This study explores, through participant observation and interviewing, the meaning of the experience of Cape Verdean women who participate in a base group of the national women's organization of Cape Verde, Organizacao das Mulheres de Cabo Verde (OMCV). The study addresses the significance of this type of organizational activity for Third World women, seeking to illuminate the perspective of women who participate in it. It also has three underlying purposes: (1) to fulfill a goal of feminist research to see the world from women's viewpoint; (2) to aid outside 'helpers' of such organizations to understand them more fully; (3) to contribute to theory-building about women organizing by examining multiple theoretical perspectives in light of a Cape Verdean group's reality. Based on 20 months of field research carried out during 1989-1991 with the OMCV base group in a low-income peri-urban neighborhood of the capital city, the study asks: What are the relationships between important themes in the women's lives and the activities and issues of their group? To answer this question, I studied the women's words about their lives and their group, revealed in individual interviews, group discussions, and informal conversation, and blended these with my participant observation experiences with the women, their group, and their community, situated within the national context. The study chronicles and reflects on this process of doing research across cultures using an interactive, interpretive approach within an openly feminist research program. From the study of the women's life stories, four major themes emerged: (1) the economic imperative and women's responsibility for survival, (2) the dynamics of help ties, (3) self-respect, pride, and status, and (4) issues of change and resistance. In the analysis of how these themes relate to women's organization activity, the help relationship symbolized by the madrinha, or godmother, appears key in defining group purposes, functioning, and relations. I suggest that the women's organization expresses tensions evident in Cape Verdean society at large involving gender, economics, and social relations and status, while it also serves as a subtle challenge to the status quo in the consciousnesses of women.

The dissertation investigates the embodied experience of fatness in spaces between subjectivity and subjection on one Internet newsgroup and one listserve. Literature on identity politics, computer-mediated communication, and the social construction of the body is reviewed as it relates to the possibility of individuals with shared characteristics and/or interests utilizing technology to transform meanings for their corporeal experience. Using the methods of critical ethnography, I provide an interpretation of the ways in which site participants fluidly invoke and reject dominant meanings for the fat body within their project of resignifying fat bodies. Emergent themes include narratives of personal fat experience, comparisons of fit within cyberspace and "real" space, discussions of the pleasures and pains of fat bodies, attempts at guarding borders of identity and community, explorations of the mutual constitution of identities and oppressions, and finally, strategies for reconceptualizing fat.

This dissertation is an exploration of the novel Gone with the Wind and its journey into Vietnamese readers' minds, specifically how the novel's concept of womanhood is perceived by Vietnamese women readers. It looks at the original text and a variety of Vietnamese translations to discover the perceptions of Vietnamese readers that may have formed from this Southern saga of the American Civil War. Chapter I traces the creation of Gone with the Wind from a Southern belle's experience of the Confederate's defeat, contextualized by women's viewpoints during the roaring 20s of the last century. Chapter II examines the characteristics of the translations into Vietnamese from English and Drench. It identifies the problems inherent in the translation process and highlight issues relating specifically to the Vietnamese language. This chapter explores various translation theories and practices and analyses the derivations that are due to the translators' viewpoints and their relation to the text. Chapter III discusses the reading and feedback process of a group of female lecturers in the English Department of Hochiminh City Open University in Vietnam. Their feedback is considered the precritical responses to the basic elements of a literary work such as the narrative's plot, characters, story, and ending. Chapter IV interprets the readers' treatment of the novel's concept of womanhood, especially the central female protagonist, Scarlett O'Hara, who dealt with the collapse of the plantation's system of values and the emergence of a new role for women. This dissertation concludes by showing that there is a strong link between Gone with the Wind and Vietnamese women readers, illustrating the reflection of Vietnamese society's interaction on a personal level. The novel's influence manifested itself in different ways in each of the respondents. This dissertation explores, through qualitative research, the meaning of Gone with the Wind for women readers in Vietnam and gives a fresh perspective of the novel's success.

This dissertation theorizes political resistance in the wake of critiques of the transcendental subject made by poststructuralist theorists. After a review of the theoretical approaches among U.S. rhetoricians to the "rhetoric of social movements" (1965-1985), I review the contributions of three French post-structuralists (Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jean Baudrillard) to theories of discourse and resistance, concluding with Michel de Certeau's correctives to them. The final two chapters propose a theory of political resistance which distinguishes rhetorical performance from rhetorical performativity to account for two forms of resistance in tension within the post-WWII "new social movements" in the U.S. Focusing specifically on the gay liberation movement, one chapter analyzes dance and popular culture (through Madonna's "Vogue" video and the cult it stems from/spawns) as sites of resistance where signifiers of gender, race, and sexuality are deployed, but evade the essentializing rhetorics and institutional forms of power seen in the field of identity. The final chapter analyzes the modes through which new right identity construction and gay liberation identity construction work in tandem, and in relation to black civil rights identity to constitute a contested field of power. I argue that identity is not a developmental accomplishment, but a deontic closure which both constitutes and is constituted by the discourse of "minority" in the U.S., and, therefore, related to a range of social practices from segmented advertising to legal claims to civil rights.