Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, EDU Teaching and Learning

This study is a text-based analysis of the use of the diary form in young adult literature about young women. Drawing upon rhetorical narrative theory, which views narrative as an action in which an author makes particular choices concerning various narrative resources in order to communicate to a reader for a particular purpose, I analyze how authors draw upon the form of the diary as one such narrative resource. My work focuses on various commercially successful and/or critically acclaimed works of YA literature from across time: Go Ask Alice (1971), Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging (1999), Becoming Me (2000), Gabi, A Girl in Pieces (2014), and Popular, A Memoir (2014). In my study, I identify how understandings of the diary as a literary form and a cultural phenomenon inform how it is used to structure works of YA literature. One such understanding of the diary—that it is a form associated with adolescent girls—leads to a second focus within my research. Informed by an understanding of adolescence and of girlhood as culturally constructed concepts, I interrogate how adolescent girlhood is portrayed in the books within my study through their content, their conceptualization of the diarist-narrator, and their construction of the implied youth reader. In each of my chapters, I identify one use of the diary form—as didactic tool, as regulatory device, as form of counter-storytelling, and as neutral vehicle for truth—and consider how that use connects to a larger conceptualization of adolescent girlhood. Across my chapters, I attend to the ways in which young women are frequently positioned as protagonists and as readers as less capable than adults, reifying traditional understandings of power and adolescence. In so doing, this research not only adds to the growing body of work that critically examines literary form in youth literature but also builds upon and extends cross-disciplinary scholarship on how young people are positioned in literature and cultur (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Michelle Ann Abate (Advisor); Caroline Clark (Advisor); James Phelan (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Education; Gender; Language Arts; Literature; Womens Studies

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2025, English

This thesis studies the psychological and emotional tensions embedded in the mother-daughter relationship in Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird through the framework of Sigmund Freud's “The Family Romances.” By examining Lady Bird's narrative arc, this study demonstrates how development and maturity can only be achieved by separating ourselves from the parental figures in our lives. It also shows how the protagonist's desire for autonomy is linked to her turbulent relationship with her mother, who functions as both a mirror and an obstacle.. Through close textual and visual analysis, the paper argues that Lady Bird's rejection of her given name, her fantasies of wealth and belonging, and her eventual geographical and emotional departure from her family home all constitute a Freudian process of individuation known as the “Family Romances”. It is only through this painful detachment that the protagonist begins to view her mother not as a limiting force, but as a complex individual. This understanding marks the emergence of a more integrated and autonomous self.

Committee: Andrew Slade (Committee Chair); Andrew Slade (Advisor); Shannon Toll (Committee Member); Bryan Bardine (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; American Studies; Developmental Psychology; Education; Educational Psychology; Film Studies; Gender; Gender Studies; Literature; Psychology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, EDU Teaching and Learning

This dissertation answers the guiding question how do the narrative elements of character, plot, and storyworld work together to create the young adult contemporary realistic romance (YACRR) genre? With a textset of fourteen YACRR narratives that have been published since 2010, I identify nine generic codes that occur frequently enough to be considered significant to the formulaity of the genre. Through methodologies of desire-centered research (Tuck 2009) and perpetual girlhood (Doermann 2022), I consider which type(s) of girl(s) have historically gotten to see themselves as a love interest and as desirable and how a young reader might metabolize those representations in relation to themself since identity is often shaped through cultural representations and the media provided to them. I employ rhetorical narratology, more specifically, the Rhetorical Model of Audience (Phelan 2020), because of its function in guiding the reader to find the point of the narrative. The point of YACRR narratives, I found, is that they are engaging, as all genre fiction is, but they are also pedagogical in that they provide models to young readers of what a safe and respectful relationship looks like. In this way, YACRR protagonists are both mimetic and thematic characters. Since young adult literature is mostly about first experiences and uncharted territory (Carpan 2004, 2009), being provided with healthy models of romance can help the implied reader, or the narratee, as they navigate new-to-them experiences. In order for this navigation to happen, YACRR protagonists and storyworlds are written to be ordinary so that the reader can slip themselves into the protagonist position and superimpose their own hometown in place of the storyworld in the narrative. In this way, the engagement into the narrative and the pedagogical implications can merge. A double consciousness is at play here because the narratee feels an affinity with the protagonist and the storyworld all the while knowing (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mollie Blackburn (Advisor); Lisa Pinkerton (Committee Member); James Phelan (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; American Studies; Gender; Gender Studies; Literature; Pedagogy; Personal Relationships; Secondary Education; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Drawing from two years of interviews, in-person participant observation, and digital fieldwork with the parents' rights group Moms for Liberty, this dissertation explores the growth of the anti-gender movement in the United States. I explore how and why Moms for Liberty has so quickly succeeded in their efforts to ban gender affirming care for trans youth, bar the discussion of LGBTQ identities and race in K-12 schools, and remove books about race and gender from school and public libraries. Moms for Liberty members situate the hierarchy of the Christian nuclear family as a roadmap for political hierarchy, using their roles as mothers to enshrine the familial subject positions of the Christian nuclear family as the basis for societal order. Arguing that the group achieved mainstream success by mobilizing the figure of the Child in danger, I demonstrate that Moms for Liberty uses normative ideas about childhood innocence and childhood development to radicalize parents into the anti-gender movement. By focusing on how M4L activists construct the Child as the private property of the nuclear family, I further explore how far-right groups situate public institutions as violations of their right to ‘ownership' over children. I conclude by demonstrating how Moms for Liberty's advocacy has contributed to a movement for the partial privatization of the education system at the state level.

Committee: Mary Thomas (Advisor); Jian Chen (Committee Member); Wendy Hesford (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Education; Gender; Gender Studies; Public Policy; Social Research; Social Structure; Womens Studies

Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2024, Creative Writing/Fiction

My Name is Dolores Haze is a first person narration of the life of Dolores Haze, the girl the world came to know as Lolita. The novel begins in 1947 in a small New England town called Ramsdale where twelve-year-old Dolores lives with her alcoholic mother who takes in a houseguest named Humbert Humbert. After experiencing weeks of molestation at the hands of Humbert, Dolores is able to find solace in her connections with other girls both in Ramsdale and at her summer camp. Humbert goes on to kidnap Dolores from camp and takes her on a year-long road trip across the United States after which they end up in a small town called Beardsley. From there Dolores makes an escape plan and must figure out what it means to be in charge of her own survival. In addition to telling the events of Dolores Haze's life, the novel utilizes cut away moments to address rape culture and how Lolita has been historically framed as a love story. Through both of these narrative channels My Name is Dolores Haze explores experiences of girlhood, rage, queerness, dis/empowerment, and precocious knowledge.

Committee: Pauls Toutonghi Ph.D. (Committee Member); Reema Rajbanshi Ph.D. (Committee Chair) Subjects: Fine Arts; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, English

When a children's recital piece from the nineteenth century opens with the interrogation, “Well, Dolly, what are you saying, / When you blink and wink your eyes?” the implication is clear: the doll's silence speaks volumes. Articulating Dolls means to anatomize Dolly's cryptic body, to decipher dolls not just as articulated figures of parts but as articulated figures of speech. Dolls in the Victorian popular imagination are saying something, and this dissertation designs to find out what. Speaking the Victorian pediolect that molded Woman like a statue, played her for a puppet, transacted her like a doll, or took her for a dummy (a sororal synonymy that contemporary Dolls Studies is only just beginning to elaborate), this project dissects the doll-inflected discourse framing femininity to anatomize how true womanhood was made to share the mold with ideal sculpture and other dolliform bodies of man-ufactured perfection. Following an introductory etiology that historicizes definitions of Pygmalionism--a paraphilia that to the Victorians inscribed a desire not for the simulated woman who comes alive but for the Gal(atea) who (re)turns to stone--chapter one emphasizes how the desire for women who were statues(que) compels their decease as the feminine form was sartorially and semiotically impressed into a fashion for mortification. Showing that the sculptural was intrinsically sepulchral, chapter two analyzes the intrinsically (nec)romantic idioms of dollification in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. More expressly executed female bodies are the subject of chapter three, in which ventriloquial phonodolls are made of the morbid (and thus more biddable) “Venuses” in Du Maurier's Trilby and Villiers's The Future Eve. The still(ed) lifes of statues (non) vivants are the focus of Carroll's narrative photography in chapter four, while chapter five filters his Alice books through the author's “photographic memory” of a lost Liddell doll. Decoding the crypsis of girls, or “dolls, (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Michelle Abate (Advisor); Patricia Enciso (Committee Member); Clare Simmons (Committee Member); Victoria Ford Smith (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; British and Irish Literature; Gender Studies; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

The experts of the state and non-state institutions that constitute India's juvenile justice system frame the system as one that protects and cares for vulnerable girls and promotes their healing, empowerment, and rehabilitation. The bodies of knowledge created by the experts of the juvenile justice system erase how caste in the form of Brahmanical patriarchy undergirds India's juvenile justice system. This dissertation argues that India's juvenile justice system is a carceral system that upholds and maintains Brahmanical patriarchy by surveilling, confining, and regulating girls from working-class, oppressed caste, and religious minority communities. Drawing on critical analyses of policy documents and reports and ethnographic research at a juvenile institution in Delhi, I examine how the juvenile justice system conceptualizes and enacts the care and protection of girls. I argue that the juvenile justice system's policies of care and protection punish multiply-marginalized girls by regulating, confining, and fixing girls' sexualities, relationships, and mobilities within the limits of Brahmanical patriarchy. My dissertation employs Dalit feminist epistemologies and centers the voices and experiences of girls confined in juvenile institutions. By examining girls' responses to the juvenile justice system and underlining the complexities of their lives, experiences, and desires, I articulate alternate conceptualizations of care. My dissertation argues that methods and practices rooted in Dalit feminist epistemologies and abolitionist frameworks are critical to the liberation of the multiply-marginalized girls who are confined in India's juvenile institutions. The dissertation draws on and contributes to research in the fields of feminist critiques of Brahmanical patriarchy, feminist perspectives on justice, feminist critiques of the state, childhood and girlhood studies, feminist geography, and feminist critiques of development.

Committee: Mary Thomas Dr. (Advisor); Treva Lindsey Dr. (Committee Member); Mytheli Sreenivas Dr. (Committee Member); Jennifer Suchland Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender Studies; Geography; South Asian Studies; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, English

The Girls' Room: Bedroom Culture and the Ephemeral Archive in the 1990s documents how feminist discourse found itself in an uneasy intimacy with mass culture at the end of the millennium by tracking how girls and young women renegotiated their relationship to mass media from the privacy of their bedrooms. In the mid-1990s, a self-help genre emerged that addressed anxieties about how best to empower the generation of girls growing up in the shadow of the Women's Liberation Movement. These works warned that girls' unregulated access to and consumption of mass media – particularly from their bedrooms – made them more oppressed than any previous generation. At the same time, young women were capitalizing on the privacy of their bedrooms to create zines and comics that radically reconceptualized feminism's presence in public culture. The Girls' Room is the first full-length study to engage the girls' bedroom as a generative space in pop culture and literature that animates competing stories about girls as consumers, media makers, and collectors. Though the bedroom's close ties to domesticity and consumer culture have vexed feminist scholars, I trace how the third wave's call for media literacy was transformed with girls into “media intimacy” in this space. Even now, this relationship continues to shape how we conceive of girlhood as girls bring the world into their bedrooms through their phones.

Committee: Robyn Warhol (Committee Co-Chair); Jared Gardner (Committee Co-Chair); Brian McHale (Committee Member); Laurenn McCubbin (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Film Studies; Gender Studies; Literature; Mass Media; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2020, Educational Leadership

Through a Black Feminist and Black Girlhood Studies lens, this qualitative photovoice study explores the ways in which Black girls construct and make meaning of self and their educational experiences. Five Black adolescent girls from a leadership and mentoring after-school experience took pictures, interviewed, and participated in group discussions to co-create knowledge about themselves and their experiences. Through the analysis, there were four themes that were found. Voice, this highlighted the ways in which the co-researchers felt like they are often not listened to by educators, but also how they insert their voice on their own terms. The second theme, the politics of identity, illuminated how the co-researchers wanted to be judged as individuals, but also acknowledged that they are a part of a larger group (i.e African American and gendered as girls). The third theme, defining self/ Black girlhood displayed the ways in which, the girls chose to define themselves in comparison to how they felt others see them. Finally, the fourth theme, Space & place illustrated what the girls felt people could do in order to improve Black girls experiences in school and allow for space for them to be able to self-define and explore their identities. Through this study, the co-researchers created an emerging framework, Black Girlhood as Visual Oppositional Knowledge.

Committee: Lisa Weems (Committee Chair); Denise Taliaferro Baszile (Committee Member); Brittany Aronson (Committee Member); Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis (Committee Member) Subjects: African Americans; Education; Multicultural Education

BA, Oberlin College, 2019, Art

How do you write about a feeling you do not understand? How do you organize what is purposefully messy? How can you name a ghost of something that you push into the world with your hands? In this thesis, I will explain my practice, form, and material as a way to illuminate my art, along with various readings and philosophies that I use to guide the work.

Committee: Johnny W. Coleman (Advisor) Subjects: Art History; Fine Arts

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2019, English

This thesis is a collection of both flash memoir and longer creative nonfiction essays centered on the intersections of poverty, girlhood, identity, patriarchy, and secrecy, particularly within the matrilineal line of my family. I reflect on the choices poor women make or are forced to make for their families and the resulting consequences. Specifically, my work examines and comments on the lives of poor women and girls in relation to outside patriarchal forces (such as religion, capitalism, and governmental regulation) that make demands on their lives and create decisions based in survival. My examination of these decisions and forces are based in essays primarily about my mother, my grandmother, and myself and the lives we have led and the decisions we made to hide aspects of our pasts and the shame that followed. By using the essay rather than a traditional narrative memoir form, the pieces are able to inhabit a number of different time periods, tenses, and points of view. The essays convey the enduring repercussions of secrecy, a life of poverty in a trailer park where we lived both without men but also in the shadow of them, with an eye toward discovery and understanding.

Committee: Daisy Hernandez (Committee Chair); TaraShea Nesbit (Committee Member); Joseph Bates (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, English

The Narrative Space of Childhood traces the representations of childhood in 21st century Anglophone Arab literature in the diaspora. Concerned with the contemporary moment, this study focuses exclusively on Anglophone Arab coming-of-age narratives published post 2000 including Rabih Alameddine's The Hakawati, Alia Yunis's The Night Counter, Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men, Nathalie Abi-Ezzi's A Girl Made of Dust, Alicia Erian's Towelhead, and Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home. Anglophone Arab writers frequently place children at the center of their literary production, most notably in the midst of conflict-ridden zones besieged by threats of violence, daily terror, and political unrest. Child narrators in Anglophone Arab literature function as reluctant witnesses, innocent bystanders, and unwitting collaborators. In many cases, they become active participants, exercising agency, sometimes finding themselves culpable in the violence. Children frequently offer testimonials, inscribe the battlefield as a playground enacting multiple states of play, become collateral damage dispossessed of home and family, and serve as a repository for collective memory in terms of families, communities, cultures, and generations. Children's perspectives are limited in understanding the confluence of events unfolding within a conflict zone. Their naivety, however, is relatively short-lived. The child's vision provides a piercing, unflinching depiction of history from a vantage point that explodes conventional sentiment in favor of a more penetrating, debilitating, and raw vision of crisis. The figure of the child in 21st century Anglophone Arab diasporic literature interrogates, challenges, and resists facile tropes of sentimentality, nostalgia, and authenticity. Most evident in these works is the child's capacity to instruct, rehabilitate, and complicate adults' beliefs about gender, sexuality, masculinity, femininity, memory, trauma, and play. The post 9/11 Era as it relates to yo (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Martin Ponce (Advisor); Lynn Itagaki (Committee Member); Dorothy Noyes (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; British and Irish Literature; Gender Studies; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2017, American Culture Studies

Media and cultural studies of girlhood have shown that we live in a postfeminist era, when the label “feminism” evokes many negative stereotypes against women demanding greater rights and opportunities whereas eye-catching “girl” figures promote and advertise a stronger vision of femininity in the popular culture market. Tracking how “girls” replace “women” and become favored icons of feminism in contemporary culture, this dissertation analyzes the shifts in cultural depictions of girlhood in the 1960s. Examining magazines and newspapers' coverage of Beatlemania in 1964 and 1965, Twiggy's successful modeling career from 1966 to 1968, and the eventful Miss America pageants from 1968 to 1970, I find that mass media and popular culture institutions presented a series of new images and themes about girlhood that featured romantic desires for male idols, challenges to prevailing definitions of fashionable femininity, and an outspoken approach to controversial political and social issues. These new themes exemplify that the differences between girlhood and womanhood intensified along with the development of feminist movements in the 1960s, when mass media invested in constructing a new girlhood identity as a way to fend off changing views of womanhood and uphold some elements of traditional femininity. This new girlhood is thus an outcome of the oscillation between the feminist counterculture and traditional gender discourses in the 1960s. The development of the new girlhood in the 1960s can help in understanding the consumption of feminism in American culture today, where the power and freedoms the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s promised are taken away from older, professionally accomplished women and reserved for girlish girls and young women.

Committee: Jolie Sheffer (Advisor); Timothy Messer-Kruse (Committee Member); Radhika Gajjala (Committee Member); Andrew Hershberger (Other) Subjects: American History; American Studies; Gender Studies; Mass Media; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, French and Italian

This dissertation reconstructs a narrative trajectory of French-Canadian girlhood in the twentieth-century through literature and film, revealing the French-Canadian girl as temporary sovereign of the contested borderland of her own body. In the works studied in this project, the girl-body emerges as a corps frontalier, a gendered borderland between childhood and womanhood, a space of no-longer/not-yet-ness that disrupts stable, traditional structures of identity and subjectivity. The girl herself, inhabitant of that body, is a troublesome subject-in-process, a figure marked by ambivalence, uncertainty, fluidity, and potentiality. She resists categorization as either child or woman, seeking instead to claim sovereignty over the territory of her body and her destiny as a girl. In many ways, she is like French-Canadian society, perpetually and actively en devenir, always working to define herself. Life in that unstable zone is at once exhilarating and exhausting, and appears untenable – but must this be the case? Or can a new conception of girlhood align with new conceptions of Quebecois(e) nationality to make it possible for both to retain the active potentiality of being mineur(e)? In order to better understand the relationship between feminine adolescence and French-Canadian identity, this project traces the evolution of girlhood as narrated in a set of literary and cinematic works. Chapter 1, a reading of Louis Hemon's Maria Chapdelaine (1913) and Gabrielle Roy's Bonheur d'occasion (1945), addresses the conflict between traditional notions of feminine destiny in French-Canadian culture and the more subversive individual desires of the girls expected to follow those notions, revealing the heavy expectation of almost literal self-effacement imposed upon girls as French-Canadian society prioritizes survivance. The second chapter brings together Anne Claire Poirier's film La fin des etes (1964) and Anne Hebert's novel Kamouraska (1970) to engage with the question (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Danielle Marx-Scouras (Advisor); Jennifer Willging (Committee Member); Wynne Wong (Committee Member) Subjects: Canadian History; Canadian Literature; Canadian Studies; Film Studies; French Canadian Culture; French Canadian Literature; Gender; Gender Studies; Literature; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2016, English

“From the Classroom to the Movement: Schoolgirl Narratives and Cultural Citizenship in American Literature” examines the relationship between girlhood narratives and discourses of cultural citizenship in American literature and human rights rhetoric. This dissertation analyzes the use of girls as symbols of national values in political rhetoric, as well as the relationship between girls as consumers of culture, and the ways in which girls conceive of their own citizenship and their place in American public life through specific political activities such as labor reform and the Civil Rights Movement. These relationships are demonstrated through life-writing such as autobiography and diaries, novels, educational materials, and other documents, which are analyzed using critical theory on gender, citizenship, and sentimentality. The first two chapters consider how girls position themselves as citizens and as members of specific communities in memoirs from immigrants at the turn of the twentieth-century and African American girls involved in the Civil Rights Movement. These chapters take up issues of gender and citizenship, as well as girls' control over narratives about their own lives, and how they respond to popular discourses of citizenship contemporary to their writing. The later chapters focus on these issues in transnational contexts, and consider the connections between citizenship, human rights, and cultural ideas about gender and childhood, as well as histories of oppression, empire, and neoliberal and capitalist means of circulating resources and “awareness.” The third chapter analyzes the construction of girlhood and citizenship on the border between the United States and Mexico, as well as issues around the dramatization of traumatic violence, through examining media accounts, novels, poetry, and testimonios about the feminicide in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The final chapter critiques the construction of girlhood and discourses of compassion used in campaigns s (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Anita Mannur (Committee Chair); Andrew Hebard (Committee Member); Edwards Erin (Committee Member); Kulbaga Theresa (Committee Member); Albarran Elena (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Gender Studies

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2015, English

thumbelina sleepwalk is a collection of poems concerning the performance of femininity, “girliness”, and the vulnerable female body, deriving their content and structure from dream and nightmare material. The poems travel the unconscious cinematically, clashing the grotesque with the traditionally female or “girly”.

Committee: Catherine Wagner (Advisor) Subjects: Gender; Language Arts; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2015, Educational Leadership

This dissertation calls attention to the complex issue of how girls construct identity in schools given interactions that challenge them to negotiate their femininities and intellect in different ways. At the root of this problem are the conflicting messages about gender norms and anti-intellectualism that schools create, reproduce, and reinscribe, placing girls who are labeled as “gifted” in a double-bind in terms of performing social and student identity at school. Using a lens of critical theory, this study critiques the small, everyday school-based rituals based on interactions between teachers and students that influence fourth- and fifth-grade girls as they attempt to “do girl” and “do gifted” in their regular classrooms, in the gifted program in which they participate, and in the informal spaces of the school building. Through ritual critique, the role of power within those observed interactions and performances is uncovered and a space is revealed for reflecting upon the diversity of the girls' lived realities. It is the hope of the author that this dissertation opens up and adds to the dialogue about the contexts in which young girls are growing up and that the questions raised in this study can help reposition schools as sites of empowerment rather than struggle.

Committee: Richard Quantz (Advisor); Thomas Poetter (Committee Member); Lisa Weems (Committee Member); Susan Mosley-Howard (Committee Member) Subjects: Education; Educational Leadership; Educational Sociology; Gender; Gender Studies; Gifted Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, Interdisciplinary Programs

New Media, New Maternities: Representations of Maternal Femininity in Postfeminist Popular Culture argues that new media facilitate the construction of new maternities in popular culture through the privileging of visuality as the primary way to celebrate and/or regulate maternal bodies; through the veneration of self-surveillence, self-discipline, and the willing subjection of oneself to feedback as the primary form of gendered citizenship and participation in these spaces; and through the processes of normativity and normalization fed by user-generated comments and feedback. Young women increasingly rely on new media in order to comply with postfeminist demands, and these technologies are also spaces where fantasies are built and anxieties are fueled, and these two elements frequently merge at the intersection of normative femininity and maternity. Postfeminism describes the ways the liberal feminism has been recognized by social institutions and mainstream culture as commonsense. It also explains the ways the feminist language of choice and empowerment has been co-opted and re-defined for a new generation of young women who find their power through (hetero)sexuality, consumption, and decisions to push marriage and motherhood to the backburner. In recent decades, normative femininity has been represented in postfeminist media through the predominant archetype of the "single girl"--the young, white, educated, heterosexual, middle class girl who prioritizes career success, consumption, romance and sex without too much commitment, and body projects ranging from fashion to diets to online profiles. The "single girl" has also been the primary subject of feminist critiques of postfeminist media culture because this archetype emphasizes postfeminism's obsession with normative bodies and its dismissal of the experiences of women of color, queer women, and working class women. I intervene in existing scholarship to argue that the "single girl" cannot be understood with (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mary Thomas (Advisor); Linda Mizejewski (Committee Member); Ruby Tapia (Committee Member); Jill Bystydzienski (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Gender Studies; Mass Media; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2012, Comparative Studies

Courtship, the practice of forgoing traditional dating in favor of trusting God to choose your mate, has been gaining ground among conservative Christians in the U.S. since the early 1990s, but it has received little attention in scholarship or popular media. It emerged among Christian homeschooling families who were looking for an alternative to traditional dating, which they feared would bring sexual and romantic temptations into the lives of their children. The movement gained widespread appeal with the 1997 publication of Joshua Harris' courtship confessional I Kissed Dating Goodbye, which went on to sell nearly a million copies. Combining ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews with courtship participants, and analysis of courtship media, including the movement's popular self-help books, this dissertation is the first to examine the courtship movement comprehensively, including its authors and proponents, media, theology, discourses and participants. This dissertation traces the growth of courtship alongside the Christian homeschool movement, arguing that the movement owes its growth to the proclivity of homeschool students to be both enterprising and voracious readers. Despites participants' reluctance to embrace the ‘courtship' label or endorse a particular Christian denomination, I identify courtship's ties to Christian Reconstructionist theology, and I argue that courtship authors' reluctance to enforce a courtship formula has actually contributed to the successful spread of courtship principles, including parental involvement, physical and emotional purity, and dating only with the purpose of marriage in mind. It also identifies characteristics I call luminous femininity and radiant modesty. Girls in the courtship movement strive to exude a mix of warm nurturing, service, hospitality and radiant modesty, a glowing purity. Contrary to critiques that equate traditional femininity with passivity, I find that girls in the courtship movement actively embra (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Tanya Erzen PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Mary Thomas PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Hugh Urban PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Gender; Gender Studies; Religion; Religious History; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2011, Womens Studies

This dissertation examines the ways that teenage girls' online interactions reflect their psychic and social struggles to negotiate contradictory and constricting discourses regarding contemporary American girlhood. Literature on girls' online interactions has tended to fall into one of two categories. In the first, scholars sound alarms about the ubiquity of risk in digital spaces (for instance, on websites that supposedly promote eating disorders). In the second, scholars celebrate the ways that teenagers engage in social activism online. In contrast, I argue that emergent media scholarship often fails to question the messages of autonomous selfhood that characterize girls' digital personas. I utilize feminist and psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity to suggest that girls' voices and agencies are always embedded in normative ideals of gender, race, sexuality, and class. I examine a variety of digital spaces that cover a diverse range of contemporary American girlhoods, including queer girls' MySpace pages, pro-bulimia message boards, and fan sites for young musicians such as Taylor Swift. I utilize a three-pronged methodology: analysis of the textual and visual elements of websites, instant messenger interviews with girls, and a research blog that explains my project to my research subjects in understandable language. Website analysis and interviews reveal that girls feel personally empowered by the ability to express themselves and demonstrate “who they really are” online in ways they cannot offline, but their digital personas are deeply embedded in discourses that privilege normative femininity, whiteness, heterosexuality, thinness, and middle-class status as conditions to aspire to. This research shows that despite girls' proclamations about articulating independent selves online, their self-presentations are consciously and unconsciously motivated by a yearning for recognition by real and fantasy online audiences. Elucidating girls' desire for recognition (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mary Thomas PhD (Advisor); Jill Bystydzienski PhD (Committee Member); Linda Mizejewski PhD (Committee Member); Julia Watson PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender Studies; Womens Studies