School of Public Health
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1633
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
Note: Prior to July 1, 2007, the School of Public Health was named the College of Health & Human Performance.
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Item A Healthy Relationship? The Entanglement of State, Corporate, and Labor Interests in Gender-based Violence Sport Policies(2023) Drafts-Johnson, Lilah; Jette, Shannon; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Gender-based violence (GBV) within professional sports made headlines in 2014 following the Ray Rice domestic violence incident, prompting a Congressional hearing with the four major men’s sports leagues in the United States. This hearing resulted in the implementation of several sport industry-wide policies addressing off-field conduct for players and employees, including ones specifically focused on interpersonal relationships. Despite the cultural prominence of corporate sport entities such as the National Football League, National Basketball Association, and Major League Baseball, in addition to the fervor for institutional accountability in the wake of the #MeToo movement, there has been limited academic scholarship examining the scope and efficacy of these policies (see Brown, 2016; Augelli & Kuennen, 2018) Drawing upon the findings of a thematic analysis of Senate Hearing 113-725: Addressing Domestic Violence in Professional Sports, this thesis utilized a governmentality analytic to critically analyze the motivations, assumptions, and tensions which underpinned the institutionalization of GBV policies in corporate sport. The findings demonstrate that while the parties present at the hearing problematized sport culture at large as a producer of GBV, their remarks characterized professional male athletes as perpetrators, reifying the idea of the “violent (Black) male athlete” and violence as an inherent trait in professional sport more generally. Instead of critically interrogating the structure of professional sport, legislators instead focused on expanding the governing capacity of sport leagues, and effectively the state, to discipline and punish perpetrators of GBV by encouraging the implementation of new extra-legal policies. I argue that this hearing reinforced the neoliberal entanglement of state, corporate, and non-profit actors in the movement to reduce GBV in society, strengthening the dependency that the state has on corporate social responsibility to solve leading public health issues, and compelling GBV advocates, activists, and scholars to engage with corporations in order to receive critical funding and legitimacy in their work. Meanwhile, suggested legislation to improve economic and workplace conditions for survivors was ignored as labor issues were positioned as oppositional to GBV accountability efforts. Through articulation and radical contextualism, this thesis sheds new insight into the origins and methods of corporate GBV policies in sport as well as the intricacies of contemporary neoliberal governance, and ultimately argues that the state response to GBV must shift from one of punishment and surveillance to one of preventative care through improved economic and labor conditions for all workers.Item America's Sweethearts? A Feminist Discourse Analysis of Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making The Team(2022) Nowosatka, Lauren Riley; Jette, Shannon L.; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The “often imitated, never equaled” Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders (DCCs) are self-proclaimed as “the premier cheerleading squad in the world,” universally setting the stage (field) for professional cheerleading. In 2006, “America’s Sweethearts” launched a hit reality television (TV) show, Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making The Team (DCCs: MTT), where the squad director positions the organization as empowering women in the opening the series’ 13th season. Taking this seemingly contradictory statement—made during the #MeToo moment of 2018—as a department point, this thesis examines the constructions of femininity and empowerment on offer in season 13 of DCCs: MTT. A textual analysis adopted from Johnson et al.’s (2004) reading for dominance methodology, with a theoretical foundation in feminist discourse analysis and intersectionality, was used to examine season 13 of DCCs: MTT, answering the following questions: 1. What versions of femininity are on offer to viewers of Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making The Team? How do they intersect with race, sexuality, class, ability, etc.? 2. How is empowerment constructed through Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making The Team? Findings suggest that performances of femininity are aligned with emphasized femininity and ambassadorship, offering a homogenous image to viewers that idealizes and reinforces hegemonic beauty standards, the thin-ideal, and the objectification of women, paired with displays of emotional expressions, “intelligence,” and poise that subjectively position the cheerleaders within the larger patriarchal, late-capitalist Dallas Cowboys and NFL structures. Supposedly empowering to the cheerleaders, the discursive practices, enforced performativities, and productional strategies displayed on season 13 of DCCs: MTT, frames the institution as faux-empowering, endorsing empowerment as the product of making “correct” individual choices. Consequently, cheerleaders and viewers who do not make these decisions are rendered disempowered and made to feel shameful, contradicting the spirited nature of the sport. This thesis seeks to fill the gap created by the lack of critical, sociological discussions of professional cheerleading as a spectacle of late-capitalist, uber sport, permeated through popular culture and which analyzes professional cheerleading through the site of reality TV.Item Redoing gender, redoing family: A mixed-methods examination of family complexity and gender heterogeneity among transgender families(2020) Allen, Samuel H.; Leslie, Leigh A; Family Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Scholars have documented that considerable health disparities exist between transgender persons and the general population. A growing research base suggests that the family environment of trans individuals—i.e., the social climate within one’s family—can have a significant influence on the population’s health and wellbeing. Despite the substantiated relationship between the family environment of transgender people and their health, there are three identifiable gaps in the literature that warrant further research. First, no known quantitative studies have considered trans family environments beyond those that are accepting and rejecting, or how such family environments might be differently related to the population’s mental and physical health. Second, though scholars are increasingly recognizing the existence of gender heterogeneity within the trans population, it remains unknown if the health and family environment vary for trans persons of different gender identities. A third gap exists within the nascent literature on individuals with nonbinary gender identities in which there is an absence of studies examining the experiences of their family members. The three papers that comprise this mixed-methods dissertation respond to the aforementioned gaps in the literature. The first two studies analyze quantitative survey data collected from transgender adults (N=873); study three analyzes qualitative interview data collected from the parents of adult children with nonbinary gender identities (N=14). Study one examines family environment heterogeneity and tests its association with mental and physical health. Study two assesses variation in mental health, physical health, and family environment as a function of having a binary vs. a nonbinary gender identity. Study three uncovers how parents of nonbinary adult children make sense of their child’s gender and the developmental processes that occur in doing so. Taken together, findings from this dissertation offer important implications for healthcare providers, clinicians, and intervention efforts aimed at improving the health of transgender populations.Item Assessing Gender Equity in the Workplace: A Case Study(2015) Wahl, Mary Grace; Garza, Mary A; Public and Community Health; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Background: Women currently represent 47 percent of the workforce, and these rates have been steadily climbing since the 1970s. The presence of gender discrimination in the workforce has been documented and measured, although not extensively, in the form of qualitative and quantitative studies, court cases, and legislation passed. There has been even less effort focused on its reciprocal, the fostering of gender equity in the workplace. This study examines staff perceptions of gender equity in the workplace, both in the office setting and in the overseas programmatic efforts of the organization. Methods: The organization in the case study, Lutheran World Relief, is a small-scale faith-based international development organization, and the study population is its domestically-based staff located at its headquarters office. This study utilizes a cross-sectional quantitative methods approach by conducting an anonymous survey. Results/Summary: The survey had a 53% staff response rate. This study showed that the organization's staff have overall positive perceptions of its gender equitable workplace culture as well as its programmatic efforts overseas. Main areas of improvement include financial resources allocated for gender integration and improving technical capacity of staff. The study results will guide the organizations' efforts to improve its office culture and programmatic efforts, and this organization sets a strong example of the importance of organization-wide reflection around and prioritizing of gender equity.