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Nearly everyone I know has a relationship with something in popular culture, whether it is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, amassing The Astonishing X-Men comics, or collecting every version of every Star Wars movie. Relationships and pop culture: couldn’t that make an autoethnography? This is a short version of my relationship with a band, Daniel Amos. I am not in Daniel Amos. I don’t know the members of the band (although I am Facebook friends with them now). I first heard them in 1982 serendipitously. Or maybe it was destiny. Either way, they opened my eyes to the wonders, doubts, and excesses of my life, critiqued my faith, and brought me joy. I feel like I know them, and they me. Thirty-one years after first hearing them, I realize our relationship is one of the longest I have had. We grew up and are growing older together.

Racial Peeves: The Exploitation of Microaggressions documents my personal experience of dealing with microaggressions throughout my life, as well as the history of these racial issues. This thesis also documents the creation of my Senior BFA Exhibition of the same title inspired by 1970s Blaxploitation posters.

One of the many cultural anxieties that existed during the nineteenth century in antebellum America centered on the dubious status of authenticity of one’s emotions, gender expression, or socioeconomic class. The fluctuating socioeconomic landscape of antebellum America destabilized the logic of categorization, rendering it an ineffectual means by which to evaluate others’ identities. In her novel The Hidden Hand, or, Capitola the Madcap, E. D. E. N. Southworth explores instead of censures the transformative properties of the self, specifically in terms of gender and class. Her interest in this lack of authenticity, or transparency regarding one’s self and intentions, is reflected by several characters in the novel who regularly engage in performance. Southworth codes manipulation, inauthenticity, and performance as distinctly masculine traits, whereas honesty, transparency, and guilelessness are coded as feminine. She draws on these idealized depictions to make a point about the limiting nature of such codified standards—and to disavow masculine manipulation and feminine passivity—before going on to complicate these binaries through Capitola Le Noir and Traverse Rocke. The implicit ideological thrust of The Hidden Hand points to the unstable, performative nature of gender as a construct. Both characters destabilize identity categories to reveal the arbitrary nature of gender and the harmful constraints of gender roles. They stage the confrontation between the reality of one’s body and the antebellum ideologies of femininity and masculinity. Capitola and Traverse are ultimately held up as ideal figures of femininity and masculinity, respectively, because their synthesis of traits produces an androgyny valorized by Southworth.

Stephen Foster is acknowledged as America’s first composer of popular music. His legacy can be seen in the number of songs that are embedded in our cultural heritage – “Oh! Susanna,” “Beautiful Dreamer,” and “My Old Kentucky Home,” are but a very few of his most popular works. Stephen Foster’s songs have been incorporated into every facet of American culture including both popular and classical musical culture, television, and film. However, his legacy is complicated as it is tainted by connections to blackface minstrelsy in some works. This document seeks to trace the threads of racial sensitivity and cultural appropriation in works arranged for choral ensembles based on Foster’s songs. The arrangements chosen for this document provide a glimpse into three distinct periods of American history – pre-Civil Rights, the Civil Rights Era, and post-Civil Rights. Using a process of comparative analysis of the music and text of the originals to that of the arrangements, this document traces expected and unexpected changes in music and text associated with each period. Perhaps through the continued study of one of America’s first purveyors of popular culture, we can begin to understand our national legacy of racism more clearly and find a path towards reconciliation.

Recollecting the history of the United States, which is inextricably entangled with westward expansionism (Manifest Destiny) and the construction of borders, is also a complex and troubling reexamination of the American identity itself. This is evident in critical perspectives that analyze our violent past and the narratives that continue to govern not only contemporary culture but also the academic sphere as Native scholars have been proposing over the last twenty years. However, what remains vital to this conversation is how to better include the narratives and voices from both native peoples and Mexicans—especially in the southwest borderlands—which also counteract the dominant narratives mentioned above. However, these alternate narratives can be affirmed and authorized as crucial histories by utilizing Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra and at the same time, act as a form of resistance. By reevaluating three crucial moments in The Crossing, Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, and employing a heuristic I will call the rhetoric of violence, I hope to highlight the importance of such marginalized narratives and the voices that occupy them in American history.

More often than not, when we think about visual rhetoric, especially in the fields of composition and literature, we imagine such visual texts as video games, advertisements, and graffiti/art. It’s rare that our thoughts turn to tattoos and the idea that women’s tattoos in particular, as visual text, act as a rhetorical device subverting dominant social norms of how heteropatriarchy defines woman and femininity. The dominant notions of how we think about text – writing, rhetoric, and the publication of narrative – facilitates the construction of a tattoo rhetoric. Utilizing a feminist lens, this thesis demonstrates the visual rhetoric of women’s tattoos and the construction of a tattoo rhetoric, drawing from elements of queers of color, women of color, and visual rhetoric scholars, as well as such theorists as Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Mikhail Bakhtin. I explore Shelly Jackson’s Skin and the embodied texts of Kat Von D’s tattoos to convey the disidentification from and deconstruction of traditional and dominant notions of writing, rhetoric, and narrative, as well as heteropatriarchal constructs and governance of women, women’s bodies, and femininity. The visual rhetoric of women’s tattoos empowers women to radically challenge mainstream perceptions of feminine beauty, reclaim agency over their own bodies, and construct new meaning of woman and embodied texts. Women’s tattooed bodies facilitate the deconstruction of dominant ideologies of woman, femininity, and of text; the reconstruction of how woman and visual text are defined; and the construction of a tattoo rhetoric.

This study is an empirical analysis of communication styles in Japan and the United States. In particular, the study deals with communication styles in Japanese and American television commercials as a reflection of human communication styles in the two countries.

This thesis is about measuring social acceptance of the American public on the increasing trend of intermarriage in the United States. It outlines U.S. Census data in the areas of population, educational attainment, regional data, and marriage data. It analyzes popular and influential media from 1960 to 2011 including: marriage of Guy Smith and Peggy Rusk, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Star Trek, Jungle Fever, The Joy Luck Club, and modern television shows such as Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, Modern Family, and New Girl.

How people think about the end of the world greatly affects how they live in the present. This thesis examines how popular American thought about “the end of the world” has been greatly affected by Hal Lindsey’s 1970 popular prophecy book The Late, Great Planet Earth. LGPE sold more copies than any other non-fiction book in the 1970s and greatly aided the mainstreaming of “end-times” ideas like the Antichrist, nuclear holocaust, the Rapture, and various other concepts connected with popular end-times thought. These ideas stem from a specific strain of late-nineteenth century Biblical interpretation known as dispensational premillennialism, which has manifested in various schools of premillennial thought over the last 150 years. However, Lindsey translated this complicated system into modern language and connected it with contemporary geopolitics in powerful ways which helped make LGPE incredibly popular and influential in the 1970s and beyond. This paper includes an introduction to some essential concepts and terms related to popular premillennialism followed by a brief history of popular prophecy in America. The second half of this thesis examines the social, religious, and political climate of the 1970s and how Lindsey’s success connects to the culture of the Seventies, specifically conservative reactions to the various social movements of the 1960s. The last major section discusses Lindsey’s malleable theology and the power of interpreting the Bible “literally.” In the 1970s, conservative theologians and denominations won the battle to define certain concepts within Christianity including terms like “literal,” “inerrant,” and related terms, and Lindsey’s treatment of “the end times” reflects these definitions and how they affect Biblical interpretation. Finally, the conclusion fleshes out the appeal of popular premillennialism in the 1970s and into the present day.