The dissertation explores the imbricated nature of race, gender, and class in the field of insurance within the political economy of the New South. It considers how enterprising black women navigated tensions between New South rhetoric and Jim Crow reality as well as sexism and racism within the industry and among their industry peers. It complicates the narrative of black southern labor history that focuses more on women as agricultural laborers, domestics, and factory workers than as enterprising risk takers who sought to counterbalance personal ambition and self-interest with communal empowerment. Insurance organizations within black-run secret fraternal societies and formal black-owned insurance companies emerged as not only powerful symbols of black business achievement by the early decades of the twentieth century but also the most lucrative business sector of the separate black economy. Negro Captains of Industry, a coterie of successful, influential, self-made men, stood at the forefront; they represented the keystone of black economic, social, and political progress. The term invoked a decidedly masculinist image of “legitimate” leadership of black business. Considering fraternal and formal insurance, gender-inscribed rhetoric, shaped by racism and New South ideology, imagined black men as the ideal protectors and providers; women became the objects of protection rather than agents of economic development, job creation, and financial security. The dissertation explores how women operated creatively within and outside of normative expectations of their role in the insurance business. The dissertation considers the role of state regulation and zealous regulators who often targeted insurance organizations and companies, the primary symbols of black business success; in other ways, regulation dramatically improved profitability and stability. The dissertation identifies three key periods: the Pre-Regulatory Era, 1890s to 1906; the Era of Regulation, 1907-World War I; and the Professionalization of Black Insurance, Post-WWI to the Great Depression. It also considers the barriers to black women’s involvement in professional organizations. By the late 1930s, enterprising women in insurance lost ground as fraternal insurance waned in influence and as the strongest proponents of the black separate economy promoted a vision that embraced women as consumers rather than business owners. / text

The sociocultural mythology of the South homogenizes it as a site of abjection. To counter the regionalist discourse, the dissertation intersects queer sexualities with gender and race and focuses on exploring identity and spatial formation among Black lesbian and queer women. The dissertation seeks to challenge the monolith of the South and place the region into multiple contexts and to map Black geographies through an intentional intersectional account of Black queer women. The dissertation utilizes qualitative research methods to ascertain understandings of lived experiences in the production of space. The dissertation argues that an idea of Progress has been indoctrinated as a synonym for the lgbtq civil rights movement and subsequently provides an analysis of progress discourses and queer sexualities and political campaigns of equality in the South. Analyses revealed different ways to situate progress utilizing the public contributions of three Black women interviewed for the dissertation. Moreover, the dissertation utilizes six Black queer and lesbian women to explain the multifarious nature of identities and their construction in place. Black queer and lesbian women produce spaces that deconstruct the normativity of stasis and physicality, and the dissertation explores the consequential realities of being a body in space. These consequences are particularly highlighted in the dissertation by discussions of the processes of racialization in the bounded and unbounded senses of space and place and the impacts of religious institutions, specifically Christianity. The dissertation concluded that no space is without complication. Other considerations should be made in the advancement of alleviating oppression deeply embedded in United States landscapes. Black women’s geographies offer epistemological and ontological renderings that enrich analyses of space, place, and landscape. The dissertation also concludes that Black women’s bodies represent sites for the production of geographic knowledge through narrating their spaces of material trajectories of interlocking, multiscalar lives.

二次世界大戰時，美國擊敗日本，使朝鮮半島脫離殖民統治，然而隨後的美蘇冷戰，使得朝鮮半島分裂成南北兩韓，而美國與南韓簽訂條約，成立美韓同盟(U.S.–South Korea Alliance)，成為繼日本之後，美國在亞洲的另一個戰略同盟。冷戰與後冷戰期間，美韓關係雖有波折，但不影響美韓同盟的強度。直到2000年美國小布希就任，其強硬的北韓政策與南韓金大中的陽光政策形成對比，成了美韓關係不協調的開端。而後連任的小布希延續其北韓政策，南韓繼任的盧武鉉將陽光政策擴大實施，推出和平繁榮政策，美韓兩國的北韓政策再度不同調，兩國關係持續跌宕起伏至2008年。本研究試圖以攻勢現實主義分析美國此時期的北韓政策；以新自由制度主義檢視南韓的交往政策，透過理論交鋒研究兩國利益的差異，並檢視外部因素如中國、日本、俄羅斯的影響，進而解釋此時期美韓關係不協調的原因。 / In 1945, the U.S. defeated Japan. The Korean peninsula was liberated from Japanese colonization at the end of World War II. However, the confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union left two Koreas separated by the Demilitarized Zone from the Cold War to the present. In addition, based on the Mutual Defense Treaty Between the United States of America and the Republic of Korea, the U.S.–South Korea Alliance was established. During the Cold War and Post Cold War era, the U.S.-South Korea relations faced hard times, but the alliance remained strong. When George W. Bush became the president of the U.S. in the year 2000, his hardline policy toward North Korea collided with South Korea’s Sunshine Policy, which was made by the president Kim Dae-jung. These different policies toward the North caused tensions to the U.S.-South Korea relations. Then the re-elected Bush continued hardline policy against North Korea, but South Korea’s new president—Roh Moo-hyun—decided to inherit the sunshine policy and develop Peace and Prosperity Policy. Washington and Seoul still failed to reach a consensus on how to deal with Pyongyang. The U.S.-South Korea relations continued to fluctuate until 2008. This study tries to analyze the U.S. policy toward North Korea through offensive realism and examine South Korean engagement policy through neoliberal institutionalism from 2000 to 2008. Besides, this thesis also considers exogenous factors such as China, Japan, and Russia, trying to explain the inconstancy of the U.S.-South Korea relations.