Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2024, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

One recent internet phenomenon that has ignited discussions on social media and in academic circles is the topic of cancel and call-out culture. To bridge this gap, I map a cultural and theoretical lineage of digital activism and cancel culture, which intersects with black feminist studies, racial capitalism scholarship, and feminist media discourses. Within this lineage, I examine the tensions between respectability politics, homonormativity, and Foucauldian panopticism to contextualize the disproportionate policing and hate speech lobbied at black and brown queer bodies online, alongside their popular representations in the media. Furthermore, I conduct a digitally ethnographic case study that collects and analyzes instances of fan cancellations involving various contestants from RuPaul's Drag Race as evidence supporting my claims that the show encourages the fanbase to act as “cancellors,” regulating how queer individuals are allowed to express themselves on the reality television giant. Interrogating respectability further, I consider how RPDR devises its own canceling culture, funneling a homonormative and white supremacist gaze that year after year, season after season, profits from and perpetuates the social disposability of disrespectable queer persons of color. By analyzing how Drag Race constructs a “canceling culture” through its mise en scene, construction of on-screen power dynamics, and fan-polling, I intend to demonstrate that RuPaul and production company, World of Wonder, invite fans to evaluate and eliminate queens alongside the show's panel of judges, depoliticizing the transgressive potential of the camp representations the show platforms by encouraging the disposal of and minimization of its queer talent.

Committee: Mytheli Sreenivas (Committee Member); Linda Mizejewski (Advisor) Subjects: Film Studies; Gender Studies; Womens Studies

BA, Oberlin College, 2022, History

This thesis focuses on Ebara Soroku's political actions, namely the strategy of moral respectability, in relation to Western powers in the 1910s. Ebara Soroku (1842-1922) was a Japanese ex-samurai, a Christian educator, and a politician of the Meiji and Taisho periods. Ebara's strategy of moral respectability was his way of showing Japan as a strong and modernized nation to the Western powers. Throughout the thesis, I argued that Ebara used his strategy of moral respectability as a rhetorical device to show Japan as a modernized empire to the Western powers. But Ebara also embodied his strategy through a moral education to the Japanese people. Ebara's use of the strategy of moral respectability was distinct from the approach that the Japanese government introduced to strengthen its nation. This distinction, I argue, highlights the importance of morality in thinking about Japanese foreign policy in the early 20th century as a pedagogical tool to improve Japan's moral status.In the first chapter, “Ebara Soroku's different identities; 1842-1912,” I argued that Ebara's moral respectability strategy resulted from the reconciliation of his different identities. As an ex-samurai and a Christian, his moral values were shaped by Neo-Confucian and Christian values. As an educator, he formed his pedagogy based on these moral values. I claim that Ebara's strategy of moral respectability was developed through his identity as an educator, amalgamating Neo-Confucianism and Christianity.The second and third chapters are case studies of Ebara's use of his strategy of moral respectability to the Western powers to demonstrate the strength of the Japanese nation in the international arena. In the second chapter, I focused on Ebara's visit to the United States in 1913 to protest the Alien Land Law enacted in California. Sent by the Seiyukai Party, the ruling party of the Japanese Diet at that time, Ebara's mission was to negotiate with politicians to stop the enactment of anti-Japanese (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Annemarie Sammartino (Advisor); Sheila Miyoshi Jager (Advisor); Pablo Mitchell (Committee Member); Leonard V. Smith (Committee Member); Renee Christine Romano (Committee Chair) Subjects: Asian Studies; History

BA, Oberlin College, 2021, History

As industrializing nineteenth-century London found itself in the position of a prominent world capital, the city faced problems of overcrowding, high poverty, and waves of epidemics, making the dead progressively more visible in public spheres of society. This thesis examines different forms of publicly-spectated death in Victorian London, moving from anatomical dissections to funerals to burials, following the Victorian corpse in these moments of dealing with the dead and the level of media involvement in structuring and marketing each of these spectacles to the public. While the current historiographical debate surrounding spectacles of death in nineteenth-century Europe agrees that death ceased to be a spectacle at the beginning of the nineteenth century, I argue that death took on new meaning in the nineteenth century, moving from a context of ritual or punishment to ostentatious and media sensationalist displays. These displays reveal a concern with both the commercialism and respectability of death, reflected in literature such as popular novels, newspapers, and reform-minded writings. The media's spin of each of these types of spectacles, coupled with the culture of materiality of nineteenth-century London, indicates that Londoners sought out spectacles of death both as escapist entertainment and as pieces of the larger moral question of respectability, which was distinctly stratified along class lines: who could secure a “good” death, and whose bodies were put on display?

Committee: Ellen Wurtzel (Advisor); Annemarie Sammartino (Committee Co-Chair); Shelley Sang-Hee Lee (Committee Member); Danielle Terrazas Williams (Committee Member); Leonard V. Smith (Committee Co-Chair) Subjects: European History; History; Modern History

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

While much has been written about white fears over the “danger” of interracial marriage, little has been devoted to understanding black perspectives—how Black Americans thought and talked about the topic. This dissertation examines debates among Black Americans about interracial marriage in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many personally opposed interracial marriage, but they publicly defended and fought for the legal right to such unions. Their fight became an integral part of the battle to gain basic citizenship rights and helped forge a collective identity as they offered, and argued over, competing solutions for racial advancement and visions of the future of the race. Examining Black Americans' internal debates reveals much about their intra-racial tensions, intraracial cooperation, racial identity formation, and the evolution of thought and strategy over time. The dissertation uncovers a vigorous debate with a diverse set of opinions, paradoxes, and complex implications for African American and American history. Black proponents and opponents of interracial marriage alike sought their race's collective advancement and attainment of rights and did so in part by projecting a particular community image. The study therefore engages with notions of respectability, uplift, patriarchy, power, privilege, gender, and sexuality. Altogether, the study broadens understanding of “the Long Civil Rights Movement.”

Committee: Stephanie Shaw (Advisor); Paula Baker (Committee Member); Kenneth Goings (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; American History; Black History; Black Studies; History

Master of Arts, Case Western Reserve University, 2018, History

A potent symbol of the Roaring Twenties, the archetypical flapper was invariably portrayed as a young woman wearing bobbed hair, heavy makeup, short skirts, and rolled stockings. She enjoyed drinking, dancing, and dating. This thesis explores how flappers were portrayed in the Chicago Defender, a major African-American newspaper. This lens unearths the black flapper – long overlooked by historians and media – and interrogates her meaning in terms of racial uplift and respectability. In turning away from respectability, the black flapper threatened to derail the ongoing project of racial uplift. The exception was a performance context, in which flapper characters onstage were seen as respectable workers instead of threateningly independent young women, and, as performers, often drew praise. The Chicago Defender's response to the flapper, a figure who epitomized women's new roles in the decade, illuminates contemporary discourse around sexuality, youth culture, and racial uplift.

Committee: Renee Sentilles PhD (Advisor); Daniel Cohen PhD (Committee Member); Peter Shulman PhD (Committee Member); Einav Rabinovitch-Fox PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; American History; Black History; Gender; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2004, History

Undergraduate women's struggles to terminate the university's role in loco parentis represented a revolutionary moment on American campuses in the 1960s. Though the end results were strikingly similar across regions and schools, the paths to change were very different on historically black college campuses when compared to predominantly white college campuses. Challenges to in loco parentis regulations took place earlier on coeducational campuses than at women's colleges. At each college or university, students forged a common language of rights to rescind long-standing non-academic regulations. Student protests against in loco parentis policies emerged out of widespread civil rights activism and Black Power ideology by mid-decade at Howard University in Washington, D.C. and at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. Undergraduate women framed arguments against in loco parentis rules in terms of civil rights and student respectability successfully to dismantle non-academic regulations on campus by the late sixties. On predominantly white campuses, the tradition of student self-government influenced the shape and tone of women's anti-in loco parentis protests. The movement to end the role of the university in place of the parent harbingered the women's rights movement of the late 1960s at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio and at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts. Women's protests on each campus mobilized female students and significantly impacted their understanding of gender issues within the broader American culture. The underlying concern of administrators and parents regarding morality and sexuality on campus permeated campus debates. The in loco parentis ideology ultimately proved obsolete as campus officials realized that they could not codify or enforce individual morality in the face of strident student demands for privacy and self determination. Undergraduate women struggled to redefine femininity and women's roles in light of shifts in the gen (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Susan Hartmann (Advisor) Subjects:

BA, Oberlin College, 2011, African American Studies

Through a methodological framework consisting of historical analysis, pop culture analysis, and hip-hop feminist theory, this paper will explore the complex intersections of race, gender, and agency in contemporary hip-hop and adult entertainment. The first section, "Look Back at Me: Jezebel, the Black Lady and Constructions of Black Female Sexuality Identity", will consist of a historical overview of images of Black women constructed since enslavement into the late 20th century and highlight the links between these stereotypes and the sexualized images that exist of Black female identity in contemporary hip-hop. The politics of respectability will also be discussed and how the concept aided in the construction of the dominant Black female sexual scripts. The second section, "Mic Check: The Rise of Women in Hip-hop", will examine the evolution of women in hip-hop from the mid-1980's to the present, analyzing how the rise in popularity of hip-hop music has affected the portrayal of Black women's bodies in the sexual marketplace. The third section, "Hip-Hop Pornography" will speak to the influence of visual culture in rap music and how it has created intersections between hip-hop and the adult entertainment industry. It will examine ways Black women who participate in these industries view their images and how they exercise and conceptualize agency while dealing with the hyper-masculinity inherent in their fields. The fourth and final section of my paper will present my conclusions and plans for further research. In sum, Black women are challenging stereotypes through the mediums of hip-hop and adult entertainment that have been subjugating their sexuality for decades. To a certain extent, this freedom is liberating because they are embracing a pro-sex framework and breaking deeply engrained silences that have been present surrounding Black female sexuality. Conversely, there are ways that these 'erotic revolutionaries', to borrow a term from Shayne Lee, re-entren (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Caroline Jackson-Smith (Advisor); Pamela Brooks (Committee Member); Renee Romano (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; Black History; Black Studies; Ethnic Studies; Film Studies; Gender; Gender Studies; History; Mass Media; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2006, Psychology/Industrial-Organizational

Previous research has shown that organizational reputation can have an important impact on recruitment and retention, but little is known about the organizational factors that differentiate between an organization with a positive symbolic reputation and one with a negative symbolic reputation. Research has begun to examine the antecedents of attraction, but these studies have typically viewed reputation as a unidimensional construct, whereas the present study examines the symbolic reputation factors of organizational impressiveness and respectability, and have primarily focused on reputation perceptions of financial and business experts, while this study focuses on the perceptions of naive, first-time job seekers. Results indicate that naive job seekers view organizations that advertise heavily to be most impressive, and view organizations with products perceived to be high-quality as the most respectable. Implications for recruitment are discussed.

Committee: Scott Highhouse (Advisor) Subjects: Psychology, Industrial