My project can be read as an intervention that aims to disrupt the "innocence" of burlesque's dominant historical narratives, where burlesque is fashioned as related to minstrelsy but not as minstrelsy. A discussion of the White women as minstrel performers is lacking in the available burlesque histories because they have not addressed the meanings of musical sounds and movements, elements that constitute the core of burlesque. Using music as a lens to re-evaluate the meanings of burlesque performance, I show how burlesque, like minstrelsy, has functioned on the historical erasure of Black and Brown bodies. In burlesque, White women performers have predicated their departures from norms of White femininity on racist performances of "black"-ness. These minstrel performances were enabled by a White fetishization of musical sounds and movements coded Black or "Other." Building on the work of Jayna Brown and Sherrie Tucker, and responding to Susanne Cusick's call to address how musical performances might be read productively through Judith Butler's theory of performativity, I foreground music and embodiment to ask: How do burlesque artists perform and (re)perform gender, sexuality, and race? To unpack this question, I first look at historical (re)presentations of burlesque performance and music. After this historical section, I read key scenes from classic era films featuring burlesque music and performance, using semiotics to argue that these performances can be read as an extension of blackface minstrelsy. I discuss how certain jazz-influenced musical devices - horn smears, belting or "loud" singing, angular or jerky dancing - primarily functioned to signal "black"-ness, sex, and modernity to the intended White audience/spectator. In the next chapter, I examine the extent to which neo-burlesque could be considered a queering of burlesque by doing close readings of contemporary burlesque performances. From here, I look more critically at how racial and genre boundaries are created and maintained within contemporary burlesque, resulting in a new burlesque normativity. Finally, I highlight the work being done by burlesque performers of color who work within and against burlesque's dominant ideologies, subverting racist representations of people of color through mimetic resistance. / text

Advancements in communication and transportation have facilitated migration processes and extended the possibility of migration to many people who couldn’t afford it in the past. This movement of people from one place to another and the attached flow of human capital are potentially the most potent political and economic forces that are changing the world by promising worldwide opportunities and challenges in the century ahead. Immigration and immigrants are altering the sociocultural and economic fabric of societies across the globe, affecting the majority/minority balance and inducing profound changes in host countries. Moreover, these changes are causing friction between immigrant ethnic groups and local populations. Manifestations of these frictions may present themselves in the form of ethnic discrimination against immigrants by the dominant group in the host society. Based on an extensive literature review, a model was developed to investigate the effects of immigrant-perceived ethnic discrimination on the relationship with national brands. A multi-group structural equation modeling approach is used to test this proposed model and its hypotheses. Study findings suggest that immigrant perceived ethnic discrimination does have an effect on the immigrants’ (dis)identification with national brands and ultimately their decision to purchase national brands. This relationship is mediated by immigrants’ (dis)identification with national consumers. Moreover, findings corroborate the notion that the more perceived difference in the desired acculturation orientations between immigrants and their host society influences immigrants’ perception of ethnic discrimination. From an academic standpoint, this study contributes to two under-researched areas in the marketing literature: (1) Immigrant consumers, and (2) Effects of ethnic discrimination on consumer behavior. This study contributes to better understanding of these two areas through incorporating novel conceptualizations of acculturation orientations discordance, perceived ethnic discrimination and stereotyping into a multigroup analysis to study the effects of these phenomena on the immigrant consumer’s relationship with national brands. From a marketing practice standpoint, in an era of increased cultural pluralism and anti-immigration climate, this study informs marketers of influences on immigrant market behaviors and their relations with national brands.

The purpose of this study is to explore the ways Black women and queer artists and their audiences employ country music as a way to facilitate a reclamation and complication of (Black) Americanness. The data for this study emerges from a qualitative content analysis of six music videos by Black artists released on YouTube between January 2016 and December 2022 and their associated comment sections. The years between 2016 and 2022 have seen the United States contend with what has been considered a "racial reckoning." This study recognizes these six music videos as sites for personal and communal reflection and re-evaluation on how this moment of race-based national conversation brings into question the ways we typify American identity and citizenship. The foundational literature for this study focuses on the production of culture perspective, disidentification, quare studies, and musical construction of identity. / Master of Science / This project explores how Black women and queer artists and their audiences use country music to facilitate reclaim and complicate Black Americanness. The data for this study emerges from a qualitative content analysis of six music videos by Black artists released on YouTube between January 2016 and December 2022 and their associated comment sections. The years between 2016 and 2022 have seen the United States contend with what has been considered a "racial reckoning." This study recognizes these six music videos as sites for personal and communal reflection and re-evaluation on how this moment of race-based national conversation brings into question the ways we typify American identity and citizenship.

Memes are a popular source of online media. As such, they become tools that can distribute racialized and gendered narratives. While memes are often a source of shaming and devaluing Black girls, my research also explores how they can be used as tools to counter and disidentify with narratives. Using Hip-Hop feminism and trap feminism as frameworks, I analyze several memes to not only exemplify the hegemonic narratives of Black girlhood that circulate via memes, but to illuminate the possibilities for resistance and transformation via this technology.

Résumé de la thèse en français : En partant, d’un côté, d’une approche socio-historique de la construction de la catégorie de personnes dites « handicapées » en France, et de l’autre d’une étude de la naissance du mouvement et des théories queer dans le monde anglo-saxon, cette thèse a pour but de montrer comment le handicap peut aujourd’hui s’inscrire dans le queer. À l’aide de penseur-es, philosophes, sociologues ou même militant-es de divers horizons, ce travail cherche à élaborer les prémisses d’une pensée crip en France pour montrer les liens, mais aussi certains désaccords, entre une réflexion sur le handicap et son inscription dans des processus si chers au queer. Ainsi, il s’agit de monter notamment en quoi les personnes handicapées s’inscrivent dans un phénomène de retournement du stigmate et de revalorisation de l’abjection tel qu’il a pu être formulé par les personnes queer dont l’insulte désignait leur sexualité déviante. Les concepts queer de désidentification et de performativité peuvent également servir à repenser le handicap en permettant de comprendre, d’une part les fluctuations possibles de l’identité handicapée, et d’autre part l’aspect de mise en scène sociale qu’il peut y avoir dans l’appréhension de ce dernier. Pour finir, la notion foucaldienne reprise par J. Butler d’idéal régulateur permet une étude approfondie de la validité comme socialement construite / Starting from a socio-historical approach of the French constructed catagory "di-sabled"; followed on by a study of Queer Movements and Theories today, thinkers, philoso-phers, sociologists, and activists from various backgrounds have helped to develop this work. The premises of French Crip thaught are analysed through the links and certain disagree-ments between disability and it's inscription in Queer Theory. One of the most important goals of this thesis is to explain how disabled people take part in stigma reversal; as a reva-luing of abjection, formulated be Queer people who through back this insult, indicating their deviant sexuality. The Queer concepts of disidentification and performability can also help to rethink disability; by allowing the understanding of the possible fluctuations in disability iden-tity, including the aspects of social staging in disability. To conclude, the Foucauldian notion of the 'ideal regulator' taken up by Judith Butler allows an in depth study of able-bodiedness as socially constructed

This study investigates the post-performance effects of stereotype threat. Undergraduate students (N = 130) classified as either strongly- or weakly- identified with academics were told a diagnostic anagram task either typically shows poorer performance for their gender (stereotype threat) or no gender differences (no stereotype threat), and received arbitrary positive or negative feedback on an initial task. They later performed a second anagram task. Results indicate a 2-way interaction between stereotype threat and academic identification among those who received negative feedback. Negative feedback under stereotype threat did not harm performance for participants strongly-identified with academics, but did harm performance for participants weakly-identified with academics. This same 2-way interaction within the negative feedback condition also predicted post-feedback levels of identification as a college student, though it did not seem to affect post-feedback levels of academic identification. Strongly-identified participants receiving negative feedback identified less as a college student if they were under stereotype threat while weakly-academically identified participants identified more. Levels of post-feedback identification as a college student negatively predicted performance.

This work explores: liberatory possibilities and limitations of narrative in healing from rape; the work and meanings of forgiveness, specifically seeking a complex definition of forgiveness drawing on spiritual, feminist, complexity, and phenomenological philosophies; and the relationships between narrative processes and forgiveness. I use an autoethnographic approach, offering my story of rape and healing in the aftermath. I attend to the physicality of the narrative, and to the way in which memory resides in the body, thus creating an embodied text. I examine current models of rape recovery, and the terms used by organizations, practitioners, and authors of rape narratives to frame the recovery process, contending that current models and the language of recovery fails to recognize the dynamic and non-linear trajectory of healing. I return to my own process of forgiveness, which is illustrative of the unpredictable event of forgiveness, which grows from the dissolution of self and other.

The current report examines the components and implications of the existing research utilizing the theory of academic disidentification. The theory of academic disidentification proposes a process that accounts for the academic disparity between the academic achievement levels of White and ethnic minority students. The premise hypothesizes that academic achievement only results from an individual’s adaptive integration of their performance in the academic domain with their identity. For ethnic minority students the academic domain presents frequent exposure to stereotype threat whether it occurs on exams or in class participation. Over time, the accumulation of these experiences promote a maladaptive process by which ethnic minority students separate their overall identity from the academic domain, thus undermining the importance of academic achievement. In addition to the analysis of the research, this paper propose a process of academic disidentification and present implications for counselors working with ethnic minority students. / text

James Deen and his distinct following of fans has allowed for a discussion of what pornography means to women and teenage girls to be teased out. His fans are vocal, public and unashamed in their fascination with him, dismissing previously held ideologies that porn be a clearly private activity that is shameful to be addressed publicly; especially for women. James Deen’s uniquely unintimidating demeanor, both physically and personally, has made him more forgivable for his mistakes (i.e. rape “joke” Tweets), evidence of an intense desire for women to find porn that they can relate to and positively consume. Despite his shortcomings, James Deen is immensely popular among women and because of this, brings to light my critique of the limited definition of feminist pornography as it stands today in academia. James Deen works against the grain of the porn industry, representing a new type of porn star that lends women their own gaze and further access to genuine pleasure intended for them. When James Deen breaks the common subject-object barrier of mainstream porn by pleasuring women on-screen, he disrupts the visual coding that holds the patriarchal gaze together at its seams, and works to produce female pleasure as a sexual truth. Not only that, but his consciousness around consent further allows women to be able to identify sexual pleasure with roles of submission. This construction of power-knowledge-pleasure to include women, and enthusiastic consent, aligns him with feminist porn aims to primarily focus on women, sexual openness and not shame, and sex positivity and not negativity. Moving beyond the foci of James Deen’s films and his personality, the theory of disidentification is integral to understanding some women’s relationship with him, and how even the more complicated aspects of porn should be considered for inclusion within the definition of feminist porn. To ignore this survival tactic is to silence women’s participation in an already exclusionary industry. To include disidentificatory practices in feminist porn is to take into account the convoluted, nonlinear and illogical ways women and teenage girls are consuming porn. When the definition is opened up to include all porn that “works on and against dominant ideology” (as James Deen’s does), experienced anxieties due to inconsistencies between one’s erotics and politics can be relieved, fantasy is further understood as a real and validated sexual tool, and masochism’s role in porn is logically brought into this dialogue. When fantasy is accepted as a complex and mysterious phenomenon, disenfranchised demographics such as women are given license. Masochism is no longer limited to an absent and repressed tendency that places women in a punished state. James Deen’s masochistic aesthetic threatens patriarchal dogma and offers up something new to the world of pornography. While James Deen does not profess to be a feminist, his porn practices and personality set him apart from the majority of the mainstream porn world and within the feminist porn sphere. In the end, the good that he is doing in providing women and teenage girls an option in an otherwise barren landscape of phallocentric porn should be enough to earn him academic scholarship and inclusion in the realm of feminist pornography.

My capstone project is a multimedia audio and photography project that creates a conversation about the Millennial Generation’s views of individual identity and masculinity, with the hopes of deconstructing the socially constructed and exclusive notions of masculinity by defining a generation’s common sense. My piece is inspired by the portraiture of Chad States in Masculinities (2011) as well as Loren Cameron’s work in Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits (1996). The theoretical basis of my project relies heavily on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of common sense as well as José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification. Common sense refers to an instinctual, uncritical and largely unconscious way of perceiving and understanding. It is a collective noun, like religion yet it is not something rigid and immobile, but is continually transforming itself, enriching itself with scientific ideas and with philosophical opinions, which have entered ordinary life. Furthermore, disidentification is Muñoz’s third mode of dealing with a dominant ideology. This aspect neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology and hegemony. Disidentification works as the negotiating mechanism for common sense because it is against assimilation to mainstream masculinity as well as asks individuals to be their personal identity in spite of what hegemonic masculinity dictates. Thus, I hope to instill a new understanding of the common sense of the Millennial Generation, and how the notion of masculinity is personal, fluid, and disidentified.