The following dissertation is a study of the construction of gender expressed by American women in a traditionally male occupation, that of the military. Specifically, the project focuses on the images and symbols of gender, work, and society created by the personal stories and life histories of women in the armed forces. The theoretical background includes contemporary concepts of language and social life, particularly those theories identified as social constructionist as well as feminist and anthropological theories of gender constructs. The methodological focus will incorporate ethnographic interviewing and discourse analysis of the life stories of the female participants. The conclusion will defend the constructionist view of communication theory and suggest ways of reconstructing gender roles in a changing post-industrial society.

This dissertation seeks to understand how the women of Cambodia recreated self and culture after experiencing civil war, displacement, refugee camps, and resettlement. The women, as well the men, lost all that was meaningful including children, spouses, immediate and extended family, known villages, the Buddhist religion, predictable life rites, and economic self-sufficiency. Since most women lost the protection of husbands, brothers, and fathers, their plight was all the more urgent as they attempted to keep their remaining children alive and safe. In order to comprehend this enormous problem, I conducted interviews with the women (and some men) in Amherst, Massachusetts, a rural New England town. In addition, I questioned several nuns and a Buddhist wiseman and gathered life histories from some of the women. I used a loosely structured interview method as well as participant observation. I attended Buddhist festivals and family events. I had access to videos, library resources and archival material at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts. I found the women have not recreated but added to their pre-war sense of self and culture. Most families maintain their Khmer/Buddhist identity through language, food, clothing, celebrations, and personal surroundings. It is important to the women that the children remain knowledgeable in Buddhist practices and learn the valuable Khmer lesson of respect. The women readily accept aspects of American culture. They understand the importance of education for their children and the need for their children to learn English. English is beyond the grasp of many older women. There are areas of difficulty for the Khmer women, especially when strongly held Khmer values violently clash with American values. There are also endeavors that will strengthen the Khmer community in Amherst, such as the construction of a traditional Buddhist Wat (Temple) in neighboring Leverett, Massachusetts. It is my conclusion that the Khmer community will remain viable as the women actively blend new traditions with older rituals.

Critical reception of Karoline von Gunderrode has largely ignored her work and focused on her tragic life and death. Even earlier feminist scholarship overlooked her writing because of its presumed adherence to masculine literary traditions. As part of a shift towards more discursive analyses, this dissertation traces the contradictory representations of gender in Gunderrode's body of work. I maintain that gender is the central conflict for Gunderrode primarily because her appropriation of romantic idealism contradicts her desire for self-fulfillment. As a woman writer, she adopted a masculine persona at a time when romanticism privileged the feminine. Rather than an identity as muse or in self-negating love, Gunderrode developed her masculine self through intellectual engagement with philosophy and history. She also had ambitions of becoming a poet. What she considered feminine, however, is not absent in her writing: love, the sexualized body, and nature figure significantly as subject matter and metaphor. The contemporary discourse on nature and the extensive feminist criticism of that form the theoretical framework of my analysis. Gunderrode did not explicitly question the natural complementarity of the sexes, but through close readings of a wide range of her texts I establish some of the ways that she transgressed conventional expectations of women's and men's natures. Because love exists in a complicated relationship with women's creativity and historical agency, Gunderrode utilized various strategies--such as the maternal, homoeroticism, incest, and triangular relationships--to counter the romantic ideal. Love is never portrayed within a bourgeois context of marriage and family. Women's economic and emotional reliance on men is thematized. I also discuss how Gunderrode appropriated an orientalist discourse in her gender critique. Given the complexity of Gunderrode's work, I concentrate on three themes: the conflict between creativity and female sexuality; the conflict between heroism and love for women in history; and the construction of a poetic self. Through my reading of Gunderrode's encounter with an ideal of subjectivity and its negation of women, I suggest new categories with which to explore how gender codes formed the basis for late-eighteenth-century German notions of the individual.

Sojourn is a composition of intercultural interactions where people (re)constitute the various forms of life such as cultural patterns, autobiographies, relationships, and episodes. This dissertation is a compilation of the stories of sojourn of three Malay women as interpreted within the theoretical framework of Coordinated Management of Meaning, hereafter referred to as CMM (Pearce and Cronen, 1980). It is an episodic analysis of their reported daily interactions with Americans and other Malays during their sojourn in the United States. This episodic method allowed the reconstruction of stories from the responses elicited through circular questions. The CMM analysis included the similarities and differences in daily interactions, the tensions and emotions that emerged, patterns of resistance, stability, and transformations that were intrinsic in their lived experiences. A review of the three cases revealed that initial episodes with Americans reflected Malay patterns of interaction. These patterns of cultural communication created tensions and misunderstandings. Patterns of intercultural communication emerged after these women recognized that there are differences between their cultural ways. The ability to coordinate these intercultural interactions was a consequence of the implicative effects of their lived experiences. These lived experiences redefined their autobiographical stories and subsequently transformed their actions and interpretations of their told stories. It was also found that emotions have a role as social action that (re)constitute particular situations. Nevertheless, interactions with other Malays reflected a Malay pattern and any attempt to do otherwise was met with resistance. There are several implications of this study for intercultural research. First, the episodic analysis renders sojourn as an experience that is situated and interactive. It provides an in-depth, reflexive and interactive look into the lived experiences of sojourners. Second, this research is a co-construction and interactive process between the researcher and reciprocators for it allowed an active participation of the reciprocators. Third, the analysis reflected the creation of stories within a Malay cultural pattern. This is significant for intercultural research since both the researcher and the women affected the questions, data, and subsequently the findings. Thus, intercultural research is a contextualized and situated account.

This study argues the need to consider the impact of social class in women's narratives. Beginning with the turn of the century, a time of great social and economic change for women, I examine how women writers challenge and redefine traditional notions of middle-class womanhood in order to accommodate emerging feminist ideals, for example, the rejection of marriage for the pursuit of a career. Using the fiction of Wharton, Austin, Yezierska, and Hurston, I explore how the female characters of their novels negotiate between traditional roles ascribed to middle-class women and new definitions of womanhood symbolized by the appearance of the "New Woman." Interestingly, while some middle-class ideals are rejected, i.e. domesticity, two of these writers, Wharton and Austin, nonetheless remain committed to a middle-class ideology. For Yezierska and Hurston, middle-class acceptance means necessarily negotiating the uncertain terrain between a desire for middle-class stability and the reality of one's ethnic and racial background. By highlighting the importance of class in the construction of female subjectivity, my study of women's narratives makes a substantial contribution to the field of feminist literary theory.

This study explores academic women's experience of writing and blocking through ethnographic interviews focusing on the women's history of writing in the academy, impediments to writing they have faced, and strategies they have used to write through blocks. Women in the humanities and social sciences at three-levels of academic accomplishment--master's students, doctoral students, and junior faculty--participated in hour-long interviews. Particular attention was given to the impact of the writer's academic and social context on her ability to compose. The results demonstrated that block, rather than a fixed entity, is a phenomenon that occurs along a continuum. It is affected by the individual's acculturation into the academy, including explicitness of cultural norms, her family and social life, the presence or absence of direct instruction in the discourse modes of her discipline, and the role and type of evaluation she has experienced in relation to her writing. Solutions and potential solutions for writing through block are discussed, as well as implications for future research in teaching, advising, and in the acculturation process of graduate students and junior faculty.

The purpose of the study is to hear and record what women, who have recovered from anorexia, have to say about their experiences of self-starvation. The study bears witness to these lives and examines the interpretations that have guided the women's intentions, actions, and purposes. There are in-depth case studies of four women—Nell, Rose, Grace, and Marie. Each narrative gives an account of the particular phenomenological meanings embodied by the action of self-starvation and analyzes how each woman used this practice as a form of communication. The principle of collaboration has shaped the process of interviewing and the way the narratives have been constructed to give voice and authorship to the participants. The deconstruction of food and body as symbols gives access to the psychological and social experience of the participants. Violence and/or alcoholism played a role in the family backgrounds of all four women.

Since the 1940s historians have rewritten theories that positioned Puritans as sexually repressed and repressive. The current assumption, heralded in the foundational works of Morgan (1942), Demos (1970), Flaherty (1971), and Bremer (1976), is that married persons entered enthusiastically into their sexual relationships and that sexual intercourse between single women and single or married men was common. These historians hold that Puritan enthusiasm for marital sexual activity is reflected in sermons and didactic literature and in extramarital sexual activity, as evidenced by the large numbers of persons prosecuted for sexual offenses by the Quarterly Courts of Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1640–1692. Historians have also asserted that Puritans rejected the traditional sexual double standard, even to the extent of punishing men for sexual lapses with greater frequency and severity than women. Neither thesis can withstand close empirical analysis. I conducted a group study of women prosecuted for fornication or bastardy, and men prosecuted for fornication or named in paternity cases in the Essex County, Massachusetts, Quarterly courts between 1640 and 1692. I analyzed prosecution and conviction rates, sentencing patterns, and socio-economic and attitudinal data. Puritans brought the impressive machinery of the Quarterly Courts to bear, in the form of fornication prosecutions, against the small number of women who bore illegitimate children and couples whose first child arrived within 32 weeks of marriage. The official language of the courts represented sexual intercourse as “uncleanness,” “filthiness,” and “incontinence,” hardly suggestive of a sexually approbative society. Ministers and magistrates successfully curbed the sexuality of young persons who conformed to the dominant ideology that marriage was the only appropriate venue for sexual intercourse. The ideological conflation of femininity and chastity placed a heavy burden on the few women who bore illegitimate children. They were punished more severely than their male partners and regarded with contempt by the majority of women who made successful transitions from adolescence to marriage. Couples who married following out-of-wedlock sex faced less opprobrium. Usually husband and wife received the same punishment and were reintegrated into the Puritan community following a series of humiliating shame rituals.

Menopause is a complex phenomenon which encompasses physiological, psychological, and social aspects of this midlife experience. The meaning of menopause or what it symbolizes to women in American society depends on multiple factors and differs among women. The assumption is that although menopause is a biological event, social meanings determine how a woman perceives and interprets the reality of that event. How this transition is experienced by women may depend on their cultural norms, social influences and personal knowledge about menopause. The purpose of this phenomenological study is to Understand the complexities of the human experience of menopause in American women from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. The research question is “What is the meaning of menopause as experienced by American women?” The specific aims of this phenomenological study were to (a) examine and interpret the reality of the menopausal transition as experienced by American women and (b) identify common elements and themes that occur as a result of the complexities of this experience. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews with fifteen women who had experienced natural menopause. Three major themes were extracted during the data analysis: (a) expectations and realization, (b) sorting things out, and (c) a new life phase. Although some women expressed similar thoughts in particular categories, no two women had the same experience of menopause. The data from this study support the premise that the experience of menopause in American women is unique and individualized and that the meaning or perspective differs among women. The data revealed the complexities of this human experience by explicating personal meanings related to experiences, expectations, attitudes and beliefs about menopause.

This dissertation examines Elfriede Jelinek's investigation of Austria's and Western Europe's "obscene fantasies" through her "perversion" of generic forms in three of her best-known texts (Die Liebhaberinnen, Lust, and Die Klavierspielerin). It also investigates how these texts, at first glance less overtly political than Jelinek's later work, can be seen as laying the groundwork for her later, more political, analysis of Austrian fascism and racism. The dissertation is composed of three chapters; each investigates a central psychoanalytic concept (alienation, jouissance, perversion and sublimation) and reads a Jelinek text in relation to the genre that it is perverting, exposing the "obscene fantasies" that lie at its heart. Chapter One examines how Jelinek depicts alienation (in the Marxist, socialist feminist, and Lacanian senses) in her 1975 novel Die Liebhaberinnen, and explores how Jelinek's depiction of alienation functions to make Die Liebhaberinnen an anti-romance. Chapter Two addresses whether Jelinek's novel Lust (1989) is a pornographic or anti-pornographic text. I investigate the complex relationship between aesthetics and pornography, arguing that many other Jelinek scholars collapse the distinction between mass-cultural forms of pornography and the high-cultural pornography of Bataille and Sade, and thus fail to understand how her text is simultaneously pornographic and anti-pornographic. Chapter Three focuses on Jelinek's novel Die Klavierspielerin (1983), examining the development of its protagonist as a (perverse) sexual subject, and her ultimate failure to achieve a stable sexual position and how Jelinek's text perverts the genre of the Künstlerroman. It also discusses Erika's training as a pianist as a possible causal factor of her perversions and lack of sexual identity, concluding that her inability to sublimate demonstrates the similarities (and differences) between the artist and the pervert, illustrating how Jelinek's novel deviates from the traditional Künstlerroman. The dissertation argues that the disruption of genres is one of Jelinek's most significant literary contributions, her works functioning to create a "negative aesthetics" as opposed to a positive reworking of generic forms. Jelinek rejects an identificatory mode of writing and refuses to create "positive" subjects, preferring instead to produce art that is a "critique of praxis as the rule of brutal self-preservation at the heart of the status quo" (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 12).