Browsing by Subject "Female sexuality"
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Item A study of the relationship between feminist attitudes and female sexual well-being through structural equation modeling(2010-12) Murphy, Erin, Ross; Smith, Douglas B.; Ivey, David C.; Sharp, Elizabeth A.; Karakurt, GunnurAs resistance to the diagnostic model of sexual dysfunction and traditional, normative language begins to increase, so too does the argument for new ways to define female sexuality. As a result, this study sought to examine the role feminist attitudes play in female sexuality and perception of healthy sexual functioning. Specifically, the purpose of the study was to explore the relationship between feminist attitudes and female sexual well-being through structural equation modeling. The focus was placed on gaining a better understanding of the female sexual experience through the collection of female responses to the sample of assessments available to women for sexual issues. The study sample was comprised of females (N=264) who were assessed through an online survey about various aspects of their sexuality and feminist attitudes. The final model included 5 latent constructs and 18 manifest indicators. Some of the findings of this study do not support extant literature in this field of study. For example, the results of this study suggested that the more one identifies with feminist attitudes, the less likely she is to be sexually satisfied. In addition, another unexpected finding suggested that the more one identifies with being sexually dysfunctional, the more likely she is to be sexually satisfied. Results that did support extant literature include the relationship between sexual communication and sexual satisfaction (the more one feels sexually satisfied, the more likely she is to communicate about sexual content with her partner). Discussion of a need for new female sexuality measures and therapeutic implications are included.Item Asking for it : girls' sexual subjectivity in contemporary U.S. cinema(2007-05) Blue, Morgan Genevieve; Kearney, Mary Celeste, 1962-How might American narrative cinema shift from oppressive objectification to positive, healthy female sexual subjectivities in films addressing and depicting adolescent girls? As more women make films both within the Hollywood system and independently, the potential increases for greater creative energy to be devoted to re-imagining and legitimizing girls’ sexuality on film. Fighting Hollywood censors is a significant battle for women filmmakers, but making films independently is also a viable, even powerful, option. It is beneficial to fight both within patriarchal systems and outside them to effect change, and now, more than ever, women and girls have access to the technologies, skills, and understanding to alter public discourse about girls’ sexuality and take control of their own representations. This project aims to point out just a few examples from commercial Hollywood, independent and DIY cinemas in which women have worked to position girl characters as active and desiring rather than as passive and desirable. Through ideological and narrative analyses of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Smooth Talk, Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore, and Coming Soon, coupled with discussions of their female directors’ struggles with Hollywood patriarchy and American society’s gendered double standard when it comes to youth sexualities, I hope to shed light on the need for women to make films that offer positive representations of girls’ sexual subjectivities.Item Beyond sexual satisfaction : pleasure and autonomy in women’s inter-war novels in England and Ireland(2011-05) Bacon, Catherine M.; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Cullingford, Elizabeth; Carter, Mia; Eastman, Caroline; Garrity, JaneMy dissertation offers a new look at how women authors used popular genres to negotiate their economic, artistic, and sexual autonomy, as well as their national and imperial identities, in the context of the changes brought by modernity. As medical science and popular media attempted to delineate women’s sexual natures, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Winifred Holtby, Kate O’Brien, and Molly Keane created narratives which challenged not only psychoanalytic proscriptions about the need for sexual satisfaction, but traditional ideas about women’s inherent modesty. They absorbed, revised, and occasionally rejected outright the discourses of sexology in order to advocate a more diffuse sensuality; for these writers, adventure, travel, independence, creativity, and love between women provided satisfactions as rich as those ascribed to normative heterosexuality. I identify a history of queer sexuality in both Irish and English contexts, one which does not conform to emergent lesbian identity while still exceeding the limits of heteronormativity.Item "Go, now, go" : liminalities of adolescence, girlhood and mode in My so-called life(2007-05) Baron, Julia Price, 1979-; Kearney, Mary Celeste, 1962-This thesis inspects the ways in which the ABC series My So-Called Life (MSCL, 1994–1995) is liminally constructed. In doing so, I focus on: 1) adolescence as a postmodern human condition, 2) girls’ subjectivities and gendered performances of sexuality, and 3) negotiations between melodramatic and realist modes. Blurring the lines between childhood and adulthood, the series invests in the process of maturation like that within the Entwicklungsroman of Young Adult literature, rather than seeking or proposing maturation as a finalized goal. MSCL initially depicts its three primary girl characters (Angela, Sharon and Rayanne) as falling along a simplistic spectrum of girlhood; however, as the series progresses, these characters socially and privately negotiate multiple aspects of their sexualities, breaking out of dichotomizing models into dialectical structures of girlhood(s). Finally, I explore how melodrama works to generate what Ien Ang calls, “emotional realism,” thereby complicating longstanding contentious assumptions between melodrama and realism. My argument relies upon deconstructing binaries and looks to texts such as My So-Called Life to address and challenge oppositional categorizations.