Digital Commons Network^™

Net/Work: Composing The Posthuman Self, Julia L. Mason

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The overall question this dissertation asks is: what does it mean to teach posthumans? To answer this question, this dissertation turns toward scholarship on the body in order to understand the virtual and material presence that students develop, it looks to online video gaming communities as alternative classrooms providing effective models of learning, and it investigates the circulation of service learning pedagogies within academic institutions as a marker of the persistence of humanistic values within the framework of a posthuman work environment.

The American university in general, and the humanities specifically, is struggling to make sense of its place in …

Male Identity And Female Space In The Fiction Of Ugandan Women Writers, Abasi Kiyimba

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article focuses on the voices of protest by Uganda women writers against age-old discriminative habits, and on the rebuttal made by women on questions of social and political power. The article particularly assesses the way women writers approach generally assumed positions on the power relations between men and women, a theme that runs through all the writing by Ugandan women. As part of the discussion, the paper inevitably pays particular attention to the presentation of male characters, and on the prominence given to issues of male dominance, injustice and discrimination against women, which take place at several levels of …

Bridging The Gender Gap In Quantum Physics, Gordon Stecklein

Pomona Senior Theses

Why is it important to study the gender gap in physics? Despite entering the workforce in increasing numbers over the last fifty years, women remain severely underrepresented in science and technology-related careers, particularly in positions of authority. Simultaneously, numerous studies verify that women have the ability to perform as well as – or better than – males in physics, and, when presented in certain lights, as many women as men show an interest in physics. Changes must be made in order to strive for equality and, given the changing demographic of the workforce, increase our country’s diminishing scientific prowess.

Voices Raised, Issue 19, University Of Dayton. Women's Center

Women’s Center Newsletter

Included in this issue: The First 25 Years of Women Students at UD; Women’s History Month; O’Rourke Award Honors Two Outstanding Seniors; Amy Anderson taking the Reins for International Women’s Day; Penis Envy? No Thanks!; The Women’s Center Grows in Resources; The UD Woman, 1937 to 2008; UD Women 1937-1962; Parents changing unhealthy aspects of UD student life.

Gender Disparities: A Medical Detoxification Program, Alberto Coustasse, Karan P. Singh, Sue G. Lurie, Yu-Sheng Lin, Claudia S. Coggin, Fernando Trevino

Management Faculty Research

Significant gaps exist in health care regarding gender in the United States. Health status, social roles, culturally patterned behavior and access to health care can be influenced by gender. Women have been the primary users of health care and minority women usually have received poorer quality care than Non-Hispanic White (NHW) females. The objectives of this study were to identify gender, racial and ethnic disparities in access to substance abuse treatment in a Texas hospital. Secondary data collected on 1,309 subjects who underwent detoxification were studied. Gender, race/ethnicity, drug of abuse, relapse and financial classification were included in the analysis. …

A Poetics Of The Soul: Devotional Poetry In Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; And Christina Rossetti, Heather Cianciola

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study explores devotional poetry of the nineteenth century as a poetic discourse in which tropes of the human soul connect spiritual reflection with lived experience in order to engage literary, religious, and social issues in Victorian England. Like G. B. Tennyson's Victorian Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode (1989), this project situates individual poets in their cultural and religious contexts, and it encourages an understanding of devotional verse as an important feature of Victorian poetry. In addition to these aims, this dissertation surveys both popular and lesser-known devotional verse by poets not formally part of the Oxford Movement in order …

Shared But Differentiated Responsibility: Integration International Obligations In Fight Against Trafficking In Human Beings, Anna Gekht

Denver Journal of International Law & Policy

No abstract provided.

The Perils And Empowerments Of Mountain Literacies: Reading Loss And Shifting Identities In Appalachian Memoirs And Novels, Erica Abrams Locklear

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the literary portrayal of literacy events in memoirs and novels written by Appalachian women during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Drawing from contemporary literacy scholarship, my project engages several definitions of the term "literacy," including theories defining it as a technical skill, a social act, cultural knowledge, or a potent form of ideological power. In a region historically (and often inaccurately) stigmatized as illiterate, "literacy" is a loaded term, a concept doubly associated with cultural pride and with cultural loss. By applying literacy theories to Appalachian literature, I analyze the identity conflicts literacy attainment causes for several …

The Emergence Of Sex, Ursula Goodenough

Biology Faculty Research

Biological traits, the foci of natural selection, are by definition emergent from the genes, proteins, and other “nothing-buts” that constitute them. Moreover, and with the exception of recently emergent “spandrels,” each can be accorded a teleological dimension—each is “for” some purpose conducive to an organism's continuation. Sex, which is “for” the generation of recombinant genomes, may be one of the most ancient and ubiquitous traits in biology. In the course of its evolution, many additional traits, such as gender and nurture, have emerged. Patterns of sexual exchange are the basis for patterns of biological evolution and are central to the …

Effects Of Job Stereotype, Applicant Gender, And Powerful And Powerless Speech Styles On Telephone Interview Outcomes, Heather Deanna Palmer Mcfarland

Dissertations

By examining the effects of powerful and powerless speech styles, gender stereotyped jobs, and gendered voices during the employment interviewing process, this study sought to further the research of Parton (1996); Parton, Siltanen, Hosman, and Langenderfer (2002); and Juodvalkis, Grefe, Hogue, Svyantek, and DeLamarter (2003). This study was designed to further explore the possibility of longitudinal changes within acceptable communicative expectations during telephone job interviewing. Participants (undergraduate and professional) listened to two audio taped interviews manipulated by speech style, stereotyped job title, and interviewee gender. Variables were evaluated on semantic differential scales following the previous work of Parton (1996). Similar …

Acculturation, Gender, And Alcohol Use Among Mexican American College Students, Marcela Raffaelli, Rosalie A. Torres Stone, Maria I. Iturbide, Meredith Mcginley, Gustavo Carlo, Lisa J. Crockett

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

Prior research with non-college samples of Mexican Americans has demonstrated that gender moderates the association between acculturation and alcohol use. We replicated this finding in a college student sample and attempted to account for the differential impact of acculturation on Mexican American men and women by examining the mediating effects of social context, family conflict and psychological functioning. Participants were 148 Mexican Americans (67% female; M age 23 years) from three state universities in California and Texas who completed self-report surveys. In multivariate analyses controlling for age, maternal education, living situation, and site, linguistic acculturation was associated with increased alcohol …

Onset Of Hearing Loss, Gender And Self Concept As Determinants Of Academic Achievements In English Language Of Students With Hearing Disability In Oyo State, Nigeria, J. Abiola Ademokoya, B. A. Shittu

Essays in Education

Since every class of students with hearing disability is always a heterogeneous one, the need for establishing relationship between some intrinsic factors in these students and their academic achievements becomes very imperative. This study therefore examined the influence of onset of hearing loss, gender and self concept on their academic performance in English language. 100 Senior Secondary School class III students with hearing disability were purposively selected to participate in the study. The study also raised 3 hypotheses to ascertain relationships between onset of hearing loss, gender, and self concept and English language achievement. Instruments such as the self concept …

Authentic Out-Of-Class Communication In Study Abroad Programs: Success Defined By Continued Motivation And Cultural Appreciation, Erin Fairlight Olsen

Theses and Dissertations

The benefits of study abroad experience in second language acquisition have evolved from unchallenged assumption to the focus of rigorous study in the past several decades. The benefits of out-of-class contact with natives have likewise been questioned. Despite conflicting evidence of its benefit, students frequently cite out-of-class conversations with natives as among the most beneficial aspects of their language acquisition experience. Reviewing the extant literature, this study narrows in on authentic communication-that is, meaningful out-of-class contact with natives, in which students are able to genuinely express themselves and their personality-as a previously unanalyzed element of study abroad research. It is …

Gendered Representations Of Jazz Vocal Artists: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Cd And Performance Reviews, And Interviews, Miroslava Jichova

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This study of contemporary jazz discourse and gender applies the techniques of critical discourse analysis, inspired by M.A.K. Halliday's systemic functional linguistics and Norman Fairclough's qualitative critical discourse analysis, to explicate the unequal distribution of power in society as represented by the institutions of jazz and mass media, in discourse about jazz vocal artists. Specifically, the study focuses on the way the genres of jazz CD review, jazz performance review, and interviews with jazz artists – disseminated via the institutions JazzTimes and Live New Orleans – represent the artists' identities, roles, achievements and skills. Following Norman Fairclough and the feminist …

Zouave Stories: Gender, Catholic Spirituality, And French Responses To The Roman Question, Carol E. Harrison

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Queer Identity? Discussing Identity And Appearance In An On-Line “Genderqueer” Community, Sharla N. Alegria

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The relatively new field of Queer Theory creates ways of thinking about people living without binary gender, but does not provide for a research model with which to give context to the material struggles of such people. Through the use of Internet discussion groups, the current research project attempts to examine the challenges that people who identify with the concept "genderqueer" describe facing as they fashion selves in social interactions; a process which inevitably requires consumer goods that typically only allow for heteronormative binary gender. Findings suggest that there are similarities in how respondents came to identify with "genderqueer," but …

The Lady In The Looking-Glass: Reflections On The Self In Virginia Woolf, Stephen Howard

Journal of International Women's Studies

This essay addresses Virginia Woolf’s exploration of the concept of the self through reference to a range of her prose writings. In these writings, Woolf questions whether the self is unitary, constant and finally knowable, or fragmented, unstable and inscrutable; whether the self is merged with other people, and constructed from interactions with the world; and whether or not a durable and fixed self-image is a necessary prerequisite for successful social interaction. Woolf’s engagement with the conventions of biography is examined primarily through the lens of two short stories: ‘The Lady in the Looking-Glass’ and ‘An Unwritten Novel.’ I argue …

The Missing Rhetoric Of Gender In Responses To Abu Ghraib, Alexandra Murphy

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper explores Western responses to the torture inflicted upon Iraqi detainees by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib facility near Baghdad. More specifically, however, this paper examines responses to photographic representations of this torture, which began to surface in the April of 2004. The analysis that follows engages closely with the status of the photographs as images, arguing that existing critical interpretations fail to account for the particular issues and problems that the visual image presents. Through detailed reference work by Judith Butler and Susan Sontag, this paper will also interrogate the limitations of recent theoretical approaches to the …

Apotheosis Or Apparition? Bombay And The Village In 1990s Women’S Cinema, Rashmi Sawhney

Books/Book chapters

This article examines the representation of Bombay in Aruna Raje’s Rihaee (1988) and Sai Paranjpye’s Disha (1990). It has been argued here that in both films, Bombay functions as a narrative anchor to the fictive village, which is depicted as the locus of Indian modernity. Symbolism of the village-city trope is used to reorganise the syntagm of modernity-location-gender in new relations of power and also to present alternative visions of national development within the socio-economic context of 1990s liberalisation in India. The dialectic between city and village in these films emphasises the role of memory and migration in women’s cinema, …

Contamination Of Childhood Fairy Tale: Pre-Service Teachers Explore Gender And Race Constructions, Wan-Hsiang Chou

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

This study explores the possibilities of challenging European-American middle-class social codes perpetuated by fairy tales through creative writing and artmaking. For centuries, writers and artists have continued to create new versions of old tales. Critiquing through recreation of fairy tales can reveal biases of personal and cultural constructions of race and gender. Like authors and illustrators of children's books, 25 pre-service teachers were invited to "contaminate" fairy tales from their childhood, through which to become aware of metaphors they live by and explore where and how pre-existing codes entered their lives. Their retellings of traditional tales and accompanying illustrations show …

Reducing The Social Exclusion Of Girls, Kelly Hallman, Eva Roca

Poverty, Gender, and Youth

Across the globe, girls are systematically excluded from participation in social, economic, and political life. The absence of girls in these arenas has implications not only for the young women themselves but also for society as a whole, exacerbating poverty and perpetuating disparities in health, education, and economic achievement. Internationally, this marginalization makes it difficult or impossible for some countries to achieve society-wide goals, such as the Millennium Development Goals identified by the United Nations as benchmarks to reduce poverty. For a number of years, the Population Council has been studying the causes and effects of girls’ social exclusion in …

Unruly Corporeality: Aids, Immigration And The Imagined Australian Body, Zoë Anderson

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Particular bodies within the Australian nation can be seen to threaten to disrupt and destabilize dominant notions of cultural citizenship. Understood through intricate intersections of ethnicity, gender and sexuality, 'Australianness' - and its correlation to the geographical nation - is constantly monitored. Crucial here is the manner in which boundaries of whiteness, and 'true Australianess', are reconstituted, fuelling avoidance of the ambiguities of national belonging and ensuring the enduring pathologisation of the 'un'Australian. In particular, discursive associations between HIV/AIDS and the 'foreign' as perceived contaminates to the nation operate to reinforce these understandings. Here, the threat of disease both informs, …

Before The Acts: The Romantic Sublime, Gender, Art, And The Modern In Virginia Woolf's "Between The Acts"., Erin K. Johns

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

A moment that fills a person with awe, terror, agony, and silence is the simplest way to describe Edmund Burke s conception of the sublime, which stems from the Greek rhetorician, Longinus, and undergoes philosophical critique by Immanuel Kant. The male poets of the British Romantic period, like William Wordsworth, P.B. Shelley, and John Keats, created a literary conversation critiquing Burke s binary of the beautiful and the sublime. Although the sublime is often grounded among these poets, the contemporary critic, Anne K. Mellor, argues for a feminist reading of the sublime, which centers around female writers of the Romantic …

[Introduction To] The Latino Body: Crisis Identities In American Literary And Cultural Memory, LáZaro Lima

Bookshelf

The Latino Body tells the story of the United States Latino body politic and its relation to the state: how the state configures Latino subjects and how Latino subjects have in turn altered the state. Lázaro Lima charts the interrelated groups that define themselves as Latinos and examines how these groups have responded to calls for unity and nationally shared conceptions of American cultural identity. He contends that their responses, in times of cultural or political crisis, have given rise to profound cultural transformations, enabling the so-called “Latino subject“ to emerge.

Analyzing a variety of cultural, literary, artistic, and popular …

Acculturation Status And Heavy Alcohol Use Among Mexican American College Students: Investigating The Moderating Role Of Gender, Byron L. Zamboanga, Marcela Raffaelli, Nicholas J. Horton

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

We examined whether gender moderates the association between acculturation and heavy alcohol use. The sample consisted of 126 Mexican American college students (Mean age = 24.7 years; 57% female) who completed self-report measures of heavy alcohol use, acculturation status (global acculturation and ethnic identity), and relevant control variables (age, peer alcohol use). Multivariable regression revealed that higher levels of ethnic identity were associated with greater frequency of heavy alcohol among men. Conversely, neither measure of acculturation was associated with heavy alcohol use among women. These findings suggest that interventions for Latino/a students should consider the role of culturally relevant variables …

Imagining The Law-Trained Reader: The Faulty Description Of The Audience In Legal Writing Textbooks., Jessica E. Price

ExpressO

In law schools today, first-year legal writing courses play a crucial role in helping students learn to communicate about the law. Many legal writing teachers approach legal writing education in a practical way, attempting to pass on their own experiences in law practice settings to students. Unfortunately, as other writers have observed, such reliance on personal knowledge about “what lawyers are like” may lead legal writing teachers to oversimplify a complicated matter – the needs and preferences of the audience for legal writing – and may even amount to indoctrination in stereotypes about law practice. This article offers a closer …

Identifying Factors That Influence Gender Disparities In Physician Income: Implications For Public Policy, Wendy Bolyard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Research has shown that female physicians continue to earn less than their male counterparts. From both social justice and feminist perspectives, laws requiring equal pay should provide just income for females as compared to males. However, the literature continues to indicate that in general females earn less than males, a trend that is also true for physicians. Theoretically informed postulates are measured here with structural equation modeling to test the influence of the unique latent construct "specialization" on the income gap while controlling for demographic and contextual variables. The analysis tests the assumption that the influence of specialization is the …

Inducing The Holy Spirit Through The Pentecostal Message, Melissa Guzman

McNair Scholars Journal

Pentecostalism (PC) is the most prolific branch of American evangelical Christianity (Jacobsen 2003) as it has been able to provide to its adherents, subcultures and collective identities that bestow meaning and belonging (Smith 1998). PC arose from Methodist and Baptist branches of Christianity at the end of the 19th century (Blumhofer 1993) and was involved in adjusting millions of migrants to U.S. city life (Synan 1997). Because PC has “straddled the race line in ways that most other American religious movements did not” (Jacobsen 2003: 260), it is significant to consider its wide appeal by analyzing how it manifests itself …

Geeks At Play: Doing Masculinity In An Online Gaming Site, Natasha Chen Christensen

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This paper uses data taken from chat logs within a first person shooter game, Quake Online, in order to explore the performance of gender online. Previous research has shown how physicality is given a position of importance in institutions where masculinity is developed and reproduced such as sports and war; cyberspace offers the opportunity of divorcing the performance of masculinity from the body. Researchers of gender in cyberspace are divided into two perspectives about the effect of the absence of a physical body on the performance of gender: One camp believes that without the constraints of the body, gender in …

When A Killer Body Isn’T Enough: Cross-Gender Identification In Action-Adventure Video Games, Marc Ouellette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

While sports games try to recreate the atmosphere of a stadium or of television broadcasts of games, role-playing and action-adventure games attempt to duplicate cinematography through animation. For Tomb Raider, the virtual reality created by the cinematic animation of the game produces an environment for male-to-female cross-gender identification, a topic that has received little critical attention. The sense of identification intended in this chapter comes from psychoanalysts Jean Laplanche and Jean-Baptiste Pontalis, who describe identification as a psychological process in which a subject assimilates an aspect, a property, a characteristic of another and transforms himself [or herself] totally or partially …