Digital Commons Network^™

Untitled (Too Real Is This Feeling Of Make-Believe), Tucker Pierce

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

Tucker Pierce works to examine the constructed nature of identity through the act of modifying the surface of his body, the site of all identity expression, and through the strategic crossing of borders, both internally and externally. Using drag and his own body, he crosses the internal boundaries that govern identity expression and then the more physical border between the private and public sphere. He crosses this boundary by taking this modification of his external identity expression into the world at large. On a personal level, this project allows him to engage more completely with his own sense of self, …

Names Are Words: A Study Of Age, Gender, Class And Race, Alexandria Michelle Baker

Communication & Leadership Dissertations and Theses

Just over 4 million babies are born in the United States each year, and as many people know each baby eventually gets a name. In an extension of research demonstrating both Symbolic Interaction Theory and the Coordinated Management of Meaning, through the use of semantics and pragmatics, the present study examined what names communicate about age, race, gender and class. Using data obtained from the first group of participants in Survey 1(i.e. names of each individual and their demographics), Survey 2 participants, a random sampling of Americans, were asked to look at 14 names and determine what those names communicated. …

Gendered Legislation: Effects Of Percentages Of Females In Legislatures On Policy, Elizabeth Gribbins

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Does the amount of women in the legislature have an effect on the type of legislation passed? Wide variation exists in gender parity across countries; however, whether or not the amount of women in legislatures has an effect on the type of policy that is proposed and/or passed by the government is largely overlooked. In this analysis, I analyze the percentage of women in the legislature and six measures of women’s rights in 139 countries. I have found that there exists a small positive statistical relationship between the percentage of women in the lower legislature and the more legislation passed …

A Study Of Domestic Violence And Patriarchal Ideologies In Popular Men’S Magazines, Annika M. Wilcox

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

This study examines the prevalence and nature of the portrayals of domestic violence in popular men’s magazines. The sample consists of 20 articles drawn from five popular men’s magazines. The small size of the available sample exemplifies that articles discussing domestic violence continue to be relatively uncommon. Through the qualitative method of continuous comparative analysis, this study identifies four common perspectives that are exhibited within articles on domestic violence: gender symmetry, feminist, GS-Neutral, and F-Neutral. The most common perspective, gender symmetry, was exhibited by 45% (9 of 20) of the articles, and is characterized by an ignorance of the context …

Examining Pay Differentials In The Legal Field, Barbara Donn, Christine Cahill, Meghan H. Mihal

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

This study investigates pay discrimination towards women in the legal field. Recent research has shown that a pay gap does exist in the legal field, and we show that this gap widens throughout the lawyers’ early careers. For our analysis, we focus on the pay differentials between associate level men and women at large private law firms in the United States. The data used in this study is provided by the American Bar Association and is a nationally representative data set following lawyers who began their legal career in 2000. We show that women earn less than their male counterparts …

International Arbitration: Demographics, Precision And Justice, Susan Franck, James Freda, Kellen Lavin, Tobias A. Lehmann, Anne Van Aaken

Contributions to Books

ICCA Congress Series No. 18 comprises the proceedings of the twenty-second Congress of the International Council for Commercial Arbitration (ICCA), held in Miami in 2014. The articles by leading arbitration practitioners and scholars from around the world address the challenges, both perceived and real, to the legitimacy of international arbitration.

The volume focusses on the twin pillars of legitimacy: justice, in procedure and outcome, and precision at every phase of the proceedings. Contributions on justice explore issues related to diversity, fairness and whether arbitral institutions can do more to foster legitimacy – based on the responses of nine international arbitral …

The Evolution Of Disney Princesses And Their Effect On Body Image, Gender Roles, And The Portrayal Of Love, Rachael Michelle Johnson

Educational Specialist, 2009-2019

The media plays an essential role in determining people’s schemas of the real world, assumptions about cultural ideals, and perceptions surrounding body image, gender roles, and the idealization of love (Behm-Morawitz & Mastro, 2008; Herbozo, Tantleff-Dunn, Gokee-Larose, & Thompson, 2004). Children in particular are vulnerable to these messages due to their high consumption of media and their cognitive development (Agarwal & Dhanasekaran, 2012; Herbozo et al., 2004). Disney is one the most powerful aspects in children’s media and their princess phenomenon plays an essential role in perpetuating stereotypes by having their heroines embody submissiveness, being young and thin, and attracting …

Implicit Association Of Gender And Politics, Bryonna Bowen, Jessica Preece

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The gender gap in participation, capability, and interest in politics has been widely researched. However, in this project we examined whether or not people implicitly identify men more strongly than women with politics. Furthermore, I was interested to determine to what extent everyday media exposure, particularly focusing on a specific gender, could influence an individual’s implicit biases. Mock newspaper articles, with either male or female political subjects, were used to further determine the effect of media content on people’s gender biases. While self-reported prejudices may be inconsistent and untrustworthy, I used the implicit association test (IAT) to assess the patterns …

Nipe-Nikupe: A Multi-Level Perspective Of Gender And Hiv Prevention In Heterosexual Marriages In Kenya, Rose Anne N. Njiru

Doctoral Dissertations

Archival abstract submitted

Dynamics Between Weavers And Voluntourists In Guatemala: Giving Ideas, Taking Photos, Rebecca L. Nelson

Doctoral Dissertations

Drawing from 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the voluntourism program of a women’s weaving cooperative based in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, this dissertation argues that voluntourists and their cooperative hosts developed more globally-oriented subjectivities through their daily information exchanges. Voluntourists shared their knowledge of tastes and practices in their countries; in return, the cooperative leaders offered them exposure to Mayan customs and weaving classes. At the same time, these interactions highlighted the hosts’ anxieties about sharing such knowledge. The cooperative leaders utilized their association with tourists to develop cosmopolitan competencies, pursue alternative gender relations, and push the boundaries of relationships with …

Fort Lipstick And The Making Of June Cleaver: Gender Roles In American Propaganda And Advertising, 1941-1961, Samantha L. Vandermeade

Madison Historical Review

This article discusses the ways in which government propaganda and corporate advertising during the 1940s and 1950s made a concerted effort to mitigate the increased sexual, economic, and social freedoms of women engendered by the circumstances of the war years. While Rosie the Riveter and others like her became the picture Americans often associate with women in World War II, advertising firms and the government deliberately created Rosie and her fellows to reinforce female participation in the war effort only through their pre-ascribed dichotomous roles as either socially tamed sexual objects or mothers. Then, as the war drew to a …

Medicalizing Gender: How The Legal And Medical Professions Shaped Women’S Experiences As Lawyers, Kathleen Darcy

Tennessee Journal of Race, Gender, & Social Justice

Despite significant progress, women in the legal profession still

have not advanced into positions of power at near the rate in which

they saturate the legal market. Scholars agree that simply waiting for

parity is not sufficient, and, thus, they have identified many of the

barriers that contribute to women’s difficulties. To date, however, the

role that scientific and medical understandings play on the evolution of

law, and on women as lawyers, has not received examination until

now. To this end, I posit that medicine played a significant role in

shaping societal expectations and assumptions about gender, and was

similarly …

Transgender Kinship: Transforming Family, Dianne M. Schindler

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the processes of negotiating and redrawing concepts of relatedness, kinship, group membership, and citizenship for transgender people. Examining relationships in the context of family, friendship, group membership, and law, I explore how relationships are defined, challenged, and transformed in the context of gender transition. By conducting structured interviews of transgender people and their family members, and engaging in participant observation in support group meetings, conferences, and social events, I was able to collect a wide range of data to utilize in my analysis. I sought to understand the ways in which transgender people identify the place …

The Weight Of Gender, Bintou Marong

Senior Honors Projects

Abstract

Gender ideologies form the basis of how we view men and women as masculine and feminine. Through more traditional gender ideologies, men are generally taught to act and look as “manly” as possible while females are to look and remain as “womanly” as possible. So as long as one does not perform gender in ways that disrupt or blur the lines of these ideologies, conflict does not arise. But for women who deviate from the status quo and develop moderate to extreme muscularity, their gender and perceived femininity is often questioned and conflict often arises in their lives. Comments …

Shakespeare And Boyhood: Early Modern Representations And Contemporary Appropriations, Marvin Tyler Sasser

Dissertations

This dissertation demonstrates that Shakespearean boyhood, both in early modern plays and contemporary reimaginings for young readers, critiques patriarchal and hegemonic ideals through the rhetoric and behavior of boy characters. Although critics have called Shakespeare’s boy characters indistinguishable, I find that they provide Shakespeare a unique resource to offer persuasive skepticism about heroic conventions, education, and political instability. This project begins by examining the lexical network of boy in order to chart its uses in early modern England. The subsequent three chapters establish how Shakespeare uses boys to comment on a range of ideal manhoods, such as the chivalrous …

Looking Back At The Media's Future: A Mixed Method Analysis Of Race And Gender Bias During The 2008 Democratic Presidential Primary Season, Tim Vance

Dissertations

Political knowledge has been defined as the individual’s ability to recall candidate names, personal characteristics, and qualifications. Furthermore, it is the ability to identify election issues, current campaign developments, and recognize connections between candidates and issue positions (C. Atkin & Heald, 1976). I posit that political knowledge has become much more…and much less.

I have introduced, in this paper, a number of sources for political learning: ads, newspapers, YouTube, and television news. All hold some interest for investigation as political knowledge sources, but methodology cannot be standardized across all sources. As such, the focus of the qualitative part of this …

The Life You've Seen: The Search For Feminine Identity Ruined My Life, Cambry Lace Pierce

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Life You've Seen: The Search For Feminine Identity Ruined My Life is a video installation created through the exploration for the search for identity, specifically female, in my personal work and in the art world for over sixty years. The videos, depicting myself in costume, display twenty different personas and scenarios created to expose the futility of this ongoing search through exposing the traditional ways in which forces such as nature, biology, heredity, and cultural constructs have been used in attempts to define "self." The installation format of the work, a wall of decades old television sets, and the …

Marriage And Gender: A History Through Letters, Victoria Kern

Senior Honors Projects

Research on the evolution of marriage can be found quite easily, but the opportunity to see into the lives of married couples from the past is rare. Through the analysis of letters between my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, I provide a glimpse of what being married has meant throughout the 20^th Century for heterosexual couples. Societal ideas about what makes a marriage ideal have changed over time, but they have always been closely linked with gender expectations (Berk, 2013), so a feminist approach to the analysis of the evolution of marriage is used with my family’s letters as a …

Stand Strong, Stand Proud: Alternative And Pariah Femininities In San Diego's Punk Rock Community, Steve Moog

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since its inception nearly 40 years ago, punk rock has often been understood as a Social space for rebellion and resistance to dominant cultural norms. As such, punk rock culture becomes fertile ground for explorations of subversive constructions of genders. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the San Diego punk rock community, this thesis unpacks the construction, embodiment and enactment of alternative and pariah forms of femininities and examines their impact on gender dynamics within the scene. Ultimately, this thesis argues that (1) the San Diego punk rock community is a space where alternative and pariah femininities can be embodied …

Exposing Narrative Ideologies Of Victimhood In Emma Donaghue’S Room And Gillian Flynn’S Gone Girl, Meredith Jeffers

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Stories about abducted women and murdered wives are sadly common on cable and network news programs, from Nancy Grace to Dateline. These at the center of Emma Donaghue’s Room (2010) and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012). These contemporary novels manipulate the narrative conventions of popular true-crime stories to expose the

In the each chapter, I examine the interesting narrative perspectives of Room and Gone Girl to understand the ways that these novels deconstruct mass media narratives of violence to reveal ideas about gender. In Room, Donaghue dislocates the narration by narrating the novel not from the perspective of …

(Re)Animating The Horror Genre: Explorations In Children's Animated Horror Films, Megan Estelle Troutman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project seeks to define the subgenre of children's animated horror film by examining its classification within the children's film genre and its use of generic conventions of horror. While this project does not aim to conflate children's film as a genre and animation as a medium, the scope of this project will be limited to children's animated horror films from 1993 - present day. In order to explore the subgenre of children's animated horror films from 1993-present, I will focus specifically on the following films: Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were …

Transgender Identity And Media In Historical Perspective, Melanie L. Bilbrey

Honors Theses

Despite recent advances in the public sphere, the transgender community remains vulnerable and underrepresented in daily life. While the media has been fascinated with transgender stories since the 1930s, these stories have been skewed in ways that undermine what it truly means to be a transgender person living in the contemporary United States. The disconnect between dominant media narratives and the daily lives of transgendered people is harmful, because it shields the mainstream from the harsh realities of every day life for these individuals and allows violence, discrimination, and transphobia to continue. This study analyzes the growing visibility of the …

Unrealistic Weeds Of Love And Romance: The Korean Drama And The "Flower Boy" Genre, Colby Y. Miyose

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The concept of love has intrigued many social critics, and has led them to accuse media of perpetuating unrealistic notions of romance that are unattainable for a healthy and satisfying relationship. Unrealistic expectations of love and romance are a primary cause of relationship dissatisfaction among real couples. It is imperative to critically analyze media sources in order to gain knowledge of how to counter unhealthy notions of romance. Korean dramas (K-dramas) typically present a scenario in which strong mutual love and desire between two people come into conflict with existing sociocultural values. The kkonminam (Flower Boy) genre in particular, caters …

Gender, Employment Status, And Unpaid Household Labor: A Test Of The Time Availability Perspective On Housework, Child Care, And Emotion Work Before, During, And After The 2007 U.S. Economic Recession, Allison Sahl

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Using the American Time Use Survey (2003-2011), I examine gender differences in time spent performing housework, child care, and emotion work before, during, and after the 2007 U.S. economic recession. This study draws on three primary theoretical perspectives; time availability theory, gender socialization theories, and relative resources theory, to explain differences in unpaid household labor tasks. I examine these differences across three time periods to explain the recessionary impact on the division of household labor. With a sample of 22,507 respondents, I employ ordinary least squares regression models to predict the total number of minutes per day that respondents spend …

Online Mormon Self-Presentation: Content Analysis Of Mormon.Org And Ldssingles.Com Profiles, Megan Marie Fereday

Theses and Dissertations

This study aimed to examine online Mormon self-presentation, specifically in the context of Mormon.org and LDSSingles.com (LDSSO). To examine the different styles of self-presentation used in Mormon.org and LDSSO profiles, this study drew upon self-presentation theory (Goffman, 1959; Jones, 1990; Jones & Pittman, 1982) and analyzed profiles according to Dominick's (1990) definitions of Jones and Pittman's (1982) five self-presentation strategies. In addition, this study examined the relationship between a profile poster's sex and the self-presentation strategies exhibited in his or her Mormon.org or LDSSO profile. Content analysis of 100 (50 male and 50 female) Mormon.org and 100 (50 male and …

Siren Song: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Gender And Intimate Partner Violence In Gotham City Sirens, Katlin Schmidt

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This project investigates comic book discourse. Specifically, I investigate how comic narratives provide readers with an interpretation for how they should discern and assess “appropriate” behaviors for women. The artifact of analysis included in this project is DC Comics Gotham City Sirens (2009). This text features popular female superheroes, Catwoman, Harley Quinn, and Poison Ivy. Because comic books utilize both textual and visual means to disseminate a message, this project evaluates the visual rhetoric of these characters within the narrative. Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm is used to provide an understanding to how these visual means contribute to the meanings assigned …

Kaleidoscopic View Of Voices Shaping Female And Male Adolescents' Dynamic Mathematics Identity Within Single-Sex And Coeducational Environments, Amber Simpson

All Dissertations

With amendments made to the Title IX legislation in 2006, public schools in the United States were permitted to establish single-sex classes as an option for students to enroll voluntarily. Yet, our understanding of how single-sex mathematics classes affect female and male adolescent students in the United States is sparse. The purpose of this study is to contribute to this limited body of scholarship by gaining insights into the similarities and differences in how middle grade female and male students' narrate their mathematics identity within a single-sex and coeducational mathematics classrooms, as well as how class type may be shaping …

Gender, Personality, And Self Esteem As Predictors Of Social Media Presentation, Heng Zhang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In an age when people make and maintain relationships in online environments, creating and sustaining impressions online becomes equally important. For a better understanding of social networking sites usage, the present study examines the influence of gender, personality, and selfesteem on social media presentation. The goal of this study is to investigate individuals‘ expressions through social media in order to determine if they reflect the author‘s gender, personality, and levels of self-esteem. Quantitative analysis was used in this study through survey and SPSS content analysis. The researcher found that neuroticism was related to selfpresentation, and agreeableness is related to Facebook …

Athletic Governing Body And Gender Equality In Intercollegiate Athletics, Megan Rabe

Research Papers

No abstract provided.

Women's Speech As Reflected In The Television Series, Friends, Gema Del Moral

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This research focuses on analyzing how contemporary women’s speech is reflected in the popular television show Friends through the characters’ differences in gender and their variances in language forms. The aim of this thesis is to find out if there are certain lexical and syntactical characteristics that distinguish women’s language from men’s language. In this study, a corpus linguistic approach is used to collect the data and make a quantitative analysis based on the verbal communication of the characters involved in Season 4 of Friends. The analysis of the linguistic features of verbal communication of all the characters in Season …