This thesis addresses the lack of scholarly attention devoted to African American Sunni women by examining how they use collective memory to negotiate embodied agency. Through an analysis of African American Sunni women’s narratives of testifying conversion, and vignettes from diaries and interviews, I show how African American Sunni women utilize racial, religious, and spiritual memory in the form of ritual practices and Islamic texts to multiply construct their bodies, and how this construction allows them to enact multimodal and nomadic forms of agency. A contextual analysis also illustrates how environment and interpretation (tafsir) further mobilizes forms of agency, articulating a need for flexibility in regard to the concept of embodied agency and challenging the dichotomy prevalent in Western and Eurocentric conceptions of liberatory agency.

All studies to date that have assessed the direct impact of benevolent vs. hostile sexism on performance outcomes have done so in the context of a Western society. Because of this void in the literature, it remained unknown how living in a low egalitarian and/or non-Western society may impact women's experiences of sexism. The purpose of this study is to address this gap in the literature. This study investigates the impact of benevolent vs. hostile sexism on women in four Turkish textile factories. 210 Turkish female textile factory workers were randomly assigned to the benevolent sexism, hostile sexism, or control condition. Performance and level of gender identification were measured. The results of this study indicated that while participants were impacted by sexism, the impact of benevolent vs. hostile sexism resulted in different outcomes than for women in higher egalitarian Western Societies.

"Cold War Playboys: Models of Masculinity in the Literature of Playboy" emphasizes the literary voices that emerged in response to the Cold War's redefinitions of space and sexuality and, thus, adds to the growing national discourse of Cold War literary and masculinity studies. I argue that the literature Playboy includes has always been a necessary feature to creating its masculinity model; however, that very literature often destabilizes the magazine's grand narrative because it presents readers with alternative models of masculinity. To make that argument, I presume five things: 1) masculinity, like femininity, is a construct; 2) the mid-century masculinity crisis should be attributed to redefinitions of space and sexuality; 3) the crisis generated a variety of masculinity models; 4) Playboy presents its own, unified model of masculinity through its editorial features; and 5) finally, that Playboy should be considered an early Cold War artifact because the space Playboy magazine represents, dually domestic and privatized, is hardly trivial--decade after decade, it has absorbed society's shifts and reflected them back to readers. Citing biographical, historical, critical, and textual evidence, I consider how the literature of Playboy magazine responds to the construction of Cold War discourses regarding sexuality and space. In particular, I examine how Playboy contributions from Jack Kerouac, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Baldwin detail models of masculinity informed by Cold War culture. Playboy's emphasis was obviously Playmates, but fiction always appeared in its pages. As its largest component, fiction became the backbone of Playboy. Therefore, Hefner's educated, sexual male identity included, and still includes, reading a wide array of literature--from Ian Fleming to Ursula le Guin. "Cold War Playboys" asks: How did literature gain primacy in Hefner's ideal male identity? What purposes does reading this literature serve when appealing to a particular masculinity? Answering these questions allows me to explore how one mass-produced magazine and specific literary figures participated in and resisted the construction of Cold War discourses regarding space and sexuality.

The overarching goal of this research is to explicate the implications of hip hop artists sampling Nina Simone's music in their work. By regarding Simone as a critical social theorist in her own right, one can hear the ways that hip hop artists are mobilizing her tradition of socially active self-definition from the Civil Rights/Black Power era(s) in the post-2000 United States. By examining both the lyrics and the instrumental compositions of Lil Wayne, Juelz Santana, Common, Tony Moon, Talib Kweli, Mary J. Blige and Will.I.Am, G-Unit and Timbaland, and bearing in mind the intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, and sexuality, this study concludes that the way that these artists employ Simone's recorded voice in their works oftentimes corresponds to the degree to which they retain her figurative message. While many would assume that these tendencies would correspond with the subgenres of "mainstream" and "conscious" hip hop, in fact the fluidity and complexity of these artists' positions in subgenre refutes this essentialist notion. By engaging in an intersectional analysis of the political and personal implications of hip hop sampling, this essay provides a critical interpretation of the ways the cultural products of the "Civil Rights era" still operate in contemporary U.S. society. These operations are integral to the human rights struggle in which we are all still very much engaged.

Women comprise over 57% of all U.S. mortuary school students, yet less than 20% of all funeral directors employed in this country are women. As such, women are underrepresented as funeral directors in the funeral industry. Research to date has not established clear differences between perceived gender roles and occupations in the funeral service industry. The research questions examined the perceived differences of gender role characteristics of masculine, feminine, and androgyny between the occupations of funeral service providers and nursing. Bem's gender role theory was the theoretical framework of this study. The research compared the mean scores of male and female funeral service professionals and nursing professionals as measured by the validated Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI). A sample consisted of 214 randomly selected male (n = 88) and female (n = 25) funeral service professionals and male (n = 37) and female (n = 64) nurse professionals. Data scores were analyzed using the factorial multivariate analysis of variance method. Results indicated nonsignificant gender role differences between male and female funeral directors. Funeral directors appear more androgynous compared to nurses. The present study contributed to the development of this important and neglected area of research by quantitatively examining the gender role perceptions of men and women in the funeral service industry for the first time. This study results highlighted the complexity in self-perceived gender role characteristics as measured by BSRI. When the funeral profession begins to dispel gender stereotypes and discrimination issues, positive social change can occur.

Bong Joon-ho‟s monster movie blockbuster, The Host (Gweomul, 2006), is the most commercially successful film in South Korean cinema history. The film‟s popularity and significance derive from its unearthing of the ambivalence concerning South Korea‟s rapid transformation from a rural dictatorship to an urban democracy with one of the strongest economies on the planet. This ambivalence is buried beneath a veneer of "progress" blanketing contemporary South Korea and constitutes a condition I call inverted exile. The Host explicitly engages life in inverted exile through my notion of aesthetic dialogue. Aesthetic dialogue, takes influence from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and allows for proliferation of meaning beyond authorial intent by focusing on The Host‟s context. My approach focuses on genre, narrative, and style to flesh out the political, historical, and social ambivalences behind any given moment of The Host to put them in dialogue with one another. The project progresses through sites of cultural dialogue central to the film and/or life in inverted exile: the monster, the city, the home. I approach each site through the genres associated with them and gender roles each of them assume in inverted exile. South Korea‟s transformation and its relationship with the United States are causes of anxiety (e.g. loss of traditional values, overwhelming Western influence) and desire (political freedom, economic opportunity). Ultimately, I argue, The Host suggests that South Korea and its citizens need to embrace the ambivalences of inverted exile and actively shape an identity that takes an active and critical attitude towards Western influence. Such an attitude can better preserve the desirable aspects of traditional culture (e.g. traditional food, familial unity) and alleviate the anxieties caused by Western influence (e.g. rampant consumerism, unjust class divisions). The Host‟s dialogic form is integral to its shaping of Korean identity as it takes from multiple cultural sources (i.e. Hollywood and Korean history) without challenging their polarization.

My dissertation explores the narrative of Aurora Bertrana (1892-1974), an unknown writer today, but a successful and recognized female author in Catalonia and Spain during the mid 20th century. The written work of Aurora Bertrana is almost never mentioned in manuals of literature. Relegated almost to absolute oblivion, her rich, intellectual writting has not received the attention it deserves. I have studied seventeen of Bertrana’s novels –practically her entire oeuvre– written in Catalan and Spanish, including the following excellent books that have escaped critical attention: Ariatea (1960), “El pomell de les violes” (mn.), L’inefable Philip (mn.), La aldea sin hombres (mn.), La madrecita de los cerdos (mn.), Entre dos silencis (1958), La ninfa d’argila (1959), Fracàs (1966) and La ciutat dels joves: reportatge fantasia (1971). I have analyzed her writing, published and unpublished, from a feminist approach, taking into account the intellectual history of Spain and Catalonia. Bertrana’s strong commitment to controversial, social issues reveals her association with the modern and noucentists Catalan trends of her time. Her novels also reveal a unique interest in Europe at war and in non-Western cultures and lifestyles that draws attention to the situation of women in different circumstances and cultural geographies. My research is therefore anchored on interpretive and theoretical parameters that intersect, with a consideration of gender, such as class-and-gender, war-and-gender and travel-and-gender. I have used the work of feminists such as Simone De Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone, Jelke Boesten, Margaret and Patrice Higonnet, Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, and Julia Kristeva to help assess Bertrana’s engagement with gender and socio-political issues. This approach is particularly well suited for a writer like Aurora Bertrana, a Catalan and Republican intellectual woman forced into exiled during the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.

When writing about Junot Díaz’s Drown (1996) Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) and This is How You Lose Her (2012), I focus on the iterations of masculinity depicted and embodied by Yunior de las Casas, the primary narrator of this collection. I explore the links between diaspora, hybridity, masculinity, and trauma, arguing that both socio-historical and personal traumatic experience reverberates through the psyches and bodies of Díaz’s characters. I demonstrate the relationship between Yunior’s navigation of the United States and the Dominican Republic and his ever-shifting sexuality, self-presentation, and gender identity. The physical and discursive spaces he must traverse contain multiple, contradictory narratives about how to be a man; within Díaz’s collection, we witness Yunior’s coming-to-terms with the way that these stories of masculinity are rendered dysfunctional and incoherent. Accordingly, Yunior uses the hegemonic discourses of masculinity as a way to cloak his own queer difference, ambivalently interacting and identifying with characters marked as Other. In this analysis, I read Yunior’s masculinity as reactionary to the expectations of Domincan society, and also explore how he shaped by migration, trauma, and unspeakable queer desire.

Using data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor and the World Bank, I examine the effect of the Great Recession on total early-stage entrepreneurship rates in nineteen European countries relative to the United States, as well as on male and female entrepreneurship independently. I find that the Great Recession has led to increased entrepreneurship rates overall and that there is little variation across European countries relative to the United States. Further, I find that female entrepreneurship rates increased more than male entrepreneurship rates following the Great Recession. This suggests that women have not only experienced greater job recovery overall after the recession, but that they have also turned more towards self-employment relative to their male counterparts.

This paper analyzes how female leaders affect the attitudes towards women in Nicaragua and Brazil. It discusses general and specific literature on the historical and current situations in each country. It analyzes the effects colonialism, culture, religion, traditions and the law have on the perceptions of women. The paper further analyzes and measures how past and current female leaders like President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro and President Dilma Rouseff affect people’s views towards women. The rates of violence against woman and domestic abuse in Nicaragua and Brazil are analyzed and compared to Latin America and the world. This paper argues that women in positions of leadership lead to changes in the general attitudes towards women, but it is not clear if women leaders decrease the rates of violence against women.