This thesis analyzes the role of performativity within the domestic novel during antebellum America; specifically, the ways in which E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand and Louisa May Alcott’s Behind a Mask subverted cultural and societal norms by exploring the performative nature of class and gender. Through their respective protagonists, the two authors sought to question the power dynamics of an overwhelmingly patriarchal society. By granting their protagonists agency through performance, Southworth and Alcott explored the ways in which women might alter existing power structures to reject the restrictions gender essentialism placed upon antebellum women, and to advocate for women’s rights, such as economic stability and class mobility.

Jill Jackson was one of the first female sports journalists and a pioneer voice for women in athletics. Although heretofore overlooked in the history of American sports journalism, the story of her career is an addition not only to the historiography of female sports journalists but also to the broader study of women in the mid-twentieth century. Jackson was admired, a hard worker, from a prominent New Orleans family, and well educated, yet she still was treated unequally in her primary workspace—the press box. Jackson left well-documented story to the Nadine Vorhoff Library and Special Collections at Newcomb College Institute in New Orleans. The collection, comprised of scrapbooks, photographs, letters, and newspaper articles, reveal the struggles and rewards of her impressive career.

Through a content analysis of the maternal relationships in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers Gardens, the author evaluates how southern black women writers construct black motherhood. This study is based on the premise that Eurocentric paradigms of motherhood confine black mothers to controlling images that continue to criminalize, distort, and devalue black motherhood. The researcher finds that the institution of black motherhood exists independently of Eurocentric paradigms. The conclusions drawn from these findings suggest that black women writers construct motherhood in terms of Womanist leadership. In the aforementioned memoirs, Womanist leadership is learned and defined in the black church. In summation, this thesis finds that southern black women writers use spiritual reconciliation as a form of Womanist leadership.

This study explored media discourse of gender violence against Black women in Black contemporary films. Four Tyler Perry films were examined using a novel, qualitative and analytical framework: Black Feminist Discourse Analysis. Discourses that were studied include, but were not limited to: portrayals of gender violence and victims, character dispositions and interactions, stereotypes, relationship dynamics as well as portrayals of race, gender, sexuality and religion. The use of new and existing controlling images based on systems of race, gender, sexuality and religion were revealed in a transitional and systemic model. Common themes across the films are provided. This research closes with concluding assertions grounded by existing literature and the current study’s findings, as well as recommendations for future film writing and production and implications for social work.

Book reviewing has a fraught history in the United States. Reviewers have long been accused of not being analytical enough. It should be no wonder then with the emergence of social media that online book reviewing has become increasingly popular. Online reviewers, especially book bloggers, are no literary gatekeepers in their own right, shaping the tastes of readers across the world. Book blogs in particular pay special attention to titles which have long been derided by institutions such as libraries, academia, publishers, and bookstores. These literary gatekeepers typically ignore romance, fantasy, mystery, science fiction, young adult fiction, comic books, and certain kinds of children’s literature, calling it lowbrow. Book bloggers, though, demonstrate that such genre fiction is much more than escapist, mixing enjoyment with the literary. In addition, book blogs create space for women who have been systematically excluded from reviewing. The primary way that they do this is by subverting the male gendered language and structure of reviews.

In the Middle Ages, marriage represented a shift in the balance of power for both men and women. Struggling to define what constitutes the ideal marriage in medieval society, the marriage group of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales attempts to reconcile the ongoing battle for sovereignty between husband and wife. Existing hierarchies restricted women; therefore, marriage fittingly presented more obstacles for women. Chaucer creates the dynamic personalities of the Wife of Bath, the Clerk and the Merchant to debate marriage intelligently while citing their experiences within marriage in their prologues. The rhetorical device of ethos plays a significant role for the pilgrims. By first establishing their authority, each pilgrim sets out to provide his or her audience with a tale of marriage that is most correct. Chaucer's work as a social commentary becomes rhetorically complex with varying levels of ethos between Chaucer the author, his tale tellers and their characters.

In its serial space, David Simon’s The Wire season two relates the seemingly “disconnected” union men, foreign sex worker women, and African-American drug traders and crosses constructed boundaries of race, gender, sexuality, and geography to evoke the possibility of a transnational working class. The Wire’s serialized narrative trespasses the limitations of money and numbers games and of individual characters to build, scene by scene, what Roderick Ferguson calls in Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique “the location for new and emergent identifications and social relations” (108).

Nearly all discussions of Hemingway and his work touch on the theme of masculinity, a recurrent theme in all of his works. Examinations of Hemingway and his relationship to masculinity have almost unanimously treated the author as a misogynist and a champion of violent masculinity. However, since the posthumous publication of The Garden of Eden in 1986, there has been much discussion of Hemingway’s uncharacteristic use of androgynous characters in the novel. Critics have taken this as a clue that Hemingway possessed a complex attitude regarding gender fluidity, but have failed to examine the constructions of gender and identity in his earlier fiction. By examining two of his earliest works, In Our Time (1925) and The Sun Also Rises (1926), I argue that Hemingway’s complex ideas about gender performance have been hidden just beneath the surface all along.

This study was made in attempt to identify the characteristics of a troop program in which tenth grade girls had been involved and to determine why they did or did not continue in Scouting. A survey instrument was devised and pretested to validate and improve upon the questionnaire. The questionnaires were distributed through the mail to 190 girls who had been registered in the Kentuckiana Council Scouting program in 1981. All girls, despite their present status in Scouting were asked to complete and return the survey. The questions pertained to such areas as years involved in Scouting, frequency of meetings, most and least enjoyable activities, family involvement, reasons for remaining in Scouting and reasons for dropping out of the program. The responses of 131 girls who returned the questionnaire to the researcher were tabulated. The data were accumulated and analyzed. The survey indicated that the Kentuckiana Girl Scout Council had a high Cadette/Senior retention rate for this period of time. A profile of the Scouting program of a girl who had remained in the program was made with recommendations, based on the analysis of the study, to encourage the retention of older girls. It was suggested, according to the findings of the study, that in order for girls to continue into the upper levels of Scouting, they needed to be recruited at a young age, involved in program planning, and feel as though Girl Scouting is fun. Leader retention and uniforms were not found to be significant factors in retention or dropping out of Scouting. Additional research was recommended by simultaneously comparing two or more Councils.

The Appalachian studies tradition ascertains that Appalachian people politically, socially, and academically represent a heterogeneous minority group of our own. In post-capitalistic America, however, the Appalachian region serves as a hotspot for media misrepresentation and tourism that perpetuate through works of fiction, nonfiction, and scholarship both negative and positive stereotypes in the overall American consciousness. Twenty-first-century Appalachian authors, I contend, are reinventing Appalachia from its postmodern rubble through fictionalized reconceptualizations of our region’s history, shifts in our collective consciousness from anthropocentric to ecocentric, and subversions of the heteronormative discourse of our internal colony through explorations of the psychosexual. The contemporary Appalachian texts that exemplify these abilities are Ron Rash’s The Cove, Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer and Jeff Mann’s Loving Mountains, Loving Men because each represents a paradigm shift within their own aesthetic metanarratives in Appalachian literary history.