Providing a new perspective on The Adventures of David Simple and its sequel David Simple: Volume the Last, this thesis reveals the utopian disillusion that causes the collapse of the ideal community in Sarah Fielding¡¦s novels. David Simple idealizes human relationships, but at a price of glossing the weakness in David and his family members that stains their ideal utopia. The problematic feminine utopia and the simulated intention of the utopian leader¡XDavid Simple¡Xgive rise to the ruin of this benevolent community. The thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter attempts to interpret the novel by emphasizing what it glosses over rather than by celebrating the admirable virtues in the David family; such a skeptical frame of mind with respect to Sarah Fielding¡¦s David Simple is rarely seen. Chapter Two connects Utopianism further with Sarah Fielding¡¦s novels. Sarah Fielding adopts not only the traditions of the utopian genre but also innovates it in David Simple. Some features of it, however, develop utopian disillusions that can hardly be overcome. In the third chapter, we switch our focus to the feminine perspective, reading the novels as a feminine utopia. The ambiguities within their feminine utopia within the utopian community bring on its final failure. Chapter Four investigates the human relationships of the David family, exhibiting the unspoken intentions of the protagonist¡XDavid Simple. Both in The Adventures of David Simple and in Volume the Last, money is an essential instrument for plot movement; David wisely uses money to exchange it for friendship and a new-styled family. We are stunned to find that, what David searches for, however, is not true friendship. He attempts to reconstruct an ideal family by collecting friends. At the end of the novels, David successfully purchases a new family, but he disappoints the expectant readers who shared his adventure for more than nine years in searching for and believing in true friendship. The conclusion of this thesis indicates the need of a suspicious attitude in reading David Simple. Such an attitude does justice to the growing darkness in Fielding¡¦s own vision, and deepens her achievement as a writer.

This study examines Anglophone Caribbean national identities to interrogate multiple and varied economies that manage citizens in the interest of economic and social production and/or the policing of national identities. It is particularly concerned with the gendered character of these economies. The formation and preservation of these national identities rely heavily on gender and sexual difference as Anglophone Caribbean national identities are inextricably linked to expressions of Afro-Caribbean masculinity. Thus I analyze novels and cultural representations of Afro-Caribbean masculinity in cricket, calypso and chutney-soca music in Trinidad's carnival. I also examine Afro-Caribbean religions, Revivalism and Rastafarianism, as well as Afro-Caribbean practices of masking. I examine these practices in order to interrogate the reproduction of colonial practices of marginalization and exclusion. These colonial practices, I argue, are inherent in the cultural politics that inform these cultural performances while denying modes of national belonging that refuse dictated performances of national identities. The literary and cultural performances in this project span three epochs in Caribbean history: post emancipation, independence, and post independence to assess the shifting cultural landscapes that shape postcolonial subjectivities. In Sylvia Wynter's The Hills of Hebron and Orlando Patterson's The Children of Sisyphus, I examine sexual economies in which power is negotiated and contested in a struggle to chart the gendered borders of citizenship and production. I then turn to Lakshmi Persaud's For the Love of My Name to analyze violence exacted against ethnically marked national collectives as an instrument of political and economic aggression that disproportionately affects women. My critique of Earl Lovelace's The Dragon Can't Dance and contemporary performances in calypso and chutney-soca carnival competitions, considers how operative traditions seek to govern post-independent cultural politics. By drawing parallels between the formation of Afro and Indo-Trinidadian nationalisms, I argue that these identity formations establish cultural difference while also dictating cultural performances to advance and police national identities. Lastly, I engage Lovelace's Salt, Garfield Ellis' Such as I Have and contemporary discourses concerning cricket performance, remuneration, and women's limited access to cricket. I argue that cricket becomes a cultural commodity in the perpetuation of a regional national identity that is dependent on gender constructs. Thus this study demonstrates how representations of culture can be mobilized to challenge ideologies and political practices of exclusion, marginalize women in the formation and performance of national identities and govern cultural politics.

The sculpture exhibition examines the notion of the cyborg as an autonomous female existing in a non-utopian future still bound by historical, social, and economic conditions of patriarchy.

The sculpture exhibition examines the notion of the cyborg as an autonomous female existing in a non-utopian future still bound by historical, social, and economic conditions of patriarchy.

This essay investigates women’s situation at home and in society, in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, from a gender performance perspective. The essay also explores the pedagogical implications of using the novel in the EFL classroom. The gender performance perspective is explored through the analysis of three female characters, Ammu, Mammachi and Baby Kochamma, whose lives reflect women’s struggle to escape traditional caste values, patriarchy and colonial power. The pedagogical perspective focuses on existing trends in literature and language teaching and the possibilities that postcolonial literary texts have to offer in the EFL classroom.

Many scholars in the field believe that identities are fluid without question. Butler’s “fluidity of identities,” for instance, describes the numerous variations in gender identities that denaturalize gender, but not consider its racial dimensions (179). Butler analyzes drag performance as a model to show how gender identities are fluid, suggesting agency and social mobility in everyday life. But what is most striking to me about fluidity of identities is the assumption that everyone has fluid identities with scarcely any regard for how racialized stereotypes fix identities (Hall 1997, 258). Fixity is the repetition of colonial power over racialized subjects rendering them without agency and access (Bhabha 94). Fixity uses stereotyping, which is a process of constructing “composite images” about groups of people, and that hold certain identities within “symbolic boundaries” (Brantlinger 306). As a result, this dissertation challenges the universality in a fluidity of identities by examining three case studies in Caribbean racialized gender identities, often thought to be fluid because of multi-ethnicity, but discriminate against, and erase blackness or “Africanness,” in race theories of “whitening” (blanquemiento), “darkening” (negreado), color-casting, and colonial stereotypes of “miscegenation” throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Through performance analyses of three black and "miscegenated" Anglophone Caribbean performers Denise “Saucy Wow” Belfon in Trinidad carnival crossdressing, Carlene “The Dancehall Queen” Smith in Jamaican dancehall transvestism, and Staceyann Chin in American performance poetry with racialized “androgyny,” I examine the figures of Creole, La Mulata, Dougla and “half-Chiney” by these women in their performance genres in order to investigate whether identities are as fluid as Butler suggests, and to chart their fixities. Focusing on fluidity alone risks denying inequalities and the lack of social mobility restricting access to marginalized people. Belfon, Smith and Chin manipulate racialized “drag” by simultaneously crossing race and gender in masquerade traditions of Trinidad carnival, Jamaican dancehall, and in the orality and embodiment in American performance poetry in performances I call black liminal displacements, defined as self-stereotyping and self-caricaturing. However fluid racialized gender identities may appear to be, I argue that racialized gender identities are not definitively fluid because racial stereotypes fix identities. / text

This dissertation features the stories of drag king performers. Through life story interviews coupled with participant observations, and informed by gender performance, poststructuralist, and psychoanalytic theories, this project examines the ways in which drag performers construct, take up and perform multiple subjectivities and how they benefit from multiple knowledges in their learnings and unlearnings. Through an examination of the creation and circulation of these drag king pedagogies, I suggest ways in which drag performers create and sustain gendered knowledge, while navigating difference and working with multiple discourses of identity, oppression, and power in a socially and economically diverse city. Participants’ perceptions of their gender identities point to the ways in which identity categories are insufficient. Each participant uses an existing identity label (e.g., transgender, tranny, boi) or a combination of existing labels, to understand their gender identities, even as their narratives point to the failures of fixed categories. It is my contention that the narratives of these particular performers highlight the multiplicity of all selves, and the ways in which all learnings and unlearnings are fragmented. Thus, drag king narratives have significant pedagogical value in examining the relationships between subjectivities and knowledge.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Sue Zschoche / In 1942, the U.S. Army and Navy announced the creation of their respective women’s military services: the WAAC/WAC and the WAVES. Although American women had served alongside the military in past conflicts, the creation of women’s military corps caused uproar in American society. Placing women directly into the armed services called into question cultural expectations about “masculinity” and “femininity.” Thus, the women’s corps had to be justified to the public in accordance with American cultural assumptions regarding proper gender roles. “Fashioning Femininity for War: Material Culture and Gender Performance in the WAC and WAVES during World War II” focuses on the role of material culture in communicating a feminine image of the WAC and WAVES to the American public as well as the ways in which servicewomen engaged material culture to fashion and perform a feminine identity compatible with contemporary understandings of “femininity.” Material culture served as a mechanism to resolve public concerns regarding both the femininity and the function of women in the military. WAC and WAVES material culture linked their wearers with stereotyped characteristics specifically related to contemporary meanings of “femininity” celebrated by American society, while at the same time associating them with military organizations doing vital war work. Ultimately, the WAVES were more successful in their manipulations of material culture than the WAC, communicating both femininity and function in a way that was complementary to the established gender hierarchy. Therefore, the WAVES enjoyed a prestigious position in the mind of the American public. This dissertation also contributes to the ongoing historiographical debate regarding World War II as a turning point for women’s liberation, arguing that while the seeds of women’s liberation were sown in women’s wartime activities, those same wartime women were firmly convinced that their rightful place was in the private rather than the public sphere. The war created an opportunity to reevaluate gender roles but it would take some time before those reevaluations bore fruit.

This thesis considers mid-20th century portrayals of working-class longshoremen’s masculinity within the context of emerging middle-class gender constructions. I argue that although popular culture presents a roughly standardized depiction of longshoremen as “manly men,” these portrayals are significantly nuanced to demonstrate the difficulties working-class men faced as they attempted to navigate socio-cultural and socio-economic shifts related to class and the performance of their male gender. Specifically, I consider depictions of longshoremen’s disruptive masculinity, male identity formation, and masculine-male growth as reactions to paradigmatic shifts in American masculinity. Using three aspects of longshoremen’s non-work lives presented in A View from the Bridge, “Edge of the City,” and “On the Waterfront”—the house, the home, and leisure/recreational activity—I ground discussions of the longshoremen’s negotiation of masculinity within a conceptual framework based in masculinity studies, social construction, and psychoanalytic criticism. To both complement and supplement the core literary and cultural analyses presented in this text, oral history interviews have been included to provide a contextual basis for understanding longshoremen culture in the 1950s.

I evaluate the ways in which newspaper articles constructed the gendered cultural and personal narratives of a woman Presidential and a woman Vice-Presidential candidate during the 2008 Presidential Election season. Drawing upon West and Zimmerman's "Doing Gender" (1987) that explains gender is performed constantly throughout life, I assess the stories told about each candidate and the way she performed gender. There are two different types of stories created. The first is a personal narrative which tells the story of each individual candidate, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. The second is a cultural narrative which tells the story of a dis-embodied type of person, a woman candidate in this instance. For this study, I use 80 articles from the New York Times to evaluate the two personal narrative identities constructed about two very different female-bodied politicians, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, and the cultural narrative about a woman politician during the 2008 Presidential campaign cycle. Each candidate performed femininity and masculinity, although in ways very different from one another. They were both constructed by the media in very different ways as well. Drawing upon their identities as mothers, spouses, fighters, and politicians, these women (and the media) constructed two different images of what a woman Presidential and Vice Presidential candidate is understood to represent. Clinton and Palin had very different physical presentations and mannerisms which contributed to each being a very different type of woman candidate. Hillary Clinton's personal narrative told the story of a second wave feminist candidate while Sarah Palin's personal narrative told the story of a post- feminist candidate. The candidates (and media) told a story about very different types of a woman candidate.