UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
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Item From Censors to Shouts: Ecologies of Abortion in American Fiction(2023) Schollaert, Jeannette; Walter, Christina; Smith, Martha Nell; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“From Censors to Shouts: Ecologies of Abortion in American Fiction” registers the urgent need to revisit the literary methods of abortion storytelling in multiethnic American women’s fiction with a close attention to one of its most significant tropes: the herbal abortifacients that signify as both code and medicine, recalling the Victorian “language of flowers” as well as essentialist metaphorical connections between femininity, reproduction, and the natural world. This project traces the literary history of herbal abortifacients from abortion’s censorship and criminalization in the nineteenth century to present-day movements to reclaim or “shout” one’s abortion. The fictional mentions of plants known to be abortifacients demonstrate how literature can communicate reproductive and plant knowledge. “From Censors to Shouts” also offers a window into how the practice of domestic herbalism (a gendered and often racialized practice) evolves over the course of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries by pairing a cultural historical analysis of the herbs themselves alongside considerations of how authors’ fictional deployments of these herbs work towards visions of reproductive and environmental justice. “From Censors to Shouts” considers fiction from multiethnic American women writers including Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Summers Kelley, Josephine Herbst, Marge Piercy, Octavia Butler, Ntozake Shange, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, and Kali Fajardo-Anstine. The fictional depiction of herbal abortifacients reveals our continued attention to plant knowledge and self-managed herbal abortion. Understanding how these plant names and knowledges have remained crucial rhetorical, cultural, and visual signifiers of abortion access is vital to understanding the reclamation of these knowledges as we re-commit to the fight for abortion rights and reproductive justice amidst a new legal landscape.Item Féminisme sur Instagram : un bilan mitigé(2022) Danos, Clara Clémentine Alice; Orlando, Valérie K; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Online feminism was birthed alongside the Internet in its infant stages. With the years, it evolved into a virtual fight on social media and especially on Instagram. The goal of this thesis is to analyze content created by French feminists on Instagram and decide if it could be identified as a fourth wave of feminism in which women would rule the virtual world emancipating themselves from patriarchy in virtual life, in hopes of a more equitable society offline. Presently, alterations in combat against this ubiquitous foe are becoming more accessible, pedagogical, and aesthetic. However, these adaptations corrupt the core of feminism itself; lost consistence in the process with a lack of references, novelty, and anti-capitalist spirit. These inhibitors actively preventing the progression of a fourth wave. Consequently, feminists currently navigate the parameters of male engineered social media and experiencing an Instagram that is complicit in masculinist abuse through internal politics and outside actors.Item A Rhetorical Criticism of Hillary Clinton in Political Satire and Political Parody(2021) Hannah-Prater, Kimberley Jacqueline; Parry-Giles, Shawn J; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Between the years of 1992 through 2016, Hillary Clinton was framed rhetorically by various forms of political humor, including political satire and political parody. These messages were disseminated across television and the Internet in ways that depicted Clinton as a “threat” to the myth of the cis-gendered, white male presidency. However, Clinton attempted to participate in mediated humor to blunt the negative characterizations of her in entertainment media. This dissertation examines how television humor and online platforms for humor contributed to the humorous, and often sexist, framing of “Hillary Clinton.” More specifically, this project analyzes how Hillary Clinton’s personality, character, political ambition, and gender identity were rhetorically framed in mediated humor and how these frames circulated widely across these texts. I propose the concepts of the political killjoy and comedic grandstanding as humor strategies that comedians used to depict Clinton and that Clinton used in turn to boost her own relatability. In Chapter 1, I explore how late-night shows, including Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, made arguments about Clinton’s political image as first lady, senator, secretary of state, and presidential candidate. I focus on television programs that implement political satire and/or political parody for at least part of their humor. In Chapter 2, I trace various forms of online political humor that were created during Clinton’s 2008 and 2016 presidential campaigns. These texts include parody articles and humor videos on the Onion, videos created for Funny or Die, humor articles on College Humor, and Internet memes posted to Reddit and KnowYourMeme.com. While sexism was present in many of the television texts in this study, the Internet humor texts often circulated more vulgar and misogynistic frames about Hillary Clinton. And in Chapter 3, I analyze examples of Clinton’s appearances on televised and online humor, beginning in 1992 and continuing through her televised and online humor appearances during her own 2016 presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton participated in mediated political humor to portray her marriage as stable, project her knowledge about policy, and frame herself as self-deprecating, especially when selling books and reinforcing her electability as U.S. president.Item Miss Schooled: American Fictions of Female Education in the Nineteenth Century(2005-04-20) Alves, Jaime Osterman; Auerbach, Jonathan; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues that the emergence of schoolgirl culture in nineteenth- century America presented significant challenges to subsequent constructions of normative femininity. Seeking to understand how literary texts both shaped and reflected the century's debates over adolescent female education, I concentrate on fictional works and historical documents that feature descriptions of girls' formal educational experiences between the 1810s and the 1890s. In Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.'s Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny, selections from the Wreath of Cherokee Rosebuds (a student-written school newspaper), S. Alice Callahan's Wynema: A Child of the Forest, Frances E. W. Harper's Trial and Triumph and Iola Leroy, and other texts, I contend that the trope of the adolescent schoolgirl is a carrier of shifting cultural anxieties about how formal education would disrupt the customary maid-wife-mother cycle and turn young females off to prevailing gender roles. To assuage these anxieties and garner support for the controversial work of adolescent female education, schools incorporated into their curricula dominant ideals of femaleness from the contexts of family, the scientific-medical field, the press, and racial and community uplift movements, and delivered these ideals as "lessons" to girls from the white middle- and upper-classes, mixed racial and ethnic heritages, dispossessed Native American tribes, and working-class African-American families. In four chapters, I explore how nineteenth century Americans perceived of and represented the distinct life stage of female adolescence, and how they imagined the processes of institutional sex-role socialization that would involve schools and other organizations in the activity of molding adolescent girls into ideal American women. I have been most intrigued by narratives of female education that depict girls' exploitation of their opportunities at school to consider and respond to their cultures' idealizations of American womanhood. By tracing the figure of the schoolgirl at crossroads between educational and other institutions--in texts written by and about girls from a variety of racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds-- my study joins an emerging critical project to transcend the limitations of "separate spheres" inquiry and enrich our understanding of how girls negotiated complex gender roles in the nineteenth century.