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This dissertation examines the interplay between gender ideology, women's actions, and automotive technology in the United States from the beginning of the automotive era through the 1920's. Looking at cultural ideology as a strong yet fragmented and malleable historical force, I have analyzed the effect of popular conceptions of masculinity and femininity on the design, marketing, and use of automobiles. At the same time, I have attempted to show how motorcars, often employed as vehicles of social ideals, promoted some reinterpretation of men's and women's proper roles and places. The auto indeed served as a focus for discourse about the contingent relation between social and political emancipation. While some observers expected the automobile to liberate women from domesticity and subordination, others insisted on the congruence between automobility and domestic life. Though some women would use cars as tools of social or political nonconformity, the auto ultimately transformed and extended women's spatial and temporal province, while preserving the home as the ideal hub of women's activities. Still, the car culture revision of gender ideology had profound consequences for the way the private family car would emerge as a primary transportation mode, facilitating new manners and morals, new commercial and political possibilities, and a revolution in urban development.

This project is an interrogation of three examples from recent popular culture of girlculture, specifically texts that target young female consumers: the Spice Girls, Scream and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. These examples are fundamentally different than texts from earlier female targeted generic models because they not only reflect the influence of the feminist movement, they work on feminism's behalf. The project's methodology grows out of feminist film theories and cultural studies theories. One chapter is dedicated to each text, and each reading works to reappropriate girlculture texts for a counter-hegemonic agenda by highlighting the moments when each text manages to subvert its mass mediated conservative biases.

This is an ethnographic study of a self-regulated Internet site that facilitates illegal female prostitution in South Florida. The purpose is to identify the social and economic characteristics of the site that can contribute to acceptable prostitution reform. The members of the site appear to sustain an orderly and mutually respectful exchange of sexual services for money, suggesting that certain social and economic features of this form of transaction diminish barriers otherwise present in typical forms of contemporary prostitution exchange. The study evaluates the thesis that when commercial sex is conducted in an open atmosphere of respect, trust and mutual understanding, within certain economic parameters, the beliefs and practices that stigmatize prostitutes and prostitution are neutralized. Evidence was generated through extensive observation of an online venue that approximates what prostitution would be like if open market exchange in sexual labor did exist. These data are supplemented by interviews with participants of the online community. Features of mutual respect, trust, and understanding, characteristically absent in traditional prostitution venues, appear to be part of an emerging community phenomenon that facilitates prostitution online. Thus, this study engages with the larger scholarly position that normalization of sex work is necessary for successful prostitution reform. This community utilizes a non-legal enforcement mechanism to facilitate cooperative exchanges based on establishing trust between participants. At the center of the cooperation system is a reputation mechanism that fosters trust between potential partners by encouraging participants to post honest reviews of their encounters with each other. / Understanding the social order as a cooperation game where participants publicly signal each other in an attempt to find the most desirable partners explains the mutual trust and respect that participants have for each other. Because stigma and disrespect are founded on mistrust, this cooperation mechanism is effective in minimizing undesirable attitudes, beliefs, and practices that stigmatize and oppress prostitutes. This study suggests that prostitution reform acceptable to many feminists is possible. But in order for meaningful reform to work in practice, it must be accompanied by regulations carefully designed to protect the sexual autonomy of women without stigmatizing prostitutes. / by Jeffrey R. Young. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This thesis analyzes Pamela Swynford De Beaufort and Jessica Hamby from the provocative HBO series, True Blood, in order to determine what hegemonic ideologies are reinforced through their sexual representation in the series. Through analysis based on concepts of the "vagina dentata" and "monstrous feminine," and in determining whether they fall victim to the Madonna/wore dichotomy, the question of Pam and Jessica's autonomous existence falls under scrutiny - particularly in regards to their sexuality. Feminist scholarship is vital to this research in order to examine the often fetishized and marginalized sexuality of women who dare to exhibit transgressive behaviors. This thesis concentrates on Seasons One through Four of the series, and also utilizes meta-text from the official website related to each character in order to help answer the posed research questions. / by Ashley Anderson. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.

Chelsea Handler is a comedian and host of the TV show Chelsea Lately. She has been successful in the late night comedy talk show genre to a degree that no woman has before. While she represents the most significant advancement for women in the genre, she also plays to patriarchal themes in order to maintain her foothold. In my thesis, I locate Handler within the history of women's stand-up comedy, analyzing her appeal via the figure of "The Unruly Woman" and other image types. I apply a mythic analysis as I look for Handler's manifestation of mythic types, including archetypal Goddess representations. I analyze her treatment of violence against women, exploring how Handler approaches these themes in ways that allow her into the "old boys club." I use textual and audience analysis to assess Handler's ability to be a transformative and empowering figure for women in comedy and beyond. / by Lauren Walleser. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

The under-theorisation of the concept of generation within feminism has led to negative and unproductive disputes. In the heated generational exchanges of the 1990s, feminists were cast according to age into opposing sides: old or young, mothers or daughters, second wave or third wave. These categories are limiting and the conflict harmful for feminist politics. In order to avoid these pitfalls, a theoretical framework is developed that draws on the work of Karl Mannheim and post feminist cultural analyses to elucidate the significance of popular culture in marking a generation. This framework then enables an examination of the way feminist discourses are played out in popular culture and helps explain young women’s complex engagement with feminism. This thesis brings together interviews with young Australian women and an analysis of two television programmes that exhibit post feminist characteristics: Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives. It examines the ways in which young women critically engage with these texts and explores popular culture as an arena where feminist discourses are contested. The era is characterised as post feminist because of the entanglement of feminism with popular culture, but it is also marked by the intersection of equality feminism with a neoliberal emphasis on individualism. Within this context, second wave feminist discourses of equality have slipped into the rhetoric of choice, which has important implications for feminist theory. The pervasive sense of choice and opportunity circulated by these discourses obscures the structural limitations that continue to affect women’s lives and demand that women make the “right” choices, build a successful career, find a suitable long-term partner, and become a good mother. This thesis mobilises post feminism as a valuable analytical concept that can be used to characterise the current generation of young women, not simply because they have grown up after the height of second wave feminism, but because the prevailing discourses of this historical moment reflect both continuity with, and a challenge to, earlier feminist debates. The mainstreaming of many feminist ideas and their reflection in popular culture provides the conditions for new forms of feminism to emerge. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 127-138).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 297-310). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 241-256). Also available on the Internet.