Many studies have been conducted on the achievement gap between Caucasian and minority students (Bankston & Caldas, 1998; A. Brown & Donnor, 2011; Howard, 2008; O’Conner, Lewis, & Mueller, 2007; Osborne, 1999), as this gap has been a persistent problem for decades. However, despite more students of color gaining access to institutions of higher education, there is still a severe gap in college graduation rates (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2011), with African American males being the least likely group to be found on college campuses (Dunn, 2012), and thus, possessing the lowest college graduation rate. St. Peter Claver Academy (pseudonym) is a Catholic, male high school located in an inner city, low-income community in the western United States. The demographic composition of the school is 65% Latino and 35% African American. Despite the fact that 100% of seniors are accepted into a college or university, the graduates of St. Peter Claver Academy have very poor college graduation rates. This qualitative study investigated the narratives of seven African- American graduates of the school in order to understand their college experiences, looking closely at attrition, retention, resilience, and persistence. Through the lens of critical bicultural theory, the voices of these former students are central to this study in an effort to seek common threads about their experiences, which can provide educators useful insight on how to improve the college graduation rate for this underrepresented student population group.

<p>This dissertation examines contemporary cultural representations of rurality in southern Ontario. It demonstrates how literary and cultural texts construct, support and/or expand our understandings of the social composition and character of rural culture. Examining various literary forms (drama, life narrative, and the novel), music, and photography, my research and analysis responds to Chris Philo’s pivotal call in the field of rural geography “to pay more careful attention to ‘the multiple forms of otherness’ present in . . . rural areas” (“Neglected” 199) and to foreground what he identifies as “neglected rural geographies.” I argue that dominant literary and cultural representations of rural southern Ontario overwhelmingly mobilize and rarely contest white heteromasculinist rural discourses that support rural cultures of sameness and exclusion. As a means of exposing the motivations for and deleterious effects of these discourses, I draw attention to alternative representations of the region’s rural social geography that expand the imaginative scope circumscribed by hegemonic conceptualizations of what it means to be rural in southern Ontario. As such, my project responds to Philo’s call in three ways: first, it repositions southern Ontario as a rural locale of critical relevance; second, it addresses a gap in Canadian literary and cultural studies by taking up new and evolving approaches in rural studies, with respect to rural “others,” being developed in disciplines like geography, sociology, history and political science; third, it intervenes in dominant socio-spatial discourses currently circulating in Canadian literary and cultural studies that eagerly address issues of gender, sexuality, race and class in Canada’s urban environments while too often neglecting how they intersect with discourses of rurality.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

In “The Contest of Marriage: Domestic Authority in Victorian Literature”, I argue that depictions of engaged and newlywed couples in the Victorian novel consistently dismantle the concept of marriage, depicting the process of two individuals attempting to become one couple as a tenuous and even dangerous project to be undertaken during the nineteenth century. By looking at works where the decision to marry comes at the beginning of the novel rather than the conclusion, I examine the ways in which different novelists document and anatomize the consistent failures in the theoretical underpinnings of domesticity and conjugality. Given that gender, separate spheres and even the family unit have been increasingly viewed as unstable divisions and demarcations by prominent voices within nineteenth-century criticism, I argue that certain novelists were consistently engaged in exposing these insufficiencies in not only the establishment of marriage as a concept, but in the home space itself as a hypothetical location of domestic stability and success. This project will contribute to scholarship in the field not only by tracing the similar patterns and structures of seemingly disparate novels, but also by suggesting that the domestic instability discussed in groundbreaking accounts of Victorian gender ideology is not merely a feature of historical and personal accounts of the era, but is in fact a tension running through much of the period’s most popular and widely read literature as well. In recent years, Victorian critics have collectively worked to demonstrate that separate spheres ideology is no longer a sufficient interpretive tool to employ in our attempts to excavate the nineteenth century's construction of marriage and conjugality. Just as John Tosh has argued for the husband's place within the home and Mary Poovey and Elizabeth Langland have argued for the woman's place beyond it, so too does my work demonstrate that more complex systems of gender and power relationships were functioning within even a "typical" Victorian home. Studies of domesticity have typically focused on either those citizens who embraced its precepts or the rebels who rejected them. In my work, I turn instead to characters whose earnest attempts to embody and enjoy domestic perfection are continually thwarted, proving that many writers consistently locate the trouble with domesticity not in the flaws of specific married couples, but in the implicitly universal claims domesticity makes on all married couples. I argue that in many novels of the period, even marriage enthusiasts are often transformed into its bitterest critics, due to its demands for performance and self-erasure of both spouses. Furthermore, even the seemingly neutral space of the idyllic Victorian home is often shown to be destructive to domesticity's goals, rather than lending structural support to the matrimonial endeavor. I conclude that these authors are suggesting that even marriage's harshest critics can never manage to be as persuasive about the relationship's pitfalls, hazards, and breakdowns as the actual experience of getting married inevitably proves to be.

Representations of Chicana bodies in dominant popular culture have historically been contested by Chicana feminists’ own self-representations through art and literature. However, few works examine representations of fat Chicana bodies in literature by Chicana feminists. Through a literary analysis of The Panza Monologues and Real Women Have Curves, as well as an artistic analysis of Laura Aguilar’s photography and through the lenses of Chicanx, queer, and fat studies, my research bridges a gap between Chicana feminist work and fat studies. It looks at how fatness is constructed through the self-representation of women’s bodies. Ultimately, I argue that these art objects are sites of fat Chicana artivism—activism through the use of art—that call for body liberation, respond to the “normative body” required by a colonial legacy of symbolic and physical violence against Chicanx women, and pave the way for further creative artistic and literary work centered on fat Chicanxs to be done.

This thesis explores the themes of Pride and Prejudice in two texts written roughly two hundred years apart. The first work that is analyzed is Elle et Lui by George Sand, published in the year 1859 . The second book that is explored throughout this dissertation is Merci pour ce moment: a best seller penned in 2014 by the ex french Première Dame Valérie Trierweiler. In particular, this thesis takes a closer look at these womens' use of a biography as a means to redeem their image as perceived by the public.

In this thesis, I trace my personal journey and the precursors of unlearning and conversation necessary to start to move towards anti-racism. With a focused look on specific aspects of feminist history, Scripps College as a place was historically contextualized. This allowed for an exploration of its student body, a look at the ways in which traditional gender meanings and expectations necessarily operate within that space. White students who claim the label feminist add complexity to that space, though their reactions to conversations of race can be traced back to the historic and gender over-determined systems of domination and victimhood that produce caustic white feminist tears. Finally, different ways of having difficult conversations are discussed, along with detailed understandings of why those conversations are necessary. In conclusion, I try to envision a kind of feminism that I would like myself and my peers to continue to work for, and emphasize again the sort of education that one must undergo in order to continue their awareness and work.

I focus on the changing and now contemporary feminist conceptualization of romance fiction. Through the genre’s mass-market success and complicated history, a definition of ro·mance (genre) is conjured. By depicting a fantasy world for the female reader to escape to, feminist critics and romance academics have found the genre’s influence to be an effective one. In an analysis if popular romance fiction author, Emily Giffin, and her most recent novel The One & Only, I demonstrate what has now resulted in the modern romance and further, how the modern heroine is understood today.

Body image, the subjective view about one’s own body and how others perceive it, has been shown to have numerous impacts on women in multiple facets of their lives, including sexual experiences. This study seeks to examine the specific impact that body image has on women using sexual relationships for self-validation. Findings suggest that the more likely a woman is to perceive herself as overweight, the higher the chance that she seeks out sex in order to validate her feelings with regards to her body. Parental involvement and comments about the participant’s body were also shown with the woman seeking out sex for self-validation. Body image can have numerous impacts on the sexual health of women, as well as on their overall mental health and view of healthy relationships.

Through the lens of the horror film and the fairy tale, this thesis explores the notion of the grotesque as a boundary phenomenon—a negotiation of what is self and what is other. As such, it locates the function that the monstrous and the grotesque have in the formation of a personal and social identity. In asking why we take pleasure in the perverse, I explore how permutations of guilt, victimhood, and desire can be actively rewritten, in order to construct a stable sense of self.

Fan studies has examined how fan fiction resists heteronormativity by challenging depictions of gender and sexuality, but to date, this inquiry has focused disproportionately on slash, to the exclusion of other genres of fan fiction. Additionally, scholars disagree about slash’s subversive effects by setting up a seemingly stable dichotomy—subversive vs. misogynistic—where one does not necessarily exist. In this project, I examine multiple genres of fan fiction—namely, slash arising from bromances; femslash from female friendships; incestuous fan fiction from dysfunctional familial relationships; and polyamorous fics. I chose fics from four televisions shows—NBC’s Revolution, MTV’s Teen Wolf, the CW’s The Vampire Diaries, and its spin-off, The Originals—and closely read them to identify patterns in their representations of gender and sexuality and how they connect to the source texts. Taking a dialogic “both/and” approach, I argue that critics claiming that slash is often not subversive are right to a point, but miss a key potential of fan fiction: its ability to evoke possibility—for new endings, relationships, and sexualities. Heteronormativity often asserts itself in endings; queerness plays in the middles and margins. So, too, does fan fiction. While some individual fics may reinforce elements of heteronormativity, many also actively question and transgress norms of gender, sexuality and love. Further, they embrace fluidity and possibility, and engage with the source texts and larger culture around them in a way that provides a subversive interpretation of both and offers insight into the function of the constructed nature of institutionalized heterosexuality.