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When “A Haircut Is Not Just A Haircut”: The Embodied Deconversions Of Former Pentecostal And Holiness Women, Casey Renee Kellogg

Masters Theses

Women of Pentecostal and Holiness belief traditions are known for embodying their faith through a set of dress standards which prevent women from cutting their hair, prohibit any form of pants, jewelry, or makeup, and require they adopt various forms of “modest” attire. While there has been significant scholarship on the social and personal significance of women’s religious dress among church members, there is little to no information about how former Pentecostal and Holiness women perceive these dress standards. Furthermore, while scholars have explored the concept of deconversion, specifically as told through narrative from a more general vantage point, there …

Dignifying Decisions: The Role Of Dignity In Surrogate Decision-Making, Jeffrey Pannekoek

Doctoral Dissertations

Dignity refers, broadly speaking, to a kind of status that is intrinsically connected to certain norms. Often, we think of dignity as the status of having inherent value, which entails that certain kinds of treatment are morally impermissible. References to dignity are pervasive in clinical ethics, where the concept is called on to do a broad variety of work, including bolstering claims about patient-focused health care, advocating in favor of and against euthanasia, and supporting an infinite number of particular medical decisions. In stark contrast to its pervasiveness, the conceptualization of dignity is still an unsettled issue, in particular in …

Film Women Violence, Madison R. Ross

Masters Theses

As a condensed version of social reality, film has become a more common object of modern sociological and criminological investigation. As such, we can explore film to understand taken-for-granted as well as innovative constructions of social phenomena. Among these are gendered violence. We can use film to dig deep into its logics, elaborated in visual and narrative representations. Prior literature has analyzed crime films and the behavioral constructions within them, outlining the representations of serial homicide, rape, mass shootings and revenge. However, few studies have outlined films that do meaningful, non-voyeuristic representational work on the issue of violence against …

Voicing Narrative Through Transatlanticism And Transformation In Historia De La Monja Alférez By Catalina De Erauso, Morgan Schneider

Masters Theses

This thesis analyzes various aspects of Catalina de Erauso’s Historia de la Monja Alférez, escrita por ella misma (1829). The first chapter explores notions of interior and exterior as categories that determine not only the protagonist’s movement in space but also their expression of self-identity over the course of the text, focalized through first-person narration. Additionally, the chapter brings to light how the interior narrative parallels Erauso’s desire to share their transformation from nun in a Spanish convent to a soldier in the Americas with picaresque tendencies. Erauso leverages the power of exterior appearances through the self-fashioning of their public …

The Balance Of Public And Private Identities For Lesbian Teachers, Delanna Kay Reed

Doctoral Dissertations

Abstract

Although tolerance and acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people is growing in the United States, misconceptions and heterosexism still abound. Schools are one of the institutions where traditional gender roles are promoted and homosexuality is often ignored or punished. Too often lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) students are bullied by their peers while teachers look the other way. LGBT teachers often fear they will lose their jobs and social standing in the community if they are open about their sexual orientation. This environment provoked me to research lesbian teachers’ perceptions of heteronormativity in their private and …

Wittgenstein And Aesthetic Reasoning With Stories In The Bioethics Classroom, Michael Woods Nash

Doctoral Dissertations

Wittgenstein once remarked that the same kind of reasoning that occurs in ordinary conversations about works of art can be found “in Ethics, but also in Philosophy.” That observation has been almost entirely overlooked by his commentators. What is aesthetic reasoning? What does it look like in conversations about art? And where might we find examples of such reasoning “in Ethics”? To set the stage for my answers, I begin with an overview of the early Wittgenstein’s view of ethics and aesthetics, emphasizing two ideas that were retained in his later view of aesthetic reasoning: the moral importance of non-moral …

Ambiguous Recognition: Recursion, Cognitive Blending, And The Problem Of Interpretation In Twenty-First-Century Fiction, Christopher David Kilgore

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation uses theories of cognitive conceptual integration (as outlined by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner) to propose a model of narrative reading that mediates between narratology and theories of reception. I use this model to demonstrate how new experimental narratives achieve a potent balance between a determinate and open story-form. Where the high postmodernists of the 1970s and 80s created ironic, undecidable story-worlds, the novels considered here allow readers to embrace seemingly opposite propositions without retreating into ironic suspension, trading the postmodernist “neither/nor” for a new “both/and.” This technique demands significant revision of both descriptions of radical experimentation in …