In this analysis, I examine how stereotypes of working women function in some of the most popular film and television shows made in past thirty years. A study of films such as Working Girl and Disclosure and television shows such Ally McBeal and Sex and the City within a second-wave and postfeminist framework ultimately reveals that Hollywood stereotypes of working women have evolved very little and simply become more creatively disguised.

My capstone project is a multimedia audio and photography project that creates a conversation about the Millennial Generation’s views of individual identity and masculinity, with the hopes of deconstructing the socially constructed and exclusive notions of masculinity by defining a generation’s common sense. My piece is inspired by the portraiture of Chad States in Masculinities (2011) as well as Loren Cameron’s work in Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits (1996). The theoretical basis of my project relies heavily on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of common sense as well as José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification. Common sense refers to an instinctual, uncritical and largely unconscious way of perceiving and understanding. It is a collective noun, like religion yet it is not something rigid and immobile, but is continually transforming itself, enriching itself with scientific ideas and with philosophical opinions, which have entered ordinary life. Furthermore, disidentification is Muñoz’s third mode of dealing with a dominant ideology. This aspect neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology and hegemony. Disidentification works as the negotiating mechanism for common sense because it is against assimilation to mainstream masculinity as well as asks individuals to be their personal identity in spite of what hegemonic masculinity dictates. Thus, I hope to instill a new understanding of the common sense of the Millennial Generation, and how the notion of masculinity is personal, fluid, and disidentified.

“‘Am I Sexy Yet?’: Contextualizing the Movement of Exotic Dance and Its Effects on Female Dancers’ Self-image and Sexual Expression” looks at exotic dancing in three contexts––a pole fitness studio, a strip club, and a college dance concert––and how the movement is experienced by the dancers in each space. It questions how the movement changes meaning for the dancers, audience, and mainstream culture based on the context and location, even with similar content. Specifically, it analyzes how the experiences of the dancers affect their self confidence, sexuality, and sexual expression. Then, it applies Audre Lorde's “Uses of the Erotic” to their experiences to show how this movement can be looked at through a different lens as deeper, more freeing, and more transgressive than it is usually thought to be.

This thesis contemplates Walt Whitman's role in the lives of 19th and 20th century women writers and his significance to early American feminism. I consider the ways women inspired him to develop pro-feminist ideas about maternity, womanhood, and female liberation.

This thesis seeks to explore why so fewer women seek political candidacy in the United States. I begin by seeing if the political arena has progressed, if at all, within the last thirty years. A comparison between the number of female legislators in the United States versus other western industrialized nations is used to see if there are cultural or institutional causes of gender disparity in governments throughout the world. I then examine existing factors that both encourage and discourage women from running for political office. External factors include the type of electoral process the United States uses, Political Action Committees (PACs) marketed to support female candidates, media coverage, and incumbency blockades. A discussion on internally existing factors analyzes ever existing stereotypes of men, women and leaders that result both from socialization of gender roles and inherent anatomical discrepancies between males and females. After analyzing the various factors I conclude that immutable biological differences between men and women affect political ambition and will consequently affect how many women seek political candidacy. This finding may not sit well with activists striving for political parity, but it is a reality society needs to accept. We cannot use anatomical gender differences as justification to prevent women from seeking office. But understanding the inherent causes will stop the criticism and essentially the undermining of women in American politics.

This dissertation addresses the notable lack of the comic mode in contemporary ecofiction and aims to integrate humor and ecological inflection through the female narrative voice. Comedy and ecology rarely intersect in literary fiction. Ecofiction tends to be unfunny because the category grows out of the nonfiction tradition of nature writing, a genre that yields solemn, reverent, meditative essays that lack humor. Also, works of ecofiction can seem didactic, lacking the complexity, richness, and ambiguity that characterize literary fiction. Furthermore, literary critics often view comedic stories as lacking in literary quality. However, comedy has an intensifying effect on narrative, imbuing tragic moments with greater darkness and eliciting conflicted emotions in the reader. Literary fiction is characterized by this kind of ambiguity, evidenced by some of the finest works of contemporary literary short fiction that integrate comedy and tragedy. Accordingly, I aim to write comic stories that are imbued with loss, darkness or loneliness. Ecofiction provides a ripe context for my work, as does the young female voice. Ecofiction stems from the modern predicament of rootlessness, alienation, transience, isolation—of our detachment from place. Stories that feature characters afflicted by this malaise are “eco” in the sense that they make us more aware of our contemporary relationship (or lack thereof) to the natural world. Most significantly, these stories are ripe for the intersection of comic and tragic. In my own stories, I strive to create comic female first person narrators whose actions reveal lives deeply afflicted by loneliness, placelessness, and disconnection, and whose inner wildness provides the primary source of comic dramatic tension. These protagonists are motivated by a desperate need to forge meaningful connections in a world that is precariously poised on a foundation of contingencies and whose stories are simultaneously hilarious and heart-wrenching.

In this project, I focus on women's relationships with technology in the context of contemporary music culture. In choosing this focus, I intend to elucidate the interplay between social constructs of gender, power and technology as they enacted in a particular arena of artistic and economic activity. The nature of this interplay is informed by prevailing regimes of truth which have emerged through historical processes and which surface in diverse social contexts, of which this is but one. My intention here is to identify such regimes and to situate women's discourses within them. In this undertaking, I draw on a body of theory which lies at the conjunction of contemporary feminist critique and the later work of Michel Foucault on power and the 'technologies of the self' to explore a model of power which promises cogent strategies in the feminist project of reworking notions of gender and social agency. The inquiry enlists the perspectives of women students in a university school of contemporary music through a guided interview process. The technologies referred to include musical instruments both of traditional and twentieth century design, as well as a range of sophisticated systems of equipment used for recording and amplifying, for composing and arranging music. Through analysis of the interview data and through readings from social science and musicology, I identify a dominant discourse, or regime of truth, which privileges men and marginalizes women in the realm of techno-musical activity. Alongside this prevailing regime are women's discourses which both comply with and dissent from its assumptions. In examining these discourses, I seek insights into the processes by which women collude in their own exclusion from a male-colonized terrain, but also exercise power to insist on entry. The alignment of technology and masculinity in contemporary music creates serious training and employment disadvantages for women in many facets of the industry. I contend that this anomaly demands attention in the interests of socio-economic justice, in the interests of the industry itself through full utilization of human resources and market potential, and in the interests of women's desires to expand their creative options and employment opportunities.

The alternative food movement is often viewed as a more moral or ethical choice compared to the industrialized food system. Because the horrors of the industrialized food system have entered public knowledge through numerous documentaries and books, consumers are looking for an alternative. Purchasing local, organic, seasonal, and fresh produce is marketed as a solution. This thesis critiques the alternative food movement for its numerous flaws using an ecofeminist lens.

This dissertation is a multi-methodological project that examines the experiences of being both LGBTQ+ and disabled from an intersectional perspective through narratives constructed in virtual spaces. In this project, I address the question ‘how do individuals who identify as both disabled/chronically ill and LGBTQ+ negotiate these often contradictory identities?’ I also complexify this intersectional analysis by examining how LGBTQ+/disabled identities are constructed in relation to race, class, and gender. Additionally, by conducting virtual ethnography as the primary method of data collection, I explore questions pertaining to how members of LBGTQ+ and disability online communities engage in virtual identity construction and virtual community building. Through these projects I seek to bring disability and LGBTQ+ identities into the intersectionality literature and discourse that has frequently excluded, and at times even ignored, these positionalities.

This study focuses on the portrayal of women images in Russia, particularly the transformation from Soviet woman to modern woman based on the analysis of one of the oldest Russian women’s magazine- “Rabotnitsa”. The sample for this study covers two periods: three decades of Russia during the era of the Soviet Union period (1970-1990) and two decades of the Post-Soviet period (1991-2017). A total of 586 relevant images were identified; 311 images by Rabotnitsa over the three decades during the Soviet Union’s period by random sampling of 20 issues published by Rabotnitsa between 1970- 1990, and 275 images by Rabotnitsa by random sampling of 20 issues published in the Post-Soviet Union period. The study was analyzed using a quantitative content analysis and grounded in framing research. Goffman’s six categories of Gender Analysis guided this research with one category being appropriated from a study by Kang (1997). The findings displayed that the images of women in the Post-Soviet Union period did not significantly change from the images discovered among the last three decades of Soviet Union period in the fifth category by Goffman. However, circulation of stereotypical portrayal of women did change in two categories- “Licensed Withdrawal” and “Independence”.