Even though virginity in Turkey is commonly defined, thus gendered, as losing the hymen, in Turkish society, discourses of virginity connect to broader discussions, such as modernity, morality, social honor/shame, religion, family values, and even medicine (vaginismus and artificial hymen surgery). Previous scholarship on women’s rights in Turkey outlines how historical approaches by Kemalist secularism were not enough to diminish oppressive social norms such as virginity and how the current conservative government and elements of traditional Turkish society perpetuate virginity as an important virtue for unmarried women. This study adds seven Turkish mothers’ interpretations of what I am calling the contemporary Turkish discourse of virginity, as well as the mothers’ descriptions of their pedagogical practices on the topic of premarital sex with regard to their adult children. Here I report the semi-structured interviews I conducted with heterosexual urban Turkish mothers, 45-60 years old, college-educated, and socioeconomically privileged, living in Western Turkey, a region more closely aligned with European ideals. Participant mothers self-identify as Kemalist women, meaning secular, and use this perspective in describing virginity and its role in the contemporary Turkish society. I argue, first, that the “modern” participant mothers speak from an interstitial location, which is the result of contradictions between secular and conservative ideals in Turkey. Second, the participant mothers discuss virginity tactically from three different subjectivities: modern women who believe in women’s rights, modern mothers who respect their daughters’ choices regarding premarital sex, and caring mothers who worry about the social consequences of their daughters’ choices in a society that still stigmatizes the loss of virginity. Third, as a result of these shifting subjectivities, participant mothers observe as well as participate in a subtle social change in urban Western Turkey, which I argue is moving the politics of virginity from a social imperative toward covert practices of choice. The transcripts also show the underlying presumption of heterosexuality not only among participant mothers’ negotiations of virginity but also in the broader modern Turkish discourse of virginity. By bringing forward the voices of these participant mothers, this study aims to portray the complex structure of Turkish society and document interpretations of a discourse that oppresses Turkish women.

This dissertation offers a cultural history of the 1980s through an examination of one of the decade’s most memorable cultural forms – hair metal. The notion that hair metal musicians, and subsequently their fans, wanted “nothin’ but a good time,” shaped popular perceptions of the genre as shallow, hedonistic, and apolitical. Set against the backdrop of Reagan’s election and the rise of conservatism throughout the decade, hair metal’s transgressive nature embodied in the performers’ apparent obsession with partying and their absolute refusal to adopt the traditional values and trappings of “yuppies” or middle-class Americans, certainly appeared to be a strong reaction against conservatism; however, a closer examination of hair metal as a cultural form reveals a conservative subtext looming beneath the genre’s transgressive façade. In its embrace of traditional gender roles, free market capitalism, and American exceptionalism, hair metal upheld and worked to re-inscribe the key tenants of conservative ideology. Historians have only recently turned an analytical eye toward the 1980s and by and large their analyses have focused on the political and economic changes wrought by the Reagan Revolution that competed America’s conservative turn over the course of the decade. This study adds to historical understandings of the decade’s political history by telling us how non-political actors – musicians, producers, critics, and fans – shaped and were shaped by the currents of formal politics. Though heavy metal music and the rise of conservatism seem to share little common ground, by putting these two seemingly disparate historiographies into conversation with one another, we gain a clearer picture of the breadth and depth of conservatism’s reach in the 1980s.

Trans* studies and issues have recently increased in coverage by the media and popular press. With recent changes in the DSM-5 (APA, 2000; APA 2013) and insurance law (HHS, 2014), trans* healthcare has been under increasing scrutiny. While a small number of studies (Bradford, Reisener, Honnold, & Xavier, 2013; Grant et al., 2011; Rounds, McGrath, & Walsh, 2013; Tanner et al., 2014) have documented discrimination and lack of cultural competencies from the perspective of trans* patients, little research exists that examines the training, support, and decision-making processes of medical professionals who treat trans* patients (Snelgrove et al., 2012, p. 2). The goal of this research study is to explore the training and cultural competencies of healthcare professionals in treating trans* patients by surveying and interviewing healthcare professionals about their experiences of trainings, familiarity with practices/protocols, and attitudes toward treating trans* patients. A survey of 35 health care professionals and nine interviews were conducted. These health care professionals, while generally accepting of trans* individuals, still had some reservations about working with trans* patients and suggested that there were many barriers and challenges to providing trans* health care. A majority of health care professionals had little or no familiarity with treatment protocols or diagnoses for trans* patients, and very few had received any type of training (formal or informal) before or after starting working in the health care about trans* patients. While there are many areas in which there perceived challenges and barriers to care, several participants did observe that there has been a shift in health care recently that is moving towards being more inclusive and responsive to trans* patients.

In The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare anatomizes Lucrece's body-fragments the whole, splits apart the parts. He does so not only to expose the otherwise concealed act of rape-which is hidden within the mysterious and "invisible" female genitalia-but to indicate that Lucrece's parts, through analogy with Pagan and Christian figures and theories, are powerful, even combative, but always pure. In the first section, individual body parts connect Lucrece with so-called "wild women," including the Amazons, Medusa, and Philomela. In the second section, body parts either link Lucrece, or sever Tarquin, from the Divine. In the final section, Classical Mythology and Protestantism conflate in the dis-embodied figure of Helen of Troy. The body-Lucrece's, Tarquin's and the figures on the tapestry-is explored in metaphorical parts, dismembered, or apotheosized/de-corporealized in an attempt to prove that a raped woman may retain her subjectivity along with her innocence.

The purpose of this thesis is to discover any existing correlation between gender and student perceptions of reflective writing in the composition classroom. Seventy-five students at Florida International University participated in a survey that explored their approaches to and understanding of reflective writing. In order to connect the specific results of this study to the larger context of composition theory, this thesis includes an examination of the theoretical background of gender and reflective writing. The results of the survey indicate that the only identifiable difference between male and female student responses resulted from their definitions of reflective writing. Beyond this difference, however, there were no significant variances in student perceptions of reflective writing. The response of these students at FIU indicates a shift in expected gender norms and suggests a reconsideration of what it means to be a gendered writer in the composition classroom.

The purpose of this thesis was to examine the treatment and portrayal of children in science fiction utopian literature and determine whether this effectively indicated the writers’ feminist visions for social change. A feminist theoretical perspective and critical interpretation of several of the genre’s canon, Sheri Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country, Suzy McKee Chamas’s Motherlines, Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series, were used as research methodologies. The findings revealed that children communicate feminist prescriptions for change in three ways: children as the literal, biological future, the link between two opposing societies, or the explanation for the difficult philosophies and structural elements of the societies. As this subject has been an unexplored area of criticism, it is recommended that critics begin to examine this treatment of children to more easily understand the writers’ social visions and effect their blueprints for change.

Women workers in the United States do not share equally in earned income with men, and the majority of female workers are employed in traditionally female occupations where the pay is also traditionally low. A socialization pattern seems to assign women certain career roles which have been traditionally female and to influence women in their professional ambitions and in making satisfying career choices. This study represents an attempt to investigate possible variables which influence women in making satisfying congruent career choices. The relationship of sex-role classification, as measured by the Bem Sex-role Inventory (BSRI), vocational interests, as measured by the Vocational Preference Inventory (VPI), and expressed vocational interests, as indicated by declared college major, of selected college women was examined by this study. Sex-role type was studied as a variable which could possible cause women to ignore the socialization process and is attending attitudes to select preferred atypical careers. The purposes of the study was to discover possible differences in sex-role identity between women who make congruent career choices and women who make incongruent career choices and to add an understanding of the process of career choice for women. The BSRI and VPI were administered to a group of undergraduate women in lower division psychology and English classes at a regional Southeastern state university. The score for each student’s Vocational interest type from the VPI was compared with that student’s declared college major, using a table of college majors arranged by Holland’s Typology of Occupational Environments which corresponds to the six scales of vocational interest types of the VPI. A congruent choice was indicated if a subject’s declared college major was listed in the occupational environment of her measured vocational interest type scale. Tables presented the proportion of sex-role classification (masculine, feminine, androgynous, and undifferentiated) in the congruent and incongruent vocational preference groupings as well as the proportion of sex-role classification in each preference group reported according to measured vocational interest. The findings of this study tentatively suggest that the variable of sex-role type does influence career choice, as problems were encountered by women whose sex-role classification was masculine or undifferentiated. The study did not indicate that the sex-role classification of androgyny was a sufficient condition to greatly influence the congruent outcome of career choice of the college women in this sample. In the population of this research, highly sex-typed feminine women—as well as androgynous women-chose college majors congruent to their measured vocational interest, indicating a satisfying career choice. The women in the sample [blank] study indicated a strong continuing interest in traditional women’s occupations whether their sex-role classification was feminine, masculine, androgynous, or undifferentiated. Implications for additional research have been identified in this project for further study of those factors (social, situational, and attitudinal) which influence career aspirations of young women.

My thesis proposes a feminist-queer reading of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene in response to Julian Wolfreys’ “The ‘Endlesse Worke’ of Transgression”. I examine the challenges to male authority that the low-born poet, Spenser, faced when he presented his manual for the formation of new English subjects to his sovereign queen, Elizabeth I. The Prefatory Letter to Raleigh and passages from the 1590 version of the epic provide evidence to support the view that traditional hierarchical male/female binaries may have been destabilized by the presence of an unmarried queen. My thesis also supplements Wolfreys’ essay with historical information regarding Mary Tudor and Mary Stuart in order to underscore the ethnocentric aspect of the process of “othering” that takes place in The Faerie Queene.

No description available.

Noticeably, there is little to no cross-cultural analysis of Black queer women artists of the African diaspora in Diaspora, Literary and Theatre and Performance studies. These disciplines tend to focus on geographic locations with an emphasis on the United States, the Caribbean islands and Europe in relation to the African continent. In addition, the work of Black men artists holds precedence in discussions of blackness, diaspora, and performance. Overwhelmingly, the contributions of Black women artists in the diaspora pales in comparison to their male counterparts, especially in number. More drastically, the voices of Black queer women artists actually published are few. Because of these discrepancies within scholarship and practice, I follow the footsteps of the late scholar Gay Wilentz to advocate a diaspora literacy of Black women writers across the diaspora. I employ a transnational feminist approach to survey the work of Sharon Bridgforth and Trey Anthony, two Black queer women artists who explore intersectionality in regards to race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and nationality. I also curated and produced Black/Queer/Diaspora/Womyn Festival, a festival of staged readings and panel discussions that placed both artists at the center. This thesis fully details the planning and execution of the festival, an evaluation of the successes and pitfalls of the festival, and then draws conclusions on how both scholars and practitioners can further engage in a diaspora literacy for Black queer women artists.