<p> This work explores the limiting beliefs that modern American man is surrounded by that create suffering and isolation for him. Utilizing heuristic and hermeneutic methodologies, this thesis leans into the primary feelings of anger, guilt, and shame typically expressed by American males. It examines how these feelings came to the forefront of his expressions and how he can allow himself to find ways to safely express the other feelings repressed inside him. Just as the blind man when given a matzo turned it over and over, examining it with his fingers and exclaiming &ldquo;who wrote this?&rdquo;, this thesis suggests new interpretations regarding how males express themselves. Through awareness of the value of rituals and metaphors, this natural language of men can serve as a beginning toward his feeling safe in expressing his repressed feelings. This thesis tempts the reader to see beyond the mask of the American male</p><p>

<p> Currently, there is limited research investigating participant perceptions of after-school program impacts. The present study evaluated the effectiveness of an after-school leadership program for adolescent females. Specifically, this study assessed adolescent perceptions of program impacts on changes in dietary behavior, body image, and self-esteem. Data was gathered through a series of semi-structured questions posed during a focus group. The focus group transcript was coded using the qualitative analysis technique of theoretical thematic analysis. Six major themes related to youth perceptions of program impacts emerged as follows: practicing healthy behaviors, applications at home, focus on health and inner beauty, awareness of false media messages, embracing true self, and realizing capabilities. Additionally, participants identified several components, such as hands-on activities, field trips, and structured &ldquo;sharing moments&rdquo; to have enhanced their experience. The perceived positive impacts demonstrate the potential benefits of programs to address common concerns in this audience related to nutrition, body image, and self-esteem.</p><p>

<p> <b>Purpose.</b> The purpose of this qualitative case study was to identify barriers for women to advance into executive management positions in STEM professions, and to identify strategies deemed to be effective for women to advance into STEM executive management positions, by women currently in STEM executive management positions in the aerospace industry. </p><p> <b>Conceptual Framework.</b> The conceptual framework included 3 concepts: (a) cultural and societal factors; (b) mentorship, sponsorship, and networking; and (c) motivation and power levels. These concepts are connected to barriers women face when entering leadership and efforts to empower women entering leadership in the aerospace industry. </p><p> <b>Methodology.</b> This was a qualitative case study utilizing the transformative framework. The participants were 7 women in STEM executive management position in the aerospace industry. The participants responded to 8 open-ended questions designed to reveal barriers women in STEM executive management positions face and to highlight strategies deemed to be effective for women to advance into STEM executive management positions in the aerospace industry. </p><p> <b>Findings.</b> Through data collection and analysis, the data indicated major themes consisting of work performance, big picture, strong work ethic, underrepresentation, and trusted networks. Other themes emerged such as diversity of thought, advocacy, mentorship, credibility, no plan for executive management, and unfavorable perception. </p><p> <b>Conclusions and Recommendations.</b> The findings revealed that 5 major themes emerged from the data analysis pertaining to barriers women face to career advancement and effective strategies used by successful women in STEM executive management positions in the aerospace industry. It is recommended that this qualitative case study be replicated with a larger sample population. Additionally, future studies could explore other populations that would directly benefit from women in STEM executive management positions, such as men, millennials, aspiring women leaders, and other key stakeholders in the aerospace industry. </p><p>

<p> Preventive health care is effective in reducing both infectious diseases and chronic conditions among the elderly. Despite efforts to prevent or decrease the risk of illness, unmarried men are less likely to receive selected preventive services compared to married men. The purpose of this cross-sectional survey was to describe disease prevention attitudes and behaviors of retired, unmarried, male baby boomers residing in Harlingen, Texas. Further, the study examined the effects of socioeconomic status on disease prevention attitudes and behaviors. The health belief theory framed the study. A validated questionnaire collected disease prevention attitudes, behaviors, and sociodemographic characteristics data. Data inquiry included ANOVA, multiple regression and moderation analysis. The findings did not show any differences in disease prevention attitudes and behaviors among retired, unmarried male boomers. Multiple linear regression indicated that the socioeconomic factors explained 24% of the variance in disease prevention behaviors (p = .001). Moderation analysis showed that 29% of the variability in the dependent variable could be explained by the independent variables and interaction terms. The only significant predictor was education, p= .002); none of the interaction terms were significant. Positive social change from the study is the possible increase in disease prevention behavior among the retired, unmarried male baby with a low level of education. The study results may help in developing policies that would target education barriers and raise awareness of disease prevention behavior among the retired, unmarried male baby boomers.</p>

This dissertation examines the intersection of art, dance, and queer sociality though Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, and their lesser-known contemporary, Fred Herko, a dancer and choreographer. Traversing art history, dance studies, and queer theory, this study uses analyses of movement, gestures, and embodiment as a bridge between the artistic and the social. In film, photography, and dance, these artists not only made art as queer artists, but their work stemmed from the form of sociality of their communities—the social and creative labor spent on seemingly unproductive ends, such as lounging together on a sofa, posing in performative-social studio sessions, or dancing in an improvised performance-party. Gestures and embodied experience became both the site of the art, and the site of the production of queer subjectivity in this watershed decade for art and queer histories. To unpack their cultural significance, I draw on the work of anthropologist Marcel Mauss on “techniques of the body,” and recent scholarship on embodiment and subjectivity. I propose queer gestures as dances of “inefficiency” in the Maussian sense, that is, as techniques of the body that do not confirm or sustain the social scripts of somatic norms. Given the contemporaneous debates about work, leisure, and alienation in the 1960s, inefficient techniques—as represented in the recurrent motif of the recumbent, languorous male body, for example—can also be read as a critique of industrial efficiency and heteronormative definitions of (re)productivity. Through this focus on bodily techniques, I open up a dialogue between this “underground” body of work with contemporaneous artistic milieus in which the body played an important role, including in 1960s sculpture, proto-feminist practices, postmodern dance, photography, and experimental theater. Throughout I also foreground the intertwinement of dance culture and queer culture. Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s reading of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, this study interprets artistic practices through a reparative lens, drawing together a queer repertoire made up of inefficient moves—just as the artists’ engagements with, and making of, dance culture and queer culture were reparative: an accretive practice of assemblage for imaginative and embodied sustenance. / History of Art and Architecture

Karl Barth is frequently named as the poster-child for modern patriarchal and heteronormative theologies. In Church Dogmatics he secures a binary, hierarchically-ordered, marital relationship between a man and woman as the norm for conceptualizing not only sexual difference but all inter-subjective relationships among human beings. Human beings find in the opposite sex their paradigmatic human “other,” and marriage to someone of the opposite sex provides the occasion in which one is able to most fully realize the sort of being-in-encounter that conforms to the self-giving, self-revealing, aid-lending relationship that Christ has established with the Christian community. The asymmetry of the relationship between Christ and his community translates into the super-/subordering of the relationship between the sexes, wherein women are lead, directed, and inspired by men. Barth applies this “ordering” beyond marriage to all interactions between the sexes. Many critics have argued that Barth’s ordering of the sexes exposes a systemic structure of domination and submission instantiated in the many relationships that comprise his theology. Others have sought a corrective to his ordering in his doctrine of the Trinity, but a corrective that demands a reconstruction of his innovative reformulation of the doctrine of election along with his christocentric theological anthropology. Until recently little critical attention has been given to his heteronormative framework. This dissertation advances a fresh approach by shifting focus from the question of the function of “order” in Barth’s theology to Barth’s christocentric understanding of human agency itself. Through contextualized close readings in Barth’s ethics, doctrine of creation, and theological anthropology, I argue that his methodological, dogmatic, and ethical commitments lead to an account of the human agent that is carefully detached from naturalizing and scientific discourses and crafted after the aid-lending, self-revelatory activity of the incarnate Christ. Constituted as a response to the divine address, human beings are called into existence as morally responsible actors and set on the path toward lending aid to and receiving aid from their human neighbors. I mobilize this account of agency to resist, unsettle, and reconfigure Barth’s androcentric and heteronormative construal of sexual difference for the purpose of securing Barth’s Church Dogmatics as a resource for theologies that resist the reduction of all inter-human differences to one overarching hierarchical model of difference. First, I argue that when Barth attempts to order the relationship between the sexes, he turns his christocentric model of agency, along with its ethical impulse, into a male prerogative, and he leaves a truncated and unlivable version for women to appropriate. By foregrounding the self-revealing and critically corrective features of the human agent’s encounter with the other, I argue that Barth’s model of agency, if fully appropriated by women, secures a site for the sort of feminist critique that Barth attempts to quash: a critique that challenges the prerogatives and positions of power that Barth presumes are proper to men alone. Second, I show that Barth’s effort to integrate the Gospels’ figure of the unmarried Christ into his heteronormative framework exposes the tenuous grounds on which he attempts to secure the centrality of sexual difference within his broader christocentric project. As a corrective, I turn to Barth’s discussions of Christ’s relationship to ethnically differentiated others. Here I locate a far more open, fluid, and flexible way of thinking about the self’s relationship to other human beings, which is inclusive of a wide variety of relationships and communal organizations. Finally, while Barth configures sexual difference as an oppositional division that must be carefully policed and maintained, Barth calls for a critical and performative appropriation of the norms, customs, and social mores through which the sexes are differentiated. This appropriation opens up space within Barth’s heteronormative framework for performances that unsettle, subvert, and transgress the reputedly unambiguous dividing line between the sexes that such norms instantiate.

<p> This dissertation seeks to examine the schooling experiences of African American males attending predominately White independent schools in California. Using Critical Race Theory as a theoretical framework and the factors contributing to schooling experiences, this qualitative research explores the role of student self-perception, teacher expectations, and parent involvement as contributing factors to participants overall schooling experiences. Utilizing counterstorytelling as a means of capturing the rich narratives shared by the participants, data analysis included holistic content coding based on themes that emerged from narrative examination. Findings indicate how parent involvement became the overarching critical component that was most significant in positive schooling experiences for Black males. These findings also support the need to continue to examine the shortage of literature examining the schooling experiences of Black males in predominately White independent schools.</p><p>

<p>This study examines sex differences on the baseline Immediate Post-Concussion Assessment and Cognitive Test (ImPACT), as well as the relationship between ImPACT measures and sex roles in a high school sample. Previous literature has shown that males tend to outperform females in the scope of reaction time and visuospatial performance. Likewise, females tend to outperform males on cognitive tasks, such as those pertaining to verbal and visual memory. There is limited research regarding sex roles and neurocognitive testing, while the present study examined this relationship. Participants were obtained from E.D. White Catholic High School in Thibodaux, LA. The 57 participants were administered the Bem Sex Role Inventory, as well as the ImPACT baseline neurocognitive assessment. A comparison of the means was analyzed using a t-test, while a Pearson Correlation was used to examine the relationship between sex roles and ImPACT measures. There were no statistically significant results. Coaches, trainers, and test administrators should not make assumptions based on sex or sex roles. The ImPACT system is a tool that has been used for the purpose of diagnosis and management of concussions, and will continue to be the most widely used assessment. Future directions should continue to focus on neurocognitive baseline testing for concussions for athletes at the high school level, being that there is limited research in this area.

The purpose with this thesis was to, through a gender perspective, get an insight in equality between genders at the electronic music stage is in Ecuador, with the renowed club Lost Beach Club as a sample for this study. The thesis is based on an observation study made in November 2016 at three different events, marketing materials and correspondence with a producer. The result was adopted through some different approaches of feministic theory and showed that on the electronic music stage at Lost Beach Club gender equality was not presented, and no consciousness about the subject existed. Men was more represented than women but they all got the same response and respect from the audience. The women was excluded unconsciously since they did not have the same opportunities to reach the big stages as men because of the masculine norms in the field.

This dissertation addresses gendered vulnerabilities after the genocide of 1994 in Rwanda. It consists of three essays, each focusing on the experience of women in a particular aspect of post-conflict development. The first essay analyzes trends in poverty and inequality in Rwanda from 2000 to 2005. The chapter identifies four important correlates of consumption income: gender, human capital, assets, and geography, and examines their salience in determining the poverty of a household and its position in the income distribution. The second essay is an econometric examination of an important health insurance scheme initiated in post-conflict Rwanda. Employing logistic regression techniques, I find systematically lower membership among female-headed households in the community-based health insurance scheme in Rwanda. This finding contravenes other empirical studies on community-based health insurance in Africa that found higher uptake by female-headed households. Female-headed households are just as likely to access health care, implying greater out-of-pocket expenditures on health. They report worse health status compared to their male counterparts. The third essay examines the prevalence and correlates of intimate partner violence, based on household-level data from the Demographic and Health Survey conducted in Rwanda in 2005. Three results stand out. First, there are significant differences in the prevalence of three different types of gendered violence: physical, emotional and sexual violence. Second, women who are employed but whose husbands are not experience more sexual violence, not less, as would be expected in conventional household bargaining models. This can be interpreted as reflecting ‘male backlash’ as gender norms are destabilized. Finally, there is a strong inter-district correlation between the post-conflict prevalence of sexual violence and the intensity of political violence during the genocide. The findings of the dissertation support its underlying premise: that looking at economic processes through a gendered lens, and recognizing that women face social, historical and institutional constraints that are ignored in much standard economic theorizing, affords important insights into social processes and development outcomes.