Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Operación Araña: Reflections On How A Performative Intervention In Buenos Aires’S Subway System Can Help Rethink Feminist Activism, Mariela Méndez

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

On July 31, 2018, Buenos Aires’s subway system was overtaken by a public intervention under the name “Operación Araña,” co-organized by Ni Una Menos - a feminist social movement focused on gender violence -, the Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe, and Free Abortion, unionized metro workers, and more than seventy organizations, with the overall intention of affirming women’s autonomy and calling attention to several social issues with direct impact on their lives. This study weaves a series of reflections on some of the specific features of the Operación Araña intervention that can shed light on how and why …

Americans' Gender Attitudes At The Intersection Of Sexual Orientation And Gender, Eric Anthony Grollman

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Extensive research on differences in women's and men's gender attitudes and more recent work on sexual orientation differences in these and other social attitudes have overlooked the potential intersection between gender and sexual orientation in predicting Americans' gender attitudes. I use data from the 2012 American National Election Survey 2012 to investigate differences in views on gender roles, gender discrimination and inequality, and abortion among lesbian and bisexual women, gay and bisexual men, heterosexual women, and heterosexual men. The results suggest that heterosexual men hold the most conservative views on gender, while lesbian and bisexual women are most conscious of …

[Introduction To] Counternarratives From Women Of Color Academics: Bravery, Vulnerablility And Resistance, Manya C. Whitaker, Eric Anthony Grollman

Bookshelf

This book documents the lived experiences of women of color academics who have leveraged their professional positions to challenge the status quo in their scholarship, teaching, service, activism, and leadership. By presenting reflexive work from various vantage points within and outside of the academy, contributors document the cultivation of mentoring relationships, the use of administrative roles to challenge institutional leadership, and more. Through an emphasis on the various ways in which women of color have succeeded in the academy—albeit with setbacks along the way—this volume aims to change the discourse surrounding women of color academics: from a focus on trauma …

[Introduction To] Audacious Voices: Profiles In Intersectional Feminism, Holly J. Blake, Melissa D. Ooten

Bookshelf

Inspiring and hopeful, Audacious Voices is a collection of twelve stories from alumnae/alumni of WILL*, a feminist model for education. Each author featured in this book is working, in their own distinct way, to make their communities more equitable―and their stories illustrate how different elements of the WILL* program influence and inspire them to act with such intentionality.

Author-activist Courtney Martin writes in The New Better Off that the times we live in may break our hearts, but they don't have to break our spirit; it's that spirit that these stories capture, alongside the power of a feminist educational program …

Bringing Mothers And Fathers Together: Undergraduate Studies In Anthropology And Sociology, Angela Castañeda, Matthew Oware

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

As social scientists in a combined Sociology and Anthropology department at a small liberal arts institution, we approach research questions on mothering and fathering from our respective disciplines. In the summer of 2014 we made plans to experiment with a first year seminar that would bring our distinct courses together: Oware’s Man Up: Unpacking Manhood and Masculinity, and Castañeda’s Global Perspectives on Reproduction and Childbirth. In the fall of 2014, we combined our courses over two-weeks to discuss the roles of fathering and mothering in our research agendas. As we suspected, our courses were unevenly represented on their own with …

Managing To Clear The Air: Stereotype Threat, Women, And Leadership, Crystal L. Hoyt, Susan E. Murphy

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

In this article, we explore the process and implications of stereotype threat for women in leadership, broadly construed. First, we provide a brief background on the phenomenon of stereotype threat generally. Next, we explore stereotype threat for women in leadership by reviewing a model of stereotype threat in leadership contexts that includes cues to stereotype threat, consequences of stereotype threat, and moderators of stereotype threat appraisals and responses. In this review, in addition to considering research focused squarely on leadership, we include the broader categories of research examining stereotype threat effects in the workplace and in tasks and domains relevant …

Women, Land & Justice In Tanzania (Book Review), Sandra F. Joireman

Political Science Faculty Publications

Among the many debates surrounding land in Africa, one that has endured through both colonization and independence is the argument over the merits of preserving customary land law. Human rights based approaches to property rights in Sub-Saharan Africa note women’s secondary or derivative rights to land under customary law, correctly identifying inequalities in rules and practice. Communitarian approaches, on the other hand, address the adaptability and accessibility of land regimes defined by customary law. This book contributes to the debates on women, land and law and, while it will be frustrating to some as it does not take a side …

Gender Bias In Leader Evaluations: Merging Implicit Theories And Role Congruity Perspectives, Crystal L. Hoyt, Jeni L. Burnette

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

This research extends our understanding of gender bias in leader evaluations by merging role congruity and implicit theory perspectives. We tested and found support for the prediction that the link between people’s attitudes regarding women in authority and their subsequent gender-biased leader evaluations is significantly stronger for entity theorists (those who believe attributes are fixed) relative to incremental theorists (those who believe attributes are malleable). In Study 1, 147 participants evaluated male and female gubernatorial candidates. Results supported predictions, demonstrating that traditional attitudes toward women in authority significantly predicted a pro-male gender bias in leader evaluations (and progressive attitudes predicted …

Women's Gun Culture In America, Laura Browder

English Faculty Publications

A recent article in the New York Times focused on the possible increase in female gun ownership in the United States. This “new” phenomenon of women and guns is of course far from new: as early as the 1870s, trapshooting for women was publicized by gun manufacturers as yet another feminine activity, not far removed from shopping or club work. The ultra-feminine Annie Oakley, who in the 1880s became an international star in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, personally taught fifteen thousand women to shoot. By the turn of the twentieth century, gun manufacturers were promoting hunting as a healthful activity …

Gender Bias In Employment Contexts: A Closer Examination Of The Role Incongruity Principle, Crystal L. Hoyt

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

This research extends the role incongruity analysis of employment-related gender bias by investigating the role of dispositional and situational antecedents, specifically political ideology and the salience of cues to the traditional female gender role. The prediction that conservatives would show an anti-female candidate bias and liberals would show a pro-female bias when the traditional female gender role is salient was tested across three experimental studies. In Study 1, 126 participants evaluated a male or a female job applicant with thoughts of the traditional female gender role activated or not. Results showed that when the gender role is salient, political ideology …

Female Leaders: Injurious Or Inspiring Role Models For Women?, Crystal L. Hoyt, Stefanie Simon

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

The impact of female role models on women’s leadership aspirations and self-perceptions after a leadership task were assessed across two laboratory studies. These studies tested the prediction that upward social comparisons to high-level female leaders will have a relatively detrimental impact on women’s self-perceptions and leadership aspirations compared to male and less elite female leaders. In Study 1 (N = 60), women were presented with both female and male leaders before serving as leaders of ostensible three-person groups in an immersive virtual environment. This study established the relatively deflating impact of high-level female leaders, compared to high-level male leaders and …

Taking A Turn Toward The Masculine: The Impact Of Mortality Salience On Implicit Leadership Theories, Crystal L. Hoyt, Stefanie Simon, Audrey N. Innella

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

The present research investigates the influence of subtle death-related thoughts (i.e., mortality salience), on people’s images of effective leaders (i.e., their implicit leadership theories). We test the prediction that mortality salience will change the content of these implicit theories to be more gender stereotypical such that individuals will conceive of effective leaders in a significantly more masculine, or agentic, manner. To test this prediction, we assessed participants’ communal and agentic implicit leadership theories after they were presented with a mortality salience or control manipulation. Results show that priming individuals to think about their mortality with two open-ended questions resulted in …

Locas Al Rescate: The Transnational Hauntings Of Queer Cubanidad, LáZaro Lima

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

“Locas al Rescate: The Transnational Hauntings of Queer Cubanidad” (originally published in Cuba Transnational) offers a significant contribution both to transnational American Studies and to gender studies. In telling the insider story of the alternative identity formation, practices, and forms of “rescue” initiated by the affective activism of the Cuban American society in drag in 1990s Miami/South Beach, Lima resuscitates the liberatory gestures of a subculture defined by its pursuit of its own acceptance, value, and freedom. With their aesthetic and political life on a raft, the gay micro-communities inside Cuban America asserted their own islandic space, Lima observes, …

Waves Of Feminism: Discussions And Disruptions, Melissa Ooten, Emily Miller

Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications

As an educator and a student situated in women, gender and sexuality studies, we find it of great importance to analyze our relationship with each other and with our fellow students and teachers. As both student and teacher, we are already actively engaged in social justice work. As a teacher, Melissa wants not only to support and nourish the work of her students, but she also wants to give students the theoretical tools necessarily to fully analyze and frame their experiences. In other words, she wants them to understand the connections between theory and practice in order to be informed …

[Introduction To] When Janey Comes Marching Home: Portraits Of Women Combat Veterans, Laura Browder, Sascha Pflaeging

Bookshelf

While women are officially barred from combat in the American armed services, in the current war, where there are no front lines, the ban on combat is virtually meaningless. More than in any previous conflict in our history, American women are engaging with the enemy, suffering injuries, and even sacrificing their lives in the line of duty.

When Janey Comes Marching Home juxtaposes forty-eight photographs by Sascha Pflaeging with oral histories collected by Laura Browder to provide a dramatic portrait of women at war. Women from all five branches of the military share their stories here--stories that are by turns …

Faulkner's Sexualized City: Modernism, Commerce, And The (Textual) Body, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

Such classicism is the aesthetic opposite of what Faulkner demonstrates at moments in Mosquitoes and that would go on to become his famously baroque style. In the discussion that follows, I will be asking a number of questions about that development, among them the following: What is the role in Faulkner of a baroque, highly refined language, especially when Faulkner uses it to convey sexuality? And what connections (or disconnections) might that style have to Faulkner’s use of the setting of the city, as in Mosquitoes, or elsewhere of the rural countryside? As we will see, changes in these …

Women Home From War, Laura Browder

English Faculty Publications

The first time I heard a woman describe her deployment in glowing terms, I was taken aback. Marine Colonel Jenny Holbert told me that being in charge of public affairs for the second battle of Fallujah was "probably one of the biggest events of my life, other than birthing two children." I thought, cynically, that this enthusiasm was all part of her role as a public-affairs officer. It took me a while to understand how compelling the experiences of being in a combat zone could be for the women I talked with. Colonel Holbert's enthusiasm for deployment was only one …

Book Panel Response: Symposium On Ladelle Mcwhorter's Racism And Sexual Oppression In Anglo-America: A Genealogy, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Unfortunately I do not have space to address individually each issue these four papers raise. Instead, I will first situate my work in relation to identity politics and address fears that my approach is reductive. Then, building on comments from Professors Wilkerson and Al-Saji, I will offer some remarks about aims, methods, and shortcomings.

The Slave, The Fetus, The Body: Articulating Biopower And The Pregnant Woman, Kevin Kuswa, Paul Achter, Elizabeth Lauzon

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Many slaveholders attempted to justify the institution of slavery in the United States by claiming that the practice of slavery was actually in the interests of the slaves themselves. Not only are these arguments invalid because they justify inhumane treatment and the imprisonment of innocent human beings, they also contain a dangerous paternalism (a “speaking for”) that has not vacated the social sphere. Indeed, this same logic—the notion that bodies can be regulated and controlled for their own protection—is presently being used to speak for the fetus in order to justify fetal rights. Borrowing from Berlant (1997), these fetal rights …

Radical Labor In A Feminine Voice: The Rhetoric Of Mary Harris 'Mother' Jones And Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Mari Boor Tonn

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Two women in particular, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, earned stature as labor movement legends. Jones persists as an icon for contemporary champions of progressive causes. Separated in age by nearly six decades, both gained reputations for their “leather-lunged” and militant oratory, their disarming fearlessness, and their uncanny talent for captivating the minds and hearts of audiences regardless of sex or ethnicity. Some observers have linked the pair through what Marx termed “the feminine ferment” of the movement. “The fiery example of Mother Jones had one conspicuous follower,” note Lloyd Morris, “Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.”

[Introduction To] With The Weathermen: The Personal Journal Of A Revolutionary Woman, Susan Stern, Laura Browder

Bookshelf

Drugs. Sex. Revolutionary violence. From its first pages, Susan Stern's memoir With the Weathermen provides a candid, first-hand look at the radical politics and the social and cultural environment of the New Left during the late 1960s.

The Weathermen--a U.S.-based, revolutionary splinter group of Students for a Democratic Society--advocated the overthrow of the government and capitalism, and toward that end, carried out a campaign of bombings, jailbreaks, and riots throughout the United States. In With the Weathermen Stern traces her involvement with this group, and her transformation from a shy, married graduate student into a go-go dancing, street-fighting "macho mama." …

Miss America Contesters And Contestants: Discourse About Social “Also-Rans”, Mari Boor Tonn

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Although feminism, of course, emerged out of the actual personal experiences of discrimination and other forms of subordination, ameliorating such obstacles required and requires a collective politics, most identifiable in liberal feminism’s focus on equality of opportunity in the public domain, such as Title IX or the push for the ERA I described. Whatever Debra Barnes’s individual achievements, those obviously neither did have nor could have had bearing on the eventual opportunity of young women to participate in intercollegiate athletics, as I did, or to make the legal reproductive decisions occasioned by Roe v.Wade. As Dow argues, the mobility or …

Operation Rescue, Eric S. Yellin

History Faculty Publications

Operation Rescue, founded in 1986, became known as one of the most militant groups opposing a woman’s right to abortion as established in the 1973 Supreme Court case Roe vs. Wade.

Enhancing Women's Studies Action Research Projects Through Technology, Lucretia Mcculley

University Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

This article describes how library and Internet technology enhanced an action research assignment in a unique women’s studies program, Women Involved in Living and Learning (WILL), at the University of Richmond. The Women’s Studies Liaison Librarian and the Director of the WILL Program collaborated to provide a meaningful assignment that incorporated the use of online databases and the Internet. The main objective of the assignment was to provide a research opportunity whereby the students would learn to use electronic women’s studies resources and actually utilize the information into some type of social action, such as writing a letter, volunteering in …

Born And Made: Sisters, Brothers, And The Deceased Wife's Sister Bill, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

We are--almost all--born into families, born into relationship. Like Mary Ann Evans, I was born a little sister--but had I encountered her "Brother and Sister" sonnets at twelve, I might have thrown the book across the room. George Eliot's fantasy of a perfected brother-sister relationship in these sonnets rings hollow and yet resonates profoundly with me. As a little sister myself, I wonder what could make the relationship--so often fraught with competition, envy, and neglect, yet potentially so richly rewarding--seem so powerfully right, so important to and adult woman's self-identification? For the narrator of the sonnets is certainly an adult …

[Introduction To] Conceiving Spirits: Birth Rituals And Contested Identities Among Lauje Of Indonesia, Jennifer W. Nourse

Bookshelf

For most of the Lauje' of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, birth spirits are of primary importance. The spirits inhabit a mother's birth fluids and placenta, nurturing fetuses in the womb and children after birth---or bringing sickness and death if rituals are neglected.

Jennifer Nourse describes how Lauje' from both modernized coastal and isolated highland villages attribute to birth spirits competing meanings that hinge on an individual's gender, social class, and religion. At the beginning of her fieldwork, Nourse collaborated with two Lauje' men whose concepts of birth spirits as divided into good and bad, male and female, or local and foreign …

Beyond Pluralism: Foucault's Strategic Counter To Heterosexist Categories, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Most nonheterosexuals want to be guaranteed civil rights without regard to sexual practices; nevertheless, quite often, gay and lesbian activists formulate demands in ways that de-emphasize practice and emphasize identity. For example, instead of saying, "My having sex with women is irrelevant to the question of whether I should have custody of my child," a lesbian activist might say, "My lesbian identity is as moral and healthy as heterosexual identity and therefore should not prevent me from having custody of my child." The general claim is that lesbian or gay personhood is as good as heterosexual personhood, so lesbians and …

Feminist Empowerment Through The Internet, Lucretia Mcculley, Patricia Patterson

University Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

The University of Richmond's upper division Political Science course, "Women and Power in American Politics," has several ambitions. Among these is an exploration of the power of information technology to foster political research by and about women and to advance feminist political aims.

Women's Studies Student Questionnaire, Lucretia Mcculley, Patricia Patterson

University Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

The University of Richmond Women's Studies program developed a student questionnaire in 1996 as part of larger program assessment project from 1993-1996.

The Integration Of Women's Studies Into Leadership Studies, Olivia J. Wilkinson

Honors Theses

The purpose of my project was to study the inclusion of gender in leadership and to offer the Jepson School a critical evaluation that could be used to initiate change. The agreement and support I previously received, has led me to realize that there was room for growth. Still such a large merger of disciplines needs research and assessment before action can be taken. I know my project will provide the building block for Jepson to address this problem.