College of Arts & Humanities
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item Gynocolonial Legacies: Lasting Influences of the French Founding Mothers in North America(2023) Robinson, Elizabeth W; Baillargeon, Mercédès; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Within the annals of history, women have begun to emerge as silent architects and resilient figures who have navigated the labyrinthine constructs of patriarchal systems. Their stories are finding their way to the light of day and taking up more space than they have previously. Such is the case with the historical figures of les filles du roi in New France, and the Casket Girls in Louisiana. In this dissertation, I embark on a comprehensive analysis of literary works from Quebec and Louisiana and the representation of these historical figures within them. Through the stories about the women transported to the French colonies in the late 17th century and early 18th century to serve the patriarchy as wives and mothers, this study extends beyond mere literary and historical analysis and explores the influence of these women in shaping cultural identity reinforced by patriarchal norms.Item Féminisme sur Instagram : un bilan mitigé(2022) Danos, Clara Clémentine Alice; Orlando, Valérie K; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Online feminism was birthed alongside the Internet in its infant stages. With the years, it evolved into a virtual fight on social media and especially on Instagram. The goal of this thesis is to analyze content created by French feminists on Instagram and decide if it could be identified as a fourth wave of feminism in which women would rule the virtual world emancipating themselves from patriarchy in virtual life, in hopes of a more equitable society offline. Presently, alterations in combat against this ubiquitous foe are becoming more accessible, pedagogical, and aesthetic. However, these adaptations corrupt the core of feminism itself; lost consistence in the process with a lack of references, novelty, and anti-capitalist spirit. These inhibitors actively preventing the progression of a fourth wave. Consequently, feminists currently navigate the parameters of male engineered social media and experiencing an Instagram that is complicit in masculinist abuse through internal politics and outside actors.Item RESPONSIVE WILD: REDISCOVERING, REDEFINING, AND REALIGNING(2021) harris, kristina aurelia; Davis, Crystal U.; Dance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The central question of, what is womanhood? anchors this work. Within that wondering and examination is research into feminism, in conversation with rock and roll and 1980s MTV, gender studies, queer studies, and dance studies. The interrogation of MTV as a superstructure for notions of White femininity operates as a site of exploration for the White heterosexual male gaze. This extends into a rediscovery of rock and roll history, and the Black and Queer women (also considered by this work as ‘original’ feminists) who laid a foundation for rock and roll’s future. Through choreographic practice and Queer methodology, questions of womanhood and femininity, Queerness, and feminism, are explored through movement. Memory, lived bodily experiences, community, and the sensations and desires connected to them, are centered in this creative process. Queer and feminist writers accompany this journey; rock and roll functions as a canvas for the exploration of ferocious and mammoth movement; metaphors of physics facilitate the choreographic research into identity as it shifts and navigates fluidity and transformation. Each of these ideas swirl, collide, and manifest through choreographed movement and writing; leading to a new and realigned question: What is Queer Womanhood?Item Blue Beard's First Wife(2020) Howell, Megan Heather; Fuentes, Gabrielle L; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A man who changes age at random following a failed suicide attempt. An inpatient at an upscale nursing home whose dementia erases her cruelty but not her past. A teenaged boy whose racist brother upends his best friend’s false sense of security. What each of these characters share in common is the women who fall into their lives, seemingly cursory interlopers whose repressed traumas inform the stories in "Blue Beard's First Wife." To survive, each woman must look to the past, investigating their lives and the lives of those around them while steering clear of the dangers the come with being too curious in a racist, misogynistic world.Item Honeysuckle Full of Poison: Gender Politics and the 1990s Reception of Courtney Love(2019) Nave, Briana; Robin, William; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Courtney Love, frontwoman of grunge band Hole, is best known for her marriage to Kurt Cobain, the revered frontman of rock band Nirvana. In the 1990s Love was unable to escape persistent sexist stereotyping by the media and Cobain’s fans even after two critically acclaimed albums and other significant artistic accomplishments. Cobain’s status was valued so highly in patriarchal society and masculinist rock that the possibility of Love’s success, who as his wife should have been subordinate, was perceived as a threat to Cobain’s dominancy and legacy. The feminist themes of her music and her unabashed ambition provoked gender anxieties in 1990s American society that reflected in her press reception. Through an analysis of her media reception from 1991 to 1999, this thesis reveals that Love’s public vilification was a matter of sociocultural policing that sought to enforce gender boundaries delineated by prohibitive patriarchal formations in marriage and rock music.Item SUFIMINISM: THE SEXUAL, THE SPIRITUAL, THE SELF(2018) Haq, Sara; Tambe, Ashwini; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation addresses the question: what does an exploration of sexual politics within Islam look like if the mandate of respectability is refused? It explores the possibilities of Sufi thought as an epistemological approach to thinking about sexuality studies and reframing the relationship between Islam and sex. Existing scholarship on Sufism, Islam, and feminism tends to overrely on legal framings of sexuality and heavily exegetical engagements with religion, and offers too many unstated concessions to respectability politics. I argue that by centering the poetic, the everyday, and the transgressive, Sufism can offer alternative understandings of counter-hegemonic Islamic traditions. I use an expansive range of texts such as Sufi qawwali (spiritual songs), Sufi poetry, Qur'anic exegeses, hagiographical texts, and oral storytelling to explore pivotal concepts in sexuality studies: heteronormativity, consent, and the divide between licit and illicit sex. In addition to textual analysis, I present interludes of experiential narratives that are drawn from semi-structured interviews with sexually marginalized Muslims as well as from autoethnographic reflections; they illustrate the complex relationships between religio-spirituality and sexual expression. Each analysis chapter is focused on distinct Sufi tropes, such as wisal/firaq (union/separation), niyyat (intentionality), ‘ubudiyya (servanthood), pain-and-pleasure, kanjri (whore), zaat (being), and izzat (honor). Together, these chapters challenge imperatives of marriage and sex, make the case for affective consent, reflect on unconventional sexual practices such as kink/BDSM, and reframe a conversation about sex work beyond the binary of licit versus illicit sex. I conclude by discussing the possibilities of future research on the contemporary resurgence of feminism and Sufism in South Asian popular culture, as well as my vision for a queer and interdisciplinary approach I call Sufiminism.Item FEMINISTS TRANSFORMING THEIR WORLDS: A COLLECTIVE ORAL-HISTORY OF SALVADORAN PROTAGONISTS(2018) Patt, Yh; Stromquist, Nelly P.; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Working from the premise that we cannot understand how feminism can transform societies without examining it as a multi-leveled project, this dissertation explores how a group of Salvadoran feminists were introduced to feminist ideas, became feminists, and are transforming themselves, communities, and nation. The object of study is how feminists in organizations became protagonists transforming their worlds. Using a collective oral-history approach, the dissertation examines 40 oral-histories with a two-pronged theoretical framework. The first prong is a theory of empowering feminism—which draws from Stromquist’s theory of empowerment (2014, 2015), definition of feminism (2015), and description of Latin America feminist organizations (2007). The second prong is Bourdieu’s theory of capital (1977). With that framework, the study examines the factors, dynamics, and actions of Salvadoran feminists transforming their worlds. The study found the following in the feminists’ trajectories to becoming protagonists: (1) being introduced to feminist ideas by other feminists, who had experienced patriarchal oppression; (2) becoming a feminist often involved either learning gender theory or a collective gender consciousness-raising process; (3) transforming their homes and workplaces by participating in groups where they read their lives with a feminist lens; (4) developing their own capital—knowledge, skills, networks, and collective feminist experiences; (5) increasing their levels of formal education, from high-school to graduate; (6) learning and teaching feminist topics—such as, gender as a social construction, gender-based violence, sexual and reproductive rights, and symbolic violence against women; (7) intervening to change culture with tools—like murals, stencils, festivals, popular theatre, street demonstrations, cyber-feminism, and media; and (8) lobbying governments and pressuring corporations. A key finding is that these oral-histories suggest an association between the feminists who had leftist social movement capital and those who were most successful in their feminist work. Thus, this dissertation found that the Salvadoran feminists in this study transforming themselves into protagonists changing their worlds through feminist praxis exercised in feminist organizations that involves individual and collective empowerment, and entails producing knowledge. Finally, the study highlights the contention that there is exponential potential for feminist social change in communities with a culture of leftist social movement capital.Item THEIR OWN AGENDA: THE HISTORY, DEVELOPMENT, AND CULTURE OF WOMEN’S ORCHESTRAS OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES(2018) Alger, Bonnie Eve; Ross, James E; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Women have been active as performers of instrumental music since the Medieval period, and yet their contributions are often overlooked. This dissertation examines the history of women’s orchestras outside the United States, and explores their development, as well as reasons for existing. Several factors regarding their development are taken into consideration, including time period, country, and culture in which the ensemble is present. The birth of the women’s orchestra is traced from the ospedali of the 18th century Venice to today. All-female ensembles from England, Canada, Cuba, and Afghanistan are profiled, as well as the Women’s Orchestra in Auschwitz. Two modern-day women’s orchestras – the Allegra Chamber Orchestra in Vancouver, British Columbia, and my recital orchestra at the University of Maryland – were surveyed in an attempt to learn more about the culture of women’s orchestras. This paper seeks to answer the questions “What is the culture of women's orchestras today, and should they continue to exist?”Item Soft Circuitry: Methods for Queer and Trans Feminist Maker Movements(2017) Rogers, Melissa Susan; King, Katie; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Fiber craft practices such as knitting, crochet, quilting, embroidery, and weaving have been used as experimental, hands-on methods for queer and trans feminist knowledge production, especially since the 1970s and 80s when feminist art movements in the United States were thriving. “Soft Circuitry: Methods for Queer and Trans Feminist Maker Cultures” tracks do-it-yourself (DIY) knowledge through contemporary feminist art praxis and high-tech maker movements, demonstrating how overlapping communities of practice use the language and techniques of craft in order to make sense of their worlds. Queer and trans fiber artists use craft in order to create historiographical interventions in the mechanisms of canonization, thereby reimagining what artistic and educational institutions might look like. At the same time, the commercialized maker movement purportedly seeks to democratize technology while transforming education, manufacturing, and war through “making”: a hybrid of art, craft, and machine-assisted fabrication, encompassing a vast array of construction techniques. Combining feminized skills such as sewing with new digital technologies for physical computing, wearable electronic textiles, and soft circuitry, maker education seeks to attract girls and women to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields, incorporating them into the official narrative that the U.S. is a “Nation of Makers.” This nationalist narrative simultaneously excludes others from its narrow definitions of creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation. I argue that the theories, methods, and conceptual tools that have been prototyped and iterated by generations of queer and trans feminists can be used to refigure the maker movement, which has a longstanding, yet devalued, relationship with craft. By attending to intergenerational feminist dialogues about craft and identity, recent art activist projects that queer digital technologies in order to create safer worlds for trans people of color, and my own fiber craft practice, I demonstrate that present-day maker cultures are active sites of transformation and feminist intervention. Borrowed from maker movements, the language of soft circuitry suggests useful metaphors for doing speculative feminist materialism. Feminist craft praxis functions as a soft circuit: a technological pathway or schematic for feeling our way toward newly habitable worlds and ways of being.Item Development Begins at Home: Women and the Domestic Economy in Brazil, 1945-1975(2016) Moura, Shawn; Williams, Daryle; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A number of historians of twentieth-century Latin America have identified ways that national labor laws, civil codes, social welfare programs, and business practices contributed to a gendered division of society that subordinated women to men in national economic development, household management, and familial relations. Few scholars, however, have critically explored women's roles as consumers and housewives in these intertwined realms. This work examines the Brazilian case after the Second World War, arguing that economic policies and business practices associated with “developmentalism” [Portuguese: desenvolvimentismo] created openings for women to engage in debates about national progress and transnational standards of modernity. While acknowledging that an asymmetry of gender relations persisted, the study demonstrates that urban women expanded their agency in this period, especially over areas of economic and family life deemed "domestic." This dissertation examines periodicals, consumer research statistics, public opinion surveys, personal interviews, corporate archives, the archives of key women’s organizations, and government officials’ records to identify the role that women and household economies played in Brazilian developmentalism between 1945 and 1975. Its principal argument is that business and political elites attempted to define gender roles for adult urban women as housewives and mothers, linking their management of the household to familial well-being and national modernization. In turn, Brazilian women deployed these idealized roles in public to advance their own economic interests, especially in the management of household finances and consumption, as well as to expand legal rights for married women, and increase women’s participation in the workforce. As the market for women's labor expanded with continued industrialization, these efforts defined a more active role for women in the economy and in debates about the trajectory of national development policies.