Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

“Can You Believe They Think I’M Intimidating?” An Exploration Of Identity In Tall Women, Elizabeth Joy Fuller

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the United States today, there is a dominant cultural narrative telling us that tallness is desirable and enjoyed by those who experience it. Much of the existing research on height correlates tallness with promotions, higher salaries, and general happiness. However, this research does not take into account the limitations of some of the previous research which tends to accept tall people’s vocabulary of motives at face value as the totality of their experience as a tall person. In particular, tall women tend to have much more to say about their lives as tall women than simply that it has …

Her-Storicizing Baldness: Situating Women's Experiences With Baldness From Skin And Hair Disorders, Kasie Holmes

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A general goal to my study was to promote an inclusive approach to baldness by sharing and centering women's experiences with baldness from skin and hair conditions, such as autoimmune alopecia areata conditions and monilethrix. Specifically, a main goal of my study was to her-storicize the lived experiences of women who are bald from skin and hair conditions by examining medical and cultural discourses surrounding these conditions, femininity, and female baldness. Additionally, my study considers strategies of accommodation and resistance that bald women perform in a given context, space, or time. For instance, I consider the ways participants manage their …

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 …

That Is Bad! This Is Good: Morality As Constructed By Viewers Of Television Reality Programs, Joseph Charles Losasso

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Reality shows that feature people going about their presumed daily lives are not base entertainment. Internet message boards about reality programs are sites where moral work happens. Viewers write about the appearance and actions of show characters and construct moral lessons. Through naturally occurring data produced by fans of these shows, I find that viewers generally express a traditional heteronormative morality around class and gender through stating moral lessons, explaining what is wrong with the characters, or through ridicule and praise.