<p> Decreasing rates of marriage and the delay of motherhood or decision to forsake childbearing altogether are emergent trends in the United States. Historically, shifts in family composition have always been important, yet the increase in the number of unmarried and child-free adults is rarely acknowledged by health researchers. Race and family type will be used to investigate the health of Black and White unmarried, childless women (SWANS), using intersectional theory, the Social Determinants of Health, and the Sojourner Model. The frequencies of poor health outcomes are analyzed to determine if family type influences health outcomes, and if so, does this differ by race. Using secondary data from the 2010-2013 Integrated Health Interview Series (IHIS) and binary logistic regression, results indicate that the main independent variables of race and family types interact to differentiate health outcomes. </p><p> This work uncovers race as a master status for Black women. Black married childfree women have better health outcomes relative to Black SWANS, with the exception of self-rated health. Black married parents are less likely to report adverse health conditions than Black married childfree and SWANS. Among Whites, all family types are in poorer health, when compared to married parents. </p><p> Notably, both Black and White SWANS experience the lowest rates of poor emotional health. These findings persist despite adjusting for demographic and socio-economic characteristics that are known to influence health. The analysis further underscores the importance of focusing on intra-racial variations in marriage and health and give added support to feminist arguments regarding the methodological and conceptual challenges to studying women who exist on the margins of society and Black women in general. Taken altogether, the results move toward an examination of health and family policies to identify areas for potential policy change and SWAN-advocacy.</p>

<p> Transgender women have the highest HIV prevalence rates of all gender and sexual minorities, yet are less likely to enter and be retained in HIV care. As a result, they are at high risk for HIV-related morbidity and mortality. This study aimed to describe the illness career of transgender women living with HIV and to describe how interactions with health care providers and important others influenced their illness trajectory. The findings are a theoretical model that includes four stages: <i>Having the world come crashing down, shutting out the world, living in a dark world, and reconstructing the world. </i> Relationships within the social network (family, friends, and romantic partners) and the network of health care providers provided the context of the women&rsquo;s illness careers. Pivotal moments marked movement from one phase to the next. <i>Having the World Crashing Down</i> was the first stage that occurred when the participants were diagnosed with HIV. They felt that their lives as they knew them had been destroyed. They indicated that the &ldquo;whole world just shattered&rdquo; the moment they found out they had HIV. <i>Shutting Out the World</i> occurred next. During this stage, many participants experienced withdrawal, denial, social isolation and loneliness. As they struggled with their diagnosis, they often avoided HIV care and avoided contact with important others. During the third stage, <i> Living in a Dark World,</i> participants descended into a dark phase of self-destructive life and health-threatening behaviors following their diagnosis. During the fourth stage, <i>Reconstructing the World,</i> participants began to reestablish themselves in the world and found new ways to reengage with important others and resume meaningful life activities. Findings confirm that the illness careers of HIV-positive transgender women are influenced by the social context of the health care setting and interactions with health care providers and important others.</p>

<p> Gender-linked language penalizes women by both systematically devaluing women&rsquo;s speech and limiting its form and content. In 1975, Robin Lakoff claimed that gender-linked language was a key diagnostic for gender equality within society. Forty years later, this interdisciplinary analysis brings together feminist, legal justice, sociological, and linguistic perspectives to examine the courtroom testimony of female domestic violence victims for compliance with gender-linked language norms and subsequent success in obtaining protective orders. Testimony was evaluated for compliance with Mulac&rsquo;s Gender-Linked Language Effect (GLLE) as well as additional variables uncovered through research and experience. Results showed that all petitioners used female-linked variables at a consistent rate but that those who used more male-linked variables received fewer protective orders. The results of this analysis will serve to inform judges and legal professionals in their evaluation of women&rsquo;s narratives without bias, fill a gap in research on the effects gender-linked language in courtroom testimony, and uncover the presence of the GLLE in everyday life. Most importantly, this analysis provides a rationale for eliminating gender-linked language as an extralegal barrier to protection helping to ensure that all citizens receive equal protection from the Court regardless of gender.</p>

<p> This study follows a year of mixed methods research that was conducted in partnership with Yoga Behind Bars and the Washington State Department of Corrections. The following study examines the utilization of yoga practices and observed trends with female inmates. While past research has produced groundbreaking work regarding the positive impact of inmate yoga practice and the noted decrease in recidivism rates and prison community conflicts (Bhushan, 1998; Landau &amp; Gross, 2008; Rucker, 2005), the nature of perceived personal transformation for participants and its practical programmatic implications have not been extensively researched, particularly in the case of a female population. </p><p> This longitudinal study employed a mixed-methods approach combining quantitative data analysis with qualitative journal entries. Results suggest that after attending five or more classes, student focus shifts from the physical benefits of the yoga practice to the practical application and improvement of interpersonal relationships, including improved interactions with corrections officers.</p><p>

<p> In the latter half of the twentieth century and especially in the last twenty-five years, soccer has grown exponentially in the United States. Historically, the country has been lagging behind most of the world when it comes to adoption and diffusion of the sport; however, recent studies suggest that it has been a space of exceptionalism when incorporating the participation of women.</p><p> Studies on soccer from a geographic perspective are relatively isolated and demonstrate a tendency to favor male professional athletes. There is no similar research to examine the origins of female professional soccer players. This study will contribute to filling this identified gender gap in geographic sports studies. These previous studies on male professional athletes suggest that they can geographically originate from areas of lower socioeconomic standing. The findings from this study show a distinct contrast between male and female professional athlete origins.</p><p> Results reveal that the origins of most female professional players can be connected to suburbanized middle to upper middle class white communities close to major cities mainly in coastal regions. From a per capita perspective, the results also show that states in the West produce more players than states in the East. Socio-cultural perspectives explain these patterns, supporting a common hypothesis that most female professional soccer players in the USA are white and come from areas of relative affluence.</p><p>

<p> Previous research highlights the relationship between gender and activism in various environmental justice (EJ) grassroots oriented contexts, including but not limited to: the coalfields of Central Appalachia, Three Mile Island, and the Pittston Coal Strike movement. However, little research examining the relationship between gender and activist&rsquo;s efforts in relation to hydraulic fracturing exists, primarily because this movement itself is relatively new. From 2012-2014, four communities and one county collectively organized in an effort to ban or enact a moratorium on the practice of hydraulic fracturing, commonly referred to as fracking. Anti-fracking activists in Northern Colorado deem this technological advancement as poorly controlled and dangerous to public health and the environment. On the other hand, pro-fracking activists argue that this process is highly engineered, adequately controlled, and necessary to boost and sustain local oil and gas development in Colorado and the United States. Historically, grassroots environmental justice organizations are often created and lead by poor and minority communities as these communities experience the brunt of problematic industry practices. The setting of Northern Colorado is unique in this sense because the communities trying to halt oil and gas development are opposite of what one might expect, as they are predominately white, middle class, and educated. Thus, my study fills current gaps that exist in the literature and adopts an intersectional approach to address the subsequent research question broadly: how do gender, race, and class intersect and impact the nature and extent of activist&rsquo;s efforts in Northern Colorado&rsquo;s Hydraulic Fracturing movement? Ultimately, I find that gendered and raced identities, such as &ldquo;mother&rdquo; or &ldquo;steward to the earth&rdquo; play an imperative role in explaining women&rsquo;s entry into the fracking movement, while men pull on a spectrum of identities. Furthermore, I find that traditional gendered divisions of labor help to elucidate the differing rates of participation among men and women in the movement, as well as the roles that activists fulfill in grassroots anti-fracking organizations. Ultimately, I argue that exploring gender, in conjunction with race and class on various analytical levels, contributes to a broader understanding of the nuances of activism in environmental justice movements.</p>

The contemporary homeschooling movement sits at the intersection of several important social trends: widespread concern about the effectiveness and safety of public schools, feminist challenges to the patriarchal family structure, anxiety about the state of the family as an institution, and challenging economic conditions. The central concern of this dissertation is to make sense of homeschooling within this broader context. Data were gathered through interviews with forty-five homeschooling parents, approximately half of whom are religious and half of whom are secular. The interviews were organized around three central questions: (1) What are the frames that parents use to justify homeschooling? (2) What are their particular tactics or methods for homeschooling? (3) What are the components of homeschoolers' collective identity? I argue that homeschooling bears the imprint of broader changes regarding the gender system and contemporary family life, as well as other economic and cultural changes. Both religious and secular parents come to homeschooling out of shared concerns about schools being ineffective and incapable of catering to their children.s individual needs. They also share concerns about the state of the family and the general moral decline of society. Religious and secular parents differ in their actual practice of homeschooling, depending on their particular conceptions of childhood, but they are alike in the fact that it is women who do most of the homeschooling work. These parents are also different in their collective identities. Religious parents regard homeschooling as just something they do. However, secular parents characterize homeschooling as part of who they are as moral people and this compels them to employ various strategies of identity work. In the end, I argue that this movement is unlikely to contribute to meaningful social change. I base this conclusion on the fact that the homeschooling movement contains two major contradictions: (1) This movement is simultaneously resisting one alleged failing institution – schools - while reproducing another highly criticized institution – the patriarchal nuclear family. (2) This movement offers individual solutions to social problems. While the participants have many concerns about social institutions, their answer is to withdraw their participation and retreat into their own families.

<p> An academic dialog concerning the intersectionality of national origin, economic class and gender, as mutually constitutive elements of migration, set the context for my inquiry into the experiences of wives who are barred from paid labor by their restricted visa status. Guided by grounded theory, I conducted seventeen semi-structured qualitative interviews to examine ways in which a move to Silicon Valley under a restricted visa class changes the self-image of women, and how they evaluate this change. I found that the ambiguous agency construct of women socialized in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras facilitated their choice to migrate despite the visa restrictions. After emigrating, the women tended to embrace values of individualism and self-reliance, which reinforced their professional ambitions. However, the absence of professional options created a split between the women&rsquo;s lived experiences and their self-representation. In addition, I found that a visa that prohibits employment creates a homogenizing effect on women&rsquo;s self-images, putting them on similar personal and professional tracks and making their legal and economic status less predictable. These findings suggest that structural strategies might be adopted to help these women reclaim their self-images and exert more control over the selection and pursuit of their goals.</p><p>

The childlike character of ideal femininities has long been critiqued in feminist literature, from Mary Wollstonecraft (1792) to Susan Faludi (1992). Yet, despite the partial gains of feminism the ‘woman-child’ continues to be a prominent subject-position in fashion photography of the West. This thesis builds upon earlier feminist critiques of the infantilisation of women by considering the meaning of childlike femininities in the period spanning 1990 to 2015. In particular, it questions whether representations of childlike femininities can shed their dehumanising, ‘second sex’ connotations and be resignified to a more progressive end in the contemporary context. The possible appeal of ‘girly’ subject-positions to women, following several waves of feminism, is explored through reception studies carried out with female participants in focus groups, as well as theory on the ‘female gaze’. Images were principally drawn from three British fashion magazines: Vogue (UK), i-D, and Lula. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, this thesis demonstrates the ways in which discourses on childhood, girlhood and womanhood overlap and intersect to produce the figure of the ‘woman-child’ in the fashion media and beyond. This subject-position is shown not to be singular but rather as appearing in a number of guises. The many permutations of childlike femininity are subsumed into four overarching categories: the Romantic woman-child; the femme-enfant-fatale; Lolita style; and the Parodic woman-child. This thesis thereby contributes to existing debates in fashion studies by considering in greater detail the different discourses on childhood and femininity that come into play when women are positioned as childlike. A multi-faceted visual methodology is employed, combining visual analysis of imagery with experimental reception studies. Reception studies were conducted in focus groups with female participants and provide insight into the way these women made sense of the ‘woman-child’. In addition, they provide an indication as to whether the participants liked or disliked childlike femininities in the fashion media, thus pointing to the possible investments women might have in childlike subject-positions. Finally, including an element of social research served to challenge and/or reinforce the researcher’s own readings of the imagery, pointing to new avenues of research and expanding the discursive field of enquiry. This aspect of the thesis makes a methodological contribution to literature on the reception of still media imagery in fashion studies, magazine studies and feminist media studies.

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