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Articles 61 - 90 of 143

Full-Text Articles in Law and Gender

Acting Objects/Objecting Girls: Ann Hirsch’S Playground, Jen Kennedy Jan 2017

Acting Objects/Objecting Girls: Ann Hirsch’S Playground, Jen Kennedy

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This paper identifies and explores an oscillation between subjectivization and objectification in young girls’ participation in digital culture as a site of self-exploration and sexual experimentation. Using media artist Anne Hirsch’s performance Playground (2013) as a case study, it examines how the ways that adolescent girls use the internet not only complicate the subject/object opposition at the crux of many Western feminist critiques of representation but may even suggest forms of agency that think beyond this binary.


A Delicate Knot: Photographing Black Girlhood And Womanhood, Nakeya Brown Jan 2017

A Delicate Knot: Photographing Black Girlhood And Womanhood, Nakeya Brown

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Más Rudas Collective, 2009-2016 (An Archival Epilogue To An Epic Pachanga), Josh T. Franco Jan 2017

Más Rudas Collective, 2009-2016 (An Archival Epilogue To An Epic Pachanga), Josh T. Franco

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Contemporary artists Más Rudas Collective (MRC) were active in San Antonio, Texas, from 2009 to 2016. This essay looks to primary source documents from preceding decades and keystone exhibitions of Chicana/o art to articulate MRC’s position in a network of art production and curatorial activity that takes Chicana/o identity as a conceptual framework and/or departure point. Specific examples of MRC members’ reappropriations of Mexican, Mexican American, and Chicana/o cultural elements are analyzed and considered as “weaponizations” against cultures of body shaming and misogyny. Their approach is compared to that of other artists and curators in order to highlight the variety …


Not Mine Alone, Nor Mine To Own: Some Reflections On The Young Girl, Jacqueline Mabey Jan 2017

Not Mine Alone, Nor Mine To Own: Some Reflections On The Young Girl, Jacqueline Mabey

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This essay looks at the role of the young girl in the curatorial practice of Jacqueline Mabey. Mabey reckons with the young girl as the signifier of a spectrum of mutable cultural signifieds and young girls as subjects on their own terms in the two exhibitions under review, Miss World and Utopia Is No Place, Utopia Is Process. In doing so, she recognizes a shift in motivations from an interest in what the young girls mean as a narcissistic reflection to how she could work in service of the development of young girls.


Leisure/Crime, Immaterial Labor, And The Performance Of The Teenage Girl In Harmony Korine’S Spring Breakers (2012) And Sofia Coppola’S The Bling Ring (2013), Maryn Wilkinson Jan 2017

Leisure/Crime, Immaterial Labor, And The Performance Of The Teenage Girl In Harmony Korine’S Spring Breakers (2012) And Sofia Coppola’S The Bling Ring (2013), Maryn Wilkinson

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012) and Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013) introduced audiences to girls exploring criminal behavior both for and as leisure. The films introduce an idea of leisure/crime: criminal acts that appear to develop as natural, fruitful extensions of leisure activities, circumnavigating conventional laws of capitalism, yet still allow its actors to access, attain, and consume goods, money, value, and status. Through close analysis of the films’ style and character performances, this article proposes that the films and their enactments of leisure/crime in fact offer complex critical commentary on contemporary relations between the representation of teenage girls, …


The Transgressive Girl, Nicole Killian Jan 2017

The Transgressive Girl, Nicole Killian

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This paper imagines the Internet as a potentially utopian girl-space by looking at how girls, and pop-cultural depictions of girls, use the language, signs, and symbols of the Internet, an inherently patriarchal system, in transgressive ways. I propose the 1990s media representations as the touchstone moment when the conditions of possibility for imagining the hacker as a weaponized girl emerged visually in popular culture. The girl, exemplified by various figures within popular television and film culture, is a precursor to and postulates an entry point into the ways Internet today is used in transgressive nature.


Tradition And Culture In Africa: Practices That Facilitate Trafficking Of Women And Children, Norah Hashim Msuya Jan 2017

Tradition And Culture In Africa: Practices That Facilitate Trafficking Of Women And Children, Norah Hashim Msuya

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

Many states in Africa have adopted legislative, administrative and institutional measures to combat trafficking in human beings. These measures include, among other things, the formulation and implementation of both national and regional action plans by African states to provide for comprehensive and coordinated interventions. Many African countries have also enacted an anti-trafficking legislation at the country level. Despite these measures, African women and children have been trafficked annually worldwide for purposes of forced labor, sexual exploitation, and domestic servitude. Additionally, women and children are trafficked within their countries from rural to urban areas. Misconception and abuse of African tradition and …


Women, Migration, And Prostitution In Europe: Not A Sex Work Story, Anna Zobnina Jan 2017

Women, Migration, And Prostitution In Europe: Not A Sex Work Story, Anna Zobnina

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.


Amnesty International's Empty Promises: Decriminalization, Prostituted Women, And Sex Trafficking, Darren Geist Nov 2016

Amnesty International's Empty Promises: Decriminalization, Prostituted Women, And Sex Trafficking, Darren Geist

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

Through a close examination of Amnesty International’s (Amnesty) own arguments and sources, this paper demonstrates that Amnesty’s proposal to decriminalize prostitution or “sex work” will harm those it claims to help. It concludes that the best available evidence indicates that decriminalization of prostitution would: increase sex trafficking, leave prostituted women or “sex workers” more vulnerable to violence, and reduce access to healthcare, protection, and services. Prostituted women primarily enter the industry at a young age, often suffering from a history of sexual and physical abuse, coming from marginalized and vulnerable communities, and driven by emotional and economic desperation. It is …


Do You Understand? Unsettling Interpretative Authority In Feminist Oral History, Katherine Fobear Jan 2016

Do You Understand? Unsettling Interpretative Authority In Feminist Oral History, Katherine Fobear

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This article interrogates interpretative authority in feminist oral history through a critical Indigenous lens. I argue that critical Indigenous theory provides a useful and needed understanding of participants’ agency and the active role they have in shaping the research. Feminist oral history as a methodology has a long and well-established lineage of exploring difficult questions of power in the relationship between the researcher and the participants. While many feminist oral historians have actively interrogated issues surrounding power within their own research, there are relatively few works that press beyond looking at the one-sided hierarchical relationship between the oral historian and …


Towards A New Theory Of Feminist Coalition: Accounting For The Heterogeneity Of Gender, Race, Class, And Sexuality Through An Exploration Of Power And Responsibility, Holly Jeanine Boux Jan 2016

Towards A New Theory Of Feminist Coalition: Accounting For The Heterogeneity Of Gender, Race, Class, And Sexuality Through An Exploration Of Power And Responsibility, Holly Jeanine Boux

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This paper develops a novel theory of feminist coalition that centers and redefines the concepts of power and responsibility. After outlining several key ways in which feminist coalition work has been addressed by both theorists and practitioners, it goes on to explore how accounting for the complex experiences of identity rooted in factors such as race, class, gender, and sexuality continues to complicate the process of coalition building and theorizing. From these foundations, the article develops a theory of feminist coalition that speaks to how such a movement—or organizations within such a movement—can drive the political will for transformation and …


From The Editors, Anna M. Klobucka, Jeannette E. Riley, Catherine Villanueva Gardner Jan 2016

From The Editors, Anna M. Klobucka, Jeannette E. Riley, Catherine Villanueva Gardner

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.


A New Heroic Figure: Female Protestors And Precarity In Puerto Rico, Guillermo Rebollo Gil Jan 2016

A New Heroic Figure: Female Protestors And Precarity In Puerto Rico, Guillermo Rebollo Gil

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This paper offers a critical look on an isolated, failed incident of protest carried out by a young Puerto Rican woman and her two children. In doing so, it explores the possibilities of radical political thought and action on the island. Furthermore, by situating this event within the larger context of danger—physical, social and discursive—that women in Puerto Rico are subjected to, it seeks to question the manner in which female protestors’ vulnerability and agency challenge those on the left to formulate gender-progressive strategies for emancipation. Lastly, it is argued here that this protestor features as new type of radical …


Bodies And Contexts: An Investigation Into A Postmodern Feminist Reading Of Averroës, Reed Taylor Jan 2016

Bodies And Contexts: An Investigation Into A Postmodern Feminist Reading Of Averroës, Reed Taylor

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

In this article, I contribute to the wider discourse of theorizing feminism in predominantly Muslim societies by analyzing the role of women’s political agency within the writings of the twelfth-century Islamic philosopher Averroës (Ibn Rushd, 1126–1198). I critically analyze Catarina Belo’s (2009) liberal feminist approach to political agency in Averroës by adopting a postmodern reading of Averroës’s commentary on Plato’s Republic. A postmodern feminist reading of Averroes’s political thought emphasizes contingencies and contextualization rather than employing a literal reading of the historical works.


More Wounding Than Wounds: Hysterectomy, Phenomenology, And The Pain(S) Of Excorporation, Heather Hill-Vasquez Jan 2016

More Wounding Than Wounds: Hysterectomy, Phenomenology, And The Pain(S) Of Excorporation, Heather Hill-Vasquez

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Focusing on the pain experience of hysterectomy, this article applies and interrogates the foundational descriptive process on which phenomenology is based and suggests that feminism and phenomenology are more compatible than previously asserted. Building upon the work of feminist philosophers who have also explored how feminist and phenomenological approaches share similar methods and intentions—especially in connection with the former’s significant attention to lived experience as a source for the theory feminism employs—the article engages with the philosophies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Samuel Mallin who maintain a consistent attention to the body in their phenomenological approaches. Arguing that Mallin’s method of …


Female Perceptions Of Islam In Today’S Morocco, Fatima Sadiqi Jan 2016

Female Perceptions Of Islam In Today’S Morocco, Fatima Sadiqi

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This paper is based on a survey, 25 interviews, and observation. According to the results so far, Islam means three things for women in today’s Morocco: faith, culture, and politics. Islam as faith is generally perceived as a personal relationship with God. Such a relationship is seen as both rewarding and empowering, but also private. Women who perceive Islam as faith observe the Islamic rituals and may or may not wear the veil. Women’s perception of Islam as faith is a rather poorly understood topic in research in a heavily space-based patriarchy, probably because of its intimate relationship with the …


“Strong Women Make Strong Nations”: Women, Literature, And Sovereignty In Paula Gunn Allen And Virginia Woolf, Kristin Czarnecki Jan 2016

“Strong Women Make Strong Nations”: Women, Literature, And Sovereignty In Paula Gunn Allen And Virginia Woolf, Kristin Czarnecki

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This essay places Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas alongside Paula Gunn Allen’s The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Reading these landmark texts together helps establish a transnational dialogue essential to twenty-first-century literary and feminist studies. A Room of One’s Own and The Sacred Hoop resonate with each other in striving to recuperate women’s history and literature, long denied or suppressed by patriarchal tenets and texts. A fruitful dialogic also emerges between Three Guineas and The Sacred Hoop, both of which argue for the eradication of patriarchy in favor of female-centric social …


From The Editors, Anna M. Klobucka, Jeannette E. Riley, Catherine Villanueva Gardner Jan 2016

From The Editors, Anna M. Klobucka, Jeannette E. Riley, Catherine Villanueva Gardner

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.


The Future Of Chicana Studies: An Intergenerational Conversation With Historian Vicki L. Ruiz And Filmmaker Virginia Espino, Lori A. Flores Jan 2016

The Future Of Chicana Studies: An Intergenerational Conversation With Historian Vicki L. Ruiz And Filmmaker Virginia Espino, Lori A. Flores

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.


A History Of Their Own: A Conversation With Vicki L. Ruiz, Anupama Arora, Laura K. Muñoz, Sandrine Sanos Jan 2016

A History Of Their Own: A Conversation With Vicki L. Ruiz, Anupama Arora, Laura K. Muñoz, Sandrine Sanos

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Creating Consciousness, Creating A Legend: A Conversation With Virginia Espino, Historian And Producer Of No Más Bebés (2015), Anupama Arora, Laura K. Muñoz, Sandrine Sanos Jan 2016

Creating Consciousness, Creating A Legend: A Conversation With Virginia Espino, Historian And Producer Of No Más Bebés (2015), Anupama Arora, Laura K. Muñoz, Sandrine Sanos

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.


I Will Tell Your Story: New Media Activism And The Indian “Rape Crisis”, Rukmini Pande, Samira Nadkarni Jan 2016

I Will Tell Your Story: New Media Activism And The Indian “Rape Crisis”, Rukmini Pande, Samira Nadkarni

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This article analyzes the mediatized representations of the Indian “rape crisis” that gained global attention in the aftermath of the brutal gang rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey in New Delhi in 2012. While much attention was given to Leslie Udwin’s documentary on the incident, India’s Daughter (2015), which was subsequently banned by the Indian government, there were several other creative responses that attempted to negotiate with the meaning of the event. This article examines two such texts—the multimedia short story We Are Angry (2015) and the augmented-reality comic Priya’s Shakti (2014). Both these texts declare their intention to function as …


From The Editors, Anna M. Klobucka, Jeannette E. Riley, Catherine Villanueva Gardner Jan 2015

From The Editors, Anna M. Klobucka, Jeannette E. Riley, Catherine Villanueva Gardner

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.


“You Have To Confess”: Rape And The Politics Of Storytelling, Tara Roeder Jan 2015

“You Have To Confess”: Rape And The Politics Of Storytelling, Tara Roeder

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This article examines the discourse of rape in contemporary culture, paying special attention to the courtroom setting, where rape victims are often required to tell cohesive, linear narratives that underscore their blamelessness if they hope to be believed. Because of deeply entrenched cultural myths about rape, the type of story often required for the successful prosecution of perpetrators may require rape victims to construct narratives that do not accurately reflect their lived experience. Writers such as Susan Brison, Patricia Weaver Francisco, and Alice Sebold engage with the complex politics of rape and its telling in their memoirs. While constructing stories …


The Power And Joy Of Derby: Women’S Participation, Empowerment, And Transformation In A Flat-Track Roller Derby Team, John Paul, Sharla Blank Jan 2015

The Power And Joy Of Derby: Women’S Participation, Empowerment, And Transformation In A Flat-Track Roller Derby Team, John Paul, Sharla Blank

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

In what ways do sports make a difference in the lives of the people who play them? In this paper, we employ a sporting feminist perspective to answer this question and detail how women benefit from the sport of roller derby. Our analyses are structured around the themes of the body (exploring examples of bodily empowerment and reconceptualization); the team (highlighting feminist themes of loyalty and team as family); and the crowd (identifying the ways in which derby is “sold” to the crowd, as well as the ways in which athletes use derby to challenge conceptions of beauty, desirability, and …


Moving Forward/Looking Back: Reclaiming And Revising Our Feminist Past And Searching For Solidarity, Cassandra Denise Fetters Jan 2015

Moving Forward/Looking Back: Reclaiming And Revising Our Feminist Past And Searching For Solidarity, Cassandra Denise Fetters

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Interweaving personal anecdotes, feminist theory, and literary and popular culture references, this article attempts to provide answers to the question of how we build a social movement and establish solidarity among women while still recognizing and respecting difference. The article traces historical accounts of feminists contending with the “difference impasse” and argues that we should return to and revise the feminist thought that preceded us, weaving together theories from our feminist past with contemporary models, including those of feminist psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin and her ideas of “mutual recognition” and intersubjectivity. Drawing on fictional accounts from literature by women writers, the …


She Legislates, He Scandalizes: Reenvisioning The Impact Of Political Sex Scandals On Assemblywomen In New York, Hinda Mandell Jan 2015

She Legislates, He Scandalizes: Reenvisioning The Impact Of Political Sex Scandals On Assemblywomen In New York, Hinda Mandell

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

A rash of three political sex scandals within the span of less than two years, from 2012 to 2014, shook the New York State Assembly. All of the sex scandals involved male politicians accused of sexual harassment of female staffers and subordinates. This study investigates how New York State assemblywomen were impacted by the scandals of their male colleagues, exploring the “contagion” of scandals (Adut 2008). Interviews were conducted with eight assemblywomen in 2014, although all 33 assemblywomen serving in the legislature at the time of this research endeavor were invited to participate in a research interview. Findings indicate that …


She Had A Name That God Didn’T Give Her: Thinking The Body Through Atheistic Black Radical Feminism, Marquis Bey Jan 2015

She Had A Name That God Didn’T Give Her: Thinking The Body Through Atheistic Black Radical Feminism, Marquis Bey

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The article attempts to demonstrate the necessity of acknowledging the body when considering the current Black Lives Matter movement, give an account of Black female and trans erasure, and ultimately (re)affirm the lived embodiment of Black, female, and trans bodies, all through an atheistic lens. Atheism here, while indeed denying the existence of gods, has as its primary concern affirming life. Too often is theology, as theologian Anthony Pinn says, “a theology of no-body”; thus atheistic feminist Blackness, as understood here, seeks to entrench the body rather than abstract it. Atheistic feminist Blackness reinscribes and affirms the subjectivity and humanity …


Paid Family Leave, Rachel-Lyn Longo, Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz Dec 2014

Paid Family Leave, Rachel-Lyn Longo, Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz

Senior Honors Projects

Paid Family Leave policies are rare in the United States. Around the world, one hundred and eighty-two countries provide some form of paid maternity leave, and seventy countries also offer paid paternity leave. It is estimated that only 36 percent of U.S. employees have access to paid leave if they get sick, a policy that is almost universal in other developed countries, and only 12 percent of employees have access to paid family leave. Presently, just three states have implemented Paid Family Leave (PFL) to help offset the cost of time taken off of work to care for a newborn …


Decolonizing Higher Education: Black Feminism And The Intersectionality Of Race And Gender, Heidi Safia Mirza Jan 2014

Decolonizing Higher Education: Black Feminism And The Intersectionality Of Race And Gender, Heidi Safia Mirza

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Drawing on black feminist theory, this paper examines the professional experiences of postcolonial diasporic black and ethnicized female academics in higher education.1 The paper explores the embodiment of gendered and racialized difference and reflects on the power of whiteness to shape everyday experiences in such places of privilege. The powerful yet hidden histories of women of color in higher education, such as the Indian women suffragettes and Cornelia Sorabji in late nineteenth century, are symbolic of the erasure of an ethnicized black feminist/womanist presence in mainstream (white) educational establishments. The paper concludes that an understanding of black and ethnicized female …