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Full-Text Articles in Women's History
Saint Brigit And Her Habits: Exploring Queerness In Early Medieval Ireland, Jacqueline K. Stephenson
Saint Brigit And Her Habits: Exploring Queerness In Early Medieval Ireland, Jacqueline K. Stephenson
Undergraduate Theses, Capstones, and Recitals
Saint Brigit's behavior and reception by society highlight an avenue by which women in the early medieval period could escape societal strictures, exercising agency over their bodies and their romantic choices, and carve out a distinct and unexpected place for themselves in a Christian patriarchal society. In Saint Brigit’s case, this is especially demonstrated by the breadth of her portrayed power as not just a nun but a saint, her extreme resistance to marriage, and her frequent comparisons to men. Indeed, her hagiography, written by Cogitosus in the seventh century, positioned her as one of the three principal and earliest …
Hollywoodlandia: Celebrity Women, Movie Culture, And American Public Womanhood, 1916-1950, Skye Cranney
Hollywoodlandia: Celebrity Women, Movie Culture, And American Public Womanhood, 1916-1950, Skye Cranney
History Theses and Dissertations
This project proposes to study the ways in which celebrity women’s behavior may have encouraged American women to challenge, but not necessarily subvert, traditional gender roles even as Hollywood publicity continued to emphasize the importance of those same roles in women’s lives. It does that by examining three sites where celebrity women prominently lived, worked, played, and volunteered between 1920 and 1950: the Hollywood Studio Club, a boarding house only for women in the entertainment industry, in Los Angeles; the Sun Valley Ski Resort, the first modern ski resort in the American West, in central Idaho; and the Hollywood Canteen, …
Lay It On The Line: The Life And Music Of Gladys Bentley, Bianki Torres, J.
Lay It On The Line: The Life And Music Of Gladys Bentley, Bianki Torres, J.
Doctoral Dissertations
This work is a historical biography of Gladys Bentley and her blues music. She was a cross-dressing entertainer from the Harlem Renaissance and performed popular songs with added, sometimes improvised sexual innuendo. This study considers the performances of her recorded and written material as trans music, meaning, that black music provided a platform to determine racial, gendered, and sexual cultural expressions changing over time, however, always rooted in black vernacular culture. Using showbills, promotional material, studio recordings and short autobiography, this study follows Bentley’s career as “male impersonator” and the effects lesbian/gay (queer) culture had on her blues. Also, I …