<p> This is a quantitative, cross-sectional study designed to examine the relationship between sexist microaggressions and mental health. <i>Sexist microaggressions</i> refer to subtle communications of hostility and discrimination toward women. Sexist microaggressions are often difficult to detect, but they have the potential for harmful mental health outcomes. Despite a strong theoretical argument for the relationship between sexist microaggressions and mental health, limited empirical research exists documenting this relationship, partly due to a lack of an adequate psychometrically developed, quantitative measure of sexist microaggressions. Therefore, for the purpose of the study, a theoretically based quantitative measure of sexist microaggressions, including a stress appraisal of these experiences, was developed. Based on survey data obtained from 699 women, the <i>Sexist Microaggressions Experiences and Stress Scale</i> (the Sexist MESS) may be conceptualized as composed of seven interrelated factors. Furthermore, the results support the reliability and validity of the Sexist MESS as a measure of sexist microaggressions among women. Even further, scores on the Sexist MESS correlated significantly with scores on the <i>Mood and Anxiety Symptom Questionaire-Dutch-30</i> (MASQ-D30), indicating a positive relationship between sexist microaggressions and general distress, anhedonic depression, and anxious arousal. Additionally, hierarchical multiple regression analysis determined that sexist microaggressions account for a unique portion of variance in mental health outcomes, above and beyond other known predictors (e.g., self-esteem, perceived social support, feminist identity development) of women&rsquo;s mental health, suggesting that sexist microaggressions are an important factor to consider in the conceptualization and treatment of women&rsquo;s mental health. Other service implications and recommendations for future research are discussed throughout.</p>

<p> Previous research highlights the relationship between gender and activism in various environmental justice (EJ) grassroots oriented contexts, including but not limited to: the coalfields of Central Appalachia, Three Mile Island, and the Pittston Coal Strike movement. However, little research examining the relationship between gender and activist&rsquo;s efforts in relation to hydraulic fracturing exists, primarily because this movement itself is relatively new. From 2012-2014, four communities and one county collectively organized in an effort to ban or enact a moratorium on the practice of hydraulic fracturing, commonly referred to as fracking. Anti-fracking activists in Northern Colorado deem this technological advancement as poorly controlled and dangerous to public health and the environment. On the other hand, pro-fracking activists argue that this process is highly engineered, adequately controlled, and necessary to boost and sustain local oil and gas development in Colorado and the United States. Historically, grassroots environmental justice organizations are often created and lead by poor and minority communities as these communities experience the brunt of problematic industry practices. The setting of Northern Colorado is unique in this sense because the communities trying to halt oil and gas development are opposite of what one might expect, as they are predominately white, middle class, and educated. Thus, my study fills current gaps that exist in the literature and adopts an intersectional approach to address the subsequent research question broadly: how do gender, race, and class intersect and impact the nature and extent of activist&rsquo;s efforts in Northern Colorado&rsquo;s Hydraulic Fracturing movement? Ultimately, I find that gendered and raced identities, such as &ldquo;mother&rdquo; or &ldquo;steward to the earth&rdquo; play an imperative role in explaining women&rsquo;s entry into the fracking movement, while men pull on a spectrum of identities. Furthermore, I find that traditional gendered divisions of labor help to elucidate the differing rates of participation among men and women in the movement, as well as the roles that activists fulfill in grassroots anti-fracking organizations. Ultimately, I argue that exploring gender, in conjunction with race and class on various analytical levels, contributes to a broader understanding of the nuances of activism in environmental justice movements.</p>

<p> Sovereignty, a mechanism of power around which a state is organized, has emerged as a way to understand the twenty-first-century biopolitical moment. Thinkers including Michel Foucault, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Roberto Esposito find sovereignty essential to understanding modern regimes of bodily domination and control. These thinkers look back to early modern England as an originary moment when older theories of sovereign power became attached to emerging modern political systems. Despite the sophistication of these arguments, however, no recent biopolitical theory accounts for the situation of women in historical or current system of power, nor do they discuss the role gender has played in the development of sovereignty.</p><p> My project addresses this ideological and historical gap by examining how sovereignty was being discussed, challenged, and appropriated by literary figures from 1588-1688. In the years leading up to and spanning the Interregnum, sovereignty splintered and became available to formerly disenfranchised individuals, especially women writers. Such women not only appropriated and challenged traditional sovereignty in their texts, but also influenced contemporary and future understandings of power, politics, and gender. Each of my four chapters serves as a test cases of a woman writer engaging with and transforming sovereignty. </p><p> I first examine Elizabeth Cary&rsquo;s closet drama <i>The Tragedy of Mariam, Faire Queen of Jewry</i> (1612); I then move on to Mary Wroth&rsquo;s epic romance <i>The Countess of Montgomery&rsquo;s Urania, Part 1</i> (1621) and <i>Part 2</i> (completed and circulated in manuscript 1629). In the third chapter, I examine Katherine Philips&rsquo; <i>Poems, </i> circulated in manuscript during the Interregnum, and published posthumously in 1667; my final chapter then moves to Margaret Cavendish&rsquo;s utopian fiction and work of natural philosophy, <i>The Blazing World.</i> These women challenged traditional notions of body and power, offering their own new understandings of sovereign agency; they enable us to more fully the genealogical progression of sovereignty and to incorporate the category of gender into twenty-first century understandings of biopolitics. </p>

<p> This study considered how youth relate, connect, and identify with Nature by exploring how Girl Scouts describe their ecological identities. The purpose of this project was to introduce reflection on ecological identity as a reflective tool for living in Nature, to learn about youth connectedness to and identification with Nature, to utilize arts-based research, and to contribute to the scholarly field of girls in adventure education. Thirty-four youth aged 14 to 16 participated in the pilot and research project phases of the study. The study was a descriptive and exploratory research project, utilizing the methodologies of case study and action research. Data collection methods were anecdote circle, survey, and art creation. Survey results indicate that development of the ecological self can be grown. Three themes emerged from artistic cartography on special places in Nature, including coming of age, earth grief or loss, and summer camp. A feminist, reflexive lens guided the work, culminating in the formulation of a four-point transformation agenda for ecological identity at camps. The four recommendations are that camp administrators and educators: (1) promote a participatory relationship with phenomena through direct experience, (2) expand perceptual experience for reflection, (3) interrogate power and marginality, and (4) advance bioregional thinking and active community citizenship. Future research could investigate the efficacy of implementations of the agenda at camps. New studies should recruit for greater participant diversity and examine how Nature connectedness is defined and developed for individuals without access to green spaces and places.</p><p>

Studies on gender in medieval and modern Sufism have tended to posit two extremes: Sufism as an oasis for women, away from the strictures of ‘orthodoxy,’ or Sufism as a haven for misogynistic views of women as temptations, distractions, and necessary evils. However, these simplistic characterisations cannot encompass the full range of the evidence, as we find many positive representations of women, and indeed female saints, alongside brutal anti-woman declarations. This study attempts to nuance these prevailing characterisations of medieval depictions of gender by providing further evidence of Sufi attitudes towards women and femininity. It does so via a comprehensive consideration of a prominent Persian Sufi poet, Farīd al-Dīn ‘Aṭṭār, in the context of select Persian and Arabic hagiographies, Qur’an commentaries, and qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā’. Analysis of the material reviewed suggests that gender representations are not fixed, even within the work of a single author. I argue that these texts exhibit a striking disconnect between their conceptions of ‘woman’ as a category and the depiction of narrative women, especially Sufi women. I suggest that this tendency reflects a Sufi philosophy of gender-egalitarianism and that philosophy’s inherent conflict with predominant social hierarchies of the medieval Islamicate context. This study shows the utility of engaging the classical Islamic tradition with contemporary theory surrounding gender and identity, including corporeality theory and intersectionality theory. It also employs more traditional formalist literary critiques using the lenses of defamiliarisation and paradox/apophasis. Ultimately, this research reveals the need for careful, critical studies of medieval views on gender, and contributes to the bodies of literature on Islamicate sexualities and the construction of sainthood in Islam.

<p> Female Genital Cosmetic Surgery (FGCS) is a burgeoning area of developing cosmetic surgery in the U.S., Britain, and Australia. Hotly debated, the procedure is caught up in cultural discourses of medicalization, on the one hand (arguing for the necessity of such procedures to correct a &ldquo;defect&rdquo; in female anatomy), and, on the other, condemnations of the practice as yet another market invention to capitalize on women&rsquo;s traditional anxieties regarding beauty, especially with regard to genital anatomy. This dissertation situates FGCS historically and culturally within practices of neoliberal capitalism, new surgical technologies, changes in U.S. healthcare systems, increased bodily surveillance and advances in media technology, and a tradition of the development and use of standardized systems of classification within practices of Western medicine. It then illustrates how these factors work in concert to produce &ldquo;defective&rdquo; bodies and the technologies marketed as necessary to fix them.</p><p>

<p> The Brothers Grimm and the Walt Disney Company have produced popular fairy tales for large audiences. In this work, cluster criticism&mdash;a rhetorical criticism that involves identifying key terms and charting word clusters around those terms&mdash;is applied to four Grimm fairy tales and four Disney princess films. This study aims to reveal the worldview of the rhetors and explore how values present in Grimm tales manifest in contemporary Disney films. Disney princess films in this study have been categorized as &ldquo;White/European&rdquo; and &ldquo;Non-White/Cultural &lsquo;Other.&rsquo;&rdquo; Because film is a form of non-discursive rhetoric, an adaptation of cluster criticism designed for film was been applied to the selected animated features. This study reveals that many patriarchal values present in Grimm fairy tales appear in contemporary Disney films, and while Moana (2016) features far fewer displays of these values, intersectional feminism should be kept in mind, with more diversity in princesses needed.</p><p>

<p> This project analyzes historical trauma, the dominant fiction, and male subjectivity as theorized by Kaja Silverman in selected Kurt Vonnegut novels. </p><p> Chapter one examines Billy Pilgrim, the focal character of <i>Slaughterhouse-Five </i>, as well as Vonnegut-as-narrator by analyzing the way these two men exhibit Kaja Silverman&rsquo;s notions of historical trauma, characterized by their failures to embody proper hegemonic masculinity as exhibited in popular culture and the dominant fiction. Despite Billy&rsquo;s comically absurd failures as a soldier and a civilian man, he survives the war and lives a financially successful civilian life, though he&rsquo;s seen by nearly all as a laughingstock of a man. Billy is a male subject whose very existence calls into question the penis/phallus equation: the symbolically and psychoanalytically significant linkage of the male sex organ with the signifier of sexual difference and, perhaps more importantly, power. His survival refuses to endorse the violent assumption that war turns boys into men, a belief in the regenerative properties of violence, a popular American mythology, especially during the WWII and Vietnam war eras. </p><p> In chapter two, I examine John, the protagonist of <i>Cat&rsquo;s Cradle</i>. While John does not experience combat traumas as Billy and Vonnegut-as-narrator do, John experiences a loss of belief in society&rsquo;s organizing principles and narratives, in turn causing him to doubt his own power as a male subject. </p><p> Chapter three details Howard W. Campbell, Jr., of <i>Mother Night </i>, a former Nazi propagandist awaiting trial for war crimes. Campbell&rsquo;s character is Vonnegut&rsquo;s attempt to work through Hanna Arendt&rsquo;s concept of the banality of evil, while also dealing with the loss of social and phallic power. As Campbell loses everything he once found joy in during his life as a Nazi, he also loses his belief in the commensurability of the penis and the phallus, unable to exist as the man he once was. </p><p> While my selections of Vonnegut&rsquo;s texts all delve into World War II either explicitly or at the margins, I argue that Vonnegut is primarily concerned with the events of the 1960s, the decade in which <i>Slaughterhouse-Five </i>, <i>Cat&rsquo;s Cradle</i>, and <i>Mother Night</i> were published. All of these characters&rsquo; experiences are analogous to several cultural anxieties of the American 1960s: the Eichmann trial, the Vietnam war, the spread of communism, the Cuban missile crisis, and changing notions of acceptable masculinity. As such, I hope to establish that the penis/phallus equation upon which our society&rsquo;s reality is maintained is continually in danger of rupture, though through cultural binding, the equation and its organizing principles continue to shape male subjectivity and American culture as a whole.</p><p>

<p> This study sought to unearth the narratives of gender nonconforming (GNC) individuals&rsquo; experiences of mental health services. The term gender nonconforming refers to individuals who do not identify with a strictly male or female concept of gender identity. There is an insubstantial research that has been conducted into the provision of effective mental health services for gender nonconforming individuals. Most of the studies in the literature review used the term transgender to highlight gender minority experience of counseling. </p><p> This study used gender nonconforming to separate from this terminology confusion. Individuals who identify with the identity label of transgender can be gender nonconforming, but not always is this the case due to the varied individual meanings of these terminology. In order to uncover the narrative of the target population, the participants of the study were purposefully selected to include only those who hold a nonbinary definition of their gender identity. This hermeneutic phenomenological study was informed by Queery theory and Hycner&rsquo;s (1985) guidelines to phenomenological research. The study was conducted with a total of nine interviews who identified with the study&rsquo;s definition of gender nonconforming. The results of the study identified themes that address the participants queer identity development, internal and external barriers for therapy, and factors that promoted positive and negative experiences of counseling. The limitations, implications of the study, suggestions for future research, and questions for future research are included.</p><p>

<p> This dissertation is an ethnography of trans identity and North American music and explores the ways musicking makes viable underrepresented forms of embodiment. The subjects of this ethnomusicological study&mdash;Jennifer Leitham, Trans Chorus of Los Angeles, Transcendence Gospel Choir, and Joe Stevens&mdash;are contemporary musicians who are trans identified. Contemplating the multiple facets of identity embodied by these individuals and groups, I consider relationships among their subjectivities, identities, bodies and behaviors, and interactions with others, and how those relationships are explored, affirmed, celebrated, judged, contested, and valued (or not) through their music and musical performances. An ethnomusicological approach allows the performances and narratives of these artists to show multiple levels and intersections of identity in relation to gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, religion, age, and disability. The dissertation draws from interviews, performances, and onsite fieldwork in and around Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area between 2009 and 2016. Ethnographic data include interviews with artists and audience members as well as live performances, rehearsals, recordings, videos, and social networks. Jennifer Leitham challenges an association of gender and sexual identity in jazz while simultaneously finding it a difficult category of music to navigate when her trans identity is foregrounded. For some of the vocalists in the Trans Chorus of Los Angeles and the Transcendence Gospel Choir of San Francisco subjectivity, identity, and embodiment are connected to ideas about voices, bodies, and behaviors and these attributes are highly variable. For example, whether singers are attempting to extend their range, grapple with the effects of androgen hormones, or both, their voices, like all singers&rsquo; voices, are in process. Joe Stevens&rsquo;s musical life presents us with particular ways in which trans subjects harness musical genre in order to perform trans identities. Genre, voice, embodiment, and transition all contribute to the ways in which masculinity and vulnerability frame Joe&rsquo;s identity, and they are juxtaposed with his female gender assignment at birth. The project ultimately concludes that sharing musical performances of trans identity requires a thinking through of bodies and behaviors, where gender identity as multiplicitous, varied, and diverse, is always in relation, contention, or collusion with socio-political and cultural forces that control those bodies and behaviors. Musicking provides a strategic arena where trans subjectivities and identities flourish.</p><p>