MA, Kent State University, 2023, College of the Arts / School of Art

The patriarchal structure of education and the lack of political equitability calls for feminist(s) leadership as the opposing structure, where power thrives with the inclusion of others, and is informed by the sharing of others' lived experiences. This study aims to contribute to the active conversation of feminism(s) in the field of art education through a cross-generational examination of feminist(s) narrative experiences. Focusing on qualitative methods such as narrative inquiry, feminist ethnography, and arts-based educational research, data was collected through personal journaling, participant journaling, and a panel interview of six feminist-identifying art educators. The findings presented through data analysis coincide with current feminist(s) art educators' discussion of mentorship or co-mentorship, inclusive leadership and feminist(s) action, deconstruction of patriarchal curriculum, and continuous conversations across generations with a focus on reclaiming the joy and histories of feminism(s).

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2020, American Culture Studies

In 2014 Roxane Gay published Bad Feminist, a collection of personal essays written from her position as a Haitian American feminist academic. This work quickly skyrocketed in popularity across both academic and nonacademic audiences. Representative of the increasingly public-facing authoethnographic scholarship of feminist academic women, Gay's work is a product of its time. For this dissertation, I examine Bad Feminist along with two other also wildly popular autoethnographic works produced in the same decade, Tressie McMillan Cotton's Thick: And Other Essays and Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts. I examine these texts as public-facing, accessible works that communicate their academic feminist authors'; feelings of feminist inadequacy in order to address larger issues of feminist practice and theory. Utilizing Sara Ahmed's theory of becoming feminist, I analyze the "bad feminist moments" expressed in these texts as moments of feminist crisis to identify what causes them and what functions they might serve. Using qualitative methodological triangulation, better known as mixed-methods research, I employ topic modeling and content analysis across all three texts to identify patterns that reveal not only why and how academic feminists might feel like they are bad feminists, but how and why they choose to share the moments in which they feel like bad feminists with others. Fighting to maintain their feminist identities in a world rife with gendered and raced violence, neoliberal ideals of self sufficiency and individual perfection, rapidly evolving technologies, and intersecting historical structures of oppression, these authors utilize moments of feminist imperfection to create space and time to disarticulate and rearticulate their relationships to feminism, their relationships to other people, and their relationships to academia. In this project, I conclude that bad feminist moments might be reactions to the pressures of both historical and contemporary structures of o (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, 2022, American Culture Studies

The mythopoetic histories of prehistoric matriarchies and European witch hunts written by second-wave feminist Goddess worshippers and witches have been roundly critiqued by feminist academics for their uncritical reproduction of conventional patriarchal gender archetypes and their neocolonial appropriation of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color's spiritual practices, deities, and symbols. Feminist scholars have argued that these narratives serve only to depoliticize feminist politics and prevent meaningful progress in the feminist movement. The goal of this project is not to refute or dismiss the critiques of these scholars, rather, this dissertation builds from these critiques to explore whether feminist Goddess worshippers and witches are doomed to perpetually repeat the sins of their foremothers, or if contemporary feminists are finding ways to engage, resist, and rewrite the neocolonial, racist, and gender essentialist tropes inherited from their first and second-wave forerunners. Refusing the binaries that ally secular, progressive activism against private, regressive religion, this project uses a mixed-methods approach of queer-feminist discourse analysis and focus group interviews to examine how the discourse of feminist Goddess worshippers and witches has produced the witch as an indelible figure within feminist activism and spirituality. It traces the figure's evolution throughout the eras of suffrage, radical second wave, and contemporary feminism. This project contributes to the existing literature by building a hermeneutics of repair using Melanie Klein's object relations theory and Stuart Hall's concept of oppositional reading to complement the critiques generated by feminist scholars working from what Paul Ricoeur calls a hermeneutics of suspicion. I offer a critical, queer-feminist analysis that employs both modes of hermeneutics to feminist discourse and focus group interviews to analyze how the spiritual practices and writings of Goddess feminis (open full item for complete abstract)

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

Envisioning Feminist Genre Film: Relational Epistemology, Catharsis, and Erotic Intersubjects addresses the ways in which feminist filmmakers create narratives that unravel masculinist power paradigms in order to demonstrate different approaches to knowledge production and subjectivity as established through erotic, relational, and feminist dialogism, which foregrounds an ideology that individually and culturally we shape language through interactive and collaborative methods. This study delves into how these feminist films offer the filmmakers and viewers cathartic and pedagogical experiences to explore trauma as well as navigate expanding conceptions of gender, sexual, and relationship diversities. The focus of this project is to examine the impact of including the diverse voices and experiences of marginalized people into the modes of film production through on- and off-screen roles, arguing that these creators' ontological and experiential frames establish structures for the exploration of feminist and queer theories. While attentive to the prior approaches of feminist and queer theories when applied to film, I articulate the ways feminist filmmakers create specifically feminist films and how constructing narratives based on feminist ideologies unlocks opportunities for undoing and transforming gender and sexuality. Methodologically using close visual textual analsysis of feminist genre films, my dissertation delves into feminist film noir, queer melodrama, horror, and pornography to demonstrate how genre impacts the tools and approaches feminist filmmakers use to interogate and establish relational epistemologies in order to envision erotic intersubjectivity, as a part of the ongoing process of articulating the sovereign sexual subjecthood of the individual.

Master of Arts, University of Akron, 2017, Communication

Applying feminist media theory to the 2015 Spike Lee film Chi-Raq, this thesis explores portrayals of black-female power and sexuality. In three layers this thesis examines: the language used by and toward women of color, the gender roles and power constructs within the film, and finally the either/or dichotomous thinking associated with the four controlling images of Black womanhood, particularly the role of the Jezebel as a promiscuous and socially dangerous character. This thesis seeks to understand how sexualized portrayals of Black women, despite the power associated with their sexuality, are limiting and problematic.

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2015, English

Composition specialists have long recognized how online writing technologies call into question our notions of what it means to write, and how they might offer opportunities for resistance and empowerment, particularly when it comes to gendered identities and epistemologies. But there is no doubt that the internet—like any technology—is embedded in networks of power that govern the production of knowledge, identities, and agency. In this project, I employ a person-based, feminist materialist methodology to map these networks in three online spaces (Wikipedia, Ravelry, and Feminist Frequency) in order to develop a theory of multimodal feminist epistemologies. By foregrounding the materiality of composing, multimodal feminist epistemologies help rhetors reflect on their embodied positions within larger networks, in addition to highlighting the overlapping networks of power that produce identity and agency. Embracing this subversive multimodal textuality will enable researchers, students, internet users, and web designers to acknowledge the diverse locations of identity production and explore alternative epistemologies, ultimately facilitating more ethical and effective rhetorical action online. The value of a multimodal feminist epistemology, then, lies in its ability to articulate new ways of being and knowing— and that can ultimately equip us to make the internet, as well as the rest of the world, a more inclusive, empowering place.

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2013, Theological Studies

The study of feminist biblical hermeneutics is very diverse; it can mean different things to different people. As a result, there is much disagreement concerning how to read Scriptures from a feminist perspective in the correct way. For a proper study of the Scriptures from a feminist point of view, one must converse with other forms of feminist hermeneutics. Therefore, using excerpts from Mark 5 and John 4, this thesis will create a dialogue between the theologians Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Musa Dube, and John Paul II. In doing so, this thesis will attempt to show a more comprehensive feminist biblical hermeneutic using theological perspectives from Catholic Western feminism, Protestant Two-Thirds World feminism, and the Magisterium.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2008, Art Education

Gender and technology scholarship demonstrates a longstanding, persistence gender gap reflecting the inequity between the large numbers of men and small numbers of women in technology educational courses and careers. What instructional and institutional changes can address and counteract the current gender inequity status quo? This dissertation presents a two-year critical case study of Digital Animation: A Technology Mentoring Program for Young Women, a pedagogical intervention that intends to increase the likelihood of young women participants pursuing future educational, personal, and professional technology opportunities. The program, situated at The Ohio State University's Advanced Computing Center for Art and Design, provides a group of 15 to 18 young women with an intensive two-week animation experience using Maya 3D animation software to produce short films on local environmental issues. The major program hypothesis is that women may be more likely to learn technology as embedded within an arts-centered curriculum, where arts function as the primary medium for learning and communication, as opposed to traditional computer technology instruction. Learning becomes co-constructed, collaborative, interdisciplinary, creative, and personal; learners become active. The aim is to provide participants with personal instructional support, a peer network, mentors, examples of successful women in technology, personal success, and exposure to a wide range of technology possibilities. I use gender and technology scholarship in conjunction with multiple critical theoretical perspectives, including feminist poststructuralist pedagogy and visual culture art education, to create a multi-faceted, complex framework for analyzing Digital Animation, its efforts, and its outcomes. This case study presents data highlighting ways a visual culture art education orientation can also utilize other critical theoretical perspectives, such as feminist poststructuralist pedagogy, to a (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, English

Knowledge-Making in Early Modern Englishwomen's Literary Writings, 1570-1650 investigates early modern Englishwomen's exploration of scientific ideas and epistemological inquiries in several literary forms, arguing that their chosen literary conventions significantly influenced their epistemic exploration of science, and vice versa. The literary works of Englishwomen writers, rich with valuable scientific insights, have often been neglected in the field, and their contributions have yet to be fully integrated into the canon of English scientific history. In this dissertation, I rectify the historical oversight regarding Englishwomen's contributions by demonstrating their active participation in scientific and epistemological thinking of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through their literary productions. This dissertation analyzes four literary works from the 1570s to the 1650s: Isabella Whitney's anthology A Sweet Nosegay (1573), Elizabeth Cary's closet drama The Tragedy of Mariam (1613), Lady Mary Wroth's prose romance The Countess of Montgomery's Urania (1621), and Hester Pulter's poetry collection Poems Breathed Forth by the Noble Hadassa (1640s-50s). I trace how these women writers deployed and reshaped epistemological inquiry to suit their creative endeavors, which reveals that literary forms served as vehicles for their investigation of scientific epistemologies, actively contributing to the scientific conversations of their time. Women writers critiqued, reinterpreted, and navigated theoretical knowledge, demonstrating a dynamic intersection between science, literature, and cultural narrative. In this way, literary forms provided these women with the means to question and reshape prevailing knowledge systems, offering diverse perspectives that are essential for fully historicizing women's knowledge-making in the early modern period. My project ultimately challenges the idea that science and art exist separately and highlights how creative and intellec (open full item for complete abstract)

Psy. D., Antioch University, 2024, Antioch New England: Clinical Psychology

Trans members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and other marginalized sexual and gender identities (LGBT+) community may be at risk of erasure from both dominant sociocultural scripts and clinical psychological research. Identity development experts have asserted that identity is fixed by late adolescence, with some room for evolution depending on context (Marcia, 2002; Sokol, 2009). Research about grief suggests that anything that has been lost has the potential to be experienced through the lens of grief (Chapple et al., 2016; Collings, 2007). This grief of non-death loss has been linked to loss of relationships, expected life trajectory, and self-concept. The loss of relationship to the previous gender label has not been discussed in the extant literature. This lack of research might both be endemic to and perpetuate self-concealment in LGBT+ communities. Trans individuals might also be vulnerable to grief, becoming disenfranchised and exacerbated by lack of representation. The current dissertation offers a mixed-method Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis to address gaps in the extant literature. Surprisingly, the current research supports that, while internal processes may play a role in shifting gender labels, participants are more impacted overall by the loss of social factors such as understanding self in relation to social environment. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu) and OhioLINK ETD Center (https://etd.ohiolink.edu).

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

The Dead Come to Carcal is a new-adult fantasy/adventure which centers around a multi-pronged mystery in the Inca-inspired city, Carcal. The novel follows five characters who become connected to that mystery and drawn together to solve it. Enrel Leolore, a militia warrior who lives in Carcal, haunted by a curse she bears from a spirit; Adwynn Theyros, a mage bounty hunter who is blood-bound to an arcane contract by the prestigious Candlelight University, attempting to save her mother from debt; Lumiseth Amruus, a skilled cleric who is chosen by the Rutaran god of the sun to halt an ancient evil rising in the land of Atrea; Vaen, Lumiseth's personal handservant and childhood friend, who is tasked with caring for his charge on his prophesied journey; and Howler, a wandering thief who is following a recurring dream in search of revenge for their shattered family. When mysterious circumstances bring each of these individuals to the city of Carcal, nestled in the mountains of the Atrean Collective Territories, they find themselves pulled into a secret plot of disappearances, would-be spirits, and the cryptic machinations of the magical forest, Yuko. They must find a way to collaborate with one another in spite of their varied upbringings and agendas to get to the bottom of Carcal's mysteries. Else their lives, and the lives of everyone in Carcal, fall to a mounting threat of unimaginable depths—depths which the world of Harrigon hasn't seen for centuries. The novel explores multiple, intertwining points of view, inspired by the popular tabletop role-playing game, Dungeons and Dragons. By doing this, it reveals its characters' troubled lives, engaging in themes of societal and structural inequality, imperialism, privilege, family, love, mental health, neurodivergence, growth, redemption, and healing. It crafts a unique and rich fantasy world that is inspired by historical cultures of our own, and is written in the feminist fantasy tradition, featuring a diverse cas (open full item for complete abstract)

DMA, University of Cincinnati, 2022, College-Conservatory of Music: Voice

Operatic vocalists encounter a range of external expectations that threaten to inhibit their pleasure of singing. Performers are often trained to fulfill the composer's creative vision, which can compel performers to neglect and limit their own creative desires. Disconnected from their creative flow, vocalists may struggle to sustain their singing. The vocal hardships and lack of artistic fulfillment become mutually constitutive and cause strife in their relationship with singing. Concurrently, many historical opera plots include outmoded sexual politics which seem to affirm repressive gendered stereotypes about women. In most performative contexts, performers do not have the freedom to alter the libretti of standard repertoire. Given these constraints placed upon the performer, could there be methods to destabilize conventional constructions and semiotic codes in a way that would deconstruct sexist representations in opera and produce alternative meanings? Could the performer's reclamation of pleasure assist in creating new meanings and liberate their singing? The move towards valuing pleasure and embodiment in classical performance can have a positive impact on the field, extending from affective gains for performers to an increase in its social impact. In this thesis, I will be offering strategies for a feminist performance praxis of nineteenth-century operatic repertoire. In my methodology, I will construct a pleasure-oriented vocal practice and then move to devise modes of embodied resistance in performance through a feminist analysis of the sexual politics in operatic libretti. Bringing Carolyn Abbate's conception of the singer's "authorial voice" into dialogue with Audre Lorde's concept of "erotic power," I will argue that women's embodied performance practice can be a site wherein gendered power structures are renegotiated through channeling counterhegemonic forms of feminine desire.

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2022, Educational Leadership

This research is unapologetically Black. It is for and about Black women and centers Black women in all aspects of the study. Historically, Black women have been either invisible or highly visible in higher education (Thomas & Hollenshead, 2001; Turner, 2008), leaving scholars to wonder: Where do Black women fit in? How are Black women represented? Where is their space in higher education? Over time, Black women have necessarily formed their own spaces where they can be themselves and support one another (Patton & Jordan, 2017; Smith, 1995). For that reason, this study is rooted in Black women in community. Specifically, this research created space for Black women in student affairs to highlight their unique experiences and perspectives in regard to leadership. The purpose of this qualitative study was to center the experiences of Black women in student affairs and explore how they approach leadership given their race and gender. The research question that guided this study was: How do Black women in student affairs at predominantly white institutions understand and practice leadership? I broadly defined Black women's leadership so that it did not need to be connected to a specific position; the focus was on how Black women saw themselves as leaders rather than focusing on a specific position. Sista circle methodology (Johnson, 2015), grounded in Black feminist thought (Collins, 2009) was used to address the research question. Participants (sista scholars) engaged in four in-person sista circles in which they shared about their experience as Black women leaders in higher education and, and in doing so, developed community. Three themes about Black women leadership in student affairs emerged: (1) role modeling as a Black woman leader; (2) barriers to leading as a Black woman; and (3) the communal nature of leadership for Black women. These findings inform research by expanding upon the concepts of Black Feminist Leadership (Abdullah, 2007; McLane-Davison, 2015 (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2022, English

This dissertation examines the important affective labor of diverse feminist activists and sexual assault survivor advocates and contributes a theory of feminist affective resistance. I define feminist affective resistance as the transformative rhetorics and literacy practices feminists employ to challenge dominant pedagogies of emotion while building toward feminist and survivor-centered futures. In Chapter 1, I situate this dissertation within scholarship on affect, feminist rhetorics, and literacies, establishing how feminist scholars and activists have begun to identify and resist social-emotional scripts. In Chapter 2, I constellate a feminist trauma-informed methodology and introduce my participants and methods. I investigate feminist rhetorical strategies and literacy practices through interviews with eleven feminist activists and an ethnographic case study at a rape crisis center where I have volunteered for three years. In Chapter 3, I describe how feminist activists enact digital tactics of feminist affective resistance while making social media work for them. Participants in this study established feminist affective counterpublics online and carefully navigated the affective burdens of their online activism. In Chapter 4, I investigate the feminist rhetorical pedagogies at the Midwest Rape Crisis Organization (MRCO), including five rhetorical tenets that guide advocate interactions with survivors. MRCO rhetorics and pedagogies help survivors and advocates realign away from discourses of rape culture and toward feminist values of the organization. In Chapter 5, I present MRCO as a literacy sponsor that helps advocates affectively attune with survivors and affectively realign away from vicarious trauma. Literacy practices of MRCO advocates include reading to believe, writing to process, and gathering to heal. In Chapter 6, I review four lessons of feminist affective resistance, including the importance of rhetorical affective education. I conclude this diss (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2022, Media and Communication

This project examined traditional gendered discourses surrounding the ends and means of sexuality, the emerging role of digital sexual technologies in purported sexual empowerment, and the socio-material aspects which revolve around these technologies, sexual medias, and sexual discourses. Combining critical feminist insights with media ecology, this project explored happenings within the sociosexually violent pre- and present-COVID-19 United States ecology, documenting novel and rigorous contributions in our increasingly algorithmic world. This study of the U.S. context critiques foundational constructs created by Enlightenment decisionmakers who rationalized colonial rhetorics and logics built into each preceding iteration of capitalisms from industrialism into neoliberalism since national origin. As such, it extends critiques of mechanistic models of the human body and sexual communications and situates them within the vastly uncriminalized sexual violences, as well as insufficient sexual education standards. Theoretically, I argue that a mechanization of humans has occurred, been pushed to its extreme, and is flipping into a humanization of objects. To demonstrate this, I critical feminist rhetorically analyzed 75 biomimetic sextech advertisements from the brand Lora DiCarlo, contextualizing them in salient discourses within 428 present-COVID-19 TikTok videos, investigating: “What rhetorical themes occur within advertisements for biomimetic sexual technologies marketed to vulva-havers in the late-stage present-COVID-19 neoliberal U.S. landscape?” “How have biomimetic sexual technologies marketed to vulva-havers effected how their sexual experiences are created and maintained in the sociosexual U.S. landscape?” and “How are biomimetic sextech changing vulva-havers sexual sense-making, experiences, and relations within the sexually violent late-stage capitalist present-COVID-19 U.S. landscape?” Using a feminist eye, this brings to media ecology a contextualization (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2021, English

Women are oftentimes forgotten in history due to the pursuit of their male colleagues. Much is the case for Lady Colin Campbell, nee Gertrude Elizabeth Blood (b. 3 May 1857), as she was left behind in history. However, unlike other similar stories, Blood was subject to the thoughts and opinions of a nation when she and her husband went through the longest and nastiest - dismissed - divorce trial in UK history. After the trial, she engaged in journalistic writing, submitting over a period of time to the periodical The World which would eventually turn into her essays A Woman's Walks. Despite her popularity at the time Blood and her writing faded out of the public sphere. What this project intends to accomplish is to reintroduce Gertrude Elizabeth Blood back into society not for her scandal, but for how her work can be considered part of the Flaneur genre. As a woman born to a family capable of social climbing and then eventually a shunned member of the upper class, Blood's work can shed unique light on the machinations of the Flaneur and the effects of class and gender. This proposed project will perform an analysis to (a) engage in understanding of the flaneur, working the flaneuse into the definition of the flaneur using Blood's writing and (b) a reintroduction of Blood as a woman worthy of analysis, and appreciation for her work as a woman who went against the grain of society.

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2021, Media and Communication

In 2006, American activist Tarana Burke started the me too movement that helped survivors of sexual assault by telling them that there were other survivors too, and they were not alone. In 2017, Alyssa Milano used the same phrase as a hashtag and called for women to share their experiences of harassment using #metoo, or just use the hashtag to show they have been through something similar. This movement eventually brought about the conviction of former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. However, echoes of this movement reached far and wide, beyond the United States of America. Survivors of assault started using social media to call out what they had been through. This study examines the voice of women on the digital media platforms and how their calling out of sexual harassers on these platforms negotiates with the discourse of shame and guilt surrounding sexual assault. Shame is a prominent emotion associated with sexual assault that finds its space within the larger narrative of silencing women. Survivors often do not report assault for fear of being shamed. In news media, shame is reinforced by way of stock images that show a woman hiding her face or crying for help that accompany stories of sexual assault. Shame could force survivors to keep their trauma to themselves for years, resulting in other psychological issues. Social media intervenes in this. This study looks at three cases in India between 2017 and 2019 where survivors used social media to speak up about how they had been sexually harassed and/or assaulted. Using textual and discourse analysis, the study found that as opposed to portraying survivors in a pitiful light, social media gives the agency to the survivor to decide how they want to be seen. They are able to bypass passive narratives through first-person reporting. This subversion of shame does not necessarily affect the consequences that the accused will face but it focuses on the survivor's needs. The results of this research sugg (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2021, English (Rhetoric and Writing) PhD

The history of women's rhetorical education is diverse, combining issues of access and exclusion, and intersecting with other factors of social location and identity such as class, race, and geography. Scholars like Gere, Johnson, Logan, and VanHaitsma have all explored the various ways women have pursued education in rhetoric and writing outside of the formal space of classroom settings, through women's clubs, parlor rhetorics, letter-writing, and more. Additionally, scholars such as Costa and Kallick and works like the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing have considered the role that habits of mind play in shaping writing education. This project has two primary goals. The first is to analyze the role of self-culture (the process of seeking out knowledge and education of one's own volition) as an element of rhetorical education for diverse women living and learning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through an investigation of self-culture texts and women's archival records. The second is to analyze the role of habits of mind in women's self-culture practices, and to draw connections between the historical evidence and contemporary research. I employed a feminist historiographic methodology, relying on digital archival research and textual analysis. The project outlines key elements of self-culture as an aspect of rhetorical education, focusing on texts' instructions related to speaking, reading and writing; analyzing diverse women's uptake and modification of self-culture advice; and uncovering the interconnected and multilayered importance of habits of mind. The findings of my analysis offer insight into modes of writing and rhetorical education that occurred alongside and outside of formal educational settings, showcase diverse women's uptake of those educational methods, and describe the interconnected role played by habits of mind in extracurricular learning activities. This project draws connections between the practices of self- (open full item for complete abstract)

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

Although Latinx communities are highly concerned with the environment, there is a lack of scholarship on Latinx environmentalism. Mainstream environmentalism is founded on a history of colonialism and racism, and thus this dissertation argues that Latinx communities have an environmentalism that is oppositional to the mainstream by acknowledging histories of colonialism and white supremacy. With growing concern about climate crisis in the public eye, this dissertation examines various types of Latinx creative expression, from music and poetry to photography and jewelry making, in order to explore oppositional environmentalism among Latinx communities. One musician, Lido Pimienta, constructs an embodied sense of environmentalism in her music videos, speeches, and performances that is built on her own experiences, and the history of her Afro-Indigenous communities. Young Latinx reporters and photographers for small regional presses in California use their photography and essays to present an alternative foundation for fighting drought conditions--one that is a critique of a capitalist view of water as a resource. The comics of Breena Nunez center Afro-Latinx queer people while imagining a different world where environmentalism rejects environmental fascism wholeheartedly. Finally, interviews with artists April Montiel and Aideed Medina discuss the importance of art in environmentalism, and the role the creative process has in fighting for a better future.