Feminism

Women's participation and roles in contemporary mosques in Western nations differ from that of many Muslim-majority countries. Yet, women’s presence and function are contentious within and outside Muslim communities, and research on the issue is limited. Most extant research on Muslim communities and religious institutions comes from Europe. Moreover, while seeking an opinion or firsthand knowledge of religious opinions in Muslim communities, the male voice takes precedence. This qualitative research investigates Muslim women’s experiences at two mosques in south Florida. I aimed to gain a better understanding of mosques’ impact on women’s religious practices, their adaptation to American society, and their views on male-dominated religious places, including the topic of gender segregation. By using narrative data collected from participant observation and interviews with informants, this study demonstrates that Muslim women at these south Florida mosques engage in their religious and social activities, creating a meaningful space to worship in the mosque while following the dominant patriarchal norms in the religious institution. The findings from this study also highlight the need for a more extensive quantitative analysis of women's demands for inclusion and equality in mosques and Muslim men's (including imams') responses to such requests as well as the significance of generational, age, and national-ethnic differences when it comes to the issue of gender in mosques.

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.

Making Wonder Women: Recursive Tendencies in Feminist Utopias argues that reduplications of patriarchal hegemonies exist in William Marston’s Wonder Women. Using several close readings of Marston’s original comics as well as three modern (2011, 2017, 2020) reimaginings by Greg Rucka, Grant Morrison, and Daniel Warren Johnson, this thesis highlights how the design of Paradise Island, the Amazons, and Wonder Woman serve to reproduce Rockwellian demands of femininity through the guise of sexual radicalism and the religious rhetoric of liberation through servitude. This culminates in the position that Marston’s feminist ideals calcified into pop-culture a confusing and muddled icon of white colonial feminism.

This thesis explores the limited economic, professional, and political opportunities for women in the Victorian era and how these roles are perpetuated through literature. Often, the lack of opportunities confined women to two choices: the angel or the monster. While there has been significant research on this binary, Virginia Woolf’s cry to “kill the angel of the house” has not been rectified. To discuss the binary, I have analyzed Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Charlotte Perkins Gilman “The Yellow Wallpaper” to discuss how these female writers reflect their authorial anxieties through Gothic tropes and a close identification with their heroines. Additionally, I have analyzed Thomas Hardy’s Tess of D’Urbervilles and Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets to discuss how these male authors take a naturalistic approach to critique the fallen woman trope.

This study investigates the use of film and video as political tools for women to promote collectivity, raise consciousness, and incite both social and political change. Through textual analysis of seven experimental films and videos, from the years 1965-1975, it is apparent that women used techniques of reclamation of three major aspects of identity formation—namely, body, pleasure, and physical space—to individually take steps toward liberation, while adding to the social phenomenon of second-wave feminism. Through this analysis the following question is addressed: how, and why, did the female media makers of the women’s liberation movement and sexual revolution implement both film and video to challenge social constructions and ideas regarding femininity, domesticity, and sexuality? The textual analysis performed in relation to this research question is rooted in cultural materialism and takes historical, economic, and cultural factors into account.

This item is part of the Political & Rights Issues & Social Movements (PRISM) digital collection, a collaborative initiative between Florida Atlantic University and University of Central Florida in the Publication of Archival, Library & Museum Materials (PALMM).

This study explores the ways in which female nurses in management negotiate their roles within the male dominated institutions of medicine and administration. Our culture provides to this highly gendered profession a dominant construction of unambiguous identities for both management and nursing. The principles of semiology and feminist media criticism are used to show that negotiation with dominant messages takes place in lived reality in ways that are very similar to the negotiation in which consumers of media texts engage. Nine interview transcripts of nurses in management positions were analyzed for evidence of negotiated decodings of dominant meanings. The analysis reveals the presence of preferred readings, oppositional readings and resistive readings of the dominant construction of identities with an emphasis on the oppositional reading.

Tensions exist between the ideology of caring as a nursing practice ideal, and the corporately managed health care settings in which nurses work. The objective of this critical feminist ethnography was to understand these tensions by grounding them in nurses' experiences and perceptions. Data was gathered through ethnographic interviewing and participant-observations of a nurse key informant and her co-workers in the pediatric unit of a corporately managed acute care hospital. The data were analyzed according to the coding procedures and comparative method described by Strauss and Corbin (1990). Four characteristics of the corporate health care culture that conflict with nurses' practice ideals were identified: The Corporate Productivity Motive; The Priority of a Medical Regime Over Nursing Care; The Tolerance of Risk to Patient Safety; and The Hospitality Perspective. A critique of the patriarchal value structure that influences the health care system and recommendations for nursing practice, education, and research is provided.

This is a historical research study of the influence of feminism on nursing and nursing education from 1970 to 1994. Historical research contributes to the knowledge of the underpinnings of nursing education practices and the socialization process of nurses as a profession within the male, patriarchal system of medicine. This inquiry identifies select nurse-woman leaders and their contributions in incorporating a new value system for education and nursing based on feminist principles. The implications of this paradigm shift for nursing education, practice and research are discussed.

Women's movements and feminisms in Brazil have taken various forms throughout the years, contributing significantly to socio-political actions that favor gender justice. However, Brazilian feminisms remain on the margins of American academic discourse. In the United States, conceptualizations of feminism are often complicated by epistemological practices that treat certain political actions as feminist while dismissing others. The invisibility of Brazilian feminisms within feminist scholarship in the United States, therefore, justifies the need for further research on the topic. My research focuses on feminist articles published by Revista Estudos Feministas, one of the oldest and most well known feminist journals in Brazil. Using postcolonial, postmodern, and critical race feminist theories as a framework of analysis, my thesis investigates the theories and works utilized by feminists in Brazil. I argue that Brazilian feminisms both challenge and emulate the social, economic, and geopolitical orders that divide the world into Global North and South.