Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2024, History

This dissertation offers a new look at the Age of Jackson to better understand the influences that women and gender roles had on American politics during the 1820s and 1830s. It offers a counternarrative to a historiography that has focused predominately on Whig Womanhood, which developed in opposition to Andrew Jackson's presidency. Instead, it looks at the women who were passionate supporters of Jackson to see what drew the “common woman” to the complicated figure who was once heralded as being a champion of the “common man.” Additionally, this research looks at how conforming to normative gender roles was a useful political tool. Jackson's reputation as a martial figure often came coupled with the idea that he was a protector of women, and his supporters responded to this narrative. At the same time, Jackson's opponents argued that he was dangerous to women, while also denigrating the womanhood of female figures close to him. This dissertation thus argues that women were integral to the electoral strategies of the Democrats as well as the Whigs during the Jacksonian period, which, therefore, cannot be fully understood without far greater attention to the neglected Jackson women.

Committee: Daniel Cohen (Committee Chair); Daniel Goldmark (Committee Member); John Grabowski (Committee Member); Renée Sentilles (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; Gender; Gender Studies; History; Political Science; Womens Studies

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2014, Popular Culture

One of the most powerful arenas where the construction of ideal femininity gets constructed is through the depiction of women on television. My thesis investigates one of the most popular television shows in the 21st century, Desperate Housewives. It explores how the female protagonists are depicted through the ways they attempt to maintain power within their suburban worlds. My thesis discusses how certain power is allotted within the narrative of the show. I investigate the implication that power is a good thing, and also offer analysis with some of the problems of gaining power. We not only see constrained power, but also see women in positions of status. Power within family dynamics, romantic love/marriage, and domestic and professional activities are central to my thesis. I focus on beauty and image through consumption, the struggles for women balancing their domestic and professional worlds, and alternative depictions of femininity through the repression of emotion. I use textual analysis to examine dialogue, plot and narrative, character development, genre, and aesthetics/formal elements within production, which include costumes, make-up, cinematography, editing, acting, lighting, and sound. My thesis draws on feminist scholarship within media studies and popular culture studies; specifically elements of sociological and psychological theory within the context of gender.

Committee: Becca Cragin (Committee Chair); Marilyn Motz (Committee Member); Sandra Faulkner (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Film Studies; Gender; Gender Studies; Mass Communications; Mass Media; Personal Relationships; Sociology; Womens Studies

M.A. (Master of Arts in English), Ohio Dominican University, 2019, English

Representations of witchcraft and beings of magical power were popular forms of entertainment for William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, despite the less whimsical ramifications faced by actual persons accused of witchcraft at the time. King James I was well known to have an acute fascination with occult studies, as evidenced by his publication of Daemonologie in 1597. The vilification and fear mongering that arose from James's condemnation of witchcraft has had resounding consequences particularly affecting cultural ideology surrounding the autonomy of women for generations thereafter. In the world of the Elizabethan theater, representations of witches could be depicted as entertainment while also either endorsing or critiquing the cultural climate surrounding the subject of witchcraft in society. Shakespeare and his contemporaries portrayed these supernatural characters in a variety of ways: some comical and innocuous, others startling and sinister. But is there a distinction between the male representations of witchcraft as opposed to female (or perhaps gender-fluid) representations of witches? This paper believes there are marked distinctions and will seek to examine this question by exploring characters depicted in Shakespeare's Macbeth, The Tempest, and Henry VI. Attention will also be given to portrayals of witches by Shakespeare's contemporaries, notably Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and The Witch of Edmonton by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford. Consideration will also be paid to the ways in which particularly Shakespeare's depictions of witchcraft and representations of supernatural women have evolved in more contemporary adaptations with the insurgence of feminist ideology over the last century, and a comparative examination of original and adaptive texts will mark the distinctions of how specific performances have transformed from what may have been their original portrayals on the Elizabethan stage.

Committee: Jeremy Glazier M.F.A. (Advisor); Martin Brick Ph.D. (Other) Subjects: Gender Studies; Literature

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 2019, Industrial and Systems Engineering

This study used a qualitative approach to attempt to provide further insight into the causal mechanisms for the previous findings of investigations which have documented a higher prevalence of musculoskeletal symptoms and/or disorders in women surgeons when compared to their male colleagues. One-on-one in-depth interviews were conducted with twelve women surgeons practicing in a range of surgical subspecialties, with a wide range of years of experience. Surgeons described the factors of their work system which resulted in awkward postures, requirements for high levels of manual force, exertions while maintaining static postures, as well as operating while physiologically strained due to minimal opportunities to eat or hydrate, combined with insufficient periods for physical recovery. These factors included manual patient handling, suboptimal task height related to operating room tables, deficiencies in instrument design related to their hand size and strength capacity, and a culture of surgery which does not advance the general well-being of surgeons. Many of the issues raised in these interviews can be addressed through application of known human factors engineering design principles, leading to an operating room environment that

Committee: Carolyn Sommerich (Advisor); Steven Lavender (Committee Member) Subjects: Design; Engineering; Health; Health Care; Health Care Management; Health Sciences; Medicine; Womens Studies

BA, Kent State University, 2017, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Modern and Classical Language Studies

Love is a Cunning Weaver: Myths, Sexuality, and the Modern World explores the relationship between the modern and ancient worlds by analyzing the depiction of queer and female characters in Greco-Roman mythology. That relationship is illuminated and defined by the modern individual's tendency to apply contemporaneous narratives to myths of the ancient world in order to understand them. The aforementioned queer and female characters are introduced in their original contexts based on the most popular written traditions of the myths in which they appear. They are then broken down through a series of interviews with current (or recently graduated) college students. Finally, the narrative established in the introduction of each chapter is subverted through a creative piece.

Committee: Jennifer Larson (Advisor); Brian Harvey (Committee Member); Donald Palmer (Committee Member); Suzanne Holt (Committee Member) Subjects: Ancient History; Gender Studies; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, Germanic Languages and Literatures

This dissertation is an investigation of portrayals of the female typist and the typewriter in popular literature, film, and advertising of Germanys interwar period. This study offers a departure from the dominant narratives that posit the technologized woman as a product of male anxiety or a conflation of woman and machine. Alternatively, I find that early images of typewriting women are better understood in terms of feminist theories of the body and the cyborg that highlight the intimate connection between the body and machine. I argue that the Weimar typist-typewriter assemblage is a fusion of a specific type of New Woman and machine within the Weimar cultural imaginary, a merger of the organic and the mechanical that I call the New Woman-Machine. Through this concept, I attempt to highlight the existence of a different narrative about women and machines as visions of productivity, automatism, machine skill, and discipline. Beginning with analyses of two popular, late-Weimar novels written by former professional typists, Irmgard Keun's Gilgi—eine von uns (1931) and Christa Anita Bruck's Schicksale hinter Schreibmaschinen (1930), I show that the authors depict typewriting as a form of automatic writing, which serves as a coping mechanism for their protagonists. Then, the study turns to an investigation of German typewriter advertisements, in which female embodiment of the machine is promoted through images of the docile, disciplined female body engaged in mechanical production. The study's final thrust is made up of an interrogation of popular romantic comedies of the late-Weimar era, in which the typewriting woman becomes a source of visual pleasure that celebrates machine skill, speed, and productivity within women's embodiment of the machine. My study, thus, comes to the conclusion that such images offered real women of the Weimar era powerful alternative identities in their relationship with technology.

Committee: John Davidson (Advisor); Katra Byram (Committee Member); Jill Galvan (Committee Member) Subjects: Film Studies; Foreign Language; Gender Studies; Germanic Literature

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2015, Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services: Educational Studies

This dissertation explores some of the challenges associated with having in-depth and critical conversations in Black Studies and Women's and Gender Studies 16 week semester courses. The data are derived from my practice as a lecturer at Northern Kentucky University (NKU). The aim is to heighten awareness of equity and social justice values in students attending general education courses. These conversations are crucial to aid students in participating in a democratic society, and to see the virtues therein from a broader perspective. NKU has identified critical thinking and analytical thinking as an ongoing goal. Examining this process by which learners move toward critical consciousness will assist me as a higher education educator as I work to expand best practices for higher education classrooms. Looking specifically at how combining Critical Pedagogy, Afrocentric theory, Black Feminist theory, and Equity theory combine to create a new theory aimed at raising critical consciousness. This process can be part of the core of liberatory education. It means revisiting prevailing understandings to reach new levels of awareness—in particular, awareness of oppression, and identifying inequities in the world through readings, dialogue and written work to aid in becoming part of the ever changing world.

Committee: Samuel Stringfield Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Debra Meyers Ph.D. (Committee Member); Vanessa Allen-Brown Ph.D. (Committee Member); Marcus Johnson Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2014, English (Arts and Sciences)

This dissertation explores the development of a risky but empowering culture-specific women's consciousness by the protagonists of Sefi Atta and Laila Lalami's early novels. My insertion of Jameson's primacy of the national situation in the development of a woman's composite consciousness allows the reader to gain an understanding of women's marginalization and subsequent empowerment in a specific setting such as Casablanca, Morocco or Lagos, Nigeria. The composite factor is essential to understand the lived experiences of people in specific cultures within the postcolonial nation, for it acknowledges the importance of traditional resources but also the modern liberation tools available to the women. This study places Atta and Lalami's characters squarely in their cultural milieu so that they are read in their social, economic, political, racial, ethnic, and religious contexts. Just as Abouzeid argued that progress in studying women must be centered on women's social and political milieu because it is there that women's agency and oppression can be localized and contextualized, this study argues that women's empowerment is, in fact, grounded on what it means to be a woman in her particular society with its cultural expressions and norms. This approach focuses on a very practical and empowering experience for women as it ties them even more closely to their communities, even as they advocate for more options than were previously available to them. This culture-specificity empowers these characters to function even more efficiently as women who continually change and improve their communities in Nigeria and Morocco. Atta and Lalami's use of the concept of the composite consciousness in the frame of the local tradition serves as a unifying metaphor for each novel. This composite consciousness approach has the potential to answer Chandra Talpade Mohanty's call for a paradigm that is culture-specific yet creates solidarity across subjectivities and across the globe witho (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Joseph McLaughlin Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Mara Holt Ph.D. (Committee Member); Nicole Reynolds Ph.D. (Committee Member); Julie White Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: African Literature; African Studies; Comparative Literature; Folklore; Gender; Islamic Studies; Literature; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2014, English (Rhetoric and Writing) PhD

This dissertation explores needlework and its use as a rhetorically significant meaning- making tool. A term for this phenomenon—“rhetorical needlework”—is proposed and defined through the application of work from several authors, most particularly Robert Herrick. While rhetorical needlework has been the subject of study by many scholars in rhetoric, it has most often been studied as a historical phenomenon. However, there is a great deal of modern craft that fits this definition of rhetorical needlework; thus far, however, it has not had the depth of scholarly attention given to historical work. This dissertation seeks to help remedy this problem. In analyzing this modern rhetorical needlework, this dissertation argues that several areas of knowledge must be combined, including craft, multimodality, and feminist rhetoric. These areas of knowledge are combined through the generation of a heuristic, with which modern rhetorical needlework can then be analyzed. In creating that heuristic, several areas of work are reviewed and synthesized into four main categories: rhetorical, craft, feminist, and multimodal. Pieces consulted in this literature review come from Macdonald, Berners-Lee, Humphreys, Royster and Kirsch, Goggin, Parker, Dasler Johnson, Bratich and Brush, Shipka, Bateman, Glenn, Cixous, Greer, Mattingly, Palmeri, and others. The resulting heuristic consists of thirteen questions that help in reaching a deeper, multifaceted understanding of specific pieces of rhetorical needlework. After it has been generated, the heuristic is then applied to a case study: The Red Sweater Project/redsweaters.org. Using the heuristic helps reveal both why this work succeeds and, potentially, some of the reasons that it went unfinished. Conversely, this application also helps suggest further ways that the heuristic might be developed and applied in future work.

Committee: Sue Carter Wood (Advisor); Kristine Blair (Committee Member); Radhika Gajjala (Committee Member); Vibha Bhalla (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Rhetoric; Womens Studies

Master of Humanities (MHum), Wright State University, 2014, Humanities

Historically, the value of a woman has been based on her ability to produce healthy and successful (male) children, leaving little room for worth based on intelligence or other achievements. Second wave feminists made significant strides for women's reproductive choices, acknowledging that motherhood is not the only way for a woman to have fulfillment or value. While women throughout the United States have more access, opportunity, and choice, women in United States prisons have not benefited from the same advancements in reproductive freedom. The denial of women's reproductive freedoms in prison can be attributed to the high costs of pregnancy care, the common assumption that prisoners do not deserve rights, and to ensure that their children eventually contribute to the labor force provided by prisoners. Despite their commitment to earning autonomy for all women over their own bodies, many feminists have overlooked the exploitation of incarcerated women and their children.

Committee: Hope Jennings Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Karen Lahm Ph.D. (Committee Member); Marie Thompson Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Criminology; Gender Studies; Health Care; Womens Studies

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2014, Popular Culture

This thesis analyzes the highly popular Old Spice commercials as a contemporary cultural guide on masculinity; it addresses a number of issues related to the construction of masculinities in contemporary American culture. Both Old Spice campaigns under analysis offer great insight into cultural ideals related to the construction of hegemonic masculinity. Through a detailed textual analysis of the commercials in these campaigns, I unravel those ideals and analyze how masculinity is constructed through the protagonists' appearances and bodies, sexuality, behaviors, as well as their character patterns and mannerisms. I argue that while both Old Spice campaigns suggest that hegemonic masculinity is the only acceptable form of masculinity, hegemonic masculinity is perpetuated in two very different ways. In the Smell Like A Man, Man campaign, satire is used as a means to disguise the blunt promotion of hegemonic masculinity. The Smell is Power campaign, on the other hand, uses a very blunt approach: its overt character clearly encourages the viewer to directly align with hegemonic notions of masculinity. Both campaigns are thus representative of a certain ambiguity that is so often to be found in postmodern texts. The analysis in my thesis therefore analyzes how both campaigns serve as prime examples of how paradoxical American beliefs about masculinity are in contemporary, postmodern America.

Committee: Becca Cragin (Advisor); Marilyn Motz (Committee Member); Rebecca Kinney (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Communication; Film Studies; Gender; Gender Studies; Marketing; Mass Communications; Mass Media; Womens Studies

Bachelor of Arts, Ohio University, 2013, Women's and Gender Studies

The female body is a site of constant contention and critique. Around the world, various cultures and religions prescribe holy or admirable behavior to women, creating skewed and misogynistic ideals that girls aspire to fulfill, thereby perpetuating global, patriarchal power structures. One of the foremost capacities in which many women lack agency and autonomy is sexuality. A popularized notion of female sex workers – especially those in the global south – portrays them as brutalized victims, incapable of autonomy or agency. Abolitionist feminists propagate this image, often with the intention of ending the global sex trade. Although I find their motives worthy insofar as they hope to end cycle of violence that finds women in positions of little or no control over how or when they have sex, abolishing the sex trade is infeasible and founded on problematic assumptions that deny women of the global south agency, pleasure and navigational capabilities. In the coming pages I analyze the sex industry in Southern India, specifically the state of Karnataka with particular emphasis on instances of sex worker empowerment. Two notable examples of sex-worker collectives (Ashodaya and Sonagachi) continue to gain popularity and political sway. I also examine the role of a governmental organization, Karnataka Health Promotion Trust (KHPT), as it aims to strengthen and empower vulnerable communities, especially sex workers. Empowerment theory literature suggests that in order to end gender-based marginalization, various structural factors such as poverty, education and ethnicity must all be addressed and contextualized before any type of programming can be truly effective. The Sonagachi and Ashodaya collectives embody this because they are grass roots based, so the people who are being helped are also the ones providing the aid. This type of localized, peer-based contextualization is capable of dissolving problematic, rescue-based initiatives, which are often corr (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Patricia Stokes (Advisor) Subjects: Gender; Gender Studies; South Asian Studies; Womens Studies

Doctor of Psychology (Psy.D.), Xavier University, 2005, Psychology

The present study directly tested the second form of prejudice posited by role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders (Eagly & Karau, 2002). This form of prejudice manifests in negative evaluations of actual leadership behaviors of women as compared with the equivalent behaviors in men. Two separate audio CD vignettes were created specifically for this study, based on identical scripts, each depicting a corporate executive during a telephone conversation with a subordinate. In one vignette, a male actor was featured as the target character; in the other a female was featured. Participants listened to one of the two vignettes and completed an interpersonal evaluation inventory designed to assess their perceptions of the target characters' likeability. Two additional items were added to this questionnaire, asking participants indicate their level of interest in having the target character as both a mentor and a boss. Participants also completed a questionnaire assessing modern sexist beliefs. Separate two-way ANOVA's were performed on each of the three hypotheses. It was hypothesized that male participants would evaluate the male executive more favorably than his female counterpart whereas female participants would evaluate the agentic female executive more favorably than the male executive. It was also predicted that participants of both sexes who endorse modern sexist beliefs would evaluate the female executive less favorably than the female executive. Results revealed a significant interaction effect between participant sex and sex of the stimulus person, with participants rating the same-sex executive as more likeable than the opposite-sex executive. A similar double-bias was found with respect to participants' preferences in a mentor. Contrary to prediction, no significant differences were found in likeability ratings of the male and female executive by participants endorsing modern sexist beliefs. The implications of the present findings are discuss (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Cynthia L. Dulaney Ph.D. (Committee Chair); David T. Hellkamp Ph.D. (Committee Member); Christine M. Dacey Ph.D., ABPP (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender Studies; Occupational Psychology; Womens Studies

MA, University of Cincinnati, 2011, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Art History

In this study, I examine Le Piano (1888) and Lucie Leon au Piano (1892) by Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) and the significant ways in which these two paintings depart from the established tradition of female piano portraiture in nineteenth-century France. Charlotte Eyerman has explored the importance of the “woman at the piano” theme and its role in the construction of femininity but limits her study to the work of male artists. Morisot's piano portraits offer an unusual female perspective on a theme primarily created and perpetuated by male artists. My analysis elucidates the manner in which these works drew upon the tradition of the woman at the piano motif and the specific ways in which the artist subverted the passivity and superficiality that characterized male-produced versions of the theme. Le Piano evokes the tradition of female bourgeois education in nineteenth-century France and the importance of the piano in the development of femininity. However, Morisot enriched the commonplace act of playing the piano with an intellectualism not part of the superficial, socially-ordained reasons for playing in a unique manner that was largely absent from its representations in visual tradition. In Le Piano, by painting the confident figure of her daughter, Julie, nonchalantly leaning on the piano and looking out at the viewer as her cousin, Jeannie Gobillard, plays, Morisot communicated the fulfilling and enjoyable role music-making played in these girls' lives. In Lucie Leon au Piano, the visual emphasis of the tensed musculature of Leon's hands and arms invites associations with the conventions of male piano portraiture. While female pianists were generally prized for their charm and delicacy, male pianists, especially the male virtuoso, were conceived of as powerful, insightful, and active musicians. Morisot departed from the static and amateurish qualities common in the woman at the piano motif to create images whose subjects are physically engaged with the act of maki (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Theresa Leininger-Miller PhD (Committee Chair); Julie Alane Aronson PhD (Committee Member); Morgan Thomas , (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History

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)

Committee: Vikki Krane Ph.D. (Advisor); Ellen Berry Ph.D. (Committee Member); Marv Belzer Ph.D. (Committee Member); Don Callen Ph.D. (Committee Member); Christina Guenther Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Aesthetics; Alternative Dispute Resolution; American History; American Studies; Art Criticism; Art Education; Art History; Asian American Studies; Communication; Comparative; Cultural Anthropology; Dance; Education; Education Philosophy; Ethics; Ethnic Studies; Fine Arts; Folklore; Gender Studies; Kinesiology; Modern History; Multicultural Education; Peace Studies; Pedagogy; Performing Arts; Philosophy; Physical Education; Rhetoric; Sociolinguistics; Sports Management; Sustainability; Womens Studies; World History