My dissertation investigates the “museum” as a site of cultural politics intersecting with the spectacle of the female body. My study aims to extend the cultural and historical readings of museums and exhibitions and focuses on female encounters with the display, collection, and civic education functions of nineteenth-century exhibition phenomena. I identify the exhibition logic in an emerging national museum culture as a triangular dynamic of the host, the exhibit, and the viewer. In this triangle, the host is figured in different roles—as an exhibitor, as a representative of the patriarchal/imperialistic culture, and as an observer of the female body. Posing the female body as a locus of discipline and resistance, women writers in that period borrow this triangulated model to destabilize patriarchal power relations: Their heroines confront the host in a variety of exhibitions to gain a measure of agency and selfhood. My first chapter traces the host-exhibit-viewer relations in the increasing popular mass visual market beginning in the eighteenth-century and culminating in Great Exhibition of 1851. With the images of power, I give an overview of the uses of “exhibition” as a metaphor in both male- and female-authored fiction. Chapter Two explores the “freak show” as a metaphor, in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, a metaphor for women's marginalization and re-imaging of a self in a patriarchal society but also a metaphor that reinforces imperialist dominance. Chapter Three investigates the female spectatorship of visual art in Brontë's Villette as an act of subversion and a critique of the patriarchal constraints on women's visibility. Chapter Four examines, in George Eliot's treatment of her heroines' relations with men in the museum space in “Mr. Gilfil's Love Story” and Middlemarch, how the museum as a cultural classroom can become problematic when “culture” as field of knowledge is defined as exclusively masculine. In my readings, I seek to open new understanding of these authors and explore the dialogical complexity of museology, literature, and societal tensions.

This is a social and legal history of the role played by Vermont's courts in regulating sexual activity during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It relies on a quantitative and qualitative review of civil and criminal cases brought and disposed of in four of Vermont's county courts, as well as the decisions of Vermont's Supreme Court. Unlike urban areas that developed alternative administrative centers of regulatory power, Vermont's rural county courts were its most important site of sexual discourse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Civil suits were brought by and on behalf of women and girls for sexual defamation, sexual assault, breach of promise to marry, and bastardy, along with suits brought by fathers resulting from their daughters' seduction. Such suits had high success rates and awarded large monetary damages. Judges and juries focused more on the harm caused by uncontrolled male sexuality than on female moral transgressions. Men were on notice that they would be punished for violating sexual norms, including unwanted sexual advances. This study also examines how prosecutors, judges, and juries dealt with criminal sexual offenses such as adultery and forcible and statutory rape. Supreme Court decisions liberalizing the evidentiary requirements for a conviction coupled with concerns about a surging divorce rate and flagging morality led to a dramatic increase in adultery prosecutions after the Civil War. The state imprisoned hundreds of men and women for this offense. In forcible rape cases, courts allowed evidence of prior sexual acts on the part of the alleged victim to be used to impeach her credibility on the question of consent, but they also made clear that the question of consent depended on the woman's perspective. A man's perception that the sexual advance was welcome carried little weight. The state also raised the age of consent from eleven to fourteen (1886) and then sixteen (1898), leading to a surge in statutory rape prosecutions. As with forcible rape cases, guilty verdicts were obtained in a large majority of cases. And as with civil cases, judges and juries punished men for failing to control their sexual impulses.

This study of the contextual aspects of adolescent girls, sexual behavior examines the role of choice by adolescent girls, regarding their first time ever sex. In addition the study explores the factors that contribute to girls, choice to have sex for the first time. Narrative analysis, using semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions, was used to interview seventeen sexually active girls ages fourteen to nineteen. The analysis, conducted with a feminist perspective, revealed that girls perceived they exercised choice regarding first time ever sex and that they developed moral codes to determine the subjective rightness or wrongness of having sex with a boy. The following criteria rendered having sex with a boy the “right” thing to do: (1) the length of relationship, (2) the boy's “being there” for the girl, (3) the girl's feeling of love toward the boy, (4) the girl's trusting the boy, (5) the girl's sense that this was the right boy and the right time for her to have sex, (6) the girl's curiosity about sex, and (7) the girl's taking precautions to maintain herself infection-free during sex. Analysis also revealed that girls had a partial and superficial understanding of taking precautions to maintain themselves free from infection. Ten of the thirteen girls who used condoms during their first time sexual experience abandoned using condoms during subsequent sexual intercourse with the same boyfriend. Younger girls did not use condoms to protect themselves from infection. First time sex with boys paved the way for the girls to trust the boys not to give them infections during subsequent sexual activity. Some girls relied on medical documentation that stated the boy was “clean,” and girls believed that the documentation was valid for the duration of the relationship the girls had with the boys. Key implications include the need for (1) sex education to pre-adolescent girls prior to girls becoming sexually active, (2) addressing the gaps and misunderstandings regarding sexual disease transmission, (3) accurate and complete instruction about disease prevention, and (4) training practitioners to take accurate sexual histories and to be alert to misunderstandings about disease transmission.

This dissertation examines a body of popular arguments concerning gender and communication. In several important areas of popular cultural discourse, conflicts between men and women are regularly explained as misunderstandings caused by differences in communication style. This specific line of discourse is part of a larger picture where women and men are portrayed as fundamentally different groups, with different values systems, interpretive frameworks, and ways of using language. This miscommunication explanation for gender strife resonates with many men and women who find that it accurately reflects their experiences with the opposite sex. The overall purpose of this project is to identify the ways in which these discourses are used to make specific arguments about the meaning of perceived gender differences and to understand the consequences of those arguments. I examine popular representations of the miscommunication argument from a gender performance perspective. This perspective treats differences in communication behavior as the on-going performance of gender identity rather than as a simple product of gender identity. This perspective shifts attention away from identifying and verifying gender differences towards understanding the consequences persistent belief in gender differences. Women's communication style, as presented in popular literature, television, and participant comments, includes assisting others and deferring authority. At the same time, men's communication style is presented as a natural product of men's greater need for autonomy and independence. In self-help literature, these two different styles are used as a justification for men and women serving different roles in relationships and in the workplace. Women are portrayed as natural helpers at home and work while men are portrayed as better decision makers. Primetime television offered portrayals of men and women that closely parallel the different communication styles present in self-help literature. Finally, interviews with individuals about their response to a primetime television program revealed that many people believe that men and women have communication styles that match the styles presented in self-help literature. I conclude that the resonance of these differences is linked to the undeniable importance of communication in relationships coupled with the heterosexist bias of self-help literature and television representations of relationships.

This qualitative study investigates the individual, structural, and social systemic interconnections of conflict in a nonprofit organization. It confronts the simplicity of mainstream, popular resolution methods that typically over-individualize and frame organizational conflict as a personal problem. In contrast to traditional organizational diagnoses based on individual self-reporting of past conflicts and the reduction of conflict systems into isolated parts, this study captures organizational conflict interaction in the moment and emphasizes the complex entanglement of organizational conflict networks. In the tradition of ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation captures conflict-rich events over a compressed timeframe of sixteen months. Critical ethnographic elicitation methods filtered through a social justice perspective, probe insider stories to reveal patterns and themes of complex meaning systems that contribute to contextually grounded analyses. This study intimately follows the conflict story within an animal welfare organization that dared to address conflict, and in doing so, managed to clarify organizational identity, identify contradictions between their implicit values and explicit mission, and unravel routines and reform relationships to reorganize and reclaim their organization. Key findings include the role of conflict in revealing significant differences in underlying ideology and the relationship of conflict to gendered organizational processes. The approach to conflict resolution outlined in this study is invaluable to grassroots and social action organizations seeking to maximize conflict for organizational growth and development.

The association between sexual violence and gender inequality was examined using sexual offense data from two international data sources: the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) and the International Crime Victimization Survey (ICVS). Sexual violence was operationalized as reported rapes (Interpol data) and sexual offenses (ICVS data). Gender inequality was operationalized using a combination of political, economic, educational and health indicators. Predictor variables in addition to gender inequality included normative violence and social disorganization. Control variables included non-sexual violent offenses; these offenses were often strongly associated with sexual offenses. Regression analyses of cross-panel data found a non-significant positive association between gender inequality and sexual violence for the Interpol data (early and late 1990s). A significant negative relationship was found in the ICVS data for 1992 and 1996, the two years for which all the data were available. Change analyses found a significant negative association between increases in women's status and Interpol rapes. Results are consistent with the so-called traditional feminist hypothesis about gender inequality and rape: increases in women's status are associated with decreases in sexual violence.

Violence toward women and girls is a complex, pervasive and ubiquitous social problem. The material problem of epidemic levels of gender-based violence in the U.S.—incest, rape, dating and intimate partner abuse—exists within a cultural environment in which thousands of images of girls and women being harmed circulate daily. Much of this representation presents such experience as being pleasurable—if not for the victim then for the viewer. Competing with these images are representations that problematize violence toward women and girls, and, occasionally, connect violence with its traumatic consequences. How interpersonal violence and its reverberations are figured popularly and within the scholarly literature has material consequences in women's lives. The three primary goals of this research were: (1) to demonstrate how the ways women make sense of interpersonal violence are constitutively related to the ways violence against women is represented in popular culture and scholarly discourses; (2) to explicate the relationship between the postmodern media subject and the trauma subject; and (3) to develop and apply a communication of trauma approach to investigate the relationship between interpersonal and representational violence as contextualized within contemporary, postmodern media culture. This dissertation, based upon two studies, comprehensively examines the relationship between the ways violence is publicly figured and privately lived by 53 ethnically-, sexually- and class-diverse survivors of gender-based violence. Situated within the U.S. cultural terrain of the early 1990s, how victims of gender-based traumatic violence made sense of violence in the media, and, more basically, how they make sense of and heal from the interpersonal violence in their lives are examined. Data sources include: 6 months of participant observation in violence support groups, extended-length viewing focus groups (which screened made-for-television movies), and follow-up individual interviews. Analysis centered upon the communication strategies women employ to survive cultural violence, and how these strategies are constrained, enabled by, and embedded within the contemporary society dominated by popular culture and the mass media. Strategies participants were found to use to resist the implicit alienation of their experience and to voice themselves and their perspectives into the cultural symbolic and the discourses of history are discussed.

Celebrity gossip blogs have quickly established themselves as a new media phenomenon that is transforming celebrity culture. This dissertation is an examination of the impact of the technological and textual shifts engendered by new media on the use of gossip as a form of everyday cultural production. Broadly, I investigate the historical role of gossip media texts in celebrity culture and explore how celebrity gossip blogs have reconfigured audience engagements with celebrity culture. Following Gamson's (1994) approach to celebrity as a cultural phenomenon, I separate celebrity gossip blogs into three elements—texts, producers, and audiences—and examine the interplay between them using ethnographic methods adapted to the new media setting. I begin with an investigation of what is being said about celebrity on gossip blogs, supported by my five-week online fieldwork observation of six heavily-trafficked, commercially-supported celebrity gossip blogs. I focus on visual images and blogger commentary as the key elements of gossip blogs as media texts. I supplement these observations with oral interviews of the producers of these texts, the gossip bloggers. I argue that the blogger, as the primary author of the site, retains authority as a cultural producer of these texts. The final component of this study focuses on the reading and cultural production practices of celebrity gossip blog audiences using data gathered online and through a qualitative survey. I examine the various ways these practices support the emergence of community within these virtual spaces. While I claim that gossip is an active engagement with celebrity culture well suited to new media‘s emphasis on immediacy and interactivity, I conclude that an active audience is necessarily a resistant one. Blogs can be seen as a space for intervention into celebrity culture that allows bloggers and readers to challenge the power of the media industry to define celebrity culture. However, gossip blogs often uphold oppressive norms, particularly around questions of gender, race, and sexuality. Gossip is an important area of inquiry because it reveals the way women, the predominant audience for and participants on gossip blogs, may be implicated in the normative ideologies forwarded by the celebrity media.

Women are facing increasing financial responsibility, while at the same time, the consumer financial world is evolving at an extraordinary pace. These trends make a imperative that we better understand the evolving nature of gender-based inequities across our current socio-economic systems and intentionally examine those areas that are most essential in accelerating the narrowing of these gaps. The results of the study indicate that the assumption can on longer be made that women simply need better financial knowledge in order to reach a certain level of financial behavior, without increased access to capital. This study shows that the re-examination of a key component of financial literacy is necessary: the idea that financial knowledge leads to responsible financial behavior, and that responsible financial behavior is a result of financial knowledge. This finding may indicate that women have different dispositions regarding how they use the financial resources, knowledge, and skills that they have acquired.

This study investigated the extent to which gender moderates, and perceptions of fairness mediate, the link between marital power and overall marital satisfaction, as well as cortisol stress trajectories in response to marital distress. Study 1 examined a sample of 213 opposite sex newlywed couples from western Massachusetts, and focused on marital satisfaction as the dependent variable. Findings from the structural equation analysis suggested that perceptions of relationship fairness concerning the division of labor completely mediated the association between marital power and marital satisfaction for wives, but not for husbands. These results also implied an association between wives' perceptions of fairness and husbands' marital satisfaction. Study 2 looked at a subsample (N = 158 couples) of newlywed couples and investigated the effect of experiencing marital power on cortisol stress reactivity and recovery in response to a marital conflict discussion. Findings from the structural equation model suggested a significant association between marital power and stress reactivity & recovery for all participants, with low power wives exhibiting a failure to recover back to baseline levels of stress post-conflict. Methodological and measurement issues pertaining to the study of marital power are discussed, as well as potential implications of this work on future studies related to marital well-being.