This dissertation explores the communal uneasiness and hermeneutic impasse created by suicide in twentieth-century US American literature by women. By considering how history is negotiated through suicidal acts and how literary texts are structured by self-inflicted death, I suggest that this intentional turn is most fundamentally readable through public spaces—the Middle Passage, Hiroshima, Harlem, San Francisco's Chinatown. My first chapter focuses on Ludwig Binswanger's The Case of Ellen West: An Anthropological-Clinical Study (1944), an existential analysis of a Jewish woman who killed herself in Switzerland when she was thirty-three. Along with Anne Sexton's poetry, West's writing acts as a prelude to my subsequent chapters because it makes the body inextricable from the imagination, and both inextricable from history, community, and politics. In Chapter Two, I trace the conflation of white femininity and suicide in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature before turning to modern novels in which women ambiguously fall to their deaths: Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), Mary McCarthy's The Group (1963), and Fae Myenne Ng's Bone (1993). These texts disperse intention over a field of inquiry, connecting the private act of suicide to culture less through consciousness than through public space—the fictional space of falling in public and the imagined space of a reading public. In Chapter Three, I examine revolutionary suicide in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1988), Sula (1973), and Song of Solomon (1977), integrating theories from Emmanuel Levinas and Huey Newton. Self-destruction operates on two revolutionary levels: within the story, as a political form of resistance and within the narrative structure, as a discursive strategy, an axis around which meanings revolve. Finally, in Chapter Four, I sketch the political terrain covered by female suicide in Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), Velina Hasu Houston's Tea (1983), and Suzan-Lori Parks's Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1990). Each play extends the logic that I have traced in previous chapters, deploying the act of suicide to register the effects of colonialism, war, and white supremacy on contemporary American women's lives.

This study of participatory action research (PAR) among Thai women and girls involved in sex trafficking and prostitution demonstrates ways to: (1) educate women and girls; (2) empower women and girls through the process of reconstructing and using their own life experiences; (3) generate a body of popular knowledge and action plans derived from their own experience which is more relevant to the problem solutions; and (4) raise their consciousness as of the process outcome in order to improve in their lives. The process of PAR including (1) problem defining, (2) data collecting and analyzing, and (3) action plans was undertaken by the participant group. These women and girls were residing at the Kredtrakarn Protection and Occupational Development Center shelter; and I took the role of facilitator. Sixteen group discussions were conducted for the PAR process at the shelter and a one-time interview of the stakeholder group consisting of politicians, government officials, police, international and domestic NGOs and etc. was implemented so as to add to the generation of popular knowledge. Learning, empowering and raising consciousness are the process outcome. Evaluations were conducted by means of the process of PAR to produce the PAR process outcome. All participants stated that they all learned much about the issues related to sex trafficking and prostitution and increased their self-confidence. Findings include: (1) two sets of in-depth people knowledge, and (2) two sets of short-term and long-term plans. Findings explore contributing factors such as family with problems, running away from home, poverty, insufficient education, drug usage, peer pressure, consumerism, gullibility, and the role of agents. Findings of this study provide more relevance related to issues of sex trafficking and prostitution because they were derived from people who had been directly involved. Findings were analyzed and consolidated within the context of Thai socio-economic-cultural views. Key concepts for implications include: (1) family issues, (2) educational efficacy, (3) law enforcement and revision, and (4) an agent. Findings related to all of these concepts can contribute toward social reform and policy development, practice within the nursing profession, and ground theory generating.

This cultural history uses the glaring spatial divides within Germany in the 1970s, the Berlin Wall and the German-German border, to analyze discourses of crisis that manifest themselves around issues of space, divisions, walls, and borders. The perspective of a "transnational feminist psychogeographer" borrows from German and cultural studies, transnational feminist theory, and postcolonial critiques to allow for a reading of cultural contradictions without reducing them to either/or positions. Discussing changes in Cold War politics that characterize the 1970s in terms of a shift to postmodernity, post-Fordism, or a new stage in capitalist globalization, chapter one develops a theoretical framework for examining how 'globalized' borders appear as both permeable and permanent, fostering contradictory discourses of security and confinement. Rather than suggesting that the specific fears produced around global issues like the oil crisis and the Vietnam War vanished by the end of the 1970s, chapter two argues that the production of fear is part of a permanent, racialized, gendered, as well as specifically Western, state of emergency. Chapter three and four reread discourses of national crisis around immigration and terrorism. The mechanisms and strategies of Othering implied in these texts promote a contradictory sense of global alliances and national identity while simultaneously fostering the militarization of the borders of the nation state. Chapters five and six examine the politics of discourses of gender crises in texts and films of the New Subjectivity and in feminist texts in the 1970s. The perspective of a "transnational psychogeographer" allows me to contextualize feminisms and the crisis of the male subject within changing interpretations of gender, nation, and the West. The conclusion contends that we should rethink our understating of the 1970s as a decade between the social change of the 1960s and the conservative backlash of the 1980s to accommodate contradictory political discourses defining a divided Germany in a global context by means of creating a 'permanent state of emergency.'

This dissertation is based on an ethnographic study of a discussion board and its 120-150 female participants, all of whom are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). My primary goal was to discover how the women’s religion influences their uses of and the rewards of their online literacy and how their online writing affects how they practice their faith and define themselves. Methods of inquiry included two years of participant observation, phenomenological interviewing, discourse analysis interviewing, and collection of discussion board threads. Participants’ spoken comments and writing show how they created an enclave in order to communicate in ways driven by their religious beliefs and to discuss the multiple essences that emerge as they live their faith. Participants’ literacy practices also demonstrate that the discussion board functions simultaneously as a private board and as a public LDS community, in which participants use intimate literacy to construct public voices that are in harmony with LDS teachings but that reflect their individual differences with those teachings. My analysis reveals that writing in this enclave often contributed to open-mindedness and critical agency. The participants conscientiously engaged in both deliberative discourse and in a pragmatics of naming to claim religious essences and to negotiate their multiple relationships to their religious doctrine, even as they accept that doctrine. In doing so, they have found power to resist other cultural discourses. They also have become more open to difference within their community. This study shows that agency can occur within a fixed structure because there are choices within fixity and that religious discourses offered participants a position of resistance from which to speak. This study suggests the importance of qualitative research on private contexts for faith-based literacy because public contexts may not be deemed as “safe” for discussions of fluidity within faith. I argue that composition studies and literacy studies need to pay attention to the extent to which religion informs individuals’ literacy practices, particularly students who struggle to reconcile the coexistence of religious and academic literacies. I also suggest pedagogical tactics for welcoming faith-based literacies in the composition classroom.

This dissertation investigates the origin, content and impact of gender and liberalization policies within the region of Telangana in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India. My analysis is based upon a year of fieldwork in the region as well as data from the National Sample Surveys. I argue that making women favored ‘clients of the development process’ gave the state in Andhra Pradesh legitimacy within local politics as well as with external funding agencies, smoothing the transition to a liberalization regime. However, the policy context of liberalization has meant that the state has reduced its share of expenditure on ‘social reproduction’ in recent years and the substantive content of its ‘women's empowerment’ policy is a highly publicized thrift and micro-credit program for women. While this program does address women as autonomous economic agents, it fails to account for the fact that hierarchies of gender are cross-cut by class and caste. In claiming to empower women through a program that lacks fiscal support and relies upon the expenditure of time and resources by participants themselves, the program serves to re-emphasize these hierarchies and tends to exclude the poorest, lowest caste women. Meanwhile there has been an increase in female labor force participation in the postliberalization period. This increase is best explained as the result of a ‘supply push’, reflecting the agrarian distress in this region. There is little improvement in the conditions under which women and men labor. As a result employment may not be translating into increased empowerment for women. Furthermore, the cultural context that shapes gender inequality in this region is also changing as denoted by an expansion of the practice and amounts of dowry. Dowry in Telangana may indicate a shift away from egalitarian marriage practices and a reduction in the level of material and emotional support a woman can claim from her natal kin. While this change predates liberalization policies, it increases overall economic insecurity for women in the region. It must thus be taken into account by policy makers if they do not wish to exacerbate the economic vulnerabilities of women.

The objective of this study was to explore the role of various barriers to mental health treatment among an ethnically diverse sample of women with serious mental illness. Although women have higher rates of initiating treatment than men (Sussman, Robins, & Earls, 1987), they may be more likely to prematurely terminate therapy (Klein, Stone, Hicks, & Pritchard, 2003), and they contend with unique barriers to effective treatment (APA, 2002, p. 28). Likewise, ethnic minorities in America face unique cultural barriers to care, and though minority groups have similar rates of mental illness, they are less likely to obtain appropriate treatment (Kessler et al., 1996). This cross-sectional study explored the hypotheses that there are differences in the amount and types of barriers reported by Ethnic minority and Caucasian women with serious mental illness, and that greater barriers will predict poorer ratings of working alliance. Participants were 64 women receiving outpatient psychiatric services at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston. They completed the Barriers to Treatment Participation Scale, Symptom Checklist 90-R, Working Alliance Inventory, and Client Satisfaction Questionnaire. Contrary to the predictions, there were no significant differences between the Caucasian and Ethnic minority women in the amounts or types of barriers endorsed, and the barriers measure did not predict ratings of alliance. The findings and recommendations for further research are discussed.

This dissertation explores the ideas about fashion and luxury in literary texts from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. The first chapter reviews the concept of “fashion,” its meaning and implications, and provides an overview of the most important theories that have attempted to explain why fashion exists and how it is originated. The second chapter is devoted to the study of the controversy about fashion and luxury during the Enlightenment, with an emphasis on the national and patriotic implications of that discussion, and on the generic aspects of a controversy in which both male and female are subjected to scrutiny and criticism for their fashionable, effeminate and unpatriotic behavior. The primary sources used for this chapter are the eighteenth century periodical El censor , the Cartas marruecas by José de Cadalso and El libro del agrado by Luis de Eijoecente. The third chapter explores the ideas and rhetoric about fashion in nineteenth century novels by Benito Pérez Galdós—especially La de Bringas—and in some writings by Emilia Pardo Bazán. The most important issues addressed are the feminization of fashion in that period, when fashion starts to be considered a feminine affair and this belief—held by novelists and theorists—is analyzed and deconstructed. The second issue is the traditional explanation of fashion as imitation of the behavior and manners of the upper classes, which explains the Victorian anxieties about fashion in the light of class competition and the worries about the confusion of classes. The fourth chapter explores the ideas about fashion and fashionability in the works of the most important writers about female education (such as Fenelon, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft and Taylor-Mill), and examines the ideas about fashion in two female Spanish writers who took part in the polemic about the female education and emancipation: Concepción Arenal and Rosario Acuña. The chapter concludes with a close analysis of the work done in the 1920 by Carmen de Burgos, a writer, feminist and journalist who celebrated fashion as art and feminine expression. One of the main conclusions of this dissertation is that the late nineteenth century marks a change from a culture of luxury to a culture of fashion in a capitalist world where being fashionable no longer means being able to purchase the most expensive fabrics and embroideries.

This dissertation draws on the Aristotelian and contemporary communitarian belief that humans are socially constituted, and analyzes the manifestations of this belief in contemporary identity politics and in the concept of 'culture' that often underlies identity politics. While I argue that it is important to maintain a communitarian conception of the self, I depart from Aristotle and the communitarian tradition by rejecting the assumption that a constitutive community is characterized by unity and homogeneity. I then claim that identity politics has inherited both the virtues and the problems of communitarian theory. Just as communitarians claim that the self is never free from social constitution, so identity politics have taken the self's identity to be formed along lines of socially defined group differences, and like communitarianism, some identity politics has entailed a call for unity. In the case of identity politics, the requirement for membership in the community may be sharing certain essential characteristics of identity; difference can result in marginalization, forced assimilation to the group norm, or expulsion. Because identity politics often relies upon the concept of 'culture' to ground group identities, I also examine this concept. When a community's unity derives from its members understanding themselves to share a culture, the maintenance of the culture itself can be conservatizing; the culture can remain closed off from changes as it preserves the "traditional" or "authentic"; furthermore, it can come to be treated as an object outside of the people who live it and as such the changing lived realities of these people--particularly changes that cross lines of identity--do not serve to continually offer new, changing, and ambiguous ways of conceiving of what is shared between members of the community. I argue for the development of group identity that recognizes intersecting group differences, and can permit hybridity or mixed identities. I end by suggesting that for a constitutive community to remain truly constitutive without harming its members through marginalization, forced assimilation to a norm or a shared essence, or stagnation, members must give up the sort of control that maintains the community as a unity.

In October 1852, Amy Fiske (1785-1859) of Sturbridge, Massachusetts, stitched a sampler. But she was not a schoolgirl making a sampler to learn her letters. Instead, as she explained: “The above is what I have taken from my sampler that I wrought when I was nine years old. It was w[rough]t on fine cloth it tattered to pieces. My age at this time is 66 years.” Drawing from 167 examples of decorative needlework – primarily samplers and quilts from 114 collections across the United States – made by individual women aged forty years and over between 1820 and 1860, this dissertation explores how Fiske and women like her experienced social and cultural change in antebellum America, and probes their personal reactions to growing older. Falling at the intersection of women’s history, material culture study and the history of aging, this dissertation brings together objects, diaries, letters, portraits, and prescriptive literature to consider how middle-class American women experienced the aging process. Chapter 1 explores the physical and mental effects of “old age” on antebellum women and their needlework. It considers samplers modified later in life through the removal of the maker’s age or the date when the sampler was made. Chapter 2 examines epistolary needlework, that which relates a message or story in the form of stitched words. Chapter 3 focuses on technological developments related to needlework during the antebellum period, particularly indelible ink and the rise of the sewing machine, and the tensions that arose from the increased mechanization of textile production. Chapter 4 considers how gift needlework functioned among friends and family members. The materials, style and techniques represented in these gifts often passed along an embedded message, allowing the maker to share her opinions, to demonstrate her skill and creativity, and to leave behind a memorial of her life. Far from being a decorative ornament or a functional household textile, these samplers and quilts served their own ends. They offered aging women a means of coping, of sharing and of expressing themselves. In the end, the study argues that these “threads of time” provide a valuable and revealing source on the lives of mature antebellum women.

This study is an Ethnography of Communication of a communication practice that explores the ways American women speak about menopause and hormone replacement therapy in face-to-face and Internet speech events. Called MenoSupport, this kind of talk occurs in specific speech events where validation, support, and information gathering are the key components of participation. The theory and method of Ethnography of Communication guides the analysis and interpretation of this talk that is described from the perspective of a communication ritual where norms for interaction and rules for interpreting the talk are analyzed to construct features of a model of personhood for this speech community. Key findings in this study include an analysis of a linguistic agon produced in MenoSupport that signals how women talk about both their bodies and their experiences in their bodies. The features of personhood discovered in this study include a woman's expressed requirement for doing something about menopause. Talk about this includes a woman's individual “quality of life” and the statement that she must be able to talk about menopause as a problem. Problematizing menopause creates an expressed need for a woman to take action during this stage of life. Taking action includes talking about menopause and hormone replacement therapy in venues other than the physician's office and medical interview. The key symbols of “doing something”, “taking action”, “quality of life”, problematizing a natural stage of life, talking as support for and validation of self are indicative of a model person who identifies with the unique qualities of being a “Baby Boomer”.