No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 269-279).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2005. Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 292-304). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNR11613

This study discusses how adolescent Black and Latina girls read the femininities made available in pop culture texts and how they take up those femininities when they narrate personal experiences. The purpose of the study is to explore how girls engage in pop culture on an ongoing basis, how these everyday engagements shape their understandings of themselves as girls, and how these engagements are themselves performances that both maintain and threaten the boundaries between boy and girl. In addition, this study witnesses the deconstruction of those meanings (Derrida, 1967/1997), exploring how attempts to make femininity mean something ultimately undermines itself. As pop culture has come to saturate everyday life, American schools, following the Common Core State Standards’ (NGA, 2010) mandate for curriculum driven by “sufficiently complex,” canonical texts, have narrowed the scope and purposes of literacy instruction in schools. This research serves as a starting point for curricula that support young people in making sense of pop culture and their relationship to it. Situated within a poststructural feminist theoretical framework, this study uses qualitative methods to make the literacy processes through which girls make sense of pop culture texts visible and to elicit narrations of the personal experiences in which girls take up the femininities made available pop culture texts. The findings suggested that girls make sense of these femininities by reading both in-narrative and out-of-narrative—standing back from the text and treating it as a text. In their readings and discussions of pop culture texts, the girls cited and inscribed discourses of femininity, constituting themselves as respectable girls by deliberately making judgments about women’s physical appearance on screen. Specifically, they acted to draw a line between what they saw as appropriate and what they saw as inappropriate. This repetitive act was one way they performed respectable femininity, stabilizing discursive meanings of gender and also holding open the possibility of the line being placed differently. The findings also suggested that storytelling as a site of discursive agency as the distance between the moment of experience and the moment of narration held open the possibility of reformulation and renegotiation of meanings.

Abstract not available

Thesis (MA(Psychology))-University of Pretoria, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of English, 2004. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 70-72).

“From Brecht to Butler: An Analysis of Dirty Grrrls” is a production centered thesis focusing on the image of the mudflap girl. The study examines the graduate production Dirty Grrrls as a form of praxis intersecting the mudflap girl, the theory of gender performativity, and Brechtian methodology. As a common yet unexplored symbol of hypersexual visual culture in U.S. American society, the mudflap girl acts as a relevant subject matter for both the performance and written portion of the study. Through the production, mudflap girl materializes at the meeting point of the terms performance and performativity. The written portion of this project examines this intersection and discusses the productive cultural work accomplished on the page and on the stage via live embodiment of performativity.

Thesis (MPhil (Journalism))--University of Stellenbosch, 2009. / Adolescent girls’ passage to womanhood is frequently exposed to a vast array of media products. Mass communication products have become educational devices, guiding young women towards an understanding of femininity and all its accompanying intricacies. We are taught gender lessons throughout our lives, but our teen years are of special significance in this regard. In a society that is becoming all the more media saturated, advertisers are capitalising on different desires and ideals that are being constructed in the media. Initially, only adult women were targeted, but these days a number of mass media products aimed specifically at young women have opened up a whole new market. Until a few years ago, South African teenage girls had only women’s magazines aimed at adult women to refer to. These days, however, a number of teen magazine titles exist locally. The aim of this study was to look at teen magazines as an example of texts that are aimed specifically at adolescent women. More specifically, the study looked at the discourse on femininity within the pages of the text – what is the magazine in essence saying about womanhood? To take the research one step further, it was decided to look at how readers of the magazine engaged and negotiated with the text in order to inform their own understanding of femininity. The goal of the study was to determine how the discourse on femininity played out between the text and the reader. Combining quantitative and qualitative elements, the study was located within a cultural studies framework and referred to Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model as a representation of the communication process. It was found that the magazine under scrutiny had twelve specific thematic categories that were most prominent. It was found that the femininity encoded in these texts revolved around consumerism, fashion and boys. The study found that the readers taking part in focus group research possessed a sufficient amount of educational “cultural capital” to be able to resist the dominant messages encoded in the texts, yet they seemingly chose not to. This study also indicated that the femininity that was constructed in the studied text did not take the greater South African context into account, and that it served to entertain readers from higher LSM groups rather than all South African girls.