Women's Studies Commons^™

Can Women Have It All?: Hesitant Feminism In American Women's Popular Writing, Anne Aramand

Graduate Masters Theses

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins are two of the bestselling series of our generation. These series are meeting widespread popularity just as the contemporary feminist debate of: "Can women have it all?" is occurring around the country. Although Twilight and The Hunger Games are not considered overtly feminist texts, they have emerged in a time when women are reexamining the possibility of empowering themselves both in the public and the domestic sphere. Meyer and Collins have introduced female protagonists that deal with precisely this issue.

First, I will be outlining why cultural studies are …

Performative Gender And Pop Fiction Females: "Emancipating" Byronic Heroines Through A Feminist Education, Joy Smith

Masters Theses

"I can be a regular bitch. Just try me." With this phrase emblazoned across her t-shirt, Lisbeth Salander, pierced, tattooed, and bedecked in leather, waltzes from the pages of Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. This woman who subverts authority, maliciously tattoos and sodomizes a man, and intentionally distances herself from close relationships of any kind has somehow managed to capture both the attention and admiration of the American audience. This disheartening phenomenon stems from a renewed interest in the Byronic heroine, a female possessing those traits traditionally assigned to Byronic heroes and men, and the rise of …

Creating Female Space: The Feminine Sublime In The Awakening And The House Of Mirth, Emily F. Faison

Selected Honors Theses

This thesis examines the Edna Pontellier and Lily Bart, the respective protagonists of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, integrating the theoretical concept of the sublime, particularly engaging Barbara Freemans’s idea of a feminine sublime, as discussed in her book, The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women’s Fiction. In three chapters, the thesis provides an overview and brief history of the theory of the sublime, contextualizing Freeman’s argument, and measures the success of both Edna’s and Lily’s attempts to engage the sublime as they each struggle to find their place as women …

Building Women’S Solidarity To Advance Women’S Rights In Bolivia, Luzdary Hammad

Master's Theses

This paper takes a historical look at the deep-seated ethnic and class divisions between women in Bolivia. It also examines the cultural challenges that help explain the status of women in Bolivia and the obstacles women face to become politically active. It provides the theories of decolonization and depatriachalization as practical ways Bolivia can move past their colonial and patriarchal history. It also looks into what feminism means overall in Latin America and what strategies Latin American women have used to make change for women. It then provides a political history of Bolivia from 1994 to the present giving the …

Women, Feminism, And Aging In Appalachia, Sherry Kaye Ms.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Aging has become a problem for men and women in Western societies where youth is touted and revered as a standard of success by which individual value is measured and esteemed. Older women in particular find that as they age they face discrimination in the form of ageism and social diminution. The purpose of the study is to remedy a lack of scholarship on aging in Appalachia and to establish a precedent for future studies. A liberal, feminist approach is used to analyze the results of recorded interviews and to interpret transcripts of relevant data. The results of the analysis …

‘A River Is Not A Woman’: Re-Visioning Finnegans Wake In Eavan Boland’S ‘Anna Liffey.’, Melissa Dinsman

Publications and Research

"This essay argues that Eavan Boland's 1994 poem “Anna Liffey” is, in part, a re-visioning of James Joyce's famous river-woman and mother, ALP. Although Joyce's deconstructive tendencies provide an added challenge for any author looking to engage with Finnegans Wake, Boland manages to reclaim ALP, both channelling and challenging Joyce's portrayal of the Liffey as “Anna Livia Plurabelle.”--From the Journal.

In Defense Of Feminists Who Like Fashion, Margarita C. Delgado

SURGE

I’m sitting on the downtown R train one night in Manhattan, a copy of Vogue resting on my crossed legs. It is late and I am clearly unwinding peacefully as I thumb through page after glamorous page of my magazine. The train stops at Prince Street and there’s the usual flux of people in and out. Those left inside settle as the train pulls out of the station.

“Ugh. Fashion is stupid,” remarks one young man to another, both of whom are sitting diagonally from me and well within earshot. He’s watching me ignore him as I continue enjoying my …

Contesting The Marginalization Of Female Leadership In Sports: The Struggle For Equal Opportunities In Men's Collegiate And Professional Basketball, Caitlain Tinker

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

This feminist critique interrogates the discourses and practices of gender discrimination in men's professional and collegiate sporting institutions in the United States. This study focuses on delineating and 'naming' the discriminatory ideologies that are (re)produced by dominant social and cultural institutions, revealing in the process how these practices (over)determine gender equality in the professional and collegiate sporting field. To this end, I perform a post-structuralist discourse analysis of what Louis Althusser calls the dominant 'ideological state apparatuses,' namely schools, the media and sporting institutions. I argue that these institutions coalesce to form a network of power that produces, reproduces, and …

Feminisms At The Door: Gender And Sex At A Women's College, Susan Chappell Overton

Cultural Foundations of Education - Dissertations & Theses

This dissertation is a qualitative study of early 21st century American female college students' experiences of their gender, sexuality, and racial identities, and of institutional politics as their single-sex college transitioned to co-education. It is an ethnography that utilizes feminist theorizing to understand tensions between feminists of different generations or waves; the complexities of identities and institutions in which gender, sexuality, and race intersect (bell hooks and Kimberle Crenshaw); and the workings of dominant gender and sexual norms (Judith Butler). As the College prepared to `go coed,' the prospect of introducing male bodies into this environment generated rich discourses about …

Claiming Citizenship: Las Vegas' Conventional Women's Organizations Establishing Citizenship Through Civic Engagement, Cynthia Cicero

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Many historians of American women portray women's organized civic engagement and work to attain social, economic, and legal equality as feminism. American feminism has been expanded and applied in scholarship. The American feminists of the 1960s wanted to alter the male power structure and redefine conventional notions of womanhood. However, many middle-class women who participated in community and civic organizations valued their roles as wives, mothers, and homemakers, expressing their citizenship and community work as an extension of these roles. Their motivation in pursuing equality was to gain full citizenship status.

In this thesis, I argue that viewing women's civic …

A Historical And Analytical Study Of Feminization In The Field Of Public Relations, Taylor U. (Flumerfelt) Beatty

Selected Honors Theses

The origin of the public relations field can be traced back more than 1,000 years. The use of its basic concepts can be seen throughout history, and increased in the 19th and 20th centuries. Until the mid-1900s, the field was largely comprised of men. World War II spurred the beginning of the feminization process, which caused public relations to experience a large influx of women. The number of female practitioners has since continued to increase. Even though feminization occurred and the field is now largely female-dominated, female practitioners experience a wide variety of gender inequalities in social, professional and economic …

Bringing Back Color, Bringing Back Emotion: Exploring Phenomenological Empathy In The Reclamation Of The Female Nude In Painting, Sophia R. Forman

Scripps Senior Theses

At the nexus of the seemingly disparate art-theoretical topics of color and the female nude is a critical consideration of phenomenology in both one of its most basic senses—as the first-person experience of perceived phenomena—and as a larger philosophical position which, through its abstraction of perception to subject-object relationships, implicates the painted figure. Specifically, this paper conflates the phenomenology of color with the transcendental phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in investigating empathy. Structured as a dialectic, it establishes the most prominent views of both color and the female nude—the nude as a symbolic figure, color as perceptual experience—before …

Moving Beyond "Slaves, Sinners, And Saviors": An Intersectional Feminist Analysis Of Us Sex-Trafficking Discourses, Law And Policy, Carrie N. Baker

Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality: Faculty Publications

This article analyzes stories and images of sex trafficking in current mainstream US public discourses, including government publications, NGO materials, news media, and popular films. Noting the similarities and differences among these discourses, the first part demonstrates that they often frame sex trafficking using a rescue narrative that reiterates traditional beliefs and values regarding gender, sexuality, and nationality, relying heavily on patriarchal and orientalist tropes. Reflecting this rescue narrative, mainstream public policies focus on criminal justice solutions to trafficking. The second part suggests alternative frameworks that empower rather than rescue trafficked people. The article argues that the dominant criminal justice …

The F-Word, Stephanie K. Adamczak, Taylor C. Amato

SURGE

I’m thinking of a word. Can you guess it? This word is considered negative and harsh. It’s generally avoided in everyday conversations. You wouldn’t normally hear this word spoken by professors or sophisticated celebrities. It starts with an F… Do you know it?

That’s right folks! It’s “feminist”. [excerpt]

Women In The 1919 Egyptian Revolution: From Feminist Awakening To Nationalist Political Activism, Nabila Ramdani

Journal of International Women's Studies

The formation of a feminist consciousness in Egypt ran parallel with the country’s rapid development as a modern state at the start of the 19th century. Technological advancements within Muhammad Ali’s increasingly capitalistic, secular country were accompanied by burgeoning intellectual thought among all sections of society, including women. By the end of the century, a middle-class female literary culture had become indelibly associated with a nationwide feminist awakening.

The feminist element to the wider independence movement was both vocal and powerful, as women rallied under the ‘Egypt for the Egyptians’ slogan. Elite women who had organised themselves politically had first …

The Caustic Pen Is Mightiest: A Tradition Of Female Satire In The Novels Of Jane Austen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, And Muriel Spark, Jaclyn Andrea Reed

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Female satirists have long been treated by critics as anomalies within an androcentric genre because of the reticence to acknowledge women's right to express aggression through their writing. In Pride and Prejudice (1813), A House and Its Head (1935), and The Girls of Slender Means (1963), Jane Austen (1775-1817), Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969), and Muriel Spark (1918-2006) all combine elements of realism and satire within the vehicle of the domestic novel to target institutions of their patriarchal societies, including marriage and family dynamics, as well as the evolving conceptions of domesticity and femininity, with a subtle feminism. These female satirists illuminate …

The Bollywood Hindu Heroine, Emily Holmstead

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

The melodramatic, high-grossing Bollywood film industry is intertwined in almost every aspect of Indian culture with its blunt commercialism and unapologetic enthusiasm. Both the western world and the feminist movement are changing women’s depictions in these films. These featured women fill university classrooms and cry out against social injustice all the while pursuing husbands and performing traditional rituals. The power structure of the female-male relationship is also changing as women’s education and career are given more importance while maintaining their devotion to romance and motherhood. The appetite for female-centered films will grow as the theories and practices of female empowerment …

The Va-Jay-Jay Revolution

Women’s Studies, Feminist Zine Archive

Writings and art about beauty standards, the portrayal of lesbians on television, a critique of the word bitch, organized religion as a violation of women's rights, harassment in public spaces, and the representation of women in various countries as observed by studying abroad.

The Beauty Mark, Annie Bruington, Connor O'Brien, Jackie Topete

Women’s Studies, Feminist Zine Archive

Writings and art critiquing television programming, sexual harassment experienced on campus, and racism experienced by a Mexican-American woman.

Surviving The City: Resistance And Plant Life In Woolf’S Jacob’S Room And Barnes’ Nightwood, Ria Banerjee

Publications and Research

In Jacob’s Room (1922) and Nightwood (1936), Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes use plant life to express a profound ambivalence about the masculine-inflected ordering functions of art and morality. They show that these processes codify lived experience and distance it from the feminine and sexual. To counter this turn towards the urban inauthentic, both novels depict non-urban spaces to upend conventional notions of usefulness. They fixate on evanescent flowers, wild forests, and untillable fields as sites of resistance whose fragility and remoteness are strengths. In Jacob’s Room, I argue that the eponymous protagonist is destroyed by his conventional education …

Claiming The Feminist Label: A Cross-Generational Exploration Of Self-Identified Feminists, Kaitlyn Kenealy

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The word feminist is often associated with negative connotations that prevent many individuals from adopting the feminist label and self-identifying with the women's movement. This creates challenges for feminists and the movement because individuals choose to believe stereotypes and distance themselves from feminism before fully understanding its purpose or positive aspects. The negative stereotypes and misconceptions associated with feminism and the women's movement contribute to individuals' hesitation to claim the feminist label. Conservative media outlets and social groups would like members of society to believe feminism is dead. As a gender and women's studies graduate student, I know that is …

The Feminist Hollywood, Stephanie Fasi, Guillaume Beaudoin, Shane Dicristina

Women’s Studies, Feminist Zine Archive

Writings and art examining feature films thought to represent feminist values, the evolution of female Disney characters, and female musicians who challenge the patriarchal music industry.

Buffy Vs. Dracula: Feminism And Its Fanged Foe, Amethyst Hethcoat, Leah Chole

Women’s Studies, Feminist Zine Archive

Writings and artwork critiquing popular vampire culture and "strong female characters" in popular media through a feminist lens.

Women In Media, Lindsay Taylor, Hadley Dion, Shelley Dehekker

Women’s Studies, Feminist Zine Archive

No abstract provided.

Rogue, Annie Hornung, Eva Mcavoy, Sara Knobel

Women’s Studies, Feminist Zine Archive

No abstract provided.

W.O.C. In Da Biz, Graeme Aegerter, Ellen Butterworth, Katie Davidson

Women’s Studies, Feminist Zine Archive

Writings and art addressing intersectionalities of music, gender, and race, focusing on M.I.A., Janelle Monae, and Ciara Princess Harris.

The Handbook Of Self-Loathing, Haley Bresnahan, Kristen Pagnan, Katie Dumas

Women’s Studies, Feminist Zine Archive

Writings and artwork on body image and dieting (including "fat phobia").

Wonder Woman Complex, Camellia Khalvati, Sarah Dawson, Kathleen Doll

Women’s Studies, Feminist Zine Archive

Writings and artwork deconstructing the institution of marriage, beauty standards, motherhood, and work ("the glorification of busy").

What You Need To Know About Sex, Lauren Gardner, Paula Pearl, Jessie Roth, Cristina Smith

Women’s Studies, Feminist Zine Archive

Writings and artwork examining messages about sex and contraception in the media, intimate partner violence, sexuality and gender in popular music, and sexuality.

Potpourri, Jasmin Sanchez, Jessica Swaney

Women’s Studies, Feminist Zine Archive

Writings, artwork, and activities addressing rape culture and victim blaming, a feminist perspective of crocheting, gendered titles for women professionals, reclaiming language (particularly the word bitch), and the music of Claire Boucher (a.k.a. Grimes). Original zine contents include a CD and crocheted "FemPower" bookmark.