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 PERFORMING NERD: THE NERD STEREOTYPE IN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE(2017) Boynton, Michael John; Carpenter, Faedra; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The primary function of the nerd stereotype—like any other stereotype—is to reinforce and reify cultural hegemony, to delineate who has access to power and who does not. In this dissertation, I argue that the nerd stereotype performs this function in two essential ways: the heteronormative dynamic and the exclusionary dynamic. As a sort of social script, the stereotype reifies compulsory heteronormativity by denouncing those who, in a Butlerian sense, misperform their gender/sexuality with regard to prescribed masculine/feminine behaviors. This heteronormative dynamic is, then, at its core an anti-intellectual one, using prescriptive notions of masculinity and femininity to demonize intelligence and critical thinking. The nerd stereotype also simultaneously operates to ostracize a number of marginalized identities (women, blacks, Asians, Jews, etc.) from educational, scientific, and intellectual empowerment via the exclusionary dynamic, while allowing certain upper-class, straight white males access to that empowerment. Taken together, these two dynamics often seem in paradoxical conflict, simultaneously denouncing intelligence (mocking nerdy white males), yet problematically reserving that intelligence as the province of hegemonic white masculinity. In this contradictory fashion, these two complex dynamics are consistently reflected in the persistent performance of nerd representations as both comic sexual failures and predominantly (although not exclusively) white males. With this configuration of the stereotype in mind, this dissertation examines the ideological origins and popularization of the nerd stereotype in U.S. popular culture from 1945 to 1989, its most formative period. A genealogical survey (or cultural history) of various performance texts (film, television, magazines, etc.) that include stereotypical nerds—from early issues of Archie Comics to the 1984 film Revenge of the Nerds—this study focuses on how the nerd stereotype reflects specific moments of identity politics and anti-intellectualism in particular cultural contexts. Using performance studies, cultural studies, and recent scholarship on white masculinity as a theoretical guide for analysis, this work arrives at the conclusion that the nerd stereotype is not only a vitally important facet of American popular culture in a general sense, but also that this stereotype reinforces a general anti-intellectual sentiment while simultaneously scripting intelligence as the province of hegemonic identities.Item `HE LOVES THE LITTLE ONES AND DOESN'T BEAT THEM': WORKING CLASS MASCULINITY IN MEXICO CITY, 1917-1929(2014) Gustafson, Reid Erec; Vaughan, Mary Kay; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how Mexico City workers, workers' families, state officials, unions, employers, and others perceived, performed, and shaped masculinity during the period of the Mexican Revolution. I argue that Mexico City's workers, officials, and employers negotiated working-class gender beliefs in such a way as to express multiple, performed, and distinctly working-class masculinities and sexualities. Scholars who study gender in Mexico argue that during the 1930s a particular type of working-class masculinity became dominant: the idea of the male worker as a muscular breadwinner who controlled both machines and women. I agree with this claim, but the existing scholarship fails to explain how this "proletarian masculinity" developed prior to the 1930s. My dissertation studies the period right before this proletarian masculinity became dominant and explains the processes through which it gradually developed. During the 1920s, the state held a relatively unstable position of power and was consequently forced to negotiate terms of rule with popular classes. I demonstrate that the 1920s represent a period when no one form of masculinity predominated. A complex range of multiple masculine behaviors and beliefs developed through the everyday activities of the working class, employers, officials, and unions. A Catholic union might represent a rival union as possessing an irresponsible form of manhood, a young man might use bravado and voice pitch to enact a homosexual identity, and a single father might enact a nurturing, self-sacrificing form of manhood. My sources include labor arbitration board records, court records, newspapers, plays, poetry, and reports by social workers, police, doctors, labor inspectors, juvenile court judges, and Diversions Department inspectors. Each chapter in this dissertation analyzes a particular facet of workers' masculinity, including worker's masculine behaviors among youth, within the family, in the workplace, in popular entertainment venues, and within unions.Item Citizen-Civilians: Masculinity, Citizenship, and American Military Manpower Policy, 1945-1975(2013) Rutenberg, Amy Jennifer; Muncy, Robyn; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Citizen-Civilians" argues that military manpower policies between the end of World War II in 1945 and the shift to the All-Volunteer Force in 1973 separated military service from ideals of masculine citizenship in the United States. Manpower policies, especially those that governed deferments, widened the definition of service to the state and encouraged men to meet their responsibilities for national defense as civilians. They emphasized men's breadwinner role and responsible fatherhood over military service and defined economic independence as a contribution to national defense. These policies, therefore, militarized the civilian sector, as fatherhood and certain civilian occupations were defined as national defense initiatives. But these policies also, ironically, weakened the citizen-soldier ideal by ensuring that fewer men would serve in the military and equating these civilian pursuits with military service. The Defense establishment unintentionally weakened its own manpower procurement system. These findings provide context for the anti-war and anti-draft protest of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Vietnam exacerbated points of friction that already existed. The war highlighted assumptions about masculinity and citizenship as well as inequities in the draft system that had existed for a generation. This dissertation, therefore, explains the growth of the mechanisms that allowed men to avoid military service, as such avoidance became relatively simple to accomplish and easy to justify. Thus, when draft calls rose in order to support a war that many Americans did not agree with, men used the channels that the Defense establishment had already created for them to avoid serving in the armed forces. This work also demonstrates how policies and ideas about masculine citizenship affected one another. Competing visions of manhood as well as debates over the rights and responsibilities of citizenship influenced policy debates. Moreover, policies took on a social engineering function, as the Selective Service and Department of Defense actively encouraged men to enter particular occupational fields, marry, and become fathers. In this way, this project is an example of the "lived Cold War." It suggests that individual men made career, school, and marriage decisions in response to Cold War policies.Item Fathers and Sons: American Blues and British Rock Music, 1960-1970(2008-11-30) Kellett, Andrew James; Herf, Jeffrey C; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the unique cultural phenomenon of British blues-based rock music in the 1960s. It provides answers to two important questions of trans-Atlantic intellectual and cultural history. First, this dissertation will provide answers to two questions. First, it interrogates how and why African-American blues music became so popular amongst a segment of young, primarily middle-class men in Great Britain. It maps out "blues trade routes"--that is, the methods by which the music was transmitted to Britain. It explains the enthusiasm shown by young male Britishers largely in terms of their alienation from, and dissatisfaction with, mainstream British masculinity. Seen in this light, the "adoption" of African-American bluesmen as replacement "fathers" can be seen as an attempt to fill a perceived cultural need. This dissertation will also examine how these young British men, having formed bands to perform their own music, began in the mid-1960s to branch out from the blues. In a developing dialogue with like-minded bands from the United States, bands such as the Rolling Stones and Yardbirds started combining the lessons of the blues with other cultural influences such as jazz, classical music and English folk. The resulting cultural bricolage innovated popular music on both sides of the Atlantic from the 1970s onward. The dissertation draws on a variety of primary sources, including the popular music press, published interviews with key musicians, and, of course, the recorded music itself. Fathers and Sons uses the development of popular music to address issues that have traditionally been central to the study of ideas and cultures. These include: the role of interpersonal relationships in disseminating ideas and culture; the impact of distance and proximity in impelling cultural innovation; the occurrences of bursts of creativity in distinct places at distinct times; and the ways in which gender and sexual identity are performed and negotiated through mass consumer culture. These are salient issues with which intellectual and cultural historians have dealt for decades. Thus, Fathers and Sons seeks a broader audience than merely that which would be interested in American blues, British rock music, or both.Item Constructions of Violent Jamaican Masculinity in Film and Literature(2008-07-28) Harewood, Gia; Collins, Merle; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Greg Dimitriadis and Cameron McCarthy sketch out what they see as an emergent postcolonial aesthetic percolating in the postcolonial artist's imagination. According to their analysis, postcolonial artists make meaning in their work through three critical motifs that help shape this aesthetic: "counterhegemonic representation, double or triple coding, and emancipatory or utopic visions" (19, italics in original). Counterhegemonic representation "rework[s] the center-versus-periphery distinction . . . to look beyond its strictures to new histories, new discourses, new ways of being" (24). Double coding combines "two or more fields of reference or idiom in any given work" pulling images from places such as "the East and the West, the first world and the Third, the colonial master and the slave" (26). And utopic visions are about "imagining possibility even when faced with impossible barriers" (30). My project is fundamentally interested in constructing healthy (masculine) identities and its arguments are ultimately guided by their first and third motifs. Using feminist theory, masculinity studies, cultural studies and postcolonial theory, I focus on the representation of black Jamaican men as violent criminal beings in three films (The Harder They Come, Third World Cop and Shottas), two novels (The Harder They Come and For Nothing at All) and one ethnographic travelogue (Born Fi' Dead). I argue that "real/reel" Jamaican masculinity is ultimately connected to gun violence and the most popular films out of Jamaica over the past thirty years only perpetuate this image. While not the only source for role models, visual images play a significant role in the lives of young men (and women) who are trying to live up to social standards of masculinity. With limited access to social mobility, they often emulate the shotta (gangster) glory that they see sparkling on the screen. Through close readings of these texts, I show how hegemonic masculinity is reinforced and reveal that non-violent models of masculinity do exist, despite being overshadowed by violent "heroes." I call for that "utopic vision," to excavate the vulnerable and intervene on behalf of peace to help young men and boys find alternative models of masculinity and ultimately create sustainable communities.