Arts and Humanities Commons^™

More Than Representation Heartstopper: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, Tracyann Josephine Harmer

Communication & Theatre Arts Theses

This thesis is a multimodal critical discourse analysis of Netflix’s Heartstopper, written with the goal of understanding its methods of representation and queer world creation. Through analysis of the ideology of heteronormativity as it relates to masculinity, internalized homophobia, homophobia, and mental health, I expand upon the significance of queer representation for queer audiences, heterosexual audiences, and producers of queer media. Through a nuanced analysis of these themes, I display how and why Heartstopper has had enormous success and expand upon the cultural phenomena surrounding this media. Finally, this thesis places these nuanced analyses into the real-world reaction to …

Self-Sexualization In Relation To Sexual Harassment And Body Shame, Dooyoung Choi, Ju-Young M. Kang, Jieun Kim, Ha Kyung Lee

STEMPS Faculty Publications

While many researchers examined several harmful consequences of the imposed or forced sexualization of women, still little is known about voluntary self-sexualization and its potential effects on women who engage in the practice. Although the idea that self-sexualization is self-fulfilling remains contentious, women who self-sexualize are naturally expected to receive sexualized attention, including unwanted attention. This study starts with the question of whether self-sexualizing women, including those who use self-sexualization as a source of power, experience sexual objectification, measured by nonphysical sexual harassment, and its negative consequence, measured by body shame. Furthermore, we investigate how age moderates the relationship. An …

The Relationship Between Self-Sexualization And Sexually Objectified Experience, Dooyoung Choi, Ha Kyung Lee

STEMPS Faculty Publications

Will women who use their sexuality as a source of power, empowering themselves through self-sexualization, experience negative consequences resulting from sexually objectifying experiences? This study explored the relationship between self-sexualization and sexually objectifying experiences, which leads to body shame, with age as a moderator. An online questionnaire was created to measure the four variables (self-empowering sexualization, general self-sexualization, sexually objectified experiences; body shame). A total of 308 female respondents participated through MTurk, and the data were analyzed with SEM. The findings showed that not all self-sexualizing women experienced a negative consequence from sexually objectified experiences; the use of self-sexualization for …

Leveraging Maternal Rhetoric, Space, And Experience: La Leche League's Emergence As A Counterpublic, Jenny Lynn Moore

English Theses & Dissertations

For over six decades, the international, mother-to-mother breastfeeding support organization La Leche League (LLL) has been helping women breastfeed successfully. LLL was formed at a time when the dominant ideology of scientific motherhood framed mothers as obedient adherents to physicians’ strict guidelines, which encouraged bottle-feeding and discouraged close mother-child bonds. LLL has been credited with challenging scientific motherhood, transforming medical discourse and practices surrounding infant feeding, and prompting the medical professional to accept mothers’ active involvement in decision-making; yet, paradoxically, it has also constrained mothers by reducing women to their maternal biology, discouraging mothers from participating in the public sphere, …

The Prison-Televisual Complex, Allison Page, Laurie Ouellette

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

In 2016, the A&E cable network partnered with the Clark County Jail in Jeffersonville, Indiana, to incarcerate seven volunteers as undercover prisoners for two months. This article takes the reality television franchise 60 Days In as a case study for analyzing the convergence of prison and television, and the rise of what we call the prison-televisual complex in the United States, which denotes the imbrication of the prison system with the television industry, not simply television as an ideological apparatus. 60 Days In represents an entanglement between punishment and the culture industries, whereby carceral logics flow into the business and …

The Affective Politics Of Twitter, Johnathan C. Flowers

Computer Ethics - Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE) Proceedings

Given the increasing encroachment of Twitter into offline experience, it has become necessary to look beyond the formation of identity in online spaces to the ways in which identities surface through the formation of affective communities organized through the use of technocultural assemblages, or the platforms, algorithms, and digital networks through which affect circulates in an online space. This essay focuses on the microblogging website Twitter as one such technocultural assemblage whose hashtag functionality allows for the circulation of affect among bodies which “surface” within the affective communities organized on Twitter through their alignment with and orientation by hashtags which …

Rethinking Algorithmic Bias Through Phenomenology And Pragmatism, Johnathan C. Flowers

Computer Ethics - Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE) Proceedings

In 2017, Amazon discontinued an attempt at developing a hiring algorithm which would enable the company to streamline its hiring processes due to apparent gender discrimination. Specifically, the algorithm, trained on over a decade’s worth of resumes submitted to Amazon, learned to penalize applications that contained references to women, that indicated graduation from all women’s colleges, or otherwise indicated that an applicant was not male. Amazon’s algorithm took up the history of Amazon’s applicant pool and integrated it into its present “problematic situation,” for the purposes of future action. Consequently, Amazon declared the project a failure: even after attempting to …

"The 100" And The Social Contract Of Social Tv, Myles Mcnutt

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

I explore how the controversy surrounding an LGBT storyline on The 100 (2014–) points to the shifting social contracts of social media engagement between fans and the TV industry, as well as the challenges faced by fans and critics who attempted to solidify that contract in the wake of said controversy.

Americans’ Willingness To Communicate With Mexican Immigrants: Effects Of Ethnocentrism And Immigration Status, Stephanie Leanne Harris

Communication & Theatre Arts Theses

Prompted by the 2016 United States (US) Presidential election, the topic of Mexican immigration has come to figure prominently in contemporary societal discourse. This study explores the willingness of US citizens to communicate with Mexicans as a function of US citizens’ ethnocentrism and Mexicans’ immigration documentation status. Specifically, this study measured ethnocentrism (Neuliep & McCroskey, 1997) and general willingness to communicate (McCroskey, 1992) of US citizens and then considered the relationship of these variables to their willingness to communicate with documented and undocumented Mexican immigrants. The study also explored the potential role that various lifespan variables, such as early communication …

Governing Bodies: Caster Semenya And The Rhetorical Management Of Sex And Gender Ambiguity In Professional Athletics, Samuel Robert Evans

English Theses & Dissertations

Sport has long been thought of as an "opiate for the masses," where a collective can forget about social, political, racial, or economic differences and unify to compete in the same space or root for a common team (Eitzen and Sage 202). Scholarship in sports communication, sports rhetoric, and sports sociology, however, has shown that this view of sport as an apolitical cultural institution separate from impactful political debate is oversimplified. Rather, sports are key sites in which beliefs about gender, race, class, and politics are made manifest.

This dissertation uses the case of Caster Semenya, a female South African …

Women's Profiles, Robyn Lynn Cochran

Institute for the Humanities Theses

This creative project chronicles the development of an innovative short-format public radio series called Women's Profiles. I include a range of pertinent materials, including a record of my public radio internship, a grant proposal, and a public radio script. Using a feminist approach, I create a prototype for a radio show in which women subjects/narrators, in a non-hierarchical interview process, share their life experiences in conversation with one ( or more) women interviewers. By incorporating myself as a subject in this document, with work journals and narrative, I give readers an opportunity to appreciate the effort and process involved in …