bodies, but of all bodies. The method for this thesis involves looking at specific …

“The Most Muscular Woman I Have Ever Seen”: Bev Francisperformance Of Gender In Pumping Iron Ii: The Women, Cera R. Shain

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The question of what constitutes femininity has been widely debated, not only in gender studies, but also in the broader social world. A venue for this debate is the 1985 documentary, Pumping Iron II: The Women, in which gender and femininity in particular become part of the central plot of the film when Bev Francis, a woman bodybuilder more muscular than any other competitor, enters the competition. While feminist scholars have analyzed gender and sport from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, little attention has been paid to female bodybuilding in particular. To fill this gap, this thesis will examine the …

Ain't I A Woman, Too? Depictions Of Toxic Femininity, Transmisogynoir, And Violence On Star, Sunahtah D. Jones

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the rate of the murder of Black trans women at the hands of Black cisgender men rises steadily every year (HRC, 2017), discourses regarding the detrimental impact of toxic masculinity within Black communities continue to increase within different branches of feminist literature. However, the role that Black cisgender women and toxic femininity play in the violent and systematic subjugation of Black trans women is largely ignored in feminist literature. In this thesis, I conduct a cultural analysis of the representations of the Black trans character Cotton Brown (from the Fox show Star) to examine how the show illustrates toxic …

‘If He Hits Me, Is That Love? I Don’T Think So’: An Ethnographic Investigation Of The Multi-Level Influences Shaping Indigenous Women’S Decision-Making Around Intimate Partner Violence In The Rural Peruvian Andes, Isabella Li Chan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how the intersections of gender, ethnicity, place, and class shape indigenous women’s risks for and experiences of intimate partner violence and related decision-making in Carhuaz province, an underserved, resource-poor setting in the Peruvian Andes. This dissertation applied a mixed-methods, community-based approach to 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Peru, which included 82 face-to-face surveys using the World Health Organization’s Multi-Country Study Instrument, 38 semi-structured interviews with survivors, community members, and IPV-related service providers, and 6 participatory action research workshops (n=64).

Through this dissertation, the voices of indigenous women struggling with intimate partner violence illuminate the lived realities …

New Lines: Mary Ann Yates, The Orphan Of China, And The New She-Tragedy, Elaine Mcgirr

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This essay demonstrates a significant break in eighteenth-century tragedy from tales of fallen women begging (the audience) for forgiveness and redemption to a different kind of she-tragedy, in which the heroine is neither fallen nor sexually desired, but rather transcends nation and politics with the “natural” moral force of maternal love. I argue that this shift was made possible/legible by Susannah Cibber’s ill-health, which forced Arthur Murphy to reconceive The Orphan of China’s heroine and allowed a rival actress, Mary Ann Yates, to step into this new role and to establish a tragic ‘line’ defined in opposition to that of …

Influencing Gender Specific Perceptions Of The Factors Affecting Women’S Career Advancement Opportunities In The United States, Kevin C. Taliaferro

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research investigates the sociological, psychological, and physiological factors known to affect women’s career advancement opportunities. It examines how awareness and knowledge shared through the #MeToo (hashtag Me Too) movement influenced gender specific perceptions about the factors affecting women’s workplace opportunities. Finally, it recommends measures to alter the divergent gender perceptions that remain an obstacle to gender equality in the workplace.

This study was conducted because gender inequalities continue in the U.S. workplace in 2018. Currently women fail to advance in careers at the same rate as men, and they are paid 21% less for similar work with equal skills …

Wishing For The Watch Face In Jonathan Swift’S “The Progress Of Beauty”, Jantina Ellens

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This article illuminates the technological underpinnings of Jonathan Swift’s satire, “The Progress of Beauty” (1719), by exploring how eighteenth-century poetics of beauty and scientific progress pit human against automaton. This article ranges from the ego of masculine technological display to women’s self-identification with the automaton to suggest that Swift’s speaker blazons the aging prostitute’s body with the hope that it might resurrect a lost ideal, the beautiful watch face. Instead, readers are confronted with the vision of Celia who, with her chipped paint, greasy joints, and faulty mechanisms, reminds them that humanity continues to break through its enamel. When readers …

“Neither East Nor West”: Shia Women Negotiating Gender Norms In America, Raheleh Dayerizadeh

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With growing hostilities towards the Ummah (Muslim global community and Diaspora) in Western countries and the fear of Sharia laws, the socialization of international human rights norms within religious institutions, makes for a timely case study. Specifically, this dissertation project aims to capture the process of norm transformation at the grassroots level by investigating the religious, cultural, and social encounter between Islam and the West by interviewing Shia women at a local mosque in Florida. Critical constructivism, post-colonial feminism, and qualitative interpretive methods, are used to address the following: how practicing Shia women are navigating between competing liberal gender equality …

Beyoncé As A Semiotic Resource: Visual And Linguistic Meaning Making And Gender In Twitter, Tumblr, And Pinterest, Addie L. Sayers China

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

At the intersection of digital identities and new language and social practice online is the concept of searchable talk (ST). ST describes the process of tagging discourse in a social networking service (SNS) with a hashtag (#), allowing it to be searchable by others. Although originating in Twitter, ST has expanded into other SNS, and is used therein not only to mark language-based posts, but also multimodal posts and images. While scholars have elucidated the structure and function of ST, their studies have primarily examined ST within language-based posts; few have researched ST with respect to images and other types …

Becoming A Woman Of Isis, Zoe D. Fine

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this study, I examine how terrorism is produced and consumed in communication. Using discourse analysis, I investigate how terrorism is constituted in the accounts of four women described in online news reports as having joined, or almost joined the so-called Islamic State (IS): “Alex,” constructed as having been lonely and flirted with IS; “Khadija,” presented as a schoolteacher turned member of IS’s all-women’s brigade; Laura, described as a woman whose partner abandoned her, who met a man online, and who brought her son with her to join IS; and Tareena, referred to as a health worker who brought her …

Reproducing Intersex Trouble: An Analysis Of The M.C. Case In The Media, Jamie M. Lane

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

How do members of the media represent intersex people? Do the voices of intersex activists find their way into mainstream media representations, or are they ignored? What types of discourses are produced by the presence (or lack thereof) of activist voices in news articles? The goal of this thesis is to interrogate the discourse surrounding intersex, or individuals who fall outside of the typical male/female binary for sex classification, and intersex activism in the media. The legal case M.C. vs. Aaronson, settled in 2017, was one of the first legal cases in the United States involving an intersex person. This …

Penalizing Pregnancy: A Feminist Legal Studies Analysis Of Purvi Patel's Criminalization, Abby Schneller

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Purvi Patel is an Indian American woman who, in 2015, was the first U.S. citizen to be convicted under feticide statutes for allegedly attempting her own abortion. Though her 2015 conviction was overturned the same year, the feticide conviction was significant as a legal precedent as well as part of a larger trend criminalizing pregnant women of color. With an eye towards the greater pattern of the criminalization of other pregnant women of color (Boyd, 1999; Faludi, 1991; Humphries, 1999; Mahan, 1996; Roberts, 1997), in this thesis I employ a feminist legal studies methodology and the theoretical frameworks of intersectionality …

The Spirit Of Friendship: Girlfriends In Contemporary African American Literature, Tangela La'chelle Serls

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Spirit of Friendship: Girlfriends in Contemporary African American Literature examines spiritual subjectivities that inspire girlfriends in three contemporary novels to journey towards actualization. It examines the girlfriend bond as a space where the Divine Spirit can flourish and assist girlfriends as they seek to become actualized. This project raises epistemological questions as it suggests that within the girlfriend dynamic, knowledge that is traditionally subjugated is formed and refined. Finally, girlfriend epistemology is considered in light of Black Girl Magic, a contemporary social and cultural movement among Black women.