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In this thesis, I provide an analysis of 1960s American popular culture by examining Playboy, "The Playboy Philosophy," Cosmopolitan, and Sex and the Single Girl. These cultural artifacts furthered the feminist movement by challenging gender structures and sexuality. I discuss how these publications focused on the advancement of the individual through careerism, consumerism and sexuality. These publications assisted in challenging and breaking down various aspects of gender and sexual boundaries and assisted in reworking social limitations that kept women from advancing themselves outside of the pre-set gender roles of domesticity. Regardless of the traditional feminist critique of Hugh Hefner and Helen Gurley Brown, this thesis argues that in fact these popular culture icons and their publications worked to re-negotiate sexual liberation, which assisted in furthering women's liberation. This thesis analyzes the writings and advertisements of these publications and shows that Hugh Hefner and Helen Gurley Brown have positive correlations to feminist discourse.

This study explores the historic relationship between pop music divas and gay male fandom. It charts fan experiences from the early 60s with Judy Garland to contemporary times with pop diva Lady Gaga. This project also gives a description of the embodied experience of Brett Farmer's "queer sublimity of diva reception." Farmer (2005) argues that diva worship among gay men has become a queer sublimity, "the transcendence of a limiting heteronormative materiality and the sublime reconstruction, at least in fantasy, of a more capacious, kinder, queerer world" (p. 170). Using the methods of participant observation in drag performance and karaoke singing, performance ethnography, and autoethnography, I attempt to understand how a diva's performance can influence the lives of gay men and how it can inspire visions of a more perfect world for everyone.

This thesis argues that the inscription of bodies is necessary in order to constitute the cosmos, gender and sex. A study of the Vedic cosmogonic mythologies of the deities Purusha and Prajapati illustrates the ways in which sacrifice, as a form of inscription, constitutes the cosmos by ordering and fashioning the boundaries of the bodies of the deities through differentiation and unification. An analysis of samskaras, or consecratory rites of The Law Code of Manu, show that they operate as regulatory norms in order to constitute sex and gender. But the instability and unnaturalness of the categories of gender and sex are exposed when an analysis of the samskara rituals of the bride and student show that performative acts and speech involved in their respective rites are nearly identical. This discussion of bodies, gender and sex is founded on Judith Butler's work to show how bodies, sex, and gender are also social and cultural constructs. In particular, Butler's work with performativity reveals the ways in which performative action and speech acts constitute people through their stylized and strained repetition. It is this repetition that proves to be deceiving as it creates the illusion that sex and gender are inherent to bodies. We discover that the problems maintaining the appearance of these categories is experienced in both the cosmogonic myths and with the wife and student.

My study highlights a link of U.S. American hypermasculinity running through Cormac McCarthy's two novels Blood Meridian (1985) and All the Pretty Horses (1992), Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), and James Baldwin's Another Country (1960). My literary interpretations of these texts suggest that U.S. American hypermasculine man originated in the American frontier and transformed into a definition of hegemonic masculinity embraced by many southern rural American men. These southern rural American men then concocted the myth of the black rapist in order to justify the mass murder of African American men after Reconstruction, inadvertently creating a figure more hypermasculine than themselves. Many black men embraced the myth of the black rapist as well as the baser patriarchal aspects of white male southern power. Consequently, black hypermasculinity evolved into the paragon of American hypermasculinity. Failed Heroes further argues that some protagonists in postwar American literature heroically fail in order not to perpetuate hypermasculinities. Continuing a modernist trend of anti-heroism, the selected protagonists develop into marginalized men due to their failure to live up to hypermasculine societal expectations. The protagonists' failure to perpetuate hypermasculinities proves heroic since it illustrates the destructiveness of these sensibilities; as a result, a sense of ironic heroism emerges from the narratives. In Blood Meridian, set in the mid-nineteenth century U.S. American West, the kid fails heroically to construct a masculine identity outside of the textual order of the judge, indicting the hypermasculine philosophies of the judge and calling into question the book's violence. In no way is the kid a classic hero; rather, his collapse exists as a direct critique of the judge's destructive philosophies. In All the Pretty Horses, set in the mid-twentieth century U.S. American South, John Grady fails to actualize his cowboy fantasy, but proves heroic in exposing its danger and destructiveness. At the end of the novel he vanishes into the countryside a failure, but unlike the mythic cowboy, he assumes the role of heroic failure because his narrative contributes to the relinquishment of a destructive male myth. In Song of Solomon, set in Ohio and Virginia during Reconstruction and the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movements, Milkman Dead functions as a black man who has the opportunity to break free from choking definitions of black masculinity. In the end he fails to break free and flies to Africa, leaving his family and his only hope at real freedom, his aunt Pilate, to die. Continuing a cycle of male flight at the expense of his family, community, and cultural guide renders him a failure. Morrison's final critique of hypermasculinity positions Pilate as the failed hero and shifts the emphasis of the novel to the women who represent victims of kinship systems and the incest taboo. The incest in the novel functions as a metaphor for Pilate's philosophy that black identity ought to come from black culture, a notion I call cultural incest. Another Country, set in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s, details the plight of an urban African American man struggling to reconcile his homosexual desire with the black hypermasculine cool pose he dons as overcompensation. Rufus Scott's death proves heroic as a critique of the rigid definitions of urban black masculinity. African Americans, and by extension all Americans, might employ their U.S. American history of oppression as a platform for a new vision of masculinity based on heteronormative failure and queerness. The association of blackness with oppression, and as a result non-normative sexuality, presents an opportunity to redefine blackness as abjection. The very failure of African Americans in measuring up to destructive notions of hypermasculinity might exist as a new definition of blackness and masculinity for all Americans.

In this thesis, I explore the perceived character of Islamophobia in American society, and how Islamophobia is embedded in the everyday lived experiences and identity negotiations of a sample of Middle Eastern immigrants, ten years post-9/11. Data consist of 13 qualitative interviews with first-generation Middle Eastern immigrants, including Muslims, Christians, and those who claim no religion. Findings suggest that perceived discrimination and cultural hostility vary across both gender and religion. Women who cover with the hijab perceive far more discrimination and humiliating experiences than men or women who do not cover in the sample. Iranians also receive extremely poor treatment, especially from border patrol agents in airports, regardless of religion. Overarching themes of identity negotiation include: (1) a Muslim First identity; (2) the individualizing of the Muslim faith through modified religious practices and diverse social networks; and (3) negotiating the Iranian vs. Persian identity. I conclude that while overall trends of discrimination are perceived to be receding from their peaks in the 9/11 backlash; there is a real possibility for sustained hostility towards those who are visibly Muslim, particularly for women, which has implications for trends in identity negotiation.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the relationship that love and romance have to young women’s experiences of and decisions to engage in heterosexual intercourse for the first time. Inspired by Sharon Thompson’s (1995) book Going All The Way, I wanted to listen to young women’s stories about love, romance and sex in order to better understand their first sexual experiences. I have interviewed six women based on their age (18-23), on whether their first experiences with sex were both heterosexual and consensual, and on whether their decisions to have ‘sex’ for the first time were influenced by a romantic relationship. I analyse the interview transcripts, contextualizing them within the relevant literature, and explore the ways popular culture and media might have influenced the girls in my study. I am concerned with intercourse because I want to gain a better understanding of young women’s experiences with it and to recognize what love and sex might mean to them. I was surprised to find that, even with third wave feminist ‘empowerment’ discourse and hyper-sexualized media and popular culture, the six women I spoke with felt that sex is about an expression of love and a “deeper connection of intimacy” (Krissy) rather than about empowerment or the fun of ‘doing it’. Even though I required that participants needed to have been influenced by a romantic relationship in their decisions to have intercourse for the first time, it was interesting to see the extent that they valued love in their relationships when love was not part of the criteria required to participate. The findings from this study will be useful to sex educators, including myself, who work with young women as well as to parents who might be able to worry less about their daughters, knowing that some girls are looking for love and commitment when they engage in intercourse, not simply casual sex or hook-ups. / Thesis (Master, Kinesiology & Health Studies) -- Queen's University, 2011-06-15 12:45:08.093

In making a distinction between secondary and fractured worlds, we can begin to determine the possibilities that fantasy literature, as a wider subject, holds for female characters and for feminine themes. These two areas of fantasy represent very different possibilities for women and the feminine, as a result of their approaches towards the presentation of ideology and authority. These approaches find their root most clearly in the creation of a story’s place and time, a fact I will explore through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “chronotope.” For, though both high fantasy and the fantastic question the real, representing, as Rosemary Jackson writes, a “dissatisfaction with what ‘is,’” they undermine the structure of that reality to very different degrees, with one mode seeking out a stabilizing transcendence, while the other revels in an ambiguous immanence. The creative response to this critical exploration will both imaginatively reflect on and practically test the initial questions posed and arguments made, in an effort to more personally understand how each tradition does or does not make room for women and the feminine.

This thesis provides a comparative analysis of the gender-differentiated outcomes of three different types of development models implemented in Latin America: industrialization by import substitution, structural adjustment programs, and the agroexport model. In undertaking this thesis, I attempted to answer three related questions: first, were women affected differentially than men were by the implementation of these three models. Second, if women were differentially affected, was their experience also conditioned by other factors, like the sector in which they found employment, their location in rural or urban environments, and their level of education. Finally, given that both of the answer to the former two questions was yes, I attempted to answer the question of why this was happening. In answering this final question, I used the analytical framework provided by feminist economics. Ultimately, I posited that while women’s differential experience was determined in part by certain domestic and individual level factors, like cultural norms and laws preventing women from working in the formal economy, much of their experience has to do with the male bias that inheres in much of classical and neoclassical economic theory.

James Deen and his distinct following of fans has allowed for a discussion of what pornography means to women and teenage girls to be teased out. His fans are vocal, public and unashamed in their fascination with him, dismissing previously held ideologies that porn be a clearly private activity that is shameful to be addressed publicly; especially for women. James Deen’s uniquely unintimidating demeanor, both physically and personally, has made him more forgivable for his mistakes (i.e. rape “joke” Tweets), evidence of an intense desire for women to find porn that they can relate to and positively consume. Despite his shortcomings, James Deen is immensely popular among women and because of this, brings to light my critique of the limited definition of feminist pornography as it stands today in academia. James Deen works against the grain of the porn industry, representing a new type of porn star that lends women their own gaze and further access to genuine pleasure intended for them. When James Deen breaks the common subject-object barrier of mainstream porn by pleasuring women on-screen, he disrupts the visual coding that holds the patriarchal gaze together at its seams, and works to produce female pleasure as a sexual truth. Not only that, but his consciousness around consent further allows women to be able to identify sexual pleasure with roles of submission. This construction of power-knowledge-pleasure to include women, and enthusiastic consent, aligns him with feminist porn aims to primarily focus on women, sexual openness and not shame, and sex positivity and not negativity. Moving beyond the foci of James Deen’s films and his personality, the theory of disidentification is integral to understanding some women’s relationship with him, and how even the more complicated aspects of porn should be considered for inclusion within the definition of feminist porn. To ignore this survival tactic is to silence women’s participation in an already exclusionary industry. To include disidentificatory practices in feminist porn is to take into account the convoluted, nonlinear and illogical ways women and teenage girls are consuming porn. When the definition is opened up to include all porn that “works on and against dominant ideology” (as James Deen’s does), experienced anxieties due to inconsistencies between one’s erotics and politics can be relieved, fantasy is further understood as a real and validated sexual tool, and masochism’s role in porn is logically brought into this dialogue. When fantasy is accepted as a complex and mysterious phenomenon, disenfranchised demographics such as women are given license. Masochism is no longer limited to an absent and repressed tendency that places women in a punished state. James Deen’s masochistic aesthetic threatens patriarchal dogma and offers up something new to the world of pornography. While James Deen does not profess to be a feminist, his porn practices and personality set him apart from the majority of the mainstream porn world and within the feminist porn sphere. In the end, the good that he is doing in providing women and teenage girls an option in an otherwise barren landscape of phallocentric porn should be enough to earn him academic scholarship and inclusion in the realm of feminist pornography.