Women's Studies Commons^™

Masking Femininity: Women And Power In Shakespeare's Macbeth, As You Like It, And Titus Andronicus, Kelly Sorge

Honors Theses and Capstones

This paper analyzes the power that Lady Macbeth from Macbeth, Rosalind from As You Like It, and Tamora from Titus Andronicus assert and answers the questions of how women assert power in Shakespeare and the role gender plays in power.

Individual Thought Patterns: Women In New York's Extreme Metal Music Scene, Joan M. Jocson-Singh

Theses and Dissertations

Extreme metal music (EMM) is both an umbrella term and a sub-category of heavy metal. Although women have a small but steady presence in heavy metal, this number shrinks when applied to the EMM scene. Using ethnographic research, participant-observation and interviews, this study surveys women in New York's EMM scene to address participation, gender performativity and feminist musicology.

Private Conversation, Gahee Park

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis paper "Private Conversation" discusses the themes, contexts, and influences relevant to paintings and drawings I made during my MFA studies.

Living Subversive Narratives: Shahrazad’S Stories Of Women, Caleb Nicholas

Honors Projects

Though scholars have examined The 1001 Nights’ Entertainments or The Arabian Nights, few have thoroughly explored the function of Shahrazad’s tales as they relate to her position as a woman. Closely reading the stories of the Nights reveals that there are chiefly two types of female characters who emerge in her stories: the heroic, who have no apparent autonomy, and the villainous, who have overflowing autonomy. These depictions of women are problematic from the viewpoint of present-day feminism, but are understandable, and even genuinely subversive, in Shahrazad’s context. Although some scholars have dismissed questions about the function of the …

Images Of Sexually Deviant Women In French Film, Lara Fox

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

This research explores representations of sexually deviant women in French film beginning with the New Wave film movement of the1960s and continuing to present day. This work examines the extent to which the gender of a film’s director affects the presentation of female nudity, infidelity, homosexuality, BDSM, and pornography onscreen. Through the lens of scholarly articles of film theorists and feminists such as Laura Mulvey, Simone de Beauvoir, and Hélène Cixous; and of both feministic and anti-feministic works of famous French directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Catherine Breillat, and Emmanuelle Bercot, this capstone work identifies filmic triumphs and failures of …

French Women In Art: Reclaiming The Body Through Creation/Les Femmes Artistes Françaises : La Réclamation Du Corps À Travers La Création, Liatris Hethcoat

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The research I have conducted for my French Major Senior Thesis is a culmination of my passion for and studies of both French language and culture and the history and practice of Visual Arts. I have examined, across the history of art, the representation of women, and concluded that until the 20^th century, these representations have been tools employed by the makers of history and those at the top of the patriarchal system, used to control women’s images and thus women themselves. I survey these representations, which are largely created by men—until the 20^th century. I discuss pre-historical …

Abdurraqib, Samaa, Iris Sangiovanni, Samar Ahmed

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Samaa Abdurraqib is a Black, queer, Muslim woman living in Portland, Maine. Abdurraqib was raised in Columbus, Ohio. She attend the University of Ohio, and later the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she received a PhD in English Literature. After graduating she worked as a visiting professor at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Next she went on to work the American Civil Liberties Union in Maine as a reproductive rights organizer. She now works for the Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence. Her advocacy and organizing work has included places such as Sexual Assault Response Services of Southern Maine, …

Positionality And Feminisms Of Women Within Sufi Brotherhoods Of Senegal, Georgia Collins

IdeaFest: Interdisciplinary Journal of Creative Works and Research from Cal Poly Humboldt

No abstract provided.

Exploring Activism: A Journey With Women-Identified Student Activists At Laurier Brantford And How Activism Can Have A Positive Impact On Campus Culture, Sarah Cifani

Social Justice and Community Engagement

Feminist student activism at Wilfrid Laurier University Brantford campus has changed and progressed over the last decade. Currently, woman-identified feminist students are actively fighting to end rape culture on campus by educating students on feminism, consent, and the negative impacts of a rape culture. This research study highlights the challenges and barriers faced by activists as they work within an institution that presents patriarchal, heternormative, and racist ideals. This research study utilized qualitative research methods to interview seven woman-identified feminist student activists from Laurier Brantford, consisting of current, graduating and graduated students. Each participant was interviewed about their experience as …

Genres Of Feminist Lives: Autobiography, Archives, And Community, 1970-1983, Meredith A. Benjamin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The desire to record lives and the conviction that such recordings would serve an important purpose for other women were the motivations behind much of the autobiographical writing in U.S. feminist writing of the 1970s and 80s. In Genres of Feminist Lives: Autobiography, Archives, and Community, 1970-1983, I argue that feminist writers in this period used autobiographical writing to create a sense of community among their readers: a new feminist public. Realizing the inadequacy of a sense of identification, these writers encouraged their audiences, in the words of Audre Lorde, to transform silence into language and action. While scholars …

Discovering My Own African Feminism: Embarking On A Journey To Explore Kenyan Women's Oppression, Glory Joy Gatwiri, Helen Jaqueline Mclaren

Journal of International Women's Studies

All Black women have experienced living in a society that devalues them. The scholarship of bell hooks submits that the control of Black women ideologically, economically, socially and politically functions perfectly to form a highly discriminative but effective system that is designed to keep them in a submissive and subordinate place. As a Ph.D. student, in a reflective journey with my research supervisor, I engage in a struggle to define my own feminist perspective in as I prepare to explore the oppression, disadvantage and discrimination experienced by Kenyan women living with vaginal fistulas. I examine how poor and socially disadvantaged …

In Their Husbands' Shoes: Feminism And Political Economy Of Women Breadwinners In Ile-Ife, Southwestern Nigeria, Friday Asiazobor Eboiyehi, Caroline Okumdi Muoghalu, Adeyinka Oladayo Bankole

Journal of International Women's Studies

In a significant number of societies worldwide, the primary role of men is to serve as breadwinners in their households. However, in Nigeria, since the mid-1980s there has been a steady rise in the number of women breadwinners in many households. In spite of this, not enough studies have been conducted on this emerging phenomenon. Using feminist and political economy theories as explanatory tools, the study examined women breadwinners in Nigeria using Ile-Ife of Southwestern Nigeria as a case study. Both quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection were utilized to explore the circumstances leading to the rise of women …

(Re)Imagining Haiti Through The Eyes Of A Seven-Year-Old Girl, Iliana Rosales Figueroa

Journal of International Women's Studies

Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat’s new novel Claire of the Sea Light (2013) explores themes of love, loss, and death. The first character that is presented to us is Claire of the Sea Light, a seven-year-old girl, whose mother died giving birth to her and who is missing. It is at the intersection of this little girl’s loss that all the other characters and topics unfold. Madame Gaëlle, an upper class woman who has a fabric shop in Ville Rose, decides to adopt Claire in order to give her a better life. In this essay I demonstrate that Edwidge Danticat articulates …

Editorial, Franziska Dubgen

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Epistemic injustice gives a name to experiences that we struggle to articulate due to the injuries of hegemonic speech. This normative grammar seeks to enable social philosophers and activists alike to name experiences of injustice that have not been previously addressed as such. This includes experiences that we cannot make sense of because the society we live in does not provide a vocabulary to make them intelligible or because we are not entitled to give them a name due to our specific identity position, which supposedly disables us from judging matters objectively. By looking at epistemic injustice in practice, this …

Split Wounds: Diverging Formations Of Trauma In The Diagnostic And Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders V, Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, And The Rat Laughed, And Once Were Warriors, Emily R. Johnston

Theses and Dissertations

Split Wounds interrogates naturalized, normalized trauma wisdom—particularly the individualization and pathologization of sexualized trauma. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of discursive formation, explicated in The Archaeology of Knowledge as a set of conditions that enables history, this dissertation elucidates differing discursive formations of trauma in contemporary medical documents, literary texts, and films. The introductory chapter explicates how founding texts in the field of trauma theory construct trauma as a preverbal, psychological experience that can only be represented through fragmented, non-linear, anti-narrative textual strategies. Chapter two exposes such Euro-American modernist ideology in the American Psychiatric Association’s clinical definition of posttraumatic stress disorder …

I Preferred, Much Preferred, My Version: Exploring The Female Voice And Feminine Identity Within Memoirs Of The 20th And 21st Centuries, Alexandra Fradelizio

Senior Theses

Memoirs have long been a valuable way in which individuals share and reflect on their past experiences. The genre of memoir writing especially had a tremendous impact on a range of American female writers. This thesis explores memoirs written by women throughout the 20^th century. With the shift in women’s roles during the 1900s and early 2000s, the memoirs examined emphasize the importance of feminine identity. The analysis provided within this thesis centers on each memoirist’s unique path in determining her sense of self. Moreover, the memoirists each use the process of writing to relay the value of personal …

Do-It-Yourself Girl Power: An Examination Of The Riot Grrrl Subculture, Lindsay Wright

James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ)

No abstract provided.

"In The Land Of Tomorrow": Representations Of The New Woman In The Pre-Suffrage Era, Natalie B. O'Neal

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This digital anthology explores feminism in selected short fiction by women writers from the 1911 run of the popular women’s magazines Woman’s Home Companion, Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Farmer’s Wife. This fiction furthered the women’s rights movement by allowing women to imagine a world similar to their own with a heroine who voiced their desires and enacted change. Rather than the more experimental, inaccessible literature of avant garde high modernist writers consumed by the upper class, popular fiction reached a wider, middle class audience and was more effective at producing a progressive zeitgeist following the stilted Victorian …

Masks And Performance As Representations Of Gender Oppression And Repression In Edith Wharton’S The House Of Mirth And Nella Larsen’S Passing, Carrie A. Wilson

SEWSA 2016 Intersectionality in the New Millennium: An Assessment of Culture, Power, and Society

Edith Wharton and Nella Larsen’s literature focus on metaphorically representing gender oppression and repression as masked social performances that result in death being the ultimate release from the drama. Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth depicts the heroine Lily Bart who, in the public social realm, attempts to mask herself as a disturbingly superficial character. Wharton’s masquerade imagery demonstrates the extent to which Lily socially capitalizes her beauty. Lily fixates on "clearness" and "lucidity" in events leading up to her death, which shows how dying releases her from the dishonest social masquerade (260). Nella Larsen’s heroine Irene Redfield similarly uses …

Rhetoric And Feminism In The Americanization Era: The Ywca's Rhetorical Education Program For Immigrant Women, Gracemarie Mike

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation examines the Young Women’s Christian Association’s International Institute movement from an administrative perspective. Founded in the United States during the Americanization Era of the early 20 th century, the International Institute movement developed programs and services for immigrant women. One of the most prominent, and least examined, aspects of the movement was its work in the area of rhetorical education for non-English speaking immigrant women. Using a feminist, administrative historiographic methodology, this project positions the work of the International Institute’s administrators ecologically among other Americanization efforts taking place in this time period. Arguing that the International Institute movement …

The Weight Of “Glory”: Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, And Women’S Issues In Middlemarch, Megan Armknecht

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Los Factores Influyentes En Las Perspectivas De Aborto De Los Estudiantes Universitarios En Santiago, Chile: Desde Lo Conservador A Lo Contrario, Victoria Albert

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Research Question: What factors influence the pro-life and pro-choice perspectives of university students in Santiago, Chile? What are these perspectives? Objectives: The general objective of this study is to describe the pro-life and pro-choice perspectives on abortion held by university students in Santiago, Chile, and to describe how factors such as feminism, religion, and the right to life influence these views today. The specific objectives of this study are to define and analyze the way in which these factors work to influence students’ perspectives, as well as identify what percentage of students currently support various types of abortion.

Background: Chile …

Niki De Saint Phalle: The Female Figure And Her Ambiguous Place In Art History, Lucy Kay Riley

Student Publications

Niki de Saint Phalle had a fearless approach in her representation of women and her invitation of audience interaction. Born in 1930, she lived through the years of very male dominated areas of art: Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Neo-Dada. Niki de Saint Phalle provided a unique treatment of the female figure through drawing, painting, writing, found object sculpture, large public sculpture, and installation. One of the pieces I will primarily focus on embodies her fascination with audience interaction and the portrayal of the female figure: her controversial and temporary installation of 1966, ‘SHE – a cathedral.' In comparison to …

From #Blacklivesmatter To #Sayhername, Aitza B. Burgess

SEWSA 2016 Intersectionality in the New Millennium: An Assessment of Culture, Power, and Society

Sanford, Ferguson, Long Island, and Baltimore are all cities that have become known nationally and internationally in households. This attention has not been about their nature of offering reasonably priced hotel lodging for tourists visiting the neighbouring major cities, but due to the killings of black men in America. Since the election of President Barack Obama in 2009, the notion of a post-racial America has circulated. With Congress members referring to the president as a tar baby to the numerous killings of black people by law enforcement and civilians these actions contradict this notion.

Between the years of 2012-2015, America …

Dorothy Sue Cobble Interview, Jennifer Thomson

Bucknell: Occupied

Jennifer Thomson, assistant professor of History at Bucknell University, interviews Dorothy Sue Cobble, professor at Rutgers University in the departments of Labor Studies and Employee Relations and the department of History. Thomson and Cobble discuss the feminism movements in the United States and the intersection of women's movements with labor and class movements. Cobble discusses grassroots activism, movements for equal rights and equal pay, and the changing objectives of feminists. Thomson and Cobble conclude by discussing contemporary issues and the historical precedent of affecting change at the state level.

Discovering My Own Black Feminism: Embarking On A Journey To Explore Kenyan Women's Oppression, Glory Joy Gatwiri, Helen Jaqueline Mclaren

Journal of International Women's Studies

All Black women have experienced living in a society that devalues women of African descent. Control of Black women ideologically, economically and in political life functions perfectly to form a highly discriminative but effective system that is designed to keep Black women in a submissive and subordinate place. As a PhD student, in a reflective journey with my research supervisor, I engage in a struggle to define my own Black feminist perspective in preparation for exploring the oppression, disadvantage and discrimination experienced by Kenyan women who are living with vaginal fistula. I maintain that women’s gender oppression is not incidental …

Resisting The Male Gaze: Feminist Responses To The "Normatization" Of The Female Body In Western Culture, Diane Ponterotto

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper attempts to present a feminist critique of the social and political promotion in Western culture of a univocal model of female corporeity imposed on women, and consequently detrimental to female subjectivity and agency. Starting from the Foucauldian position concerning social oppression determined by the disciplinary gaze of power structures, the paper discusses perspectives of resistance to the patriarchally-motivated scrutiny of the female body, and to the mass-media induced coercion of conformity to the normatized model for the female body in contemporary society.

Multi-Architecture In Saudi Arabia: Representing The History Of Women, Salwa Nugali

Journal of International Women's Studies

The purpose of this research project is to put into context the role of women in Saudi Arabia through reading of symbols and signs of the physical shape of the first sky scrapers: AlMamlakah (Kingdom) and AlFaisalia. The paper analyses perceptions of modern Saudi Arabian architecture and the significance of our visual perception to gender codification is what this project attempts to analyze. The project uses three interlaced lines of investigation. The first is the relationship of architecture to the culture and the population. The research paper will study the architecture of the two skyscrapers. The second line of investigation …

Presenting The Absence: A Contrapuntal Reading Of The Māita In Nepali Tīj Songs, Balram Uprety

Journal of International Women's Studies

Much before the arrival of Western feminism in Nepal with its vocabulary of protest and polemics, the discourse of right and fight, Nepali women have had a long complex and ambivalent genealogy of protest in the genre of Tīj songs. However, such discourses have been rendered invisible by the dominant epistemology that derives its ideological sustenance from the Eurocentric and Enlightenment paradigm of knowledge production. The collusion of native patriarchy with the dominant epistemological system can be located in the absence of any systematic engagement with the Tīj songs in the indigenous academia. Through Nepali women’s complex and highly nuanced …

Feminist Futures And Campus Changes: Dismantling Ursinus College's Greek Life, Jordan Ostrum

Richard T. Schellhase Essay Prize in Ethics

No abstract provided.