Women's Studies Commons^™

Stroller Flâneur, Katerie Gladdys

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

Pushing a baby stroller, I examine the minutiae of my suburban neighborhood, searching for patterns and narratives in the genealogies of architectural structures and topographies while simultaneously searching for items of interest for my son. My resulting observations collage both real and imagined systems into metaphors of community. The methodology informing this video is a gendered riff on the practice of the flâneur where the necessity of childcare becomes a platform for textualizing suburban space.

Review Of Revolutionary Women In Postrevolutionary Mexico By Jocelyn Olcott, Duke University Press, Durham, 2005., Gianfranco Piccone

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

No abstract provided.

Review Of Specters Of Mother India: The Global Restructuring Of An Empire By Mrinalini Sinha, Durham And London: Duke University Press, 2006., Sharon Pillai

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

No abstract provided.

She's Walking . . ., Henry Gwiazda

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

No abstract provided.

Petticoat Government: Poems And Essays, Tiffany Ann Noonan

Dissertations

Petticoat Government is a collection of poems and essays that draw upon the varied lexicons of science, mythology, sports, literature, travel, art, fashion, and popular culture in an attempt to understand what deliminates womanhood. Using a mix of traditional and contemporary forms, these texts seek to complicate the myriad—and often conflicting—models of femaleness and the female body.

Is Disney Surfing The Third Wave? A Study Of The Pervasiveness Of The Third Wave Of Feminism In Disney's Female Protagonists, Emily S. Ellington

Senior Honors Theses

It is important to understand factors that have influenced Generation Y’s view of womanhood. One way to do this is to analyze third wave feminist messages portrayed by Disney, the media powerhouse. In order to determine if Disney reflects feminist values, the third wave themes portrayed in The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Pocahontas (1995), and Mulan (1999) are examined. It is concluded that Disney portrays the feminist values of independence and multiculturalism; however, the films are set within patriarchal societies and portray women to be domestic. Ultimately, Disney portrays four messages about womanhood: Women are equal …

I Promise I Won't Say 'Herstory': New Conversations Among Feminists, Jannelle Ruswick, Alycia Sellie

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Brothers Are Better Than Sisters: A Semiotic, Feminist Analysis Of Hbo's "Rome", Patricia Mamie Peers

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In 2005, the Home Box Office and British Broadcasting Corporation partnered to produce Rome , a television series that retells the Roman histories of Julius Caesar, Marc Antony and Augustus through the lives of two centurion soldiers, Titus Pullo and Lucious Vorenus. The show's producers endeavored to bring Roman streets to life and included more storylines of women, men and children of all classes. At first considered a more egalitarian approach to history, Rome 's women are said to "challenge expectations" (Vu, 2005) and "forge a new path" (Ragalie, 2007, p. 2). But does this new representation challenge the old …

A Feminist Criticism Of Work-Related Advice In Essence And Glamour Magazines For The Year 2007, Joelle Marie Cruz

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This feminist criticism study examines work-related advice in Essence and Glamour magazines for the year 2007. Essence magazine is an African American magazine destined to women, and Glamour is a mainstream publication mostly read by young to middle-aged women. A total of 24 issues pertaining to work were examined in order to assess the feminism of both publications. Findings reveal the presence of four main themes: success as hegemonic masculinity, modeling the ideal employee: maintaining capitalism, the gendered workplace, and postfeminism. The first theme indicates an emphasis on career advancement for women. Because this notion is framed in masculinist terms, …

Editorial, Tiantian Zheng

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

No abstract provided.

Birth On The Threshold: Childbirth And Modernity In South India By Cecilia Van Hollen. Berkeley, Ca. University Of California Press, 2003, Kathryn Coffey

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

No abstract provided.

Woman’S Identity And The Qur’An: A New Reading. Nimat Hafez Barazangi. University Press Of Florida. 2004. Isbn: 0-8130-2785-3, Mark Davidheiser

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

No abstract provided.

The Ngo-Ification Of The Anti-Trafficking Movement In The United States: A Case Study Of The Coalition To Abolish Slavery And Trafficking, Jennifer Lynne Musto

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

While NGOs proffer valuable services to trafficked persons, this paper maps how increased professionalization of the anti-trafficking movement in the U.S. has curtailed trafficked persons’ efforts to organize a movement that speaks to their experiences and needs. In order to highlight tensions and exclusionary practices that exist within the professionally centered U.S. anti-trafficking movement, I present one case study of a Los Angeles based NGO dedicated to providing social services and political advocacy to trafficked persons. By examining the micropolitics of advocacy work, this paper explores how funding pressures and ideological debates about prostitution have delimited trafficked persons’ ability to …

When Tragedy Hits: A Concise Socio-Cultural Analysis Of Sex Trafficking Of Young Iranian Women, Sholeh Shahroki

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

In this paper, I focus predominantly on the cultural context of sex trafficking of young Iranian women into the underground markets of the Persian Gulf region. Neither human trafficking nor sex trade is a modern trait. While these age-old practices have been the subject of protest by the moralists and the liberal feminists alike, rarely does the discourse of eradication of human trafficking and the restoration of the abject bodies include a remedy to revise the local and common gendered belief that allows for these informal economies to proliferate. New trends of sex-trade in the Gulf region have emerged out …

From Thailand With Love: Transnational Marriage Migration In The Global Care Economy, Sine Plambech

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

Women from Asia are increasingly traversing borders to marry men in the Western world. This article presents ethnographic research focused on Thai women married to Danish men. The existing discourse portrays these Thai ”mail order brides” through a discourse of victimization. First, they are commonly portrayed as being uprooted and permanently alienated from Thailand. Second, they are seen as merely victims of Third World poverty. A third portrayal sees them as a contraband commodity in illegal human trafficking. As a result, they are seen as victims of simple male domination. This raises two socio-political problems. First, the discourse does not …

Beyond Trafficking, Agency And Rights: A Capabilities Perspective On Filipina Experiences Of Domestic Work In Paris And Hong Kong, Leah Briones

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

Current analyses of trafficking in unskilled female migrant labour are dominated by the concepts of victimisation, agency and rights. So far, however, such concepts have done more to legitimate receiving countries’ border control protection than to protect the livelihood needs of these migrant workers. Drawing on the experiences of Filipina domestic workers in Paris and Hong Kong, this paper uses Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach to question the efficacy of the current anti-trafficking discourse.

Anti-Trafficking Campaign And Karaoke Bar Hostesses In China, Tiantian Zheng

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

This article discusses the adverse effect upon sex workers of China’s abolitionist policy that focuses on forced prostitution and launches anti-trafficking campaigns. The argument developed in this paper is based on over twenty months of fieldwork between 1999 and 2002 in Dalian. I will first discuss karaoke bar industry and China’s policy of anti-trafficking campaigns. I will then demonstrate the impact of this policy on hostesses in karaoke bars. I will follow it with an account of how, unlike the government’s perception of forced prostitution, hostesses voluntarily choose their profession and actively seek sex work in countries such as Japan …

Akua Kuenyehia (Ed.). Women And Law In West Africa: Gender Relations In The Family- A West African Perspective (Accra: Women And Law In West Africa, 2003. Pp. Xv, 215. Graphs, Tables.), Emma Nesper

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

No abstract provided.

Fantasies Of Gender And The Witch In Feminist Theory And Literature, Justyna Sempruch

Comparative Cultural Studies

In Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and Literature, Justyna Sempruch analyzes contemporary representations of the “witch” as a locus for the cultural negotiation of genders. Sempruch revisits some of the most prominent traits in past and current perceptions in feminist scholarship of exclusion and difference. She examines a selection of twentieth-century US American, Canadian, and European narratives to reveal the continued political relevance of metaphors sustained in the archetype of the “witch” widely thought to belong to pop-cultural or folkloristic formulations of the past. Through a critical rereading of the feminist texts engaging with these …

The Female Body In Margaret Atwood’S The Edible Woman And Lady Oracle, Sofia Sanchez-Grant

Journal of International Women's Studies

This essay examines scholarly discourses about embodiment, and their increasing scholarly currency, in relation to two novels by the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. Like many of Atwood’s other works, The Edible Woman (1969) and Lady Oracle (1976) are explicitly concerned with the complexities of body image. More specifically, however, these novels usefully exemplify her attempt to demystify the female form. In the following pages, I investigate Atwood’s treatment of the mind/body dualism and analyse the ways in which she responds to, and resists, its destructive effects. Using contemporary theory, moreover, I show how Atwood deals with the concept of female …

Body And The Text/Body Of The Text In Mina Loy’S Songs To Joannes, Lucia Pietroiusti

Journal of International Women's Studies

This essay advances a close reading of Mina Loy’s Songs to Joannes, a sequence of poems dedicated to her failed relationship with the futurist Giovanni Papini and published in 1917. Through a close analysis of the typographical complexities by which Songs to Joannes is characterized, I attempt to draw explicit connections between Loy’s radical approach to physical existence and sexual activity in the poems, and her equally radical departure from the conventions of poetic form. In the systematic tension between form and content, then, I illuminate the ways in which Loy’s poetry redefines the familiar concept of the ‘body …

Bare Justice: A Feminist Theory Of Justice And Its Application To Post-Genocide Rwanda, Megan M. Carpenter

Law Faculty Scholarship

Within this Article I seek to develop a feminist legal theory of justice, by questioning the ability of traditional legal strategies to facilitate justice and identifying underlying principles that contribute to a more inclusive and holistic form of justice. Secondly, I apply this theory to the situation of women victims of sexual violence in post-genocide Rwanda, in an effort to explore how these principles can contribute to a realization of justice that empowers women.

In Part II of this Article, I seek to develop a set of principles underlying a feminist reconceptualization of justice. This endeavour is a three-step process: …

The Modernization Of Resistance: Latin American Women Since 1500, Melanie Byam

Undergraduate Review

No abstract provided.

Cover To Cover: Contemporary Issues In Popular Women’S Magazines, Debbie Danowski

Communication, Media & The Arts Faculty Publications

Exposure to popular magazine covers is widespread among even those choosing not to read a particular magazine. With news racks in all grocery and convenience stores, the American public cannot escape at least a quick glance at the material presented on the cover. Because of this, it is vital that we analyze the messages being disseminated each month through these publications.

This study will attempt to analyze and categorize the messages sent out via the covers of the five most popular general interest women's magazines with the highest circulation during the year 2000: Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, Ladies' Home Journal, …

Beyond Postmodern Margins: Theorizing Postfeminist Consequences Through Popular Female Representation, Victoria Mosher

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In 1988, Linda Nicholson and Nancy Fraser published an article entitled "Social Criticism Without Philosophy: An Encounter Between Feminism and Postmodernism," arguing that this essay would provide a jumping point for discussion between feminisms and postmodernisms within academia. Within this essay, Nicholson and Fraser largely disavow a number of second wave feminist theories due to their essentialist and foundationalist underpinnings in favor of a set of postmodernist frameworks that might help feminist theorists overcome these epistemological impediments. A "postmodern feminism," Nicholson and Fraser claim, would become "the theoretical counterpart of a broader, richer, more complex, and multilayered solidarity, the sort …

Rights And The Hijâb: Rationality And Discourse In The Public Sphere, Howard Adelman

Human Rights & Human Welfare

The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens by Seyla Benhabib. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 251 pp.

and

Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space by John R. Bowen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 290 pp.

and

Muslim Girls and the Other France: Race, Identity Politics & Social Exclusion by Trica Danielle Keaton. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. 223 pp.

and

Human Rights and Religion: The Islamic Headscarf Debate in Europe by Dominic McGoldrick. Portland, Oregon: Hart Publishing, 2006. 320 pp.

Race In Feminism: Critiques Of Bodily Self-Determination In Ida B. Wells And Anna Julia Cooper, Stephanie Athey

Trotter Review

If, as Angela Davis has argued, "the last decade of the nineteenth century was a critical moment in the development of modern racism," the same can be said of the development of modern feminism. Late nineteenth-century feminism, like institutional racism, saw "major institutional supports and ideological justifications" take shape across this period. Organizations of American women, both black and white, were shaping political arguments and crafting activist agendas in a post-Reconstruction America increasingly enamored of hereditary science, prone to lynching, and possessed of a virulent nationalism. This essay takes a historical view of "womanhood," bodily self-determination and well-being, concepts now …

Can Developing Women Create Primitive Art? And Other Questions Of Value, Meaning And Identity In The Circulation Of Janakpur Art, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

In this article, I examine the values and meanings that adhere to objects made by Maithil women at a development project in Janakpur, Nepal – objects collectors have called ‘Janakpur Art’. I seek to explain how and why changes in pictorial content in Janakpur Art – shifts that took place over a period of five or six years in the 1990s – occurred, and what such a change might indicate about the link between Maithil women’s lives, development, and tourism. As I will demonstrate, part of the appeal for consumers of Janakpur Art has been that it is produced at …

The Disabling Nature Of The Hiv / Aids Discourse Among Hbcu Students: How Postcolonial Racial Identities And Gender Expectations Influence Hiv Prevention Attitudes And Sexual Risk-Taking, Bruce H. Wade

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

This analysis reveals how some African American college students respond to the discourse on HIV / AIDS as a social disability. The methodology includes surveys (n = 217), focus groups and interviews with convenience samples of students attending a consortium of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the U.S. The findings show that the perceived risk of HIV is high in this community, that nearly half of students use condoms inconsistently even though they are well aware of the risks of unprotected sex and their levels of HIV / AIDS knowledge are high. Social stigma, gender role expectations, an …

The Technology Of Immortality, The Soul, And Human Identity, Richard A. Jones

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

In this paper, I argue that human beings will soon achieve immortality, but that that immortality will be neither the theistic promise of resurrection of the body nor the soul. Rather, I suggest that technological immortality—the ability through pure techné to reproduce any human life ever lived—is not only possible, but inevitable. Moreover, more than a cursory survey of the biological sciences, computer technology, and fictive literature, this essay also examines the normative dimensions of this near-future reality; ought we or ought we not?