Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

The subject of this study is contemporary Saudi women's literature and art between 2005 to 2017. In this research, I examine a selection of novels written by Saudi women and paintings composed by Saudi women artists to discuss how women negotiate their individuality, independence and rights to personal decision-making. This research argues that Saudi women have used literature and art to transform the way their society thinks about women. Novelists intertwine love stories, a traditionally taboo topic, with social issues on which there is broad agreement, for example the critique of terrorism, thus hoping to mute criticism. Saudi women artists, on the other hand, focus on portraying women's faces and figures in ways that show emotion and reveal depth of feeling. The key themes in these novels and works of art contribute to the authors' and artists' goals. Both the novels and the paintings focus on depicting some intimate aspects of women's lives in order to create empathy and make their society think differently, thus act differently. This dissertation highlights the importance of including Saudi women's literature and art in discussions of world literature and arts. It contributes to our understanding of Saudi women's shared challenges and seeks to establish that although Saudi women struggle with some sociopolitical issues, as do other women throughout the world, they do not allow these obstacles to prevent them from having open conversations about their position within society. They create conversations by confronting the power structures that women face and using techniques that foster audience engagement. This research was designed to describe Saudi women's concerns as told through their own literary and artistic expressions, in hopes that it may also inspire women in other societies who may share similar social circumstances.

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2023, Leadership and Change

Of the roughly 3.5 million public school teachers in the United States, approximately 80% are White. In contrast, about 51.7% of the nation's students are African American, Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian. This mismatch is expected to grow as the number of BIPOC students in our nation's public schools continues to increase. Studies have shown that strong positive relationships are essential for learning, but often, the relationships between White teachers and BIPOC students are strained at best, leading to poorer learning outcomes. The purpose of this Constructivist Grounded Theory study was to explore an understudied question: How do White teachers who have been deemed exemplary by educators and parents of Color perceive their relationships and experiences with BIPOC students in an educational system and a society that often marginalizes them? Open-ended interviews were conducted with 19 middle and high school teachers in Massachusetts. Dimensional analysis revealed Being-and-Becoming Across Difference as the core dimension. Five primary dimensions were identified: Reflecting, Relating, Embodying Humility, Affirming Culture, and Holding Hope. Results of this study suggest that significant changes are needed in the recruitment and hiring of White teachers and that pre-service and in-service professional development must support White teachers in far more robust and sustaining ways than currently exist. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA, https://aura.antioch.edu/, and OhioLINK ETD Center, https://etd.ohiolink.edu.

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2018, American Culture Studies

Existing cultural studies scholarship on New Orleans explores the city's exceptional popular identity, often focusing on the origins of that exceptionality in literature and the city's twentieth century tourism campaigns. This perceived exceptionality, though originating from literary sources, was perpetuated and popularized in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by film and television representations. As Hollywood's production standards evolved throughout the twentieth century, New Orleans' representation evolved with it. In each filmmaking era, representations of New Orleans reflected not only the production realities of that era, but also the political and cultural debates surrounding the city. In the past two decades, as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the passage of film tax credits by the Louisiana Legislature increased New Orleans' profile, these debates have been more present and driven by New Orleans' filmed representations. Using the theoretical framework of Guy Debord's spectacle and the methodology of New Film History and close "to the background" textual analysis, this study undertakes an historical overview of New Orleans' representation in film and television. This history starts in the era of Classical Hollywood (1928-1947) and continues through Transitional Hollywood (1948-1966), New Hollywood (1967-1975), and the current Age of the Blockbuster (1975-). Particular attention is given to developments in the twenty-first century, especially how the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the recent tax credit laws affected popular understandings of the city. Hollywood's representations have largely reinforced New Orleans' exceptional, "Big Easy" identity by presenting the city's unique cultural practices as every occurrences and realities for New Orleanians. While Hurricane Katrina exposed this popular identity as a facade, the lack of interest by Hollywood in meaningfully exploring Katrina, returning instead to the city's pre-Katrina identity (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, English

Drawing on Black feminist thought, queer theory, and queer of color critique, Touching History argues that Black women in the Post-Civil Rights era have employed diverse technologies in order to produce fictionalized narratives which counter the neoliberal imperative to forget the past. Black feminist and queer theorists have described the potential for artistic imaginings to address gaps in the historical record and Touching History follows this line of theory. Touching History examines an archive of Black women's cultural productions since the 1970s which includes novels, short stories, essays, experimental video film, digital music videos and visual albums. Reading across these diverse media and genres, this project considers how Black women have made use of the affordances of specific technologies in order to tell stories which may be fictional yet reveal “a kind of truth” about the embodied and affective experiences of the past. These mediated images and narratives serve as extensions of their bodies that push against static ideas of the Black female body. Whether it's the image in a film or video, or the digital avatar presented through social media, Touching History argues these representations are intimately linked to the corporeal presence of the Black female artist. Alongside technologies of the video camera and the digital camera, this project also considers other embodied technologies of expression including sadomasochism and the book and considers how these also provide a means for Black women to touch history. Examining the novels of Thulani Davis and Marci Blackman, the short fiction of Alice Walker, the experimental films of Cheryl Dunye, and music videos created by singers Erykah Badu and Beyonce, this project examines the expression of queer desires by Black women. In this project “queer” is not synonymous with gay and lesbian or same-sex desires, although it may at times be used to describe them. Queer desires in this project also include the (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2004, East Asian Languages and Literatures

This study examines adaptations of Chinese culture in medieval Japanese No theatre through analyzing a group of No plays featuring Chinese motifs, also referred to as “Chinese plays,” written between the late fourteenth and the early sixteenth centuries. It investigates how changing relations with China, reception history of Chinese motifs, as well as evolving aesthetic and cultural norms on the part of playwrights and audiences of No, shaped the making of these plays. I propose what I refer to as a Filter Model, based on my reading of treatises of No and supported by contemporary theory of intercultural theatre, to analyze the (re)interpretations and (re)construction of various images of China within specific historical and cultural contexts. I argue that this group of plays was not about representing China, but rather about manipulating the perceived images of China and catering to the cultural practices, aesthetic preferences, and sociopolitical attitudes of various audience groups in medieval Japan. It is through the different images of China constructed in these plays that the playwrights amplify certain aspects of No, such as auspiciousness, cultural identity, depictions of human emotion, and dance performances. Chapter One lays out the theoretical and historical framework for the study. I critically review current scholarship on issues of Other and Self, and on conceptions of Intercultural Theatre. I then trace the dynamics of cultural exchanges between China and Japan that had influenced the reception of Chinese motifs in No theatre. Chapter Two centers on the underlying variables in the composition of “Chinese plays.” I first assess the influential role of audience and patron of No. I then introduce my Filter Model, which illustrates the complex interplay of sociopolitical milieux, basic sources, perspectives and dramaturgies of the playwrights, in the making of “Chinese plays.” Chapters Three to Seven examine ten “Chinese plays” that, taken together, displ (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2013, American Culture Studies/Ethnic Studies

This study investigated aikido, a martial art that emphasizes non-violent conflict resolution. After an extensive period of preliminary research including personal study of aikido and historiographical contextualization of aikido lore, fifteen aikido students and instructors were interviewed, and thirty-four students were observed during a total of sixty-four classes at two different aikido schools, each of which were led by female head instructors who taught a mixed-sex student body. Ethnographic data was analyzed from a multidisciplinary perspective that blends feminist cultural studies with decolonial and psychoanalytic theories. Connections between research participants' understandings of the concept of power and their approaches to conflict resolution are explored. Participants described power as: physically internal, the ability to be grounded and centered, the ability to direct and re-direct energy, the ability to maintain awareness of one's self and environment, and the ability to cultivate growth. Study participants' sense of generative power resonated interpersonally through participants' self-reported and observed conflict resolution strategies, which include: maintaining awareness of one's environment, adjusting one's posture through practices called centering and grounding, not fighting by turning (tenkan) and blending with one's "opponent" while entering (irimi) the conflict with measured assertiveness, and maintaining a capacity for a wide range of reactions (ukemi). Participants demonstrated an ability to think about and productively engage with large-scale social conflicts (such as gender violence) by relying on philosophically and kinesthetically sophisticated understandings of links between the personal and the political. This is because the movement practice aikido challenges colonial ways of knowing by functioning as an embodied meta-ideological deconstruction, one of several (r)evolutionary tactics discussed in decolonial feminist theory. This (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2024, American Culture Studies

The study focuses on the shifting socioeconomic and cultural practices of street vending in Solo City, Indonesia, in response to structuring the global economy and culture. The dissertation seeks to answer the research questions: (1) How did street vending socioeconomic and cultural practices shift in Solo City from the 1980s to the early 2020s? (2) How has the changing cultural landscape of Solo City changed from the 1980s to the early 2020s concerning street vending? (3) How does American global cultural influence affect Solo City's spatiotemporal cultural landscape from the 1980s to the early 2020s? (4) How does Solo City negotiate with American global cultural influence in everyday-life cultural street vending practices from the 1980s to the early 2020s? I employ Burawoy's extended case method in this qualitative transnational American studies project by immersing myself into the field to delve within the context of the study and collect primary data from fieldwork—field observation and interviews—and personal narratives. The secondary data are artifacts, such as historical archives, statistical data, regulations, spatial mapping, news, social media posts, and so on, concerning street vending in Solo over time. I view the diffusion process of the global norm as friction (Tsing, 2005) between aspirations within global connections. Therefore, the study critically examines stories of the continuous reproduction of habitus (Bourdieu, 2013) as represented by shifting practices of sociocultural and political-economic activities committed by stakeholders and actors in street vending in Solo. The findings demonstrate that street vending socioeconomic and cultural practices in Solo City persist despite the shifting values affected by the modern capitalist economy. Street vendors constantly negotiate with local, national, and global structuring in such spatiotemporal politics, whether through formalization or strategizing the spatiotemporal gaps of left-over space and tem (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2022, American Culture Studies

This dissertation is rooted in the general question: How do contemporary TV series featuring Black queer and trans representation highlight and address sociopolitical questions often found circulating within queer and cultural studies? Employing three programs, The Prancing Elites Project (2015), Empire (2015), and Pose (2018), this study argues that recent upticks in Black queer characters on TV provide room to move beyond traditional analyses often predicated on critical suspicion to instead engender readings revealing themes related to Black futurity, worldmaking, and coalition building, prominent topics within the fields of queer and cultural studies. Building from both Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's articulation of reparative reading and prior scholarship often critical of Black queer televisual representation, this dissertation's interventions are both theoretical and methodological, presenting a recalibrated approach to gleaning the richness in Black queer media. Black Queer TV: Reparative Viewing and the Sociopolitical Questions of Our Now invigorates and broadens critical scholarship on media through nuancing programs depicting a range of Black queer people's represented experiences.

Master of Arts, University of Akron, 2021, English-Composition

In this text, I examine the relationship of three concepts: healing, lived writing process, and the making of knowledge. This inquiry blends theory and practice, and it is situated within Black life writing. I situate my inquiry accordingly not to produce a collapsed framework of “racial healing,” but to show how Black life writing, while marginalized, is yet central. Though other scholarly work on healing and the writing process exists, I argue for a greater recognition of what I call "the lived writing process." I also argue that the lived writing process—as demonstrated by Black composition scholars—embodies healing and transformative knowledge-making, particularly within ethnography. Within the depth of this tradition, we may observe, grapple with, and universally consider what it means to heal.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2020, Interdisciplinary Arts (Fine Arts)

This dissertation explores the role of African media in shaping Africa's image through both the analysis of newspapers over the course of the 2014 Ebola crisis and an exploration of African films. This methodology redeploys aspects of Africa's (in)visibility in global politics and discourse on representation in geopolitics. Placing African film and media organizations at the center of analysis in this study is vital, as they add diversity of voices to the conversation about Africa's image in the media. The dissertation looks at how Africa is framed as perpetually “in crisis.” Specifically, the research engages analysis of African film and media depictions under the premise of crises to advance Africa's visual culture and representation. I am interested in exploring how coverage of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in The Inquirer, a major English newspaper in Liberia, compares with that in the New York Times coverage of the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Likewise, I explore how African cinema frames and represents crisis through three films – Xala (Ousmane Sembene, 1975); Pumzi (Wanuri Kahiu, 2009); and Les Saignantes (Jean-Pierre Bekolo, 2005). I argue that African films speak to the possibility of positive anticipated outcomes ignored by western scholars, and, therefore, possess the agency to decolonize minds. For instance, Pumzi and Les Saignantes offer an outlook on Africa's challenges and possibilities through newly imagined futures. Precisely, the selected films first address Africa's crisis in relation to the political, economic, and environmental struggle as well as gender discourses and, second, offer a prescription of development and progress. How do African filmmakers and media personnel, through their various creative works, reconstruct Africa's global identity? Finally, I advance that this research gives voice to how Africa frames crisis. This dissertation interrogates an unbalanced global power structure that has been typically Eurocentric. Taking an opposing pos (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Camp is a critical sensibility and a queer reading practice that allows women to simultaneously critique, resist, and enjoy stereotypes and conventional norms. It is both a performative strategy and a mode of reception that transforms resistance into pleasure. Scholarship on feminist camp recognizes a tradition of women using camp to engage with gender politics and play with femininity. Most of the scholarship focuses on women's camp in mainstream and popular culture and how they talk back to the patriarchy. Little work has been done on feminist camp outside of popular culture or on how women use camp to talk back to feminism. My dissertation adds to conversations about feminist camp by exploring a new facet of camp that talks back to feminism and challenges a feminist audience. I examine the work of three contemporary feminist and queer independent filmmakers: Anna Biller, Cheryl Dunye, and Bruce LaBruce to explore the different ways they subvert cinematic conventions to interrupt narrative, play with stereotypes, and create opportunities for pleasure as well as critique. I argue that these filmmakers operationalize a feminist camp gaze and open up space for a feminist camp spectatorship that engages critically with ideas about identity, sex, and feminism. In addition, I consider the ways in which other types of feminist cultural production, including sketch comedy and web series, use camp strategies to deploy a feminist camp gaze to push back against sexism and other forms of oppression while also parodying feminism, ultimately creating space for resistance, pleasure, and self-reflection.

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2019, American Culture Studies

In late 2014 the mainstream press reported about a far-right movement that sought to discredit feminist, anti-racist, and trans-inclusive interventions in the video games industry, its products, and its consumer culture. Called GamerGate by its devotees, the movement began when American game designer Zoe Quinn weathered public harassment after her ex-boyfriend published a five-part essay falsely alleging she had sex with a game journalist to collect a positive review for her game Depression Quest. GamerGate activists launched a smear campaign against Quinn but attempted to absolve themselves of harassment by rebranding the movement as a game consumer revolt against unethical journalists and leftist academics. Almost five years later, GamerGate continues to grow in membership on its official subreddit, /r/KotakuInAction, which is a self-governed community hosted on the popular discussion forum-based social media platform Reddit. Shortly after /r/KotakuInAction materialized, a conscientious objector created the pro-feminist /r/GamerGhazi to resist GamerGate. Despite Reddit's massive user base, its 1.2 million subreddits, and its ubiquity in American culture, it remains an underexplored space in the academic literature. Academics have neither adequately addressed Reddit's role in promoting far-right communities like /r/KotakuInAction, nor the efficacy of using Reddit as a space for staging feminist resistance to such communities. Drawing from feminist epistemology, intersectionality, and masculinity studies, this dissertation investigates /r/KotakuInAction and /r/GamerGhazi's use of the Reddit interface—most particularly its upvoting and downvoting mechanic—to shape debates around feminism and critical race issues in American culture. The research is based on data collected over the course of six months from discussion threads on each subreddit, subreddit wiki documents, and the video game Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Using a mixed methods approach defined by textu (open full item for complete abstract)

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)

BA, Oberlin College, 2018, Religion

The transposition of the cultural, religious, and sacred onto physical geographies is practiced by humans everywhere as landscapes are canvases for meaning making and integral placeholders of histories. In the Indian context, this practice is distinct for several reasons. Scholars of Hindu traditions recognize that the place-oriented disposition and centrality of land to Hindu traditions and cultures is unprecedented and integral to identity formation in modern India. As India faces increasing environmental degradation, the preservation of “sacred geographies” is especially crucial to the identity of Hindu traditions. The rise of Hindu nationalist (Hindutva) political parties (e.g., the Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP) has heavily influenced the mapping of landscape as distinctly Hindu. By analyzing contemporary environmental movements in India and delineating Hindu nationalist histories and contemporary politics, this project claims that environmental work politicizes the landscape through a Hindutva framework in ways that shape environmentalism to prioritize geographical features tied to imagined Hindu pasts and futures that further a Hindu nationalist agenda.

BA, Oberlin College, 2018, Comparative Literature

Across the world, capitalist and neoliberal economic policies have trapped communities in chaotic cycles of boom and bust. bell hooks writes about this chaos of connected systems of economic and social domination, “this is what the worship of death looks like.” The aim of this project is to explore points of formal association between popular horror media, or narratives of fear, and the politically unconscious beliefs, dreams, and knowledges of subaltern classes that live and tell stories under a social order that demands either complicity or silence. These narratives of fear demonstrate how certain political discourses are, and have been, culturally unspeakable as collective experiences of trauma and violence. From Argentina, to South Korea, to Japan, studying narratives of fear gives us a point of access to the cultural process of integrating and narrating the previously unspeakable. These examples foreshadow dynamics discernible in modern Western narratives of fear, and thus I propose that the deeply traumatic class violence that underlies neoliberal order is emerging from a condition of unspeakability on a massive scale. To support these claims, I focus my analysis on conventions and tropes of modern horror media, in both narrative and formal terms. Works discussed include Halloween, the Scream franchise, World War Z (the novel), Get Out, Train to Busan and more. Bringing these works, in conversation with ideas from Jameson, Ranciere, and Gramsci, into a Crenshawian intersectional framework, this project presents a hopeful vision of class consciousness by reading horror in a new way.

BA, Oberlin College, 2018, Latin American Studies

This project offers a new perspective for understanding the country and culture of Chile by examining the messages embedded in sport competitions. I will first detail the success of distance runner Manuel Plaza in his second-place finish at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympic Games, and analyze how Plaza's success at an international competition was adopted and interpreted to represent the entrance of Chile into modern and Western society. I will then discuss the struggle between different sections of Chilean society to create and monopolize the master narrative of the events that took place following the military coup of 1973. This section will demonstrate how sporting symbols like the National Stadium, World Cup, and Chilean national futbol team were used as the battleground to propagate these conflicting narratives. This project aims to understand how definitions of chilenidad, or Chilean identity, have evolved over time, and explore the intersection of chilenidad and sport. Drawing upon historical, political, and literary frameworks, this project advocates for the continued study of sport within the field of area studies, in order to learn from the cultural significance that sport carries.

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2018, American Culture Studies

Beginning from Foucault's notion that “where there is power, there is resistance,” I uncover how fat people are at any given time accepting, resisting, and/or subverting the oppressive power embedded in social norms surrounding their bodies (95). Each chapter reveals a new layer, a new complication as to how, why, and when individuals are (un)able, (un)willing, and/or (un)certain about how they can and are treating their own and other people's fat bodies. In my study, I take as a given that behavior is fluid, ever changing, shifting, and in progress. My study demonstrates how media messages are being accepted, resisted, re-appropriated, altered, internalized, and/or ignored by individuals; thus, my study brings focus to the complex relationships fat people have surrounding their subjectivity, their sense of power, agency, and ability to resist, as well as the interplay of the intersections of their social identities, and their sense of embodiment and the performance of their fat body.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, Dance Studies

My dissertation investigates the relationship between contemporary dance practices and performances in the San Francisco Bay Area and the political and cultural geography that shapes the region. Specifically, I examine both movement practices and training techniques that inform the aesthetic production and the ideology of the city's dance scene, as well as the culture and politics of various social issues that manifest in dance content and performance practices. Through a consideration of key choreographers, spaces for training and performance, and thematic trends in Bay Area physical practices, this research emphasizes the political geography of dance's development specifically as it relates to Anna Halprin's lingering influence manifested in contemporary choreography. With its progressive political landscape and investments in counter-culture, the San Francisco Bay Area offers a counterpoint to dance history narratives that continue to emphasize New York City as the birthplace of dance in modern America. Just as the geographic area fosters a progressive politics of social issues, the dance produced in the region provides a lens into ideology, aesthetics, social and political engagements, training, and performance practices. In this dissertation, I situate these within theoretical discourses on embodiment, political action, queer and feminist theories, and cultural studies.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, English

Adolescence has always been a cultural construction. The designation of a separate space apart from the presumed innocence of childhood and the myths of autonomy and responsibility that come to define adulthood is a surprisingly modern phenomenon. As such, adolescence bears the traces of the ideologies of race, gender, sexuality, and nation that attend so much of the period that calls itself “modernity.” My dissertation asks how writers and artists of color imagine themselves into the archive of coming of age narratives in post-1960s US literature and culture. In thinking about the importance of identity in the period following the advent of nominal civil rights, I offer the “long(er) civil rights movement” as a way of resisting the move to periodize the struggles through which difference has historically accrued meaning in the US nation-state. Each chapter centers around a “technology,” the academy, the body, the entertainment industry, and the internet, which is essential to the formation of adolescent identity in the post-war era, alongside a key term in the lexicon of American culture that accrues added meanings when filtered through the experience of difference. Ultimately, I argue for understanding the liminal space of adolescence as a dynamic metaphor for writers and artists of color to work out questions about the meaning of difference and the concept of progress. My first chapter, “Becoming Excellent,” places Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez and Rigoberto Gonzalez's Butterfly Boy: Memoirs of a Chicano Mariposa side by side to unpack the racialized valences of “excellence” inside the American academy. I read these two memoirs as overlapping, and at times competing, accounts of the fraught and often invisible labor involved in becoming “one of the good ones.” The second, “Becoming Trans,” considers the advent of trans identity in the context of questions about desire, and metamorphosis. I turn to Octavia Butler's sci-f (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures

This dissertation is an examination of how St. Petersburg punks create and sustain their culture through social practice and talk-in-interaction. This study examines how punks in the scene build (both literally and metaphorically) communities of svoi [one's own] that support positive ideologies like mutual-support, mutual-respect and openness. Yet, while this dissertation discusses the positive ways that the community impacts those within the scene, this work also brings to the fore practices of gender inequality within the scene that perpetuate patriarchal social norms. As such, this dissertation represents the first detailed, long-term examination of punk in Russia. Punk in Russia gained international notoriety with Pussy Riot's rise to prominence in 2009; however, their ascendance also exposed our limited understanding of what punk is and is not in the Russian scene. This dissertation aims to address this gap and explore precisely what Russian punk is and is not from the vantage point of Russian punks themselves. In order to do so, I conducted nearly two years of fieldwork, interviewed 32 punks and analyzed over 6 hours of spontaneously occurring talk-in-interaction. This holistic approach helped facilitate a description and analysis of punk culture in Russia that presents a detailed account of my informants' full lives. My findings show that the primary punk ideologies operating within the St. Petersburg punk scene are: mutual-respect, mutual-help and a focus on action and agency through Do-It-Yourself (DIY) enterprises. Yet at the same time as I draw on interview data for explicit characterizations of punk ideology, I also examine and analyze punk practice and discourse. This approach helps to elucidate not only the `point of punk', but also helps to connect interview data to actual discursive practices. Exploring the connection between interview data and real-life practice reveals a contradiction between explicit ideologies of equality within the punk scene (open full item for complete abstract)