Focusing on girls who compete in downhill longboarding, this thesis examines how women are pushed to display typically "male" characteristics in order to succeed. With contemporary western society viewing attributes such as speed, being competitive, overcoming fear and coping with pain as typically masculine traits, the main research goal of this inquiry is to find out how female riders cope with maintaining their femininity in the masculinized world of downhill longboarding. The main focus is on observing how female riders cope with being a good rider and being feminine at the same time, primarily through the way this double-faced pressure is projected in the bodies of female downhill longboarders.The theoretical part of this thesis is mainly focused on a sport as a gendered/masculinized field and the ideal form of the body constructed by the sociocultural pressure and instructions which are associated with it. The analytical part of this thesis is focused on the experiences of Czech female downhillers and the way in which they negotiate their femininity/masculinity, perceived or otherwise, and how the gender order is projected onto their bodies. This thesis aims to reveal the ambivalences caused by the pressure to women to maintain the hegemonic femininity and be masculinized competitive sport...

This work is an exploration in which clothes are expanded in space, being the mediator between the body and the surrounding space. Aiming to explore clothes in spatial compositions through deconstruction, generating garment installations that challenge the perception and relationship of body, fashion, and architecture. It consists of a series of experiments that explore the space by opening up, deconstructing, and expanding garments, creating tension between the body, and the arranged or existing space. Exploring the material of design through experiments in order to find a better understanding of it, the research of this applied work is based on the ideas of experimental design research. Resulting in six examples of garment installations that challenge the viewpoint of the importance of clothes as it also proposes a new way of thinking in the communication between fashion and architecture.

In this thesis, non-binary people’s experience of gendered embodiment as well as inhabiting and navigating society is analysed. This is primarily done by using the theoretical framework of institutional lines, specifically applied through a trans studies perspective. Other important influences have been theories about how regulatory norms impact queer and trans subjectivities. Furthermore, special notice has been made of how social categorisations such as sexuality, class, and (dis)ability impact the non-binary subject’s experience of gender and of inhabiting society. This study is based on interview material produced through in-depth interviews with eleven non-binary Swedish people, as well as autoethnographical narratives produced by the author. The study shows that several different institutional lines impact the non-binary subject’s navigation through social space, as well as their experience of gendered embodiment. It was also clear that it was difficult for non-binary people to be recognised as coherent subjects, because of them breaking the regulatory norms that dictate intelligibility. Non-binary people are therefore often seen as the abject. This could be exacerbated if one not only deviated from the straight line of gender, but also from other lines and thus did not follow the expected trans line. It was clear that one’s experiences as a non-binary person could not fully be reduced to one’s position in relation to any specific line, be it gender, sexuality, class, or body normativity, but was rather a result of all those lines.

<p>Within the United States, infertility diagnoses are becoming increasingly commonplace, yet treatment often remains shrouded in stigma and silence. Consequently, for the women going through it, infertility is an isolating experience. Infertility is frequently conceived through notions of medicalization, which prompts a disembodied, scientific, ‘never give up’ discourse that often leaves women feeling disempowered and further alone. This study considers how individual narratives of infertility contributes to the organizing of a social identity of infertility, one which abuts and diverges from medicalized notions. In adopting theories related to narrative organizing, tenuous identity/identification, resilience, and social support this project engages a feminist-interpretivist framework. In doing so, this study draws upon a three-phase methodological engagement of (1) online ethnographic observations and auto-ethnographic reflections, (2) in-depth interviewing of participants narratives and networks related to (in)fertility, and (3) text mining and semantic network analysis of public discourses related to (in)fertility.</p><p>Findings from this project reveal how infertility is discursively-materiality organized to both embrace and disengage from medicalized logics. First, analysis of personal and organizational narratives illustrate how infertility is construed through competing tensions of loss, empowerment, and support. Second, identities were shown to be communicated as potentially tenuous, liminal, and/or challenged during the process of infertility as women cope with an ambiguous future; however, so too can identities be considered a source of strength and hope. Third, through conceptualizing resilience as a communicatively constructed process, this study showcases the embodied nature of resilience as it ebbs and flows throughout treatment. And fourth, in analyzing social and semantic networks this project interrogates individual and organizational discourses, building a more holistic, yet still thoroughly partial, understanding of effective supportive communication during treatment. Through this process, this study reveals how online support groups re-center the women’s body and emotions as central to the (in)fertility experience, while noting the disembodiment that occurs within health clinics. This study advances knowledge on emergent, embodied organizing and the communicative construction of resilience through considering the intrapersonal and embodied aspects of resilience. Through conceptualizing embodied organizing and embodied resilience, this project advances theories of antenarrative, emergent organizing, and self-persuasive rhetoric. Methodologically, this study contributes to qualitative inquiry by linking crystallization methodologies with network science. Additionally, this project offers recommendations for family members, friends, and medical professionals on how to promote resilience within women receiving infertility treatment.<b> </b></p><p><b> </b></p><div><br></div>

This dissertation develops a feminist materialist interpretation of the role the neuroendocrine system plays in the development of gender/sex differences in religion. Data emerging from psychology, sociology, and cognitive science have continually indicated that women are more religious than men, in various senses of those contested terms, but the factors contributing to these findings are little understood and disciplinary perspectives are often unhelpfully siloed. Previous scholarship has tended to highlight socio-cultural factors while ignoring biological factors or to focus on biological factors while relying on problematic and unsubstantiated gender stereotypes. Addressing gender/sex difference is vital for understanding religion and how we study it. This dissertation interprets this difference by means of a multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological approach. This approach builds upon insights from the cognitive and evolutionary science of religion, affect theory and affective neuroscience, and social neuroendocrinology, and it is rooted in the foundational insights of feminist materialism, including that cultural and micro-sociological forces are inseparable from biological materiality. The dissertation shows how a better way of understanding gender/sex differences in religion emerges through focusing on the co-construction of biological materiality and cultural meanings. This includes deploying a gene-culture co-evolutionary explanation of ultrasociality and an understanding of the biology of performativity to argue that religious behavior and temperaments emerge from the enactment and hormonal underpinnings of six affective adaptive desires: the desires for (1) bonding and attachment, (2) communal mythos, (3) deliverance from suffering, (4) purpose, (5) understanding, and (6) reliable leadership. By hypothesizing the patterns of hormonal release and activation associated with ritualized affects—primarily considering oxytocin, testosterone, vasopressin, estrogen, dopamine, and serotonin—the dissertation theorizes four dimensions of religious temperament: (1) nurturant religiosity, (2) ecstatic religiosity, (3) protective/hierarchical religiosity, and (4) antagonistic religiosity. This dissertation conceptualizes hormones as chemical messengers that enable the diversity emerging from the imbrication of physical materiality and socio-cultural forces. In doing so, it demonstrates how hormonal aspects of gender/sex and culturally constructed aspects of gender/sex are always already intertwined in their influence on religiosity. This theoretical framework sheds light on both the diversity and the noticeable patterns observed in gender/sex differences in religious behaviors and affects. This problematizes the terms of the “women are more religious than men” while putting in place a more adequate framework for interpreting the variety of ways it appears in human lives.

Fire and smoke were fundamental ritual forces in Mesoamerican religious worldview. Found in varied contexts (funerary processing, animation ceremonies, and desecratory rituals), fire and smoke were applied to multiple media (human bodies, architecture, and ceramics). In the Postclassic (AD 950–1524) Maya lowlands, burning both processed honored ancestors’ remains and violated enemies’ remains. Ceramic incense burners with deity effigies were used to burn resins to communicate with supernaturals. Here we consider whether fire and smoke were applied in similar fashion to human bodies and censer effigies in the Petén lakes region of northern Guatemala during the Postclassic period. Specifically we document and compare (1) archaeological contexts in which human remains were burned (or have associations with burning), (2) archaeological contexts of ritual use of effigy censers, and (3) descriptions of ritual contexts involving the use of fire and smoke from codices and ethnohistoric and ethnographic accounts. Comparing human remains to representations of bodies suggests that both were subjected to similar ritual processes but that the former were particularly necessary under some political, and religious and calendrical circumstances.

This thesis examines the conditions for professional and aspiring professional male theatre dancers across two separate field sites in Stockholm, Sweden. By analysing these conditions I aim to discuss how hegemonic masculine social norms inform and affect the lives of these male dancers and the consequences of those norms for the wider male population. Through interview, unobtrusive observation and dance participation I will scrutinise the male experience of dance work and training in order to understand the lives of professional male dancers and their perception of themselves and their work, as part of a very small minority of men in Swedish society. Through a comparative analysis of dance and sport, I suggest that the stark gender imbalance in dance work and training is indicative of a larger pattern of hegemonic masculine social norms that stymie male social development and undermine wider societal efforts towards gender equality.

This paper explores the field of museum interactions with a specific focus on the introduction of smell as a means to communicate the objects on display and create more memorable museum visits. Through literature, research, focus groups, and a substantial ideation phase I have found problems and design openings in the exhibition room. These, I have addressed by creating and testing a set of three olfactory display prototypes in the exhibition, all with a scent fitting not only the objects but also the exhibition room as a whole. The introduction of these interactive olfactory displays has resulted in a change in how the exhibition was perceived and what the visitors took with them from the experience. This is an exploration into a new and unknown field, contributing to the field of museums as well as the general field of smell interaction in space. It is also an exploration into how museum visits can be made more memorable by using the incredible ability of smells to spark associations and memories.

Indigenous dance music in Ghana serves peculiar roles in the lives of its practitioners from birth to death. This dissertation explores the role of the Kete dance of the Asante people as an Afrocentric agency of meaning-making. As a dance-music form, Kete is one of the most popular dances in Ghana and a major cultural attraction in the diaspora. Apart from ethnomusicological explorations of its music, not much has been done with regard to its movement element. I theorize Kete as a social construction that promotes and sustains culture through gestures. A performance of Kete at a particular context like a funeral can expose indigenous gender disparities, socio-cultural class structure, and embodied agencies for indigenous knowledge propagation. Through a qualitative research methodology including first-person methods of autoethnography and practical experiences, I examine my own experience and understanding of Kete as a practitioner since childhood and the experiences of selected participants in Ghana and the United States. The research also has an advocacy purpose through its affiliation with Afrocentricity. As a reflection of intelligent social structuring where dancers communicate through gestures, I explore the transition of Kete from the Manhyia palace in Kumasi (Traditional Category) to the Ghana Dance Ensemble (Academic and then Professional Category) in the University of Ghana from 1963 and explore the impact of neo-traditional structures on its proliferation today. Specifically, I explore the agency of the Kete dancer as centered within Kumasi and Accra, to ascertain to what extent this embodied knowledge can be explored through first-person methods to understand the structures of its proliferation and anticipated future developments. / Dance

Thesis advisor: Stephen J. Pfohl / Using qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with vegans of diverse backgrounds and body types, this study aims to investigate how vegans understand their own bodies and the bodies of others in relation to their consumptive practices and habits. The context of fatphobia in vegan activist spaces and communities surrounds this research as a tension within veganism that helps to elucidate the ways vegans use and engage with their bodies, further helping to understand not only vegan embodiment but also how fat vegans navigate these tensions with their own bodies. Vegans often engage with veganism as a tool for better understanding their own bodies and the social identities their bodies are associated with. This reflexivity causes them to not only concern themselves with how they relate to their own bodies but also with how others view and perceive their bodies. Thus, vegans respond to anxieties and fears about these perceptions by constructing their bodies in opposition to the stereotypes others apply to them (unhealthiness, preachiness, militancy, etc.). This may result in the exclusion of some bodies which are socially understood as fitting these roles (such as fat bodies as unhealthy) and, further, the ethical nature of vegan practices also causes these bodies to be seen as immoral or especially indulgent. This research helps to understand more precisely how vegans act as bodies in promoting their veganism and how they sometimes exclude other bodies in their attempts to defend vegan bodies. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.