History of Gender Commons^™

Queering Black Greek-Lettered Fraternities, Masculinity And Manhood : A Queer Of Color Critique Of Institutionality In Higher Education., Antron Demel Mahoney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Drawing heavily on Roderick Ferguson’s (2012) theory of institutionality, this dissertation constructs a counter-historical genealogy of racialized gender in higher education and U.S. society through the formation of black Greek-lettered fraternities. Ferguson argues that with the insurgence of minority resistance globally and domestically during the mid-twentieth century, hegemonic power took a new form. Instead of rejecting minority difference, power’s new network attempted to work through and with minority difference in an effort to absorb and restrict these radical formations within state, capital and academy frameworks—producing narrow or one-dimensional minority subjectivities. Established at the turn of the twentieth century, black Greek-lettered …

The South African Women's Movement: The Roles Of Feminism And Multiracial Cooperation In The Struggle For Women's Rights, Amber Michelle Lenser

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the historiography of South Africa’s recent past, focus has been most heavily placed on apartheid and the anti-apartheid movement, with much emphasis placed on male involvement and men as the primary agents of change in the country. Women are largely viewed as playing a supportive role to male activists throughout the movement, and far less has been written on female involvement or women’s activism in its own right. Running parallel to the anti-apartheid movement, however, was a women’s movement characterized by women across the racial and socioeconomic spectrum struggling to secure their own rights in a very hostile and …

Curating Care: Creativity, Women’S Work, And The Carers Uk Archive, Alice Hall, Hannah Tweed

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This article analyses the previously unexplored archives of the British charity, Carers UK, and its predecessor organizations, from its formation in 1965 to the present day. We argue that the archive is a valuable resource for social, political, and economic histories of care in the home, women’s work, feminist campaigns, and charitable organizations in the UK and beyond. It gives voice to traditionally silenced populations of carers through a strikingly diverse range of letters, edited collections of fiction, minutes of meetings, video diaries, newsletters, and anthologies of creative writing. As a case study, the Carers UK archive provides an important …

Elze, Diane, Wendy Chapkis

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Diane Elze is and has been an active member of the LGBTQ community in Portland, Maine for many years. Diane has spent most of her adulthood and professional life participating in activism and advocacy for LGBTQ adolescents. She was involved with the Wilde Stein club at the University of Maine at Orono, where she also founded the Greater Bangor Rape Crisis Center. After being unable to find a job in the Bangor area, Diane moved to Portland where she began working with the MLGPA, the Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and taking a leadership role with Outright, among many other …

Beach Bodies: Gender And The Beach In American Culture, 1880-1940, Margaret Elena Depond

History ETDs

This dissertation argues that American beaches, within the world of leisure and pleasure, were significant contested spaces of social change and debate. Overtime, from about 1880 to 1940, social restrictions loosened at the beach, allowing men, women, and people of color to express themselves in ways that had been previously controlled, curtailed, or proscribed. The emergence of mass popular amusements at the beach attracted a wide array of the American population. Both working-class and middle-class Americans absorbed the culture of new beach attractions, such as amusement parks, piers, boardwalks, and bathhouses. In doing so, they interacted more with each other …

Like Father, Like Son: Modelling Masculinity For The Ethical Leadership Of President Theodore Roosevelt, Elizabeth Summerfield

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

President Theodore Roosevelt is frequently portrayed as a rugged, hypermasculine cowboy. But this depiction ignores the powerful modelling for masculine leadership provided by his father, Theodore Roosevelt senior. A closer examination of the private and public spheres that framed the latter’s life offers another route into understanding the ethical and rational motivations that characterised his progressive Presidency, not least in the area of natural resource management, where his policy innovations were both unprecedented and sustained over time. What emerges is a more complex portrait than the above stereotype, a leader who used his heart, head and experience to think and …

White-Collar Working Class: The Ambiguous Identity Of Canadian Telegraph Operators, Michael Feagan

Western Research Forum

Were telegraph operators members of the working class or the business class? Were they skilled or unskilled? Were they labourers or executives-in-training? Was a job as a telegraph operator a temporary stepping stone or a lifelong career? Was it a job for men or for women? Telegraph operators were suspended somewhere between all these poles. The telegraph operator occupied a “liminal space” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century economy: a transitory position between management and labour, between skilled and unskilled labour, between men’s work and women’s work, between the white-collar office and the blue-collar factory floor. The ambiguous …

"A Bias Steam-Ironed Into Women's Lives": A Conversation With Author Phyllis Chesler About Women And Madness, 47 Years After Publication, Jody Raphael

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

A conversation with Phyllis Chesler about Women and Madness, 47 years after publication, conducted by Jody Raphael. Chesler discusses her motive for writing Women and Madness and its early reception. She reflects on changes and lack of changes in views and treatment of women by society and the mental health system in the years since its publication. Her feminist analysis now includes Islamic fundamentalism, prostitution, and surrogacy, which are not always politically correct views among feminists today.

Cuckoldry And The “Gone For A Soldier” Narrative: Infidelity And Performance Among Eighteenth-Century English Plebeians, Elias Hubbard

Lawrence University Honors Projects

This project addresses existing historical arguments about the role of performance in eighteenth-century English plebeian infidelity cases, identifying some of the cultural scripts available to married men and women from popular texts in order to better understand cases of infidelity in contemporary plebeian marriages. The thesis seeks to clarify the effect of infidelity on a plebeian individual’s social standing and relationships, and to draw conclusions about the nature of plebeian infidelity, marriage, and gender in England through the long eighteenth century.

While examining contemporary public texts of cuckoldry, I address how homosocial behavior appears in narratives of cuckoldry, how the …

Sexual Dimorphism In Homo Erectus Inferred From 1.5 Ma Footprints Near Ileret, Kenya, Brian Villmoare, Kevin G. Hatala, William Jungers

Anthropology Faculty Research

Sexual dimorphism can be one of the most important indicators of social behavior in fossil species, but the effects of time averaging, geographic variation, and differential preservation can complicate attempts to determine this measure from preserved skeletal anatomy. Here we present an alternative, using footprints from near Ileret, Kenya, to assess the sexual dimorphism of presumptive African Homo erectus at 1.5 Ma. Footprint sites have several unique advantages not typically available to fossils: a single surface can sample a population over a very brief time (in this case likely not more than a single day), and the data are geographically …

Dmt And “The Man Box:” Provoking Change And Encouraging Authentic Living, An Arts-Based Project, Steven Reynolds

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

This thesis explores the mind-body experience through an arts-based research approach to examine, and redefine the emotional capacity and usefulness of males through societal determinants that limits and hinders men from living their authentic selves. Through the lens of a metaphoric “Man Box” 112 men participated in a workshop recreating their personal narratives of socialization through, style of dress, coping mechanisms, belief systems and who they should be as men through society's standards. In the “Man Box,” male bonding, and emotional feelings are discouraged, while the objectification of women, material property and physical/emotional strength are encouraged. This research investigates the …

Dialogical Practice, Meenakshi Jha

Graduate School of Art Theses

Within an interdisciplinary and dialogical practice where process is as significant as final form/s, I delve in matters not to resolve but to explore them. Digging deep in my studio practice over my philosophical yearnings to talking loud and clear about my life in performances, I venture out in the geographical expanse to connect with self and others. In fact, the more I practice my craft, I feel a lesser and lesser gap between my ‘self’ and others. The walk outwards brings me closer to my internal realizations as a human being. In short, my practice is based on the …

Α “Guarantee Of Clustered Energy And Collective Promotion”: The Association Of Greek Women Artists And Its Exhibitions In The 50s And 60s, Glafki Gotsi

Artl@s Bulletin

Founded in Athens in 1954 the Association of Greek Women Artists aimed at promoting art among the Greek public, confronting the problems of women artists through collective action, and encouraging the presentation of Greek art on the international scene. In the 1950s and 1960s it organized a significant number of group exhibitions in Greece as well as abroad, where its members showed their work. This paper examines the context of the association’s all-women shows and their meaning in relation to feminist cultural politics inside but also beyond national borders. More specifically, it analyzes the circumstances under which the collectivity was …

Transgender Digital Embodiments: Questions Of The Transgender Body In The 21st Century, Jessica Fisher

Master of Arts in American Studies Capstones

This thesis looks at an intra-community discourse in the transgender community between “transtrenders” and “transmedicalists” or “truscum.” It observes how these different sub-communities conceive of what it means to be transgender and attempts to contextualize these conceptions within transgender history. This thesis utilizes a brief ethnography of online spaces where transgender community discourse could be found, including Reddit, Twitter, and Tumblr. It discusses the idea of “transtrenders” as cultural appropriators, looks at the role of passing, and wanting to and trying to pass, in the transgender community and in conceptions of who is truly transgender and who isn’t. This thesis …

James Buchanan And Ideals Of Manhood In The Election Of 1856, Ryan Lockwood

Theses and Dissertations

James Buchanan was the only lifelong bachelor to be elected President of the United States. While not seen as disqualifying in and of itself, his single status was often commented upon. Analysis of the campaign literature reveals competing ideals of manhood in the lead up to the Civil War.

Opportunism & Duty: Gendered Perceptions Of Women's Involvement In Crusade Negotiation And Mediation (1147-1254), Gordon M. Reynolds

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Women’s involvement in negotiation and mediation during the Middle Ages has received close scrutiny. However, few scholars have concentrated their investigations on the trends in female-led negotiations during the crusades in the Near East, and the significance of the religious connotations of such leadership in this theatre. There were dramatic societal shifts in the Latin East during the twelfth-thirteenth centuries, most significantly in the aftermath of the Battle of Hattin and loss of Jerusalem in 1187. The destruction of much of the Latin East’s crusader states that followed Jerusalem’s fall displaced many individuals, and with a plethora of Christian nobles …

Resistance To Statism In Frontier Era Upper East Tennessee, 1760-1820, Casey Price

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes efforts among frontier settlers of Upper East Tennessee to resist particular elements of state-craft from the 1750s until 1820. Building on the work of James C. Scott, this study suggests that some residents of the area may have resisted acceding to what they considered the negative aspects of residing within state sovereignty. These included, taxation, land enclosure, organized religion, and regulation of economic activity. Analyzing from outside the lens of the state, this study attempts to explore why organized government remained largely ineffective and widely disregarded in the Upper East Tennessee region even as governance rapidly and …

Film Review: The Impure: An Abolitionist Documentary Film Of The 19th Century Traffic In Jewish Women, Caroline Norma

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Dance Of Exile: The Sakharoffs’ Visual Performances In Montevideo (1935–1948), Pablo Munoz Ponzo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the life-work chronology of the dancers and choreographers Clotilde von Derp (whose surname then was Sakharoff) and Alexander Sakharoff, who were exiled in Montevideo, Uruguay, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, between 1941 and 1948. During their stay in the Rio de la Plata region, the Sakharoffs stirred up the art scene by performing extremely detailed dances with great attention to costume design. This thesis begins with a review of the reception of the dancers’ performances by the artistic and cultural circles in Montevideo, arguing that the Sakharoffs’ “queer” trajectory resonated with the Uruguayan artistic community, influencing the creation …

"A War Within A War": Policing Gender And Race In New York City During World War Ii, Emily Brooks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

During World War II, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine launched aggressive policing campaigns in New York City against crimes of “vice” or “immorality” that they believed threatened the order of the wartime city. The municipal leaders argued that racialized and gendered threats posed by prostitutes, juvenile delinquents, gamblers, and disorderly persons weakened the nation’s ability to mobilize healthy troops and to compete in a postwar world. While the war disrupted racial and gender hierarchies in the increasingly interracial city, Valentine and La Guardia connected America’s global security to policing at home. This dissertation follows patrolmen, policewomen, …

Casualties Of War? Refining The Civilian-Military Dichotomy In World War I, Eric Grube

Madison Historical Review

Throughout the First World War, newspapers around the world mocked the British state for its lavish spending on captured German officers kept at Donington Hall, a refurbished English estate. Why was this camp such a controversial space of perceived decadence? I argue that its comforts seemed to linger from an earlier era, one in which military men exuded genteel civility as integral to their supposedly heroic service. The British state essentially enabled such treatment, and the public decried this space for sustaining the anachronism of aristocratic privilege in the face of a globalized total war. However, the German inmates expected …

Russia's Empress-Navigator: Transforming Modes Of Monarchy During The Reign Of Anna Ivanovna, 1730-40., Jacob S. Bell

Madison Historical Review

The eighteenth century was a markedly volatile period in the history of Russia, seeing its development and international emergence as a European-styled empire. In narratives of this time of change, historians tend to view the century in two parts: the reign of Peter I (r. 1682-1725), who purportedly spurned Russia into modernization, and Catherine II (r. 1762-96), the German princess-turned-empress who presided over the culmination of Russia’s transformation. Yet, dismissal of nearly forty years of Russia’s history does a severe disservice to the sovereigns and governments that molded and crafted the process of change. Specifically, Empress Anna Ivanovna (r. 1730-40) …

Strict Restraints: Abstinence's Gender Problems In Measure For Measure, Joseph Makuc

History Honors Papers

Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure poses questions about sexual coercion and governmental corruption that resonate today. Recent scholarship has examined sexual abstinence in Measure for Measure in terms of its historical economic and religious context regarding Isabella. However, Angelo and the Duke, the play's other central characters, also make claims about the value of abstinence. I put these characters’ claims into dialogue with Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity and extensive scholarship on Shakespearean England. I argue that abstinence is the axis around which Measure’s main characters revolve, and that Measure locates these characters’ abstinences as competing performances of manhood and …

Sage, Johnna Ossie

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Sage explored her highly religious upbringing and relationship with her family. She is of Greek descent and her Greek-American culture played a large role in shaping her identity. Her parents rejected her during her young adulthood due to her sexuality and Sage discussed the impact that the ostracization had on her development. Her positive experience with being a part of a long-term, loving lesbian relationship was one that she frequently came back to during the course of the interview. On top of relationships and religion, Sage also examined her experiences undergoing workplace harassment and feeling unwelcome and unsafe in many …

A Look Into The Tuskegee Study Of Untreated Syphilis In The Negro Male In Macon County, Alabama, Austin Valentine

Student Scholarship & Creative Works

In the 1930’s there was growing concerns over a disease known as syphilis. With 300,000 new cases each year, coupled with the disease’s ability to create blindness, arthritis, heart disease and instances of premature death, the search for a way to stop the epidemic quickly was expanding. With such numbers the United States Department of Health needed answers fast (DiIanni 1993).

At this time, the United States was in an economic crisis left by the Great Depression. As a result, the U.S. Department of Health needed to find cheap test subjects in an effort to combat syphilis and prevent its …

Women Of The War: Female Espionage Agents For The Confederacy, Sarah Stellhorn

Steeplechase: An ORCA Student Journal

Although historians have frequently examined the role of women on the home front during the Civil War, women who contributed to the cause in more direct ways, such as espionage, are often neglected. An in-depth examination of specific females spying for the Confederacy, such as Rose O’Neal Greenhow and Belle Boyd, proves that their actions, both remarkable and uncharacteristic of women at the time, had a direct impact on the war. A vast network of spies and smugglers existed not only in the southern and border states but also throughout the North, even in Washington D.C. itself. This network was …

Ossie, Johnna Conference Paper “Querying The Past: Intergenerational Conversations And Queer Community”, Johnna Ossie

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Paper from a presentation given by Johnna Ossie (University of Southern Maine, Class of 2019)

Talking Bodies: fourth biennial interdisciplinary, international conference

Institute of Gender Studies at the University of Chester, England

April 10 - 13, 2019.

Citation

Please cite as: Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer+ Collection, Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine, University of Southern Maine Libraries.

For more information about the Querying the Past: Maine LGBTQ Oral History Project, please contact Dr. Wendy Chapkis.

Indonesia’S “Fresh Meat”: Lgbtq Activism Amid Political Homophobia And Transphobia, Catherine Cho

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

In 2016, Indonesia—the fourth most populous country in the world—received international attention for what the Human Rights Watch calls an LGBTQ “Crisis” (2016). Sparked by high ranking officials publicly declaring homophobic and transphobic sentiments, a wave of intolerance, fear, and hate disseminated throughout the country. Gender and sexual minorities became “fresh meat” for political players—government officials, military leaders, religious figures, and other social agents competed to take a stand against an “impeding” LGBTQ threat. These dialogues catalyzed into action as zealous anti-LGBTQ campaigns staked violence and discrimination against gender and sexual minorities across Indonesia.

The “Crisis of 2016” cannot be …

"Sometimes You Have To Be The Leader": A Minnesota Oral History On Fighting Sexual Exploitation, Trudee Able-Peterson

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

Prostitution survivor Trudee Able-Peterson used oral histories to research and document the efforts of women and men to respond to the sexual exploitation of women and children in Minnesota. Her findings illustrate the leadership needed to overcome centuries of commercial sexual exploitation to obtain a beginning societal response. Respondents indicated the importance of their interaction with pioneer leaders in other locales. Their comments also illustrate the many issues and challenges still facing the community.

Harold, They're Lesbians!: Interrogating And Understanding The Histories Of "Lesbians.", Chloe Sheraden

History Presentations

No abstract provided.