Center for Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Florida Atlantic University Departmental Dashboard Indicators. Department program reviews for Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, Florida Atlantic University.

In an intersectional feminist analysis of Dexter in both the novels by Jeff Lindsay as well as the Showtime television series, this dissertation will explore the challenging but compelling nature of the serial killer as a pop culture icon, and address themes of gender and sexuality as well as class, ethnicity and regions as they are portrayed in the series. Dexter Morgan, on the Showtime series and in the novels, both exposes popular culture’s problematic identification with the serial killer and solidifies it by being a socially palatable anti-hero.

This thesis is a memoir of the women in my family and their relationship to
motherhood, both adoptive and biological. The primary source of this work is
memory and is contextualized within the Caribbean culture. The process of
interpreting these memories relies on narrative, cultural, and life history theory that
disarticulate ideas of motherhood found in North America from those in the
Caribbean. The beginning chapters are a personal memoir of motherhood while the
end chapters are analyses of the theoretical foundations of what I have explored. In
the last chapter, I reflect upon the personal process of writing memoir. There is no
equivalent study of the perception of the adoptive mother versus the biological
mother in the Caribbean. These stories of my family contribute to our understanding
of motherhood in the lives of women of color in the Americas, many of which have
been missing from history's larger narrative.

This dissertation explores the making of and research for the film, Fattitude, a
social justice based documentary that looks to awaken viewers to the reality of weight
bias in media representation. This dissertation reviews the filmmaking process and then
engages with the nature of stereotypes about fat bodies. Deeply tied to feminist and fat
studies theory, the work here seeks to categorize and shape the understanding of weight
bias in the media by linking fat tropes to clearly understood images of oppression, for
example the monstrous, the fool, they hypersexual and the asexual. The work also seeks
to present theory on the nature of creating media representations of fatness that are not
oppressive – making note of current media created by grassroots movements for body
acceptance and fat positivity.

This research provides a feminist perspective on the lowest paid sector of the United States long-term care industry, Certified Nursing Assistants. This research adds to current feminist scholarship on the modern professional caregiving industry by focusing on the perspective of the workers. As the population of older adults requiring care is expected to increase over the coming decades, the demand for paid caregivers will increase as well. Historically, care work was an expected duty done freely by the women of the family, but today much of the vital intimate caring labor is relegated to paid caregivers. I examine how alternative social, political and economic frameworks can transform United States society’s attitude towards the increasingly relevant issue of caring labor. I argue that incorporating a feminist perspective will be helpful in developing a sustainable model for caring labor that acknowledges the dignity of both patients and their caregivers.

Food insecurity or low-access to good quality, affordable foods affects
minority women and children disproportionately (Herndon, 2014; Ivers & Cullen,
2011; Lee, 2012; Wigg Dammann & Smith, 2009). Linked to the rise in nutritionrelated
and other health problems afflicting these populations (e.g., malnutrition,
obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure among others) (Azarbad & Gonder-
Frederick, 2010; Bove & Olson, 2006; Larson, Story, & Nelson, 2009), this issue
has been gaining some attention. Still, programs combating weight and “weightrelated
disorders” generally focus on individualistic solutions (Orbach, Bodies
2009)—such as increasing daily exercise and vilifying certain diets.
Dismissing important spatial and systematic aspects, these approaches
rather perpetuate problematic socio-political, economic, medical, and ideological
biases informing our understanding of poverty, health and food. This project
offers and alternative perspective. Most importantly, it 1) scrutinizes sexist,
classist and racist constructs across the literature on overweight, obesity, poverty,
and health; 2) examines the relationship between our food system, the growth in
nutrition-related diseases, and the intersections of gender, race, and class within
food insecure communities; and 3) analyzes interview data looking for important and resonating themes that could guide the development of more efficient local
food access strategies. As this study shows, these women’s experiences,
knowledge, and strategies have the potential of, not only helping eradicate food
insecurity across South Florida, but also combating a great number of the
nutrition-related health problems afflicting these populations.

In this thesis I utilize a feminist case study method to explore gender, race, authenticity, and nationalism in the context of globalization. Each year, Guatemala conducts two ethno-racially distinct pageants – one indigenous, the other ladina. The indigenous pageant prides itself on the authentic display of indigenous culture and physiognomies. On the contrary, during the westernized ladina pageant, contestants strive to adhere to western beauty ideals beauty and cultural norms engendered by discourses of whiteness. However, when the winner advances to the Miss World Pageant, they misappropriate elements of Mayan culture to express an authentic national identity in a way that is digestible to an international audience. In the study that follows, I examine the ways in which national and international pageants are reflective of their respective levels of social and political conflict and how they serve as mechanisms of manipulation by the elite at the national and global levels.

Feminist theorists have criticized Rene Descartes' conception of oppositional dualism, finding that it falsely separates mind from body and invidiously values mind over body. This ideology generally associates marginalized groups with the body and devalues physicality as seen in the human body and the natural world. Many institutions such as the zoo, the strip club and the historic display of Non-Westerners reflect Cartesian patterns of human isolation from the physical body, from the natural world and from one another. Each of these institutions produces a cultural spectacle in which a member of a marginalized group is marked as the denigrated body. Through objectifying displays, the spectacle reinforces the dominant ideologies, fantasies and fears of a culture. Although physicality has been used to reproduce patterns of domination, it may also be examined as a potential site of resistance.

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.

Whereas male masturbation has generally been normalized by being the butt of friendly jokes and a popular subject in romantic comedies, the predominant discourse surrounding female masturbation, both in society and the movies, is silence and stigmatization. However, female masturbation is symbolically powerful because it signifies a female sexuality that is not dependent on male presence. This thesis seeks to explore depictions of female masturbation, specifically looking at how female characters who engage in autoeroticism are stigmatized, controlled or silenced. This thesis will also explore the minority of depictions that show the act as liberating in films like Pleasantville (1998) and Better than Chocolate (1999).