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
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Item Insect Politics: Presidential Optics and the Promises of Manly Monsters in 1980s Horror Film(2023) Santos, James Nolan; Giovacchini, Saverio; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In their own terms, the intellectual and political spheres of the American 1980s spoke on conversations on gender through human bodies. Feminist theorist Sandy Stone wrote the foundational text for transgender studies in 1987 at the height of the Reagan Administration, which was defined by its own masculine politics. Between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, their White House Office of Communications staffers were tasked with upholding this image of masculinity, specifically upholding the physical bodies of men, going against 1980s feminist theorists that upheld binary views on gender. Horror filmmakers in Hollywood, however, more closely aligned with feminist thought regarding the flexibility of gender, and like the White House Office of Communications, used the bodies of characters onscreen to convey their ideas. This thesis is a comparative history of Washington and Hollywood in the 1980s, using the psychoanalytic framework of Julia Kristeva’s abject as a means to look beyond the gendered boundaries set by Washington and seeing how those same boundaries were manipulated by Hollywood.Item OF MUSES AND MONSTROSITIES: ENGLISH TRAVESTIE PERFORMANCES OF THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY(2018) Ginder, Brittany; Kim Lee, Esther; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation serves as an introduction to the performance genre of travestie. Unlike the popular breeches form in which an actress plays a female character who crossdresses as a man for a short duration of time but returns to her skirts by the end of a play, travestie performance is defined as an actress performing a male character on a public stage in male disguise for the entirety of a production. In this dissertation, I showcase how travestie questions the complex eighteenth-century English conceptions of normative gender roles, gender identity, and gender representation through performances of public undress that may have been the precursor to the modern burlesque genre. Through examining the case studies of Miss Margaret “Peg” Woffington, Mrs. Charlotte Charke née Cibber, and Mrs. Dorothy “Dora” Jordan, this dissertation analyzes the travestie genre through its connections to comedy, mythmaking, iconography, and the modern burlesque movement. I have chosen to utilize the spelling of travestie over the Italian and contemporary English spellings (travesti and travesty, respectfully) in accordance with the accepted spellings of the term within the eighteenth-century London theatrical landscape. I assert within this dissertation that the actresses who performed travestie purposefully chose this genre through their own theatrical awareness and business savvy. Emphasizing transhistorical perspectives and historiographical intervention, this dissertation reassesses and reinterprets contemporary views of these travestie actresses, using autobiography, biography, and narrative techniques to allow the long-gone voices of these actresses to speak for themselves. Muses for various artists and poets, the successful travestie actress lived within the liminal space between the fluidity of gender. Within their travestie performances, these actresses housed within their own bodies monstrous contradictions of gender that are explored in this dissertation through the interdisciplinary lenses of theatre historiography and gender studies.Item The Textualization of Pat Tillman: Understanding the Relationships Between Person, Discourse, and Ideology(2011) Herbig, Arthur William; Gaines, Robert N; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project is a critical examination of the ways in which the life and death of Pat Tillman were shaped into a discursive Pat Tillman. This is not a project that examines the life led by the person Pat Tillman. The discursive Pat Tillman can be found in the pages of magazines, on television, invoked by politicians, and even memorialized in song. It is Pat Tillman, the discursive creation, that is my focus. In this project I take for granted that Pat Tillman only existed in places like the pages of books or on film. What is not lost on me and should not be lost on the reader of this project is my own participation in this process. With this project I have entered into the very discourses that I seek to critique. This is an analysis of the existence of a Pat Tillman that many people still know and the ideas that help shape how that existence is communicated. My critique focuses on the existence of a discursive Pat Tillman as a rhetorical phenomenon, drawing upon scholarship that can inform an understanding of how the life of Pat Tillman became the material for public discourse. My analysis interconnects Michel Foucault's (1972) work on knowledge and discourse with Michael Calvin McGee (1990) referred to as rhetorical fragments, in order to provide a foundation for understanding the discursive existence of Pat Tillman. Using how discourse producer connected various facts, stories, and images with conceptions of heroism, masculinity, and the American Dream, I reveal how the life and death of Pat Tillman was used as the material to represent political and cultural positions that exist external to that life. Through an analysis of the various news reports, books, documentaries, blogs, and other mediated texts that were produced in response to the life and death of Pat Tillman, this study presents a clearer picture of what is meant by "fragmentation" in critical analysis.Item "Well-Dispos'd Savages": Elite Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century British Literature(2010) Veisz, Elizabeth Hayley; Rosenthal, Laura J; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Writers in eighteenth-century Britain catered to, and helped create, public fascination with the brazen, sometimes illicit, often violent exploits of elite and aristocratic men. Literary critics have seen this elite male figure as part of an outmoded order superseded over the course of the century by the rising British middle class. Debauched aristocratic characters are often reformed over the course of eighteenth-century narratives, reflecting a larger societal shift in values towards polite restraint. As expressed in my dissertation's title phrase, however, many of the period's writers develop elite male characters whose behaviors and self-presentation blur those very boundaries between oppositional categories, like savagery and civilization, on which both Enlightenment theories of human progress and polite culture's prescriptions for decorum were presumed to rest. Through an examination of this paradoxical figure in novelistic, dramatic, and autobiographical literature, my dissertation demonstrates that the oft-repeated reform-of-the-rake narrative calls attention to obstacles and resistance to the ascendancy of a middle-class culture, not to the inevitability of its rise. Each chapter centers on a site that is accessible to a larger public only through literary or dramatic accounts, including the club, the elite school, the court, and the overseas estate. Chapter One, "`Our imperial reign': Addison, Steele, Gay and the London Mohocks," examines writings about a gang of rakish gentlemen rumored to prowl the streets of Augustan London. Chapter Two, "Schools for Scandal: Elite Education and Eighteenth-Century Narrative," uncovers a relationship between key mid-century novels and a longstanding debate about elite schooling. The final two chapters trace the influence of late-eighteenth-century discourses of liberty and sensibility on constructions of elite masculinity. Chapter Three, "Command Performance: Boswell's Libertine Diplomacy," focuses on the journals and travelogues of James Boswell, a self-professed libertine who strove, with mixed results, to restrain his appetite for power and pleasure. Chapter Four, "A `strong transition of place': Cultural Encounter and the reform plot in Sydney Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl," offers a new framework in which to read the genre of the national tale by shifting the critical lens from the novel's Anglo-Irish marriage plot to a parallel plot of intersecting and competing masculinities.Item EVANESCENT HAPPINESS: OTTOMAN JEWS ENCOUNTER MODERNITY, THE CASE OF LEA MITRANI AND JOSEPH NIEGO (1863-1923)(2010) Skarlatou, Amalia; Cooperman, Bernard D; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The thesis aims to be a collective biography of Joseph Niego and Lea Mitrani, two Ottoman Jews, whose lives would span a sixty-year period of profound changes for Ottoman Jewry. Born in Edirne, Joseph and Lea were educated in the schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Subsequently, they were sent to Paris in order to be trained as teachers and be sent back to help "regenerate" "Oriental" Jews through a Western- style education. After their marriage, Joseph was appointed director of the agricultural school "Mikveh Israel," established by the Alliance in the outskirts of Jaffa, where the family would spend twelve years. Their time in an agricultural school and contact with Zionism and the Jewish pioneers in late nineteenth-century Palestine would define their lives as a married couple and as Jews in the vortex of modernization and nationalisms. While Joseph would thrive professionally, Lea would gradually lose control of her life.Item Broadcasting Birth Control: Family Planning and Mass Media, 1914-1984(2010) Parry, Manon; Michel, Sonya; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The history of the birth control movement in the United States is traditionally told through accounts of the leaders and organizations that campaigned to legalize the distribution of contraception. Only recently have historians begun to examine the "cultural work" of printed media including newspapers, magazines, and even novels in fostering support for the cause. This dissertation builds on this scholarship, to examine the films and radio and television broadcasts developed by birth control advocates, and the communications experts they increasingly turned to for guidance, over the course of the twentieth century. As advocates tried to mimic the efforts of commercial advertisers to "sell" health-related behaviors to a wide audience, they crafted the new academic specialty of health communication. I argue that mass media was central to the campaign to transform the private subject of fertility control into one fit for public discussion in the United States. Moreover, the international family planning movement played an instrumental role in establishing and expanding health communication in the promotion of contraception around the globe. As they negotiated for access to cinema and radio platforms from which to promote their cause, birth control advocates toned down their feminist rhetoric of sexual liberation. After the legalization of contraception, censorship and broadcasting conventions affecting educational messages further diluted the kinds of representations they could promote over the radio and on the nation's television sets. As commercial media became increasingly explicit in the 1960s and `70s, family planning promoters conversely expunged sex from their broadcasts for domestic and foreign audiences. In this way, media helped to shape the messages of the movement. Seeking greater creative freedom, some of the family planning community began to cultivate informal partnerships with entertainment media producers, perfecting a strategy abroad that would be brought home to the U.S. The Mexican "education-entertainment" approach has since become the most influential model of family planning communication, replicated around the world in efforts to reintroduce the context of sex and relationships to the promotion of contraceptive use. This history is thus a transnational narrative of the dissemination of messages and the technologies and techniques that delivered them.Item A Qualitative Examination of Gender and Power in Public Relations(2010) Place, Katie; Toth, Elizabeth; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Gender and power shape the practice of public relations. Gender contributes to power differences which may, in turn, influence an individual's strategic decisions and communication styles. Because male and female public relations practitioners make meaning of their roles as public relations practitioners differently (Grunig, Toth & Hon, 2001; Krider & Ross, 1997), looking at the profession from the viewpoint of women - and women only - provides unique insight into these differences. The purpose of this study was to examine qualitatively how women public relations practitioners make meaning of gender and power. Additionally, the study examined the overlap of gender and power and the implications they hold for professional practice. Whereas previous public relations scholarship has examined the concepts of gender and power separately, the secondary purpose of the study sought to examine these phenomena together. Literature regarding gender, gender theory of public relations, power, power-control theory contributed to this study. From the literature, three research questions were posed: How do women public relations practitioners make meaning of gender? How do public relations practitioners make meaning of power? and What are the intersections of gender and power in public relations? To best illustrate and describe how women public relations practitioners experience the phenomena of gender and power, I chose a qualitative research method which utilized 45 in-depth, semi-structured, face-to-face interviews with women public relations practitioners guided by an interview protocol. I utilized a grounded theory approach to data analysis. From the data, arose several themes regarding gender, power and their nexus. Results suggested that women practitioners made meaning of gender through contrasting definitions, as a function of a feminized public relations industry, as a function of pregnancy, childbirth and family responsibilities, through expectations and discrimination, and as an intersectional phenomenon involving one's race, age and geography. Participants made meaning of power as a function of influence, a function of relationships, knowledge and information, access, results-based credibility, negative force and empowerment. Women practitioners communicated that gender and power intersected through use of gendered appearances, management style, women's bonding together for power, the queen bee syndrome, leadership, women's self realization and confidence in their choices, and education of others. The data extend our understanding of gender theory of relations and power-control theory of public relations. Results suggest that gender, for public relations practitioners, exists as a socialized and learned phenomenon. Power in public relations exists in a system and empowerment serves as an alternative meaning making model of power. Evidence suggests that gender and power do intersect in the meaning making of practitioners and that future research must focus on examining this overlap and educating students and professionals about gender and gender discrimination.Item Les (En)jeux de la femme: conflits et (ré)solutions dans la littérature vietnamienne et sénégalaise d'expression française(2010) Hoang, Phuong; Orlando, Valerie; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this thesis, I analyze the female conflicts and resolutions that are represented in two Francophone Vietnamese novels - En s'écartant des ancêtres and La Réponse de l'Occident by Trinh Thuc Oanh - and two Francophone Senegalese novels - Une si longue lettre and Un Chant écarlate by Mariama Bâ. I begin with an exploration of the patriarchal constraints of Vietnamese and Senegalese societies in order to demonstrate that female oppression results in the competition between women for men and their resources. Additionally, since women are considered the bearers of culture due to their role as mothers, the introduction of Western culture through colonization creates a cultural conflict between traditional and `modern' or `Westernized' women in these societies. Despite these conflicts, I also address the authors' proposal of education and careers for women as channels through which the socio-cultural and personal liberation of Vietnamese and Senegalese women will be possible.Item Do Lesbians in the Military Pass as Heterosexual?(2010) Bonner, Kimberly Bridget; Segal, David R.; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This exploratory multiple-case case study investigates if lesbians in the military, past and present, manage to "pass" as heterosexual. This project is designed with the aim of enabling new questions about old problems regarding gender and sexuality within American military culture. Data come from two sources comprised of seventy-three interviews with military lesbians from three previously published works and five face-to-face interviews with active duty lesbians conducted by the author between 2007 and 2008. Lesbians in the military are centralized here in this multiple-case case study because they are both "women" and "homosexuals" participating in an institution that has had historically tense relationships with members of both of these social groups. This project pays specific attention to non-gender conforming lesbians in the military and argues that this group in particular potentially stands to shed light on how both gender and sexual norms operate within both American society and military culture.Item The Politics of Teenage Sexualities: Social Regulation, Citizenship and the U.S. State(2010) Mann, Emily S.; Kestnbaum, Meyer; Mamo, Laura; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines the emergence of a now-hegemonic discourse of teenage sexuality, which constructs teenagers' engagement in "sexual activity" as a social problem with and about girls in general and low-income girls of color in particular, and explores how the U.S. state and the community health centers that contract with it regulate the sexual practices, relationships, and identities of teenagers in relation to these and related understandings. My analysis draws on feminist and queer theories of sexuality, gender, the state, social regulation, and sexual citizenship and emphasizes how intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and age are explicitly and implicitly articulated through dynamics of regulation prior to state intervention at the federal level; the federal policymaking process; and the discourses and practices of service providers working in two community health centers that provide health care and social services to a predominantly low-income Latina/o clientele in Washington, DC. I argue that the U.S. state and community health centers comprise important sites through which inequalities of gender, race, class, sexuality, and age are articulated and teenage sexual citizenship is produced. As such, this study is located at the intersection of political sociology and gender and sexuality studies, and makes contributions to the sociological and interdisciplinary literatures on intersectionality, welfare states, social regulation, sexual citizenship, and the social construction of adolescence.