College of Arts & Humanities
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item They 'Boast of Dressing Like Gentlemen': Cross-Dressing, Print Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Gender Ideology(2024) Hemphill, Julia Kay; Lyons, Clare A; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Nineteenth-century gender roles were very strict but cross-dressing challenged these extremely binary roles, often being written about in different forms of print media. The press published stories about cross-dressing people in different ways depending on the actions they took in male attire. Soldier women cross-dressed and entered the military, but were not reprimanded for their decisions because their amount of time in male attire was perceived to be finite and because they were performing a service for their country. Women and male-presenting people who wore male attire and went into male workplaces, took wives, and became heads of household were highly reprimanded in the press in lengthy articles and short stories. Finally, women who wore the reform dress and liberated themselves from enslavement in male attire were spoken about in the press in two competing ways, with people supporting their transgressions and others not. Looking at the different ways that print media discussed these women and male-presenting people is important for looking at how gender roles were structured, and for understanding why powerful men were only threatened by certain cross-dressers.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 Odd Characters: Queer Lives in Nineteenth-Century Baltimore(2020) SCHMITT, KATHRYN; Lyons, Clare; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Queer history in Baltimore began long before the twentieth century. People who diverged from societal norms of gender and sexuality were always present in Baltimore’s history, and they can be seen through media representations and popular press of the time period. Even when representation of queerness in media was less common, stories of people who diverged from gender and sexual norms were still distributed to the public. Media representations provided inspiration and information to people who did not have access to a group of like-minded people through a distinct subculture. Queer Baltimoreans drew from media representations, early stages of a developing subculture, or their own personal thoughts and feelings to inform their gender and sexual identities. Despite the legal and social measures restricting these people from living their lives as freely as they might wish, they still found individualized ways to live life outside of gender and sexual norms.Item “A Beautiful Mind: Faces, Beauty, and the Brain in the Anglo-Atlantic World, 1780-1870”(2018) Walker, Rachel; Lyons, Clare A; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the years surrounding the Enlightenment and the American Revolution, Americans began critiquing slavery and arguing for women’s intellectual equality. Yet by the early decades of the nineteenth century, white male scientists increasingly described the minds and bodies of white men as innately and unalterably superior to those of white women and African Americans. How did early Americans reconcile this Enlightenment and Revolutionary commitment to universal human equality with the very real persistence of inequality in their society? To answer this question, “A Beautiful Mind” focuses on physiognomy: a popular transatlantic science predicated on the idea that facial features revealed people's inner nature. Because most individuals in early America believed the head and face were the physical features that best revealed the internal capacities of individuals, this project begins from the premise that we cannot comprehend how Americans understood human difference or navigated social relationships unless we unravel the connections they made between faces, bodies, and brains. At the most basic level, it argues that physiognomy constituted an influential scientific discourse and widespread social practice—a technology of character detection that people used to rationalize the hierarchies that defined their worlds. Through this new science of beauty, many Americans suggested that social inequalities were not only necessary facts of life, but also empirically verifiable realities. Perhaps the minds and faces of some people were simply better than others, they posited, and perhaps there were superior human specimens who truly deserved the social, political, and economic dominance they currently retained. Yet even as some people used this popular science to argue for white supremacy, justify gender inequities, and enforce class hierarchies, numerous Americans manipulated physiognomy’s slippery language for a wide array of purposes, using it to undermine existing inequities. This dissertation highlights their voices and experiences, showing how women and people of color created unique forms of scientific knowledge and shaped the trajectory of American intellectual thought. In doing so, it not only asks scholars to rethink what might have counted as science in the early republic; it also challenges us to reimagine who might have counted as a scientist.Item Development Begins at Home: Women and the Domestic Economy in Brazil, 1945-1975(2016) Moura, Shawn; Williams, Daryle; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A number of historians of twentieth-century Latin America have identified ways that national labor laws, civil codes, social welfare programs, and business practices contributed to a gendered division of society that subordinated women to men in national economic development, household management, and familial relations. Few scholars, however, have critically explored women's roles as consumers and housewives in these intertwined realms. This work examines the Brazilian case after the Second World War, arguing that economic policies and business practices associated with “developmentalism” [Portuguese: desenvolvimentismo] created openings for women to engage in debates about national progress and transnational standards of modernity. While acknowledging that an asymmetry of gender relations persisted, the study demonstrates that urban women expanded their agency in this period, especially over areas of economic and family life deemed "domestic." This dissertation examines periodicals, consumer research statistics, public opinion surveys, personal interviews, corporate archives, the archives of key women’s organizations, and government officials’ records to identify the role that women and household economies played in Brazilian developmentalism between 1945 and 1975. Its principal argument is that business and political elites attempted to define gender roles for adult urban women as housewives and mothers, linking their management of the household to familial well-being and national modernization. In turn, Brazilian women deployed these idealized roles in public to advance their own economic interests, especially in the management of household finances and consumption, as well as to expand legal rights for married women, and increase women’s participation in the workforce. As the market for women's labor expanded with continued industrialization, these efforts defined a more active role for women in the economy and in debates about the trajectory of national development policies.Item The Democratic Self: Gender, Memory, and Human Rights under the Augusto Pinochet Dictatorship and Transition to Democracy in Chile, 1973-2010(2015) Townsend, Brandi Ann; Rosemblatt, Karin A; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Democratic Self asks how ideas about gender shaped the ways that Chileans reconstructed the affective, social, and political bonds the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) sought to destroy. It intervenes in debates about the degree to which right-wing military regimes in Latin America eroded social ties during the Cold War. Torture targeted gendered and sexual identities and compelled victims to re-assess their roles as men, women, militants, husbands, wives, sons, daughters, mothers, and fathers. This dissertation argues that to reconnect the individual to collective struggles for democracy, survivors and their allies drew on longstanding, heteronormative gender ideologies within the left. Those ideologies gradually changed over the course of the dictatorship, and in turn, influenced memories during the subsequent transition to democracy (1990-2010). The dissertation draws on government and non-governmental documents and oral interviews with survivors, their families, and human rights workers. Between 1978 and 1990, mental health professionals working within human rights organizations provided psychological therapy to approximately 32,000-42,000 Chileans to help them work through their traumatic experiences as part of a collective project to repair the social connections that state violence ripped apart. These professionals translated psychoanalytic concepts of “the self” into the language of pre-1973 frameworks of citizenship grounded in the heterosexual, male-headed nuclear family. By the mid-1980s, Chile’s feminist movement changed the terms of the debate by showing how gendered forms of everyday violence that pre-dated the dictatorship shaped political violence under the dictatorship, as well as the opposition’s response. Slowly, mental health professionals began to change how they deployed ideas about gender when helping survivors and their families talk about state violence. However, the narratives of violence that emerged with the end of the dictatorship in 1990 and that were enshrined in three separate truth commissions (1990, 2004, and 2010) only partially reflected that transformation. The democratic governments’ attempts to heal Chile’s painful past and move forward did not always recognize, much less dislodge, entrenched ideas that privileged men’s experiences of political militancy. This dissertation shows how Chileans grappled with their memories of state violence, which were refracted through gendered discourses in the human rights movement.Item Boosting the Mythic American West and U.S. Woman Suffrage: Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain Women's Public Discourse at the Turn of the Twentieth Century(2013) Lewis, Tiffany; Maddux, Kristy L; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project examines how white women negotiated the mythic and gendered meanings of the American West between 1885 and 1935. Focusing on arguments made by women who were active in the public life of the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain States, these analyses illustrate the ways the mythic West shaped the U.S. woman suffrage movement and how Western women simultaneously contributed to the meaning of the American West. Through four case studies, I examine the ways women drew on Western myths as they advocated for woman suffrage, participated in place-making the West, and navigated the gender ideals of their time. The first two case studies attend to the advocacy discourse of woman suffragists in the Pacific Northwest. Suffragist Abigail Scott Duniway of Oregon championed woman suffrage by appropriating the frontier myth to show that by surviving the mythic trek West, Western women had proven their status as frontier heroines and earned their right to vote. Mountaineer suffragists in Washington climbed Mount Rainier for woman suffrage in 1909. By taking a "Votes for Women" pennant to the mountain summit, they made a political pilgrimage that appropriated the frontier myth and the turn-of-the-century meanings of mountain climbing and the wilderness for woman suffrage. The last two case studies examine the place-making discourse of women who lived in Rocky Mountain states that had already adopted woman suffrage. Grace Raymond Hebard, a Wyoming historian and community leader, participated in the pioneer reminiscing practices of marking historic sites. Hebard's commemorations drew on the agrarian myth and Wyoming woman suffrage to domesticate Wyoming's "Wild West" image and place-make Wyoming as settled, civilized, and progressive. When Jeannette Rankin was elected as Montana's U.S. Representative in 1916, she introduced herself to the nation by enacting her femininity, boosting Montana's exceptionalism, and drawing on the frontier myth to explain Western woman suffrage. As I conclude with an analysis of Henry Mayer's "Awakening" cartoon, I illustrate the ways place-based arguments for woman suffrage and the boosting of Western woman suffrage worked together to construct the meaning of the West as a place of gender equality in the early twentieth century.Item Fractured Front: Gender, Authenticity, and the Remaking of the American Left after World War Two(2012) Larocco, Christina G.; Muncy, Robyn; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is a study of one long&ndashterm, inherently gendered effect of the Cold War. In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, as the emerging Cold War empowered a long&ndashstanding anti&ndashcommunist strain in U.S. political culture, many artists and intellectuals feared the massification of human beings communism allegedly produced. One of the tools they developed to combat this specter of massification was the discourse of authenticity. Authenticity was predicated on the belief that useful analyses of the world came only from individual thought, experience, and emotion&mdashnot existing political theories or overarching explanations. The artists and intellectuals who developed this theory argued that the expression of this individual truth was the best way to combat and prevent totalitarianism. Authenticity continued to be important to the white, left&ndashleaning social movements of the 1960s. Through them, it fed into the identity politics of the 1970s and 1980s. I thus draw a straight line between Cold War anti&ndashtotalitarianism and identity politics. I explore this phenomenon in a range of cultural, intellectual, and political realms, including the anti&ndashtotalitarian thought of Frankfurt School intellectuals, the Method acting of Lee Strasberg, the Beat writing of Jack Kerouac, and the New Left politics of Students for a Democratic Society. In each arena, I trace two key patterns. The first is the gendering of authenticity. The men who dominated these fields often insisted that women were too deeply tied to the conformist &ldquomass&rdquo to be truly authentic. Women like Method actress and teacher Stella Adler, liberal feminist Betty Friedan, Beat writer Joyce Glassman Johnson, and the women's liberationists who broke off from SDS had to fight to be included in this culture. I document their attempts to do so. Second, I argue that the connection between 1950s culture and 1960s New Left activism went far beyond a shared gender politics. The discourse of authenticity also granted special authority to the artist, who was imagined as the figure best equipped to resist the forces of massification. This belief had far-reaching effects on the relationship between cultural production and left politics, precluding the appearance of a 1930s&ndashstyle &ldquocultural front&rdquo.