This dissertation grows out of an interest in the women who are pastors in formerly Southern Baptist churches. Because they continue to face opposition to their role as pastors I wanted to know the sources of their strength and determination. Specifically, how did feminism and feminist theology influence their decision to be pastors and their continuing ministry?;I interviewed twenty woman pastors in five different states representing two generations of pastors. These women are among the very few who grew up in Southern Baptist churches and are now pastors, since the Southern Baptist denomination has officially banned women from the pulpit since 1984. I found that their experience of call was nurtured in the church and their plans for ministry were encouraged until the plans included being pastors of churches. Faced with opposition, the women claimed their calling, joined networks of support and turned to feminist theology for alternative biblical interpretations, validation of their role as ecclesial leaders, and inspiration for non-hierarchical models of theology and ministry. These pastors embody feminist theology.;This dissertation explores Southern resistance to evangelicalism, the gendered and racial dynamics in the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention, as well as the post World War II changes wrought by the civil rights, women's movement and women's ordination movements; documents the ways Baptist women employed feminist theory and theology to counter the backlash and Southern Baptist controversy of the 1980s; and relates these women pastors' narratives of call, ordination and ministry.

Police organizations have a problem retaining female police officers, especially those who are mothers. Women leave the policing profession at higher rates during childbearing and child-rearing years than during any other time in their career. Using feminist theory as a foundation, the purpose of this phenomenological study was to gain a deeper understanding of the lived experiences of policewomen who are mothers and identify factors that contribute to poor retention rates during childbearing and child-rearing years. Data were collected through 11 interviews with policewomen, who were also mothers, in Ohio. These data were analyzed using Saldana's 2-cycle coding procedure followed by thematic analysis. The findings included a set of patterns that provided insight into the reasons why female police officers are more difficult to retain. These patterns included: (a) challenges related to a double standard associated with women being primary caregivers, (b) psycho-social changes after children including hypervigilance on the job, (c) fear of reassignment or termination, and (d) the perception that departmental policy fails to address the unique needs of female officers. Together, the findings suggest that police departments today have yet to fully understand the challenges that policewomen who are mothers face on a daily basis. The implications for social change include reformed policies and practices that could contribute to the advancement and professionalization of the policing profession as a whole by changing the traditionally masculine organizational culture and promoting a more gender-neutral environment, thus allowing communities to benefit from having a more diverse police force.

It is criticism of traditional theory and methods, and the advocacy of new approaches that feminists have tried to present to social workers and to other professionals in mental health and other social services. The feminist goal has been to convince social workers and others to modify their beliefs and practice in order to be more helpful (as the feminists believe) to women. In this study of the beliefs and practice of social workers in Oregon, I attempt to find out to what extent, ten years after the "rebirth of feminism," they have adopted feminist beliefs and recommendations for practice.

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Using methods of critical queer genealogy and discourse analysis, Injury & Resistance historicizes the HIV/AIDS epidemic through four lenses—activism, criminalization, memory, and “post-AIDS” queer health—in national and transnational U.S. locales from 1987 to the present. Unlike in the 1980s, when white middle-class gay men were the most visible demographic of what was known as the “gay plague,” today’s American AIDS epidemic is becoming more and more racialized. And unlike 30 years ago, HIV today is a chronic condition that is effectively treatable with antiretroviral drug regimens. Concurrent with the medical survivability of HIV/AIDS, queer Americans have won legal rights to marry, serve openly in the military, and adopt and raise children. Meanwhile, however, for many the AIDS crisis has remained just that: a crisis. If current patterns persist, today one in two African American gay men will become HIV-positive within his lifetime—amidst a healthcare landscape in which racial, regional, and socioeconomic disparities abound. To date, little scholarly work has attended to how the epidemic’s American histories, having fueled an LGBT politics of individual “equality,” have in fact produced these stark simultaneities in which HIV is a chronic reality for some but has remained an emergency for others. Indebted to Michel Foucault, Injury & Resistance historicizes this evolution through a queer “history of the present” that explores the non-linear and asynchronous motions between and among AIDS past and HIV present. In the absence of a multitemporal critique, I argue, we risk ceding the urgency of HIV/AIDS to the past and preclude confronting what is an ongoing public health epidemic. Sources include oral histories from the ACT UP Oral History Project, memoirs of survival, activist photography, medical science statistics and publications, public health campaigns, newspaper records, and documentary film, as well as archival holdings from the Smithsonian National Archive Center, the Archiv der Sozialen Bewegungen (Archive of Social Movements) in Hamburg, Germany, the Special Collections at the James Branch Cabell Library at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), and the New York Public Library, among others. This diverse body of sources re-contextualizes national and transnational U.S. AIDS histories that anticipate an ongoing crisis with peculiar dualities: yesterday yet today, ghostly yet present, and acute yet chronic. Arranged loosely from past to present, the four chapters and epilogue present evidence, readings, theories, and speculations, listening for past and present echoes of HIV/AIDS histories that reverberate in experiential chasms between injury and resistance. Chapters present a critical genealogy of feminist activism in the New York chapter of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) from 1987 to 1993, explore a 1987 West German court case against African American ex-soldier Linwood Boyette for alleged HIV transmission, trace Derridean hauntology and queer temporalities in two AIDS memoirs and the National AIDS Memorial Grove, place narratives of “post-AIDS” queer health in relation to neoliberal LGBT rights politics, and consider Uganda’s 2011 “Kill the Gays Bill” as a transcultural circulation of U.S. anti-queer affect and violence. Throughout, this dissertation insists that the ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis, with its rich histories of resistance and dissent, must again become cornerstones of contemporary queer culture and politics.

This project uses the remarkable careers of anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing, stunt reporter Nellie Bly, anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, and war correspondent Richard Harding Davis, as well as literary texts by Davis and Henry James, to frame a set of questions about the politics and implications of cultural crossover at the end of the nineteenth century. Through their work as participant observers of racial, ethnic and social Others, these reporters, reformers, and authors were gradually transformed into charismatic exotics. More than simply mediating between a mainstream (usually white, middle-class) audience and a more exotic people or place, these individuals inserted themselves into the story and ultimately became its star. Putting their own bodies to work in this manner---as evidence and even spectacle---often meant transgressing the limits of what was socially acceptable for their gender, race, or class. The ensuing scrutiny and speculation, together with their efforts to manage this precarious celebrity, provide insight into the complex cultural tensions underlying America's emergence as a modern nation and imperial power.;As a white man who appeared to "go native," Cushing struggled to reaffirm his status as a serious scholar and dispel rumors that he had succumbed to the intoxicating pleasures of playing Indian. The divergent personas he adopted to describe his experience living as a Zuni suggest that the role of a Smithsonian scientist in primitive drag was an inherently unstable one at this moment. By blurring the boundary between "savage" and "civilized," Cushing threatened to disrupt the self-Other dichotomy which lay at the heart of America's emerging relationship to the exotic.;Despite the titillating social dislocations that her undercover stunts entailed, Bly, unlike Cushing, maintained a coherent performance of self and emphatic bodily presence. By filtering all experience through the lens of her own consciousness and asserting her middle-class femininity, Bly forged what I term personality armor, enabling her to float through the metropolis as an untainted observer while mesmerizing readers with a seemingly unabashed display of self.;Davis' work chronicling America's burgeoning empire posed little threat to his social standing, instead linking him to the gentlemen explorers who populated his fiction. While deeply implicated in the nation's outward imperial drive, Davis also sought to reassert boundaries, particularly those that protected the male body. to see him, as I do, as a proto Boy Scout, allows us to appreciate how freighted his early adventures were with the burden of future expectations.;Seizing upon the new visibility of spectacle lynchings, Wells adeptly manipulated the mechanisms of the exotic to "other" the white South before an external, international audience during and after her two British lecture tours. In addition to advancing the anti-lynching cause, the tours marked a turning point in Wells' sense of her own authority as a public figure. Her reception abroad as an American Negro lady, an oxymoron in the Jim Crow South, paradoxically emboldened her to adopt tactics more suited to a race man.

Drawing on poststructuralist theories of gender, nation and modernity, this dissertation is an interdisciplinary exploration of American experimental women's writing and their linkages to and explorations of colonial and U.S. imperialist histories. "Between Fact and Fiction: Writing by American Women in a Transnational Context" considers experimental literary texts by women writing from diverse spaces across places and times as cultural texts that can provide important insights for understanding transnational politics of power and possibilities for disrupting power. The project examines a broad range of experimental literary texts by women including Gertrude Stein, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, and Iranian-American women writers from the first literary anthology of Iranian-American women's work entitled Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writings by Women of the Iranian Diaspora .;Each author, in her own way, produces nuanced readings of power and domination on a structural (macro) level. Power and domination work both in terms of a culture's official narratives about itself, for example its history and its politics, as well as the literary stories it cherishes. These readings of power often remain unacknowledged in critical discourse because they are bracketed as aesthetic only. However, through an examination of American experimental writing by women, I argue that the aesthetic, the historical, and the political are all part of the same kind of discursive structure. and, for this reason, it is imperative to make known those discursive structures which masquerade as only historical or only aesthetic when basic discursive structure is left intact. I argue that together, these writings provide new ways of understanding U.S. culture and studying "America" within a transnational historical framework.

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Cross-dressing is a recurrent theme in Shakespeare's comedies, and the theatrical trend of gender bending casting has added an extra layer of complexity to performing his work. How does the gender of the actor affect the performance of a role in Shakespeare? How does it affect the perception of the role, and how can an actor utilize that perception to connect more fully with the audience? How does the female perspective illuminate hitherto unexplored elements of Shakespeare's text and characters? I was inspired by Orlando Shakes' all male production of Twelfth Night to research gender theory in relation to classical texts. I was largely inspired by Judith Butler's theories of gender performance, and herein use feminist and gender theory as a lens to view Shakespeare's work. I put on my own production of an All-Female Twelfth Night in which I played Viola. This thesis is an exploration of my process as a scholar, actor, and activist in the context of that production. It follows the journey from page to praxis, as I attempt to apply academic theories to live theatre. It is my intent that this will serve as a possible roadmap for future gender bending in Shakespeare productions, and to empower female theatre makers in that process.

Elizabeth Tudor succeeded to England's throne during a time when misogynist societal ideology questioned the authority of a female monarch. Religious opposition to a woman ruler was based on biblical precedent, which reflected the general attitude that women were inferior to men. Elizabeth's dilemma was reconciling her femininity with her sovereignty, most notably concerning her justification for power, the issue of marriage and succession, and the conflict over the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. The speeches Elizabeth presented to Parliament illuminate her successful solidification of her authority from a feminine gendered position. She established and reinforced her status through figurative language that presented her femininity as favorable to ruling England, ultimately transcending her womanhood to become an incarnation of the state. Elizabeth's speeches reflect her brilliance at fashioning herself through divine and reciprocal imagery, which subsequently redefined English society, elevating her to the head of a male-dominated hierarchy. By establishing her position as second to God, Elizabeth relegated all men to a status beneath hers. Elizabeth's solution to the perceived liability of her gender was to recreate herself through divine imagery that appropriated God's authority as her own. She reinforced her power through a reciprocal relationship with Parliament, evoking the imagery of motherhood to redefine the monarchy as an exchange rather than an absolute rule.