This dissertation argues for a feminist practice of liminal laughter, a bodily laughter that cements a critical engagement. Liminal laughter is formed in the margins, across various disciplines and genres; it is a subversive and parodic laughter that radically challenges the hegemonic narratives of patriarchy and heterosexuality. To contend that feminism benefits from this practice of liminal laughter, I expand on poststructural and phenomenological feminisms and their conceptualizations of the body. Subsequently, using the nineteenth century philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche and his concepts of the transvaluation of all values, overcoming, and affirmation, I create a conceptual frame for thinking liminal laughter. To provide examples for this theory, I look to the Mickee Faust Club, an eclectic theater troupe in Tallahassee, Florida and the works of the theorist and novelist Hélène Cixous. Liminal laughter is a practice that revalues the body's capacities of sensing feeling to disrupt and destabilize the mind / body, masculine / feminine, natural / unnatural, and subject / other binaries. By doing so, liminal laughter not only displaces the dominant terms, but it is also creates alternative narratives. / A Dissertation submitted to the Program of Interdisciplinary Humanities in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2011. / March 18, 2010. / Feminism, Gender Studies, Nietzsche, Liminal, Cixous, GLBT Studies, Laughter / Includes bibliographical references. / Robin T. Goodman, Professor Directing Dissertation; Enrique Alvarez, Committee Member; Donna M. Nudd, Committee Member.

Traitor, Traitor is a collection of poetry combining Celtic selkie myths with the Caribbean Nanny figure to construct a narrative about a widower living in the foothills of the Appalachians during the mid-20th Century. Grounded in the Romantic tradition, the poems explore the boundaries of personal power and the limits of the human will. However, unlike the traditional Romantics, this collection also seeks to explore issues of gender and socio-economic class to become a mystical poetry of witness. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2015. / December 5, 2014. / marriage, Nanny, poetry, selkie, transformation / Includes bibliographical references. / David Kirby, Professor Directing Dissertation; Nicholas Mazza, University Representative; Barry Faulk, Committee Member; Barbara Hamby, Committee Member.

A collection of short stories and a novella focusing on the lives of Muslim characters, American and otherwise, primarily of South-Asian descent. The collection examines concepts such as family relationships, arranged marriage in a changing world, and negotiation of identity. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2015. / February 23, 2015. / Creative Writing, Fiction / Includes bibliographical references. / Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Professor Directing Dissertation; Maxine Jones, University Representative; Candace Ward, Committee Member; David Johnson, Committee Member.

When Charles Edward Stuart landed on the shores of Scotland in 1745, he was greeted with ardent support from Jacobite men and women who supported the Stuart claim to the British throne. Women were particularly important supporters of Stuart. They provided money, hospitality, military support, and even acted as spies. While some women such as Jean Cameron and Anne Mackintosh actively mustered troops for the Stuart army, others such as Margaret Ogilvie and Margaret Murray accompanied their husbands during the entire military campaign. Despite Jacobite women’s high level of political and military involvement in the Jacobite Rising of 1745, scholarly writings have largely overlooked their significant contributions to the Cause, and theirwartime narratives have been largely dismissed. This project seeks to rectify the gender imbalance inherent in the Jacobite historical narrative through a focus on one artistic medium: song. This thesis examines the roles that women played throughout the 1745 Rising by focusing on musical lyrics composed both by and about Jacobite women. The lyrics composed by Jacobite women prior to the Jacobite army’s final defeat at the Battle of Culloden are shown to take on a politically aggressive stance uncharacteristic of typical women’s compositions for the time. Those composed directly after the Jacobite defeat turn inward toward personal expressions of grief and more characteristically traditional lyric content. In the decades following the failed Rising, Jacobite women’s musical contributions took on increasing levels of romanticization. While gender conventions of the period kept Jacobite women from engaging in combat throughout the 1745 campaign, these women turned to song composition as a means of supporting the Jacobite Cause. The importance of women to the Jacobite Cause can also be tracked through the number of songs written about them by both Jacobite, and Hanoverian propagandists. The two caricatures of Jacobite women that are most recognizable today, Flora MacDonald and Jenny Cameron, were popularized over the course of the Jacobite Rising and directly after, both to mythologize, and defame the Jacobite campaign. For her role in helping Charles Edward Stuart escape Scotland after the end of the failed Rising, Flora MacDonald was mythologized by Jacobite supporters. Many Scottish songwriters used her name as a means of garnering sympathy, and her narrative voice as a means of expressing grief. Supporters of the Hanoverian government also turned to the use of female figures in political propaganda surrounding the Jacobite Risings. Hanoverian songwriters took to defaming Jacobite women through propagandistic lyric, and focused their attention on one character in particular: Jenny Cameron. The character of Jenny Cameron was loosely based on a Jacobite woman named Jean Cameron, who mustered approximately three-hundred men to fight for the Stuart Cause. Her political exploits acted as the catalyst for the creation of the transgressive character Jenny Cameron. The anti-Jacobite songs written about Jenny Cameron attack her sexuality and political agency, while drawing from a repertoire of written and artistically-rendered propaganda depicting her as “mannish” and militaristic. The existence of female-centric political propaganda during this time, especially that aimed against Jacobites, proves just how important women were to the Stuart Cause. Had women not been providing a substantial amount of aid the Jacobites, the Hanoverian government would have felt much less compelled to undermine them by debasing their characters and threatening their physical well-being. As the songs written by and about Jacobite women prove, Scotswomen were active in the Jacobite Rising of 1745 from its very beginnings until its military conclusion on Culloden Battlefield. The women discussed in this thesis were important political and military actors who used their positions of authority to provide support for Charles Edward Stuart over the course of his campaign. Most importantly to this thesis, I wish to tell the stories of Jacobite women whose voices have previously been silenced. It is my hope that this project leads to further study of Jacobite women by scholars of all disciplines, as well as to an increased public awareness of women’s historical contributions to wartime efforts. Within this project, Jacobite women assert themselves as military leaders, poignant propagandists, grieving widows, and compassionate protectors, ultimately defying essentialization. With song as a uniting factor, this thesis draws Scotswomen together and asserts the importance of their voices to the Jacobite narrative. / A Thesis submitted to the College of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Music. / Spring Semester 2018. / April 2, 2018. / Jacobite, Music, Scotland, Song, War, Women / Includes bibliographical references. / Sarah Eyerly, Professor Directing Thesis; Charles E. Brewer, Committee Member; Douglass Seaton, Committee Member.

This thesis analyzes the 35-year-run of the Ladies' Repository, and Gatherings of the West, a monthly periodical distributed by the Methodist Episcopal Church from 1841-1876. This thesis will first look at the publication history of The Ladies' Repository to understand why this publication was financed by the church, what its readership looked like, and why it ceased publication in 1876 (or, rather, why the money ran out). Second, and the main thrust of my argument, is that this particular magazine decentralized the idea that private and public spheres could not be transgressed unless some rhetorical trickery was afoot. For The Repository women's agency is not understood in the confines of the domestic sphere, but through articles about female missionaries the domestic sphere was always considered to be doing public good. I argue that the articles in The Repository oriented women to an idea of western expansion that called on them to missionize or support itinerant husbands in order to see America manifest from sea to shining sea. Finally, while many narratives of westward expansion in America characterize the frontier, or any land outside the geographical borders, as masculine, I argue that The Ladies' Repository gives scholars a sketch of a feminine, yet still uncharted West. To do this, I connect this westward expansion to Methodist understanding of nature, natural power, and God's providence. Through this, while men might have done the conquering of the West, women domesticated this unruly, and seemingly unbounded space. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester 2018. / April 20, 2018. / Ladies' Repository, Methodist, missionaries, Nineteenth Century, popular literature, women's magazines / Includes bibliographical references. / Amanda Porterfield, Professor Directing Thesis; John Corrigan, Committee Member; Jamil Drake, Committee Member; Michael McVicar, Committee Member.

This dissertation takes as its starting point a recurring problem within the composition classroom: women writers silencing themselves in compliance with patriarchal expectations that frame the good girl role. In the process, these students subordinate, if not entirely erase, their own feminist agency. The disempowerment of women within the writing classroom is especially worrisome given that the NCTE Mission Statement defines one of the main aims of this classroom as helping students use "language to construct personal and public worlds and to achieve full participation in society." If the composition classroom aims to help students develop and practice rhetorical agency, how can this goal be successfully met when women students are implicitly and explicitly taught to adopt a classroom persona of silence? To address the problem of the good girl identity within the composition classroom, I turn to an exploration of feminist agency enacted beyond academia. Women have not – perhaps have never – been completely disempowered or completely silenced. Historically and currently, women have developed innovative and effective ways of performing feminist agency in social spaces beyond the classroom. Accordingly, this dissertation asks, "What strategies for fostering feminist agency in the composition classroom might be derived from the practice of feminist agency deployed outside of the classroom?" To answer this question, I first identify the visual, linguistic, and embodied strategies employed by feminist activists beyond classroom walls. Next, I consider how the activists use these strategies to support enactments of feminist agency within their specific spheres. Finally, I analyze these enactments in order to discern specific strategies we can use for fostering feminist agency within the composition classroom. This dissertation consists of three case study analyses. The first analysis focuses on The Guerrilla Girls, a feminist art activist group. The second examines Here. In My Head, a feminist perzine, and the third considers the feminist music album A Woman's Reprieve. Within each case study, I conduct first-hand interviews with the participants and textual analyses of the activists' work. This analysis of the rhetorical practices of feminist activists has revealed three valuable conclusions regarding feminist agency. 1) Effective feminist agency, understood as action that challenges rather than perpetuates patriarchal ideologies, begins with the personal and circulates beyond the self. 2) Choice, self-determination, action, and audience participation are central tenets to effective enactments of feminist agency. 3) One overarching goal of feminist activists is to promote a more inclusive reality, one that values women and their experiences/perspectives within the public sphere. These conclusions call on us to consider fascinating avenues through which we might foster feminist agency within the composition classroom. Specifically, my study proposes that we can foster feminist agency within the classroom by emphasizing its personal, active, public, and collaborative characteristics, and I offer specific pedagogical means for doing so. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester 2015. / June 2, 2015. / composition, feminism, feminist activism, feminist agency, pedagogy, rhetoric / Includes bibliographical references. / Kristie Fleckenstein, Professor Directing Dissertation; Pat Villeneuve, University Representative; Kathleen Blake Yancey, Committee Member; Linda Saladin-Adams, Committee Member.

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the debate over education is centered on women's bodies and receives significant discussion in works by women. In this dissertation, I discuss five domestic novels written by women that make education their main topic and, despite political and personal differences, show a unified interest in asserting the importance of improved education for women and a desire to open up the roles available to women in education and educational reform. Each novel depicts the education of the female protagonist and shows her also as an educator of those around her. In doing so, all five of these women contributed to the educational discourse of the time, entering into the discussion on the different educational ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau and John Locke while also revising Mary Wollstonecraft's polemical theories on women's education as expressed in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. I argue that each of these novelists show the importance of improved educations for women, while also opening a more public role for women in educational practices. The five novels I discuss in this project are Belinda by Maria Edgeworth, Adeline Mowbray by Amelia Opie, The Cottagers of Glenburnie by Elizabeth Hamilton, Discipline by Mary Brunton, and Mansfield Park by Jane Austen. These five novels were written by women of various backgrounds and educations and were all published after Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication and after the backlash against her and other radical thinkers of the 1790s. I explore how these novels deal with issues discussed in Vindication, including female subjectivity, marriage and women's role within the home and in society, focusing particularly on female education. These novels were written and published within a few years of each other and were all well-received at the time of publication. All five of these novels have generally been considered conservative novels because they appear to uphold the status quo through appropriate marriages or the death of the character who has stepped out of the normative bounds of society, but a careful reading shows more reformist tendencies. Each of these novels has moments of progressive thought that seem to subvert the main moral thrust of the novel and force the reader to question the conservative categorization. These novelists test and extend the domestic boundaries, clearing more space for women both inside and outside of the home. In most of the novels I discuss in the following chapters, the protagonist and main educator is a woman entering into society while being educated and educating others. She does not yet have a home of her own from which to perform her domestic educational role. However, each protagonist has a particular power in her situation as a single woman and her choices surrounding her marriage and future. Each of these characters is thus operating in a space between the domestic and public spheres; her role as moral guide and educator grows out of a domestic circle but enters into the larger social world. Each is engaged in educational activities outside of her own home, showing the influence women can have outside of the domestic sphere. These female characters also receive an important part of their own educations by being part of the world and engaging in society at large. The movement of these women within society further politicizes women's roles in educational practices; the portrayals of these protagonists show the need for better education for women and suggest that women can and should have more public roles both in and through education. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2015. / January 22, 2015. / Austen, Jane, Brunton, Mary, Edgeworth, Maria, Hamilton, Elizabeth, Opie, Amelia Alderson, Wollstonecraft, Mary / Includes bibliographical references. / Eric Walker, Professor Directing Dissertation; Timothy Hoekman, University Representative; Helen Burke, Committee Member; Candace Ward, Committee Member.

Investigation into how the Jane and Cadwallader Colden navigated the physical, social, and cultural environment of colonial New York both as regular people representative of their class, and as scientists offers insight into the changing nature of colonial society and views of science in the mid 1700s. The work of the Coldens is especially important to this topic because it shows the influence of Enlightenment thought in creating "proper" fields of science and intellectual activity in the English colonies on in the mid to late 18th century when this "feminization" of certain sciences is often seen as primarily an English phenomenon of the 19th century. Instead, their work shows that this was a trans-Atlantic change with earlier origins. As elite women participated in the sciences with greater frequency, multiple narratives emerged in both England and the American colonies, to justify this change and place it in an understandable context. For men, society accepted participation in sciences as a manifestation of Enlightenment values focused on reason. Women"s participation in the sciences, on the other hand, was often justified through an appeal to natural philosophy or through emphasis on continuity with established beliefs about manners and hetero-gender social interaction that generally mandated familial support for their endeavors. By examining the writings of the Colden family and commentary on changes to intellectual culture that emerged in popular pamphlets and behavior manuals we can see that the groundwork for the "feminization" of certain intellectual subjects such as botany was already in place in the 18th century and examine some of the cultural forces that led to this trend which would continue into the 19th century. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of History in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2010. / March 26, 2010. / Gender, Botany, Jane Colden, Cadwallader Colden / Includes bibliographical references. / Edward Gray, Professor Directing Thesis; Jennifer Koslow, Committee Member; Frederick Davis, Committee Member.

The Soviet Union was unique in its use of women for combat roles, becoming the first state to use female pilots to fly combat missions. "Unit Cohesion Among the Three Soviet Women's Air Regiments During World War II" analyzes the factors that shaped the cohesion of the three women's regiments formed from Aviation Group No. 122. Unit cohesion is the glue that holds together a military unit through times of adversity, fear of death, and unimaginable suffering and sacrifice. Many factors affect the cohesion of a unit. The factors discussed in this study are: the effectiveness of command, the plane each regiment flew, the gender composition of the unit, and the reaction of men to the women fighting. This thesis utilized the published memoirs written by veterans of the women's regiments along with interviews conducted years later by Anne Noggle and Reina Pennington. The study of these women presents a tremendous opportunity to straddle military history, women's studies, and Russian history to establish precedence in contemporary debates surrounding the use of female combatants. / A Thesis Submitted to the Interdisciplinary Program in Russian and East European Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2004. / March 25, 2004. / World War II, Soviet Airwomen, Unit Cohesion / Includes bibliographical references. / Jonathan A. Grant, Professor Directing Thesis; Ljubisa S. Adamovich, Committee Member; Michael K. Launer, Committee Member.

This study provides a historical examination of working women's relationship with social and theatrical dance in New York City during the Progressive Era. These years, between 1890 and 1920, were seminal in bringing America into the modern age, as well as providing a unique framework for women's activism against restrictive sociopolitical roles. The purpose of this thesis is to illuminate the relationship between New York City working class women, dance, and intellectual ideas in an attempt to broaden the scope of both dance studies and history. By utilizing historiography, women's studies, cultural studies, and movement analysis, this project addresses the shift of women (from Victorian to Modern) through the lens of dance. Social dancing, especially in dance halls, was an outlet for working class experimentation with new attitudes of social and financial independence, as well as in defining a more liberal attitude of sexuality. Likewise, the chorus girls of Ziegfeld's Follies used a theatrical medium in which to explore new identities of independence and sexuality. These high-grade chorines epitomized the working girl dream--they earned their own money while gallivanting through elite social circles. Throughout these two spheres--social or theatrical--the social and sexual transformation of women was underscored through ideas of conspicuous consumption and ethics of leisure. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Dance in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Summer Semester, 2003. / June 6, 2003. / Social Dancing, Working Women / Includes bibliographical references. / Neil Jumonville, Committee Member; John O. Perpener, III, Committee Member.