This dissertation is a qualitative exploration into the politics of pornography and focuses on the instability of the pornographic sign and on the external determinations which naturalize pornographic ways of looking. My project is to supplant assumptions in current debates that pornography has interior, often trans-historical meanings and effects which are "put into" the text by various agencies with the idea that pornography is a cultural transaction constructed in practice. I offer up the idea of a pornographic code to designate the moment (or the "event") which occurs when others are transformed into sexualized objects, and I explore pornographic sign as a site (rather than an object) where important cultural issues relative to gender, power and representation are staged and contested. This dissertation is thematically divided into halves, with the first three chapters providing an historical overview of various "stagings" of pornography. In this first half, I examine key transformations of "pornography" in the United States and Great Britain from the word's first use (circa 1857) as the writings about prostitution as a matter of social hygiene to its currently accepted use as the sexually explicit material intended to arouse the consumer and which sometimes equates sex with violence. Specific chapters track permutations of pornography throughout the mechanical age (roughly 1850-1920), and, later, during the "sexual revolution" and its aftermath (late 1960s to mid-1970s). The final three chapters explore the indeterminacy of the pornographic sign and the ubiquity of the pornographic code through an examination of current stagings. Chapter Four draws extensively from the literature of feminism and considers the problem of interpretation within a postmodern context. Chapter Five provides an analysis of the literature emanating from such Christian Right leaders as James Dobson, Carman, and Jerry Falwell; I argue that their anti-pornography and anti-gay material reenforces instrumental and pornographic ways of looking. The dissertation concludes by revisiting the idea of a feminist erotic as an alternative to pornographic culture.

The myth of Atalanta represents the struggle for women athletes to gain legitimacy. Atalanta has strength and power that are foiled by heterosexual conventions of the sex/gender system. Thus, she functions as a metaphor of possibility and dashed hopes. This study explains the persistence of heterosexist representation of female athletes in popular press by exploring the linkages among sport, gender, and technology. Such an exploration is situated amid a body of interdisciplinary research that explores sport as a social and cultural form. As a Feminist Mass Communication study, this project explores the textual strategies employed by producers of mass-mediated content, as well as the institutional power relationships that secure them; and finally, for the exploration of the ways in which gendered ideologies are rearticulated in coverage of female athleticism. The study addresses four research questions: (a) What forms of femininity have been valorized or eclipsed in popular representations of female athleticism? (b) When and in what contexts is female muscularity addressed in the popular press? (c) What strategies does the popular press use to naturalize differences between male and female athletes? (d) Are there moments in the popular press coverage of female athleticism where the relationship between sport and gender is, or potentially could have been, transformed? To answer these questions I conduct a frame analysis on 140 articles from the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, 1921–1996. Frame analysis allows for the examination of the stability and/or change of mediated representations over time, the organizational practices of media and the representations they engender, and the politics of gender. I conclude that femininity as constituted by the popular press has limited potentially transformative moments in sport and athleticism. Furthermore, the origins of female athleticism are inaccurately represented in media, resulting in a collective amnesia about female athletic experiences. Finally, technological discourse embodies the masculinist values replicated not only in sport media, but also in the more general and popular representation of female athleticism.

Violence toward women and girls is a complex, pervasive and ubiquitous social problem. The material problem of epidemic levels of gender-based violence in the U.S.—incest, rape, dating and intimate partner abuse—exists within a cultural environment in which thousands of images of girls and women being harmed circulate daily. Much of this representation presents such experience as being pleasurable—if not for the victim then for the viewer. Competing with these images are representations that problematize violence toward women and girls, and, occasionally, connect violence with its traumatic consequences. How interpersonal violence and its reverberations are figured popularly and within the scholarly literature has material consequences in women's lives. The three primary goals of this research were: (1) to demonstrate how the ways women make sense of interpersonal violence are constitutively related to the ways violence against women is represented in popular culture and scholarly discourses; (2) to explicate the relationship between the postmodern media subject and the trauma subject; and (3) to develop and apply a communication of trauma approach to investigate the relationship between interpersonal and representational violence as contextualized within contemporary, postmodern media culture. This dissertation, based upon two studies, comprehensively examines the relationship between the ways violence is publicly figured and privately lived by 53 ethnically-, sexually- and class-diverse survivors of gender-based violence. Situated within the U.S. cultural terrain of the early 1990s, how victims of gender-based traumatic violence made sense of violence in the media, and, more basically, how they make sense of and heal from the interpersonal violence in their lives are examined. Data sources include: 6 months of participant observation in violence support groups, extended-length viewing focus groups (which screened made-for-television movies), and follow-up individual interviews. Analysis centered upon the communication strategies women employ to survive cultural violence, and how these strategies are constrained, enabled by, and embedded within the contemporary society dominated by popular culture and the mass media. Strategies participants were found to use to resist the implicit alienation of their experience and to voice themselves and their perspectives into the cultural symbolic and the discourses of history are discussed.

The dissertation investigates the embodied experience of fatness in spaces between subjectivity and subjection on one Internet newsgroup and one listserve. Literature on identity politics, computer-mediated communication, and the social construction of the body is reviewed as it relates to the possibility of individuals with shared characteristics and/or interests utilizing technology to transform meanings for their corporeal experience. Using the methods of critical ethnography, I provide an interpretation of the ways in which site participants fluidly invoke and reject dominant meanings for the fat body within their project of resignifying fat bodies. Emergent themes include narratives of personal fat experience, comparisons of fit within cyberspace and "real" space, discussions of the pleasures and pains of fat bodies, attempts at guarding borders of identity and community, explorations of the mutual constitution of identities and oppressions, and finally, strategies for reconceptualizing fat.

This study is an analysis of a group of contemporary Western European and North American films, which are described as male border-crossing films and focus on a state of existential crisis experienced by their male protagonists. The study includes the analysis of Wim Wenders' Kings of the Road (1976); Michelangelo Antonionni's The Passenger (1975); Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Despair (1977) and his episode in Germany in Autumn (1978); and David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988) and M. Butterfly (1993). The study aims to develop a critical reading strategy informed by postcolonial and feminist discourses, and to read male border-crossing films on the basis of their cultural politics, rather than their aesthetic and "authorial" characteristics. The study engages in a theoretical exploration of postmodernist, postcolonial and feminist discourses in relation to their critique of the sovereign position occupied by the Western, white, male subject in the Western modernist/imperialist project. The distinction between the situations of a "tourist" and a "refugee" is applied as a metaphor to make sense of the disparate articulations of the notion of "border-crossing" in postmodernist discourse, and postcolonial and feminist discourses. It is argued that the notion of "border-crossing" which appears in male border-crossing films is most consistent with a postmodernist notion of "border-crossing." This study demonstrates that the cultural politics of male border-crossing films is ambivalent. In these films, the questioning of white, male authority can easily turn into its reaffirmation. Western, white, male identity can be restored at the moment when it is supposedly destroyed; or what appears to be border-crossing can as well be seen as border control.

This dissertation examines Concerned Women for America (CWA), an anti-feminist Christian conservative organization, as a way to study how religion intertwines with media and culture within the larger contexts of globalization and transnational politics. Over the last twenty-five years, CWA has formulated a specific US American religious nationalism, in which women play an important role. Starting in the 1970s, CWA established itself as a "Christian women's alternative to feminism" in order to defend US culture and national sovereignty and to protect women, children and the "natural" family. Since the 1990s, CWA has expanded its interests to the international arena, especially within the United Nations, and now focuses on sex trafficking as a global concern. To better understand what discourses reveal about culturally and religiously-based attitudes in the United States, I use transnational feminist cultural studies as a theoretical and methodological tool. This approach offers ways to historicize, critique, and de-essentialize discourses and examine how both religious nationalisms and feminisms function as systems of representation and as transnational movements. The signifying practices of CWA take shape in multiple locales. The first part of the dissertation critiques the historical narrative created by CWA about its formation and the culture war with US feminism in the 1970s and 80s, focusing specifically on the importance of the Equal Rights Amendment. In the next section, I scrutinize CWA's media coverage of UN conferences and proceedings pertaining to women and children, arguing that CWA situates itself as an expert on family and national sovereignty issues by generating truth claims about the purpose, function, and outcome of the United Nations. In the final analysis chapter, sex trafficking is analyzed as a transnational economic and political practice providing an entrance point for groups, such as CWA, to engage in contemporary Christian missionary discourses. I demonstrate how CWA's conceptualization of women, nation, and itself as a Christian public policy organization is interconnected with and mutually constituted by feminism.