In my investigation of Li-Young Lee's poetry, my concerns were two-fold: first, to find evidence of an androgynous quality or ideal; secondly, to demonstrate that ideal as authentically feminist. In the introduction, I investigate the feminist debate about the traditional definition and concept of androgyny, demonstrating the difference between the patriarchal traditional androgyny and the androgynous elements in Lee's poetry. In Chapter Two, the rose as image and as symbol in Lee's poetry is examined and found to be strikingly androgynous as a symbol. As an image, however, it is more often than not used as a vehicle to describe the destructive nature of social tyrannies such as the patriarchal symbolic order. In Chapter Three, Lee's heavy implications of an existing "other" is examined. This examination is particularly pertinent when considering the feminist debate, since one of the major problems with the idea of androgyny is that it often necessitates a binary thought system in which the male is usually the "one" and the female is usually the "other." In Lea's poetry, I found no significant evidence of that kind of phallocentricism; rather, I found substantial evidence that Lee's poetry demonstrates the destructiveness of insisting on any being's otherness. Lee's search for identity, and for the meaning of personal identity, involves the acceptance of the mutability of identity. In conclusion, although I don't find androgyny to be authentically feminist, I find Lee's poetry--and its particular use of an androgynous ideal--to be authentically feminist.

A biographical study of the life of Eleanor Roosevelt was undertaken to explore the various obstacles she was required to overcome as she grew to become an influential figure in the world of liberal politics. During the New Deal years her influence was most visible as she traveled across the country and relayed to her husband the concerns of the average man. As a delegate to the United Nations, after the death of her husband, Eleanor's devotion toward attaining a United Nations which would keep peace among all nations and her ability to carry out tasks in a patient and persistent manner, gained for her the respect of all other United Nations delegates. Even later, in the area of Democratic party politics, Eleanor continued to be a living example of the humanitarian ideas for which she and the Democratic Party stood; as such, her symbolic influence served to strengthen the humanitarian image of the Democratic Party and its leaders. Though her influence was little more than a symbolic one, Eleanor Roosevelt stood as proof that politics is more than campaign tactics and party organization; that symbolism and idealism do, in fact, play a large role in determining the popularity and success of a political party.

During the Victorian age, the law and society were in conversation with each other, and the law reflected Victorian gender norms. Nineteenth-century gender attitudes intersected with the law, medical discourse, and social customs in a multitude of ways. Abuse and gender violence occurred beneath the veneer of Victorian respectability. The models of nineteenth-century social conduct were highly gendered and placed men and women in separate social spheres. As this research indicates, the lived practices of Victorians, across social and economic strata, deviated from these accepted models of behavior. This thesis explores the ways that accepted and unaccepted standards of female behavior manifest in Victorian legal discourse and literary sources. The three tropes of female behavior analyzed in this thesis are: “the angel in the house,” “the mad woman,” and “the fallen woman.” Victorian men repeatedly failed to protect their wives, daughters, and companions and were often the sources of abuse and violence. Women, in turn, were unable to shape themselves to fit the accepted model of Victorian womanhood. This thesis suggests that widespread Victorian gender attitudes and social causes that are taken up by politicians are reflected in the legal system. This thesis unearths the voices of Victorian women, both literary and historical ones, in order to tell their stories and analyze the ways that their experiences are a result of social conventions and legal standards of the nineteenth-century.

The intention of this thesis is to provide an alternative counter-narrative to the mainstream histories of punk that center white men. By focusing on the contributions of fem queer and POC punks, I aim to legitimize punk music as a form of resistance against systems of oppression that are oppositional to the commodified forms of mainstream punk. Using Alice Bag, as my central case study as a fem queer punk that is often left out of punk historical narratives, I contextualize her work through feminist, queer, and media studies lenses to bridge the gap between academia and forgotten personal experience.

This thesis delves into the role of women in the Zapatista movement and how that role has changed over time in the private, public and political spheres. It also draws parallels between the struggle for female liberation within Zapatismo and the struggles of working-class, women of color movements in the United States. Chapters are focused on topics including women's involvement in the San Andrés Accords, the Women's Revolutionary Law, the Other Campaign and Marichuy's electoral campaign as well as personal observations from time spent in Oventik, a Zapatista caracol. As complement to the text, the thesis includes a visual zine.

Conceptions of masculinity on film shifted after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks from representations of male heroism as invulnerable, powerful, and safe to representations of male heroism as resilient, vengeful, and vulnerable. At the same time, the antagonists of these films shifted towards representations as shadowy, unknowable, and disembodied. These changing representations, I argue, are windows into the anxieties Americans faced in the aftermath of the attacks. The continuing presentation of power as linked to violence, however, illustrates the ways in which conceptions of masculinity have stayed the same.

A year after Alyssa Milano’s tweet launched the #MeToo movement, survivors of sexual assault are being called ‘accusers’ in the media, and public opinion is swinging in favor of guilty men. #MeToo raised awareness but not understanding. What is rape? What is consent? As evidenced by the #MeToo movement and the backlash against it, clearly, as a society, we don’t know. Contact is a work of Creative Nonfiction that uses scenes and details from the narrator’s personal experiences to illuminate the micro-negotiations that occur in sex and seduction. In a world where women are still expected to stay small and stay out of the way, where we publicly decry but privately propagate the notion of being 'seen and not heard,' and where to be seen means to be sexualized, this narrator seeks to take up space and make noise. In Contact the personal is political and the political is personal.

In spite of its common designation as an outmoded classic of sentimental middlebrow literature, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath remains relevant as a milestone in an extended liminal stage between the failing cultural myths of the past and the founding of newly relevant shared stories. This stage begins with the Enlightenment and continues to present-day conflicts over identity, labor, migrants, notions of truth itself, the function and responsibilities of government, and our shared ecological destiny. Arriving near the end of the Depression and its concurrent economic and environmental disasters, The Grapes of Wrath reflects a particularly chaotic stage in mythological disintegration and regeneration. While critics routinely note the structure of myths within the narrative, they too often fail to note the ways said structures fail, providing for the oppressive tone of the narrative, which ironically leaves space for the rise of new myths.

One aspect of the role of advertising in the process of maintaining and reinforcing or challenging the socially constructed worlds of maleness and femaleness, and especially the portrayal of the "woman's place," was explored in this study.

This thesis reconsiders the generally held view that Friedrich Nietzsche's works are misogynist. In doing so it provides an interpretation of Nietzsche's texts with respect to the metaphor "woman," sets this interpretation into an historical context of Nietzsche reception and follows the extension of Nietzsche's metaphor "woman" into French feminist theory. It provides an interpretation that shows that a misogynist reading of Nietzsche is in error because such a reading fails to consider the multiple perspectives that operate in Nietzsche's texts.