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My dissertation examines the cross-class relations of Victorian women separated by social status but brought together by their faith in a subversive Christian God who supports female labour. Using original archival research, this project documents the untold story of working-class women and their middle-class allies who challenged patriarchal interpretations of Christian theology and, particularly, the limitations placed on women’s material lives. Drawing on Victorian social thought, feminist autobiography theory, and contemporary body theology, my project pursues two complementary objectives. The first aim is to bring the neglected voices of working-class women into the debates about gender, labour, and cross-class relations that defined the Victorian period. The second is to trace the origins of a feminist “theology from below,” which, born out of the material grittiness of everyday life in the nineteenth century, emphasized the incarnational nature of all bodies, including those labeled dirty, disabled, and perverse. My first two chapters respectively explore the diaries of two well-known Victorian women, Josephine Butler and Hannah Cullwick. Both reconfigure Christian discourses of mission and servitude, seeking not only agency within their positions of subjugation but also new models of relationality. The final two chapters bring together the voices of Jane Andrew (a farm worker) and Ruth Wills (a factory worker) with the writings of fin-de-siècle Christian socialists to construct a politics of redemption based on an ethics of inter-relation that, instead of positioning some bodies as “godly” and others as in need of “saving,” recognizes the immanent divine spirit animating all material life. Using contemporary feminist theology to strengthen the incarnational politics found in these Victorian writings, I argue in favour of bodily transgression—the willingness to walk, talk, touch, and labour in ways that are thought to be “perverse” and “ungodly”—as a legitimate answer to Christ’s call to defy social hierarchies, especially the ones established by capitalist modernity. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Suicide is a common global problem about which more knowledge is needed. The purpose of this study is to make visible, through autobiographies, individuals experiences of the time before the suicide of a loved one. The questions and themes of this study concerns the presented mood, life situation, future plans and signs of suicide risk. The empirical material, consisting of three autobiographies, were analyzed by thematic analysis. The theoretical foundation is Goffman`s dramaturgical theory, where the opposite poles of pride and embarrassment and the avoidance of embarrassment play a major role in the understanding of an individual’s action. The result of the study shows that when circumstances show that the life situation is going in the right direction and plans for the future are imminent, it can cloud the signs of suicide risk. The result also shows the ability of individuals to maintain a facade in order to not share their feelings. Withdrawing or maintaining a facade become strategies to avoid embarrassment and live up to social norms and expectations. And usually, signs of suicidal risk or the seriousness of them are seen in retrospect. This is a small qualitative study and result of this study cannot be generalized.

This essay explores two fictional works about problematic eating by female writers in Sweden published in 2022: Bröd och mjölk by Karolina Ramqvist and Ut ur min kropp by Sara Meidell. The study aims to analyze how bodies and subjects are shaped through food, eating, and starvation. The questions of the essay are: How do the fictional works use emotions to show how bodies are formed? How are bodies shaped through contact with human, non-human, and abstract objects? How do the fictional works use aesthetics to negotiate the borders of the bodies? To answer my questions, I use Sara Ahmed's theory about the relationality of emotions and affective economies; I use Judith Butler's theory about performativity, bodily ego, and culturally intelligible subjects; I also use Donna Haraway's theory about situated knowledges and the hybrid cyborg figure. I use a close textual analysis to explore the works, which are handled like extended material. Therefore, this is not a comparative study. This study shows that Bröd och mjölk uses Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic construction of the semiotic to show how a subject can be created by a continuous flow of pleasure. It also shows how the semiotic and the intake of food can be regarded as a discourse, and therefore a regulating force. By that, food takes place as an agent of the inside of cultural discourse. Ut ur min kropp uses single narrative stories in a subversive way to show how the female protagonist uses autonomy as a resistance against a patriarchal society. Through starvation, the protagonist claims herself as a transcendental agent free from the body. The resistance shows itself as contradictory, and by that Ut ur min kropp says that autonomy is a story available for bodies that fit in a certain narrative. Therefore the study shows how food, eating, and starvation can be viewed as material, psychic, and fictional relationships between women and their surroundings.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)

This thesis uses autobiographical inquiry to "re-member" how I came to understand that applied storytelling was a valid teaching tool in facilitating autobiographical expression in mature learners. It is an examination of how story sharing and story listening can transform a continuing education classroom into a learning community. Applied storytelling can help elders reframe their negative mental models about the value of their stories, memory, and mythology and create opportunities for positive story sharing experiences. I selected highlights of my journey that best represented my experience and use of applied storytelling techniques. Each chapter includes an exercise and reflection as well as a story and commentary. In the appendices, I include stories written by the elders.

This paper explores the complexity of the texts women create through blogging and their inherent value. I seek to explore how the mothers who blog are constructing online identities for their family units and family members in this space and how those constructions affect and inform the mothers' construction of their personal identities online. I analyze how perceptions of gender norms and practices of gender performance may affect and inform the identities thus constructed, and further complicate the liminal nature of blogging spaces. I begin with the sociological framework of Erving Goffman, which is commonly used to deconstruct identity performance in social and digital mediums through his explanation of social performance and identity construction. After presenting the shortcomings of this framework, such as its inability to deal with the more private aspects of blogging, I introduce theories of gender performance and feminist autobiographical studies to frame a constructive discussion of the subjectivities and constructed identities within women's blog posts. I explore the role and effects of audience relationships in creating autobiographical writing. I illustrate the co-constitutive relationship between understood norms, gender norms, and genres in blogging, as well as the forms that bloggers' self-representations take. , I analyze factors that inform female authorship and how these factors are shaped by prior models of female authorship, demonstrating how the private/public paradox of blogging informs how women perceive of their audiences in a gender-conscious way, and how that in turn affects their blogging behavior. I offer suggestions for how the study questions in this thesis can inform the decisions women make when they perform their identities through disclosive blogging. I demonstrate how an increased awareness of the unique qualities and tendencies of female subjectivity can decrease women's inclination to define their experiences as an “other” to a male normative. I also show that as women highly regard their autobiographical blogging, blogging can become more effective in fulfilling the autobiographical urge and can have a democratizing effect on global dialogue about blogging.

This thesis seeks to understand the South as a space through which the contested bodies of two literary characters and the men who authored them can be more fully explored: the Ex- Colored Man in James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Nicholas Worth in Walter Hines Page's The Southerner; each appearing within an early twentieth-century novel masquerading as an autobiography. These bodies serve to help us understand how the regional Other of the South has inflicted itself on individuals living in the South and caused an irreparable fracture to the characters' identities forcing them into passing roles in lives they do not see as their own. This passing allows the characters to adopt a new persona in the communities that they inhabit, but never permits them to inhabit new bodies themselves. They are always left with the perception that they do not corporeally belong and the anxiety that the "truth" about their body might be exposed at any moment. Ultimately, the thesis also challenges the notion of passing as merely racial and explores other forms of passing, especially ones dealing with geography (i.e. a Southerner passing as a Northerner) and explains that the New Southern Studies needs to find ways to examine the South that are not dependent on racial binaries.

Over all, this thesis was written to be a "ramble" of its own around and through three issues that are central to the writing of the personal essay-voice, authority, and experience-and central to the emergence of this author's own sense of "self."Drawing upon years of voluminous journals, this collection of six personal essays demonstrates what the scholarly introduction proposes: that the personal essay is both a valid genre and a magnificent bridge from informal life-writing to genuine literary accomplishment. Drawing on Phillip Lopate's differentiation of "memoiristic" essays from the more classic autobiographical form, this collection includes three of each "persuasion." First, there are three autobiographical pieces which combine narrative with exposition. In the second section of the thesis there are three memoiristic essays written entirely in a story-like style, employing such devices as dialog, character development, and detailed description.

LIVE BED SHOW is an autoethnographic practice as research thesis exploring the apparent theoretical impossibility of reconciling the "unbridgeable gaps" of traumatic memory within autobiographical performance. Embracing an embodied poetics of failure, LIVE BED SHOW considers the possibility of employing the "ghosts" and "echoes" inherent to vinyl turntablism as a tool to represent traumatic memory in autobiographical performance. In doing so, it tests Karen Jürs-Munby's hypothesis that post-traumatic experience might share an affinity with the fragmented, non-linear, and repetitive structure of postdramatic performance.