This dissertation examines narratives about female bullying and aggression through mediated images of "mean girls." Through textual analysis of popular media featuring mean girls (television shows such as Gossip Girl and films like Mean Girls), as well as national news coverage of the case of Phoebe Prince, who reportedly committed suicide after being bullied by girls from her school, this feminist examination questions how the image of the mean girl is raced and classed. This dissertation values an interdisciplinary approach to research that works to make sense of the forces that produce bodies as gendered, raced, and classed. One of the central concerns of this project is explore images of mean girls in order to highlight the ideas that construct female aggression as deviant. In popular culture, the mean girl is constructed as a popular girl who protects and cultivates the power associated with her elite status in duplicitous and cruel ways. Specifically, mean girls are framed as using indirect aggression, which is defined as a form of social manipulation. This covert form of aggression, also referred to as "relational" or "social" aggression, includes a series of actions aimed at destroying other girls' relationships, causing their victims to feel marginalized. The bullying tactics associated with indirect aggression include gossiping, social exclusion, stealing friends, not talking to someone, and threatening to withdraw friendship. The leader of the clique is the Queen Bee who is able to use boundary maintenance to exclude other girls from her friendship groups. In media texts, while the Queen Bee is always White, the Mean Girl discourse does not ignore girls of color. Instead, girls of color are acknowledged as having the potential to be mean, but, more often, they are shown to exemplify the characteristics of normative White femininity (they are nice and prioritize heterosexual relationships) and to escape the lure of popularity. Indeed, whereas media texts continually center Whiteness as a necessary component of the mean girl image, nice girls are constructed as White, Latina, and Black. The constructions of the girls of color often rely on stereotyped behaviors (i.e., Black girls' direct talk and Latina girls' commitment to nuclear family structures); at the same time, these essentialized characteristics are revered and incorporated into the nice girl tropes. The Queen Bee is always upper-class, while the Wannabe (the girl who desires to be in the clique) is middle-class. When attempting to usurp the Queen Bee's power, the Wannabe breaks with normative cultural versions of White, middle-class passive femininity in ways that are framed as problematic. Although the Wannabe rises above her class, in so doing, she also transcends her "authentic" goodness. As a result, middle-classness is recentered and ascribed as part of the nice girl's authentic image. The Mean Girl discourse defines girls' success on a continuum. A popular girl stays at the top of the social hierarchy by being mean. The nice girl finds individual success by removing herself from elite social circles. As a result, privilege is not defined inherently as the problem, but girls' excessive abuse and access to privilege is.

The purpose of this study is to expose the strategies through which extreme sports constitute gender through exaggeration, parody, queering, resistance, and transcendence of normative gendered binaries. I interrogate how extreme sports operate on the margins of sport, gender, media, and lived experience to better understand the processes and performances that retain, reinforce, and resist our notions of normative gender, bodies, and sexuality. Starting with the claim that performance is constitutive of gender and culture, I will focus on how extreme sporting performances create significant commentaries on mainstream assumptions surrounding sporting gender, sexuality, and corporeality. These commentaries function in extreme sports' spaces: to critique how extreme sports reclaim oppressive language of gendered binaries; to give voice to sexual silences in performances that lampoon, retrofit, and transcend those assumptions; and, for athletes to reclaim corporeality through strategies of parody, resistance, and elision. Taking up the transcendent possibilities for gender, body, and sexuality in extreme sports, I suggest that these are also places to reimagine a phallocentric combat myth, revisit issues of class and performance, and speak of the invisibility of racial difference. Using critical analysis, interviews, and personal narrative, I explore performances of gender, sexuality, and the body in mediated and live extreme events beginning with the revival of the roller derby phenomenon exemplified in the 2007 documentary Hell on Wheels, the 2006 A&E series Rollergirls, and the multiple websites, leagues, and fictional representations such as 2009's Whip It. I then turn to MTV's pranktainment playground of Jackass, Viva la Bam and Nitro Circus as well as the traveling motocross spectacle Nuclear Cowboyz. Finally, I attend to the extreme bodies of ultradistance running through multiple texts and conversations with runners as well as my own participation in the 2011 Keys100 in the Florida Keys. My study will not repeat the many questions, critiques, or concerns of foundational or traditional scholarship on sports, media, or risk. Instead, I focus on several key issues across the chapters: how sport is housed as always already a masculine realm, how mainstream and extreme sports do gender corporeally, and the ways extreme sports challenge our mainstream notions of sexualities.

Abstract Objectification most literally refers to perceiving a person as an object. Research shows that when people focus on a woman's appearance, compared to her personality, she is perceived of as more of an object (e.g., lower in human nature traits). These objectification effects, however, rarely occur for male targets. Moreover, humans, unlike objects, are typically believed to have a soul, that is, some part of the self that outlasts the death of the physical body and extends into a post-mortem existence (e.g., Heaven). In turn, I hypothesized that women, but not men, would be perceived as having less soul when focus is on their physical appearance, and that this will be mediated by human nature traits. Partially supporting these hypotheses, in Study 1, males and females were perceived as having (marginally) less of a soul when focus was on their appearance; however, there was no effect of appearance focus on human nature ratings for male or female targets. In Study 2, using a different manipulation of appearance focus and measure of soul ratings, the same findings emerged. In Study 3, focusing on a woman's appearance elicited heightened psychological need for structure and worldview defense when evidence was provided that she had a soul, compared to when evidence was provided that she did not have a soul. This indicates that a woman having a soul is less coherent and meaningful than a woman not having soul when focus is on her appearance. The discussion centers on possible mechanisms for these findings, as well as why the effects were found for male in addition to female targets. Limitations, future directions, and implications are also addressed.

ABSTRACT The single-mother figure shows up in myriad American film genres, and my thesis explores three of these genres, maternal melodrama, film noir, and horror. I argue there is a melodramatic mode that carries over from maternal melodrama to film noir and horror. This mode emphasizes emotional excess. In maternal melodrama, the emotional excess is pity. For film noir, the emotion is anxiety, and in horror, it is repulsion. Even though each genre has its own emotional excess, maternal melodrama still speaks to these other genres through its maternal sacrifice, non-heteronormative families and misreading of proper gender performances. For this reason, I intentionally begin with classic maternal melodrama, wherein conventional gender roles, heteronormative familial structures, and mother-daughter separation are standard features. In Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937), Stella misreads what "proper" femininity looks like. As a result, she believes she is "bad" for her daughter, Laurel, and makes the heart-wrenching decision to sacrifice Laurel to a traditional nuclear family. The other films I chose extend Stella Dallas' interest in gender roles, kinship structures, and mother-daughter separation but also subtly change the maternal melodrama's relationship to heart-wrenching sacrifice. In each of three chapters, I explore Michael Curtiz's film noir Mildred Pierce (1945), Douglas Sirk's melodrama Imitation of Life (1959) and William Friedkin's horror film The Exorcist (1973). After examining the standard features of maternal melodrama in Stella Dallas, I begin to explore them in other genres that focus on one of the three ideas more predominantly. These ideas are gender roles, kinship structures, mother-daughter separation. This does not mean that each film is limited to only one idea. All of the films address gender performance, familial structure, and mother-child separation, but I let each film take the lead on one of the three ideas. In Mildred Pierce, I explore gender performance. Mildred performs masculinity and femininity depending on whether she is in the public or private sphere. Imitation of Life takes the lead on alternative kinship. The film illustrates how two single mothers create a economically viable non-heteronormative interracial family. I conclude with The Exorcist and the possibility that the mother and child do not need to separate like Stella and Laurel. The Exorcist challenges what has long been considered a necessary process. This is the only film that successfully keeps mother and child united. I believe this project draws attention to the lack of analysis of single mothers in American film, but more importantly, it makes us rethink motherhood. The single mother privileges a certain approach to gender performance, familial structure, and mother-child separation that feminist theory and film studies have overlooked. This approach includes a masculine gender performance to perform as a father, disrupting the heteronormative familial structure to make it work for them, and mothers maintaining a relationship with their adolescent daughters.

In this thesis, I look at the mobilization of the domestic workers in Brazil as a social movement. In Brazil, the domestic workers have managed to organize continuously for over eight decades using both informal and formal mechanisms to connect workers all over the country in unique ways. By viewing these women and the ways in which they have organized in the framework of a social movement, we can begin to identify their repertoires of contention and how those repertoires have contributed to the successes of the movement. In order to guide this investigation, I ask, how has the doméstica movement in Brazil been successful in reducing the vulnerability of domestic workers? Throughout the development of the domestic workers movement in Brazil, the participants have shaped their repertoires of contention to embody their intersectional narrative and conceptualized it to reduce the vulnerability of domestic work. I argue throughout this work that, as the movement became more successful and better organized, the vulnerability of domestic workers declined. I consider this vulnerability to be a combination of informality associated with the profession for domestic work and the lack of legal protections which apply to domestic workers. This work is a single unit case study analyzing solely the doméstica movement in Brazil from the mid-1930s to the present. I gauge success primarily using two types of within-case observations: 1.) process-tracing through the historical trajectory of the movement to understand the development of the repertoires of contention within four distinct waves of organizing; and, 2.) comparative analysis of official statistics on indicators of the level of informality associated with domestic work.

Homophobia and prejudice against the lesbian community have been argued to be consequences of lack of education within academic and non-academic spaces. This study introduces a pedagogical model of gendered lesbian identity that can act as a tool for educators to understand lesbian experiences, and thus contribute to addressing issues related to homophobia and prejudices in the classrooms and beyond. Based on thematic analysis of data generated by a qualitative online survey of 29 participants, this study argues that notions of social norms, individual agency, and importance of advocacy are critical points of emphases in the proposed educational model. Although the model may be seen as a pilot study, its experiential and theoretical foundation should make it a novel and simple pedagogical tool in teaching lesbian identity.

Care is socially constructed, shaped by expectations embedded within particular relationships and the culturally-specific understandings of what it means to work, love and suffer. In this dissertation, I conceptualize care as a fundamental component of everyday life in which individuals are oriented towards the needs of others. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a rural Konkomba community in northern Ghana, I explore the geographies of care shaping the everyday experiences of women engaged in intergenerational relationships as they encounter emerging dependencies associated with ageing. Dependencies emerge when an individual requires support and care from another, and in turn the struggles for, and the provision of this support has material and emotional implications for those involved. I make three primary contributions. First, I examine the potential for a feminist ethics of care within livelihoods approaches in order to destabilize notions of independence and material outcomes, arguing that livelihood strategies are characterized by interdependencies within families and communities. Second, I contribute to an understanding of the politics of care by considering women's mobility in the face of competing demands on their labor and resources. Despite responsibilities to provide a 'good death', women experience social and material hurdles to negotiate their mobility in order to provide end of life care to a parent. Third, I explore the embodied emotional experiences of elderly women as they experience dependencies and struggle to engage in material exchange and caring relationships. As a result of these emergence of dependencies, women's everyday lives are deeply shaped by experiences of love and suffering. In northern Ghana, as in other rural agrarian communities in developing regions, the elderly population is growing and a weak formal care infrastructure is ill-prepared to face the pressures of an ageing population. Through this dissertation, I highlight the complex geographies of care shaping everyday life experiences and contribute to an understanding of the particular issues faced by communities where intergenerational relationships are key to lives lived with care.

Prior to the advent of modern birth control beginning in the nineteenth century, the biological reproductive cycle of pregnancy, post-partum recovery, and nursing dominated women’s adult years. The average birth rate per woman in 1800 was just over seven, but by 1900, that rate had fallen to just under than three and a half. The question that this dissertation explores is what cultural narratives about reproduction and reproductive control emerge in the wake of this demographic shift. What’s at stake in a woman’s decision to reproduce, for herself, her family, her nation? How do women, and society, control birth? In order to explore these questions, this dissertation broadens the very term “birth control” from the technological and medical mechanisms by which women limit or prevent conception and birth to a conception of “controlling birth,” the societal and cultural processes that affect reproductive practices. This dissertation, then, constructs a cultural narrative of the process of controlling birth. Moving away from a focus on “negative birth control”—contraception, abortion, sterilization—the term “controlling birth” also applies to engineering or encouraging wanted or desired reproduction. While the chapters of this work often focus on traditional sites of birth control—contraceptives, abortion, and eugenics—they are not limited to those forms, uncovering previously hidden narratives of reproduction control. This new lens also reveals men’s investment in these reproductive practices. By focusing on a variety of cultural texts—advertisements, fictional novels, historical writings, medical texts, popular print, and film—this project aims to create a sense of how these cultural productions work together to construct narratives about sexuality, reproduction, and reproductive control. Relying heavily on a historicizing of these issues, my project shows how these texts—both fictional and nonfictional—create a rich and valid site from which to explore the development of narratives of sexuality and reproductive practices, as well as how these narratives connect to larger cultural narratives of race, class, and nation. The interdisciplinary nature of this inquiry highlights the interrelationship between the literary productions of the nineteenth and twentieth century and American cultural history.

This paper is part of the academic effort to recover historical memory in post-Civil War Spain and metaphorically applies the so-called Giobert Tincture to Carmen Martín Gaite’s El cuarto de atrás (1978), Dulce Chacón’s La voz dormida (2002) and Pedro Almodóvar’s La mala educación (2004) in order show how these works reveal the ghosts of the repression exerted against the epitome of the abject/obscene by Franco’s dictatorship: the queer collective. This collective continues to suffer from marginalization as well as from the effects of repression. I argue that El cuarto de atrás reveals C.’s repressed hybrid/queer identity and sexual orientation, that La voz dormida reveals Tomasa and Reme’s homoerotic/queer relationship and that La mala educación reveals in the form of cross-dressed/hybrid bodies how gender performativity is based on the repression of generic and sexual identity. First, I analyze the historical and artistic-cultural context of the selected works. Second, I outline the methodology and poststructural theoretical concepts that frame my thesis. Although the following chapters develop an episodic structure, a comprehensive reading of the paper provides a holistic perspective of the repression of queer people and its palimpsestic-spectral representation in the works of the above-mentioned authors.

In 2012, the Entertainment Software Association announced that 47% of all game players are women. Before this statistic came out, it wasn't a surprise that girl gamers existed but the fact that this supposed 'minority' almost shared equal parts with the majority was used as a catalyst for the types of gaming environments we have today where females are faced with sexism, patriarchy, and other various forms of prejudice. This, in turn has initiated both positive and negative discourse and has perpetuated social change in the video game community. This is my response...