<p> All women, including Christian women, are susceptible to the diet industry&rsquo;s selling of thin bodies as a commodity and media portrayals of thin women as desirable and successful. Overall, diet books are the most popular category of nonfiction, worth over $1.2&nbsp;billion annually as of 2005. Evangelical Christian women believe they are obeying God&rsquo;s will when they follow a Christian diet, but in reality they are subscribing to and perpetuating the prevailing American culture of thinness. The popularity of Christian diet books began in post-World War II America and continues today. They propose to solve the problem of women&rsquo;s dissatisfaction with their bodies by offering diets based on Biblical teachings and Christian beliefs. This paper examines five Christian diet books published between 1957 and 2013: <i> Pray Your Weight Away; First Place; The Weigh Down Diet; What Would Jesus Eat? The Ultimate Program for Eating Well, Feeling Great, and Living Longer; </i> and <i>The Daniel Plan: 40 Days to a Healthier Life.</i> As long as the culture of thinness is an integral part of American society, there will be a market for diet books, and among evangelical Christian women for Christian diet books. This phenomenon is pernicious because it damages women&rsquo;s self-assurance and alters their beliefs about the way they appear to the world.</p>

<p> Berthe Morisot was one of the founders of the French Impressionist movement in the nineteenth century. However, she is not researched with the same level of respect as her male Impressionist counterparts. Scholars often rely on her biography to analyze her artwork, compare her to other women artists, or briefly mention her ac-complishments in a generalized history of the French Impressionist movement. I ana-lyzed nine of Morisot&rsquo;s paintings and applied feminist theory, including third-wave feminism (post-1960&rsquo;s). My research was angled to approach and understand Morisot&rsquo;s artwork as a contemporary woman would at an exhibition.</p>

<p> Feminist artists during the second wave movement wanted to gain the same rights as men in a historically male-dominated art world, a world that was being influenced more and more by modernist ideals. It was during this precise moment that postmodernists helped transform art, in addition to the fields of literature, music, architecture, law, and philosophy. The synthesis between postmodernism and feminism helped art evolve in non-traditional ways. In this thesis, I seek to answer the question: &ldquo;How did postmodernism influence feminist artists from 1970-1982 to create the adaptation of new media?&rdquo; Evidence of this influence is seen in the evolution of new media such as performance, decorative arts, video, photography, femmage, and collage. As I examine the synthesis between postmodernism and feminist art, I will also show evidence of how second wave feminist movement influenced the evolution of postmodernism, and how the mixture of postmodern and feminist ideals influenced these women artists.</p>

<p> This dissertation employs four case studies&mdash;illustrator Alice Barber Stephens in Philadelphia; Louisville-born sculptor Enid Yandell; photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston in Washington, D.C.; and the Newcomb College Pottery in New Orleans&mdash;to show how individual women artists from a variety of media utilized collaborative strategies to advance their professional careers. These strategies included mentoring, teaching, and sharing commissions with one another; establishing art organizations; sharing studio and living spaces; organizing and participating in all-female art exhibitions; and starting businesses to market their work. At a historical moment when expectations and ideas towards gender roles and feminine performance were shifting, these women artists negotiated these changes as well as those of a fine art world that was redefining itself in an increasingly consumer-based culture that challenged traditional definitions of the &ldquo;professional&rdquo; artist.</p><p> &ldquo;Sisterhood as Strategy&rdquo; intersects with important work in the fields of American History, Women&rsquo;s and Gender Studies, and Art History. It bridges a gap between broad, cultural histories of women&rsquo;s artistic production and more focused scholarly studies on women&rsquo;s labor and organized womanhood. Indeed, this dissertation brings more specificity to these areas by focusing on particular artists who were highly acclaimed during their lifetime but who have since fallen through the cracks of the art historical canon and by attending to the wide array of genres and media that all artists, men and women, worked with during the era: illustration, photography, public sculpture, and the decorative arts. By analyzing the art produced as a result of collaboration; the artists&rsquo; letters, photographs, and personal papers; and contemporary mass media, particularly art journals and popular ladies&rsquo; magazines, this dissertation recovers the voices of artists who served as professional role models and creates a far more diverse picture of the people and art forms that constituted early modern American visual culture.</p><p>

<p> <i>Photography in the First Person</i> offers an alternative account of postmodernism in American art during the 1970s and `80s by examining the work of five photographers. Robert Mapplethorpe. Peter Hujar, Nan Goldin and Sally Mann, who are united, not by circumstance, style or acquaintance, but rather by how each one of them used aspects of their personal lives as subject matter, whether it was their friends, lovers, families or children. Collectively their art explores many of the same themes as that of the Pictures Generation, but is structurally opposite to it. Where the Pictures artists appropriated images from popular culture in order to demonstrate how identities were not given or natural, but were discursively and institutionally constructed, the practitioners of what I call photography in the first person set their sights on the ostensibly neutral viewer predicated by these same discourses and institutions&mdash;a viewer who is invariably male, white and heterosexual. Through a series of four case studies, it is shown how each of the aforementioned artists used the medium of photography and the specific contours of their personal lives through strategies of excess and indeterminacy to establish a different ethical stance towards the work of art. from one of detachment to one that forces us to consider our own bodies, desires and identifications. </p><p>

<p> The women of the Ndebele, an ethnic minority living in the rural North of South Africa, decorate their homes in colorful geometric paintings. This thesis retraces how Ndebele mural art was "discovered" by white South African modernist artists at the beginning of the twentieth century. By examining their paintings and photographs, it shows how their specialist interest contributed to Ndebele villages becoming popular tourist destinations during the apartheid era.</p><p> This thesis furthermore demonstrates how the format of the glossy coffee-table book facilitated global exposure and appreciation of the Ndebele "style," and eventually led to its commodification as an ethnic brand. Finally, it evidences that despite this appropriation, the designs of Ndebele women are part of a rich cultural heritage that continues to fascinate artists and designers worldwide.</p><p>

<p> The images of dissected pregnant women in William Hunter's atlas <i> Anatomia Uteri Humani Gravidi</i> published in 1774 were among the first realistic, highly detailed illustrations of fetal development and pregnant female physiology. Commissioned by Hunter, the images established scientific truth about female reproductive anatomy, a previously misunderstood field, and aided in the elevation of the work of male-midwives to that of respected obstetricians. The fetal image he presented, like a Lacanian mirror, also opened the door into the psyche of William Hunter. Driven by his passion for anatomical research, Hunter pursued the uncharted territories of female anatomy and fetal development in a narcissistic path of self-aggrandizement. The thesis herein compares Hunter's images to historical images to examine Hunter's unique and innovative qualities. Hunter's images demystify the Jungian maternal archetype and reflect his desire to create artful images. The ethical use of the human body in the arts is also discussed.</p>