American Studies
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Item Old Yankee Women: Life Histories and Cultural Significance(2010) Tydings, Judith Church; Caughey, John L.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Responding to the notion that old age is like a foreign country, this study explores a small portion of this understudied terrain by examining the lives of eight old New England women (four primary subjects and four supplemental participants). In keeping with current ethnographic and life history practice, this cultural study of these American women in late life uses a journey format with the researcher engaged in exploration along with the other project participants. After a comprehensive review of the various literatures on aging women, this study provides detailed cultural portraits of the project participants who ranged in age from 60 to 92 when their participation in this ten year study began. By a close reading of their writings, by in depth life history conversations, and by participant observation, including living with each participant for a brief period of time, this study illuminates how these women in old age see themselves, the choices they have made or resisted in late life and what gives their lives meaning. This study is intended to illustrate the usefulness of the person centered life history method as a lens through which to examine the complex ways in which women negotiate aging. Old age, as this study shows, is experienced quite differently by each of these individual women; the old are far from a homogenous group. Even within this small group of white New England women of similar class backgrounds, many factors differentiate their experiences. One key factor has to do with their different cultural meaning systems. Using a "cultural traditions" model in conjunction with contemporary life history methods and ethnographic participant observation techniques, and informed by nascent age studies perspectives, this research examines how and to what extent the old age experiences of these women are affected and influenced by the particular cultural orientations of key cultural traditions these New England women bring with them into old age and how the aging process affects the ways they work with these traditions.Item Beyond Scraps: Narrating Traumatic Health Experiences Through Scrapbooking(2010) Reynolds, Dawn M; Struna, Nancy; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)For centuries, women have served as the primary storytellers of domestic life. In volumes known as scrapbooks, women collect family snapshots and memorabilia for generations to enjoy. Traditional scrapbooking tends to highlight cheerful familial themes, such as weddings, births, and other life milestones. Contemporary online iterations of the age-old artform have begun publicly incorporating stories of traumatic health experiences. In this dissertation, I attend to the scrapbooking projects created by a selection of women who address personal health issues. I examine narrative and rhetorical strategies employed in health trauma scrapbooks, contending that women use the craft to preserve a sense of self while also publicly voicing social concerns. I combine feminist textual analysis and ethnographic-inspired observation to illustrate how scrapbooking comprises a form of knowledge production narrating women's collective wisdom about survival. The scrapbook projects I explore demonstrate techniques crafters use to manage cultural memories by reformulating their self-image as social change activists rather than as mere enthusiasts engaging in a trite hobby. This dissertation explores a selection of health concerns women raise through the craft, with a particular emphasis on breast-cancer themed scrapbooks. Applying breast cancer scrapbook pages as a case study, I illustrate how women deploy online scrapbooking in the service of health narration, thereby claiming a public voice about the illness experience. As I show in the final part of the dissertation, scrapbookers coalesce in activist communities, carving out a platform from which to press for social justice. I conclude by revealing ways that scrapbookers utilize the World Wide Web to facilitate health activism and public narration of traumatic health experiences. This dissertation is designed to elevate the place of contemporary scrapbooking in American Studies scholarship. Because the scrapbook has been both poorly preserved and grossly understudied, the earnest task of my project is to offer a useful model for analyzing women's trauma scrapbook pages that resonates for future scholars. I seek, above all, to raise awareness about the scrapbook as a relevant cultural artifact that contains richly contextual narratives of self and society.Item "Don't Believe the Hype": The Polemics of Hip Hop and the Poetics of Resistance and Resilience in Black Girlhood(2009) Oliver, Chyann Latrel; Parks, Sheri L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)At a time when Hip Hop is mired in masculinity, and scholars are "struggling for the soul of this movement" through excavating legacies in a black nationalist past, black girls and women continue to be bombarded with incessant, one-dimensional, images of black women who are reduced solely to sum of their sexual parts. Without the presence of a counter narrative on black womanhood and femininity in Hip Hop, black girls who are growing up encountering Hip Hop are left to define and negotiate their identities as emerging black women within a sexualized context. This dissertation asks: how can black girls, and more specifically, working class black girls, who are faced with inequities because of their race, class, and gender find new ways to define themselves, and name their experiences, in their own words and on their own terms? How can black girls develop ways of being resistant and resilient in the face of adversity, and in the midst of this Hip Hop "attack on black womanhood?" Using myriad forms of writing and fusing genres of critical essay, poetry, prose, ethnography, and life history, this dissertation, as a feminist, artistic, cultural, and political Hip Hop intervention, seeks to address the aforementioned issues by demonstrating the importance of black women's vocality in Hip Hop. It examines how black women in Hip Hop have negotiated race, class, gender, and sexuality from 1979 to the present. It addresses the disappearance or hiatus of the black female rapper and the subsequent rise and reign of the video vixen, and the implications this has for black girls coming of age during this hyper-commercialization of Hip Hop. It discusses how creative writing workshops, which teach black girls between the ages of 12-17 about the importance of vocality and feminist resistance through poetry/spoken word, can become a new method for investigating black girlhood and exploring issues of resistance and resilience.Item The Long Tradition: Black Women and Mothers in Public Discourses(2009) Sanders, Tammy L.; Struna, Nancy L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Document THE LONG TRADITION: BLACK WOMEN AND MOTHERS IN POPULAR DISCOURSES Tammy Sanders, Doctor of Philosophy, 2009 Directed By: Chair and Professor Nancy Struna Department of American Studies With her insightful analysis, Nancy Lurkins in &ldquoYou are the Race, You are the Seeded Earth:&rdquo Intellectual Rhetoric, American Fiction, and Birth Control in the Black Community (2008), asserts &ldquo(past) black leaders promoted the ideal of black domesticity and moral motherhood as a counterstrategy to white attacks. Over time, appreciating and even desiring black motherhood came to be identified with black communal pride and as a result black women became responsible for upholding the entire race&rdquo (47). Similarly, recent history has proved to be no different when it comes to the responsibility of black mothers. This dissertation will explore how public discourses involving the social sciences, films, and novels historicize, represent, and re-envision black motherhood. It will investigate how these discourses about motherhood are shaped by the historical moment of their occurrence and what they tell us about the attitudes of those establishing critical thought. By examining texts like the Moynihan Report, Ann Petry's The Street, Lorraine Hansberry's play, A Raisin in the Sun, and the 1974 film Claudine, this project will analyze the rhetoric of scholars about black motherhood alongside popular images of black mothers to illustrate how they overlap and how black women's bodies are consistently at the nexus of academic, social, cultural and political conversations. In an attempt to further complicate mothering studies by using black feminist thought as my lens, this dissertation seeks to tease out the interconnectedness of historical moments and discourses without perpetuating traditional gender norms as it relates to black female identities.Item Amish Women, Business Sense: Old Order Women Entrepreneurs in the Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Tourist Marketplace(2008) Graybill, Beth E.; Caughey, John L.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is an examination of Amish businesswomen and gender roles in the tourist marketplace of Lancaster County, PA. Tourism in Lancaster is a $1.5 billion business; most tourists come because of the Amish and values associated with them. Recently, tourism has come to provide an important source of income for many Old Order Mennonite and Amish women, whose business enterprises cater primarily to a tourist market. Among the Amish, known for their separation from wider society, tourism now puts many women on the front lines in dealing with outsiders, a monumental shift historically. Thus, this ethnography of Amish businesswomen serves as a useful lens for examining Amish women's changing gender roles in Lancaster County today. Moreover, it fills a significant gap in the literature, as little has been written about Amish women, to date. Mine is a micro-study that examines tourism, entrepreneurship, and gender through the words of Amish women themselve, and my analysis of them. Using ethnography and life history I examine the lives of Old Order Amish and Mennonite women whose businesses range from quilt shops to greenhouses to serving meals in their homes. As I show, the ways in which these women handle their business, family, and community roles sometimes involves extensions of traditional roles and sometimes departures from them.Item "Live in the country with faith": Jane and Ralph Whitehead, The Simple Life Movement, and Arts and Crafts in The United States, England, and on The Continent, 1870-1930(2008-01-23) Nasstrom, Heidi; Sies, Mary C.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)American artist Jane Byrd McCall Whitehead (1858-1955) and her English husband Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead (1854-1929) are best known for co-founding the Byrdcliffe Art and Crafts school and colony in Woodstock, New York, which was active from 1903 into the present. Long before Byrdcliffe, however, the Whiteheads formulated plans for an "art convent" founded on principles of the simple life movement. A rejection of repressive social mores and materialistic behavior and a critique of social inequality in the modern world, the Whiteheads' simple life was enacted in rural places where nature served as a model for spirituality and aesthetics in art and the built environment, and where handwork in the form of art and craft and working the land were balanced with intellectual activity, leisure time and socializing in order to improve physical and psychological well being. This dissertation uses the wealth of primary source material on the Whiteheads--their personal papers, photographs documenting their lives, arts and crafts by them and their circle, built environs and landscapes--to trace the evolution of simple living as it was holistically expressed in the lifestyle and environs they constructed in their early years abroad; their first attempt at simple living as a married couple at Arcady in Montecito, California; and finally, their mature expression at Byrdcliffe in Woodstock, New York. Incorporating an interdisciplinary methodology involving a material culture approach that looks at the man-altered world as evidence for social and cultural history, this is the first scholarly effort to explore what simple living meant and looked like to these particular individuals, and the first project to look at the interconnectedness of simple living on a bi-coastal United States and trans-Atlantic scale between 1870-1930. It also seeks to restore an understanding of Jane's contributions to the simple life environs and art schools she formulated collaboratively with her husband, which were previously attributed solely to Ralph.Item (Re)Mapping the Black Atlantic: Violence, Affect, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Caribbean Women's Migration Literature(2007-05-29) Shaw, Barbara L.; Rosenfelt, Deborah; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is a project of literary reclamation, canonical revision, cultural analysis, and interdisciplinary remapping. Drawing on American studies, women's studies, postcolonial studies, and Caribbean studies, particularly performance theory and recent theoretical work on affectivity, it analyzes the negotiations of protagonists who move back and forth between and among cultures and nations, exploring complex possibilities for subjectivity, identity, and citizenship within worlds of domestic and neocolonial violence. Collectively, America's Dream, The Line of the Sun, Geographies of Home, Breath, Eyes, Memory, and The Unbelonging re-map Gilroy's influential theory of the Black Atlantic in three ways: by tracing the legacies of colonization in relation to interpersonal violence; by re-writing national narratives of the metropole from migrant Caribbean women's perspectives; and by including Puerto Rico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, as well as Jamaica, within its purview. While arguing for the complex personhood of these migrant protagonists and elucidating their legacies of pain and healing, alongside their victimization and resistance, this dissertation also provides a materialist analysis of cultural production, examining how these books circulate as objects in the global/local economy of book selling and distribution. Through a small-scale ethnographic study of independent publishers, alongside a material and visual cultural analysis of the book covers, it analyzes the politics of publication and canonization of Caribbean women's literature. By centering the Caribbean and its diaspora in an American Studies project, this dissertation pushes the boundaries of the discipline beyond the examination of cultures in the United States or American imperialism in other nations. (Re)Mapping the Black Atlantic asks not only that the Caribbean be considered part of the Americas, but also that the relational aspects of migration between the Caribbean on the one hand, and the United States and Britain on the other, become part of the new cartographies of American Studies.Item From the Liminal to the Land: Building Amazon Culture at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival(2006-04-27) Kendall, Laurie J.; Struna, Nancy L.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Every year in August, thousands of womyn from around the globe make a journey that takes them from the liminal world of patriarchal marginalization, oppression, and violence to the safety of a land where they build a matriarchal culture of families, homes, and sacred traditions. This new culture binds these womyn to each other as a people and to the 650 acres in Michigan that they call their homeland. This dissertation is a five-year ethnographic study of the cultural community womyn build at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. It focuses on the experiences of 32 participants, and the physical work they do to create a world that places their minds and bodies, their values and experiences, and their relationships in the center of their own community structures. By inverting the concept of liminality used to describe lesbian cultural spaces, this study reframes these womyn as a diasporic group who journey home once each year to reconnect with their home, family and sacred traditions. The significance of the study is that it demonstrates the ways womyn resist patriarchal oppression by using love as a technology for building a matriarchal culture. Theoretically, by inverting the concept of liminality, researchers might better understand and articulate the interlocking structures of power and oppression, as well as the "methodologies" that marginalized people use to resist oppressive forces in American culture.Item PERCEPTIONS AND EXPRESSIONS OF CLASS IDENTITY: A LIFE HISTORY APPROACH(2005-05-01) Coleman-Casey, Joannie Linda; Caughey, John; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Utilizing a life history method, a working class male's perceptions of and responses to notions of discrimination experienced by the working class are documented. The concept of class as an experience unique to each individual is explored through comparison with the author's experiences with discrimination against the working class and a review of literature. At first the subject's actions may appear arbitrary and unexpected, but what is discovered is a coherence or meaning system based on individual rights and self-worth that accounts for his seemingly unrelated activities. Experiences in conflict with this system are detailed and social resistance is revealed as a response to the conflict arising from belief versus experience. Expressions of resistance range from economic and occupational decisions and political involvements to sexual expressions all of which are designed to resist middle class expectations. The individual's construction of masculinity as a response to perceived class discrimination is investigated. What emerges is a model of masculinity rooted in a desire to express the power denied to him because of class affiliationItem WOMEN, CRIME AND CULTURE: LIFE STORIES AND ETHNOGRAPHY IN THE RESIDENTIAL PARENTING PROGRAM AT THE WASHINGTON (STATE) CORRECTIONS CENTER FOR WOMEN.(2005-04-20) Wells, Robert Marshall; Caughey, John L.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the Residential Parenting Program (RPP) at the Washington State Corrections Center for Women. In this unusual, experimental program, imprisoned women are allowed to keep their babies and small children with them during their prison sentences. Typically, a mother and child are released together before the child reaches the age of three. Data on the RPP were gathered, first, through extensive participant observation research in which an effort was made to learn how this "nursery program" functions on a day to day basis. Person-centered informal and formal interviews also were used to obtain information on how various people connected to the program, now and in the past, including administrators, service providers, staff, correctional officers, other women prisoners, and, especially, incarcerated mothers participating in the program, viewed the functioning of the RPP and its benefits and problems. Detailed life stories of some 20 of the mothers were also obtained. These stories show how the women construct their past experiences in the drug world, how they describe everyday life in the RPP and how they articulate the hopes that they have for the future. The dissertation also explores the process through which women and children leave the prison and return to society. In general, all those associated with the program view it positively, and early returns suggest that the program is quite effective in helping women and their children make successful transitions back into society. This investigation offers insights into a unique and innovative rehabilitative program that aims to halt an ongoing cycle of criminality, which shows no signs of abating within a large segment of U.S. women who tend to be at the lower end of the socio-economic ladder, regardless of other demographic characteristics.