Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Inside Out: Masculinity From Delinquent Cinema To New Queer Cinema, 1983-1991, Blue Aslan Philip Profitt

Theses and Dissertations

With the rise of multiplexes, cable television, and video rental stores, the 1980s became a golden age for youth cinema in the U.S. While many scholars have researched this decade’s youth films, much of that attention is focused on the films of John Hughes and his collaborators, whose work mostly follows affluent teenagers enjoying high school traditions. This dissertation fills gaps in youth cinema scholarship by examining the period’s delinquent films. By studying six delinquent films released between 1983 and 1991, this project looks to the understudied connection between 1980s delinquent films and 1990s New Queer Cinema. In contrast to …

Mental Health Needs Among Latina Migrant Farmworkers In The State Of Wisconsin - A Colonial Legacy, Maria Del Carmen Graf

Theses and Dissertations

Latinos have an increased risk for mental health problems due to several factors, including immigration, socio-economic and cultural barriers (Espeleta et al., 2019). Besides mental health risk factors such as gender, lower education attainment, and poverty (Espeleta et al., 2019), Latina migrant farmworkers also face the demands of their domestic roles, which result in work-family conflicts and stress (Arcury et al., 2018). Furthermore, persistent stigma perpetuated primarily by poor health literacy and traditional cultural perceptions and beliefs about mental health hinders their decision to seek mental health treatment (Lopez et al., 2018). To date, there are no scholarly works published …

“Mirrors Can Give Us Space To Imagine…” Representations Of Gender And Sexuality In Bbc’S Dracula (2020), Riana S. Slyter

Theses and Dissertations

What follows discusses how BBC’s Dracula uses character representations, scripted dialogue, and narrative to challenge and perpetuate the dominant ideologies of our society. Dracula exposes the tensions in the growing cultural acceptance of, but also increased resistance to, the fluidity of gender and sexuality in contemporary western culture. I contextualize representations of women and queer characters in Dracula with the broader issues of gender and sexuality in our current socio-political environment. Queer horror looks at Dracula as a text that arouses cultural anxieties concerning sexuality, while also attempting to illustrate fear within queer communities and subcultures. In many ways, the …

Joan Rivers: Comedy And Identity On The Road To Fashion Police, Melanie Gaw

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes how Joan Rivers’ comedy content and style changed during the first 30 years of her career and how these changes impacted Rivers’ presentation of her identity as a Jewish female comedian. This project focuses on Joan Rivers’ career in two sections: her early career with its reliance on a self-deprecatory style of humor spanning roughly from her first appearance on The Tonight Show in 1965 to the early 1980s, and a transitional period in her career that saw a shift toward a celebrity gossip style of humor during the 1980s. I perform textual analyses of some of …

Marriage Maintenance, Miscategorization, And New Manifestations: How People Are Reinforcing And Disrupting Gender And Sexual Inequalities In Married Life, Daniel John Bartholomay

Theses and Dissertations

This research positions marriage as an institution that has historically served to privilege men, masculinity and heterosexuality. Overall, this project is intended to advance our understanding of gender and sexual inequalities in the realms of marriage and family by examining the lived experiences of married people. It draws on data from 41 in-depth interviews conducted with married people living in Wisconsin, many of whom identify as part of the LGBT+ community. Using qualitative social science methods, this research speaks to unanswered questions regarding the capacity of a more gender-fluid society to reshape key social institutions (like marriage) in ways that …

Partisans And Soldiers: Themes Of Gender And The Commemoration Of Jewish Resistance In The Soviet Union During World War Ii, Taylor Marie Dews

Theses and Dissertations

Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, thousands of Red Army soldiers, peasants, and Jewish men, women, and children escaped imprisonment and certain death by fleeing into the vast forests of Belorussia. Using oral histories, archival websites, and survivor testimony, this thesis explores the Soviet partisan units and the Jewish partisan units and family camps that were organized in the forests and raises questions including: How do the experiences of Jewish women in the partisans compare with Jewish women who fought in the Red Army? How are the Jewish partisans remembered around the world today? What postwar …

A New Brand Of Men: Masculinity In French Republican Socialist Rhetoric, Randolph A. Miller

Theses and Dissertations

Social theorist and activist, August Blanqui, used his appearance before court in 1832 to lay out an argument that condemned the present political and economic system and demanded emancipation of the male worker. During his monologue, along with his devastating portrayal of worker misery and systemic corruption, Blanqui made comparisons between the male bourgeoisie and the male proletariat. Recounting the recent overthrow of Charles X for his audience, Blanqui described the “glorious workers” as six feet tall, towering over a groveling bourgeoisie who praised them for their “selflessness and courage.” According to Blanqui, the workers, unlike the aristocracy of wealth …

"Don't Be Such A Girl, I'M Only Joking!" Post-Alternative Comedy, British Panel Shows, And Masculine Spaces, Lindsay Anne Weber

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis discusses the gender disparity in British panel shows. In February 2014 the BBC’s Director of Television enforced a quota stating panel shows needed to include one woman per episode. This quota did not fully address the ways in which the gender imbalance was created. This thesis argues that the gender imbalance stems from post-feminist sensibilities and masculine-centric trends in British comedy and culture. This work demonstrates this through a discourse analysis of the opinions expressed about panel shows by the British popular press and media personalities from 2002 to 2017. The discourse analysis exposes patterns where British producers …

Gender Reflections: A Reconsideration Of Pictish Mirror And Comb Symbols, Traci N. Billings

Theses and Dissertations

The interpretation of prehistoric iconography is complicated by the tendency to project

contemporary male/female gender dichotomies into the past. Pictish monumental stone sculpture

in Scotland has been studied over the last 100 years. Traditionally, mirror and comb symbols

found on some stones produced in Scotland between AD 400 and AD 900 have been interpreted

as being associated exclusively with women and/or the female gender. This thesis re-examines

this assumption in light of more recent work to offer a new interpretation of Pictish mirror and

comb symbols and to suggest a larger context for their possible meaning. Utilizing the Canmore

database, …

Nietzsche's Signpost For Feminism, Sara N. Pope

Theses and Dissertations

This paper focuses on the apparent misogyny and anti-feminism found in Part VII of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (BGE). Following an interpretation put forward by Maudemarie Clark, I argue that Nietzsche’s claims and observations about women are purposely reflective of the dubious metaphysical assumptions of dualism and essentialism maintained with respect to biological sex. Given this, we can see Nietzsche’s text as highlighting the effects of “cultural breeding” in the form of gender. Thus, this paper aims to rehabilitate Nietzsche’s characterizations of women and “woman’s emancipation” as an important signification of the culturally bred, latent discrimination of the sexes, …

Queer Literary Criticism And The Biographical Fallacy, Shawna Lipton

Theses and Dissertations

“Queer Literary Criticism and the Biographical Fallacy” engages with three fields of inquiry within literary studies: queer literary criticism, modernist studies, and author theory. By looking at the critical reception of four iconic queer modernist authors – Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Radclyffe Hall, and Virginia Woolf– this dissertation reinvestigates the relation between criticism and the figure of the author. Queer criticism-- despite its fundamental critique of identity—relies on the identity of the author when it blurs the distinction between the literary text and the author’s biography. Ultimately this work provides a deeper understanding of the queer relation to the modernist …

"I Know I Can't Be The Only Lesbian Out There:" An Inductive Thematic Analysis Of A Virtual Community Of Lesbian Breast Cancer Survivors, Rachael Lynn Wandrey

Theses and Dissertations

Sexual minority women are at a significantly greater risk for developing breast cancer (BC) than heterosexual women. Little is known about the unique BC experiences of lesbian women. The present thesis describes the findings of an inductive thematic analysis of messages posted to a large lesbian-specific discussion forum found on breastcancer.org. Fifteen themes were identified, including privileging sensation over appearance, experiencing heterosexism in medical contexts, believing others perceive a lack of distress over breast loss because of patient’s lesbian sexual orientation, feeling pressure from surgeons to get reconstructive surgery, and viewing the BC journey as a sexual-identity disclosure crisis. In …

Sardanapalus And Gender: Examining Gender In The Works Of Byron And Delacroix, Stacey Schmiesing

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis discusses the gender standards as portrayed in Lord Byron's play Sardanapalus (1824) and Eugène Delacroix's painting Death of Sardanapalus (1828). These Romantic artists were part of a movement that changed gender rules forever. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought about a culture that was more visual than ever and symbols of gender identity were everywhere. Rules of masculinity evolved from valuing raw power to including middle class virtues like moderation. Women continued to be objects of male desire but also began to represent the nation and its history. To explore the specific gender relationships within Byron's play and …

"Tales" Of Text And Culture: Tropes Of Imperialism, Women's Roles, Technologies Of Representation, And Collaborative Meaning-Making In Rita Golden Gelman's Tales Of A Female Nomad, Female Nomad And Friends, And Personal Website, Michelle Lynne Van Wert Kosalka

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines contemporary travel writing specifically created for a popular reading culture, Rita Golden Gelman's Tales of a Female Nomad, Female Nomad and Friends, and personal website. The project is concerned with how culture is continuously represented and shaped through the dialogic interaction between writer and reader, and the subsequent liminal spaces which emerge in moments of meaning-making. Chapter 1 is a close reading of how Gelman's works reinforce and, in some cases, resist, tropes of imperialism. Chapter 2 examines patriarchal gender roles in Gelman's works and the ways in which recent advances in feminist psychiatry and psychology can …

"Murderous Mania": Gender And Homicide In Milwaukee Newspapers, 1840-1900, Kadie Kroening Seitz

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the ways in which Milwaukee's newspapers used gender norms to make sense of acts of murder during the nineteenth century. First, women victims of men's violence are examined, particularly through the lenses of ethnicity, class and race. Women victims who did not fit into middle class gender norms were less likely to be portrayed as "beautiful female murder victims." Then, women perpetrators of violence (not exclusively against men) are discussed, including a specific examination of women's use of an insanity defense. Newspaper tropes used to describe women's motivations for filicide are also examined, and found to vary …