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Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file as well as 2 gif files and 10 jpg files. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on March 23, 2009) Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis advisor: Devin O. Pendas / Thesis advisor: Paul Breines / "Man's Duty to Woman: Men and the First Wave of German Feminism, 1865-1919" charts the modernization of gender relationships in Imperial Germany through an exploration of German men's engagement with both organized feminism and the so-called "Woman Question." An examination of German men's contributions (as well as challenges) to feminist newspapers, women's suffrage societies, women's educational and vocational organizations, and the discourse of expanding women's civil and political rights illuminates not only the ways in which German men helped shape the "first wave" of German feminism, but also the process by which German men were, in turn, shaped by feminism and women's breach of a male-defined public sphere during the second wave of the Industrial Revolution. While Germany is better known for its misogynistic intellectual legacy of thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as the maxim of "Kinder, Küche, und Kirche" (children, kitchen, and church) used to describe the so-called "women's sphere," my dissertation demonstrates that the cause of German women's rights enjoyed a broad base of male support during the Imperial era and that women's reforms were pivotal to progressive liberal, socialist, and conservative social policies. My examination of male allies, therefore, counterbalances and critiques the longstanding view of Imperial German society and German men as fundamentally hostile to women's rights. Male allies of German feminism, I contend, were motivated by a twin mission to genuinely improve the lives of and opportunities for women in the industrial economy, and to utilize feminine energies--both spiritual and biological--for their own ideological designs. While these male allies retained some degree of principled commitment to expanding women's opportunities in Germany society over time, they were opportunistic men, as well, who sought to harness and direct the power of the "eternal feminine," a power which the moderate female-led feminist movement celebrated and deployed in their own work. My dissertation also considers the ways in which German men reconciled their own masculine identity with their support of reforms that ultimately undermined male hegemony. In the late 1870s, after female leaders took the helm of women's educational and vocational associations and began to embrace the rhetoric of maternalist feminism, men committed to women's reforms were forced to carve out new forms of pro-woman and feminist advocacy within, or alongside of, woman-led feminist organizations. As a result, male allies of German feminism developed a variety of masculinities. Although a few feminist men like Karl Heinzen, Georg von Gyzicki, and Hanns Dorn advocated a gentler, egalitarian masculinity that rejected most aspects of traditional masculinity, the majority of male friends of first wave feminism embodied a hyper-masculinity to balance their commitment to increasing women's social, economic, and (in some cases) political power. The act of becoming a "modern German man" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century necessarily entailed figuring out how to retain one's manliness and maintain refuges of male authority in a world in which women were becoming ever more powerful and visible. Male allies of German feminism represent an essential case study in this project of modernizing masculinity. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

“This Day, We Use Our Energy for Revolution” is a collaborative ethnography of activist endurance, which I have researched and written alongside the leaders of Women With A Vision (WWAV) in New Orleans, a black feminist health collective founded in 1989. Grounded in three years of fieldwork and a decade of engaged partnership, this dissertation centers the often-hidden histories, practices, and geographies of struggle in America’s zones of abandonment and asks how visions for living otherwise become actionable. Two events frame its inquiry: On March 29, 2012, WWAV overturned a law criminalizing sex work as a “crime against nature,” thereby securing the removal of more than 800 people from the Louisiana sex offender registry list; two months later, on May 24, still unknown arsonists firebombed and destroyed the organization’s headquarters. Using a multidisciplinary approach, this dissertation excavates the histories of violence and struggle that surround these events in order to render visible a complex geographic story of religion, conquest, and refusal. Post-Katrina New Orleans has been imagined as a “resilient” city fulfilling secular visions for progress and development. I argue, by contrast, that this spatial project of renovation rests on centuries-old colonialist logics, wherein blackness figures as the foil upon which “resilience” establishes its own significance. As such, I read the attacks on WWAV not as exceptional, but rather as clues into the enduring spatial threat that black women’s material, spiritual, and intellectual labors pose. For generations, southern black women have been doing history outside of established historiography. Their archives take many forms: texts written, bodies resurrected, communities made whole. So do their narratives. The deft two-step of southern black women’s history-making both refuses and reframes the dominant discourses into which they enter, as well as the places they have been assigned by white supremacy, gender injustice, and state power. I argue that this generations-honed black feminist praxis opens new directions for understanding the work of crafting social life and political vision since emancipation. Complementing historical studies on how black women fashioned authority within mainline and charismatic Christian institutions, this dissertation looks beyond the pews to the blues, to front porches and to Afro-Caribbean traditions––to locate and theorize black women’s ethics, aesthetics, and epistemologies for crafting more livable human geographies.

The scholarly field of traditionally religious women has during the last decade gone from a so called “paradox-approach” which identifies women’s agency with the capacity of acting autonomously – something most clearly demonstrated through acts of resistance – to a nonparadox approach defining agency as a continuum encompassing both resistance to and compliance with traditionally religious structures. While the latter approach assumes that women’s participation in traditional religions is not necessarily a paradox – mainly because some women value religious submission – this thesis argues that the paradox of women and religion becomes essential when speaking about religious feminism. This has proven particularly evident in this study’s Grounded theory approach to blog posts written by Mormon feminists. By combining theories on cognitive dissonance with religious ambivalence this thesis finds that Mormon feminist bloggers express an agency of virtuous ambivalence where they perceive the relationship between their faith and their feminism as dissonant but simultaneously describe this as an ambivalence of religious virtue which bestow upon them a sense of freedom, authenticity and creative potential.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 284-302).

It has become commonplace within feminist theory to claim that women's lives are constructed by multiple, intersecting systems of oppression. In this thesis, l challenge the consensus that oppression is aptly captured by the theoretical model of "intersectionality." While intersectionality originates in Black feminist thought as a purposive intervention into US antidiscrimination law, it has been detached from that context and harnessed to different representational aims. For instance, it is often asserted that intersectionality enables a representational politics that overcomes legacies of exclusion within hegemonic Anglo-American feminism. largue that intersectionality reinscribes the political exclusion of racialized women as a feature of their embodied identities. That is, it locates the failure of political representation in the "complex" identities of "intersectional" subjects, who are constructed as unrepresentable in terms of "race" or "gender" alone. Further, largue that intersectionality fails to supplant race- and class-privileged women as the normative subjects of feminist theory and politics. [...] / Dans la théorie féministe, l'énoncé selon lequel la vie des femmes est structurée par de multiples systèmes d'oppression qui se croisent est devenu un lieu commun. La présente thèse conteste l'accord général que le modèle théorique connu comme « l'intersectionalité » explique adéquatement l'oppression. Alors que l'intersectionalité a ses origines dans le féminisme noir comme intervention spécifique dans la loi antidiscriminatoire des États-Unis, elle a depuis été arrachée à ce contexte et consacrée à d'autres buts. Par exemple, on affirme souvent que l'intersectionalité permettrait une politique de représentation qui surmonte l'héritage d'exclusion du féminisme hégémonique anglo-américain. Je soutiens que l'intersectionalité réinscrit l'exclusion politique des femmes racialisées, cette fois comme caractéristique de leurs identités incarnés.[...]

This thesis argues that in North America since the late 1980s, young women's interest in feminism has been expressed through participation in feminist music subcultures. The project provides an overview of the studies of culture, musical subculture, and gender and music making, as well as an historical context of feminism and a discussion of the relationship between second and third wave feminism. / The first case study explores Riot Grrrl's roots in the DIY activism of DC hardcore punk, its links to the female-oriented indie music scene of Olympia, Washington, and the subculture's use of alternative media. The second study examines efforts to integrate queer politics into third wave feminism through lesbian punk rock music subculture. The final study of electronic feminist punk rock examines how young feminists use alternative media such as zines, internet message boards, web sites, music making, and performance to educate young women about sexual abuse and homophobia. / Analysis of the Riot Grrrl, lesbian punk rock, and electronic feminist punk rock subcultures demonstrates how young women claim spaces for their own feminist politics, even if they have gone relatively undetected by the mainstream culture.