Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Performing Fatness and the Cultural Negotiations of Body Size(2007-04-27) Tillery, Sarah M.; Struna, Nancy; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In his thoroughly researched work, Transmen and FTMs: Identities, Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities (1999), Jason Cromwell states for the communities of transmen and FTMs, "The limits on the uses of bodies, and on what types of bodies are considered legitimate, is regulated through the body politic (judicial, medical, and political systems) Furthermore, through the body, the body politic dictates what constitutes legitimate sex and gender, normal sexuality, and even what identities are considered appropriate" (32). Similarly, our cultural understandings about and personal relationships to fatness are informed by an intricate configuration of medical, legal, political, and visual messages that convey notions of "acceptable" and "unacceptable" body size. This dissertation will examine multiple instances wherein the negotiation of these messages produces complicated subject positions for bodies of size. It will investigate how the fat body operates to reveal both hegemonic as well as counter-hegemonic significance by drawing upon the authority of medical, legal, and political narratives produced about fatness and body size. By analyzing the performative texts of the film, Real Women Have Curves, the photography collection Women En Large, and a political performance group of fat cheerleaders, called F.A.T.A.S.S., this project will examine the representations of fat women to illustrate how fat subjectivities are neither merely accommodating nor simply resistive. Denying any construction of a one-dimensional story about resisting bodies or hegemonic narratives, this dissertation seeks to highlight the nuanced and complicated subjectivities produced by and for fat women within various contexts. And by analyzing the complexity of these moments, "Performing Fatness" will attempt to elevate body size as a major point of consideration within the analysis of all bodies. In so doing, body size will be revealed as interconnected and inseparable from our understandings of race, class, gender, sexuality, as well as, other points of identification, and ultimately transform the ways in which we theorize and understand bodies altogether.Item BODY/IMAGE/NARRATIVE: CONTEMPORARY RHETORIC OF BODY SHAPE AND SIZE(2005-05-03) Brown, Sonya Christine; Fahnestock, Jeanne; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The dissertation examines body shape and size from a rhetorical perspective as ethos, or character, in contemporary American culture. The analysis is primarily of narrative and visual texts that proliferated in the debate over ideal body size and shape that has emerged in the last fifteen years. By demonizing fatness and glamorizing slenderness for women and muscularity for men, our culture has rendered all bodies' shapes and sizes rhetorical. The body as material and visual rhetoric is interpretable as representative of character, with the fat body representing a lack of the virtues that seem inherent in the lean body: health, fitness, discipline, beauty. Narratives written about individual's bodies, including weight loss success stories, eating disorder memoirs, size acceptance narratives, and films that feature actors in fat suits, have the possibility to maintain or challenge prevailing views about body shape and size and the relationship between body shape and size and character/ethos. The four narrative genres studied have emerged in mainstream cultural productions rather than what might be considered alternative media, and come from a wide variety of popular sources. These narrative genres, and also the visuals that accompany or transmit the narratives, are important pieces of the debate over acceptable body shape and size for men and women. The last fifteen years of the debate have brought with them changes to mainstream media through challenges to the ideal body image for women, though men, particularly heterosexual men, have limited venues through which to challenge media representations of ideal male physiques.