<p>This study explored the perceptions of black South African women residing in Khayelitsha, Site B, about thinness, HIV./AIDS and body image. Obesity is a major public health problem in developed as well as developing countries. The HIV/AIDS epidemic has been escalating in Sub-Saharan Africa and has been said to be the leading cause of death in South Africa.</p>

This thesis is an ethnographic analysis of kinship among the Kuna of the San Blas Archipelago of eastern Panamá, which focuses on the creation of bodies and persons. San Blas island villages are characterized by a compact layout and a burgeoning demographic concentration in relation to space. Despite land is available on surrounding mainland areas, the Kuna continue living in nucleated villages, emphasizing kinship as the value of a life in spatial and social concentration. By describing quotidian life in one Kuna community, this thesis considers what it means to live in concentration from a Kuna perspective, and how wellbeing is created through daily practices and rituals aimed at contrasting the social disengagement, that people consider an effect of domestic splitting, the ramification of collateral ties, and illnesses inflicted by invisible pathogenic beings. My analysis focuses on two main lines of enquiry: 1) the progression of social relations from close to distant. Beginning from the house, where the bodies of co-residents are made consubstantial through commensality, the thesis analyses marriageability as the management of social distance, and the celebration of communal drinking festivals as the re-patterning of relations with different types of non-kin (e.g. non co-resident kin, the dead, and pathogenic spirits) for the regeneration of fertility and wellbeing. 2) It focuses on the person and discusses how adults make sense of babies and processes of body and kinship making in relation to non-human beings. By describing how ritual and micro-quotidian practices operate according to patterns of density and repetition, this thesis demonstrates that concentration and saturation are the core notions of sociality and personhood for the Kuna. The thesis argues that saturation is interior to the ongoing creation of kinship.

This dissertation layers trauma studies theory with feminist theories of performance and autobiography to investigate how women's autobiographically based performances of illness experience disrupt and/or reinforce master discourses of medicine, identity, and knowledge. Feminist theories of performance and autobiography share with trauma studies the distrust of traditional frames and mechanisms of representation, and seek to discover new methods of interpreting experiences that lie "outside the realm" of normative discourse. These theories are further linked by their shared focus on agency and identity construction and an understanding of autobiography that emphasizes the limitations of language and memory which allows for aporia, contradiction, and dissonance, and the belief that testimony functions as a politicized performative of truth. Employing these theoretical perspectives, Carr investigates how these performances witness to radical reconfigurations of identity through the transference of trauma into conveyable life narrative -- even when those narratives falls outside the paradigm of traditional storytelling structures. Carr questions how the structures and content of these performances reveal what traumas are inflicted not only through illness, but also through treatment and care within the western medical model. Throughout the study Carr examines the moments when the cognitive structures of trauma are transmitted into performance through a variety of feminist and avant-garde performance techniques. Carr investigates the work of specific performers and contextualizes the performances within popular culture and medical discourse. Performances analyzed include; Robbie McCauley's Sugar, Susan Miller's My Left Breast, Brandyn Barbara Artis's Sister Girl, and Deb Margolin's bringing the fishermen home and Three Seconds in the Key. Carr questions how the formerly or currently ill female body performing in public disrupts notions of fixed and stable identity while examining the myriad identity constructions embedded within illness narrative. Rather than simplistic triumphant stories of individual cure and recovery, these complex expressions of traumatic experience reveal patterns of cultural oppression that keep the ill female body isolated and silenced. This study attempts to intervene in that silence by foregrounding these politicized performances.

The purpose of this research is to examine through sociological and psychological theories how women make sense of the desire and attainment of breast implants for graduation. The study used a qualitative approach and focused on women ages 18-35 in the state of Texas who have received breast implants for graduation. The sample size in this study included 10 high-school graduates receiving implants as a gift and their 10 mothers. Seven theoretical paradigms provided a better understanding for why the daughters asked for breast implants and why the parent(s) paid for them. Symbolic interaction theory explained why the daughters wished to replace their "fake" cotton padded self with their augmented self, to become the most authentic woman possible. Social construction of reality theory explained why both mothers and daughters wanted to conform to the social construction of gender, and to accomplish their gender well. Conspicuous consumption theory demonstrated how cosmetic surgery practices allow women to appear wealthy, gain status, and "flash" their assets. Feminist theory explained why some women were motivated to capture the attention of men and others altered the body out of empowerment. Reference group and social comparison theories explained how the women in this study were influenced to undergo cosmetic surgery by ranking themselves in attractiveness against real friends and media icons. Lastly, self-discrepancy theory showed how the daughters in this study felt they needed surgery to fix a discrepancy between their real and ideal self. The majority of respondents expressed complete comfort with their gifting and receiving of breast implants for graduation, claiming it was a great decision. They also agreed surgery was worth any risk to increase their daughter's confidence. Most of the mothers expressed that they were comfortable with their decision to gift surgery to their daughters, despite knowing that their gift of augmentation would ultimately result in more surgery in the future.