ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
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This study examines the Disney affiliated series Ugly Betty to assess how the culture and identity of Betty Suarez, its titular character, as a Mexican-American woman is manufactured. Of particular interest is how she is coded as a diverse member of U.S. workforce, and how her transformative makeover from ugly duckling can be read as an assimilation narrative from racialized ethnic invader to white American professional. Using criteria extracted from scholarship and cultural production regarding Latina identity formation, I locate Betty within what I call the spectrum of assimilation among U.S. Latinas. Because there are various ways in which one negotiates, expresses and balances the multiple cultural, racial and classed components of their self-identity, I tease out markers from existing theories to locate Betty's self-projected cultural identity within the series narrative.
Building on the evidence gathered regarding Betty's rejection of a politicized Latina identity, this project analyzes the implications of the choice of New York City as site of Betty's transformation and how the use of queer visibility and American Dream discourse inform a reading of Betty as assimilation narrative. This dissertation concludes with a brief analysis of two shows featuring Latina titular characters. Both Cristela (ABC 2014-) and Jane the Virgin (CW 2014-) are successors of Ugly Betty yet diverge in the way their portrayals of Latinidades include more nuanced and pluralistic representations.
Utilizing frameworks from critical transgender studies, youth studies, and media studies, this project illustrates how value is distributed, and at the expense of whom this process of assigning value occurs, in media economies of transgender youth visibility. Discursive analyses of online self-representations, as well as of online representations of media narratives, facilitate this investigation into how transgender youth negotiate the terms of those narratives circulating about them in U.S. contemporary media. This project demonstrates that increases in visibility do not always translate into political power; at best, they distract from the need for political interventions for marginalized groups, and at worst, they erase those stories already far from view in popular discourse: of non-normative transgender youth who are already positioned outside the realm of intelligibility to a national body structured by a heteronormative binary gender system.
Placing feminist cultural studies theories of affect in conversation with feminist disability studies and girlhood studies, this dissertation maps evocations of disabled girlhood. It traces how certain affective states as an intersubjective glue stick to specific disabled girls’ bodies and how these intersubjective attachments generate an emergent affective atmosphere that attempts to repair the fraying fantasy of the good life. Utilizing affect as methodology and object of analysis, this dissertation interrogates ambivalent visual artifacts: ranging from the “real” figure of the disabled girl through YouTubers, Charisse Living with Cerebral Palsy and Rikki Poynter, to a fictional disabled girl in Degrassi: Next Class; spanning from physically disabled beauty pageant contestants to autistic girls learning how to dance; and, finally, looking to a black disabled girl in her life and death, Jerika Bolen. I contend that through their roles as disability educators, shared objects of happiness and optimism, and pedagogues of death, exceptional disabled girls have been deployed as guides on a new roadmap to ideal, affective post-ADA citizenhood.