Feminist theory

This narrative research study focuses on the lived experiences of Black female doctoral students navigating predominantly White colleges and universities (PWIs) and their connections within cultural safe spaces. Through the lens of Black Feminist Theory and the application of a Black Feminist-Ecological Perspective, this study investigates how Black female doctoral students are defining cultural safe spaces and how these safe spaces support their academic and personal lives. Specifically, this study explored the narratives of nine Black female doctoral students and how they define and locate cultural safe spaces.
This study expanded on the limited existing research on Black women in doctoral programs by delving into a more nuanced look into understanding the specific dynamics of Black female cultural safe spaces and the role they play in supporting Black women pursuing doctoral degrees at PWIs. Using the Rodgers 3-R Framework, three major themes unfold from this narrative, beginning with participants’ initial experiences in their doctoral programs (recognition phase), their journey towards finding a cultural safe space after recognizing that there was a deficit in their doctoral experience (reconciliation phase), and their recounts of how they interpreted their experience after becoming a part of a cultural safe space of their own (reflection phase). Implications for future research are discussed.

This thesis aims to contribute to contemporary feminist theory through the integration of several interdisciplinary texts from the last century, all of which challenge an existing, male-oriented norm of woman as ‘lesser’ in a particular field of study. The historical position of woman as ‘other’ in a negative light is a postulate that contemporary feminist studies may take too much for granted. The supposed lack of prominence of women in scripture, such as what Phyllis Trible gestures to, for example, is not erasure at all, but women present as archetypes, a mode of representation later dispersed in literature and film. The textual ‘absence’ of the feminine which has been previously understood as erasure may in fact be a clandestine interpretative tool which must be sought for, or, within a textual framework, explicated. Instead of accepting woman as a minimized ‘other’ to be merely a given in biblical and other texts, her peripheral role must be teased out in order to be fully appreciated. The critical most important to this claim include Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development and film theorist Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, the latter of which lends this thesis its title. Lastly, I will be using erasure as an interpretative method as applied to a series of case studies: to analyze the female figures in Hamlet using Carol Gilligan’s psychological development framework; to consider Haskell’s rigorous critique of American cinema alongside Woman in the Dunes, a 1964 film based on a fabulist novel, which uses erasure as its modus operandi; and to apply Phyllis Trible’s hermeneutic interpretive method to Lot’s wife. The interdisciplinary design of this thesis allows for the inclusion of scholars from a variety of inherently ethical disciplines to showcase how societal perceptions of women have informed women’s ethical decision-making and identity.

The experiences of those with difficult to diagnose conditions, chronic illnesses, and disability lack intelligibility in an able-bodied world. Much of this originates in the disjuncture between first- and third- person experience as accounted for between patients and their doctors, caregivers, and the greater public. Utilizing the insights of feminist philosophy and disability studies, I will explore how these marginalized identities face consequences in the real world for their embodiment.
I propose that the best methodology to examine the experiences of chronically ill, hard to diagnose, and disabled individuals’ experiences is through the phenomenological perspective. Through utilizing case studies, I will demonstrate the importance of first- to third- person encounters in medicine and receiving adequate treatment. By examining such experiences, as well as my own, through such a perspective, I argue we can work towards creating a more equitable world for the chronically ill, hard to diagnose, and disabled.

During the Renaissance and the Baroque periods, both in the Old and the New World, the patriarchal social structure had created a set of fixed gender rules based on gender roles to control female sexuality, female voices, and their social freedom because it was considered a threat to male superiority. The Venetian Veronica Franco and the Mexican Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz are two extraordinary women from different places and a hundred years apart who, with their elaborated writing and body-related techniques, escape the gender patriarchal constrains and give voice to their new authorial persona in a female liminal environment. Veronica Franco and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz represent the two facets of the same coin that symbolizes the phallocentric patriarchal structure in which these two women happened to live, struggle, and write. These women were pushed to the margins of society, confined in convents, brothels/patrician houses, or the streets, to silence their personae and reinforce their inferiority and, at times, inexistence. There are no works that focus on the comparison between the well-known Mexican nun and the forgotten Venetian courtesan. Therefore, this dissertation aims to analyze the writings of Veronica Franco and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz through the lens of feminist theory (Cixous, Irigaray etc.) and the concept of the body as an instrument of subversion and female liberation. In their respective time and marginal places of confinement (the patrician house and the convent), both women were able to create a liminal space that allowed them to go beyond the rigidity of gender binaries and explore different venues of freedom. In this liminal space both Veronica Franco and Sor Juana stopped “performing” the fixed gender roles imposed by the patriarchal social order and created new female creatures at the margins of patriarchal society; a new type of woman who could, through her body and writing, destabilize the patriarchal gender identities and go from a passive silence object to an active writing subject.

Wiccan witchcraft, a contemporary religion, frequently suffers from misunderstandings; the worst of which, arguably, being that it thrives in a postfeminist society. Although it remains unclear why witches, despite their specific traditions, would not immediately embrace feminism, this study claims that whether practitioners agree or disagree, they are performing feminism. In this study, I argue that Wiccan rhetoric (both discursive and non-discursive) functions epistemically to encourage feminist values. The thesis analyzes three typical forms of Wiccan rhetoric using Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin’s approach of invitational rhetoric and the values of equality, immanent value, and self-determination.

The Discourse of the Divine: Radical Traditions of Black Feminism, Musicking,and Myth within the Black Public Sphere (Civil Rights to the Present) is an exploration of the historical precursors and the contemporary developments of Black feminism in America, via Black female musical production and West and Central African cosmology. Historical continuity and consciousness of African spirituality within the development of Black feminism are analyzed alongside the musical practices of two Black female musicians, Nina Simone and Me’shell Ndegéocello. Simone and Ndegéocello, The High Priestess of Soul and the Mother of Neo-Soul, respectively, distend the commodified confines of Black music and identity by challenging the established norms of music and knowledge production. These artists’ lyrics, politics, and representations substantiate the “Signifyin(g)” elements of West and Central African feminist mythologies and music- making traditions.

Mass Effect is a Science Fiction/Action Role Playing/Third Person Shooter video
game series that takes place in the year 2183, in which the player assumes control of
Commander Shepard. Players can choose to customize the character based on his/her
gender, appearance, sexual orientation, background origin and occupation. The
choices that show up in the game are also based on how the player wants their version
of Shepard to interact with other characters and allows players some leeway to shape
their own narrative. The series also discusses and acknowledges issues of race, gender, subjecthood and sovereignty, politics and sexual orientation within its narrative. This analysis
focuses on the text of the series and its implications concerning hegemonic reinforcement and/or resistance in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, politics, and warfare tactics.

This thesis is an exploration of popular media texts that influence veganism, with either explicit representations or implicit messages that implicate vegans. Research focuses on the question: How does the gendering of food in popular media texts implicate veganism? Theories used include a combination of cultural, film, and feminist studies, including Stuart Hall’s audience reception, Laura Mulvey's male gaze, R.W. Connell’s hegemonic masculinity, Carol Adams' feminist-vegetarian critical theory, and Rebecca Swenson's critical television studies. A print and television advertisement analysis demonstrates the gendering of food, and subject-object relationship of meat, women, and men. A film analysis of texts with vegan characters and horror film texts with implicit vegan and feminist messaging follows, thus revealing interesting trends and developments in the characterization of vegans on films, and hidden messages in the horror films studied. Lastly, an examination of competitive and instructional cooking shows ends the analysis, with interesting challenges to hegemony present in these television texts. The thesis concludes with examples of modem media feminizing veganism through food associations, the problematic imagery of women and meat as fetishized objects, along with challenges to hegemony that exist in some explicitly vegan texts.

Between 1939 and 1940 the United States Government conducted a study
of the measurements of women’s bodies to establish a standardized system of
garment and pattern sizes. The central theme of my research is to analyze the
female figure in the context of a technology-driven global contemporary society.
My thesis exhibition includes a body of work that echoes the pressures that
Western Society employs by standardizing women’s appearances. The focus of
the work is to confront the viewer with a visual examination, which illustrates the
preconceived notion that Western Society portrays the female body as a
commodity and exports those views to different cultures and societies. This calls
to question: “who makes those standards endorsed by society and why women
follow them?”.
From the standardized measurements conducted by the United States
Government, I generated a 2-D computer model of an outline of the generic
female figure. Based on the 2-D representation, I constructed a series of ten
27”x36” inkjet prints and a 3-Dimensional prototype of the figurative form. The
project consist on the manufacture of 14,698 molds base on the 3-
Dimensional prototype -- 10% reduction of the size of the average female.

This project examines the presence and significance of ecofeminism and pedagogy within contemporary Young Adult literatures, particularly girls’ ecofantasy literatures. Specifically, I examine the role and representations of the female body in nature and any real or perceived connections between them. To accomplish this, I bring the theories of several feminist, ecofeminist, and environmental studies scholars together with my primary texts, Green Angel and Green Witch by Alice Hoffman, to examine the depiction of the female body in nature through interconnectedness and reciprocity between human and non-human nature, green transformations, and the archetype of the witch.