With Christine Elliot and Linda Brent, we have two types of the supposed ungendering of women: in Christine, public lecturing and the self-propulsion of one young woman into the public, male sphere, and the ungendering through objectification and dehumanization of Linda Brent in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861. We’ll see both young women reject the accusations that they are being de-femininized by engaging in the work or survival modes that they are utilizing. We’ll see both characters assert that femininity can encompass their transgressions, that femininity is more resilient, and that women’s rightful place is in reality, in both spheres of the public and the private, both the virgin and the mother. In pairing two different narratives that revolutionize different aspects of femininity, in a way they never have before, we can see common threads of sisterhood and emphasis on the bonds between women. While Christine deals with the social and ethical difficulties that are placed upon her for moving between the public and private sphere in an urban and rural setting, Linda deals more with internalized anguish based on the notions of purity as virginity that have been instilled in her. This is a place of divergence for the two texts –enslavement, othering, virginity, and motherhood are at the center of Jacobs’ text, whereas Christine uses virginity as a legitimizing authority for its protagonist and focuses more on how publicity is thought to threaten ideal femininity. Christine, by succeeding as a women’s rights lecturer and actually ending up in a heavenly marriage after years of strife, proves that a woman can enter the public sphere and affect the lives of her fellow citizen, while maintain a sense of virtue, even outside the public sphere. Linda, by choosing the loss of her virginity as a safeguard against her licentious master, shows women that one can find virtue and essential goodness in being a mother, and that the valorization as virginity as the highest standard for femininity is not sustainable, and therefore should be replaced with a respect for mothers. Both of these inversions of the previous feminine ideal rework the entire realm of possibility for women’s potential by reimagining who fits under the title good woman.

Research in sex-roles has found masculinity and androgyny to be correlated with self-esteem while femininity has a low or negative correlation with self-esteem. Much of the research in this area is based in studies of androgyny. Androgyny is the ability to respond in a feminine or masculine manner, depending on the situation rather than being limited to only feminine or masculine behavior because of sex-role stereotypes. In the research on self-esteem some studies have reported androgynous individuals measure high in self-esteem. Other studies have found that masculine characteristics contribute more to the self-esteem than androgynous characteristics. These results, taken together, suggest people with androgynous and masculine characteristics have high self-esteem while those with feminine characteristics have lowered or negative self-esteem.

This dissertation identified and developed indicators of a new potential predictor of relationship satisfaction and intimate partner violence (IPV): discrepancies between the ideal and perceived gendered characteristics of romantic partners. Past research has overlooked the implicitly gendered nature of these "partner-ideals." Two pilot studies were conducted to develop measures of gendered partner-ideals and -perceptions based on existing measures of gender ideology. The main study examined survey data collected online from adults (n = 643) living in the U.S. who were in a heterosexual romantic relationship for at least six months. Three main hypotheses were tested regarding the associations among gender ideology, gendered partner-ideals, gendered partner-perceptions, gendered partner-ideal discrepancies, relationship satisfaction, and experiences with IPV. While confirmatory factor analyses supported the reliability of the new measures of masculine-ideals and -perceptions, results did not support the hypothesized factor structure of the feminine measures. Thus, only hypotheses utilizing women's data were tested. This measurement limitation resulted in an unanticipated focus on women's IPV perpetration for Hypothesis Two. However, these data are valuable in their uniqueness. Hypothesis One was supported: women's masculinity ideology positively correlated with the corresponding masculine-ideal for each subscale of the respective measures as well as for the aggregate measures. Tests of Hypothesis Two showed that women's masculine-ideal discrepancies predicted their emotional abuse perpetration, but not their physical assault or injury perpetration, mediated by relationship satisfaction. However, this effect was small. Hypothesis Three had mixed support. Women's aggregate masculine-partner perceptions were positively associated with their reports of emotional abuse victimization. Additionally, women's reports of most types of IPV victimization positively correlated with perceptions of their male partners' conformity to the specific norms of negativity toward sexual minorities and restrictive emotionality. Contributions of this dissertation and implications of the results are discussed. A major contribution is the creation of masculine-ideals and -perceptions measures that can be used in future research on relationships. Study results suggest that gendered partner-ideals and -perceptions, beyond gender-ideology, have relevance to the functioning of romantic relationships--including both relationship satisfaction and some kinds of IPV. Future research should continue to investigate the validity of the created measures and explore the possibility of using discrepancies between gendered partner-ideals and -perceptions to prevent and intervene in abusive romantic relationships.

My dissertation tracks the production of "common sense" about female sexuality and psychology in nineteenth-century sensational British literature. I move from the sensation novel's heyday, represented by Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), through the fin-de-siècle Gothic literary revival with Bram Stoker's Dracula(1895), and conclude with a reading of the representation of aberrant female sexuality in the emergent science of nineteenth-century sexology. For Victorian readers, few things could have seemed further removed from sensation literature--from lurid crime novels to sordid news stories to sexualized science--than common sense. Yet, my project illustrates the role of sensational literature in provoking the dark millennial fantasies that passed as common sense and often animated theories of femininity expressed in late-Victorian science. Common sense retains its rhetorical force through the assumption that its premises arise naturally and apply universally. But if we take a historical view, a troubling pattern emerges: common sense has often worked to preserve reactionary views of femininity. For example, in the nineteenth century, common sense led medical professionals to the belief that a woman's reproductive system left her constitutionally more susceptible to "hysteria." define common sense as the product of the frequent iteration of a particular train of associative logic that results in the naturalization and legitimation of claims about reality, even if those claims are both sensationalized and arbitrary. The rhetorical force of common sense requires the perpetual obscuration of its origins. The elusive and frustrating quality of common sense as a cognitive category derives from its ability, in Stuart Hall's words, to "represent itself as the 'traditional wisdom or truth of the ages,' [when] in fact, it is deeply a product of history, 'part of the historical process'" ("Gramsci's Relevance" 431). Hall describes this type of associative relationship between disparate figures often exemplified in the logic of common sense as "an articulation." What Hall refers to as an "articulation" might also be called, when viewed through the lens of literary theory, a "metonymic chain," wherein the literal term for one thing is applied to another with which it becomes linked, articulated. Both terms—articulation and metonymic chain—effectively describe the illusion of necessary correspondence in mere arbitrary association. My translation of this cultural phenomenon into the framework of literary analysis allows for a precise description of the rhetorical transformations involved in conjuring common sense. With frequent iteration, metonymic association may appear to be based on some more substantial similarity—not circumstantial, but necessary; not the product of sensationalism, but the inevitable conclusion derived from and constituting common sense. Common sense regarding female sexuality has frequently been preserved through sensationalism; but paradoxically, sensationalism is often most effective when its characteristic paranoia seems somehow self-evidently justified, even rational. In other words, sensationalism works best to consolidate the paranoid patterns of associative logic informing the nineteenth-century figuration of femininity when it appears not to be working at all—when sensationalism takes on the weight of common sense.

Esta dissertação propõe investigar, de uma perspectiva etnográfica, os processos de produção e apreensão de noções de feminino nas diferentes práticas que compõem o campo da dança do ventre na cidade de São Paulo, mapeando e descrevendo os principais espaços relacionados à produção e circulação de performatividades de gênero. Tais noções englobam não somente os movimentos inerentes à dança, mas também as concepções de comportamentos e cuidado do corpo que ela circunscreve. Busca-se, assim, verificar quais signos corporais e comportamentais compõem as noções de femininos em circulação e quais agentes e espaços contribuem para sua produção. / This dissertation investigates, from an ethnographic perspective, the production and apprehension processes of notions of femininity in different practices concerning the field of belly dancing in the city of São Paulo. The main spaces related to the production and circulation of such performativity are mapped and described. Those specific notions of femininity include not only the movements inherent to the dance, but also conceptions of behavior and body care that it circumscribes. This research aims to verify which bodily and behavioral signs create the circulating notions of femininity and which agents and spaces contribute to their production.

A general goal to my study was to promote an inclusive approach to baldness by sharing and centering women's experiences with baldness from skin and hair conditions, such as autoimmune alopecia areata conditions and monilethrix. Specifically, a main goal of my study was to her-storicize the lived experiences of women who are bald from skin and hair conditions by examining medical and cultural discourses surrounding these conditions, femininity, and female baldness. Additionally, my study considers strategies of accommodation and resistance that bald women perform in a given context, space, or time. For instance, I consider the ways participants manage their conditions and baldness within certain contexts. To achieve these goals, I interviewed four women who are bald from alopecia areata, alopecia totalis, alopecia universalis, and monilethrix by using an interactive approach to the interviews. Once the interviews were completed, I used interpretative phenomenological analysis to extract themes across the four interviews. Based on the analysis, I organized the findings into two overarching themes that include (a) navigating the feminine ideal and (b) negotiating the assumptions of illness and female baldness. In these themes, I discuss how participants' experiences demonstrate the significance of accommodating and/or resisting hegemonic notions of femininity and illness.

This paper explores how the "warrior woman" trope in western culture, as portrayed in late 20th century science fiction/fantasy and speculative television, reflects heteronormative/heterosexist discourses of femininity in American culture. First, I will examine feminine discourse in American culture, especially in the late 20th century. Then I will discuss how the tenets of second and third wave feminism influenced western paradigms of "the ideal female" and impacted pop culture by producing "warrior women" who both reflected and challenged heteronormative ideas and feminist principles. By examining several television shows produced in the United States and Great Britain from the late 1960s to 2007, I hope to show how the warrior woman trope has grown and changed under the influence of feminism and 20th century values.

Abstract not available

In this thesis I argue that science fiction is not a genre exclusively made up of written texts but a community or series of communities. I examine the science fiction community's engagement with questions of femeninity, masculinity, sex and sexuality over the past seventy years, that is from 1926 until 1996. My examination of this engagement is centred on the battle of the sexes, the lives of James Tiptree, Jr. and the Award named in Tiptree's honour. I make connections between contemporary feminist science fiction and the earliest pulp science fiction engagements with sex and sexuality.

<p>The intention of this study is to find out how the female celebrity is portrayed in women’s magazines directed at women of different age groups. The magazines that I have chosen to analyse are Frida, Veckorevyn and Damernas Värld. My aim is to find out what kind of celebrity appears in the magazines in terms of occupation and topics in the articles. Furthermore, the aim is also to determine whether the celebrity is portrayed in a different or similar way depending on the target group. This thesis is done from a gender perspective in order to elucidate what distinguishes the celebrity in the context of the celebrity being female. The frameworks of theories are the following: culture theory, ideology, stereotypes, homo-sociality and connotation and denotation. The methods used to analyse the texts were content analysis and qualitative discourse analysis. Since images of the female celebrities have also been of importance, I have used the method of semiotics for picture analysis. I discovered that there are both differences and similarities in how the female celebrity is portrayed, in relation to different age categories. It appears there are more types of women celebrities in Damernas Värld in-comparison to Frida and Veckorevyn, as not only do the celebrities in Damernas Värld have more varied occupations, they also engage in more topics in their interviews. I found that the celebrity woman is not always portrayed in exactly the same light. However, I could identify the average woman which appears most frequently in all the magazines. The portrayal of the celebrity woman is usually built on contrasts and stereotypes. The occupation is typically an actress or a singer; she is usually white, heterosexual and rich. Her traits are typically being tough and independent, yet in conjunction considerate and friendly. She is also glamorous but ordinary, sexy but sweet. The underlying preconceptions of femininity are never challenged by the journalist’s way of portraying the celebrities.</p>