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Old Wives’ Tales: Collections from Beneath the Floorboards draws on the rich tradition of feminist speculative fiction, particularly in the genre of the fairy tale. It responds to Walidah Imarisha’s idea of “visionary fiction,” a kind of fiction which seeks to participate in “the decolonization of the imagination.” Using an experimental fragmentary form, it explores themes of story and counter-story, maternal legacy, female interconnectedness and community, and magic as a form of female empowerment in opposition to patriarchal control and surveillance.

This thesis analyzes the character designs from the Disney XD animated series Gravity Falls (Alex Hirsch, 2012-2016) through a third-wave feminist lens, arguing that these designs reflect an essentialized perception of gender that is in conflict with the themes of acceptance present in the series’ narrative. The series’ narrative pushes forth the idea that female characters are the moral center of the series and serve as an example to their peers, that they are self-assured and in control, and that men can push past any ignorance to care for the people around them, but this effort is undermined by the portrayal of gendered stereotypes of ignorance in the designs of these characters. By looking at these character designs through the lens of two character design techniques, color theory and shape language, it becomes apparent that these designs perpetuate the stereotype that strong, independent women and girls are doomed to a life of disorganization, dissatisfaction, alienation as perpetuated by Backlash Theory as outlined by feminist journalist Susan Faludi. These designs also reinforce stereotypes against single men that claim that single men are ignorant, selfish, dangerous, cold, and incapable, a stereotype that actively harms real men according to Hannah E. Dupuis and Yuthika U. Girme’s study about discrimination against single men and women. Mobilizing the work of third-wave feminist scholars Kimberlé Crenshaw, Sara L. Crawley, Lara J. Foley, Constance L. Shehan, Elizabeth Grosz, and Judith Lorber also allows one to examine how these character designs represent a constructed concept of an essentialized gender that reinforces gender stereotypes of ignorance. Finally, when comparing the narrative themes of selflessness and strength in the series to the character designs of female unruliness and male selfishness, this analysis highlights a disconnect between these two elements. This possibility for a disconnect encourages further discussion in the animation and film industry as well as film studies as to the relationship between narrative themes and character design which additionally allows for a deeper understanding of the shaping of gender and character design, which is especially important due to the youth-oriented nature of the animation industry in the United States.

Tourism may be a source of growing gender inequity in some tourist setting due to their cultural and historical contexts even though it is a potential instrument for improving the welfare of women through employment and entrepreneurial activities. Many studies have focused on the role of tourism in improving the lives of women in Tanzania, but few have focused on women employed in male dominated positions like adventure tour guiding. While being a female tour guide is regarded as a big achievement in Tanzania with many women wanting to be tour guides, there are very few female tour guides in the country - less than 1% of all guides. Through a constructivist-interpretivist and Afrocentric research lenses, this dissertation examined the gendered experiences of female adventure guides in Tanzania, including those who guide wildlife safaris, ocean and beach safaris, or treks at Mount Kilimanjaro, to better understand how to address the challenges they encounter at work. This dissertation contains three studies. The first study focused on identifying the beliefs and worldviews that shape the experiences of women working as adventure tour guides in Tanzania. Major themes found include the ways in which adventure tour guiding intersect with the concept of womanhood; the belief that female tour guiding is against African culture; the belief that tour guiding is difficult for African women; domesticity; male supremacy; submissiveness and sexuality (the belief that female tour guides are wahuni or have inappropriate sexual behavior). The second study also examined challenges, but focused on those that were considered as violent acts against women. Findings from this study identified forms of gendered-based violence such as sexual violence, humiliation, bullying, harassment, and psychological violence to be 3 problematic for female tour guides in Tanzania. The third study built on these two studies by exploring potential ways to address these challenges for female adventure tour guides. The themes that emerged included better waste management strategies; mentorship; training; advocacy; female uniforms; support from foreign tourists; support from men; policies; and strategic tourism marketing as proposed solutions to addressing the challenges faced by female adventure tour guides in Tanzania. The findings across all three studies have the potential to shape policy and practice for female tour guides in Tanzania and contributes theoretically to our understanding of their experience in the workplace.

This dissertation is about teeth- rather, how they are portrayed in British colonial discourses of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and their development as a commodified material object associated with purity, lands, and visceral emotionality. What do teeth specifically, and orality more generally, mean to eighteenth and nineteenth-century readers in relation to the logics of white possession? How did objectified subjects react to and respond to the affective tension created by this objectification? Teeth are represented in relation to feminine purity throughout British writing from at least the 1600’s. However, between 1770-1900, teeth gain additional cultural meanings, most often appearing within commentary about the diets, consumption, land-resources, and perceived sexual-moral purity of those whose common lands were targeted for resource extraction and enclosure. This was primarily true of people whose land-based spirituality, including Irish Peasants and Indigenous people of the Americas, stood in opposition to British imperial agricultural and resource gains. Teeth and their affectively-charged presentation within texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth century began to symbolize power exchanges where human and land bodies were ‘dispositioned’ through phrenology, dentistry, and agricultural discourse of “use value” versus “waste value.” As a fetishized commodity, the teeth of colonized and working-class people were stolen or sold to fill aristocratic mouths, whose voracious hunger for resources was projected onto those they villainized and objectified. The project examines how teeth gain increasing cultural and medical significance simultaneously as increases in colonization, industrialization, and traces from the discourse of “the savage” are circulated in Britain, Ireland, and the Americas and how the value system behind the discourse is responded to.

How does a contemporary audience handle medieval queerness? What, exactly, constitutes medieval queerness, and how does the medieval literary genre of romance impact it? This thesis attempts to grapple with these questions, and many more, utilizing the 13th-century Old French romance Le Roman de Silence by Heldris de Cornuälle. Medieval romances are particularly fruitful for this analysis because, on one hand, the genre consistently re/turns to cisheteronormativity, and, on the other, because scholarship generally has not applied queer theory to the study of romance. Silence follows Silence, a young Englishwoman who is raised as a boy to protect her family’s inheritance. As King Evan of England has outlawed women’s abilities to inherit, Silence’s parents raise Silence as a boy rather than a girl. What follows is that Silence embodies masculinity—performing as a better man than any of the other men in the poem—yet takes on multiple, sometimes conflicting, identities simultaneously. She eventually finds herself at King Evan’s court, where Queen Eufeme accuses Silence of raping her. From there, King Evan commands Silence to strip naked—to find out which genitals she has. King Evan is surprised to see she is assigned female; realizing why Silence disguised herself for so long, he reverses his inheritance decree, executes Queen Eufeme, and marries Silence. What is particularly stunning about Silence is the extent to which the genre constricts her trans/formation into a man. She cries out that “I am Scilentius, / As I view it, or I am nude,” yet the end of the poem not only finds Silence back into compulsory heterosexuality, it also finds her completely silenced, unable to say anything more (2527-8). The romance seems to favor—and even necessitate—this trajectory for Silence: if King Evan allows women to inherit again, then there is no reason for Silence to continue embodying queerness. In effect, Silence silences Silence, offering little to no recourse for her ambitious genderplay. The genre of romance appears to erase queerness because it is not equipped to handle such dis/configuration of the body. The implications of this practice not only reflect romance’s aristocratic sympathies, but also parallel contemporary attacks against the LGBTQ+ community. This study cannot speak for non-Western bodies, but it nonetheless challenges one of the most popular medieval genres for how it handles marginalized bodies and marginalization. Thus, this thesis will argue that gender—constrained by genre—becomes an irreconcilable category for medieval romance writers to negotiate through their works and words, suggesting that the rigidity of gender within romance is a chaotic force for both the story and genre. Hence, the poet confines gender into a strict system that, through the actions of each character, paradoxically risks slippage. As a result, queerness becomes a threatening force to the stability of the story. Erasing queerness and replacing it with cisheteronormativity illustrates romance’s inability to handle queer bodies.

Environmental leaders are tasked with finding innovative solutions to dynamic environmental challenges. Leaders must gain and use new knowledge and experiences that motivate resolving gaps in one’s knowledge (i.e., curiosity) and thereby find forward-thinking solutions. Although curiosity is an integral part of human existence, it may be experienced in various ways. Studies have shown that men and women may possess different leadership styles. Nevertheless, the influence of curiosity on leadership between genders has not been as readily explored. Women exhibit unique characteristics for successful leadership in many contexts, but they are often underrepresented in natural resource management overall. Characteristics of human curiosity and those of women leaders are similar to qualities of transformational leaders in successful environmental stewards. This present study employs explanatory mixed methods to investigate the role of curiosity in transformational leadership and seeks to understand the influence of curiosity and leadership in women environmental leaders. We assessed gender, trait curiosity, and transformational leadership scores of participants in the year-long Nebraska Water Leaders Academy. Regression analysis found that curiosity was a strong predictor of transformational leadership while gender was not, from both participant and rater perspectives. Thematic analysis of interviews with women environmental leaders produced seven themes that characterize the essence of the roles of curiosity and transformational leadership influence their experiences. Participants expressed constant awareness of stereotypical gender roles and how they reinforced power imbalances. These imbalances both limited and supported elements of women’s curiosity and leadership. Their people-oriented curiosity supported communication, relationship building, and perspective gaining which have been identified as strengths of women leaders. Adviser: Mark E. Burbach

Reaching for Fairies is a New Adult fiction novel about the slow process of healing from generational trauma in young adulthood. The story is told through a close-third person perspective focused on the inner thoughts of Cadence Marsh, an insightful and people-pleasing 20-year-old with generalized anxiety and chronic depression, as she navigates the rocky process of realizing just how severe her family’s dysfunctions are. The world inside her head is always fighting itself, and the world outside is a field of social landmines. She’s somehow always alert and never aware. Years after a bad first attempt at therapy, Cadence gives a new therapist a second try who encourages her to indulge in her questions about what she comes to call the “mirrored voice” inside her head. When she reconnects with her childhood friend, Mona Stilt, Cadence starts her journey through the Otherworld and tries to not only survive but to live.

Fantastical narratives such as fairy tales and magical realist literature utilizes fantastic and intangible spaces to unpack that which is often beyond the limitations imposed on our understanding by reality: the stunting experience of individual and generational traumas. This study aims to contribute to the current literary discourse’s understandings of fantastic literature and its subgenres as a tool for healing from trauma through the application of ontological notions of Selfhood and Otherness supplied by 20th century philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, and the notion of Orientalism by postcolonial scholar, Edward Said. The dialogue generated by these schools of thought provide a space in which I unpack the narrative structures unique to fantastical genres through psychoanalytic, feminist, and postcolonial literary theories.

This work concerns women within a single family and the ways that these women experience various levels and types of trauma, ranging from sexual trauma and child abuse to addiction and mental illness. Using various types of research and childhood memories, as well as the inherited stories from generations prior, this poetic memoir investigates long-term effects of intergenerational trauma on the collective consciousness. Not a Tracing employs rhizomatic philosophies both in research and in form, braiding narratives and moving from eras, emphasizing circularity throughout the manuscript. It also employs research from leading trauma and feminist researchers, as well as notable organizations like RAINN and the American Psychological Association.

As a condensed version of social reality, film has become a more common object of modern sociological and criminological investigation. As such, we can explore film to understand taken-for-granted as well as innovative constructions of social phenomena. Among these are gendered violence. We can use film to dig deep into its logics, elaborated in visual and narrative representations. Prior literature has analyzed crime films and the behavioral constructions within them, outlining the representations of serial homicide, rape, mass shootings and revenge. However, few studies have outlined films that do meaningful, non-voyeuristic representational work on the issue of violence against women. The purpose of this thesis, then, is to fill the gap by conducting a thematic analysis of four films that convey women resisting violence: Precious (2009), Room (2015), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), and Promising Young Woman (2020). While resistance to violence against women and other feminized subjects is usually the province of men or the masculine state, these four films cast women as the main protagonists and furthermore characterize them as active and powerful in their negotiation of violence.

This dissertation examines how stories shape both the perpetration of sexual harassment and the experiences of victims during and after sexual harassment. During and after the experience of sexual harassment, a narrative contest transpires between the harasser, victim, and others who contribute to the contest by engaging in the formal and informal conversations that follow known experiences of harassment in the workplace. I analyze 22 public statements, interviews, and investigative reports, including statements from men accused of sexual harassment, women who were sexually harassed, and bystanders. A narrative framework, including concepts of narrative believability and story credibility, is used to theorize the entrenchment of sexual harassment and its race and gender patterns. I discern how narrative contests between harassers and victims of sexual harassment influence action and inaction, and thereby support harm but may inform resistance.

“Around the Gate” is a collection of lyrical and narrative poems written by a New Orleans native. Beyond local color and Creole culture, the collection treats archetypal figures in mythology and the literary tradition as contemporary personae, frequently in a dramatic monologue. The poems span across several times and time zones, and readers are just as likely to find themselves cruising down St. Claude Street in New Orleans in the 1980s as they are to find themselves on an ancient beach of Naxos, in the Aegean Sea. The collection’s poems are often, thusly, dialogic, including a smattering of ekphrastic poems. The manuscript may easily be interpreted through a feminist or ecopoetic lens, moving between familial, or domestic scenes and tales of travel and transformation.

Graduates of Women and Gender Studies (WGS) programs gain skills that aid in the development of a feminist leadership, a leadership practice that is committed to challenging oppressive structures and institutions and empowering others to reach their full potential. Through semi-structured interviews, this qualitative study explored the experiences of five graduates of WGS undergraduate programs in the Northeast region of the United States whose post-graduation work across a variety of professional fields has offered them opportunities to practice feminist leadership. While research on both WGS and Leadership is abundant, this research addresses the gap in the literature on feminist leadership and how it is practiced in both formal and informal ways in gendered organizations in a gendered society. The analysis of data collected from these narrative interviews revealed themes that include the impact of feminist pedagogy in the classroom, the development of language skills needed to navigate issues of difference, the importance of mentorship, and the value of gaining a deeper understanding of structural inequality in our systems and institutions.

Too many scholars still rely on adjectives such as deviant, unruly, dangerous, and wild to describe women who interrogate rigid forms of womanhood, especially women of color. My project intervenes in nineteenth-century womanhood discussions, which have traditionally solidified three main categories: Republican, True, and New Womanhood. Between True Womanhood in the mid-nineteenth century and the late nineteenth-century concept of New Womanhood lies an overlooked category aptly understood as Lost Womanhood. I focus on newspaper archives, archival research, and imaginative literature to find “lost” women who critiqued a patriarchal system that thrives on women living in a status akin to being socially dead. Recovering marginalized women writers and reexamining how women openly questioned the gender roles prescribed to them proves that an alternate model of womanhood always existed. Lost Women can recognize the instabilities in their lives and work to change them through negotiation or resistance. They deeply understand their second-class status and rebel against it with successful strategies of writing located in their literary texts and the historical archive. Lost Womanhood creates a critical approach to embracing more nineteenth-century women’s material conditions and lived realities. As a more normative form of womanhood, Lost Womanhood directly critiques a patriarchal system that thrives on women as second-class citizens with a lack of rights. This new category of womanhood will remedy True and New Womanhood’s problematic nature as forms of unsustainable womanhood and decenter middle-class whiteness as the principal determiner of womanhood with an interracial approach. Women who would not or could not embody True Womanhood provide a more expansive way of understanding nineteenth-century womanhood in the United States.

While there are creative pieces theorizing about Tamar and her inclusion in both David and Jesus’ genealogies, there is a lack of research comparing King David’s genealogy in I Chronicles 2 with the kingly genealogies of the same time. Comparing the two shows that genealogies in the surrounding nations—Assyria, Babylonia, etc.—are lacking women. In contrast, the Old Testament is filled with kingly genealogical records that list and name women. This thesis will touch on the differences and similarities between the kingly records/genealogies, theorize and explore the levirate marriage custom and matrilinear descent, and attempt to provide a better understanding of Tamar and what set Ancient Israelite society apart from the surrounding cultures.

This thesis conducts a feminist analysis of depictions of sex work in fin-de-siècle, or turn of the19th-century, French literature. It draws connections between literature from this time period and the social and political forces that sought to eradicate female sexual autonomy. In the introduction, the political and social setting of fin-de-siècle France is explored, when sex work was widely prevalent and for many women offered a route to sexual and financial autonomy that was otherwise unattainable, much to the anxiety and irritation of the patriarchal forces in place.The first chapter analyzes Emile Zola’s Nana as a classic representation of the patriarchal fin-de-siècle fear of and resulting attempt to conquer feminine sexuality via the stereotyped figure of the sex worker in literature. In contrast, chapters two and three offer feminist counter-discourses that deviate from the traditional fin-de-siècle depictions of sexuality and protest the superficial depictions of the sex worker. Liane de Pougey’s Idylle Saphique and Rachilde’s Monsieur Venus each offer more authentic and multi-faceted portrayals, effectively illuminating the existence of the sex worker who was so often silenced and spoken for. The concluding chapter compares this dichotomy between literature and feminine sexual autonomy of the past to the very same dynamic today in the criminalization and censorship of sex workers and the opposing sex worker activism and literature. Although literature can be a force of oppression, it can also be a medium for agency- and with forces of oppression always comes the counter-movements of the oppressed.

Pornography is a complicated and controversial topic. Much has been said about how porn may or may not affect individuals, but very little has been done in the academic community on how pornography affects the LGBTQ+ community. In debates of censorship and regulation of porn, their voices are often ignored in public debate in favor of straight, feminist, or puritanical, religious discourses. This is problematic because pornography, particularly queer pornography, has done much for the evolution and self-affirmation of the LGBTQ+ community. It would be remiss if such positive effects of such a controversial exploit were to go unacknowledged. In conjunction with my academic readings, I interviewed a contact in the queer porn and Burlesque world named Max Shaw to better understand the finer points of queer porn production and the effects it has on its participators and viewers. Interestingly, the interview often lined up with themes that occurred in some of the more current literature referencing queer porn while giving a specific emphasis on the current issue of censorship of LGBTQ+ sexuality in the public and private spheres as well as an intersectional analysis of the queer porn industry. I will break down my research into three sections beginning with issues of mainstream porn for LGBTQ+ individuals. Then, I will shift to queer porn and discuss how it differs from mainstream porn and how those differences make it a better alternative to the current mainstream LGBTQ+ porn categories. Finally, I will discuss the issues of censorship that have arisen, as well as the merits of porn literacy programs and how they might help dispel some of the main concerns people have over adolescents’ access to pornography.

Rosi Braidotti warns us in her book Lo posthumano (2013) that “when the word difference implies inferiority, the connotation can be both dangerous and harmful for those marked as the other” (12). Since Michel Foucault first began his analysis of biopolitics, there have been many thinkers who have theorized how heteropatriarchal roles demand conformity at the risk of self-alienation and loss of identity. The theatrics demanded by an externally imposed social order can tax personal autonomy and diminish the resources required for individual growth and development. Judith Butler’s performance theory uses biopolitics to underscore how gender identity and sexual orientation are social constructs. The cyberpunk novels Lágrimas en la lluvia (2011), by Rosa Montero, and Piel (1989), by Elia Barceló, use fiction to unveil the real life mechanics at work in a biopolitical world. Using Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory and Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman theory, this dissertation examines how Montero and Barceló offer an alternative that allows the individual to deconstruct said discourse through the hybridity of their main characters and the hybrid nature of the narratives themselves. In order to do so, Chapter One explores these theories, while Chapter Two consists of a practical analysis of gender and sexual orientation norms. Chapter There examines how the posthuman breaks from this discourse of domination and instead chooses to embrace life and promote bonds of equality and sustainability with both the other and nature. In order to do so, this thesis draws on Erich Fromm’s ideas on positive freedom and the tools that he and Braidotti provide to change the paradigm and prevent the dystopias these novels portray from becoming our future.

With limited access to the traditional sources that historians typically use to document their work, it has become necessary to find new ways to explore the voices of local peoples who have been historically “denied a voice.” One way is through the study of petitions. Indeed, scholars of history have sparingly used petitions in some way while few have made systematic use of them. Even so, historians of colonial Africa have largely overlooked petitions in their studies, despite the important role that these sources played in negotiating African-European relations. This dissertation revolves around the hundreds of selected petitions, dubbed “voices in ink,” addressed to British officials by subjects of colonial Igboland – part of the southern protectorate of Nigeria, located in present-day eastern Nigeria. In fact, one of the challenges I raised for myself – and the field of African history more generally – was how to extract social and political history from a study of petitions. This research is my response to that challenge. It allows me to tackle the old issue of colonial rule with new angles of vision. “Voices in Ink” brings together transnational, historical, sociopolitical, geographical, and gender perspectives in exploring previously untapped colonial petitions written by Igbo subjects from 1892 to 1960. I make some vital arguments. Firstly, I argue that the outcomes for colonial policies in this period were not the making of imperial Britain alone but were also shaped by African responses through petitions. Secondly, I argue that imperial ideologies, which were employed to justify colonial rule in the first place, influenced the framing and writing of petitions. And thirdly, I contend that petitions are unique windows through which the daily lives, thoughts, desires, and actions of colonial subjects are revealed and, therefore, they should be treated as an integral part of the complex politics between colonial subjects and officials. Petition writing, delivery, and feedback should be seen as transactional processes – interactions that defied imperial hegemony and power structures. The contents of these petitions are results of strategic choices made by their authors in the context of their surroundings which not only provide insights into constructions of colonial relationships and social change but place petitioners as active agents of colonial administration. My arguments are based on three questions: How can people, especially subject people, without any official political power, push the colonial authorities to act? What do petitions tell us about everyday life and social change? How do petitions, petition writing, and bureaucratic responses form important (and historiographically neglected) parts of imperial politics and ideology in Igboland? I offer a revisionist reading that stresses the value of petitions, both as alternate historical sources of and methodology to the study of African history, which historians must exploit. What excites me most is how petitions record, so to speak, the voices of ordinary subjects. In this dissertation, I read petitions as a representation of agency, power, and bargain—whether they were successful or not—and as a venue of lived experiences of colonial subjects, who defined and sometimes, redefined colonial interactions in terms that demonstrated the complex web of relations between them and British officials. By exploiting these overlooked sources, my dissertation, arguably, offers the most comprehensive study of petitions in colonial Nigeria. Unquestionably, “voices in ink” humanizes colonial subjects and brings fresh insights into their ordinary lives and colonial experiences previously undocumented, or rarely even heard of, in other historical documents.

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale presents a dystopian world in which women have lost all individualism and have been reduced to breeding machines. This paper analyzes the patriarchal characteristics of The Handmaid’s Tale by using a Darwinian feminist theory to understand the evolutionary psychological root of male control of women in the narrative. Additionally, this in-depth reading relies on David Geary’s analysis of male and female mating dynamics and Barbara Smuts’ study of the evolution of patriarchy in humans to further give evidence to the evolutionary root of Gilead’s patriarchy. The men of Gilead control women through creating a fundamentalist biblical society, eliminating economic and educational resources for women, forcing women into becoming surrogates, implementing uniforms, and instilling social isolation; each of these cultural changes can be further explained through Darwinian feminism.

Looking primarily at two critically acclaimed texts that concern themselves with American citizenship—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Stephanie Powell Watts’ No One is Coming to Save Us—I analyze the claims made about citizenship identities, rights, and consequential access to said rights. I ask, how do these narratives about citizenship sustain, create, or re-envision American myth? Similarly, how do the narratives interact with the dominant culture at large? Do any of these texts achieve oppositional value, and/or modify the complex hegemonic structure? I use Pierre Bourdieu’s “The Forms of Capital” to investigate the ways in which economic, cultural, and social capital are distributed amongst identity groups of citizens, focusing on its favorable distribution to white upper-class men. Interesting, too, is the way in which these texts relate with one another and evolve over time. As Fitzgerald reaffirms boundary rights to white upper-class social capital to longstanding wealthy white males, Watts celebrates the survival of black individuals through the hard-earned persistence of human connection. Ultimately, as Gatsby fails to repeat the past, Watts succeeds in rewriting it.

A year after Alyssa Milano’s tweet launched the #MeToo movement, survivors of sexual assault are being called ‘accusers’ in the media, and public opinion is swinging in favor of guilty men. #MeToo raised awareness but not understanding. What is rape? What is consent? As evidenced by the #MeToo movement and the backlash against it, clearly, as a society, we don’t know. Contact is a work of Creative Nonfiction that uses scenes and details from the narrator’s personal experiences to illuminate the micro-negotiations that occur in sex and seduction. In a world where women are still expected to stay small and stay out of the way, where we publicly decry but privately propagate the notion of being 'seen and not heard,' and where to be seen means to be sexualized, this narrator seeks to take up space and make noise. In Contact the personal is political and the political is personal.

The emergence of African-American Environmental thought responds to the ongoing erasure of Black experiences and their perspectives on nature. Mainstream environmentalism maintains a legacy of perceived innocence and incorruptibility towards the land, while Black Environmentalism demonstrates the limitations of that ideology. Limitations include the erasure of history in regards to stealing land from Indigenous people, the brutality of slavery, legalized lynching, forced removal from the land, exploitation in sharecropping, destruction of sacred lands, heavy pollution in urban centers, and harmful environmental policies. For Black and Indigenous peoples, it is impossible to view American soil as innocent. This project surveyed the scholarship of prominent intellectuals within the growing field of African-American Environmental Thought and Ecofeminist Thought. Several scholars have examined the relational aspect of African Americans to their natural environment in the realms of environmental justice, poetry, and scholarship. However, few have considered the work of Alice Walker as fundamental texts towards an vi understanding of African Americans and their environment, particularly as it relates to healing and connection towards the self, community, and nature. In addition, I performed an environmentally based content analysis on the work of Alice Walker, specifically, her work in novel the Meridian. Her theory examines the tension that emerges between nature and identity, as Walker believes environmental alienation is a result of the devastating effects of oppression and her views offers reclamations of that very relationship. In addition to identifying her environmental theory, this project asked in what ways does Walker’s environmental thought emerge within Meridian and other poems and how does this concept guide the characters to define themselves in relation to nature, especially in the midst of environmental alienation, and what suggestions, if at all, do they offer towards the mending of that relationship? The primary fictional work that I utilize is Walker's novel Meridian, with a few selected poems from Her Blue Body Everything We Know and Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful. In addition, this project explores Alice Walker's environmental ideology as presented in her non-fiction work Anything We Love Can Be Saved, with supporting insights from In Search of Our Mother's Gardens and The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker in the hopes of uncovering how Alice Walker came into her own understanding regarding the relationship among the environment, the self, and community. This served as a catalyst for deeper insight into the offerings she makes towards healing, connection, and reclamation with the goal of gaining awareness of how those themes become apparent in her fiction.

The hijab, a symbol of modesty and privacy in the Islamic faith, negatively affects ratings of perceived attractiveness. Although postcolonial feminism strives to portray women as not one universal group, but as an incorporation of different races, ethnicities, social classes, and other cultures, the Western world may not be where it endeavors to be. In this study the impact of the hijab on people’s perceptions of attractiveness was examined. Participants rated four target photos of the same woman with and without a hijab, and with or without cosmetics. Attractiveness and trustworthiness was then assessed in each condition, between genders, in relation to personal feminism ratings, and in relation to religious schema beliefs. Based on the Halo Effect, I hypothesized that lower ratings of attractiveness would lead to lower ratings of trustworthiness. The data, however, did not conform to this effect. Participants who rated themselves as higher in Religious Schema, therefore identifying as less open-minded in religious belief, gave lower ratings of attractiveness for the women when she wore the hijab. Participants who endorsed feminism, however, showed with higher ratings in attractiveness for all conditions. Results are discussed in light of research on feminism and religious belief.

Abortion is a common medical procedure, with twenty-one percent of all American pregnancies ending in induced abortion in 2011. Literature shows that abortion is highly stigmatized in the United States and even more so in the American South. The contentious discourse surrounding the moral and ethical viewpoints, “right” versus “wrong,” often overpowers women’s lived experiences. Although abortion has been studied extensively across multiple disciplines, literature on women’s lived experiences is limited. Previous research has focused on women in the Midwest, West, and Northeastern regions of the United States but the South has not been a significant focus of study. The purpose of this research is to provide an anthropological perspective on abortion experiences and abortion stigma and to bring the experiences of women to the front of the discussion. Eight qualitative interviews were conducted with women in Georgia who have had abortions. Ultimately, I argue that abortion experiences are unique and varying, and that abortion stigma is prevalent in the lives of the women interviewed.

The following dissertation on the trope of the mujer varonil[1] employs bibliographical research in literary criticism and historiography to identify and describe socio-historic attitudes about gender. In particular, this dissertation examines gender as communicated by texts that use the mujer varonil, or “masculine woman”, characterization to either praise or vilify exceptional female subjects in ways that highlight normative limits for masculine and feminine gender expression. Four texts are examined: a male author writes each and each represents a literary genre that was significant in early modern Spain and Spanish America. These genres are the hagiography, the relación, the inquisition proceeding, and the comedia. These texts communicate important attitudes about gender-bending that are associated with cultural limits for gender expression, which inform boundaries that demarcate three normative gender roles: male, female and third gender. The selected texts are didactic because they communicate limits for gender-bending by exceptional females that ultimately reinforce an androcentric social structure and its associated normative gender roles. These texts use the mujer varonil trope to portray their subjects in ways that communicate the limits for female agency. Simultaneously, the texts allow for some agency by praising certain forms of transition to a male identity by people identified as female at birth. The texts and genres explored in this dissertation thus raise important questions about socio-historic limits for normative gender expression in early modern Spain and Spanish America while also providing answers that resolve the ambiguities that they explore. They do this in ways that support the imperial project and the social stability necessary for its success. [1] The term mujer varonil is employed provisionally here. In the language of the times, the word mujer in most contexts did not include virgens. In further research, I plan to address this issue of terminology as it applies to the masculine female in the religious orders. That is outside the scope of this present work.