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Trans Women And Reproductive (In)Justice - How Race, Class, And Gender Shape Experiences Of Family Formation And Parenthood, Derek Siegel Jan 2023

Trans Women And Reproductive (In)Justice - How Race, Class, And Gender Shape Experiences Of Family Formation And Parenthood, Derek Siegel

Data and Datasets

The following support document includes demographic data from my dissertation research, disaggregated to preserve the anonymity of respondents. It also includes two separate interview schedules for semi-structured interviews I conducted with trans women who were either currently parents (the first guide) or who want to be parents in the future (the second guide). My dissertation examines how race, class, and gender shape trans women’s parenting journeys. Trans women, and particularly trans women of color, experience high levels of discrimination across the contexts of employment, healthcare, and the legal system, yet remain virtually absent from contemporary research on family and parenting …


La Circassienne: A Study Of The Female Circus Artist In French Literature, Crystal Menninga Oct 2022

La Circassienne: A Study Of The Female Circus Artist In French Literature, Crystal Menninga

Masters Theses

This study examines how the female circus artist is represented in twelve pieces of French literature ranging from the late nineteenth century to the modern day. The books are divided into three categories by author type: first, authors without a circus background; second, male authors involved in the circus world; and third, women involved in the circus world. Although predicted that the first section would reveal the largest use of stereotypes and misogyny, the second would show the sexist expectations of the circassienne onstage and off, and the third would call out these stereotypes and suggest improvements, there was less …


Embodiment And Gendered Subjectivity In Ukrainian Women’S Film, Poetry, And Prose During Perestroika (1985-1991), Sandra J. Russell Oct 2022

Embodiment And Gendered Subjectivity In Ukrainian Women’S Film, Poetry, And Prose During Perestroika (1985-1991), Sandra J. Russell

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I look to Ukrainian women’s literary and filmic contributions in the final Soviet years of perestroika to recontextualize and reconsider feminist and gendered epistemologies in Eastern Europe. I view the last Soviet Ukrainian filmmakers, writers, and artists as groundbreaking in their conceptualization a new, more “liberal” vision of nation, especially through their increasingly open and subversive critiques of the Soviet state. I locate perestroika as a powerful moment in Ukraine’s histories of resistance to the weaponization of colonialist and imperialist mythologies, past and present. For women in particular, the stakes of this shifting articulation of nation became …


Bitten By The Demon Of Cinema: An Examination Of Women-Made Horror, Erica Tortolani Oct 2021

Bitten By The Demon Of Cinema: An Examination Of Women-Made Horror, Erica Tortolani

Doctoral Dissertations

Moving away from a discussion of horror films directed by men, “Bitten by the Demon of Cinema” those films—and, where appropriate, works across media, like on television, the Internet, and in the visual arts—created by women. As I explore in this dissertation, women-made horror has narrative, thematic, and stylistic qualities that borrow from the genre at large but are then transformed into a class of films all of their own. While seemingly diverse, they share enough commonalities to constitute a new mode of filmmaking altogether. The films and filmmakers that I have chosen in this dissertation are cases in point …


The Voice Of The Other: The Influence Of Capitalism On The Representation Of Gender And Race In Western Classical Music, Marie Comuzzo May 2021

The Voice Of The Other: The Influence Of Capitalism On The Representation Of Gender And Race In Western Classical Music, Marie Comuzzo

Masters Theses

This thesis argues that in order to understand the non-representation of women and BIPOC in the Western musical canon, the analysis of their cultural musical production and reception must start in early modern period, a time heavily influenced by the establishment of capitalism. Intertwining political feminist studies, critical race theory and musicology critique, I argue that the witch hunts and the inhumane colonial practices in Africa and the America (fundamental to establish capitalism as a global system), had an important role in shaping Western musical culture as homogeneous and monolithic. Thus, I first trace the change in female customs in …


Writing Against History: Feminist Baroque Narratives In Interwar Atlantic Modernism, Annaliese Hoehling May 2020

Writing Against History: Feminist Baroque Narratives In Interwar Atlantic Modernism, Annaliese Hoehling

Doctoral Dissertations

In the decades following the end of the Great War, paranoia and panic about survival and sovereign control were driven by unprecedented death tolls from war, disease, and economic disaster as well as by revolutionary agitation around the globe. This fear was channeled into policing gender, sexuality, and race; and the parameters of white, middle-class womanhood were weaponized for social control in the transatlantic imaginary. In this study, I identify two rhetorical-political figures that helped to shape this imagination: Surplus Women and Trafficked Women. In my analysis of the literature, these figures help to contrast domestic scenes, on one hand, …


Everything Feels Like The Future But Us: The Posthuman Master-Slave Dynamic In Japanese Science Fiction Anime, Ryan Daly Jul 2019

Everything Feels Like The Future But Us: The Posthuman Master-Slave Dynamic In Japanese Science Fiction Anime, Ryan Daly

Masters Theses

This thesis is an exploration of the relationships between humans and mechanized beings in Japanese science fiction anime. In it I will be discussing the following texts: Ergo Proxy (2006), Chobits (2002), Gunslinger Girl (2003/2004), and Mahoromatic (2001/2002). I argue that these relationships in these anime series take the form of master/slave relationships, with the humans as the masters and the mechanized beings as the slaves. In virtually every case, the mechanized beings are young females and the masters are older human males. I will argue that this dynamic serves to reinforce traditional power structures and gender dynamics in a …


Wanderers Of Empire: The Tropical Tramp In Latin America, 1870-1930, Jack Werner Jul 2018

Wanderers Of Empire: The Tropical Tramp In Latin America, 1870-1930, Jack Werner

Masters Theses

U.S. public and private imperial interests confronted the problem of labor and labor power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as the U.S. empire expanded into Latin America and the Caribbean. The question of how to make an empire work spurred the creation of new labor regimes reliant on black West Indians who traveled to work in the Panama Canal Zone and on United Fruit Company (UFCO) banana plantations. Just as importantly, new labor regimes engendered new categories for troublesome laborers. One of these classifications, “tramp,” surfaced in the United States after the U.S. Civil War as a …


Theatres Of War: Performing Queer Nationalism In Modernist Narratives, Elise Swinford Nov 2017

Theatres Of War: Performing Queer Nationalism In Modernist Narratives, Elise Swinford

Doctoral Dissertations

Queer writers in Britain during the early twentieth century found themselves in a fraught geopolitical context formed by imperial violence and the First World War. In this dissertation, I argue that many queer modernist artists employed performative strategies in order to navigate the increasingly narrow vision of WWI-era British national culture that accompanied this historical context. While performance allowed them to express queer politics and desires without risking total exposure and persecution, their performative aesthetic depended on a problematic use of racial tropes through which these desires were channeled. By attending to moments of national and gendered performances in the …


Women On Trial: Translating Femininity Through Journalism, William B. Ollayos Jul 2017

Women On Trial: Translating Femininity Through Journalism, William B. Ollayos

Masters Theses

The focus of this thesis is on cultural translation as a means of understanding the relationship between sociocultural identity with respect to bourgeois white female sexuality and interpretations by news journalists, writers and filmmakers. The thesis brings translation scholar Lawrence Venuti’s description of foreign and domestic texts (2008) into conversation with Catherine Cole’s analysis of journalists as active interpreters of newsworthy events (2010) to support my view of the media as a translator of sociocultural identity. The thesis outlines the construction of bourgeois white femininity within the U.S. imaginary and a more detailed account of its direct impact upon journalistic …


Women, Convergent Film Criticism, And The Cinephilia Of Feminist Interruptions, Rachel L. Thibault Nov 2016

Women, Convergent Film Criticism, And The Cinephilia Of Feminist Interruptions, Rachel L. Thibault

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the ways in which female film critics practice film criticism in the convergent age. In original research drawn from ethnographic interviews with eight female film critics and bloggers as well as textual, historical, and reception analyses of criticism, this dissertation argues that women who write film criticism in the convergent era are not only writing from a space of marginalization based on the patriarchal dominance of the film industry, but also face a series of obstacles through gendered and discursive conflicts that are unique to writing online and which do not exert the same impact on male …


Japanese Pronoun Adventure: A Japanese Language Learner's Exploration Of His Japanese Gender Pronoun, Takumi Nakano Nov 2016

Japanese Pronoun Adventure: A Japanese Language Learner's Exploration Of His Japanese Gender Pronoun, Takumi Nakano

Masters Theses

In Japanese, there are various kinds of first-person pronouns, and some of them express the referent’s gender identity. Gender-neutral pronouns are made in English- speaking world day by day, but there is not any common first-person pronoun which indicates the gender identity that positions the referent’s gender somewhere between masculine and feminine. The present paper conducted a life story research on the “Japanese life” of an advanced learner of Japanese at a university in the United States who has been exploring his gender identity by coining and using a new Japanese first- person pronoun 㛪 ore, which indicates “in the …


Prosthetizing The Soul: Reading, Seeing, And Feeling In Seventeenth-Century Devotion, Katey E. Roden Jul 2016

Prosthetizing The Soul: Reading, Seeing, And Feeling In Seventeenth-Century Devotion, Katey E. Roden

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation proposes a new context for reading early modern devotional writing’s rich engagement with the language of the body in its focus on the relationship between gendered representations of devotional desire and spiritual ability in the religious poetry of seventeenth-century England. By tracing how somatic speech and bodily conditions are portrayed in the devotional poetry of John Milton, Richard Crashaw, Thomas Traherne, and An Collins, this project examines how these writers fashion spiritual states through the language of a sometime sorrowful and sometime ecstatic, but always desiring body. My project reveals how early modern authors manipulate or respond to …


Cat On A Hot Tin Roof: 60 Years Of American Dialogue On Sex, Gender, And The Nuclear Family, Amy Brooks Mar 2016

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof: 60 Years Of American Dialogue On Sex, Gender, And The Nuclear Family, Amy Brooks

Masters Theses

This thesis is a two-part work. Its components, a written paper and a one-night symposium/film screening event entitled Tennessee Williams: Gender Play in 2015 and Beyond, have been closely coordinated with my dramaturgical research for the February 2015 University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Theater production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The written inquiry is structured around a chronological, selected American production history of Cat; this history, rendered in a series of three case studies, will (1) synthesize preexisting analyses of Cat’s dramaturgical profile, its impact on American theater, and its position in Williams’s oeuvre; …


Says The King, Rushing Pittman Jan 2016

Says The King, Rushing Pittman

MFA Program for Poets & Writers Masters Theses Collection

A collection of poems.


Young Germans In The World: Race, Gender, And Imperialism In Wilhelmine Young Adult Literature, Maureen O. Gallagher Nov 2015

Young Germans In The World: Race, Gender, And Imperialism In Wilhelmine Young Adult Literature, Maureen O. Gallagher

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation shows how popular reading material for young adults was used to craft a new generation of German imperial citizens in the Second Empire (1871-1918). Uniting insights from contemporary postcolonial theory, gender studies, and the global history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, it shows the intersectional development of German national identity in the children’s and young adult literature of Wilhelmine Germany. As literature written by adults for young people, designed both to entertain and instruct, children’s and young adult literature offers a unique window on how Germany built nation and empire simultaneously during this period. Focusing on texts set …


African American Environmental Ethics: Black Intellectual Perspectives 1850-1965, Vanessa Fabien Nov 2014

African American Environmental Ethics: Black Intellectual Perspectives 1850-1965, Vanessa Fabien

Doctoral Dissertations

The historical scholarship in environmental history centers around the narratives of elite white men. Therefore, scholars such as William Cronon, Dorceta Taylor, Noël Sturgeon, and Carolyn Merchant are calling for research that uncovers the political and moral stances of people of color on nature, land ownership, and environmental pollution. This dissertation addresses this call by engaging William H. Sewell Jr.’s cross-disciplinary approach between history and the social sciences to introduce a nuanced historical analysis that interrogates the channels via which African Americans’ environmental ethic sculpted the development of North American environmental history and activism. This dissertation contends that African Americans …


Project Space(S) In The Design Professions: An Intersectional Feminist Study Of The Women's School Of Planning And Architecture (1974-1981), Elizabeth Cahn Nov 2014

Project Space(S) In The Design Professions: An Intersectional Feminist Study Of The Women's School Of Planning And Architecture (1974-1981), Elizabeth Cahn

Doctoral Dissertations

The Women’s School of Planning and Architecture (WSPA) was an ambitious, explicitly feminist educational program created by seven women planners and architects who used the school to introduce ideas and practices of the 1970s women’s movement into design and planning education in the United States. Between 1974 and 1981, WSPA organized five intensive, short-term residential educational sessions and a conference, each in a different geographical location in the United States, after which the organization ceased formal programming and the organizers moved on to other activities. The founders and participants involved in WSPA collectively imagined and created a feminist space for …


Nationalism And The Public Sphere: Tracing The Development Of Nineteenth-Century Latin American Identities, Lisa Ponce Jan 2013

Nationalism And The Public Sphere: Tracing The Development Of Nineteenth-Century Latin American Identities, Lisa Ponce

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Through the combined usage of primary source documents and secondary source research, this thesis seeks to discern how the individual national identities of Argentina and Mexico came to fruition. This thesis will demonstrate that the early national period of each region was directly influenced by the colonial context out of which Argentina and Mexico arose. Additionally, this thesis is focused on the ways that a national identity is developed within the public sphere, and how the public sphere might be defined beyond printed newspaper accounts.


The Terrorist Doppelganger: Somoza And The Sandinistas, Thomas A. Hohenstein Jan 2013

The Terrorist Doppelganger: Somoza And The Sandinistas, Thomas A. Hohenstein

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

This thesis makes two arguments. First, that the analytical lens of terrorism is useful to understanding the modern state because it pits the state against its antithesis. Additionally, the discursive contest between the state and terrorists is best understood within a gendered framework. Second, the Sandinista Revolution did not revolutionize the discourse the Nicaraguan state used to legitimate itself, thus limiting the movement’s revolutionary nature.


"Flying Is Changing Women!": Women Popularizers Of Commercial Aviation And The Renegotiation Of Traditional Gender And Technological Boundaries In The 1920s-30s, Emily K. Gibson Jan 2010

"Flying Is Changing Women!": Women Popularizers Of Commercial Aviation And The Renegotiation Of Traditional Gender And Technological Boundaries In The 1920s-30s, Emily K. Gibson

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

This thesis explores how the complex interplay between gender and technology significantly shaped the popularization of commercial aviation in the United States during the 1920s and 30s. As technological innovations improved both the safety and efficiency of airplanes during the early part of the twentieth century, commercial aviation industries increasingly worked to position flight as a viable means of mass transportation. In order to win the trust and money of potential passengers, however, industry proponents recognized the need to separate flight from its initial association with danger and masculine strength by convincing the general public of aviation’s safety and reliability. …


Before The Second Wave: College Women, Cultural Literacy, Sexuality And Identity, 1940--1965, Babette Faehmel May 2009

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 …


It’S ‘A Good Thing’: The Commodification Of Femininity, Affluence, And Whiteness In The Martha Stewart Phenomenon, Melissa A Click Feb 2009

It’S ‘A Good Thing’: The Commodification Of Femininity, Affluence, And Whiteness In The Martha Stewart Phenomenon, Melissa A Click

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

This study examines the ideologies of gender, race, and class present in Martha Stewart's unprecedented popularity, beginning with the publication of Stewart's first magazine in 1990 and ending in September 2004, after Stewart's conviction for her involvement in the ImClone scandal. My approach is built on the intersection of American mass communication research, British cultural studies, and feminist theory, and utilizes Hall's Encoding/Decoding model to examine how social, cultural and political discourses circulate in and through a mediated text and how those meanings are interpreted by those who receive them. Drawing from textual and ideological analysis of over thirteen years …


On Becoming Virginia: The Story Of A Man Who Crashed A Woman's Body: A Translation Of Alejandro Tapia Y Rivera's Postumo El Envirginiado [1882], Aaron M. M. Suko Jan 2009

On Becoming Virginia: The Story Of A Man Who Crashed A Woman's Body: A Translation Of Alejandro Tapia Y Rivera's Postumo El Envirginiado [1882], Aaron M. M. Suko

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

This thesis establishes a biographical and critical context pertaining to the life and work of the nineteenth-century Puerto Rican author Alejandro Tapia y Rivera (1826-1882), and presents a proposed translation of his final novel, Póstumo el envirginiado o la historia de un hombre que se coló en el cuerpo de una mujer (1882). In a discussion of Tapia’s life and work, I highlight important historical factors for comprehending the text’s and Tapia’s relatively obscure status. Then I turn to the text itself to analyze key themes and narrative techniques, referring to literary scholars of Póstumo in order to provide a …


An Exploration Of Gender Issues And The Role Of The Outsider In Women's Education Programs In Muslim Communities Case Studies In Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Senegal, And Yemen, Jode Lynne Walp Jan 1995

An Exploration Of Gender Issues And The Role Of The Outsider In Women's Education Programs In Muslim Communities Case Studies In Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Senegal, And Yemen, Jode Lynne Walp

Master's Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.