Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

An Examination Of Pervasive Language Around Sexual Harassment Through The Lens Of Anita Hill, Christine Blasey Ford, And #Metoo, Elizabeth Theriault

Honors College

This thesis explores the hypothesis that the #MeToo Movement and Twitter have contributed to the changes in language used by individuals to describe sexual harassment and the survivors that come forward with their stories. To do so, this thesis identified common themes derived from language used in New York Times articles published during the Hill and Thomas hearings of 1991, as well as Tweets published between the dates surrounded the Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh hearings, September 25, 2018 and September 29, 2018, to create a comparable platform for language used in similar settings 27 years apart. It contains a literature …

Playing At Women And Men: A Discourse Analysis Of Gender And Sexuality Performance In An Online Play-By-Post Role-Playing Game, Caitlin M. Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Online play-by-post role-playing games mark the discursive intersection between computer-mediated-communication and gaming. The performance of gender and sexuality is an important aspect of online play-by-post role-playing games.

Although play-by-post role-playing games are open world and do not have the same graphical and technological constraints as other forms of gaming, the performances on them are governed by both explicit and implicit rules. Performances of gender and sexuality are also governed by cultural standards. This thesis seeks to describe how players perform gender and sexuality within these boundaries.

This thesis describes the performance of gender and sexuality on the website Another Day …

Staking Out Gender: A Poststructuralist Analysis Of Gender Roles And Identity In Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Patrick Pittis

Honors College

My aim in writing this thesis was to show that, contrary to the underlying themes of most critical approaches to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, there is more to be gained by approaching the series from a poststructuralist, postmodern feminist perspective, an approach that is aligned with the works of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault. From this approach, one can see that the show’s rhetoric suggests gender is an unfixed, discursively constructed phenomenon, rather than a static oppositional masculine/feminine binary. The show’s subversive rhetoric is indicative of its agency, which can also be identified by the impact BtVS has had on …