The power of Confessional poetry derives in large part from its reputation for telling the truth. Indeed, the very term “confessional” indicates the genre’s status as a discourse of truth. Recent scholarship on Confessional poetry has focused on revealing how the genre is not as authentic or truthful as readers have assumed, and has countered assumptions from earlier critics that Confessional poems are uncritically autobiographical. The relationship between Confessional poetry and truth does not entail the facts of the author’s lives as previously assumed, yet, rather than disassociate Confessionalism from truth altogether, I seek to redefine the relationship. Instead of regarding Confessional poetry as a collection of individual confessions, we should understand the genre more broadly in terms of what U.S. culture considers to be confessional. The truth at the heart of Confessional poetry lies in its revelation of culturally significant information: the sites of our deepest emotions, the topics we vehemently disagree on, the places we feel most vulnerable, and the matters we really care about. Confessions often have cultural significance as they tap into the systems of power that intimately shape people’s lives. The continuing genre of Confessional poetry in the United States reveals the truths of the body, and how the personal is political over generations. I carry out this argument through the poems of several generations of Confessional poets, and through the lenses of class, gender, and race, in order to find what we consider worth confessing, what we do not, and how the content of our confessions evolves or remains over time. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2018. / March 23, 2018. / confession, Confessional poetry, gender, race, truth / Includes bibliographical references. / Joann Gardner, Professor Directing Dissertation; Reinier Leushuis, University Representative; Linda Saladin-Adams, Committee Member; Robert Stilling, Committee Member.

Given the expanding role of today’s grandparent within the family, this dissertation seeks to explore the diverse range of grandparenting experiences outside of the commonly studied experience of the caregiving grandparent. Using the 2005-2006 wave of the Longitudinal Study of Generations (LSOG), this study explores underlying types of grandparenting, the social factors that predict membership in the various types, and the association between grandparenting types and subjective well-being. Unlike previous research on non-caregiving grandparents, this study pays greater attention to potential gender differences in grandparenting experiences and uses quantitative techniques to explore variation in grandparenting types. In my first set of analyses, I use latent class analysis (LCA) to develop a typology of grandparents using the following dimensions of grandparent-grandchild relationship quality: distance from grandchildren, frequency of contact, receipt of support, and emotional attachment. Results reveal three latent classes of grandparents derived from two dimensions of grandparent-grandchild relationship quality on which respondents vary—distance from grandchildren and frequency of contact with grandchildren. The three latent classes are labeled Geographically Close/High Contact, Geographically Close/Low Contact, and Geographically Distant/Low Contact. Results from the LCA show different patterns for grandmothers and grandfathers: The Geographically Close/Low Contact class is comprised of significantly more grandfathers (70%), while the Geographically Close/High Contact class and the Geographically Distant/Low Contact class are made up of mostly grandmothers (60%; 61%). I then test if various social factors—including age, gender, number of grandchildren, education, and household income—predict probability of membership in the three grandparenting categories. Surprisingly, gender does not emerge as a significant predictor in the multivariate analyses. However, highlighting the importance of socioeconomic status, household income and education are significantly associated with membership in two of the grandparenting categories: Geographically Close/High Contact and Geographically Distant/Low Contact. Grandparents with higher household incomes have a lower probability of belonging to the Geographically Distant/Low Contact class (p<.05) and a higher probability of belonging to the Geographically Close/High Contact class (p<.01), while grandparents who have attended or graduated from college have a lower probability of belonging to the Geographically Distant/Low Contact class (p<.01). In the second set of analyses, I examine the association between grandparenting type and two measures of subjective well-being: depressive symptoms and life satisfaction. Suggesting some evidence of variation in well-being across the different grandparenting categories, Geographically Close/High Contact grandparents report the highest levels of subjective well-being, while Geographically Close/Low Contact grandparents report the lowest levels. However, ordinary least squares (OLS) regression results surprisingly reveal no significant relationship between grandparenting category and either measure of well-being. Taken together, this study builds on previous work by developing a quantitative typology of grandparenting, investigating the social factors that predict membership in the resulting grandparenting types, and examining the association between grandparenting type and subjective well-being. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Sociology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester 2017. / November 13, 2017. / aging, family, gender, grandchildren, grandparenting, grandparents / Includes bibliographical references. / Anne E. Barrett, Professor Directing Dissertation; Marsha Rehm, University Representative; Miles G. Taylor, Committee Member; Koji Ueno, Committee Member.

This dissertation explores contemporary literary representations of the Haitian Duvalier dictatorships (1957-1986), by authors Nadine Magloire, Kettly Mars, Evelyne Trouillot, and Marie-Célie Agnant. The questions that I explore through my dissertation research are: How do these authors represent the instrumentalization of sex during this time, both as a weapon of oppression and a means of resistance? How might Haitian women view their potential for agency in the context of this regime? The theoretical approach to this dissertation combines scholarship on postcolonial feminism and sexuality studies in a Haitian context in order to understand the implications and dynamics of power imbalance, agency, and heteronormative discourse in the works in question. Within the field of Haitian studies, I consider the work of little-studied authors and question a tendency to focus on the 2010 earthquake as the defining break between current and past literature. Rather, I suggest that cyclical trauma--of which the Duvalier dictatorships represent an important period--constantly informs the aesthetics of Haitian literature. More broadly, I respond to questions of agency and subjectivity, and demonstrate how these authors experiment with sexuality as a way to simultaneously reclaim agency and delineate the limits of such agency. Ultimately, I argue that these authors create a sort of literary dialogue between Haiti and the diaspora. These women imagine strategies involving feminine geolibertinism, homosexuality, self-sacrifice, prostitution, and abstinence as means of surviving and coping with the legacy of the Duvalier era. In fact, I argue that writing gender and sexuality outside of heteronormativity is one way in which 21st-century female Haitian novelists remember the Duvalier regime and create a space for potential resistance. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2015. / March 27, 2015. / Duvalier, Gender, Haiti, Sexuality / Includes bibliographical references. / Martin Munro, Professor Directing Dissertation; Jerrilyn McGregory, University Representative; Lori Walters, Committee Member; Reinier Leushuis, Committee Member; José Gomariz, Committee Member.

In the Atlantic world of the eighteenth century, revivalists in Europe, North America, South America, and the Caribbean centered their theology around the doctrine of the new birth. The new birth was the unifying, if contested, theme of the transatlantic revivals. Although prominent evangelical theologians like Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley and Nikolaus von Zinzendorf each conceptualized rebirth a little differently, the surprising unity of the doctrine across geographic and institutional boundaries stemmed from the fact that they all sought to ground the spiritual metaphor of the new birth in the natural philosophy of childbirth. Before the early modern Atlantic world saw a sudden increase of this evangelical preaching on the doctrine of the rebirth, there was a sudden increase of writings by natural philosophers on new findings about conception and childbirth. This seventeenth-century fascination among natural philosophers with the process of "generation," as it was called, led to the eighteenth-century preoccupation with "regeneration" among evangelical leaders. Edwards, Wesley and Zinzendorf were each exposed to the mechanism of Descartes, the empiricism of Locke, and the theory of preformationism at early ages, long before their theological systems had solidified. Employing this natural philosophy of generation was not simply a way to legitimize the idea of the new birth; it was the method by which this doctrine was produced. The main question of this dissertation, then, is one of epistemology: where do religious knowledge and values come from? How is a theological doctrine formed? As this case study of the new birth shows, theology is oftentimes produced from the body--from embodied experiences, bodily metaphors, and empirical information about the body. Bodies--as much as sacred texts, charismatic leaders, ecclesiastical institutions, etc.--are sites of religious values and truths. The experience of being born again, Edwards, Wesley and Zinzendorf agreed, was instantaneous and sometimes accompanied by convulsions of the body and terrors of the mind as in the pangs of childbirth. To learn about the spiritual mechanisms of this new birth experience, one could study the physical process of childbirth as explained by natural philosophers. Revivalism relied heavily on enlightenment philosophy for the development of its values and worldview, and in turn enlightenment movements relied on transatlantic revivalism for the transmission of its ideas to those who would not otherwise have had access to them. Evangelical preachers like Edwards, Wesley and Zinzendorf were the cultural mediators between what Wesley called "plain people" and natural philosophers like Malebranche, Descartes, and Locke. The sermons and treatises written by these preachers were the medium through which knowledge about the natural and supernatural worlds was conveyed. Rather than viewing evangelicalism as opposed to the heady intellectualism of enlightenment empiricism, this dissertation shows how these revivalists consistently drew from the findings of natural philosophy in the creation of their theology. For them, the body was a site for the formation of such theological knowledge. Early modern natural philosophy put human bodies into discourse, transforming bodies from an experiential reality into a natural phenomenon worthy of academic study. This in turn opened up the body as a site of theological inquiry for clergy across the Atlantic who believed that divine truths could be gleaned from the natural world. Several of these clergy birthed the first evangelical movement by translating the natural philosophy of childbirth into a streamlined metaphor that both united those who had had the experience of the new birth and radically divided them from those who had not. If the body was the epistemology that revivalists drew knowledge from, then religion was the medium through which such knowledge was conveyed. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2015. / December 5, 2014. / evangelicalism, John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, natural philosophy, new birth, Nikolaus von Zinzendorf / Includes bibliographical references. / Amanda Porterfield, Professor Directing Dissertation; Edward Gray, University Representative; John Corrigan, Committee Member; Michael McVicar, Committee Member.

When Kurt Weill chose to compose a work based on Elmer Rice's play Street Scene (1929), he set out to create a new American operatic idiom crafted for the Broadway stage. Because Weill's writings about Street Scene (1947) are centered on the topic of genre, most of the scholarship on the work contends with this issue. Street Scene is also remarkable in the way it highlights the female experience in mid-century America. In the focus on Street Scene in the history of American opera, questions of the roles of women and Street Scene's relationship to American social history have been largely ignored. The characters in Street Scene exemplify a nuanced conception of male and female roles, which results in a commentary on and criticism of conventional gender dynamics. Among the topics explored in this show, gender dynamics may be the most potent. The female characters in Street Scene negotiate vocal spaces of expression and recognition. Multiple layers of character portrayals serve to expose a treacherous space in which female vocality is policed, truncated, and devalued. This emerges in the way the thoughts of the central female characters are interrupted and in how some of the most poignant musical expressions generate no response from the other characters onstage. Examining Street Scene through the lens of music as gendered discourse illuminates the ways in which this work highlights female experience, through both the affirmation and the negation of its characters' vocality. The New York City street of the show's title opens a space where the audience observes the public and private expression of female experience. These elements reflect a sensitive perspective on female voice and female agency in mid-twentieth-century American culture, a perspective not explored in other contemporary music theater productions. At a time when many people were concerned about a "woman problem," Street Scene centered its narrative on women who did not fit the conventional model of womanhood. Weill belittles ostensibly upstanding female community members in the music he wrote for female ensembles. Conversely, for the characters of Mrs. Maurrant and her daughter, Rose, he contextualized their story for his audience through sympathetic musical expressions. The audience's relationship with the leading women also hinges on the musical portrayal of the show's male characters, including a largely one-dimensional portrayal of the jealous husband, Frank Maurrant, and the choice to keep Mrs. Maurrant's lover in a non-singing role. The Maurrant women's voices possess a heightened form of expression, allowing them to be heard more acutely and with greater significance than the spoken word could afford. Although the content of their lyrics may indicate uncertainty about their futures or their senses of self, the music empowers their voices in song. But the feminist reader elated to hear the female condition communicated so significantly in Street Scene must also recognize the ways in which the show denies its female voices and removes its characters' agency as much as it offers them a vocal space. Mrs. Maurrant's neighbors consistently grant no value to her voice, whether they interrupt her speech, ignore the content of her song, or associate her with a voiceless character. Mrs. Maurrant's voice may transcend her pitiable circumstances, but the character herself remains trapped. Street Scene was situated in a historical time on the verge of change in the way women were conceptualized and discussed. The conflicting arguments surrounding the "woman problem" would soon be confronted directly by second-wave feminists, ushered in by authors such as Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir. The issues in Street Scene are the same issues to which Friedan and Beauvoir responded. Street Scene reflects a social need that feminist literature would soon begin to meet. A crucial necessity for women belonging to themselves is to feel strength in their voices, from feeling comfortable enough to express their thoughts publicly to expecting that those who hear them will acknowledge their expression. Street Scene makes ignoring the female voice impossible. Street Scene gave its women a voice through music and its audiences a chance to hear them better and, consequently, to understand them. / A Thesis submitted to the College of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Music. / Spring Semester, 2015. / April 9, 2015. / Gender, Kurt Weill, Langston Hughes, Street Scene, Voice, Women / Includes bibliographical references. / Douglass Seaton, Professor Directing Thesis; Sarah Eyerly, Committee Member; Douglas Fisher, Committee Member.

The purpose of the present research study is to provide preliminary evidence of validity for the Eating Behaviors and Attitudes Inventory (EBAI) as an educational device and screening tool. The ultimate goal for the development of the EBAI is to provide an instrument that could be administered by 8-12th grade health education teachers or guidance counselors to facilitate learning about healthy and unhealthy self-regulatory eating behaviors and attitudes among adolescent women. A secondary goal for the EBAI is for the instrument to be utilized by counselors to help college women in a counseling setting to help them fine-tune and shape healthy eating patterns. The EBAI is an instrument which was initially developed through sampling college women in order to identify behavioral mechanisms and attitudes women employ to self-regulate eating behaviors when faced with three levels of eating stress, (a) baseline, (b) 3-5 day disturbance, and c) 10 lb. weight change. The item development of the EBAI yielded a total of 84 items: 60 behavior and 24 attitude items. The EBAI is comprised of two sections, the Assessment of Eating Behaviors (Part I) and the Assessment of Eating Attitudes (Part 2). The EBAI's format calls for a yes/no response to each of the behavior and attitude items. Participants are directed to recall three episodes of eating stress and to complete the instrument accordingly. The sample for the preliminary validation study consisted of a combined, assessable, and heterogeneous sample of 202 undergraduate women enrolled at three academic institutions. The participants were 18 to 44 in age and the mean age was 20.6 years. The sample was also comprised of: 40% freshmen, 17% sophomores, 26% juniors, and 17% seniors. In regards to race, 45% of the individuals self-identified themselves as majority participants and 55% of the individuals self-identified themselves as minority participants. One subsample was composed of 100 undergraduate female African American students who were enrolled in an introductory psychology course at a large historically African American university in the Southeast. A second subsample consisted of 42 undergraduate female cadets who were enlisted in an introductory psychology course and attended a military academy in the Northeast. The third subsample was comprised of 60 undergraduate women who were enrolled in either a science of nutrition, communication and human relations, or introduction to educational psychology course at a large state university in the Southeast. During the last 30 minutes of a class period within their respective course, each of the participants received and completed a packet consisting of informed consent, a background data sheet, and the EBAI. This study addressed six research questions in order to ascertain the descriptive attributes, factorial validity, concurrent validity, and discriminant validity of the EBAI. First, frequency counts of behavior and attitudes items endorsed at each of the three levels of eating stress were conducted. Then, a frequency count of the total mechanisms selected per individual was performed. Next, an exploratory factor analysis, using a principal components analysis with varimax rotation, was conducted on both the behavior and attitude checklists across three levels of eating stress. Then, a Pearson Product Moment correlation was used to ascertain the strength of the relationship between the participant's BMI and factor scores on the both the behavior and attitude checklists of the EBAI. A t-test was also performed to compare the number of behavior strategies and attitude items employed by majority and minority participants. Finally, a chi square analysis was administered to contrast the endorsement between majority and minority participants for each item. The results show that all items of the EBAI are useful, as each item was endorsed by at least one participant. Also, a four-factor structure model for both the Behavior and Attitude Checklists emerged. The factors were labeled control and monitoring, self-detachment, extreme behaviors and action for the Behavior Checklist and positive emotions, negative emotions, guilt, and motivation to change for the Attitude Checklist. A Pearson Product Moment correlation showed some relationship between participants' BMI score and factor scores. The majority participants endorsed significantly more behavior and attitude items than the minority participants. However, the individual items did not discriminate between race and therefore no bias was present at the item level. Finally, suggestions for further research development and validation of the EBAI and implications for practice are discussed. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Educational Psychology and Learning Systems in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2008. / July 21, 2008. / Disordered Eating, Eating Habits, Self-Regulation, Self-Regulation in Eating, Eating Attitudes, Eating Behaviors / Includes bibliographical references. / James P. Sampson, Jr., Professor Co-Directing Dissertation; Gary W. Peterson, Professor Co-Directing Dissertation; Thomas E. Joiner, Outside Committee Member; Steven I. Pfeiffer, Committee Member.

The purpose of this research study is to develop the Eating Behaviors and Attitudes Inventory (EBAI) as a diagnostic tool and educational device. The EBAI is an instrument that measures women's ability to self-regulate eating behaviors when faced with eating stress. A sample of 100 female students ranging in ages of 14-23 completed the Eating Behaviors and Attitudes Inventory. The participants consisted of 90 undergraduate women who were enrolled in an introductory psychology course and attended a large university in the Southeast. The sample also contained 10 female high school students who attended a charter high school in the Southeast. The EBAI is comprised of a behavior and attitude checklist. The participants recalled four episodes of eating stress and completed the instrument accordingly. The development of the EBAI yielded a total of 84 items: 60 behavioral items and 24 attitudinal items. The results showed that 11 of 60 behavioral items and 14 of 24 attitudinal items discriminated among four levels of eating stress. For both the behavior and attitude scales, every item was endorsed by at least once one individual and none of the items were endorsed by every individual. In addition, the behavior items were aggregated into nine domains of self-regulation of which 4 of the 9 domains varied among levels. The findings also indicated that individual's employ an average of 9.8 mechanisms along all levels of eating stress. The implications of findings for further research and potential uses of the EBAI are described. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Educational Psychology and Learning Systems in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. / Summer Semester, 2005. / June 15, 2005. / Eating Attitudes, Self-Regulation, Eating Behavior / Includes bibliographical references. / Gary W. Peterson, Professor Directing Thesis; Steven I. Pfeiffer, Committee Member; Thomas Joiner, Committee Member.

The Crimean War (1854-1856) followed quickly by the Indian Revolt (1857-1858) caused many civilians to become interested in the affairs of the army and the lives of soldiers. The increased visibility of the army created numerous calls for reform. Civilian moral reformers and government officials embarked on a project to create a more ‘respectable' army. This project was not teleological, nor was it voiced in a unified or always consistent manner. Furthermore, movements for moral reform consistently faced the realities of the financial constraints of the mid-Victorian Liberal State. The project was gendered, and it involved competing discourses of masculinity. This dissertation offers a thick description of key debates involving corporal punishment, soldiers' sexuality, the desirability/inability of soldiers to marry, and programs to assist their wives and children. It argues that one cannot understand the Victorian Army without considering what occurred in civilian society. These two worlds intersected and intertwined in numerous ways throughout the mid-nineteenth century. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2016. / April 8, 2016. / British Army, Crimean War, Masculinity, Sexuality, Soldiers' Families / Includes bibliographical references. / Charles Upchurch, Professor Directing Dissertation; Barry Faulk, University Representative; Suzanne Sinke, Committee Member; Robinson Herrera, Committee Member; Jonathan Grant, Committee Member.

On February 15, 2014, Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice was arrested for assaulting his then fiancé, Janay Palmer, at the Revel Casino in Atlantic City (Bien, 2014). Four days later, a video surfaced via TMZ, which showed Rice dragging an unconscious Palmer out of an elevator at the casino. In June, the NFL held a disciplinary hearing with Rice, and on July 24, the league suspended Rice for two games. Fast-forward a month and a half, on September 8, TMZ released another video, which showed Rice punching Palmer in the face inside the elevator at the casino back in February (Bien, 2014). That same day, the Ravens terminated their contract with Rice and released him from the team, and shortly thereafter, the NFL suspended Rice from the league indefinitely. The public outcry over the assault video generated a national conversation around intimate partner violence unlike anything seen before (Blow, 2014). Rice's assault arguably became the most publicized incident of domestic violence since O.J. Simpson, and therefore, it is important to analyze the media narratives surrounding it. As McDonald (1999) noted, media coverage of domestic abuse committed by male athletes may "offer some of the most visible cases of domestic violence available for public consumption," functioning "as significant sites where larger cultural understandings of domestic violence are constructed, contested, and struggled over" (p. 112-113). With the purpose of discovering how journalists construct particular understandings of domestic violence that (re)produce dominant ideologies, I conducted a critical discourse analysis of multiple mainstream media sources, including national newspapers, local Baltimore newspapers, online sports news, and women's magazines. Additionally, because the entire Ray Rice assault case—from his initial arrest until he appealed his suspension—occurred over a seven-month timespan, it was important to map the (re)construction of the assault over time. Thus, I isolated five important time frames for analysis, broken into one-week intervals, in order to examine the initial framing of each event. The research questions that I sought to address were as follows: 1) Do journalists give voice to domestic violence victims, or do they continue to silence the voices of victims and support the hegemonic structure of oppression? 2) Do journalists discuss the larger cultural problem of domestic violence, or do they continue to treat domestic violence as an individual issue? 3) As new information is released and different events unfold, does the narrative change, and if so, what is the instigating factor? That is, how do different objects of reference construct particular understandings of domestic violence and possibly change the narrative? In answering these research questions, I argue that, after Rice's initial arrest and through his two-game suspension, many journalists conformed to previous patriarchal narratives that have consistently blamed the victim, excused the perpetrator, and ignored the social problem of domestic violence. In doing so, journalists continued to reinforce dominant ideologies that silence the voices of victims and support the hegemonic structure of oppression. Although several critical narratives emerged after Rice's two-game suspension in July, it was not until TMZ released the second assault video in September that the narrative drastically changed. There was a clear shift in coverage after the release of the second assault video, as many journalists began critiquing tone-deaf narratives that have consistently blamed victims, excused perpetrators, and ignored the social problem of domestic abuse. With this, journalists began talking about domestic violence in a much more sensitive way than ever before. Although this discourse is crucial to changing the national conversation surrounding domestic violence, several problems still exist. First, it took a video of domestic abuse for most of these discussions to emerge. In regards to victim blaming, it appears that much of society—and certainly the NFL—does in fact need to see it to believe it. Second, even after the release of the assault video, football remained more important than domestic violence to many fans and journalists. While many fans continued to support the running back on social media and at Ravens games, many journalists focused on the game of football more than Rice's assault. Third, a majority of the critical narratives that emerged throughout the Ray Rice assault case focused on the league's (mis)handling of the assault. While these narratives are certainly important, they shift the focus away from the real issue—domestic violence. Fourth, although critical narratives surrounding domestic violence finally came to the forefront after the release of the second assault video, the number of articles that actually discussed domestic violence as a cultural problem were few and far between. Fifth, in order for these critical narratives surrounding domestic violence to emerge, Palmer's physical body had to be continually revictimized, and she was stripped of any agency she once had. Thus, although critical discussions surrounding domestic violence emerged during the Ray Rice assault case, there are still many issues surrounding gender and power that must be discussed. / A Dissertation submitted to the School of Communication in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2017. / April 12, 2017. / Includes bibliographical references. / Joshua Newman, Professor Co-Directing Dissertation; Arthur Raney, Professor Co-Directing Dissertation; Michael Giardina, University Representative; Donna Nudd, Committee Member; Brian Graves, Committee Member.

In this dissertation, I explore retirement income using a sample of Black and White men and women over age 62 who draw Social Security. I examine three of the main sources of retirement income – Social Security, occupational pensions, and private assets – to understand gender and race variation, including the simultaneous effects of disadvantages experienced based on gender and race. I also explore a comprehensive set of explanations for gender and race variation, specifically experiences related to the paid labor force, family, and health. To guide this research, I draw on two perspectives: cumulative (dis)advantage and welfare state. First, I use the cumulative (dis)advantage perspective to explain how experiences in earlier life can contribute to – and magnify – inequalities in later life. I also draw on the welfare state literature to shed light on the ways labor force, family, and health experiences may contribute to retirement income, and how the welfare state can contribute to gender and race inequalities. Together, these perspectives shed light on gender and race differences in retirement income and possible experiences that contribute to explanations for these differences. Using the 2010 data from Version N of the RAND HRS data file, I conduct bivariate and multivariate analyses, specifically mediation analyses and Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition regression analyses. My dissertation has three main findings. First, retirement income varies by gender and race, but race variation is more consistent and substantial. Second, explanations for gender and race variation in retirement income differ based on type of retirement income (e.g., occupational pension coverage), though labor force characteristics most consistently contribute to explanations. Third, explanations for race variation depend on gender and vice-versa, suggesting that experiences matter differently for White women, Black women, White men, and Black men. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Sociology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester 2016. / June 2, 2016. / Includes bibliographical references. / Anne Barrett, Professor Directing Dissertation; Patricia Born, University Representative; John R. Reynolds, Committee Member; Koji Ueno, Committee Member.