Browsing by Subject "Women's and gender studies"
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Item “Dr. Paul cured my apathy”: Ron Paul’s libertarian discourse(2013-08) Goad, Rhiannon Jade; Heinzelman, Susan Sage; King, ChristopherDuring the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, many young white men found a political hero in the 77-year-old Republican Congressman from Texas, whose rallies often center on obscure, technical arguments concerning the Federal Reserve. It is because of the grassroots support of the young white men who adore him that Ron Paul has become a major figure in today’s political scene. What attracts young white men to Ron Paul? This paper explores the history and discourse of Libertarianism to better understand the political subjectivity and identity of Ron Paul supporters. In Chapter 2, I historically contextualize Paul’s libertarian discourse. I argue that the discourse of libertarianism is characterized by claims to an apolitical, ahistorical past in which Libertarian rhetoric naturalizes discourses of free market capitalism, “classical” liberalism, and “authentic” Americanism. In Chapter 3, I shift focus to Ron Paul’s career and policy positions and argue that Paul’s Libertarian discourse naturalizes existing hierarchies of race, class, and gender. In Chapter 4, I explain the interview methodology used for this project. Finally, in Chapters 5 and 6, I explore how libertarian discourse is (re)produced or disrupted through the personal political discourse of Ron Paul supporters.Item Family-friendly : homo-affinity in the French sentimental novel, 1770-1850(2016-12) Spinelli, Nicholas Christopher; Wettlaufer, Alexandra; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Picherit, Hervé; Wilkinson, Lynn; Bennett, ChadThis dissertation investigates the central significance of desire for the self defined as different-than-the-self––of an affect I articulate as homo-affinity––within the domains of Romanticism, Romantic love, and the French Sentimental novel. As expressed in my Introduction, this project is predicated on an analysis of the erotics of sameness, the literary trace of outlaw desire, and the exploration of a queer archive of feelings in the French Sentimental novel. Chapter One pertains to François-René de Chateaubriand’s Atala/René (1801), in which I outline the Romantic topos that serves as a forerunner to the ideal of homo-affinity in the French Sentimental novel. In keeping with Chateaubriand’s autobiographical mode of fiction, the enchanteur’s reliance on reflexive metaphors yields a chiasmatic mirror through which his protagonists might envision another version of themselves and that, as such, conditions the experience of an expansive desire that encompasses passions toward incest, homosexuality, and narcissism––if not a newfound libertinage. In Chapter Two, I examine archival documents that obtain to the manuscripts of Claire de Duras’s Olivier, ou le secret (1821-1824) in order to expose the author’s careful treatment of the closet, which revolves around her creation of a linguistic polari that could furtively portray the eponymous secret and its relevance among writers and intellectuals of Restoration France. Finally––in Chapter Three––I go on to posit that Stendhal, in Armance (1828), deliberately reinscribes and multiplies the erotically charged bonds that figure between knights in pre-Revolutionary novels and chivalric lore, so as to forge a trope for the expression of homosexuality––and even that of a homosexual subject––within his satire of Romanticism. Throughout these chapters, I illustrate how the interconnectivity of these topoi (such as the chiasmatic mirror, parlor polari, and Romantic chevalerie) constitutes a coherent expression of homo-affinity that spans the formation of the French Sentimental novel. In the end, I conclude that the prevalence of a (now queer) attraction toward sameness in Sentimentalism and Romanticism intertextually colored a handful of subsequent literary movements and, ultimately, determined the emergence of homo-affinitive (and equally non-heterosexual) narratives across the evolution of the French novel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Item Gender, power, and performance : representations of cheerleaders in American culture(2012-05) Wright, Allison Elaine; Engelhardt, Elizabeth S. D. (Elizabeth Sanders Delwiche), 1969-; Davis, Janet M.; Smith, Mark C.; Kearney, Mary C.; Todd, Janice S.This dissertation reveals that the various, often conflicting media representations of cheerleaders are responsible for the many ways gender and power are refracted through the lens of American popular culture and on the bodies of American youth. Beginning in the circumscribed nineteenth century world of elite male privilege, the history of cheerleading is intimately connected to the discourse of masculinity in America. It is not until almost one hundred years after the activity’s birth that its primary narrative changes from one of masculinity to one of power. This project calls attention to the ways in which sociohistoric context impacts representations of cheerleaders. My interdisciplinary project draws on sources from the popular press; children’s, adult, and mainstream literature, film, and television; material culture; and interviews with cheerleaders themselves; and engages with existing cheerleading scholarship as well as literary criticism and feminist scholarship. Each chapter interrogates a different, related trend in the cultural representation of cheerleaders, including: competing narratives of victimization, im/perfection, and popularity; a third wave feminist vision of gendered superpower; prescriptions of beauty and behavior; pornography and its connection to the professionalization of cheer; and the performance of representation by actual cheerleaders. Taken together, these chapters trace patterns of representation, fraught with nuance and complexity, to provide a picture of a shifting cultural icon whose relationship to larger social movements is often reciprocal and who challenges societal expectations of gender and generation over three centuries.Item “Strong views about what you call things” : how disability studies scholars interact with information classification systems(2012-05) Koford, Amelia Bowen; Feinberg, Melanie, 1970-; Doty, PhilipInformation studies writers from various theoretical perspectives, including feminism and critical race theory, have argued that information classification systems are politically charged artifacts that privilege some types of information while marginalizing others. Although several writers have documented the limitations of classification systems in representing marginalized topics, few have studied how searchers understand, address, and circumvent these limitations. To investigate this question, I conducted a qualitative study of the information seeking behavior of nine disability studies scholars. In semi-structured interviews, I asked faculty members and graduate students about their experiences conducting disability studies research. In this thesis, I discuss three main themes from the interviews: research challenges, search tactics and strategies, and interaction with subject headings. I also discuss the Library of Congress Subject Headings for one book, Eli Clare's Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation, as a case study. I situate scholars' experiences in relation to disability studies as a field that is interdisciplinary, relatively new, and concerned with a group that has been socially and economically marginalized. I offer suggestions about how librarians and knowledge organizers can address the needs of researchers in disability studies and other critical interdisciplinary fields.Item Voices that matter : hearing the corseted body in American domestic performance(2016-12) McLemore, Bethany Shae; Carson, Charles, Ph. D.; Seeman, Sonia; Dell'Antonio, Andrew; Buhler, James; Tusa, Michael C; Davis, JanetMusical performance and curation provided artistic outlets for middle- to upper-class women in the nineteenth-century U.S. and their resulting collections, called binder’s volumes, provide a valuable record of their musical practices. Moving beyond earlier musicological studies which use binder’s volumes to reconstruct performance practice, I argue that binder’s volumes can, when taken in dialogue with women’s other material goods and the material of their actual bodies, show how women created and expressed their own identities through material culture and how the continual intra-actions among their bodies and objects impacted their lives, performances, and contemporary notions of femininity. In this dissertation, I examine the material agents involved in women’s musical and gendered performances in the nineteenth-century United States, as well as their material and ideological repercussions. Specifically, I consider the intra-actions of the body, the corset, musical curation, and musical and gendered performances to understand how performance animates the body, how music, marketing, and mass products alter the body, and how the body experiences and impacts performance. I argue that the practice of corseting had a concrete impact on women’s singing and both corseting and popular song performance impacted the body, the voice, and notions of ideal femininity. Considering musical performance through and beyond performativity—as an act that has tangible bodily repercussions—brings the “material turn” of recent feminist theory into dialogue with musicological studies. Going beyond considerations of embodiment and performativity to consider the material impacts of art on bodies, as well as the impact of bodies on music and social constructions deepens our understanding of musical and gendered performances, and also allows the body to act as a locus of performers’ agency.Item Wicked horses : women's will in Harley 2253(2012-05) Sapio, Jennifer Leigh; Birkholz, Daniel, 1967-British Library MS Harley 2253 is a unique fourteenth-century miscellany consisting of 140 folios and containing 116 different texts, including lyrics, political poems, fabliaux and other secular and religious texts in verse and prose, Latin, Middle English and Anglo-Norman. While the so-called “Harley Lyrics” popularized by Brook’s edition may have registered widely on scholarly radar, many of the non-English texts in the collection have failed to elicit critical attention. However, these texts are vital points in the narrative of English literary history. In particular, the four Anglo-Norman fabliaux included in Harley 2253 constitute a majority of the extant pre-Chaucerian fabliaux produced on the English isles, and of these, Le Dit de la Gageure and Du Chevalier a La Corbeille have no Old French analogues. This report explores the Anglo-Norman fabliaux in this manuscript, their relationship to the continental French tradition and to the subsequent English (ie. Chaucerian) fabliaux incarnations. Specifically, I argue that representations of female desire – figured as an opposition between “stillness” and doing one’s “will” – surface in these obscene misogynist stories that simultaneously objectify and colonize the female body. “De Clerico et Puella”, Le Dit de la Gageure and Le Chevalier qui fist Les Cuns Parler all include an unmarried female who articulates her sexual desire freely, a sharp contrast to the traditional cuckoldry plot of Old French fabliaux which revolves around a married woman’s illicit affairs. Indeed, the grotesque images of sexual violence and the pornographic images of sexual fulfillment in these pre-Chaucerian fabliaux are not contained by the ecclesiastic context from which these texts originate, but rather they linger and are transformed by the female characters, patrons, readers and hearers of the medieval manuscripts in their domestic contexts.