Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

A Journey To A Black Woman’S (Read Black Girl’S) Joy And Her Story Of Coming Home, Brittany Lauren Brock

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is an auto/ethnography about the self-actualizing journey of reclaiming storytelling as my native tongue and my journey to joy. Throughout, using my story and the stories of so many others, I not only lay out the wounds (the pain, the loss, then the hope that comes) within the academy and outside in the world but I also use storytelling as a tool of healing—my tool of healing—to show how I wrote myself free.

When Black women (read Black girls) go through The Reckoning (the moment we realize something isn’t right with how we are perceived by others) …

Politics Of Refusal: Justice And Liberation For Black Trans Lives, Quincy Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis investigates the challenges faced by Black trans people. In this thesis, I will explore how protest is used to highlight and confront the obstacles faced by the Black trans community. I will also examine the cultural work of Black trans people and what they teach us. The Brooklyn Liberation march and the TV show Pose is an important part of Black trans legacy. They both look at the complications surrounding Black trans lives and contributes to Black trans representation in protesting and fighting marginalization. This thesis will argue the importance of allyship to create safe space for Black …

Publishing Inequality In Lgbtqia+ Research In Psychology: A Content Analysis, Mackenzie L. Fingerhut

Student Theses

Despite the American Psychiatric Association’s removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973 and ego-dystonic homosexuality in 1987, nonheteronormative sexual orientations remain stigmatized and underrepresented in scientific literature. To estimate the prevalence of LGBTQIA+ topics in popular psychological research, the author queried more than 20,000 articles from 1987 to 2022 in the two most cited journals in each of four major domains (cognitive, clinical, developmental and social). In addition, the author randomly queried 20% of all empirical articles published from 1987 to 2021 in the top eight empirical journals to understand how often sexuality …

Transgender And Gender Nonconforming Individuals And Intimate Partner Violence Resources In Lgbtq+ Organizations, Claire Herr

Student Theses

A meta-analysis reporting on the prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization of transgender populations found transgender people were two to three times more likely to experience IPV than cisgender people (Peitzmeier et al., 2020). The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) (2012) found transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) people, particularly transgender women and transgender Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), were more likely to be threatened and harassed by their abusive partners than cisgender people. TGNC people may be at a high risk of IPV due to the lack of services designed for TGNC victims of IPV. Once …

Muscling Through: Athletic Women In Victorian Popular Representation, 1864–1915, Julia G. Fuller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Muscling Through” reconstructs an overlooked history of strong female bodies in the nineteenth century. It argues that popular representations of athletic women introduced a new category of identity that was distinct from women’s traditional relational and social roles. The project’s central figure is the hyper-able “Sportswoman,” who bridges the gap between two familiar versions of the Victorian woman’s body: the mid-century ideal of docile, domesticated femininity and the sturdy, capable women who enter universities, professions, and public spaces en masse just before the turn of the century. Representationally, the Sportswoman figures a range of attitudes, from anxious to aspirational, toward …

Whose Imagination Are We Living In?: An Examination Of Feminist Utopia Through The Lens Of Pragmatism, Mia A. Gindis

Student Theses and Dissertations

Pragmatic feminism is a philosophy which utilizes and merges the fundamental concepts of pragmatism, such as its emphasis on pluralism and lived experience, with feminist theory in hopes of inciting social change. The main goals of pragmatic feminism are to recover the work of women who were influential in the popularization of American pragmatism but were also excluded from the history of philosophy, to analyze the “canon” of lauded pragmatist philosophers through a feminist lens, and to yield pragmatist philosophies as a weapon for contemporary feminist activism. In my study, I argue that feminist utopian literature can be a serviceable …

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. …

Diasporic Women’S Mutability In South Asian Postcolonial Literature, Tasnim S. Halim

Theses and Dissertations

Though Western scholarship tends to homogenize South Asian experiences, researchers and novelists shed light on different classes of South Asian postcolonial and migratory women who experience mutability, or the internal and external changes as a trauma response after British colonial rule ended and the 1947 Partition abruptly fractured national identity. Though this mutability has positive and negative transformative qualities, it also allows women characters the power to remove themselves from cycles of oppression, work towards healing, and transforming their physical bodies from sites of repressed trauma to sites of expression and agency. What binds them is not only their physical …

Skin Echoes, Andreia Santana

Theses and Dissertations

Santana’s explores the intersection of biology and identity, incorporating living matter and performative gestures into installations to reflect on social constructs of history and gender. By observing water and its qualities of defying Western dichotomies, Skin Echoes focuses on the material interchanges across bodies and the wider material world.

Naming Venus: An Exploration Of Goddesses, Heroines, And Famous Women, Kavya Beheraj

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Humans have been observing and romanticizing Venus for more than 5,000 years. However, mapping its surface has nearly always been impossible, since the planet is shrouded in thick clouds. A breakthrough came just fifty years ago with the invention of radar imaging, leading to the discovery (and naming) of hundreds of new features in a relatively short length of time.

The rapid naming of Venus is a case study on the impact of planetary nomenclature — the process of naming features on other worlds. While the act of naming streamlines communication and humanizes alien landscapes, it is subject to bias, …

How The U.S. Mainstream Media Perpetuates Cis White Masculine Hegemony, Yelena Dzhanova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The news is important because it helps individuals understand their place in the world and make the best decisions for themselves. Throughout its strong history and presence in the United States, the journalism industry has prided itself on delivering fact-based news using an objective framework, meaning that there is an expectation that journalists communicate the news impartially and without bias. Through an examination of gendered language and visual representations published in and by recent mainstream U.S. digital and print media outlets, this paper explains how the media plays a major role in the perpetuation of cis white masculinity. This paper …

Metamorphis, Luca Lee Sobarzo Faust

Theses and Dissertations

Web3D interactive experience that explores time, communication, and transformation, from a personal storytelling perspective. Hosted on a web platform, the experience displays three environments: Metamorphis, Cuir AI, and Hain. These spaces propose a fragmented narrative that seeks to interrogate both the characters and the viewer’s perception on the linearity of time

The Impact On Gay Men Of Support And Enforcement Of Workplace Dei Policies: A Meta Analysis, Steven M. Vega

Student Theses and Dissertations

The poor enforcement of workplace DEI policies affects gay men in ways that are unique and invite close attention. The nature of the impact of missing or unsupported DEI policies on gay men has been widely debated in the field of human resources and communication studies, with scholars such as David Wicks, Helen Seitzer, James Ward, and Diana Winstansley arguing that these effects include lasting negative mental and physical health effects and discomfort with self-disclosure in the workplace. However, the existing research on this topic has not sufficiently considered the effects of the poor enforcement of workplace DEI policies side …

Preservando La Playa Del Pueblo, Tasha A. Sandoval

Capstones

After more than 80 years, the only queer beach in New York City, the People’s Beach at Jacob Riis, is in danger. In 2022, the city announced the demolition of the Neponsit Hospital, a long-abandoned structure that shelters the beach from the street, creating a sense of privacy and safety. Can Riis Beach live on as a safe and joyous utopia for queer communities without the presence of the hospital buildings? Some beach-goers are campaigning to ensure that whatever replaces the hospital space centers the queer community and preserves the beach’s queer history, including the legacy of Ms. Colombia, a …

From Perfect Victims To Collateral Damage: How Nigerian Women Are Implicated In And Impacted By Contemporary French Anti-Trafficking Policies And Discourse, Oladunni Patricia Oduyemi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although the Nordic Model has been embraced by the international anti-trafficking movement, recent studies, and closer examinations of France’s approach to the issue of sex trafficking reveal a strong anti-migrant and anti-sex work bias. In this thesis, I use studies of the impacts of France’s 2016 anti-trafficking bill on migrant sex workers, feminist critiques of neo-abolitionism and the Nordic Model, and examples of France’s hypocritical anti-migrant position, to explore how Nigerian women are harmed by the contemporary French fight against sex trafficking. The pervasive influence of anti-sex work radical feminism on anti-trafficking protocols which define the sex industry as analogous …

A Labor Of Livingness: Oral Histories Of Formerly Incarcerated Black Women, Robin Mcginty

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Anchored in the political subjectivity of formerly incarcerated Black women, “A Labor of Livingness: Oral Histories of Formerly Incarcerated Black Women” is a project situated at the intersections of Black geographies and Black Feminist thought that considers a re/imagination of the ‘living prison’ experiences of formerly incarcerated Black women. I offer the term “a labor of livingness” as the liberatory articulation and everyday practices of resistance to the prison as a site of ‘living death’ that is reflective of the carceral experiences of currently and formerly incarcerated Black women. Attentive to the prison as a repository of epistemological knowledge production, …

Shame On You: The 2018 Senate Race And Gendered Language On Facebook And Twitter, Heather A. Mir

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is a study that determines whether or not new media amplifies gender stereotyping during campaigns. Numerous studies about women and the media, which have been conducted by scholars using traditional media, show that women endure more gender stereotyping then men. More recent studies show that women have made some ground and gender stereotyping is not as prevalent. These studies, however, were conducted using traditional newspapers. This is a study that compares traditional media and online news sources to determine if gender stereotyping is more prevalent in the latter. Another feature of this study is that it contains interviews of …

Claiming Ownership Of One’S Body Through Language: The Disability Memoir, Sarah Elizabeth Kaufman

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the ways in which the disability memoir creates pathways that generate new ways of thinking. Focusing primarily on the disability memoirs of Simi Linton, Ellen Forney, and Kenny Fries, this analysis will personalize the disability experience as these authors live it and redefine its social stereotypes.

Long Live The Queer: Demystifying Noncitizenship In Uncle Frank And Pain And Glory, Andrew D. Manker

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the ways in which a nation infantilizes its citizens, and how family dynamics internalize this infantilization. Queer family members and citizens are treated as threats to the family and by extension the nation because to live into queerness is to refuse the nations infantilization. Additionally, this thesis shows how queer people can cultivate a hopeful future for themselves and the family-as-extension-of-nation by radically redefining what citizenship looks like in a family and nation.

Committed To The Fragment: Feminist Literature And The Promise Of Wellness, Lynne Beckenstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“I have never been able to blind myself” to the cruelty of a world that “destroys its own young in passing…out of not noticing or caring about the destruction,” Audre Lorde tells us in her 1980 “mythobiography” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. This quality, Lorde says, “according to one popular definition of mental health, makes me mentally unhealthy.” In rejecting psychological self-possession as a sign of wellness, this passage also rejects it as one of sovereignty’s conditions. At the time of Lorde’s writing, this version of sovereignty already dominated the landscape of therapeutic culture in the United States, …

Queer And Trans Prison Voices: A Podcast Archive On Prison Abolition, Josefine Ziebell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project is located at the intersection of Critical Prison Studies, Gender Studies, Sound Studies, and American Studies. It highlights the importance of sonic modes of anti-carceral resistance by featuring the recorded voices of incarcerated people through the creation of a sonic archive of prison writings. By integrating that sonic archive into the podcast medium, this project functions as a digital archive for incarcerated voices, consisting of two tracks: a collection of short-spoken readings by queer and transgender incarcerated authors, and podcast-style interviews with activist scholars, organizations, and sound artists working towards prison abolition. In this paper, I establish …

“She Too ‘Omanish’”: Young Black Women’S Sexuality And Reproductive Justice In Bluefields, Nicaragua, Ishan Elizabeth Gordon-Ugarte

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Most never-married young “Creole” (Afro-Caribbean) women in Bluefields, Nicaragua are raised in fundamentalist Protestant families and institutions that emphasize sexual abstinence before marriage. In this context, abstinence is required to maintain social standing and “respectability.” Nevertheless, women in Bluefields, the administrative center of Caribbean Nicaragua, exhibit what Creoles themselves understand to be high rates of sexuality and pregnancy among post-menarche unmarried teenaged women (USAID, 2012; Mitchell et al. 2015). Such young women’s pregnancies occur at an important developmental stage of their lives and have long been associated by social scientists with adverse social, emotional, and health situations. These scholars have …

Gender-Informed Features Of Film Reviews: A Statistical Linguistic Analysis, Matthew Kadish

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The project analyzes how language is used differently in movie reviews based on both the gender of the author of the review as well as the gender of the director of the reviewed film. In doing so, it aims to gain a better understanding of what contexts evoke a typically “masculine” use of language vs. a typically “feminine” use of language within the genre of film criticism, and what implications this has for the state of the film criticism with respect to gender. The results of this study seem to indicate that a critic’s language use takes on the characteristics …

Femicides: The Other Growing Epidemic We Don’T Want To See, Natalia Gutierrez

Capstones

This report analyzes how gender-based killings is a growing topic within the feminist community of New York and Mexico City and how the use of the right terminology is essential to understand the scope of the problem. I worked for 18 months with the feminist community in both cities and the term ‘femicide’ came over and over in the interviews Femicide, how it is referred in the rest of the world, is the intentional killing of women or girls because they are female, and it is a growing epidemic in the U.S. and in Mexico. I interviewed more than 40 …

Afterlives Of Discovery: Speculative Geographies In The Colombian Political Landscape, Heidi A. Rhodes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation considers how the temporal remains of the Age of Discovery and its doctrine persist in a racial-geographical ranking of human and non-human, terrestrial and planetary life and worth. Across this work, I interpret a series of historical moments and their objects of speculative geographic cultural production: a state mapping program, a painting, a biomedical project, a de-monumenting protest action. As repositories of codified belief and repertoires of Discovery’s political and affective modes of racialized domination, I read these materials from the Colombian archives of coloniality and liberalism to illuminate their implications for Colombia’s national becoming as a liberal …

What We Owe To Our Audience: The Hermeneutical Responsibility Of Fiction Creators, Kathryn Wojtkiewicz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this project is to provide a theoretical underpinning for the belief that creators of fiction should dedicate time to diversifying the cast of characters in their fictions, and to avoiding harmful stereotypes when doing so. I establish this as a hermeneutical responsibility: because of the epistemic influence fictions can wield over their audiences, trafficking in harmful stereotypes of marginalized identities (instances of which I call Bad Representation Problems) or excluding marginalized identities entirely (which I call No Representation Problems) from one’s fictions can reinforce harmful beliefs about real people with those identities. The more popular the fiction, …

Desde El Fuego Que En Mí Arde: Performance, Literatura Y Cine Afro-Latinoamericano Producidos Por Mujeres Afrodescendientes En Perú, Cuba Y Brasil (1960–2000), Elena Ekatherina Chavez Goycochea

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines different films, literary, and performance art pieces created by contemporary afro-descendant women from Peru, Cuba, and Brazil after the sixties with emphasis on the most relevant works of Conceição Evaristo, Sara Gómez, Victoria Santa Cruz, and Lucía Charún-Illescas. I focus my research on the crucial role these artists played in the cultural identity formation of Latin America when inserting ‘race’ as a category of socio-political analysis and cultural production. How did their films, performances, and texts challenge national narratives and imaginaries after 1960? Although in the sixties, women improved their civil rights in different countries, the ‘mujer …

Put Yourself First (In A Sexy Way): Postfeminist Beauty Messaging And Resistant Media Texts, Margarita Artoglou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The makeover montage trope is one of the most recognizable in media content aimed at young women, sending the message that social status and acceptance are only a new outfit and face of makeup away. While this trope and its message have been heavily critiqued by scholars, the message that beauty—and all its social benefits—can be achieved through consumerism has not disappeared, though the means by which this message is conveyed has changed. As a result of companies co-opting feminist rhetoric, conforming to standards of beauty has been recast as a “choice” one makes for herself, often wrapped in the …

Beyond Pathology: Specters Of Suicidality In The Queer Community, Alison E. Parks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the psychic effects of a life haunted by proximity to suicide. Beginning with demographic data indicating that the queer community has experienced disproportionately high rates of suicide in the U.S. since nationwide data collection began in the 1960s, my dissertation’s argument is twofold. First, suicidality shapes the experience of being queer. Second, the queer community’s history of association with suicide has shaped its relationship to death and morbidity. Therefore, in order to better address the issue of suicide in the community, a new approach is required that considers this history’s entanglement with systemic power relations and the …

The Compressed Modernity Of Legalizing Same-Sex Marriage In Taiwan: Digital Activism, Human Rights Discourse, And Intertwined Sexual, Political And National Identities, Jyun-Jie Yang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 2019, Taiwan became the first Asian country to officially legalize same-sex marriage. Remarkably, the Taiwanese queer movement achieved the goal of marriage equality in only 30 years, with the first tongzhi (同志) activist group organized in 1990. Compared to Euro-American social movements, Taiwanese tongzhi activism has experienced a “compressed modernity” (Chang, 1999, 2010a, 2010b), which accelerates cultural and social transformations. Although Taiwanese academia has been significantly influenced by queer studies as a form of western knowledge production, local scholars and activists created a new interpretation from “queer” to “tongzhi.” Entangled with complex political identifications in post-martial-law Taiwan, …