Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Women Entrepreneurs In China: Dialectical Discourses, Situated Activities, And The (Re)Production Of Gender And Entrepreneurship, Zhenyu Tian

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Despite the number of women entrepreneurs on the rise globally, the business world and the identity of the entrepreneur remain to be normed masculine and male gender stereotyped. This male gender stereotyping situates women who practice entrepreneurship in disadvantages, limiting their access to resources on which they depend to make meaning of their activities and identities. This imbalanced masculine gender order also manifests in China’s economy. Women entrepreneurs in China face complex contradictions and challenges when navigating an arena that privileges men and masculinity. However, not much is known about the micro-dynamics of Chinese women’s entrepreneurial experiences in light of …

Performances Of Gender And Sexuality In Extreme Sports Culture, Carly Michelle Gieseler

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to expose the strategies through which extreme sports constitute gender through exaggeration, parody, queering, resistance, and transcendence of normative gendered binaries. I interrogate how extreme sports operate on the margins of sport, gender, media, and lived experience to better understand the processes and performances that retain, reinforce, and resist our notions of normative gender, bodies, and sexuality. Starting with the claim that performance is constitutive of gender and culture, I will focus on how extreme sporting performances create significant commentaries on mainstream assumptions surrounding sporting gender, sexuality, and corporeality.

These commentaries function in extreme …

Selling The Third Wave: The Commodification And Consumption Of The Flat Track Roller Girl, Mary Catherine Whitlock

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In an ethnographic examination of the "modern" roller derby movement that began in the early 2000s, I explore Women's Flat Track Derby in Florida. What does it mean to be a roller derby player? How is she conceptualized and commodified? Or more centrally, how is third wave feminism used as a catalyst of this commodification? In order to fully appreciate, understand, and even embrace roller derby, I look at roller derby leagues as social movement organizations (SMOs) in order to note how they frame themselves and maintain collective identity the commodification of third wave feminism. First, I will explore various …

Improvisational Music Performance: On-Stage Communication Of Power Relationships, David A. Steinweg

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project explores how musical improvisational processes come into being through interacting discursive power relationships that are embodied and enacted through performance. By utilizing the concepts of framing and performativity I am able to show how discursive power constitutes the performance of improvisational music. To exemplify this theory, the project presents a case study examining a Grateful Dead cover band named Uncle John's Band that performs at Skipper's Smokehouse in Tampa, FL. Using an ethnographic methodology, the project articulates the dominant discursive power relationships that constitute Uncle John's Band's improvisational performances. The dominant discursive power relationships revolve around the lived …

From Cosmogony To Anthropogony: Inscribing Bodies In Vedic Cosmogony And Samskara Rituals, Christine Boulos

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that the inscription of bodies is necessary in order to constitute the cosmos, gender and sex. A study of the Vedic cosmogonic mythologies of the deities Purusha and Prajapati illustrates the ways in which sacrifice, as a form of inscription, constitutes the cosmos by ordering and fashioning the boundaries of the bodies of the deities through differentiation and unification. An analysis of samskaras, or consecratory rites of The Law Code of Manu, show that they operate as regulatory norms in order to constitute sex and gender. But the instability and unnaturalness of the categories of gender and …

An Ethnography Of The Bay Area Renaissance Festival: Performing Community And Reconfiguring Gender, Matthew Johnson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This performance ethnography analyzes the means by which performers at Tampa, Florida‘s Bay Area Renaissance Festival constitute community and gender through performance. Renaissance Festivals are themed weekend events that ostensibly seek to allow visitors to experience life in an English Renaissance village. Beginning with the theoretical assumption that performance is constitutive of culture, community, and identity, and undergirded by David Boje‘s festivalism, Richard Schechner‘s restored behavior, Victor Turner‘s liminoid communitas and Judith Butler‘s performative agency, The Festival is explored as a celebratory community that engages in social change through personal transformation.

Employing reflexive ethnography and narrative as inquiry, Chapter Two …

An Ecology Of Performance: Gregory Bateson's Cybernetic Performance, Daniel Matthew Blaeuer

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a case study of the public performances of Gregory Bateson at The Esalen Institute. The case study is a reconsideration of the work of Gregory Bateson from the perspective of performance studies. The author brings together performativity, cybernetics, and the sacred to argue that Gregory Bateson, in his public performances, was striving for grace in encounters with others. The author has conducted archival research into Bateson’s presentations and has spoken with several close to Bateson to get a sense of how his process of public presentation paralleled his ideas—a process of continually working through ideas in conversation …

Metadrama And Antitheatricality In Shakespeare’S King Lear And Troilus And Cressida, Douglas R. Willcox

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Shakespeare uses metadrama as a rhetorical vehicle for responding to antitheatricalism; realistic drama and staged theatricality therefore coexist in his plays. The cultural context of the early modern era, especially its antitheatrical rhetoric and the predominance of theatricality throughout the structures of its society, illumines the interaction of metadrama and antitheatricality Shakespeare's plays, particularly Troilus and Cressida and King Lear. By failing to consider adequately the unique nature of the emergence of early modern theater and the equally distinct reaction to its popularity, previous scholarship considering antitheatricality has exhibited essentialism and a universalizing tendency similar to that of the …

Getting It Right: A Story Of Truth In Music Performance, Christopher Mcrae

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project looks at the relationship between music performance and truth in narrative. Music performance is a fluid and dynamic process with complex and multiple relationships among musician, audience, text, and production. The five sections of this thesis discuss five different musical performances that address different aspects of this dynamic process. I look at the relationship between music performance and Performance Studies, issues of personae and presence, questions of identity and masculinity, pedagogy and performance, and the intersections of writing and performance. The five musical performances in this project are written to not only discuss important aspects of music and …