Martha Root (1872-1939) was an exceptional religious and spiritual activist, a leading figure in the international women's peace movement, and a new organism of a new world in the early twentieth century. This thesis represents Martha Root from three aspects: the early life of Martha Root, her four world teaching trips from 1919 to 1939, with a focus on her peace advocacy, and an investigation into her gender awareness and identity construction by reflecting on Tahirih the Pure, Iran's Greatest Woman, Martha Root's only book.

This thesis analyzes the teen-targeted website gURL.com, which is committed to providing safe space for young girls to explore different aspects of girlhood. I primarily focus on girls’ comments and conversations posted on the message boards in order to trace how teens mediate and extend the borders of the popular conceptualizations of contemporary girlhood. I interpret young women's online activities within the discursive framework of the complex relation between Girl Culture and feminism. Without overvaluing the freedom of online environments, I assume that the relatively unregulated space of the Internet enables girls to step outside the dominant stereotypes and discover alternative modes of doing feminist activism. I argue that these new venues of political engagement are adequate ways of resistance within the specific era of postmodern global capitalism.

Hooters restaurants are typically staffed by Caucasian women that resemble the company’s idea of an “All American Girl, Surfer Girl, Girl Next Door” image, promoted in employee training materials. However, my experience working for this company has been in a predominantly African American-staffed Hooters, atypical for the corporation. Through a mixed methods approach encompassing content analysis, participant observation, autoethnography, and interviews, this research seeks to understand the ideal Hooters Girl image promoted by the corporation, and the performance of that ideal in an atypical Hooters location.

A 2001 national study of college women’s sexual attitudes and behaviors revealed that students have stopped dating and started “hooking up.” Previous studies focused on fraternities and their relation to the rape culture but neglected to connect rape culture to hook up culture. This study evaluated the culture surrounding rape by interviewing seventeen college aged men about masculinity, behavior in male homosocial groups, “hooking up” and rape. It addresses the following questions: 1-How do college men understand “hooking up” and sexual consent? 2-In what ways might men’s understanding of “hooking up” and sexual consent be related to the ongoing incidence of rape on college campuses? 3- How do men understand and adhere to rape myths? In-depth interviews with college men in this study point to their dependence on nonverbal communication when negotiating “hookups,” with implications for their understandings of consent and perpetuation of myths concerning women's sexuality.

This is a critical discourse analysis research project that examines the print and television advertisements of Merck & Co.’s Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine GARDASIL®. There are three commercial campaigns identified for this project: “Make the Connection/ Charm4Life,” “Tell Someone,” and “One Less/ I Choose.” Two print and two television commercials per campaign are analyzed. I used black feminist and girls studies theoretical frameworks to address how representations of race, class, “girl power,” and the cooptation of feminist language are both expressed and utilized in the marketing as a method to target consumers. I conclude with “parody/ protest” advertisements of the vaccine featuring young women demonstrating a critical consumer voice towards the marketing of the vaccine. As a result, I found that the PSAs used fear-driven messages about HPV’s link to cervical cancer beginning a year before the FDA’s approval of GARDASIL® in order to market and sell its product.

With background information on militarism, nationalism, and torture, this study analyzes Monsters, Inc., Toy Story 3, and The Incredibles, three Pixar films released from 2001 through 2010, for the ways in which the torture scenes are framed. These frames, state control, prisons, and 60s spy thrillers, invite laughter through intertextuality, while deflecting attention from torture of central characters in the films. The implications of this analysis are: these films present torture as deserved and normative; the tortured characters stand outside the frames of recognition for humanness; and they redefine children as threats and dangers. This study concludes that these ideologies are just as potent as the themes of nationalism, militarism, and a violated sacrosanct homeland.

Since the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964 research on the effect of group size on bystander intervention has risen quite rapidly. While this research on the “bystander effect” has proven quite useful there are many other factors that affect bystander intervention. One such factor is the gender of the bystander. This paper reviews current & groundbreaking literature pertaining to the effect of gender on bystander intervention in individual, group, low-severity, and high-severity situations. A review of the literature suggests that gender has a significant effect on bystander intervention. Research results were mixed with some research showing that individually males were more helpful in high-severity situations, while women tended to be more helpful in low-severity situations. Other research showed male or females more helpful in situations of all severities. The effect of gender in group variables showed to be inconclusive. These mixed results demonstrate a need for further empirical research to clarify the strength of the effect when accounting for situational covariates.

This thesis examines three diverse vampire narratives from around the 1990s, arguing that the liminal figure of the vampire, forever in between life and death, is also then well-positioned to queer norms around gender, sexuality, and relationships. This queering, however, manifests differently in each narrative. My analysis looks at each of these three narratives in turn, while also considering how each text’s placement as mainstream or not mainstream affected the manifestation of the vampires’ queering.

ADHANS & ORGASMS is a collection that includes both free verse and prose poetry. The poems shape the Florida landscape as well as cultural aspects of the speaker’s home life, providing insight to the hyphenated space between Arab and American societies. The frequent use of the female perspective and humor inform the speaker of her own past, while portraying a woman at odds with a patriarchal society. Many of the poems explore the self through pop-culture, sexuality, and heritage. ADHANS & ORGASMS discusses the family unit’s dysfunction as it tries to bridge cultures. Romantic relationships are examined, and many of the poems consider the male muse in an effort to reverse societal expectations with unexpected subversion by turning the lens to focus on the male body. ADHANS & ORGASMS has a variety of influences, especially third-wave feminist voices such as Elizabeth Bishop, Dorianne Laux, and Sharon Olds. Cultural poems were influenced by Richard Blanco and Naomi Shihab Nye.

Stranger harassment has been a rising issue regarding gender equality globally. Nevertheless, this issue has been rarely explored in Hong Kong. This study aims at discovering its prevalence, the frequency of its occurrences, local women’s reactions toward it and variables that may determine women’s reactions in a local context. Both personal qualities, including gender-related belief, self-objectification and body image, as well as situational qualities, namely perceived situational norms, are examined. 350 self- administered questionnaires were collected from local women aged between 18 and 25, in either pencil-and-paper or online forms. Results showed that more than 80% of respondents reported experiencing stranger harassment at least once in their lifetimes. The frequency of experiencing certain types of harassment decreases as the severity of harassment increases. Unlike the results found by previous studies, active coping strategy has been reported as the most common reaction adopted by local young women, following by passive, self-blaming and lastly benign coping strategy. As for personal qualities that may determine women’s reactions toward stranger harassment, self-objectification has been found to be positively linked to benign and self-blaming coping strategies, whereas benevolent sexism, which was one of the measurements of gender-related belief, is positively linked to self-blaming and passive coping strategies. Situational qualities were also found to be related to women’s reactions toward stranger harassment. Among the three items that measure perceived situational norms, item B – ‘women should expect stranger harassment in that setting’ is positively correlated to all three nonactive coping strategies. Item C – ‘people nearby will help me if I experience stranger harassment in that setting’ was also found to be positively correlated to active coping strategy. Explanations to the relationships between these variables and women’s coping strategies as well as practical implications are discussed. This study contributes towards a greater understanding of stranger harassment and women’s reactions toward it, and fills gap in the literature on stranger harassment in the local context.