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Spring 2016

York, Ashley Elaine

This dissertation explores the serial design model of The Closer. It answers the following question: How does The Closer offer multiple entry points along a spectrum of views on gender and feminism, appeal to a range of viewers, and thus secure popularity? To generate metadata of how The Closer

group study conducted with forty-two sample viewers in Tucson, Arizona in 2013. Combining textual, industrial, and ethnographic audience analyses, I find that The Closer’s historic popularity is due to the ways its television codes broaden hegemonic discourses, break gender binaries, and relieve the

dominant male gaze—that is, temporarily, subtly, and anachronistically. This smart serial design offers characterizations and content that chip away at hegemonic ideologies of gender over the series run. Viewers along a spectrum of feminism, gender, or sexuality are interpellated into the text through

Fall 2020

Cotton Cornwall, Olivia

way into the colonies, it took with it British ideals and worldviews, including an understanding of gender roles and identities. Using mainland America and Jamaica as case studies, this thesis will demonstrate that between 1750 and 1820, the consumption of British print promoted British ideals of

masculinity and femininity within these colonial societies and gave rise to transnational notions of gender identity. While the roles and responsibilities of men and women differed, as this study will suggest, they also shared several core values, including sociability, politeness, sensibility, and

cosmopolitanism. Tracing the formation of gender identity can prove challenging, but Atlantic-wide literary institutions such as coffee houses and circulating libraries, which contained strong gender connotations, act as useful frameworks to study how gender traits were acquired, promoted, and practiced

Fall 2012

Kolopenuk, Jessica

While scholarship has recognized the role that sex discrimination has played in the naming of “Indians” in Canada, one aspect of this depiction has been minimized. In addition to the gendering of Indigenous subjectivities, Canada has consistently racialized us/them through practices of juridical...

2012

Harol, Corinne

The Passion of Oroonoko situatues Aphra Behn's novella Oroonoko (1689) within the context of debates about passive obedience and political obligation during the Revolution of 1688-9. It argues that Oroonoko leverages residual theories and forms of representing human action (baroque allegory,...

Fall 2018

Meyer, Angela M.

into public sphere policy-formation” (Bonnett, 2006, pp. 1-2), and Albertan legal and political discourses on gender and sexuality consistently placed queers and gender non-conformists as not normal Albertans (Filax, 2006; Rayside, Sabin, & Thomas, 2012). These kinds of discourses follow centuries-long

history in the North American legal system’s treatment of sexual and gender minorities, which includes but is not limited to anti-cross-dressing, sodomy, and anti-gay statutes in American and Canadian contexts (Warner, 2002; Stryker, 2008; Eskridge & Hunter, 2004; Sutherland, 2000; Weeks, 1977; Jackson

gender and sexuality. In multiple ways, drag performers engage in drag as a way of going inside to a safer space because of their experiences in the outside world, both in public spaces and with family. Drag kings have been popularly understood as female lesbians dressing up as men; however, they can

Fall 2015

Mikalson, Kaarina Louise

This thesis looks at gender practices in Canadian radical political movements through the novels of the Great Depression. In the first chapter, I examine hegemonic masculinity, as defined by R.W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, in Irene Baird’s unemployment novel Waste Heritage. The

read her alongside her real-life inspiration, Gerda Taro, and interpret the ways both women are simplified and compromised to give way to masculine antifascism. Judith Butler’s theory of gender as a set of practices supports my conclusion that the refusal to challenge gender compromises the radical

politics in both novels. All the same, these narratives offer models of resistance–and models of radical failure–that remain relevant and appealing, particularly because gender persists as a divisive issue.

Fall 2022

Doran, Larissa

This thesis explores the ways gender plays a role in the reintegration of women convicted of sexual offences in Canada. Through the use of 15 qualitative interviews, I examine how staff and volunteers working with these women understand and approach their reintegration, and seek to determine what

sexual offences and their victims for failing to do their gender properly results in underreporting, and thus a serious lack of reintegrative services and support for these women in community. Moreover, those who work with women convicted of sexual offences can be biased in their beliefs about the danger

of these women based on the expectations surrounding their gender, thus further contributing to a lack of services and support. Based on my research, there are currently no community reintegration programs specifically for women convicted of sexual offences in Canada. To improve the reintegrative

Fall 2021

Schowalter, Glenna

SPN’s treatment of gender and sexuality in the first five seasons, and the ways in which it interacts with representations of otherness and monstrosity. For this analysis, I draw on theoretical contributions in the areas of gender studies, genre studies and popular culture scholarship, specifically the

study of the horror genre. The thesis consists of three chapters, which explore gender ambivalence, monstrous femininity and monstrous sexuality respectively. I conduct analyses of specific episodes, using close reading as a method to examine representative scenes and characters. Within SPN one can

trace concerns and anxieties surrounding otherness, especially regarding women and queer people, and a desire for individualist masculine power. The project contends that while the creators of the show attempt to explore nuanced and non-normative representations of gender, the series nonetheless is

Fall 2021

Laxamana, Kevin Chavez

What does it mean to live a non-linear or disrupted life? When circumstances and society deny someone’s existence because of their non-normative gender and sexuality, by what means do people reconstruct their lives, reclaim their identities and sense of being, and gather the strength to survive

shapes our perspectives on gender and categories. As such, I argue that anthropological studies on transgender and queer subjects, in connection with sex work, are sites for contesting and reformulating classifications and categories. The meanings produced and created from anthropological research and

gender, as a matter of fact, are ways and processes for cultural transformation. This research is based on 28 in-depth and semi-structured interviews conducted and collected during my ethnographic fieldwork in Singapore and Bali in the summer of 2017. Given the scarcity of scholarly material pertaining

Spring 2016

Allam, Nermin

Popular and scholarly accounts emphasize the absence of gender issues in women's framing of their participation during the 2011 Egyptian uprising. In this dissertation, I interrogate the collective action frame adopted by women at the time of the uprising to elucidate how gender featured in the

obscured women′s participation in politics. By offering a gender analysis of these early interactions, the dissertation contributes to explaining the nature and implications of their gender dynamics. It recovers women′s voices in the writing of history and opens up new ways of understanding the Egyptian