This feminist oral history project records, interprets, and analyzes the educational experiences of seven Ismaili college women in Chitral, Pakistan. Chitral is a part of the world where educating girls and women is not a priority. Yet in the scarce literature available one can observe an increase in the literacy rates, especially amongst the Ismaili Muslims in the North of Chitral District. This thesis introduces students' accounts of their personal educational journeys. I argue that the students' accounts exemplify third space feminism. They negotiate contradictions and social invisibility in their daily lives in quiet activism that shadows but changes the status quo of the society. Through their narratives the narrators see themselves as devout Muslim women who are receiving Western-style education through which they have learned to be women's rights advocates. The narrators now wish to pay forward their knowledge and help their families financially. Analysis of the oral histories revealed six themes: (1) distance from educational institutions, (2) sacrifices by the family, (3) support from family, (4) narrators as the first generation of women to attend school, (5) early memories of school including severe winters and corporal punishment, and (6) feminist touchstones. While honoring their families and communities, the narrators plan to become educators and advocates to empower girls and women in their own villages. In response to these oral histories, I recommend that the government of Pakistan, non-government organizations working in Pakistan, men and women, and teachers in schools work together to improve the educational journeys of future Chitrali women. Education for women needs to be introduced as a universal human right in Chitral so women, too, can get financial and psychosocial support from their families as well as communities to achieve their educational goals.

Although, the histories of forced sterilizations and eugenics practices have been all but forgotten by most, these subjects gained national attention again when the state of North Carolina repealed its sterilization law in 2003. The history of forced sterilization in the United States began with a eugenics based demand to wipe out populations that were constructed as inferior. The evolution of who was sterilized shifted in accordance to changing national social perception of who was ‘unfit’ to reproduce, from the developmentally disabled to ‘immoral’ and ‘irresponsible’ women. North Carolina has also taken unprecedented steps towards providing reparations for the living victims of the statute. The history, current sentiments, and unique components of compulsory sterilization in North Carolina help to illustrate why the government has taken such proactive steps in offering restitution while others have not. What happened in North Carolina and throughout the eugenics movement in the United States are poignant examples of the power of social constructions. Social constructions allows those with power, in this case the state, to enforce them, using policy and other mechanisms, to divide up members of society. With this power to divide groups of people comes the ability to use this constructed sense of otherness as a means to control and mistreat these populations.

This thesis problematizes early cyberfeminist claims that heralded the Internet as a liberating space for women. Cyberfeminism emerged in the early 1990s, at the dawn of the “Internet Age,” and is heavily influenced by Donna Haraway’s 1985 “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Haraway theorized a new way of looking at the nature of female identity, using the figure of the cyborg found in science fiction literature and films. Traditionally, women have been explained in terms of sexual difference and have been forced to uphold a gender binary that privileges men. By contrast, Haraway argues that the cyborg, a hybrid of human and machine, escapes binary logic, thereby resisting categories and hierarchies, and embraces a more fluid understanding of identity. This model contains powerful ramifications for women. Every day, we become more like Haraway’s cyborgs as our physical bodies become increasingly intertwined with modern technologies, specifically in our ever-growing relationship with the Internet. In online interactions, users are no longer confined to their physical bodies and are free to play with identity. Early cyberfeminists believe that this leads to a more fluid understanding of identity and, more importantly, allows for the deconstruction of gender. These claims, however, do not apply in practice as well as they do in theory. From the anonymous text-based spaces that early cyberfeminists describe to social networking sites like Facebook, Internet spaces tend to polarize the gender binary rather than blur it, and women are now colonized on a new front. This becomes increasingly dangerous as the boundaries between our virtual and real lives continue to blur.

This thesis explores the way popular culture imitates and reinforces a sentimentalized reading of sonogram images that has been established by the conservative Right as the proper way to view this image. It analyzes several popular culture texts to expose the way their use of sonogram images personifies the fetus. It aims to problematize the way this image has become a symbol of fetal personhood and initiate a discussion about our roles as consumers of popular culture and images. Finally, it connects the use of this image to recent legislation surrounding mandatory ultrasounds and personhood initiatives, and argues that the public’s acceptance of fetal personhood is dangerous for women’s personhood and citizenship.

Since the late 1950s, Russian-American novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand has been “the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right.” Her philosophy – “Objectivism” – combined militant atheism, libertarian natural rights, and a philosophical commitment to what she called “the virtue of selfishness,” and earned her the admiration of such luminaries as Alan Greenspan: a remarkable achievement for an immigrant woman who learned to speak English in her late 20s. What is less-often observed is that Rand’s work, especially her mature novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), bear a close stylistic resemblance to the Soviet Socialist Realist novel. This thesis identifies these similarities and attempts to answer the question of why a heavily Soviet-inflected writer was able to reach such cultural and political prominence in, of all places, America.

This thesis examines the evolution of feminist praxis within the riot grrrl movement, focusing on two specific riot grrrl demographics - founding riot grrrls in the early 1990s and currently active riot grrrls in southern California. This thesis argues that riot grrrl activism is still thriving but in diverse, strategically modified ways. Using José Muñoz’s concept of “disidentification,” it analyzes how contemporary riot grrrls have appropriated and adapted the original movement’s tenets to allow for greater accessibility and diversity.

This study examines the coverage of women's athletics at USF provided through photographic representations on the university's Athletics Internet home web page during the 2009-2010 academic year. Findings revealed that, consistent with recent research on coverage of female athletes and women's athletics on university web pages, women, compared to men, were underrepresented in the majority of the five areas of the home page analyzed. Studies such as this can be beneficial because, if gender coverage inequities are brought to the attention of university administrators and Athletics personnel, actions could be take to reduce the inequities, thereby setting the tone for how we see and think about female athletes.

This dissertation examines narratives about female bullying and aggression through mediated images of "mean girls." Through textual analysis of popular media featuring mean girls (television shows such as Gossip Girl and films like Mean Girls), as well as national news coverage of the case of Phoebe Prince, who reportedly committed suicide after being bullied by girls from her school, this feminist examination questions how the image of the mean girl is raced and classed. This dissertation values an interdisciplinary approach to research that works to make sense of the forces that produce bodies as gendered, raced, and classed. One of the central concerns of this project is explore images of mean girls in order to highlight the ideas that construct female aggression as deviant. In popular culture, the mean girl is constructed as a popular girl who protects and cultivates the power associated with her elite status in duplicitous and cruel ways. Specifically, mean girls are framed as using indirect aggression, which is defined as a form of social manipulation. This covert form of aggression, also referred to as "relational" or "social" aggression, includes a series of actions aimed at destroying other girls' relationships, causing their victims to feel marginalized. The bullying tactics associated with indirect aggression include gossiping, social exclusion, stealing friends, not talking to someone, and threatening to withdraw friendship. The leader of the clique is the Queen Bee who is able to use boundary maintenance to exclude other girls from her friendship groups. In media texts, while the Queen Bee is always White, the Mean Girl discourse does not ignore girls of color. Instead, girls of color are acknowledged as having the potential to be mean, but, more often, they are shown to exemplify the characteristics of normative White femininity (they are nice and prioritize heterosexual relationships) and to escape the lure of popularity. Indeed, whereas media texts continually center Whiteness as a necessary component of the mean girl image, nice girls are constructed as White, Latina, and Black. The constructions of the girls of color often rely on stereotyped behaviors (i.e., Black girls' direct talk and Latina girls' commitment to nuclear family structures); at the same time, these essentialized characteristics are revered and incorporated into the nice girl tropes. The Queen Bee is always upper-class, while the Wannabe (the girl who desires to be in the clique) is middle-class. When attempting to usurp the Queen Bee's power, the Wannabe breaks with normative cultural versions of White, middle-class passive femininity in ways that are framed as problematic. Although the Wannabe rises above her class, in so doing, she also transcends her "authentic" goodness. As a result, middle-classness is recentered and ascribed as part of the nice girl's authentic image. The Mean Girl discourse defines girls' success on a continuum. A popular girl stays at the top of the social hierarchy by being mean. The nice girl finds individual success by removing herself from elite social circles. As a result, privilege is not defined inherently as the problem, but girls' excessive abuse and access to privilege is.

The purpose of this study is to expose the strategies through which extreme sports constitute gender through exaggeration, parody, queering, resistance, and transcendence of normative gendered binaries. I interrogate how extreme sports operate on the margins of sport, gender, media, and lived experience to better understand the processes and performances that retain, reinforce, and resist our notions of normative gender, bodies, and sexuality. Starting with the claim that performance is constitutive of gender and culture, I will focus on how extreme sporting performances create significant commentaries on mainstream assumptions surrounding sporting gender, sexuality, and corporeality. These commentaries function in extreme sports' spaces: to critique how extreme sports reclaim oppressive language of gendered binaries; to give voice to sexual silences in performances that lampoon, retrofit, and transcend those assumptions; and, for athletes to reclaim corporeality through strategies of parody, resistance, and elision. Taking up the transcendent possibilities for gender, body, and sexuality in extreme sports, I suggest that these are also places to reimagine a phallocentric combat myth, revisit issues of class and performance, and speak of the invisibility of racial difference. Using critical analysis, interviews, and personal narrative, I explore performances of gender, sexuality, and the body in mediated and live extreme events beginning with the revival of the roller derby phenomenon exemplified in the 2007 documentary Hell on Wheels, the 2006 A&E series Rollergirls, and the multiple websites, leagues, and fictional representations such as 2009's Whip It. I then turn to MTV's pranktainment playground of Jackass, Viva la Bam and Nitro Circus as well as the traveling motocross spectacle Nuclear Cowboyz. Finally, I attend to the extreme bodies of ultradistance running through multiple texts and conversations with runners as well as my own participation in the 2011 Keys100 in the Florida Keys. My study will not repeat the many questions, critiques, or concerns of foundational or traditional scholarship on sports, media, or risk. Instead, I focus on several key issues across the chapters: how sport is housed as always already a masculine realm, how mainstream and extreme sports do gender corporeally, and the ways extreme sports challenge our mainstream notions of sexualities.

Abstract Objectification most literally refers to perceiving a person as an object. Research shows that when people focus on a woman's appearance, compared to her personality, she is perceived of as more of an object (e.g., lower in human nature traits). These objectification effects, however, rarely occur for male targets. Moreover, humans, unlike objects, are typically believed to have a soul, that is, some part of the self that outlasts the death of the physical body and extends into a post-mortem existence (e.g., Heaven). In turn, I hypothesized that women, but not men, would be perceived as having less soul when focus is on their physical appearance, and that this will be mediated by human nature traits. Partially supporting these hypotheses, in Study 1, males and females were perceived as having (marginally) less of a soul when focus was on their appearance; however, there was no effect of appearance focus on human nature ratings for male or female targets. In Study 2, using a different manipulation of appearance focus and measure of soul ratings, the same findings emerged. In Study 3, focusing on a woman's appearance elicited heightened psychological need for structure and worldview defense when evidence was provided that she had a soul, compared to when evidence was provided that she did not have a soul. This indicates that a woman having a soul is less coherent and meaningful than a woman not having soul when focus is on her appearance. The discussion centers on possible mechanisms for these findings, as well as why the effects were found for male in addition to female targets. Limitations, future directions, and implications are also addressed.