Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
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 "Born That Way" and Other Notions: Measuring Sexual Minority Individuals' Beliefs About Sexual Orientation(2008-08-03) Arseneau, Julie; Fassinger, Ruth; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The focus of the present study was the creation and initial validation of a measure of popular beliefs about sexual orientation in a sample of sexual minority (i.e., lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, or otherwise same-sex attracted) adults, the Sexual Orientation Beliefs Scale (SOBS). While drawing from the empirical literature on essentialist beliefs about social groups, the current project sought to investigate ontological assumptions that are both essentialist and non-essentialist in nature, specifically including beliefs rooted in agentic and social constructionist perspectives as yet untested in the empirical literature. Participants (N = 332) were a national sample of sexual minority adults ranging in age from 18-74 years. Data was collected using through the use of an internet-based survey, and exploratory factor analysis was used to investigate the underlying factor structure of the SOBS. An initial 91 items were reduced to a 35-item scale using a best-fit four-factor solution that accounted for 35.33% of the obtained variance. Based on their component items, the four subscales of the SOBS were named Naturalness, Discreteness, Entitativity, and Personal and Social Importance of Sexual Orientation. Relationships between sexual orientation beliefs and right-wing authoritarianism, need for cognitive structure, collective self-esteem, and sociodemographic characteristics of participants were explored and results of these analyses are presented. Notably, the level of endorsement of specific types of beliefs, as measured by the SOBS subscales, was found to differ significantly according to gender and sexual orientation self-labeling of participants. Results broadly suggest the need for further investigation of popularly-held beliefs about sexual orientation and their correlates. Strengths and limitations of the present study, as well as recommendations for future research with the SOBS, are also discussed.Item Essentially Powerful: Political Motherhood in the United States and Argentina(2007-04-29) Gibbons, Meghan Keary; Peres, Phyllis A.; Rosenfelt, Deborah; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Essentially Powerful" explores the roles of essentialism around motherhood in the political protests of two groups in the United States and Argentina. Another Mother for Peace in the U.S. and the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Argentina based their protests on their identities as mothers, authorizing themselves to challenge their states' actions around their children. The states themselves also used the figure of the mother to promote specific behaviors that limited political opposition. The contrast between these two approaches problematizes the figure of the subject within poststructuralist and feminist debates about resistance. The subject is seen alternately as an active agent who can use essentialism strategically and a discursive construction that can be easily manipulated by ideology. This study explores the ground between these two poles, mapping the ways in which essentialisms around motherhood can be proscriptive in the hands of hegemons, but empowering when used by subjects themselves, who blend experience with essence. Interviews with participants in both groups as well as testimonial accounts, films and media coverage of the groups combine to allow a rich exploration of essentialisms by the mothers and their states. My first chapter explores how the Madres and the dictatorship used essentialism to struggle for discursive control over Argentine motherhood. The Madres' authorization of themselves as public, political subjects -in interviews, testimonies and letters-- challenged the dictatorship's formation of motherhood as a private, domestic identity. Chapter two examines the representation of the Madres' protests in film, exploring the ambivalence that Argentine audiences experienced in the women's blurring of several traditional binaries: emotion and reason, family and state, private and public. My third and fourth chapters analyze the narrative strategies of Another Mother for Peace. These North American mothers used essentialism to justify their movement into the public, political sphere, while still performing traditional, domestic motherhood in strategic ways. My final section explores how distinct cultural, religious and historical paradigms inflected the experiences of these two mothers' groups differently, facilitating and/or problematizing their uses of essentialist identities. This analysis critiques the limitations of both proscriptive and biological essentialisms, and allows us to see how the mothers' own experiences of motherhood pushed them beyond the boundaries of traditional essentialism and into new subjectivities.