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Beyond The Boundaries Of Childhood: Northern African American Children's Cultural And Political Resistance, 1780-1861, Crystal L. Webster
Beyond The Boundaries Of Childhood: Northern African American Children's Cultural And Political Resistance, 1780-1861, Crystal L. Webster
Doctoral Dissertations
Notions of childhood as a distinct developmental period of life were concretized during the nineteenth century. Features of children’s lives including innocence, play, and exclusion from labor became markers of ideal childhoods as part of the racialized modernization of childhood. This dissertation uncovers the ways in which modern constructions of childhood attempted to subjugate northern African American children throughout the nineteenth century and highlights the means by which black children and conceptualizations of black childhood became agents and sites of resistance. In doing so, it demonstrates both how African American children experienced age-based forms of subjugation as well as their …
Monstrous Mothers: The Politics Of Forced Mothering, Gillian Henry
Monstrous Mothers: The Politics Of Forced Mothering, Gillian Henry
Honors Theses
Can a woman be a woman without being a mother? By studying the control of women's bodies around reproduction, my work elucidates the insistence on women becoming "good mothers" for society. Is the childless woman a monster? Analysis of the Medea trope identifies that the most monstrous woman of all is thought to be the woman who kills her children. And while white women fight for reproductive choice, women of color fight for reproductive freedom, as coercive policies such as forced sterilization deprive women of color as even being considered as potential mothers. Society's insistence on women fulfilling their destiny …
Becoming Pamela: The Fight For Maternal Authority In Pamela Ii, Danielle Pollaro
Becoming Pamela: The Fight For Maternal Authority In Pamela Ii, Danielle Pollaro
Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)
In Pamela, Volume II, Pamela and her husband, Mr. B, clash over breastfeeding their child. The conflict over breastfeeding represents a contest for control over the maternal body and with it control over woman’s authority. The eighteenth-century created the concept of motherhood in order to maintain and perpetuate the patriarchy’s social, economic and sexual hierarchies. Pamela, Volume II propagates eighteenth-century domestic discourse by instructing and constructing the idea of the good wife and mother. Pamela’s failure to resist domesticity reveals patriarchy’s role in establishing gender identity. The novel functions to reinforce, strengthen and sustain eighteenth-century domestic discourse to stabilize …
Affective Dissonance: (Post)Feminism And Popular Cultural Expressions Of Motherhood, Judith Lakämper
Affective Dissonance: (Post)Feminism And Popular Cultural Expressions Of Motherhood, Judith Lakämper
Wayne State University Dissertations
In “Affective Dissonance: (Post)feminism and Popular Cultural Expressions of Motherhood,” I argue that motherhood in the so-called post-feminist age is structured by a conflicted relationship between affective expectations raised by public discourses of motherhood and the material, embodied experience of maternity, inflected by race, class, age, and sexuality. While recent feminist scholarship has engaged questions of (bodily) materiality, and popular medial discourses increasingly critique unrealistic ideals of motherhood, my dissertation considers these approaches together. Juxtaposing representations of motherhood from various sources – memoirs, digital media, art photography, and television – I demonstrate how the postfeminist rhetoric of female empowerment and …
Protecting Systems Of Nature And Gender: Ecofeminism In Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer And Ruth Ozeki's All Over Creation, Sarah J. Hirsch
Protecting Systems Of Nature And Gender: Ecofeminism In Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer And Ruth Ozeki's All Over Creation, Sarah J. Hirsch
All Student Theses
Ecofeminism has permeated the disciplines of politics, philosophy, science, and literature – all of which are embedded in the fiction of Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer and Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation. In this thesis, I consider the authors’ use of scientific evidence to engage readers with their rhetorical goals of protecting the systems of nature and gender. In the first chapter, I define the history of ecofeminist activism and how Kingsolver and Ozeki continue its tradition. The second chapter considers the parallels between biodiversity and cultural diversity within both Prodigal Summer and All Over Creation. In the final chapter, I …