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 Modeling Wise Angers Online: Generation Z Activists and Their Digital Rhetorics of Feminist Rage(2023) Starr, Brittany Noelle Schoedel; Enoch, Jessica; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Modeling Wise Angers Online: Generation Z Activists and Their Digital Rhetorics of Feminist Rage” works at the nexus of feminist theory, digital media studies, and rhetoric to investigate how teen and young adult activists use 21st century social media technologies to challenge the sexist, racist, ageist, and ableist anger norms that disenfranchise young women in the public sphere. Each chapter theorizes what I call a “wise anger” strategy that its principal subject deploys to generate rhetorical agency for angry girl activists and change oppressive anger norms. The activists I examine are Greta Thunberg, Thandiwe Abdullah, and Shina Novalinga. While their causes range from the climate crisis to racial justice and Indigenous rights, and their primary platforms in my case studies are Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, respectively, they all make innovative, strategic use of digital affordances to reframe young women’s anger in public discourse. Examining datasets I compiled from the activists’ social media posts between 2018-2022, I use grounded theory and rhetorical analysis to identify patterns in the anger expressions in the multimodal, multilayered posts. I read the patterns through feminist and Black feminist theories of oppressive anger norms (Jaggar, Ahmed, Traister, Chemaly, Lorde, Cooper, Judd, Collins), cultural rhetorical frameworks (Powell et al.; Karetak, Tester, and Tagalik) and youth activist rhetorical frameworks (Applegarth, Hesford, Taft, Dingo). This dissertation is premised on the understanding that emotions have a biological basis, but are constructed socially, rhetorically, and culturally and thus tend to be scripted in ways that reproduce asymmetrical relations of power (Aristotle, Dixon, Fine, Gross, Harrington, Koerber). Ultimately, I develop a theory of wise anger as an angry response to injustice that is intelligent, informed, constructive, justice-oriented, hope-driven, rational, reasonable, and moral. The wise anger these youth activists model through their digital rhetorics on social media is part of a genealogy of feminist rage that envisions and enacts a more inclusive, more livable world.Item Resisting Reproductive Regulation in Early Twentieth Century American Women's Fiction(2017) DePriest, Elizabeth Ann; Mallios, Peter L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Resisting Reproductive Regulation contributes to a growing body of criticism about how women participated in early twentieth century debates about reproduction in the United States. While the mainstream American birth control movement led to the legalization of contraception, it gained popular support by prioritizing the desires of married white women who were able-bodied, born in the United States, and members of the middle and upper classes. Because birth control advocates embraced eugenics and condemned abortion, their campaigns resulted in greater reproductive regulation for many women deemed “unfit” for reproduction by eugenicists, including unmarried, poor, non-white, immigrant, and disabled women. Resisting Reproductive Regulation examines the fiction written by American women during this period that challenges this limited agenda. These writers insist that women should be able to control the reproductive potential of their own bodies, regardless of their circumstances or forms of embodiment, and they examine the negative consequences that reproductive regulation enacts in American women’s lives. As a result, their texts depict women’s reproductive struggles in ways that anticipate late twentieth and early twenty-first century intersectional campaigns for reproductive justice. Though Mary Hunter Austin, Josephine Herbst, and Katherine Anne Porter each enjoyed relative privilege as white, American-born, and generally able-bodied women, each experienced reproductive difficulties in her own life. Each subsequently challenged mainstream birth control advocacy from this period in her fiction by grappling with those difficulties and examining the conditions that caused them. In so doing, these writers expose the prejudices encoded in the arguments upon which early twentieth century American eugenicists and birth control advocates relied. Resisting Reproductive Regulation argues that their fiction reveals inextricable relationships between the reproductive regulations American women faced and American prejudices about (dis)ability, sexuality, class, race, and/or country of origin. By addressing these connections, these writers explore the ways that reproductive regulations secure and perpetuate existing patriarchal, nationalist, white supremacist, heteronormative, capitalistic, and ableist systems of power. By advocating for women to be able to control the reproductive potential of their own bodies, these writers also attempt to interrupt the reproduction of these systems of power. Further, American women writing about contraception, abortion, and reproduction in the early decades of the twentieth century knew their depictions of these topics were subject to censorship, suppression, and marginalization. This dissertation argues that these writers resisted this form of reproductive regulation as well, developing innovative narrative and aesthetic techniques in order to communicate with readers about reproductive issues. While some of their concerns and experiences were successfully suppressed and marginalized during their lives, Austin, Herbst, and Porter each preserved illuminating materials in their personal archives. This dissertation recovers many of those materials, which provide new context within which to examine their published fiction and to recognize their literary and feminist contributions.Item Youth Engaging in Prostitution: An examination of race, gender, and their intersections(2013) SHANAHAN, RYAN; Thornton Dill, Bonnie; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Between 2008 and 2012, 10 states took steps to decriminalize young people arrested for prostitution while providing them with court-mandated services to help them recover from their experiences with prostitution. In 2006, the National Institute of Justice funded a study to estimate the population of youth engaging in prostitution in the New York City area. As a part of the study, 249 young people engaging in prostitution (YEP) were interviewed about their experiences. This dissertation explores the legislation created to address YEP and the incorporation of ideas in public discourse into legislative policy, as well as how these policies reflect the experiences and needs of YEP as they articulate them. This interdisciplinary, feminist study explores how these differing constructions and the relationships between them are built within raced, gendered, and classed power relations. To answer these questions, the dissertation uses quantitative and qualitative methods and draws from theories of feminism, intersectionality, harm reduction, and strength-based social work.Item Crafting Queer Identity, Building Coalitions, and Envisioning Liberation at the Intersections: A Rhetorical Analysis of 1970s Lesbian-Feminist Discourse(2012) Samek, Alyssa A.; Parry-Giles, Shawn J.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines how lesbian-feminists navigated the competing pressures of identity politics and coalition politics and confronted compounding frustrations, divisions, and exclusionary practices throughout the 1970s. Specifically, the study attends to the ways lesbian-feminists rhetorically recalibrated their identities in and through coalitional relationships with such social movement communities as women's liberation, gay liberation, and anti-war activism. In the process, they were able to build coalitional relationships with activists from other movements while retaining a space for articulating and bolstering their lesbian-feminist identities. This study accordingly examines lesbian-feminist published writings and speeches given during conferences, marches, demonstrations, and political rallies between 1970 and 1980 to reveal how they crafted a space for lesbian-feminist politics, identity, and liberation from within coalitional relationships that also marginalized them. The project intersects the theories of public address, social movement rhetoric, intersectionality, identity politics, and coalition politics to examine the strategic interaction between coalition politics and identity politics in lesbian-feminist activism. In particular, recalibration allowed lesbian-feminists to strategically capitalize on intersectionality in order to negotiate the tension between identity creation and coalition formation. Using the rhetorical strategy of pivoting to feature certain aspects of their identities with the various coalitions in mind, lesbian-feminists increased their visibility. They did so not only for the sake of promoting shared political goals and legitimizing lesbian-feminism, but also to confront social movement members on issues of exclusion, homophobia, and sexism. As a result, lesbian-feminism came to hold a variety of meanings for women working in the second-wave women's liberation, gay liberation, and anti-war movements. At times, lesbian feminists upheld a separatist, vanguard ethic, which was defined in opposition to other identities and movements. Though empowering and celebrated by some as more ideologically pure, separatist identity formations remained highly contested at the margins of lesbian-feminist identity politics. With those margins clearly defined, lesbian-feminists strategically pivoted to enact political ideologies and preserve identity from within coalitional relationships. In the process, their discourse revealed a great deal about the relationship between identity politics and coalition politics in the context of U.S. social protest in the post-1960s era.Item Beyond Political Neutrality: Towards A Complex Theory of Rights in the Modern Democratic State(2006-10-23) Mason, Chataquoa Nicole; McIntosh, Wayne; Williams, Linda F; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As of late, women, racial and ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, and other similarly situated groups have begun to make right-claims that once again test liberal notions of neutrality and raise significant questions concerning whether or not full equality and autonomy is possible in modern democracies. This study focuses on the impact of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and other markers of difference on the realization of rights in the modern democratic state. This dissertation uses three case studies, which separately and together demonstrate attempts to realize full freedom and autonomy through practices of direct democracy, the California Referendum Initiative; appeal to the courts, the issue of Gay Marriage; and the creation of public policies and landmark legislation, the Violence Against Women Act. The findings of my research suggest that at all levels of government, race, class, gender, sexual orientation and other markers of difference shape the realization of rights in the modern democratic state. In this study, I extend the insights offered by critical race scholars by proffering a complex theory of rights that is able to account for the impact of identity and culture to the realization of rights and rights-claims made by individuals and groups in the public sphere. Employing a complex theory of rights, the findings of this study confirm that there are a variety of factors that influence the realization of rights in the modern democratic state. Chief among them are: (1) A notion of the good operating in society that is connected to deeply entrenched societal values and norms and that privileges the dominant culture; (2) the structures and institutions that govern society are enmeshed in race, class, sexuality, and ethnic hierarchies; (3) the accumulated advantages gained through historic practices of exclusion, conquest, and enslavement; (4) the representation of the dominant group and subjugated groups in the public sphere through texts, the media, and discourse; and (5) whether or not individuals or groups are recognized as bearers of rights under the law.