Project [She] Rebel
Dora (Yuan) Mou
Feminist Intersectionality Past And Present, made available and accessible for all.
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What: Project [She] Rebel?
It has been 46 years since Mary P. Jane’s call for spotlight on complex female agency in history and a re-evaluation of picturing historical women as “eternal victims and passive objects;” However, although Academia’s responses are vehement and supportive, our layperson narrative has not been as eager to incorporate more layers in their already monolithic, male-centered and binary tale.
From flattening Hutchinson’s trial to the marker of religious controversy to dividing Asian women via racial triangulation during the Gilded age to white-washing horizontal discrimination within the Gay Liberation movement, these narratives persuade us to trust echo-chambered prose that nooses our attention and attitude towards specific subjects, thus robbing us of our sovereignty to think.
Project [She] Rebel, then, is my initiative to publicize the omitted narratives of women and other marginalized groups throughout American history through my feminist-lensed, muti-media works.
The breadth of my voice manifests through poster exhibits, documentaries, sculptures, interpretive & research-based essays, and poetry. And the depth of my research delves into the various “power with,” “under” and “over” across gender, race, sexuality, class and culture, along with the respective responses and actions taken by the surrounding structures.
Why: Project [She] Rebel?
I want to weld my passion for the arts, my curiosity for historical research, my duty for public activism together with the evolving technology. I want to show that technology, when wielded for hope, can diminish the gap between academia and the public, and furthermore inspire grass-root and positive changes that fuels more humane communities.
Only by engaging history from a feminist/queer lens can we gain a more nuanced, and provocative understanding of how inevitably linked events are to each other and furthermore escape from thinking in a structured, hierarchical way. The main takeaway from Project [She] Rebel that the audience gets is: there is never a straight forward answer to why; we always ask more informed questions.
(1)
The Fragility Radar:
A Re-examination Anne Hutchinson’s Trial with a Toulouse-Style Lens of Ambivalence
Abstract:
The mainstream dominant narrative defines Anne Hutchinson’s trial as the climax of the antinomian crisis of 1636 to 1638, when the religious dissent in Massachusetts Bay Colony caused Puritan leaders to excommunicate unlawful yet influential figures from Massachusetts. However, a reading of Anne Hutchinson’s trial through a Toulouse lens of ambivalence offers more than just Quakers and Puritans. Specifically, this essay examines the Puritan authority’s—Governor John Winthrop—monolouges and responses to Anne Hutchinson to reveal the hidden ambivalent traits of weak yet potentially powerful that Puritan male authority projected on to women. This essay argues that Toulouse's lens of ambivalence deepens the dominant interpretation of religious dissent of Anne Hutchinson’s trial by offering an alternative perspective that exposes male fragility as another reason for the trials, and giving insights into how Puritan male power, triggered by their male fragility, uses emotional ambivalence to reorder and constrain the Puritan female identity. By giving a new way of recognizing oppressor fragility, oppressed agency, and identity construction, a Toulouse styled lens of ambivalence reinforces various discrimination trends that string across American and global history.
(🤷🏼♂️😰⛓️💥)
(2)
Kiss My-thologies Goodbye:
A Tour Proposal Unearthing Gilded Age Bostonian Women Who Transcended Intersectional Barriers
Abstract:
Modern mainstream medias’ portrayal of Gilded age history is problematic: they establish a definite hierarchical tale that overlooks the evolution of Gilded Age female agency, neglects minority agency, and accordingly, does not make space for recognition of interracial collaboration and interdependence. My tour reverses this. My tour leads the public (13 yrs+) to five places related to distinguished Boston females or/and their female-led organizations, and explains to them how those females/female-led organizations disrupt the dominant portrayal of Gilded age social dynamics. Specifically, I will present on Isabella Stewart Gardner, Bella Long, Zitkala-Ša, The Ladies society of Litter Syria, and the Women’s Era Club of Boston. By examining diverse Bostonian women, and each of their unique, intersectional agency in their communities, this interactive tour presents an alternative narrative that demonstrates Gilded age women’s ability to undermine their respective constrained environments and create moments of inspiration, collaboration, and interdependence that transcend gender, race, and class, not to mention fortifying the dominant characteristics of immigration and race relations as well. Accordingly, this tour serves as a call to action for all dominant narratives to reconsider the way they portray the Gilded age, and to revise their section(s) on women in the Gilded Age.
(👸🏻👒⛓️💥)
(3)
Myrtle’s Body:
Sculpting Physical Corruption and Individuality Loss Through Myrtle Wilson in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Abstract:
ThPerhaps the flattest character out of all of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is Myrtle Wilson, the not-so-secret mistress of Tom Buchanan. Simple, stubborn, and sexy to the very end, Myrtle seems to be the very embodiment of the drunk whore stereotype. And given that Myrtle is the only representation of lower working class females, her sexualization and stereotyping by the text have every reason to come across as the novel’s intention to tarnish the image of the lower class. That said, an re-examination of the the text’s diction surrounding Myrtle’s stereotyping staticness—her voluptuous first appearance, her hedonistic behavior at the penthouse, her mad gaze from the garage, and her vulgar death—demonstrates that this textual objectification is intentional in revealing and critiquing an unique two fold cost to lower class women pursuing their American Dream in the roaring twenties—the loss of both physical integrity and personal individuality. The sexualization of Myrtle’s first appearance demonstrates the corruption of both her physical integrity; then, the hyperbolic imagery of her flaunting her dress at the penthouse and her later crazed, attached, and jealous gaze at Tom’s car unveils the loss of her personal identity; and finally, the novel tips it hand to the consequences of the two fold loss by rendering myrtle death unnecessarily brutal yet corporal. This double ante of the great American gamble to working class women, shown by The Great Gatsby, is a sad truth that still resounds in corporatism’s gendered practices today.
(👄💃🥵)
(4)
Chasing Justice: Rights and Responsibility of African American Women in WWII
Thesis:
“‘The contribution [of Black women] is one which this nation would be unwise to forget or evaluate falsely.’”-–Kathryn Blood (Aaron Randle, “Black Rosies’” The Forgotten African American Heroines of the WWII Homefront, September 12th, 2023)
Despite facing double discrimination for their race and gender, African American women like The Black Rosies, Red Cross Nurses, The 6888th Battalion, and Willa Brown fulfilled their responsibilities and fought for equal rights in both the military and in society during WWII.
(💪🏽⛓️💥💁🏽♀️)
(1)
Transcending Superstardom: Josephine Baker’s Allied War Espionage and Post War Civil Rights Activism
Abstract:
Baker’s weaponization of her public persona to obtain intelligence demonstrates an overlooked story of African American female agency that suggests an alternative narrative to the dominant white male centered story regarding both WWII and related espionage.
As Hannah Diamond observes in her book Josephine Baker’s Secret War:
"The war [for Baker] was so important; it’s the missing piece of her puzzle. She [Baker] was amazingly well equipped to be a spy; a performer, through and through. Her motivation came from the huge debt she felt to France, which had made her a star – and it had its roots in the racism she grew up with."
Adding on to Diamond’s argument, this essay argues that fighting prejudice in all its forms is Baker’s principled legacy. Her experiences of racial discrimination—particularly witnessing the 1917 East St. Louis race riot—lay the foundation for her lifelong fight against racism, first by galvanizing her risky yet autonomous decision to move to France; then by informing her decision to fight Nazism by working as a spy for France. Ultimately, her double life as both a Black femme fatale and a secret agent of the French Resistance shaped her ideology and activism during the American Civil Rights Movement. Baker was far more than just a showgirl; she was a risk-taker and a trailblazer who fought against antisemitism abroad and racism and discrimination at home.
(💃🕵🏽♀️🎖️)
(1)
She Refused: Dr. Frances Kelsey and the Thalidomide Reform of 1962
Abstract:
Frances Kelsey’s role is crucial in the 1962 Thalidomide Reform in two ways. On the one hand, Kelsey’s delay for the marketing of Thalidomide saved many potential life losses and inspired a major component of Kevaufer-Harris reform, flipping sponsor-examiner dynamics for the first time in American history. On the other hand, she is a silent revolutionaire: she, as a woman living in the patriarchal 1960s, showcases to the public the female potential to influence major governmental decisions, and equate men in male dominated situations. She confronted two false gods: Thalidomide, and male pride. Kelsey's response and involvements with the thalidomide reform of 1962 tells of the poisonous debris of male hegemony that American society suffers from today.
(👩🏻⚕️🙅🏻♀️🤰)