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.

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.