Digital Commons Network^™

Shifting Masculinities From North Africa: In Yasmina Khadra, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Mohamed Leftah And Abdellah Taïa’S Fictions, Melyssa Haffaf

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation concentrates on four texts by Maghrebian writers, published between the late 1990s to the 2000s, and explores the ways in which their fictional narratives portray, articulate and challenge the dominant discourse on masculinity in postcolonial North Africa. The four novels are the following: Wolf Dreams (1999) by Yasmina Khadra, Leaving Tangier (2006) by Tahar Ben Jelloun, An Arab Melancholia (2008) by Abdellah Taïa and Le dernier combat du Captain Ni’mat (2011) by Mohamed Leftah. I demonstrate that despite a strong influence of hegemonic models of masculinity promoted and cultivated during and after the decolonization processes, the masculinities presented …

Sprints Of Citizenship: Black Women Track Stars And The Making Of Modern Citizenship In The United States And Jamaica, 1946-1964, Catherine "Cat" Ariail

Open Access Dissertations

In the postwar period, nations and territories used international sport to codify their ideal citizenries. For the United States and Jamaica, black women athletes complicated these efforts. This dissertation analyzes the ideological influence of black women track stars, examining how they destabilized dominant ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. The strivings and successes of American and Jamaican black women track athletes at international sporting events forced sport cultures in the United States and Jamaica continually to wrestle with the meaning of black women’s athleticism. Their struggles to fit black women athletes into their respective visions of their national …

Opera Kardashian: An Opera In One Act, Dana E. Kaufman

Open Access Dissertations

This essay discusses the making of and philosophies behind Opera Kardashian, a one-act opera about tragedy and the human condition, as told through the infamous Kardashian clan. The opera, composed in collaboration with librettist Tom Swift and approximately an hour in length, creates one of the first known trans roles in opera written exclusively for performance by trans women.

Inharmonic Resonance: Music And Temporality In Literature Of The Long Nineteenth Century, Sarah Elizabeth Cash

Open Access Dissertations

This project examines the way nineteenth century authors use music in their work to complicate social expectations and hierarchies. These authors use music as a fluid metaphor for subversive possibilities that work against hegemonic readings of the text. By “music” I mean representations of people playing and listening to music, discussions of music in text, and the production of musicality through language. I posit that music confounds its own seemingly measured structure through the nature and movement of sound. Thus, “music” can operate in written text as a non-linear and non-cyclical temporal sound space, revealing cracks or ruptures in dominant …

Peer Victimization And Adolescents' Academic Functioning, Caroline Jane Ehrlich

Open Access Dissertations

Background. Peer victimization (PV) has been linked to poor psychological adjustment in adolescence. Research in younger populations has linked PV to poor academic functioning, but few studies have examined this relationship during the high school years. Low academic functioning (e.g., lower GPA, more school absences, and more disciplinary action brought against the student) has been linked to higher school dropout rates and poorer mental health in adulthood. The current study examined the trajectories of academic achievement across one year of high school for 9th, 10th, and 11th graders, and the extent to which PV was associated with those trajectories. Gender …

Éticas Y Estéticas De La Profanación: Redes Y Tensiones En La Literatura Peruana Y Venezolana Del Entre Siglos (1880-1910), Luz Ainai Morales Pino

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes a selection of literary productions from Peru and Venezuela´s entre siglos (1880-1910) from a relational perspective that combines some of the tenets of literary studies, visual culture studies, and gender studies. This dialogical approach is groundbreaking in as much as it puts in relation a set of texts that have never been studied together, given their apparent aesthetic and ideological divergences. With this method, I aim to problematize the taxonomies set by the critical tradition, as well as to articulate a wider and more complex perception of Perú and Venezuela´s entre siglos literary production. In that sense, …

Teoria De La Mente Y Sociedad En La Narrativa Policiaca De Lorenzo Silva Y Francisco Garcia Pavon: Estereotipos, Roles De Genero Y Minorias, Jesus Castro Gorfti

Open Access Dissertations

Spanish:

The purpose of this study is to utilize certain aspects of cognitive psychology as a framework to analyze the police procedural novels of two Spanish authors: Francisco García Pavón and Lorenzo Silva. Specifically, we will focus on two main aspects of the mind studied by the cognitive sciences: Theory of Mind and metarepresentations. Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the capacity that human beings have to attribute mental states to other humans, as well as oneself, based on their bodily and facial gestures. The concept of metarepresentation refers to the ability of humans to keep track of who said …

Bad Girls In Corsets: Women And The Transgressive Body In The Nineteenth Century, Colleen Warwick Green

Open Access Dissertations

Women, and their bodies, posed an increasing anxiety for Victorian society. Culturally and outwardly, the Victorian era strove to maintain a level of decorum that, increasingly, the nineteenth-century woman were, rebelling against. The urge for women to break through social barriers and constraints binding them to the century created a divergence in thought from the traditional mores of the past, in turn affecting the ways in which womens’ bodies were portrayed, displayed and manipulated by the authors and artists of the century.

As women entered actively entered into spaces once closed to them, they furthered the rift of uncertainty and …

Out Of Time: Queer Temporalities In The Works Of Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, And Langston Hughes, Lauren Riccelli Zwicky

Open Access Dissertations

Focusing on texts by Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and Langston Hughes, this dissertation examines the temporally situated body as a gendered, sexed, and racialized site of contestation through which dominant ontological modalities are challenged and ultimately destabilized. This transgressive politics takes the form of an interrogation of the heteronormative time-table that constructs, regulates, and disciplines subjective ontological progress. Specifically, these texts challenge the notion that legibility is produced through a triad of progressive temporal phases: the adolescent/early adult direction of sexuality towards the heterosexual union, normative marriage and family-based kinship bonds, and finally the transmission of cultural values, norms, and …

Women Writers And The Genealogy Of The Gentleman: Masculinity, Authority, And Male Characters In Eighteenth-Century English Novels By Women, Mary Elizabeth Harris

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation demonstrates that women authors in the eighteenth century carved out a space for their authority not by overtly opposing their male critics and society’s patriarchal structure, but by rewriting the persona of the gentleman—the poster boy for eighteenth-century society’s moral, masculine, and patriarchal values—and thereby advocating for novels as an important site for cultivating proper masculine behavior as well as a means of renegotiating gender relationships. Eighteenth-century feminist criticism has charted the wide-ranging and creative avenues women carved out for themselves within a male-dominated, patriarchal culture. However, critics have typically dismissed the male characters of eighteenth-century female authors …

Gender And General Strain Theory: An Examination Of The Role Of Gendered Strains And Negative Emotions On Crime, Aaron Michael Puhrmann

Open Access Dissertations

One of the predominant issues in the criminological study of gender and crime is the gender gap in crime. Women are much less involved in crime than men and are involved with different types of crimes. By integrating gender-specific theory with General Strain Theory (GST), this dissertation provides an explanation of female crime and the gender gap in crime. Gendered General Strain Theory (gendered-GST) argues that gender differences in negative life events (strains) and differences in negative emotions lead to distinct pathways to criminal offending. This dissertation empirically examines the different propositions of gendered-GST and whether they adequately explain female …

Essays On The Economics Of Police Officer Discretionary Decisions, Huong Nguyen

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three chapters studying police officer discretionary decisions on traffic stops and traffic violations. The decisions include whether to stop and search a vehicle, whether to write a ticket or a warning, the duration of stop, and the fine amount. The purpose of this research is to determine whether police officer discretion is affected by various factors other than the violation itself

Race. Nation. Zombie: Imperial Masculinities Gazing At The Undead, Adryan Glasgow

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation argues that zombie narratives have always been about white masculinity and that colonialism is the true living dead monster. The zombie is not the load-bearing signifier in these stories. It is the white men who act as representatives of empire that embody tropes and evolve. This dissertation examines the survivor masculinity in zombie films over time to see how hegemonic masculinity has adapted to a range of national crises. I argue that the failure of white masculinities in these films and novel is rooted in the limited ways of knowing inherent in the Imperial Gaze. Starting in the …

Blood, Tears, And Sweat: An Intersectional Excavation Of The Literary Vampire In Neoliberal Discourse, Jessica Elizabeth Birch

Open Access Dissertations

This project engages in a critical examination of the figure of the sympathetic vampire in paranormal romance novels and its relationship to neoliberal individualism, using an analytic frame informed by Valerie Smith's conceptualization of black feminist thinking; it focuses on the portrayal of the neoliberal institutions of nationalism, race, heterosexuality, and motherhood within Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories, L.A. Banks's Minion, and Charlaine Harris's Dead Until Dark. As the ideology of neoliberal individualism has shaped the dominant discourse of the United States, neoliberal individualism has also remade the discourse of monstrosity with regard to vampires. The shifting representation of the …

Intimate Otherness: Immigration In Recent Spanish Narrative, Lennie Coleman

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation explores the personal spaces shared by Spaniards and immigrants in recent fiction. Traditional gender models and stereotypical images of immigrants are employed but modified, informing new models of Spanish identities in novels such as José Ovejero's Nunca pasa nada, Pablo Aranda's Ucrania, Lucía Etxebarria’s Cosmofobia, and young adult fiction. This work addresses how the sociocultural negotiations occurring in present-day Spain are represented in narrative. Building on migration studies, Spanish literary history, and concepts of hospitality and intimacy, I show that, whereas most current work on immigration in Spanish literary studies has focused on the public social sphere, intimacy …

Continuity In The Face Of Change: Mashantucket Pequot Plant Use From 1675-1800 A.D., Kimberly Carol Kasper

Open Access Dissertations

This investigation focuses on the decision making relative to plants by Native Americans on one of the oldest and most continuously occupied reservations in the United States, the Mashantucket Pequot Nation. Within an agency framework, I explore the directions in which decision making about plants were changing from 1675-1800 A.D. I evaluate plant macroremains, specifically progagules (seeds), recovered from ten archaeological sites and the historical record from the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation, located in southeastern Connecticut. I demonstrate how decision making about plants related to food and medicinal practices during the Colonial Period were characterized by heterarchical choices that allowed the …

Gender, Labor, And Virtue In Eighteenth-Century Georgia, Lauren E. Lane

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation explores interrelated conceptions of gender, labor, and virtue in early Georgia, focusing on the Trustee period and in particular upon the ways in which the founding goals of the Georgia Trustees, in combination with the cultural values held by the colony’s non-elite settlers, fostered largely collaborative gender roles. “Gender, Labor, and Virtue in Eighteenth-Century Georgia” illuminates the existence of a gender order very different from the more power-based models historians have described among the southern elite in colonies such as South Carolina or Virginia. Although Georgia’s officials and colonists certainly favored a gender hierarchy that, in most instances, …

Biocultural Perspectives On Gender, Transitions, Stress, And Immune Function, Leo Zachary Dubois

Open Access Dissertations

Health disparities, including higher rates of mental or physical illness, are found among members of minority or marginalized groups including people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. However, there is a paucity of research incorporating both experiential components and measures of physical health, particularly among trans men during their transition from female to male. Trans men transition through the use of testosterone therapy (T) and surgical procedures in order to align their internal male gender identities with their physical presentation. This study combines the analysis of qualitative and quantitative data in order to understand trans men's experience of …

Newlywed Couples' Marital Satisfaction And Patterns Of Cortisol Reactivity And Recovery As A Response To Differential Marital Power, Mattitiyahu Scott Zimbler

Open Access Dissertations

This study investigated the extent to which gender moderates, and perceptions of fairness mediate, the link between marital power and overall marital satisfaction, as well as cortisol stress trajectories in response to marital distress. Study 1 examined a sample of 213 opposite sex newlywed couples from western Massachusetts, and focused on marital satisfaction as the dependent variable. Findings from the structural equation analysis suggested that perceptions of relationship fairness concerning the division of labor completely mediated the association between marital power and marital satisfaction for wives, but not for husbands. These results also implied an association between wives' perceptions of …

Ecowomanist Endeavors: Race, Gender, And Environmental Ethics In Contemporary Caribbean Women's Literature, Debbie-Ann C. Morrison

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation examines the intersections of gender, sexuality, community, landscape, ecology, and social justice as they appear in selected literary texts by contemporary Caribbean women writers. Beginning with an awareness of the various ecological crises enveloping the Caribbean as well as a firm belief that an analysis of literature might reveal inherent values regarding ecological sustainability and the need for propagating environmentally ethical practices throughout the region, the project uses Alice Walker’s notion of womanism to craft what it calls an “ecologically womanist” reading of texts by Lorna Goodison, Olive Senior, Jamaica Kincaid, Mayra Montero, Dionne Brand, and Pauline Melville. …

Utopian Gender: Counter Discourses In A Feminist Community, Jolane Flanigan

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation is an ethnography of communication, situated in the context of a feminist utopian community, that examines members' use of communication and communicative embodiment to counter what they consider to be oppressive United States gender practices. By integrating speech codes theory and cultural discourse analysis with theories of the body and gender, I develop analyses of spoken and written language, normative language- and body-based communicative practices, and sensual experiences of the body. I argue that there are three key ways communication and communicative practices are used to counter gender oppression: the use of gender-neutral words, the "desensationalization" of the …

Resisting Schools, Reproducing Families: Gender And The Politics Of Homeschooling, Brian Paul Kapitulik

Open Access Dissertations

The contemporary homeschooling movement sits at the intersection of several important social trends: widespread concern about the effectiveness and safety of public schools, feminist challenges to the patriarchal family structure, anxiety about the state of the family as an institution, and challenging economic conditions. The central concern of this dissertation is to make sense of homeschooling within this broader context. Data were gathered through interviews with forty-five homeschooling parents, approximately half of whom are religious and half of whom are secular. The interviews were organized around three central questions: 1) What are the frames that parents use to justify homeschooling? …

It's Nothing Personal: Competing Discourses For Girls And Women In Mathematics, Shannon Dawn Bryant

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation used a post-structural feminist theoretical lens to examine women’s under-representation in mathematics graduate programs and careers. Five dominant discourses that potentially influence women’s decision to enter mathematical careers were discussed, including how those discourses interact in competing and complementary ways to shape women’s and men’s ideas about the nature of mathematics. The study investigated the long-term impact of a single-sex reform-based summer mathematics program on high school girls. The study utilized a variety of data collection techniques including surveys, field observations, phenomenological interviews, and artifact collection. Nine participants who were enrolled in a summer mathematics program for high …

Gendered Vulnerabilities After Genocide: Three Essays On Post-Conflict Rwanda, Catherine Ruth Finnoff

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation addresses gendered vulnerabilities after the genocide of 1994 in Rwanda. It consists of three essays, each focusing on the experience of women in a particular aspect of post-conflict development. The first essay analyzes trends in poverty and inequality in Rwanda from 2000 to 2005. The chapter identifies four important correlates of consumption income: gender, human capital, assets, and geography, and examines their salience in determining the poverty of a household and its position in the income distribution. The second essay is an econometric examination of an important health insurance scheme initiated in post-conflict Rwanda. Employing logistic regression techniques, …

Intersecting Contexts: An Examination Of Social Class, Gender, Race, And Depressive Symptoms, Amy Claxton

Open Access Dissertations

This study examined whether commonly used social class indicators (occupational prestige, education, and income) had direct or indirect effects on mental health, and whether these relationships varied by gender, race, or family structure. To this end, 597 working-class participants were interviewed in the months before they had a child. Findings indicated that income, and not occupational prestige or education, had a direct effect on mental health, in that it was related to fewer depressive symptoms. Additionally, education and race interacted, such that for People of Color, more education was related to more depressive symptoms. Furthermore, occupational prestige and education, and …

Ethnic Markets And The Empowerment Of Immigrant Women In America: A Case Study Of The Redland Harvest Market Village In South Dade, Florida, Carmen Castellanos Meeks

Open Access Dissertations

Among the ever-growing studies on globalization and economic development, research studies focused on specific women's issues are few and far between. An increasing concentration of immigrant women in the ethnic markets across the United States has raised interest into the motivation and rationality behind these women in choosing this entrepreneurial niche as a main venue to enter the labor market in the North American economy. The implications of this phenomenon, both for the women involved and for the local economy, need to be ascertained and analyzed. This dissertation is a case study that uses the ethnographic method and several ethnographic …

Sildenafil Does Not Improve Cardiovascular Hemodynamics, Peak Power, Or 15-Km Time Trial Performance At Simulated Moderate Or High Altitudes In Men Or Women, Jochen Kressler

Open Access Dissertations

Sildenafil increases oxygen delivery and maximal exercise capacity at very high altitudes (greater than or equal to 4300 m) and has been shown to improve short-duration exercise performance in some individuals at simulated high altitude (3900 m). It is unknown whether sildenafil improves maximal exercise capacity and longer duration exercise performance at moderate and high altitudes where competitions are more common. Additionally, the effects of sildenafil on women exercising at altitude have not been examined. The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of sildenafil on cardiovascular hemodynamics, arterial oxygen saturation (SaO2), peak exercise capacity (Wpeak), and 15-km …

Before The Second Wave: College Women, Cultural Literacy, Sexuality And Identity, 1940--1965, Babette Faehmel

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation follows career-oriented college women over the course of their education in liberal arts programs and seeks to explain why so many of them, in departure from original plans of combining work and marriage, married and became full-time mothers. Using diaries, personal correspondences, and student publications, in conjunction with works from the social sciences, philosophy, and literature, I argue that these women's experiences need to be understood in the context of cultural conflicts over the definition of class, status, and national identity. Mid twentieth-century college women, I propose, began their education at a moment when the convergence of long-contested …