This dissertation explores gender codes within the intersection of two American pop culture staples, video games and rock music, by conducting a feminist analysis of two video games (Rock Band and Rocksmith). Both video games and rock music have had their share of feminist academic critique: Musicologists point out how lack of canonical inclusion, gendered attitudes towards instruments, and messages from supporting media create an unwelcome environment for women to pursue a rock music career. Game studies scholars have examined similar attitudes, including a lack of women represented in both the video games and the studios that create them. Through a mix of creator and player interviews, participant observation, content analysis, and autoethnography, I look at the intersection of these two literatures (the rock music video game) to see how gender is hard-coded into the game, and what opportunities, if any, exist for subversion of societal and industry gender norms. Through not just looking at the game as text, I present a more “thick description” of a video game that takes into account the creators of the games, the players that play them, and a researcher that occupies multiple identities within the space. I argue that, in an effort to replicate an authentic rock musician experience in a video game, Rock Band and Rocksmith often replicate a lot of these gendered messages. The games’ text and set list emphasize a male-centric rock music canon. Rocksmith’s original whiskey-soaked visual design and marketing skew heavily towards an older male demographic. However, resistances to these codes exist in both the players who defy expectations by showing up to perform and compete, as well as the creators who actively work to make these games more inclusive via changes to future games as well as inclusive hiring practices, marketing, and music sourcing (with varying degrees of success).

This dissertation engages with the driving motivations behind the actions of all those involved in The Gambia’s tourism-based sexual economy: the Gambian and other West African male and female sex workers, the Global North (habitually European) male and female tourists, the Gambian and expatriate Lebanese bar and restaurant owners, the Gambian state, and the semesters (members of the Gambian diaspora on vacation in The Gambia). It presents thick ethnographic accounts of interactions with Gambians and tourists, as they form temporary couples or friendships for the duration of tourists’ vacations, and sometimes for longer. This ethnography-rich dissertation pays careful attention to Gambian voices, which have been somewhat marginalized in the limited literature on sex tourism in The Gambia. It theorizes the existence of a Gambian sexscape, within which socio-sexual scripts are performed. The socio-sexual scripts that make the Gambian tourism-based sexual economy are re-located within Gambian society’s larger sexscape, which allows for a better consideration of the wider socio-economic, cultural, and political processes that have led to the formation of contemporary Gambian society. The dissertation briefly outlines The Gambia’s political and economic history, which explains the ongoing economic dependency and the importance of emigration for contemporary Gambian youth who want to escape the abject poverty in which too many live. It proposes a descriptive analysis of the Gambian sexscape and its socio-sexual scripts. Greater precision is given to the socio-sexual scripts that make the tourism-based sexual economy: chanters and white Global North female tourists; Gambian female sex workers and white Global North male tourists; Gambian men who have sex with Gambian men/semesters, and/or with white Global North male tourists. Finally, I adopt a socio-ecological approach to sexual health and examine the tourism-based sexual economy’ s impact on the country’s sexual health.

In this thesis, I use feminist ethnography at a nonprofit organization to analyze the racialized gender in (re)integration of victim-survivors of commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC). Critical race feminism and intersectionality are the theoretical frameworks to guide the analysis of community advocacy. The analysis considers two themes with various subsections that capture CSEC at the site. The first theme analyzes the definition, challenges, coordination and rhetoric of reintegration at the site. The second theme highlights the site’s racial identity, Black victimhood of victim-survivors of CSEC in the context of community, and racialized gender within reintegration. I discuss the strategic use of colorblindness within reintegration at the NGO and the child/adult dichotomy that shapes the organization’s understanding of CSEC.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006) by Marisha Pessl and Das Blütenstaubzimmer (1997) by Zoё Jenny both feature strong female characters who go through difficult times because they experience genuine disillusionment with regard to their friends, the opposite sex, and, especially, their family. The focus of this thesis was to analyze if the authors depict their characters in such a way that one can see correlations between the emotional behavior of these characters and a phenomenon that is often referred to as adolescent angst. The theoretical foundation for defining adolescent angst and for understanding mechanisms that trigger adolescent angst was provided by Rapoport and Ismond’s internationally appraised DSM-IV Training Guide for Diagnosis of Childhood Disorders (1996) and Reinherz et al.’s ground-breaking study on „Depressive Disorders“ (2006). In my thesis, I was able to show that the depictions of difficult relationships between the protagonists and their parents and friends show characteristics of adolescent angst. Contrary to that, positive influences like reliable friends who are understanding and lend support, function as motivational forces which decrease the protagonists’ anxieties and frustration in both texts. The analysis of the final scenes showed that after all hardships, the protagonists do not give up hope and open themselves up to a once unimaginable future. Although Pessl and Jenny dismiss the concept of a clear didaxis in their texts, they nevertheless imply a motivational message; namely that adolescent angst can be conquered and overcome. I was able to demonstrate that the concept of adolescent angst serves as a catalyst for the development of the protagonists in both Special Topics in Calamity Physics and Das Blütenstaubzimmer . The bestseller status of both novels underlines that the authors’ decision to conclude these novels which are centered around adolescent angst with an open ending seems to cater to a modern young adult readership, especially within the context of pop culture.

Churchill’s plays incorporate intensity, complexity, and imagination to create a theatrical landscape that is rich in danger and possibility. Examining her plays through the theoretical lens of Antonin Artaud’s “theater of cruelty” allows an open investigation into the way that violence, transgression, and theatricality function in her work to create powerful and thought-provoking pieces of theatre. By creating her own contemporary “theater of cruelty,” Churchill creates plays that actively and violently transgress physical, social, and political boundaries. This paper examines three of Churchill’s plays spanning over thirty years of her career to investigate the different ways Churchill has used concepts of Artaudian cruelty to layer and complicate the theatrical experience, and each offers a different vision of a modern “theater of cruelty.” A Mouthful of Birds provides a starting point for exploring Artaudian concepts in connection to her work and uses physical, embodied cruelty as a catalyst through which the characters must come to terms with their subjectivity in a system which has allocated their rightful “place” in society. Hotel incorporates the same magnitude of cruelty into everyday rituals and mundane actions, and an Artaudian reading reveals the way in which an ‘invisible’ cruelty acts on both the characters and the audience as a form of erasure through which the “vanished” characters “signal through the flames” in an attempt to re-assert their subjectivity. In Seven Jewish Children, Churchill inverts the cruelty and re-enacts onstage the Artaudian ‘double’ of the terror occurring during the Gaza conflict in order to force the characters and audience into a direct relationship with the cruelty. Using Artaud as a framework through which to investigate Churchill’s work foregrounds the way in which the interplay of cruelty rips apart the commonly accepted cultural norms on which our understanding of the world is based and opens complex and multi-faceted possibilities of interpretation and understanding that are absolutely necessary for investigating the intensity of the theatrical experience in her plays.

The German Armed Forces were originally thought to be completely innocent of all war crimes associated with unethical Nazi racial policies. This has been proven not to be the case. History has adjusted itself to show that Wehrmacht forces were guilty of virtually every war crime except for the sexual violation foreign women. Due to the long-standing assumption that Nazi racial ideology prevented the intermingling of the “Aryan” race with the “unworthy” Eastern European races, this myth was rarely questioned. Given the lack of hard evidence proving that civilian women were raped by invading Wehrmacht troops, a firm conclusion is out of the question. However, with a concrete understanding of the Nazi attitude towards sexual relations, the components in the East that led to a breakdown in Wehrmacht discipline, and the resulting reaction of the Soviet Union in light of this brutality, one can surmise the type of violence women were forced to endure. Through the research conducted in this thesis, it is likely that the mass rape of Eastern European women did indeed occur. The silence that surrounds this issue is highly indicative of the cultural elements that prevent an open discussion of this topic. This thesis is meant to spark a discussion of the implications and reverberations of mass rape in a wartime setting.

The primary objective of this work is to understand the importance of the indigenous, female body in early New Spain through the study of visual media from the first two centuries of colonization: specifically looking at illustrations from Book 10 (of 15) in the Florentine Codex and images of indigenous Christian wedding ceremonies such as the painted folding screen Indian Wedding and a Flying Pole (c.1690). I argue through visual, theoretical and historical analysis that regulating indigenous female sexuality was a critical component to in the creation of colonial New Spain and that imagery played an essential role in this regulatory process.

The global phenomenon known as the Hallyu, or the Korean Wave, has brought Korean pop culture to every corner of the Internet. In this paper, I discuss the impact Hallyu has had in France specifically and examine the online subculture of female-created fanfiction that has arisen from it. I postulate that, for a French woman, the act of participating in fandom and/or writing slash fanfiction about Korean pop idols constitutes a political act of rebellion against the patriarchy and gender norms, even if the fan herself is unaware of it.

The way Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted simultaneously conforms to its late-20th-century American standards and rebels against its Cinderella origins is analyzed in this thesis. As an analysis of a piece of literature written for children, the thesis works to defend the notion that playful literature produces a serious dialogue with its readers, and that young female readers are a particularly apropos group for the dialogue about hegemony that Ella Enchanted allows.

Interviews of senior females ranging in age from 55 through 72 were conducted between September 2004 and April 2005, in order to determine what lifestyle options this group would like made available to them. The participants represented a sample of senior females who had different backgrounds, including culture, education level, and economic circumstance. Although all the participants had very different lifestyles at the time of their interviews, most were satisfied with their current lifestyles but wanted to change something about it. The research results indicate that there are three desired lifestyle options that senior females want: socializing, improving their health, and traveling, with the ability to travel being the most highly desired lifestyle option.