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.

Psy. D., Antioch University, 2024, Antioch Seattle: Clinical Psychology

Recent political movements such as the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements have brought renewed attention to the social roles of White women and their unique position of intersectional privilege and oppression. White women experience the benefits of whiteness while simultaneously experiencing the gendered oppression of womanhood. However, there is a lack of research exploring how White women conceptualize and respond to their own positionality as both White individuals and as women. This study utilizes constructivist grounded theory to examine how White women navigate their social location within the context of working in the nonprofit sector, a space wherein White women are overrepresented and often in close contact with various elements of systemic oppression. The analysis revealed that White women view nonprofit organizations as protected spaces that allow them to foster careers without encountering overt sexism. However, White women also believe that nonprofits are fragile and easily threatened by external pressures. They seek to protect these spaces by maintaining a homogenous culture that aligns with White womanhood. They view increasing diversity as simultaneously aligned with their personal and organizational values and threatening to the organization's culture and internal stability. As a result, White women engage in a variety of maneuvers that serve to symbolically pursue diversity without altering the fundamental culture of the organization. These maneuvers allow White women to see themselves as benevolent and values driven, while also maintaining their systemic power over People of Color. The findings offer insight into the role White women play in maintaining systems of racial oppression in response to their own fears of gender-based oppression, and guide recommendations for further intersectional deconstruction of oppressive systems. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu) and OhioLINK ETD Center (https://e (open full item for complete abstract)

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.

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2019, Theatre

Performance and even vulnerability are not inherently liberatory or revolutionary, however when we set this intention, we produce a product and a framework that seeks to liberate not only self, but others. As one young woman attempts to make sense of the world by first making sense of herself, “The Liberation Will Be Televised: Performance as Liberatory Practice” explores the process of producing a product in search of collective liberation through performance. Following in the footsteps of many Black feminist theorists, the curation of this portfolio invokes a Narrative approach, taking the reader on a journey of liberatory practice.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, Spanish and Portuguese

This dissertation analyzes the construction of a pervasive social imaginary of unequal order in Central America between 1870 and 1900. This period was crucial in the region, which underwent a series of economic, political, and social reforms that would forever transform the natural and social landscapes of the isthmus. Although most of these structural changes have already been studied, it is still unclear how literary and cultural production intersected with the liberal elites' endeavors of social classification, economic modernization, and political institutionalization. This dissertation addresses that problem through theoretical elaborations on the social imaginary (Cornelius Castoriadis) and the distribution of the sensible (Jacques Ranciere). I specifically analyze three different types of cultural texts: household economy guides for girls and young women; cuadros costumbristas (sketches of manners); and sentimental novels and theater plays. Part 1 deals with the cultural measures that contributed to a symbolic and material division of public spaces and private spaces, both ruled by the rationale of capitalism. Chapters 1 through 3 study in detail the role of household economy manuals in the dissemination and implementation of the new capitalist logics of productivity, rationalization, and accumulation across the domestic or private spaces. Chapter 1 analyzes how these cultural texts created two opposing female archetypes: the "economic woman" or "productive housewife", figured as an agent of domestic modernization, and the "abject servant", a subaltern subject that would undergo a set of new domestic policies of surveillance, discipline, and exploitation. Chapter 2 addresses the role of the productive housewives in the implementation of new modes of regulation of time and desire within the urban households, while Chapter 3 covers the rearrangements in domestic spaces brought by the new concepts of comfort and hygiene. Part 2 deals with the simultaneous reo (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Liberal Studies, University of Toledo, 2015, College of Languages, Literature, and Social Sciences

“All Made-Up: The Hyperfeminization of Fat Women” analyzes the way some fat women conform to cultural ideals regarding femininity with the goal of having fatness included within that ideal. Fat phobia is used by the dominant culture to oppress women and keep them `in-line' with the heternormative, white, cultural ideals of beauty in the United States. “All Made-Up” argues that fatness is socially constructed via medicalization, political rhetoric, and mother blame. It argues that hyperfeminization is an important form of fat activism, but one that is narrow in its ability to change cultural ideals. Hyperfeminization reinforces cultural ideals regarding femininity and excludes a vast group of women in the process.

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2001, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

This work examines Native women's activism in contemporary North American decolonizing movements. Looking at Native women's political literature with particular attention to their theories of gender, post-colonialism, Indigenism, feminism, and the reformative obligations of the writer, this study is concerned with several questions. First, how do Native women activists and writers analyze their experiences of hegemonic and patriarchal oppression, how do they outline and enact their political vision, and how do they theorize "race" and "gender" in twentieth- and twenty-first-century North America? Second, how does the history of conquest, going back at least three centuries, continue to affect contemporary Native women's theories and praxes of activism today? Third, what are the intellectual, cultural, and political responsibilities of the Native activist/writer living in modern America? Finally, how have Native women constructed their political vision against and alongside white women's movements? Can they coalesce for political reform? Native women's decolonizing movements include a critique of Eurocentrism, grounded in an analysis of specific historical contingencies, along with the reintegration of Native traditions of social and political praxes into contemporary tribal life. Several Native writers characterize this movement as "Indigenism" which presupposes several assumptions: that indigenous people worldwide share a common experience of colonization and subsumption into a capitalist, hegemonic nation state; a shared investment in the attainment of sovereign nationhood; and a fundamentally non-disruptive, integrative relationship to the natural habitat. Chapter One examines Native women's life narratives, concentrating on questions of writing as witness and the achievement of a liberatory voice through inscription. Chapter Two reviews the differences between Native and western feminist activism, arguing that these differences are determined, in part, by Native (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2010, Womens Studies

Bringing together Black Feminist and post-structuralist perspectives, this dissertation examines how the public discourse of the African American Civil Rights movement has created specific subject-positions that African American women must write through and with, if they are to tell their remembrances of that historical moment. Through textual analysis and archival research, this dissertation performs a queer reading of the Civil Rights movement. Previous scholarship on African American autobiography has centered on analyzing race, gender, and the experience of being oppressed by the dominant culture. My project differs from previous scholarship because it explores the ways that hetero-normative and racialized surveillance influences African American constructions of the self.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2010, Womens Studies

This project investigates the ways that the Black female body has been constructed using corpulence as a central narrative that reflects anxieties about race, gender, class, sexuality, and national identity. It identifies how the performance of corpulence through the Black female body has particular ideological meanings that have been articulated through visual and narrative cultures. Corpulence is operative in defining rigid boundaries in regards to identity, which are built on constructed notions of whiteness and Blackness. Moreover, this study identifies corpulence as a facet of identity and illuminates how it intersects with race, gender, and class to relegate Black women to the bottom of American society. Through an analysis of several popular texts, this study illuminates the varied ways that the discourse involving corpulence reflects narratives that deploy race, gender, and class as signifiers of “authentic” American identity and restrict the social, economic, and political mobility of the Black female body. The analysis begins with a historical examination of how pertinent size has been to the construction of the Black female body in visual and narrative cultures and how this particular construction has worked to establish ideals regarding difference. It assesses the historical ‘Mammy' construction of the Black female body in an effort to identify how the physical attributes of this particular construction serve to nurture whiteness in general. The primary interest is to identify the function of corpulence in the construction of this caricature and analyze how it was composed as a signifier of ‘Blackness' that was used to establish, promote and sustain white supremacy through visual culture. Also, corpulence has been appropriated and used in Black folklore as a means to comical effect. This study illuminates the ways in which corpulence is performed in Black folklore as a means to denigrate the Black female body. Moreover, it traces this assault through ana (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2008, Women's Studies

My project investigates the ways that the representation of Black female revolutionary activists during the 1970s produced images and narratives of justice that have informed the artistic work of Black women over the past 30 years. My analysis begins with Black revolutionary icons, Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver, and the various historical discourses that informed the circulation, consumption and meaning of their images. Photographic images of these prominent Black female activists circulated in the sixties and seventies and produced important narratives about the primacy of Black male experience as representative of the Black liberation struggle. They also contributed to the mythological, Amazonian image of Black womanhood that developed into filmic images in blaxploitation films, featuring actresses like Pam Grier and Tamara Dobson. These films reflected anxieties about gender, race and sexuality.My analysis of visual images of icons such as Davis and Grier are linked to a legacy of revolutionary Black feminist rhetoric, representation and critique that continued in the literature of Black women in the eighties. Revolutionary imagery and Black feminist rhetoric embedded in the work of Black female writers and poets, such as Alice Walker and Audre Lorde, provided a space for a more complex and nuanced articulation of Black female revolutionary womanhood. More specifically, their use of the image of the Amazon and the willingness of Lorde and Walker to explore a Black female experience that included both strength and vulnerability were crucial to the development and visual articulation of revolution that emerged in work of Black women in the early nineties. The work of Black female artists such as Erykah Badu and Me'shell Ndegeocello are examples of the ways that young Black female musicians have appropriated and rearticulated Black feminist revolutionary rhetoric, iconography and aesthetics from the 1970s to explore what it means to be a Black female revolution (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, English

This dissertation is situated at the intersection of 20th-century American literary and cultural studies, particularly contemporary formulations that urge a comparativist, hemispheric, or transnational approach to American literatures and cultures. Taking up this critical conversation through a study of genre, namely autobiography, I argue for a comparative and transnational approach to ethnic women's life narratives. Scholars of autobiography have examined how the genre, in its construction of the autobiographical subject as model citizen, participates in the project of U.S. citizenship and nation-building. What is less recognized is how ethnic and immigrant women autobiographers have pushed the borders of the genre and, by extension, have challenged the fantasy of the representative citizen-subject in the U.S. I argue that a number of contemporary autobiographers are rewriting the genre in order to represent the transnational subject—that is, the subject who does not identify with a single nation-state or whose national identity is inseparable from global social and economic contexts. These writers, I argue, use genre as a rhetorical strategy in order to redefine identity, citizenship, and rights through a global or transnational lens.

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2013, Popular Culture

When The Golden Girls premiered in 1985, the show helped usher in a new era in American situation comedy television. American audiences had never seen a situation comedy where a group of adult women were the focal point of each episode. There had certainly been programming prior to the show where women held starring roles, but never before had anything like The Golden Girls been shown in American prime time television. The show left an indelible mark and millions of Americans have followed the adventures Dorothy, Rose, Blanche, and Sophia, both in its original run from 1985 to 1992, and in its current syndication status on several cable television networks. Sex and the City, Platinum Edition: How The Golden Girls Altered American Situation Comedy explores several of the ways in which the program effected American culture in terms of television as well as away from the television screen. The first chapter of the project explores how the show laid the groundwork for several other programs followed the show's lead by installing a group of adult women at its center. Comparisons between The Golden Girls and several of these shows (including Sex and the City, Designing Women, and Hot in Cleveland) are made in terms of character types and plotlines. The conclusion is drawn that The Golden Girls was the first adult female ensemble in situation comedy television and these shows were inspired by the program. The second chapter of the project examines how each of the characters through the performance of age and sexuality were actively fighting denigrating stereotypes often associated with older females in American society. The chapter contains specific examples from several episodes involving each of the series four main characters and how each of these portrayals stands in direct contrast to the beliefs typically attributed to older American women regarding the intersection of age and sexuality. The third and final chapter of the project explores how the series was abl (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2024, English/Literature

This thesis puts into conversation the work of four influential late medieval writers whose lives or writings skirted the fringes of Christian orthodoxy - Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, John of Morigny, and Marguerite Porete - in order to explore the way "autobiographical" theological and/or mystical writers asserted spiritual authority and subjectivity under the constraints of both the threat of condemnation for heresy and the inherent inexpressibility of mystical or visionary experiences. Beginning with Marguerite Porete and reverberating out, the performance-based rhetorical strategies in storytelling, in self-narrativization, in discernment, and in revision employed by writers in response to the dynamic, complex, and in many ways increasingly hostile social and religious environments of the long fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries in France and England provide an important window into the relationship between these writers' ideas and the environment which shaped them. Each of these writers struggles with the limitations of the written word to express the truth of their spiritual experiences, and each engages in an experiential and bodily performative, rhetorical, and/or apophatic discourse in order to understand, assert, or make real their encounters with and understanding of themselves, the divine, and the relationship between the two.

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2024, Geography (Arts and Sciences)

This research seeks to establish an understanding of Appalachian women and their experiences of environmental justice through an arts-based analysis of their poetry. I ask two research questions that inquire how Appalachian express their experiences of EJ through poetry, as well how Appalachian women associate and relate gender to environmental injustices through their poetry. To investigate this process, I perform a poetry-based analysis of ten different poems by Appalachian women. Ultimately, I find that Appalachian women engage themes of empathy, othering, and gender to portray their connections to, relationships with, and understandings of environmental justice. This research is important because it addresses intersectional themes of both geography and environmental justice, however in new ways. Ultimately, this research portrays Appalachian women's use of poetry as an expression of their experiences with environmental justice, and as such, provides a different method and outlook from which to view environmental justice issues.

MA, Kent State University, 2024, College of the Arts / School of Art

A Cholitas dress has become a paramount symbol for Indigenous movements in response to anti-Indigenous, neo-colonial forces that control Bolivian cities and resources. Despite its pivotal role in Bolivia's Indigenous history, Cholita women's presence in Bolivian visual culture has been understudied in art historical discourses. As Indigenous movements gained momentum in Bolivia's art world since the election of Evo Morales (the first Indigenous president) in 2006, Cholitas became a central emblem of resistance, embodying the rich cultural presence of the Indigenous Andean woman. Production of international photographic series started identifying the historical movement witnessed in Bolivia's cities as Cholita women began gaining access to jobs and visibility in Bolivia's cultural landscape on their terms. This thesis analyzes artists who have reintroduced Cholitas in Bolivian visual culture into the international Indigenous Feminist discourses. These artists recognize the necessity of Cholitas for advancing Indigenous rights movements while contextualizing Bolivia's Indigenous identity as fundamentally feminist. By providing a platform to highlight the unique stories of the Cholita women, these artists address the need for diversification within global feminist and Indigenous studies. The impact of these photographs extends beyond aesthetic documentation. They serve as a call to scholars and artists alike, urging continued support for the Cholita women's mission during this precarious juncture in Bolivian history.

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2024, Environmental Studies

Inspired by the community of farmers and food producers that surrounded her, Stitchick decided to utilize her love of creative writing and film photography to deliver the stories of multiple women farmers in Athens County to the broader community. She begins by contextualizing the hegemonic systems of patriarchy that pose unique challenges and obstacles to women in agriculture. With this contextual framework in mind she aims to both inform and inspire her readers with the anthology of livelihoods she has crafted; women in agriculture are disadvantaged, yet they are pushing back, finding themselves on the forefront of agricultural innovation. This communication is also important to Stitchick in terms of reconnecting consumers to the food system that feeds them, and celebrating the hard work that goes into producing the food we eat. In her journey back to the beginnings of the food system, she found four incredible women who are not only making impressive strides within the historically male-dominated industry of agriculture, but are also simultaneously regenerating the soil, sequestering carbon dioxide, building cop resilience, and nourishing the community that surrounds them with the fruits of their labor. This anthology is a love letter to women, to Appalachia, to the unyielding whimsy of goats, the unbridled fury of geese, and to the sustainable future we can build together, one seed in the soil at a time.

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2024, Geography

Despite ongoing geopolitical concerns and influence of big data companies, this research focuses on the everyday practices on TikTok that reveal different aspects of the platform's use. This research explores the impact of TikTok on the lives of Bhutanese-Nepali women residing in Central Ohio. Through six ethnographic interviews with Bhutanese-Nepali women – who use TikTok to showcase their–everyday domestic practices – this study reveals how TikTok practices facilitate (digital) placemaking, fostering a sense of belonging for relocated refugees living in the suburbs. By contextualizing the history of displacement from Bhutan to Nepal and the US, and mapping relocation patterns from urban areas to suburbs, I illustrate how these recent movements can traced within online practices of Bhutanese-Nepali refugees. While acknowledging the potential risks of manipulation and public scrutiny associated with sharing content on a public platform, Bhutanese-Nepali women demonstrate adeptness in navigating and leveraging the algorithm, showcasing their agency and resilience both online and offline.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2024, Interdisciplinary Arts (Fine Arts)

Kurdish cinema represents a vital transnational and global art form that bridges the Kurdish community, uniting a stateless people through cultural expression. This dissertation explores common narrative threads of Kurdish cinema relating to identity, statelessness, trauma, and women's issues, despite the differences between Kurds of various nationalities in both the ancestral Kurdistan region and the diaspora. The first chapter examines how these artworks confront issues of identity, exile, and homeland. The second interrogates depictions of individual and collective trauma in Kurdish cinema, especially generational trauma resulting from racism, conflict, and displacement. Chapter 3 analyzes Kurdish cinema from a comparative perspective through the lens of Indigenous studies, examining how Kurdish cinema confronts settler-colonial oppression. The fourth and final chapter addresses the portrayal of Kurdish women's issues in Kurdish cinema, contrasting how male and female directors represent these issues and emphasizing the vital contributions of Kurdish women filmmakers especially with regard to telling Kurdish women's stories. Ultimately this work positions Kurdish cinema as a powerful artistic movement spanning national and international boundaries driven by the efforts of a distinct filmmaking community united in the desire to represent Kurdish identity and culture through cinematic storytelling.

Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) in Leadership Studies, Xavier University, 2021, Leadership Studies and Human Resource Development

This mixed-methods study explored how a Black female school principal serves a low-income urban school based on a partnership with a private STEM industry in an effort to improve students' math and science performance. Using Lidens et al.'s (2008) servant leadership instrument and ad-hoc survey items related to the principal's contribution level of improving students' academic performance, exploratory factor analyses identified the principal's servant leadership and partnership competencies in a sample of 49 school community members consisting of 15 teachers, 13 paraprofessionals, and 21 parents. The servant leadership and partnership competencies included empowering community and helping others succeed, problem solving for others and organization, ethical and critical thinking skills, others' needs and interests, and principal's partnership with a private STEM industry. One sample T-Test revealed that the school community members perceived the principal's servant leadership and partnership competencies significantly contributed to the improvement of science and math performance. Further, the principal's partnership competency was significantly and positively correlated with the following two servant leadership competencies: Problem solving for others and organization and Ethical and critical thinking skills. The principal perceived that students have built authentic relationships with their mentors including the private STEM industry's volunteered staff and tutors, thereby contributing to student academic growth and community engagement. The survey findings were consistent with the narratives of the principal as shown a positive correlation with the principal's servant leadership competencies and students' academic growth in math and science through the partnership with a private STEM industry. Therefore, the study's data provide evidence that the Black female principal is well equipped with the competencies necessary for a servant leader and for building a partner (open full item for complete abstract)

PHD, Kent State University, 2021, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Modern and Classical Language Studies

Over the last two decades, researchers have shown an increased interest in studying gender-related issues in the translations of the Quran (Hassen, 2012; Maliki, 2015; Hassen, 2018). Existing research recognizes the influence of translators' ideologies on their translation of gender in the Quran. However, this research has relied on subjective approaches and small-scale qualitative analysis. The existing studies (Habibeh Khosravi & Majid Pourmohammadi, 2016; Maliki, 2015; Hassen, 2012; Herrag, 2012) tend to focus on a limited number of verses known to be problematic with regard to our understanding of gender and provide an in-depth textual analysis of excerpts from different translations. These micro-level methodologies fail to account for all the instances of reference to women in the texts and subsequently cannot provide a comprehensive picture of the representation of women in the translations of the Quran. Quantitative methods are needed to provide a systematic, more objective, large-scale analysis to account for all the instances of reference to women and to take into consideration the whole discourse defining and describing women in these translations. Thus, the present study employs, for the first time, a combination of qualitative Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth CDA), (an analytical approach for critically investigating the ways in which discourses construct, maintain and legitimize social inequalities) and quantitative corpus-based methods to investigate how women are translated in five different English translations of the Quran. The use of mixed methods analysis offers a balanced way to study gender in translation. While corpus methods provide a point of entry to the data through frequencies, collocates and concordances, CDA uncovers the connection between the text and the ideology of the translator. The findings make an important contribution to the theory and praxis of feminist translation by extending its boundaries to include nonwestern percep (open full item for complete abstract)