More than 2.6 million troops have deployed in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, surveys reveal that more than half feel “disconnected” from their civilian counterparts, and this feeling persists despite ongoing efforts, in the academy and elsewhere, to help returning veterans overcome physical and mental wounds, seek an education, and find meaningful ways to contribute to society after taking off the uniform. This dissertation argues that Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans struggle with reassimilation because they lack healthy, complete models of veteran identity to draw upon in their postwar lives, a problem they’re working through collectively in literature and artwork. The war veteran—returning home transformed by the harsh realities of military training and service, having seen humanity at its extremes, and interacting with a society apathetic toward his or her experiences—should engage in the act of storytelling. This act of sharing experiences and crafting-self subverts stereotypes. Storytelling, whether in a book read by millions, or in a single conversation with a close family member, should instruct civilians on the topic of human resiliency; it should instruct veterans on the topic of homecoming. But typically, veterans do not tell stories. Civilians create barriers to storytelling in the form of hollow platitudes—“thank you for your service” or “I can never understand what you’ve been through”—disconnected from the meaning of wartime service itself. The dissonance between veteran and civilian only becomes more complicated when one considers the implicit demands and expectations attached to patriotism. These often well-intentioned gestures and government programs fail to convey a message of appreciation because they refuse to convey a message of acceptance; the exceptional treatment of veterans by larger society implies also that they are insufficient, broken, or incomplete. So, many veterans chose conformity and silence, adopting one of two identities available to them: the forever pitied “Wounded Warrior” or the superficially praised “Hero.” These identities are not complete. They’re not even identities as much as they are collections of rumors, misrepresentations, and expectations of conformity. Once an individual veteran begins unconsciously performing the “Wounded Warrior” or “Hero” character, the number of potential outcomes available in that individual’s life is severely diminished. Society reinforces a feeling among veterans that they are “different.” This shared experience has resulted in commiseration, camaraderie, and also the proliferation of veterans’ creative communities. As storytellers, the members of these communities are restoring meaning to veteran-civilian discourse by privileging the nuanced experiences of the individual over stereotypes and emotionless rhetoric. They are instructing on the topics of war and homecoming, producing fictional and nonfictional representations of the veteran capable of competing with stereotypes, capable of reassimilation. The Introduction establishes the existence of veteran culture, deconstructs notions of there being a single or binary set of veteran identities, and critiques the social and cultural rhetoric used to maintain symbolic boundaries between veterans and civilians. It begins by establishing an approach rooted in interdisciplinary literary theory, taking veteran identity as its topic of consideration and the American unconscious as the text it seeks to examine, asking readers to suspend belief in patriotic rhetoric long enough to critically examine veteran identity as an apparatus used to sell war to each generation of new recruits. Patriotism, beyond the well-meaning gestures and entitlements afforded to veterans, also results in feelings of “difference,” in the veteran feeling apart from larger society. The inescapability of veteran “difference” is a trait which sets it apart from other cultures, and it is one bolstered by inaccurate and, at times, offensive portrayals of veterans in mass media and Hollywood films such as The Manchurian Candidate (1962), First Blood (1982), or Taxi Driver (1976). To understand this inescapability the chapter engages with theories of race, discussing the Korean War veteran in Home (2012) and other works by Toni Morrison to directly and indirectly explore descriptions of “difference” by African Americans and “others” not in positions of power. From there, the chapter traces veteran identity back to the Italian renaissance, arguing that modern notions of veteran identity are founded upon fears of returning veterans causing chaos and disorder. At the same time, writers such as Sebastian Junger, who are intimately familiar with veteran culture, repeatedly emphasize the camaraderie and “tribal” bonds found among members of the military, and instead of creating symbolic categories in which veterans might exist exceptionally as “Heroes,” or pitied as “Wounded Warriors,” the chapter argues that the altruistic nature which leads recruits to war, their capabilities as leaders and educators, and the need of larger society for examples of human resiliency are more appropriate starting points for establishing veteran identity. The Introduction is followed by an independent “Example” section, a brief examination of a student veteran named “Bingo,” one who demonstrates an ability to challenge, even employ veteran stereotypes to maintain his right to self-definition. Bingo’s story, as told in a “spotlight” article meant to attract student veterans to a college campus, portrays the veteran as a “Wounded Warrior” who overcomes mental illness and the scars of war through education, emerging as an exceptional example—a “Hero”—that other student veterans can model by enrolling at the school. Bingo’s story sets the stage for close examinations of the “Hero” and the “Wounded Warrior” in the first and second chapters. Chapter One deconstructs notions of heroism, primarily the belief that all veterans are “Heroes.” The chapter examines military training and indoctrination, Medal of Honor award citations, and film examples such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Heroes for Sale (1933), Sergeant York (1941), and Top Gun (1986) to distinguish between actual feats of heroism and “Heroes” as they are presented in patriotic rhetoric. The chapter provides the Medal of Honor citations attached to awards presented to Donald Cook, Dakota Meyer, and Kyle Carpenter, examining the postwar lives of Meyer and Carpenter, identifying attempts by media and government officials to appropriate heroism—to steal the right to self-definition possessed by these men. Among these Medal of Honor recipients one finds two types of heroism: Sacrificing Heroes give something of themselves to protect others; Attacking Heroes make a difference during battle offensively. Enduring Heroes, the third type of heroism discussed in the chapter, are a new construct. Colloquially, and for all intents and purposes, an Enduring Hero is simply a veteran who enjoys praise and few questions. Importantly, veterans enjoy the “Hero Treatment” in exchange for silence and conforming to larger narratives which obfuscate past wars and pave the way for new ones. This chapter engages with theorists of gender—such as Jack Judith Halberstam, whose Female Masculinities (1998) anticipates the agency increasingly available to women through military service; like Leo Braudy, whose From Chivalry to Terrorism (2003) traces the historical relationship between war and gender before commenting on the evolution of military masculinity—to discuss the relationship between heroism and agency, begging a question: What do veterans have to lose from the perpetuation of stereotypes? This question frames a detailed examination of William A. Wellman’s film, Heroes for Sale (1933), in the chapter’s final section. This story of stolen valor and the Great Depression depicts the homecoming of a WWI veteran separated from his heroism. The example, when combined with a deeper understanding of the intersection between veteran identity and gender, illustrates not only the impact of stolen valor in the life of a legitimate hero, but it also comments on the destructive nature of appropriation, revealing the ways in which a veteran stereotypes rob service men and women of the right to draw upon memories of military service which complete with those stereotypes. The military “Hero” occupies a moral high ground, but most conceptions of military “Heroes” are socially constructed advertisements for war. Real heroes are much rarer. And, as the Medal of Honor recipients discussed in the chapter reveal, they, too, struggle with lifelong disabilities as well as constant attempts by society to appropriate their narratives. Chapter Two traces the evolution of the modern “Wounded Warrior” from depictions of cowardice in Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895), to the denigration of World War I veterans afflicted with Shell Shock, to Kevin Powers’s Iraq War novel, The Yellow Birds (2012). As with “Heroes,” “Wounded Warriors” perform a stereotype in place of an authentic, individualized identity, and the chapter uses Walt Kowalski, the protagonist of Clint Eastwood’s film, Gran Torino (2008), as its major example. The chapter discusses “therapeutic culture,” Judith Butler’s work on identity-formation, and Eva Illouz’s examination of a culture obsessed with trauma to comment on veteran performances of victimhood. Butler’s attempts to conceive of new identities absent the influence of systems of definition rooted in the state, in particular, reveal power in the opposite of silence, begging another question: What do civilians have to gain from the perpetuation of veteran stereotypes? Largely, the chapter finds, the “Wounded Warrior” persists in the minds of civilians who fear the veteran’s capacity for violence. A broken, damaged veteran is less of a threat. The story of the “Wounded Warrior” is not one of sacrifice. The “Wounded Warrior” exists after sacrifice, beyond any measure of “honor” achieved in uniform. “Wounded Warriors” are not expected to find a cure because the wound itself is an apparatus of the state that is commodified and injected into the currency of emotional capitalism. This chapter argues that military service and a damaged psyche need not always occur together. Following the second chapter, a close examination of “The Bear That Stands,” a short story by Suzanne S. Rancourt which confronts the author’s sexual assault while serving in the Marines, offers an alternative to both the “Hero” and the “Wounded Warrior” stereotypes. Rancourt, a veteran “Storyteller,” gives testimony of that crime, intervening in social conceptions of veteran identity to include a female perspective. As with the example of Bingo, the author demonstrates an innate ability to recognize and challenge the stereotypes discussed in the first and second chapters. This “Example” sets the stage for a more detailed examination of “Veteran Storytellers” and their communities in the final chapter. Chapter Three looks for examples of veteran “difference,” patriotism, the “Wounded Warrior,” and the “Hero” in nonfiction, fiction, and artwork emerging from the creative arts community, Military Experience and the Arts, an organization which provides workshops, writing consultation, and publishing venues to veterans and their families. The chapter examines veteran “difference” in a short story by Bradley Johnson, “My Life as a Soldier in the ‘War on Terror.’” In “Cold Day in Bridgewater,” a work of short fiction by Jerad W. Alexander, a veteran must confront the inescapability of that difference as well as expectations of conformity from his bigoted, civilian bartender. The final section analyzes artwork by Tif Holmes and Giuseppe Pellicano, which deal with the problems of military sexual assault and the effects of war on the family, respectively. Together, Johnson, Alexander, Holmes, and Pellicano demonstrate skills in recognizing stereotypes, crafting postwar identities, and producing alternative representations of veteran identity which other veterans can then draw upon in their own homecomings. Presently, no unified theory of veteran identity exists. This dissertation begins that discussion, treating individual performances of veteran identity, existing historical, sociological, and psychological scholarship about veterans, and cultural representations of the wars they fight as equal parts of a single text. Further, it invites future considerations of veteran identity which build upon, challenge, or refute its claims. Conversations about veteran identity are the opposite of silence; they force awareness of war’s uncomfortable truths and homecoming’s eventual triumphs. Complicating veteran identity subverts conformity; it provides a steady stream of traits, qualities, and motivations that veterans use to craft postwar selves. The serious considerations of war and homecoming presented in this text will be useful for Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans attempting to piece together postwar identities; they will be useful to scholars hoping to facilitate homecoming for future generations of war veterans. Finally, the Afterword to the dissertation proposes a program for reassimilation capable of harnessing the veteran’s symbolic and moral authority in such a way that self-definition and homecoming might become two parts of a single act.

Looking primarily at two critically acclaimed texts that concern themselves with American citizenship—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Stephanie Powell Watts’ No One is Coming to Save Us—I analyze the claims made about citizenship identities, rights, and consequential access to said rights. I ask, how do these narratives about citizenship sustain, create, or re-envision American myth? Similarly, how do the narratives interact with the dominant culture at large? Do any of these texts achieve oppositional value, and/or modify the complex hegemonic structure? I use Pierre Bourdieu’s “The Forms of Capital” to investigate the ways in which economic, cultural, and social capital are distributed amongst identity groups of citizens, focusing on its favorable distribution to white upper-class men. Interesting, too, is the way in which these texts relate with one another and evolve over time. As Fitzgerald reaffirms boundary rights to white upper-class social capital to longstanding wealthy white males, Watts celebrates the survival of black individuals through the hard-earned persistence of human connection. Ultimately, as Gatsby fails to repeat the past, Watts succeeds in rewriting it.

This dissertation offers an in-depth descriptive account of how women manage daily risks associated with sex work, criminalization, and HIV/AIDS. Primary data collection took place within two slums in Kampala, Uganda over the course of fourteen months. The emphasis was on ethnographic methodologies involving participant observation and informal and unstructured interviewing. Insights then informed document analysis of international and national policies concerning HIV prevention and treatment strategies in the context of Uganda. The dissertation finds social networks and social capital provide the basis for community formation in the sex trade. It holds that these interpersonal processes are necessary components for how women manage daily risks associated with sex work and criminalization. However, the dissertation also finds that women’s social connections can undermine the strategies they need to manage their HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment. This is because current HIV/AIDS policies prioritize individual behavioral change practices that undermine the complex interpersonal activities developed by women to stay alive. In response, this dissertation concludes that social networks are fundamental to the formation of sex work communities and to the survival of women in the sex trade and should be considered in future HIV policies and programs intending to intervene in the HIV epidemic of female commercial sex workers in Kampala, Uganda.

This thesis seeks to bridge feminist and environmental justice movements through the literature of black women writers. These writers create an archive that contribute towards the liberation of queer, black, and transgender peoples. In the novel Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler constructs a world that highlights the pervasive effects of climate change. As climate change expedites poverty, Americans begin to blame others, such as queer people, for the destruction of their country. Butler depicts the dangers of fundamentalism as a response to climate change, highlighting an imperative for a movement that does not romanticize the environment as heteronormative, but a space where queers can flourish. Just as queer and environmental justice movements are codependent on one another, feminist movements cannot be separate from black and transgender liberation. This thesis will demonstrate how writers, such as Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, and Janet Mock, help establish a feminism that resists the erasure of black and transgender people.

This dissertation explores issues of gender politics, market segmentation, and taste through an examination of the contributions of several artists who have achieved Adult Contemporary (AC) chart success. The scope of the project is limited to a period when many artists who figured prominently in both the broader mainstream of American popular music and the more specific Adult Contemporary category were most commercially viable: from the mid-1980s through the 1990s. My contention is that, as gender politics and gendered social norms continued to change in the United States at this time, Adult Contemporary – the chart, the format, and the associated music – was an important, if overlooked or even trivialized, arena in which these shifting gender dynamics played out. This dissertation explores the significance of the Adult Contemporary format at the end of the twentieth century through analysis of chart performance, artist image, musical works, marketing, and contextual factors. By documenting these relevant social, political, economic, and musical factors, the notable role of a format and of artists neglected by scholars becomes clear. I explore these issues in the form of lengthy case studies. Examinations of how Adult Contemporary artists such as Michael Bolton, Wilson Phillips, Matchbox Twenty, David Gray, and Mariah Carey were produced and marketed, and how their music was disseminated, illustrate record and radio industry strategies for negotiating the musical, political, and social climate of this period. Significantly, musical and lyrical analyses of songs successful on AC stations, and many of their accompanying promotional videos highlight messages about musical genre, gender, race, and age. This dissertation ultimately demonstrates that Adult Contemporary-oriented music figured significantly in the culture wars, second and third wave feminism, expressions of masculinity, Generation-X struggles, postmodern identity, and market segmentation. This study also illustrates how the record and radio industries have managed audience composition and behavior to effectively and more predictably produce and market music in the United States. This dissertation argues that, amid broader social determinations for taste, the record industry, radio programmers, and Billboard chart compilers and writers have helped to make and reinforce certain assumptions about who listens to which music and why they do so. In addition, critics have weighed in on what different musical genres and artists have offered and for whom, often assigning higher value to music associated with certain genres, socio-political associations, and listeners while claiming over-commercialization, irrelevance, aesthetic insignificance, and bad taste for much other music.

This thesis analyzes the ideologies present the campaign rhetoric surrounding the 2008 California legislative initiative Proposition·8. Using Foss' method of ideological criticism the campaign is read prior after the opposition response to determine if an ideological shift occurs. The study is framed to identify this shift as a potential product of oppositional interaction, a characteristic of rhetoric defined by Smith and Windes. The study concludes that the shift in ideology during the campaign by the supporters of Proposition 8 was a significant development. The response from the Proposition 8 campaign reframed the debate, making the electorate vulnerable to a different ideology. This new ideology places the state education apparatus, not the courts, in the spotlight as the state mechanism that is in dispute in the marriage controversy. When placed in .this context, theories of political economy are employed to explain how the electorate may have interpreted these arguments. One. explanation offered is that the response ideology of the Proposition 8 campaign allowed voters to vote to outlaw gay marriages as a proactive response to a mistrust of education. The discussion section indicates that this could be an adjustment to existing ideologies, or development of an issues specific ideology that is only relevant for one issue in the mind of the individual. Ultimately, this study demonstrated the utility of ideology as a method to analyze political rhetoric and examines the role that oppositional interaction plays in the long-term development of public dialectic.

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The ONE Exhibition explores an era in American history marked by intense government sponsored anti-gay persecution and the genesis of the LGBT equality movement. The study begins during World War II, continues through the McCarthy era and the founding of the nation’s first gay magazine, and ends in 1958 with the first gay Supreme Court case in U.S. history. Central to the story is ONE The Homosexual Magazine, and its founders, as they embarked on a quest for LGBT equality by establishing the first ongoing nationwide forum for gay people in the U.S., and challenged the government’s right to engage in and encourage hateful and discriminatory practices against the LGBT community. Then, when the magazine was banned by the Post Office, the editors and staff took the federal government to court. As such, ONE, Incorporated v. Olesen became the first Supreme Court case in U.S. history that featured the taboo subject of homosexuality, and secured the 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech for the gay press. Thus, ONE magazine and its founders were an integral part of a small group of activists who established the foundations of the modern LGBT equality movement.