Insofar as human beings try to “know” we must define concepts, objects, actions. We label, we distinguish between one concept and another, and in doing this, we make categories. Labels are categories. Our categories are imperfect. Our labels are always relative, defined by and dependent on that which they exclude. The boundaries of our terms, what “counts” as something or what is considered to be within a certain term, are always shifting. Our definitions change based on our method of analysis. For instance, the definition of “human” is different in different disciplines, like science, philosophy, sociology, economics, etc. Given their instability, categories can only be rough approximations of what we mean, and not always very good ones at that. To our detriment, we sometimes forget that they are approximations, and already laden with meaning of their own. Michel Foucault and other thinkers have pointed out that some of our ways of knowing, for example, the scientific method, have become synonymous with truth, objectivity or neutrality. When this happens, we cease to question those ways of knowing, and the questions within those ways of knowing. We forget that the kinds of questions we ask determine the kinds of answers we find. Then, when something that does not prove easily “knowable” or categorizable troubles our ways of knowing, we call it trouble. Instead of remembering that our methods are imperfect, we think that the thing we want to know about is flawed, wrong or bad. This thesis is a reclamation of the flawed, the failed, the queer, a revaluation of it as something positive and productive. It is a reminder to be critical of our categories, and to rule them rather than be ruled by them. Categories are tools, not truth.

Aging has become a problem for men and women in Western societies where youth is touted and revered as a standard of success by which individual value is measured and esteemed. Older women in particular find that as they age they face discrimination in the form of ageism and social diminution. The purpose of the study is to remedy a lack of scholarship on aging in Appalachia and to establish a precedent for future studies. A liberal, feminist approach is used to analyze the results of recorded interviews and to interpret transcripts of relevant data. The results of the analysis are mixed owing to the heterogeneity of the women interviewed and the differences in personal circumstances, socioeconomic status, and levels of education that influence their perceptions. Limitations of the study include: the size of the sample, and a lack of ethnic diversity.

<p>This thesis examines how obscenity can be used either to maintain or to challenge gender stereotypes. Though this thesis focuses on only three texts, the questions raised concerning the relation between obscenity, gender, and subjectivity have wide applications. The primary theory applied here is a feminist poststructuralism which sees gender as socially constructed through language. According to poststructuralism, everything is formed socially or culturally through language. This includes the realities people experience of themselves and their surroundings; therefore, the language used to describe, and ultimately to construct, gender, is extremely important for a feminist critique of gender construction in our patriarchal society. Obscenity plays an often theoretically neglected role in the construction of gendered subjectivities. Drawing attention to the interconnection between obscenity and gender construction is important to feminists for several reasons. Understanding this interconnection may allow feminists not only to undermine stereotypical gender subjectivities, but to create entirely new subject positions.</p> <p>To investigate the relationship between obscenity, gender, and subjectivity, this thesis examines the following texts: Last Exit to Brooklyn, The Women of Brewster Place, and for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf. The Introduction provides a general survey of critical work concerning obscenity and gender construction as well as providing an introduction to poststructural theory. Chapter I examines Last Exit to Brooklyn and raises questions about, among other things, the misappropriation of obscenity by Selby's female characters where women swear but do so in a patriarchal manner. Selby, in privileging violence over language, silences his female characters in his reinscription of the patriarchy. Chapter II examines The Women of Brewster Place and the context Naylor creates which clearly condemns male violence and gives power to female voices. Chapter III examines for colored girls ... and finds several similarities between Naylor's and Shange's use of obscenity. The new subject positions that these two authors create will be investigated.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

This paper discusses the relationship between gender expression and gender identity. It recounts my personal exploration of the two through the process of photographing two fellow AFAB individuals to create visual representations of their gender expressions while interviewing them to examine how these expressions relate to the gender with which they identify. Following this, I engage in self-reflection taking into consideration both the narratives of my peers as well as Judith Butler's insights on gender. The project culminates with a series of self portraits and a conclusion on how I came to understand both facets my gender.

In this project I argue that trauma is a major component of society. Rather than positioning trauma as an event, I contend that it should be understood as an environmental force. To form this reorientation I look to an actual environment and the ways in which it remembers and responds to systemic violence. Specifically, I track the colonization and exploitation of Mount Baldy, and how natural occurrences such as floods and fires have consistently threatened human development on the mountain. If trauma is both monumentally impactful and an environmental force, then it merits a major rethinking of many of the aspects of human existence that are assumed to be stable. In chapter 1, I move trauma outside of the psychological definitions of the DSM and into a communal and systemic framework. In chapter 2, I use a case study of Mount Baldy to understand how environmental forces react to trauma, which provides a way to imagine how a society or community might collectively operate as a traumatized being. In chapter 3, I undertake a material research process using clay harvested from Mount Baldy. Clay, which mimics characteristics of the human body and is literally a part of the natural environment, connects the embodied nature of trauma for human to the ecological manifestations of trauma. This allows a glimpse at what it might mean to acknowledge trauma as a major component of the human experience.

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This dissertation examines discourses and experiences of reproduction in Virginia, 1630-1785. I define reproduction as an experiential reality that contoured women's lives in specific ways, as a central demographic phenomenon that shaped colonial populations, and as a discourse of power in the colonial project. Informed by feminist theory, queer theory, and postcolonial theory, the dissertation examines the relationship between reproduction and colonialism in the development of a plantation economy in Virginia. I draw on a varied archive of court documents, colonial records, newspapers and other print culture, plantation records, diaries, letters, and medical texts. Chapter 1, "'A considerable parcel of breeders': Reproduction and Discourses of Racial Slavery in Colonial Virginia," examines the ways that development of racial slavery in Virginia was based, in part, on the appropriation of black women's reproduction. I examine the roots of the 1662 law that defined slavery as a condition of birth, finding the legal and cultural precedent for the law in the conflation of servitude and bastardy. I further examine the vernacular discourses of slavery that used reproduction to define enslaved people (especially women) as a kind of property legally similar to livestock. I close the chapter with a discussion of the Virginia House of Burgesses debates around defining slaves as real or personal property, and I argue that these debates were a consequence of defining slavery as a status of birth. In Chapter 2, "Wicked, Dangerous, and Ungoverned: The Transgressive Possibilities of Reproduction," I examine the ways that childbearing could transgress colonial hierarchies and boundaries, especially in cases of bastardy and interracial birth. Throughout the chapter, I am particularly interested in understanding the relationship between domination and transgression, and the specific ways that reproduction could inhabit the space between those two poles. In Chapter 3, "Knowledge 'not fit to be discust publiquely': Colonialism and the Transformation of Reproductive Knowledge," I examine the ways that colonialism transformed Virginians' reproductive episteme. I attempt to reconstruct knowledge about reproduction in this space and time, and I show how childbearing became a potent intimate zone for the negotiating of colonial power relations. In the final chapter, '"She lives in an infant country that wants nothing but people': Discourses of Reproduction, Print Culture, and Virginia's Colonial Project," I examine the competing discourses of reproduction that informed Virginia's colonial project. I argue that two competing discourses about reproduction - one that privileged "prolific reproduction" and another that privileged "rational reproduction" - show the ways that the experience of colonialism transformed ideas about reproduction. This transformation occurred because the exigencies of the colonial project prioritized the maintaining of colonial boundaries and hierarchies over the early notion of peopling a "virgin" land.

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No description available.

In the years following the Civil War, southerners struggled to adapt to the changes wrought by the war. Many, however, worked to resist those changes. In particular, southern men fought the revised racial and gender roles that resulted from defeat and emancipation. Southern men felt emasculated by both events and sought to consolidate the control they had enjoyed before the war. In their efforts to restore their pre-war hegemony, these men used coercion and violence with regularity.;White southern women were often as adamant as their male counterparts. Women of the elite classes were most eager to bolster antebellum ideals of womanhood, the privileges of which they enjoyed and guarded carefully. In keeping with the turmoil of the war, however, white women endorsed, encouraged, and engaged in acts of racial violence alongside their men. Such behavior may have been intended to preserve the antebellum order, but it served only to alter it.;In addition, black women were as determined to carve out a measure of womanhood for themselves as powerfully as white women worked to keep it from them. Black women asserted their rights as mothers, wives, and independent free women in the post-war years. Ironically, they too participated in acts of intimidation and racial violence in an effort to safeguard their rights. Such activities did not simply force the inclusion of black women in white definitions of womanhood, but altered the meaning of womanhood for both races.;The fields of battle on which these men and women engaged included the struggle for land and labor immediately following the war's end; the rise of black politicization and the reaction of white Democrats; the creation of the Ku Klux Klan as an agent of both gender and politics; the election of 1876 in which men and women of both races used the political contest to assert their competing gender definitions; and the rise of lynching as the final, desperate act of antebellum white manhood. Despite the reactionary nature of white women's activism, the fact of their activism and the powerful presence of black women in these violent exchanges reshaped the nature of southern gender roles forever.