▼ Tracing the development of genre studies in critical film theory, Barry Keith Grant defines genre movies as "those commercial feature films which, through repetition and variation, tell familiar stories with familiar characters in familiar situations" (xv). While Grant explains that early genre analyses focused primarily on gangster films and westerns (xv), broad conceptualizations of what constitutes a genre, such as that offered above, spelled the expansion of genre criticism to include a wide spectrum of film types. Ranging from melodrama to film noir, from musicals to war films, and everywhere in-between, genre criticism lends itself to innovation and expansion. It is in this space that I would like to discuss films targeted toward an adolescent female audience as a genre.Common to many of the films in this genre is the presence of a tomboy character. Coded as gender outlaw/transgressor, the tomboy character poses a potential threat to hegemonic gender constructs. This threat, however, is often recuperated narratively by figuring the tomboy's transgressions as temporary. The containment of the tomboy character throughout the course of the character's development thus limits the transgressive potential of these films. Despite these limitations, however, it is possible to read these films against the grain and thus resist the narrative recuperation of these tomboy characters. Searching the subtexts allows space for the reader to put the film to what Andrew Britton terms "unauthorized use" (201). These genre films then perform a double-edged and contradictory function, one that simultaneously enables and contains gender disobedience. My thesis explores those contradictions in six films representative of the genre. Advisors/Committee Members: Mayne, Judith.

▼ Scholarly attention to cinematic adaptation remains a neglected site of inquiry in contemporary cinema, literary, and cultural studies. The lack of attention may be due in part to the theoretical limitations of scholarship on adaptation and the moralistic systems of evaluation it relies upon, usually aimed at assessing a text’s faithfulness to source material. This dissertation intervenes in traditional understandings of cinematic adaptation by proposing that adaptation is a site of social transformation, and an important technology in the mapping of historical and social time. In this dissertation, I address the distinctive racial logics instigated by the events of September 11, 2001, and the role of the adaptive process in shaping their circulation in American culture. I argue that adaptation and post-9/11 racial logics share similar meaning-making processes. They both transplant ‘old’ narratives into new settings, signifying a new location in time and space through repetition and reiteration. This alignment allows racial logics to appropriate the adaptive process, and introduce particular racial narratives and ideologies into the textual meaning-making process. Not only do these narratives articulate regimes of space, time, gender, and race that reflect the effects of racialization after 9/11, but they also help to create models of citizenship complicit with a post-9/11 racial order. Focusing on women writers and filmmakers from the South Asian and Iranian diasporas, I examine how post-9/11 racial logics align with cinematic adaptation through three sites of citizenship formation: the transformation of women’s political performance and self-making in the adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s novel Persepolis; the creation of female cosmopolitan subjects in Gurinder Chadha’s retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in her film Bride and Prejudice; and the distinct engagement between gender and the nation in the representations of South Asian American citizenship in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake and its adaptation by filmmaker Mira Nair. The influence of post-9/11 racial logics on the adaptive process, in each of these texts, results in images of female citizenship that adhere to a post-9/11 racial order, prefacing modernness, cosmopolitanism, and a Westernized, liberal feminist point of view. While cinematic adaptation works as a technology of racialization, the female-female authorial pairings that I examine in this dissertation do on occasion subvert the patriarchal regimes that keep post-9/11 racial logics in place. As a result, Chadha, Satrapi, and Nair also use the adaptive process to speak back to the masculinist narratives of loss, heroics, and hostilities popularized in the wake of 9/11. Advisors/Committee Members: Mizejewski, Linda.

Advisors/Committee Members: Mayne, Judith.

▼ This thesis explores how discourses of gender, sexuality, race, and class reveal themselves in two texts by The University of Tennessee's women's basketball Head Coach, Pat Summitt. I examine Reach for the Summitt and Raise the Roof via a feminist lens to explore the ways in which Summitt understands and describes herself as a leader of young women. An analysis of Summitt's texts and coaching strategies exposes the impact of male models of leadership and coaching paradigms, and the negotiations made by female coaches to fit into the patriarchal institution of sport. The thesis focuses on the rhetorical strategies utilized by Summitt to negotiate her socially constructed roles of woman and coach. Ultimately, I contend that coaching and rhetorical strategies employed by Summitt fail to challenge the male models and power structure of sport. Summitt's style reproduces rather than defies dominant gender ideology of women in sport. I offer suggestions on imparting tenets of feminist pedagogies into a coaching methodology to provide a way in which male hegemony in sport may be challenged. Advisors/Committee Members: Fonow, Mary Margaret.

▼ In Mexico, as in the United States, gender categories are based on the feminine/masculine dichotomy, generally assigned to a specific sex. This either/or dichotomy is also present in how dominant meanings about femininity/womanhood are constructed within the Mexican, Chicano, and many Latin American cultures. The images and stories of their most popular female icons, LaMalinche, La Llorona, and La Virgen de la Guadalupe, are present in folk tales, music, poetry, movies, and literature. Through them, womanhood is represented through opposites: the virgin-whore, pure-sensual, honorable-immoral woman.Male dominated institutions, such as the (Mexican) Catholic Church, have built a solid foundation for the strictly defined and assigned categories of gender that limit women's options for freedom, autonomy, and mobility. Mexican, Chicana, and Latina women in general are affected by the ways in which social and religious institutions shelter these three images. Many Chicana and Latina feminists have argued that significant factors in women's oppressions are the pervasive meanings encoded in their representations of appropriate and inappropriate womanhood. Through different forms of appropriation, these women have, in turn, re-visited and re-invented the stories of these images by producing alternative empowering meanings.The processes of constructing meanings constitute technologies of meaning. Technologies of appropriation, on the other hand, allow Latina and Chicana women to remove meanings of domination from an object and transform them through the construction of new empowering meanings. In this context, centers and margins are constantly involved in appropriation, production, re-production, and consumption of meanings. This project is concerned with how the images of La Malinche, La Llorona, and La Virgen de la Guadalupe are used as tools of both technologies of meaning and technologies of appropriation, controlling and empowering Latina and Chicana women's lives.This analysis is framed by the theoretical models on technologies and appropriation provided by writings of Chicana feminist Chela Sandoval and science and technology theorist Ron Eglash. Through their models, I am able to position these three female icons as essential tools of these technologies as they work in the production and re-production of Latina and Chicana womanhood. Technologies of meaning and appropriation have been central for the survival of these images through centuries of social, political, geographical, and economic change. Because we can trace these images and their meanings throughout history and because of the abundant literature on them, La Malinche, La Llorona, and La Virgen de la Guadalupe become very useful tools in the study of both hegemonic ideologies on gender and competing voices challenging them. Advisors/Committee Members: Lee, Valerie.

Advisors/Committee Members: Robertson, Claire.

▼ This dissertation explores the ways in which the problem of violence against women has been constructed as a public and social problem in South Korea. Violence against women is a common problem that women share around the globe; at the transnational level, the women's human rights framework has been widely accepted and celebrated by human rights activists as the best way to combat violence against women. However, the experience of activists at the local level suggests they confront serious, contextual obstacles to this framework, forcing them to develop a more culturally relevant framing.Dissertation research was based on multiple methods, including document research, in-depth and semi-structured interviews with key actors, participant observation, frame analysis and institutional ethnography. The dissertation analyzes several key issues. First, the reasons behind and ways in which Korean feminist activists constructed a framework emphasizing "preservation of the family" as a tool to elicit public and political support is the major focus of the dissertation. Second, how, why and with whom they formed strategic coalitions is examined extensively. And third, the dissertation analyzes debates and disagreements among local feminists over strategic decisions such as framing of issues, coalition building, divisions among feminists, and the goal of prioritizing laws to eliminate violence against women. Because of the globalization of human rights language to combat violence against women, the dissertation explores the dilemmas that locally situated feminists confronted in their political and social contexts. Findings include the following. Although women's human rights and legislative change were agreed upon as the best approaches to socially construct the notion of gender violence and to challenge patriarchal discourse and practices about domestic violence, locally situated women activists may feel forced to rely on a more culturally resonant framing to gain attention and support. This can happen even when they prefer a human rights framework. Therefore, the dissertation suggests that feminist debates surrounding the usefulness of human rights language or that equate such language with imperialist Western feminist practices need to be productively reconstructed. One useful way to achieve this is to focus on the situational reality of cultural entrapment that local feminist anti-violence activists may confront in different cultural contexts. Advisors/Committee Members: Rakowski, Cathy.

▼ In this dissertation, I use contemporary Chinese immigrant women’s visual and literary narratives to examine gender, race, ethnicity, migration, immigration, and sexual experiences in various power discourses from a transnational perspective. In particular, I focus on the relationship between body memories and history, culture, migration and immigration portrayed in these works. I develop and define “the sent-down body,” a term that describes educated Chinese urban youths (also called sent-down youths in many studies) working in the countryside during the Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The “sent-down body” in this context and in my analysis is the politicized and sexualized migrant body. The term also describes previous sent-down youths’ immigration experiences in the United States, because many of them became immigrants in the post-Cultural Revolution era and are usually described as “overseas sent-down youths” (yangchadui). Therefore, the “sent-down body” is also the immigrant body, and it is sexualized and racialized. Moreover, the “sent-down body” is gendered, but I study the female “sent-down body” and its represented experiences in specific political, historical, cultural, and sexual contexts. By using “the sent-down body” as an organizing concept in my dissertation, I introduce a new category of analysis in studies of Chinese immigrants’ history and culture. I use the term “the sent-down body” to explore a new terrain to study representations of historical, cultural, and political experiences in the context of body memories and coerced or voluntary human movement in physical or symbolic locations. The focus on Chinese immigrant women’s cultural production also helps enrich studies of new Chinese immigrants’ experiences by treating them as part of Asian American immigrants’ experiences. Advisors/Committee Members: Mizejewski, Linda.

▼ My project investigates the ways that the representation of Black female revolutionary activists during the 1970s produced images and narratives of justice that have informed the artistic work of Black women over the past 30 years. My analysis begins with Black revolutionary icons, Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver, and the various historical discourses that informed the circulation, consumption and meaning of their images. Photographic images of these prominent Black female activists circulated in the sixties and seventies and produced important narratives about the primacy of Black male experience as representative of the Black liberation struggle. They also contributed to the mythological, Amazonian image of Black womanhood that developed into filmic images in blaxploitation films, featuring actresses like Pam Grier and Tamara Dobson. These films reflected anxieties about gender, race and sexuality.My analysis of visual images of icons such as Davis and Grier are linked to a legacy of revolutionary Black feminist rhetoric, representation and critique that continued in the literature of Black women in the eighties. Revolutionary imagery and Black feminist rhetoric embedded in the work of Black female writers and poets, such as Alice Walker and Audre Lorde, provided a space for a more complex and nuanced articulation of Black female revolutionary womanhood. More specifically, their use of the image of the Amazon and the willingness of Lorde and Walker to explore a Black female experience that included both strength and vulnerability were crucial to the development and visual articulation of revolution that emerged in work of Black women in the early nineties. The work of Black female artists such as Erykah Badu and Me'shell Ndegéocello are examples of the ways that young Black female musicians have appropriated and rearticulated Black feminist revolutionary rhetoric, iconography and aesthetics from the 1970s to explore what it means to be a Black female revolutionary. Through an analysis of the visual aspects of performances by Badu and Ndegéocello, my research illuminates the multiple ways that images of Black female revolutionaries continue to play a key role in the articulation of Black feminist liberation politics. Advisors/Committee Members: Mayne, Dr. Judith.

▼ The Parental Rights movement and its relationship to the growing trend of abstinence-only sex education in United States public schools has not yet been addressed by feminist scholars or other progressive health advocates. This thesis examines how public policy on sex education has been influenced by the Parental Rights movement, and how both the movement and the abstinence education currently mandated by federal law are associated with the Christian Right. Specifically, I explain the correlation between the Parental Rights movement and abstinence-only public policy through a rhetorical analysis of the movement's texts and the abstinence policy itself. Evident in parental rights rhetoric are multiple definitions of "public problems," which I have categorized as sexual "immorality," gender role transgression, and teenage pregnancy. I focused my analysis on the construction of these "public problems" in the rhetoric of both the Parental Rights movement and U.S. government documents. My findings indicate that the Parental Rights movement was successful in its promotion of abstinence-only curriculum policy because its cultural values, evident through its construction of "public problems," mirrors the cultural values present in U.S. federal legislation. That is, the cultural narratives of Judeo-Christian moralism and democratic liberalism are embedded in Parental Rights rhetoric and this is turn expedites the abstinence-only policy the movement proposes. Moreover, my research indicates that the "public problems" constructed in the rhetoric primarily focus on the female sexual subject. For example, in the texts I analyze, the "public problems" of pre-marital sex, "out-of-wedlock" births, poverty, and female autonomy are each listed as evidence in support of increased regulation of the female sexual subject. In this manner, abstinence-only sex education is an example of paternal (state) power and social regulation of the female subject. My findings confirm the importance of a feminist response, and opposition, to the Parental Rights movement and abstinence-only sex education public policy. Ultimately, a feminist response would articulate the sexual rights of adolescents, and adolescent females especially, while calling for comprehensive sex education in all public schools. Advisors/Committee Members: Bohmer, Carol.

Advisors/Committee Members: Mayne, Judith.

▼ Since the mid-1990s, Somali refugees have been resettling in Columbus, Ohio, which is a large city in the Midwest of the United States. In 1990, there were less than 100 Somalis living in the Columbus metropolitan area, while the current estimate is that between 40,000 and 60,000 Somali refugees are Columbus residents. This population continues to grow and constitutes the second largest community of Somali refugees in the United States. The Somali community in Columbus is almost entirely Muslim, and this creates particular challenges in the post 9/11 era and within the specific context of Columbus, which has never before seen a high influx of African refugees or Muslims into the community. Situating my fieldwork with this Somali community within existing debates in feminist theory concerning multiculturalism and women's rights, I examine the representations and narratives that Somali Muslim women and men identify as dominant in the Western media concerning their community. In addition, I explore Columbus Somalis' discursive and material practices of resistance to these narratives. I employ feminist ethnography to gather and analyze what I have identified as narratives of alienation that predominate in both discursive constructions of Somalis as well as interactions between Somalis and non-Somalis in Columbus. These narratives of alienation are gendered and racialized, relying on Orientalist images of Islam to construct discursive divisions within the Columbus community that have material repercussions for Somali women and men. Somali men and women are differently framed by narratives of alienation and have differing reactions and resistance strategies as a result. For Somali women, beginning to wear the hijab is an important practice of resistance to narratives that construct them as inherently subjugated. Somali men's resistance strategies differ because they position themselves as agents in pursuit of the American Dream in order to contest narratives of alienation. In calling attention to these narratives and resistance strategies, I lay the groundwork in this dissertation to explore in my future work how feminist directives can be employed productively in improving women's lives in minority cultures without reinforcing larger narratives of alienation between hegemonic America and newly arrived immigrant groups. Advisors/Committee Members: Shuman, Amy.

▼ A proslavery advocate and anti-suffrage rhetorician, Louisa McCord's writing serves as an interesting example of the types of arguments advanced as foundational fictions of both "race" and "womanhood," explicitly conveying the personal stakes she had in slavery and the racial economy of meaning supporting the southern slaveocracy. Whether addressing the issues of slavery, women, theoretical equality, racial superiority, abolition, or the economy, McCord structured her arguments around essentialized binary oppositions. Ultimately, all of McCord's arguments rested upon tropes of race. McCord's writings operate along explicit constructions of blackness, womanhood, and implicitly whiteness, signifying upon a relatively new tradition of essentialist racial discourses. These socially constructed discourses, essentialized notions of race and gender which I refer to as foundational fictions, remain central to McCord's writing, serving as the context around and from which she builds her arguments. Employing the tools of both intertextual and intersectional methods of analysis, I engage in an interrogation of McCord's work in order to determine how the writings of McCord contributed to the construction of foundational fictions which consciously influenced racial economies of meaning prior to the Civil War, fictions which continue to carry currency within the national imagination. Ultimately this thesis focuses on the (de)construction of essentialized identities, calling into question the imperative to create, bring into being, disempowering differences which have resulted in very real material inequalities among persons differentially situated within the American social context. Advisors/Committee Members: Lee, Valerie.

▼ Anti-pornography feminists argue that pornography eroticizes violence against women by focusing on male pleasure and dominance, using visual techniques that objectify female bodies. Alternatively, “pro-pornography” feminists argue that not all pornography uphold male dominance and question whether porn’s explicit style is necessarily “bad” for women. This thesis examines these debates, as well as the connected feminist discourse around penetration, heterosexuality, and S/M, to analyze Bend Over Boyfriend 2 (1999). Written, directed, and produced by feminist sex-activists Shar Rednour and Jackie Strano for the mainstream (heterosexual) market, BOB 2 features male receptive anal sex given by (phallic) women. Although the film’s visual style resembles mainstream pornography, I argue that the film’s plot critiques dominant heterosexual sex scripts and offers new, less restrictive, sexual possibilities for both men and women.Since such a reading implies that the film can potentially change people’s sexual behaviors and sexual self-images, I deviate from standard textual analysis in order to address this claim. Drawing from social movement theory, I examine the filmmakers’ intentions and outline how viewers and the adult industry have received the film. My specific purpose for blending textual analysis and social movement theory—two very different bodies of knowledge – is to avoid conflating the subversive potential of representations and performances like BOB 2. The “evidence” I present, such as viewer appreciation and industry accolades, suggests that BOB 2 does encourage individuals to change their opinions about “proper” gender roles and sexual scripts. Since the “personal is the political,” this individual change could also indicate social change in our culture’s sexual values.Suggesting that BOB 2 causes or encourages social change also indicates a large shift in what is considered feminist activism. The film is a product consumed on the marketplace, thus BOB 2’s “subversive” potential occurs within the capitalist patriarchy. Traditionally, feminists have sought methods of activism and change that operate outside of capitalism; therefore, I examine feminism’s relationship to capitalism and suggest that working within the system is not inherently negative. I argue that Rednour and Strano are able to successfully market pro-sex feminist politics through the commercial film. Advisors/Committee Members: Wilson, Ara.

▼ “Care” in relationships between disabled and nondisabled partners is typically constructed as a binary between care-givers and care-receivers. In other words, the disabled partner is represented as only a care-receiver and the nondisabled partner as only a care-giver. This dependency dynamic desexualizes nondisabled/disabled relationships because the care burden is expected to interfere with sexual intimacy. This image of care and sexuality between disabled/nondisabled partners can be found in a variety of fields and discourses that touch the lives of people with disabilities and their partners. For example, in the applied fields (e.g., rehabilitation, medicine, counseling) the assumption that nondisabled partners experience only burden is frequently built into research designs and it is rare for such studies to even measure sexual and marital satisfaction or positive aspects of caregiving. Similarly, contemporary feminist research constructs nondisabled partners as victims of a system that refuses to help caregivers, statistically female. It is true that family caregivers need help, but it is symptomatic of our beliefs about disability in intimate relationships that the disabled partners are erased in much feminist care research. Even in the disability rights movement, care is often downplayed because, in a culture that views care so negatively, it is only a liability to draw attention to personal care needs. Disability rights advocates prefer to emphasize the similarities between disabled and nondisabled people. Thus, contemporary feminist research, the applied fields, popular culture and the disability rights movement—all relatively disparate discourses—engage in a surprisingly coherent, negative image of care in intimate relationships.The voices of people involved in disabled/nondisabled intimate relationships are missing from this picture. This project turns to self-representations of people in disabled/nondisabled intimate relationships to illuminate alternative understandings of care and sexuality. It combines data from focus groups, autobiographies, and documentaries made by people with disabilities and/or their partners. Contrary to dominant representations of care in disabled/nondisabled relationships, this research suggests that the boundary between caregiver and care-receiver is often blurred. That is, the disabled partner gives care and the nondisabled partner received care and vise versa. In addition, physical care is often part of sexual intimacy. Advisors/Committee Members: Burack, Cynthia.

Advisors/Committee Members: Mayne, Judith.

▼ My dissertation examines the construction of the contemporary Chinese women’s movement against domestic violence. It explores the anti-DV campaign in China within the global context of women’s transnational human rights campaigns against gender violence and historical factors (local and global) associated with the origin and work of the Network/Research Center for Combating Domestic Violence (the DVN), a new women’s non-governmental organization in Beijing with an unprecedented and exclusive commitment to the fight against domestic violence in China. Specifically, my analysis interrogates the DVN as a global-local interface for women’s rights that usually emphasizes initiatives at the global level and their “impact” on women’s organizing at the local level. My case study finds that transnational feminist advocacy activism, which has made violence against women an international policy issue through application of a human rights framework, provides crucial political opportunities and economic resources for women’s local political organizing. For anti-DV activism in the civil society sector of China, the processes of the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995 and the international donors who fund Chinese women’s NGOs are particularly important. However, Chinese woman have not bee passive followers of their Western sisters, nor is violence against women an imposed agenda or imported ideology. In fact, for DVN activists, mobilizing against domestic violence and establishing a specialized NGO to address this issue went beyond the goal of combating domestic violence. To raise social awareness and promote institutional action, the DVN focuses on inculcating gender and human rights perspectives in local agencies and adopts an “engaging” approach to the state through the official women’s organization, a strategic process shaped by local relations of power. In sum, my dissertation argues that local women’s activism forms a critical – though under-studied and under-recognized – site through which a global feminist cause (in this case VAW as a human rights violation) is advanced in locally appropriate ways that feed back into the cause’s increasing importance on the global agenda. Evidence comes primarily from archival research, observations and interviews with DVN activists. Advisors/Committee Members: Rakowski, Cathy.