My dissertation consists of fifty poems that create a narrative arc of a woman's life and beyond. The poems consider and reconsider a woman's place and displacement within the family unit, society, and religion, and focus on major events in a woman's life: childhood, marriage, motherhood, divorce, grand-motherhood, and the deaths of children, siblings, and parents. Many of the poems focus on representations of women in art--in particular, religious art. Several poems consider constructions of God inside religion and outside conventional religion, and explore ideas of the soul before and after death. The majority of the poems are written in free verse, but I have included various other classic forms as well as nonce forms. My poetry attempts to make sense of my experiences. Much of my past work concerns my son's death, and while I have a number of poems that reference that event in this book as well, the majority of the poems spring from situations I have experienced that I was not able to fully process when they were happening. While these events are particular to me personally (my parent's divorce and my divorces; my son's diagnosis, deteriorating illness, and death; my daughter's marriage and motherhood), I believe that grappling with the significance of these events in my life honestly and crafting art from them is an important endeavor, one that can have meaning and significance for readers. My aesthetics have been influenced by Leon Stokesbury, Beth Gylys, and David Bottoms through working with me at GSU. Poets I have studied who have influenced my work include Amy Clampitt and Pattiann Rogers, because of their close observations of the natural world and unapologetically feminine perspective on that world. Pattiann Rogers combines natural science and metaphysics in her poetry to great effect and I pursue similar themes in my book. My interest and curiosity about the world around me is the wellspring for my creative processes and investigating ideas about the world revealed in science and reflected in art helps me put my life’s experiences in a context I can respond to in my poetry.

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This thesis adopts maternal well-being as a prism for studying the roles and identities of African women. It critically analyzes the dynamics in culture and religion that militate against women's quest for fullness of life. As its methodology, it adopts narratives of African women as a source and means of theological research based on the anthropological model. This method prioritizes the voices and humanity of previously silenced, excluded, and oppressed women and their conditions of maternal mortality, poverty, and oppression rooted in gender biases and patriarchal stereotypes. Theology has largely ignored the reality of maternal mortality evidenced by the paucity of theological materials. A consequence of the neglect and ignorance of this critical factor is the chasm between the rhetorical use of feminine and maternal symbolisms to represent and define the significance of women in church and society and the concrete realities that confront them as women. Bridging this gap necessitates identifying exemplary icons and models of maternal leadership and wisdom in scripture, traditions, and cultural practices to redefine the status, identity, and role of women. It also entails recognizing and harnessing the unique gifts, qualities, and spirituality of African women for the edification of church, transformation of society, and flourishing of humanity. Of salience is the practice of maternal leadership as a source of a new ethos for church and society through women's capacities and contributions, though a patriarchal mind-set imposes biological motherhood as the sole criterion for defining women's existence and relevance. Maternal leadership and wisdom liberated from a reductionist, biological understanding of motherhood and the highlighting of incarnated roles and identities inspired by maternal values represent innovative and original aspects of this thesis. Only by listening to voices of women can church and society develop a more just, liberating, and inclusive understanding of womanhood and motherhood. Nothing substitutes for the voices of women.

This dissertation explores articulations of Black Womanhood during the socio-political crisis of police brutality against Black women during the 2010s. I use Stuart Hall’s concepts of conjuncture and articulation as the orientation to analyze three of Lifetime’s original reality television programs: Dance Moms, Bring It!, and Girlfriend Intervention. I contend that the discourses on these shows create articulations of Black womanhood that fail to reflect the realities of the complex social struggles and state-sanctioned police violence against unarmed Black women that led to the #SayHerName movement. Rather than portray the full realities of the Black female experience, the shows conceal the social unsettling experiences of being a Black woman in order to bring entertaining and banal discourses to the forefront. As such, those reductive articulations of Black Womanhood act as an unstable settlement, a temporary joist to the national social formation in an attempt to avoid radical socio-political reconfigurations.

The musical short pilot presentation, HOW TO DEAL WITH FAMe, follows Lannie Daniels, a young masculine-presenting actress who has been given the role of a lifetime as a character who looks quite the opposite of her. When her mother comes to town for the show and their values begin to clash, she is reminded of how she falls short of the traditional expectations of womanhood. It is the creative culmination of a deep dive into gender performance, the restrictiveness of self-expression and how that impacts desirability and assumed preferences, specifically through the lens of Black women. As a series, the word "performance" expands to explore how we as people perform, for each other, for ourselves, because of ego, because of doubt. I reflect myself, my loved ones and the people I’ve known along the way. It is an ode to the homies and things that I love, but grander and far more dramatic. Thank you to my wonderful cast and exceptional crew for making this huge vision possible. And lastly, this short is in protest of the disappearance of tv theme songs, so I hope everyone of them gets stuck in your head.

In this thesis, I examine depictions of black female characters crafted by black authors writing in the late 19th century, and I consider how they use these depictions as attempts to challenge white supremacist rhetoric and imagery. In particular, I examine how Frances E.W. Harper and Sutton E. Griggs represent black women through their female characters in their respective novels, Iola Leroy and Imperium in Imperio. I situate these novels within the historical moments, Reconstruction and Redemption, with which Harper and Griggs both document and contend. In these two texts, Harper and Griggs trace, through their characters’ struggles, the hopes and gains of Reconstruction, and the frustration and despair of Redemption. In attending so closely to their own political contexts, Harper and Griggs, non-traditional novelists who were more well known for other forms of writing and for their oratorical skills, selected the novel as a political tool to theorize uplift. Throughout this thesis I examine how and why their constructions of black womanhood in Iola Leroy and Imperium in Imperio frequently idealize their female characters, and I focus on both authors’ efforts to reclaim the image of black women, salvaging it from the destructive imagery of plantation literature and introducing a proud and positive model of black feminine virtue, strength, and influence.

The purpose of this project is to examine how contemporary contexts of Islamophobia contribute to shaping notions and performances of Muslim womanhood. I center Muslim female social media influencers in my analysis and examine how they perform and (re)define Muslim womanhood through fashion, aesthetic labor, the hijab, and modest embodiment practices online. The specific research question that undergirds this project is, "How do contexts and discourses of Islamophobia contribute to shaping notions and performances of Muslim womanhood?" My data is derived from interviews with Muslimah social media influencers in the US, UK, and Canada; a survey with their social media followers, and a content analysis of their photo and video posts on Instagram and YouTube. Findings suggest that racialized and gendered expectations of Muslim womanhood emerge on the one hand, from the western non-Muslim community's racialized perceptions and understandings of Muslim women and Islam, and on the other, from the western Muslim community's reaction to its racialization in the global war on terror. The result of these expectations is the imposition of representational and moral responsibilities on Muslim women, who are regarded as visible and public representations of the Muslim community and of Islam as a faith. Findings also suggest that in response to the burden of these expectations, Muslim women exercise their agency to mobilize Islamic feminisms to their advantage in order to negotiate with, resist, and critique western Muslim and non-Muslim expectations of modesty, piety, empowerment, and the hijab. Consequently, Muslimah influencers are forcing western Muslim and non-Muslim communities to reevaluate their expectations of who fits within the category the 'Muslim Woman' while also opening up a discursive space for the possibility of new formulations and conceptualizations of Muslim womanhood that are more aligned with egalitarian Islamic feminist interpretations of Muslimah ways of living and being. / Doctor of Philosophy / In this research study, I examine how Islamophobia has contributed to shaping western Muslim and non-Muslim community perceptions and expectations of Muslim women. I focus specifically on Muslim female social media influencers to understand how they perform Muslim femininity, modesty, piety and the hijab on Instagram and YouTube. I collected data from interviews with Muslim female social media influencers in the U.S., UK, and Canada, a survey with their social media followers, and photos and videos posted by Muslim female influencers on social media. My findings show that Muslim women must contend with expectations from western non-Muslim communities, whose perceptions of Muslim emerge from Islamophobic understandings of Muslims and Islam. Simultaneously, Muslim women must contend with certain moral and representational responsibilities imposed on them by Muslim communities in the west, who are currently working to address and counteract Islamophobia, by posing a positive image of Muslims and Islam in the eyes of the western public. My findings also show that in response to the burden of these expectation, Muslim women critique these gendered burdens by exercising their agency to interpret Quranic scripture on modesty, the hijab, and gendered behaviors with an Islamic feminist lens. In doing so, they are forcing Muslim and non-Muslim communities to reevaluate the moral and representational burdens placed on Muslim women's shoulders, while also offering a space where others can conceptualize and perform Muslim womanhood in ways that align more with egalitarian Islamic feminist interpretations of Muslim women's ways of living and being.

Research suggests that disaffiliation from a religious organization brings a myriad of positive and negative consequences to those who choose to disaffiliate. This is the first study to examine the specific impact of disaffiliation on how women who have disaffiliated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints conceptualize womanhood. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 women who voluntarily chose to disaffiliate from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Data were analyzed using interpretive phenomenology, informed by hybrid identity theory. Findings suggest that women who disaffiliate from the church undergo an intense and painful identity reconstruction where they create a hybrid identity that includes their Mormon identity and other identities they have chosen to embody. Findings outline the limitations participants felt as women in the church, the pain and mourning experienced throughout the disaffiliation process, and the empowerment and expansion of their self-concept of womanhood felt post-disaffiliation. Limitations of this study, future research, and clinical implications are discussed. / Master of Science / People are choosing to disaffiliate from religious organizations in highly increasing numbers. Individual experiences of disaffiliation vary and often bring a combination of both positive and negative consequences. This study examines the experiences of women who were raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and how their choice to step away from the church impacted their self-concept of womanhood. The results of this study confirm that the disaffiliation process prompts an intense and painful identity crisis in which participants had to reconstruct how they viewed all parts of their identities. Findings outline how women felt limited by church teachings, the intense pain and mourning they experienced as they left the church, and how their ideas of womanhood expanded and felt more empowered post-disaffiliation. It is important for therapists to create space in-session for women, at any point in the disaffiliation process, to process feelings of grief and resentment, explore their identities, and reclaim themselves in an empowering and strengths-based environment.

The purpose of this study is to explore the meaning of womanhood in relation to the Swedish fäbod culture at the turn of the 20th century. The study is based upon a questionnaire from 1928 and the material is collected from the archives at the Nordic Museum in Stockholm and the Institute for Language and Folklore in Uppsala. Drawing upon gender and ritual theories, the study intends to gain an understanding for what it meant to be a woman of the fäbod by examining how fäbod herdswomen were culturally shaped and initiated into women both in relation to their place in the fäbod community of herdswomen, but also in respect to the wider community and society of which they were a part of.  The main conclusion of the study is that the journey into the fäbod woods can be seen as a rite of passage where adolescent girls going to the fäbod for the first time were initiated into the fäbod community of herdswomen. Womanhood is a cultural phenomenon in which women are culturally shaped and initiated into women not only by the codes, conceptions and values of the society at large, but also by the stories, customs and traditions of their local communities. The fäbod herdswomen were born into the gender power structures of a patriarchal society that sought to shape them into promising wives, and they were also women of the fäbod, initiated into the fäbod communitas, a form of female counterculture with its very own musical language, customs and traditions, and with its very own definitions of womanhood.

In this thesis I investigate intimate partner violence (IPV) against women in heterosexual relationships by analysing the accounts of women and men in the Anglophone Caribbean country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Since IPV occurs in the context of a range of abusive practices (Dobash and Dobash 2004) participants' talk on the use and experiences of violent acts, violent threats, as well as other controlling and coercive tactics are examined as part of this study. Analytically, I focus on the points at which discourses of gender converge with narratives of violence. In other words, the current work examines the ways in which participants construct, (re)produce, disturb and/or negotiate gender in their accounts of IPV, and the kinds of power dynamics that are implicated in these verbal performances. I apply a feminist poststructuralist framework to the study of IPV against women. Synthesising feminist theories of gender and power, and poststructuralist insights on language, subjectivity, social processes and institutions, feminist poststructuralism holds that hegemonic discourses of gender are used to subjugate women (Weedon 1997; Gavey 1990). The points at which individuals complicate dominant discursive practices will also be assessed as part of this approach. In-depth interviews conducted with 34 participants - 19 women and 15 men - between 2007 and 2008 are analysed by using a version of discourse analysis (DA) compatible with the feminist poststructuralist framework outlined in the thesis. My analysis begins by highlighting the ways in which narratives of gender inscribe asymmetrical relations of power. The focus then shifts to a comparison of women's and men's accounts on a range of abusive acts. Traditional scripts on gender are often used to police the boundaries of femininities and masculinities, tying these to female and male bodies respectively. This is the context in which control, coercion, violence and violent threats are discussed in these accounts. Understandings of manhood and womanhood also emerge in the analysis of the strategies used to explain violence. I conclude with a summary and discussion of the analysis, and I suggest possible areas for further research on IPV in the Anglophone Caribbean.