History of Gender Commons^™

Writing, Performance, Resistance: Examining Feminist Ideology And Theory In Theatre Since The Second Wave, Olivia Cross

Theater Honors Papers

This project seeks to identify and analyze how feminist theatre is informed by theory and activism in its resistance against white, heteronormative, and patriarchal hegemony offstage through onstage representation. By identifying three consistent themes of gender & sexuality, race, and trauma and the methods used to effectively convey them to an audience, feminist theatre displays how advocacy takes unique forms to uproot the status quo. Furthermore, this research highlights how theatre is a viable and rich outlet for feminist intellectual history, displaying its versatility as a frame of analysis.

Genderless And Sexualized: Caribbean Enslaved Women In The 18th Century, Amy Van Arsdell

Campus Research Month

This study focuses on the uniquely-gendered experiences of enslaved women in the Caribbean in the 18^th century. First, I examine the racialized views of femininity and how enslaved women were denied the privileges of white femininity and forced to do the same work as men, yet were still valued less than their male counterparts because of their gender. The study goes on to highlight the sexual oppression enslaved women experienced, and its adverse effects on their health. The study concludes that despite the intersectional racism and sexism they faced, enslaved women were able to use their gender to resist …

The Contributions Of Nuevomexicanas To New Mexico Lowrider Culture, Traditions, And Rituals: The Significance Of Young Chicana Cultural Pachuca And Chola Aesthetics And Identity Expression In The Albuquerque Lowrider Community, Valerie J. Chavez

Chicana and Chicano Studies ETDs

The lowrider community in Albuquerque creates a space for families and individuals to gather and express themselves within Chicana/o/x culture. Nuevomexicanas have played a significant role in the teaching and preservation of the New Mexican traditions and rituals of lowriding. This research project is a visual and plática-based study. It explores how young Nuevomexicanas express their Chicana identity through la pachuca and chola cultural aesthetics and identity while actively participating in lowrider culture. This project utilizes the research methods of la resolana, querencia, and plática to understand, discover, and document the roles of young Nuevomexicanas in the Albuquerque …

Res Historica, Volume 3, Lynneth Miller Renberg Phd, Alpha Rho Epsilon Phi Alpha Theta

Res Historica

The 2024 journal of historical research by Anderson University students, Res Historica.

The editorial team for this edition of Res Historica was Dr. Lynneth Miller Renberg, Johnathan Sorce, and Samuel Sanders.

Racial-Sexual Normativity In/As Narratives Of “The Human”, Jeri Brand

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis synthesizes Sylvia Wynter’s and Judith Butler’s models of identity-formation to analyze discourses of racialization and sex/gender difference in normative scientific theories of “the human.” I argue that eugenicist white supremacism and sex/gender normativity form a single conceptual framework – what I call “the racial-sexual matrix” – throughout these scientific narratives. I then trace an epistemological consistency across 18^th- through 21^st-century scientific literature as evidence for the ongoing legacies of coloniality, white supremacy, and eugenics in current hegemonic sex/gender ontologies. Finally, I contend that the racial-sexual matrix functions as an index of proper humanness not …

“A True Tower Of Babel”: Nation, Race, And Gender In The French Foreign Legion, 1831 To 1854, Nicholas Michael Charnley

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

The French Foreign Legion, part of the July Monarchy’s 1831 expansion of the Army of Africa, sought to create a non-French force entirely deployable outside of the metropole. The creation of the expatriate corps intended to solve two of France’s most pressing problems at the time: an excess of foreign migrants at home, and a dearth of French soldiers abroad. The Paris government hoped to attract recruits from its considerable non-national male population, particularly political exiles and migrant workers fleeing Europe’s 1830 revolutionary wave. Initially intended as a temporary expedient for the homeland’s demographic crisis, the expatriate fighting force grew …

Mama’S Got A Brand New Degree: Education And Changing Perceptions Of Femininity During The Mexican Revolution (1910-1917), Eden E. Baize

The Cardinal Edge

Bloody struggles, tense political debates, and general unease characterized Mexico in the early twentieth century. Under former president Porfirio Díaz, tensions grew as the lower classes pleaded for labor and land reform, culminating in a violent period of revolution from 1910 to 1917. As with all conflicts of this scale, the Mexican Revolution prompted the challenging of many long standing social conventions, specifically as they pertained to the role of government and the organization of social classes. With the restructuring of society already underway, many activists capitalized on the uncertainty of the era to push against the subjugation of women. …

[2023 Winner] The Reclamation Of Two-Spirit Identity, Kelly Christensen, Paige Monier

Ethnic Studies Research Paper Award

Our project looked into the history of two-spirit people, briefly talking about what happened to them during colonization, with a deeper look into how the two-spirit identity as been reclaimed and used as a way for queer indigenous people to connect with both their culture, and their personal identity.

Woman Flytrap, Brianna Jo Hobson

Student Theses and Dissertations

Woman FlyTrap is a short story zine collection that explores the topic of sexual violence through the perpetrator and victim relationship with an explicit lens. Replete with cultural and entomological themes and motifs, Woman Flytrap seeks to remind survivors that we are not alone. In our bodies or in our lives. Neither in the world. There are over a million insects to every human, proving that there is strength in numbers. All five stories in the collection present different abstracts: revenge, transformation, justice, healing, body image, self-harm, mourning, etc. There is also a playlist and a section about the author. …

The Story Of Jennie Steers: An Examination Of Race, Gender, And Lynching In Northwest Louisiana, Lauren Smith

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

As the nineteenth century ended, the American South entered a new century equipped with the foundations of a Jim Crow society. Through political intimidation, segregation, and racial violence—most notoriously through the practice of lynching—white Southerners reasserted white supremacist rule. Yet the lynching of Black men in this era is more often documented than the plight of Black women at the hands of white mobs and local authorities. By focusing on Jennie Steers, a woman lynched outside of Shreveport, Louisiana in 1903, this project sheds light on the violent history of Northwest Louisiana and the ways in which Black women navigated …

“Yellow Fever” + Pornhub Statistics: A Sociological Sickness, Patricia Plachno

Audre Lorde Prize

This essay was written to explore the complexities behind "Yellow Fever," or the fetishization of Asian women. In further understanding the origins of "Yellow Fever", shining a light on historical stereotypes and microaggressions assist in problematizing this phenomenon. Pornhub's yearly statistics provide a tangible outline of the sheer volume of participants in racial fetishization.

Beginnings Of The Nuevo South: Mexican Migration In 1970s And 1980s Mississippi, Isabel Loya

Master's Theses

Mexicans and Mexican Americans have been present in Mississippi since the early twentieth century with a large increase in the 1970s. The majority of the scholarship surrounding Mexican migration focuses on the 1990s leaving a historiographical gap concerning this earlier period of significant population growth. This thesis argues that Mexican migrants during the 1970s and 1980s were uniquely affected by Mississippi’s racial climate due to their ambiguous status in a Black and white society, where they fit in neither category. The examination of tactics by businesses, like B.C. Rogers Poultry plant, show the impact recruitment had on migrants’ living conditions …

The Murder Of George Floyd: A Case Study Examining How The Policing Of Black Men And Grassroots Activism Influence The Will Of Black Women To Lead, Ella Gates-Mahmoud

Doctorate in Education

This study's objective investigates the viewpoints held by Black women in two urban areas of Minnesota about the social upheaval that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020 for using a counterfeit $20 bill. In the last decade, police killings of innocent Black people in the United States have received more attention, and Floyd's death is only one example of this phenomenon. In the U.S., the likelihood of a police officer taking the life of a Black man is higher than that of a White man. Between 2013-2019 there have been 1,641 fatal shootings of defenseless Black men by …

A Legacy Of Homophobia: Effects Of British Colonization On Queer Rights In India And Uganda, Kelly Christensen

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Globally, there are 69 countries where homosexuality is still illegal, of these 69, 36 countries are current or former British Colonies, creating a statical connection between the era of British Colonization and homophobic practices. This paper researches how moral regulations were used during the act of colonization to control and separate populations, using India and Uganda as case studies.

Ghosting Humanity: In Search Of An Ethics For The Disappeared, John Kaiser Ortiz

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

This paper visualizes what an ethics of the disappeared might look like if the troubled ontology of ghosts and their (un)seen realities are posited as real as allied discussions of the victims of human trafficking and other instances of violence against women, including femicide and sexual slavery.

Review Of Walaa Alqaisiya. Decolonial Queering In Palestine. London: Routledge, 2023, Ankita Chatterjee

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

Decolonial Queering in Palestine by WalaaAlqaisiya offers an in-depth study of the conquest of Palestine with respect to the variegated power structures of settler colonialism and underscores the political significance of a reformulated mode of decolonization. It argues for the need to interweave queer into the native Palestinian positionality termed as 'decolonial queering', so as to challenge the (hetero) sexualizing and gendered discourses embedded within both the Israeli/Zionist settler colonial regime and the Palestinian Nationalist visions of liberation. By the 'ethnographic' engagement with the works of Palestinian artists and activists from one of the prominent queer groups, alQaws, the book …

Perhaps Discomfort Is The Answer: Refusing Liberal Feminism And Imperial Cartographies Of Thinking/Feeling, Saida Hodzic

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

The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs is an unsettling feminist ethnography that traces the movements of three objects: the endings of female genital cutting in Ghana, their relationship to anti-cutting campaigns and the forms of governance they instantiate, and the role anthropology and feminism have played in this governance since colonial rule. It makes the case that the three objects must be studied together: namely, that we need to understand the practice of female genital cutting alongside its endings; that cutting does not exist outside of anti-cutting campaigns; and that anti-cutting campaigns are entangled with both …

Review Of Saida Hodzic. The Twilight Of Cutting: African Activism And Life After Ngos. Oakland: Univeristy Of California Press, 2017., Tobe Levin Von Gleichen

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

With considerable fanfare, in Adieu !'Excision. Histoire et fin d'une tradition (Raymond Hounsa, 2009), Christa Muller rejoices in having saved Benin from FGM, the French text lauding eradication. The effort instigated by a Saarbrucken-based NGO, it has banned blades from the vicinity of vulvae. In 1996, on a state visit, Muller, then married to Saarland's governor Oscar Lafontaine, was asked by Benin's First Lady Rosine Vieyra Soglo¹ to assist her Inter-African Committee (IAC) chapter by creating an association. This she did, launching I(N)TACT, e.V. and securing 300,000 Euros for the movement, a sum with strings, however. Berlin insisted on …

Feminists As Cultural ‘Assassinators’ Of Pakistan, Afiya S. Zia

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

Pakistan’s annual Aurat March (Women’s March) signifies a milestone in the culture of feminist protest, but a tense impasse follows a series of encounters between sexual and religious politics, and this has serious implica- tions for rights-based activism in the Islamic Republic.

The Fundamentalist Nexus Of Neoliberalism, Rentier Capitalism, Religious And Secular Patriarchies, And South Asian Feminist Resistances, Fawzia Afzal-Khan

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

In two case studies from Pakistan, which I then link to Afghanistan (under the Taliban before and after the Soviet/ US proxy war there) as well as the Farmer’s Movement in India—I wish to proffer an intersectional analysis of debates around the issue of women’s rights in the global south. Feminist artivism (art-as-activism), can help build solidarities to mount resistances against globally-inflected state repression in our age of neoliberal economic and religious fundamentalisms, which, working in tandem, seek to roll back the rights of women and minorities in and across South Asia, as elsewhere.

Full Issue

The Forum: Journal of History

No abstract provided.

“Madam” Elizabeth: Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley’S Sisyphean Attempt To Join The “Cult Of True Womanhood”, Bella Biancone

Undergraduate Research and Scholarship Symposium

Nineteenth century notions of femininity and etiquette were governed by strict societal standards. “True Womanhood” was defined by four fundamental virtues– piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. However, there was another pre-requisite for joining this revered cult¬: whiteness. No matter how pious or domestic a woman of color was, she could never hope to be considered a proper lady by Victorian standards. In discerning what it meant to be a member of that “cult of True Womanhood,” Black women were used to determine the boundaries of white womanhood; a “True Woman” was to be the antithesis of the stereotypical sexual and …

Gender, Race, And Religion In An African Enlightenment, Jonathan D. Lyonhart

Journal of Religion & Film

Black Panther (2018) not only heralded a new future for representation in big-budget films but also gave an alternative vision of the past, one which recasts the Enlightenment within an African context. By going through its technological enlightenment in isolation from Western ideals and dominance, Wakanda opens a space for reflecting on alternate ways progress can—and still might—unfold. More specifically, this alternative history creates room for reimagining how modernity—with its myriad social, scientific, and religious paradigm shifts—could have negotiated questions of race, and, in turn, how race could have informed and redirected some of the lesser impulses of modernity. Similar …

Emotions In Work And War: Comparisons Of Emotional-Cultures Of New Deal Ccc Enrollees And Wwii U.S. Army Enlistees, 1933-1945, Maeve Losen

Master's Theses

Though the Great Depression and Second World War were consecutive eras and overlapped in numerous aspects, scholarship often overlooks the commonalities between these periods. To demonstrate these eras’ shared qualities, this thesis examines the relationship in emotional-cultures—the cultural norms that dictated how individuals felt and demonstrated their emotions—among Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) enrollees and U.S. Army enlistees during WWII.

The broad intent of this undertaking is to place the cultural history of the Great Depression and WWII in conversation and to show the advantage of inter- and multidisciplinary work by applying anthropological and historical theories of emotion. Though the historical …

Reevaluating The Pension System: The Struggles Of Black Widows Following The Civil War, Samantha E. Carney

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

Following the Civil War, the United States government invested heavily in the U.S. Pension Bureau: a government agency that distributed monetary aid to wounded veterans. This paper discusses the impact of race and gender with regards to pensions in black communities, as evidenced by the pension files of the 34^th Regiment of the South Carolina United States Colored Troops. In particular, it addresses the lack of education and documentation amongst black widows which was largely due to their enslavement, in concert with the inherent racist and sexist prejudice of white Special Examiners hired by the Pension Bureau. This combination …

Fashioning The Flapper: Clothing As A Catalyst For Social Change In 1920s America, Julia Wolffe

Honors Program Theses

Fashion has been a catalyst for social change throughout human history. Fashion in 1920s America in particular reflects society's rapidly evolving attitudes towards gender and race. Beginning with how corsetry heavily restricted women for nearly four hundred years up until the twentieth century, this thesis explores how clothing has acted as a tool for societal progression following World War I and Women's Suffrage and during the Jazz Age and The Harlem Renaissance. Specifically, this thesis examines how the influence of jazz music and dance that originated from Black American communities led to the creation of the flapper evening dress. The …

A Workers' Paradise: Re-Integrating Newfoundland Into Colonial American History, Elena Hynes

Electronic Theses & Dissertations

The island of Newfoundland is conspicuous in colonial British and North American histories, most particularly and paradoxically, in its absence, a state of affairs which this study aims to help address. Multiple factors, including a paucity of documentary sources and various historiographic trends, have traditionally contributed to Newfoundland’s marginalization within colonial historical narratives. However, developments in recent years have made Newfoundland’s potential integration into the broader colonial dialogue more feasible including the advent of the Atlantic perspective, the expansion of available sources, and the work of multiple regional historians who have challenged enduring historiographic trends characterizing Newfoundland colonial settlements as …

Exhibit Me / Prohibit Me, Alok Vaid-Menon

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

No abstract provided.

Racialization.Spectacle.Liberation, Sm Rodriguez, Chriss Sneed

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

This special issue navigates the complexity of racialization, experiences related to identity, social structure, and inequality, and that which emerges when one/many embark on journeys towards liberation. “racialization.spectacle.liberation” is an intentional provocation; in both punctuating each word and leaving them affixed, wegesture towards the curious amalgamations that are produced at the intersections of where each project begins and ends. Such processes are not benign.

The Fantasy Of Spotting Human Trafficking: Training Spectacles In Racist Surveillance, Elena Shih

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

In January 2019, in honor of National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month in the US, the Marriott International hotel group announced that it had successfully trained 600,000 hotel workers to spot the signs of human trafficking in its hotel properties around the world. This training, planned and executed in partnership with anti-trafficking organizations and law enforcement, reflects the recent proliferation of training schemes to identify victims of trafficking. This paper explores how such trainings script racist optics into the surveillance and policing of potential victims. Using proxy markers of poverty, sexuality, race, and nation, victim identification trainings expand policing--by …