▼ Iraqis who worked with the US occupation Army in Iraq after the war in 2003 experienced extraordinary challenges and risks as a result of their jobs. My thesis examines the experiences of these Iraqis who worked for the US Army in Iraq and who eventually immigrated to the United States. The study explores this experience by focusing on (a) the immense need to hire native Iraqis to mediate between US troops and locals due to the poor linguistic and cultural preparations of the US Army, (b) the significance of these local linguistic and cultural mediators and their critical roles, and (c) the risks these Iraqis experienced and their immigration and adjustment experience in the US. Drawing attention to the unknown destiny of thousands of Iraqis who helped America in Iraq, this study engages the testimonies of six of US-affiliated Iraqis and four US veterans of Iraq. My ethnography and data analysis reveal that these native Iraqis provided the US Army with an abundant and cheap source of linguistic, cultural, and mediation services without which the US troops would not have had the ability to function in Iraq. However, these Iraqis occupy a historically awkward and ambiguous position as natives who collaborate with invading forces. As a result, at least hundreds of them were murdered by insurgent and extremist groups. In this thesis, I provide evidence that the courage and the services these Iraqis provided qualify them to be considered as honorable members of the US armed forces and to be rewarded as the “unknown soldiers” of the Iraq war. The US government made serious and sincere endeavors to protect the lives of these Iraqis and their families by legislating Special Immigrant Visa programs since 2006 to allow some of them resettle in the US. However, since US forces will withdraw completely from Iraq on December 2011, I contend that the US has a moral responsibility to protect the lives of thousands of other Iraqis who assisted America and who remain in Iraq fearful for their lives and those of their families. Advisors/Committee Members: Menon, Sridevi.

▼ Hunting things and saving people. This is the plot and purpose of Eric Kripke's ongoing CW series Supernatural on the most surface level. Despite the overt fantasy which frames the series, it is better defined as a drama which explores the depths of not only family but also class. Fans and critics both have discussed the ways in which Kripke was constructed family and masculinity. Oddly, though, discussions of class have been surprisingly sparse in both critical and fan circles. Likewise, there is only a small pool of literature that focuses on the theoretical and lived experience of white trash. White trash, of course, is in and of itself a term that is hotly debated. What does it mean? Who does it include? Is it even real? Who is included within the umbrella of white trash? Who decides who fits within this rubric? Through out this project, these two discourses will be joined together in order to broaden the scope of conversations within both spheres. Chapters including the genealogy of white trash, the aesthetics and commodification of white trash, and the construction of a specifically homosocial white trash family use Supernatural as a case study for the ways in which contemporary meditated American culture views or, more aptly, does not view class. Advisors/Committee Members: Gajjala, Radhika.

▼ This dissertation critically evaluates the concepts of tolerance and toleration and how these two ideas are often deployed as the appropriate response to any perceived difference in American culture. Using young adult literature about the Holocaust as a case study, this project illustrates how idealizing tolerance merely serves to maintain existing systems of power and privilege. Instead of using adolescent Holocaust literature to promote tolerance in educational institutions, I argue that a more effective goal is to encourage readers’ engagement and acceptance of difference. The dissertation examines approximately forty young adult novels and memoirs on the subject of the Holocaust. Through close readings of the texts, I illustrate how they succeed or fail at presenting characters that young adults can recognize as different from themselves in ways that will help to destabilize existing systems of power and privilege. I argue this sort of destabilization takes place through imaginative investment with a literary “Other” in order to develop a more cosmopolitan worldview. Using the theories of Judith Butler, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Gerard Delanty I contended that engagement with and appreciation of difference is possible when reading young adult Holocaust literature. By looking at how Jewish, Roma-Sinti, disabled, and homosexual victims are portrayed I illustrate how victimized populations are represented as vulnerable and grievable in ways that will help readers understand how particular populations were viewed as less than human and targeted for cultural annihilation as well as physical death. I also look at how Germans and neo-Nazis are portrayed in young adult literature, arguing for nuanced portrayals of the Germans themselves and how unethical choices are represented. I also remind readers not all books are created in ways that enable cosmopolitan engagement; many fail on the grounds of historical inaccuracies, vague characterizations, and the presentation ongoing stereotypes. The ultimate goal of the project was to challenge rigid binary systems of identity categorization and to encourage readings of the literature that contest ongoing unequal distributions of power and privilege. Young adult Holocaust literature has the potential to do this, but it must be reconceptualized as a tool that can do other work besides teaching tolerance. Advisors/Committee Members: Griech-Polelle, Beth.

▼ This latest moment of feminism has been marked by a surge of energy around femininity and the potentially radical and queer pleasures feminists might find in feminized gender expressions. In both academic and popular contexts, contemporary feminist fascination with femininity is discussed as two separate phenomena: as evidence of a third wave feminist “reclamation” of femininity amongst young and largely heterosexual-identified women on the one hand, and as evidence of a “revival” of femme identity practices in queer communities on the other. These kinds of clear delineations between feminists based on sexual identity and age persist despite efforts in queer and feminist theory to disrupt notions of stable and coherent identity. However, viewing femme and non-queer-identified third wave feminists in isolation to each other ignores how both of these groups are innovating expressions of femininity which reject heteronormative expectations. By thinking differently about how individuals relate to each other, we can see tenuous but telling affinities between femme and third wave feminists, and imagine models for feminist organizing around such affective crossings. In this literary study, I argue that femme and non-queer-identified third wave feminists have similar understandings of their femininities and their erotic desires, if not necessarily similar sexual experiences or partners. Specifically, I trace how the affects of irony and hunger travel within and between femme theory and third wave theory as partially shared sensibilities. Ironic femininities are constituted in femme and third wave discourse as self-reflexive, deliberately cultivated and chosen feminized gender expressions which resist repressive patriarchal ideals. Furthermore, both queer femmes and heterosexual-identified third wave feminists employ a sensibility of hunger to recode feminized sexual modalities like openness, vulnerability and submission, and to pursue ways of fucking and loving outside of heteronormative models. In order to examine this largely unacknowledged and implicit relationship, I use Jose Esteban Munoz’s theory of queer relationality and Ann Cvetkovich’s concept of “literary publics” as the framework of this study. I argue that feminist coalition building around affect would offer us the chance to explore connections between feminists of various ages and sexual identifications that we currently ignore. Advisors/Committee Members: Albertini, Bill.

▼ (Dis)Articulating the Frontier Body examines the discursive formation of the body in the history and mythology of the American West. This project examines the body as a “myth-artifact,” or a latent site for the prefiguration and emergence of myth, and an apparatus for refracting and compounding ideas. From the colonial period through the nineteenth century, paradigms for both interpreting and representing the body promoted the expansion of empire, defined bodily alterity, and constituted a burgeoning national popular culture. Bodies and their disassembled parts entered into circuits of capital accumulation, transatlantic entertainment, and narrative networks. Harnessed as scientific specimens, entertainment commodities, disciplinary spectacle, and political propaganda, bodies and bodily appendages performed vital cultural work in legitimating and narrating the movement of the western frontier. Central to this dissertation is the value of the body as both an artifact and metaphor which signified the parameters of racial and regional identity, contributed to the formation of the American character on the frontier, and provided a commercially and scientifically validated narrative of civilization and progress. Themes of bodily dismemberment, prosthetic reassembly, and macabre exhibition symbolized violence and established an exportable national myth of the heroic settlement of the West. Bodily artifacts, prosthetic appendages, and spectral bodies augmented ideas about progress, territory, technology, and identity. They were engaged in the politics of racial difference and hierarchical entitlement to knowledge and power, as well as signifying the colonization of unruly territories and subjects. In the discourse of the frontier West, the body both conjured and denatured reality, contributing to the legacy of a chimerical regional history. This project concludes by challenging the legacy of the frontier as a postmodern vanishing point marked by the successive diminishment of materiality and affect, showing how contemporary authors such as Cormac McCarthy and Robert Coover counter the purported disappearance of populations and tangible history with a residual historical memory experienced through the body. Advisors/Committee Members: Berry, Ellen.