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- All Subjects: Women's Studies
- All Subjects: Food in literature
- Creators: Sturges, Robert
- Creators: Estrada, Emir
Description
This dissertation focuses on the connections between childbirth and spirituality in fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England. It argues that scholastic interest in conception and procreation led to a proliferation of texts mentioning obstetrics and gynecology, and that this attention to women's medicine and birth spread from the universities to the laity. This dissertation contends that there is interdependence between spiritual and physical health in late medieval English religious culture, correlated with and perhaps caused by an increasing fascination with materialism and women's bodies in religious practices and rhetoric. The first chapter provides an analysis of birth in medical and pastoral texts. Pastoral works were heavily influenced by the ecclesiastical emphasis on baptism, as well as by scholastic medicine's simultaneous disdain for and reluctant integration of folk medicine. The second chapter examines birth descriptions in narratives of saints' miracles and collections of exempla; these representations of childbirth were used in religious rhetoric to teach, motivate, and dissuade audiences. The third chapter turns to the cycle play representations of the nativity as depicting the mysteries of human generation and divine incarnation for public consumption. The fourth chapter analyzes the abstract uses of childbirth in visionary and other religious texts, especially in descriptions of spiritual rebirth and the development of vice and virtue in individuals or institutions. By identifying their roles as analogous with the roles of midwives, visionaries authorized themselves as spiritual caretakers, vital for communal health and necessary for collective spiritual growth. These chapters outline a trajectory of increasing male access to the birthing chamber through textual descriptions and prescriptions about birth and midwifery. At the same time, religious texts acknowledged, sought to regulate, and sometimes even utilized the potential authority of mothers and midwives as physical and spiritual caretakers.
ContributorsSwann, Alaya (Author) / Voaden, Rosalynn (Thesis advisor) / Newhauser, Richard (Committee member) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
ABSTRACT For many years, difference scholars, such as Cornel West, Iris Marion Young, and Janet Atwill have been reminding humanities scholars that if social equity is ever to be realized, difference needs to be reconfigured and reframed. As Janet Atwill puts it, "difference can no longer be the anomaly, the enemy, or the problem to be solved. Difference is the condition" (212). While these scholars insightfully recognize that difference needs to be accepted, welcomed and loved rather than merely tolerated, they have not sufficiently addressed the perceptual change that must occur worldwide if difference as an intrinsic underlying condition of human existence is to be embraced. This project provides a point of departure for carrying out such a dramatic epistemic change by arguing that hierarchical thinking, not difference, is the real agent underwriting societal violence and discord. Hierarchical thinking delineates a more appropriate critical space than does difference for social justice inquiry, invention, and intervention. This project also rhetorically theorizes the realm of intersubjectivity and provides two novel contributions to contemporary rhetorical theory: 1) privilege as a rhetorical construct and 2) the untapped inventional potential of the postmodern understanding of intersubjectivity. To illustrate the embodied and performative aspects of hierarchical thinking, this work draws upon the writings of Lillian Smith, a white southerner (1897-1966) whose descriptive analyses of the Jim Crow South allude to large systems of privilege of which Jim Crow is merely representational. Illustrating the invidious nexus of privilege, Smith's writings describe the ways in which individuals embody and perform practices of exclusion and hate to perpetuate larger systems of privilege. Smith shows how privilege operates much as gender and power--fluidly and variously and dependent upon context. Viewing privilege as a rhetorical construct, operating dynamically, always in flux and at play, provides rhetoricians with a theoretically important move that un-yokes privilege from specific identities (e.g., white privilege). When viewed through this more dynamic and precise lens, we can readily perceive how privilege functions as a colonizing, ubiquitously learned, and variegated rhetorical practice of subordination and domination that, as a frame of analysis, offers a more fluid and accurate perspective than identity categories provide for discussions of oppression, social justice, and democratic engagement.
ContributorsHoliday, Judy (Author) / Goggin, Maureen D (Thesis advisor) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Miller, Keith (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This dissertation theorizes nineteenth-century public performance of spiritual media as being inherent to the production of autobiography itself. Too often, dominant social discourses are cast as being singular cultural phenomena, but analyzing the rhetorical strategies of women attempting to access public spheres reveals fractures in what would otherwise appear to be a monolithic patriarchal discourse. These women's resistant performances reap the benefits of a fractured discourse to reveal a multiplicity of alternative discourses that can be accessed and leveraged to gain social power. By examining the phenomena of four nineteenth- century Spiritualists' mediumship from a rhetorical perspective, this study considers how female spirit mediums used their autobiographies to operate as discursive spaces mediating between private and public spheres; how female mediums constructed themselves in the public sphere as women and as spiritual authorities; how they negotiated entry into volatile and unpredictable publics; how they conceived of the vulnerability of the female body in the public sphere; and how they coped with complications inherent to Victorian era constructions of feminine corporeality. In conclusion, this dissertation offers a highly situated performative theory of subaltern publicity.
ContributorsLowry, Elizabeth (Author) / Daly Goggin, Maureen (Thesis advisor) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Miller, Keith (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Following mixed method ethnographic research conducted between January 2020 and January 2022, this thesis discusses how United States all-female mariachi musicians, or mariacheras, express femininity in the mariachi femenil. Mariachis femeniles are all-female mariachis. Building upon Mary Lee Mulholland’s (2013) discussion of how mariacheras in Jalisco are often valued more for their physical appearance than for their musical skills, this thesis investigates how similar phenomena manifest in the United States’ professional mariachi femenil circuit. Applying a Chicana Feminisms lens to a collection of 28 mariachera plática-interviews, generational and transborder mariachi knowledge production, visual expressions of mariachi femininity, and aural feminine expressions in the mariachi setting are complicated. Each participant details what it means to be a mariachera, breaking down concepts of purity in the face of dichotomous cultural gender expectation and the genre’s visual expectations of how female musicians should present themselves in society. These sociocultural phenomena led these women in many ways to disidentify and resignify various pieces of the mariachi tradition to “carve out” their own space in the practice, expressing the concern they want to be respected as a musician, not as just a visual object. Ultimately, the “carved out” space allows mariacheras to perform a “different” sound of mariachi—a negotiation of strength, femininity, and balancing sociocultural expectations of the mariachera in and out of performance.
ContributorsFlores, Cameo Rachelle (Author) / Fossum, Dave (Thesis advisor) / Estrada, Emir (Committee member) / Feisst, Sabine (Committee member) / Wells, Christi Jay (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
This study investigates the perceptions and experiences of U.S. urban poverty among Mexican immigrant women living in La Villita, a neighborhood in Chicago. La Villita is the largest Mexican and Mexican American neighborhood in the Midwest with a population of 77% Mexican and Mexican Americans, with women making up 43% of the population, and 34% of the population living below the poverty line. Although women are less than 50% of La Villita’s population, immigrant women are more likely to experience poverty and earn lower wages than immigrant men. Using qualitative methods and a demographic survey, this study explores the ways in which immigrant women perceive and experience living in a low-income neighborhood. This study addresses the following three questions: 1) How do citizenship status, migration experience, and gender inform the ways Mexican immigrant women experience and manage poverty in Chicago? 2) How do their pre-migration experiences in Mexico influence the women’s perceptions of U.S. poverty? And 3) How do Mexican immigrant women develop and/or find resources from in their low-income neighborhood in Chicago? This study applies a transnational feminist framework to thirty-five semi-structured interviews and demographic surveys. The findings demonstrate that women’s perceptions about poverty are constructed before migrating to the U.S. Once in the U.S., these perceptions begin to change because of their continued referencing to what used to be their living situations in Mexico. However, even though some of the women might not identify as poor after years living in the U.S., their perceptions of escaping poverty in the U.S. are based on attaining basic necessities such as shelter, food, and clothing. Based on the findings of this study, the women’s experiences of poverty informs us that the lack of social opportunities in the women’s lives hinders their full participation in society, an exclusion that perpetuates poverty. Thus, this study shifts the focus from material deprivation to social exclusion as an additional factor that sustains poverty. The last finding demonstrates how women manage living in poverty and how La Villita itself is a resource that offsets some of the material and social challenges they face in the U.S.
ContributorsGutierrez, Julia (Author) / Leong, Karen J (Thesis advisor) / Romero, Mary (Committee member) / Fonow, Mary M (Committee member) / Durfee, Alesha (Committee member) / Estrada, Emir (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Women of Latin American descent comprise at least 20% of the nearly seventeen million members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (also known as the Mormon or LDS Church). This dissertation study examines the lives of 69 Latina immigrant Mormon mothers living in the U.S. Southwest. With qualitative interviews, participant observation, and Photovoice (community-driven, participant-based photo collection), I investigated how race, ethnicity, gender, geography, legal status, and religion shape women's migration, marriage, and mothering decisions. Chapter One shows how Latina immigrants experienced ethno-racial belonging, exclusion, and social positionality. An "ethnoreligious hybridity" concept explains how Latinas adopted Mormonism alongside their racial and ethnic identities. Chapter Two examines participants' perceptions within Spanish-speaking LDS congregations. Latina Mormons perceived these worship spaces as beneficial for social networking, cultural preservation, and family support. There were tensions among LDS Latinx due to class differences, colorism, migration statuses, and historical political climates. I coined “congregational heterophily” to describe this congregational heterogeneity and diversity. Chapter Three examines women's dating and marriage practices by race, class, and immigration status. The Mormon Latinas in my study preferred marriage to other Latinos or co-ethnics. Ethnocentrism, racism, and gendered expectations can strain pan ethnic Latinx LDS partnerships. Another third had married white Mormon men. The relationship between Latinas and their white in-laws was often fraught with racial aggression and cultural clashes. Across Chapter Four, I examine how immigration status, culture, and race affect women's mothering. Latina Mormons is expected to be devout church members who excel at motherhood. Women felt pressure to provide social, spiritual, and financial support even after their children were adults. As a result of intersectional disadvantages caused by race, legal status, and gender, Latina Mormon immigrants experience increased maternal stress. Leaders, church members, and other mothers stigmatize Latinas when they do not meet church and motherhood expectations. I used "matriarchal policing” to describe these religious pressures and frequent social monitoring. Collectively, the results of this ethnographic study challenge stereotypes about Mormonism and add to academic knowledge about gendered migration, marriage, and motherhood while providing institutional and community solutions.
ContributorsRomanello, Brittany (Author) / Estrada, Emir (Thesis advisor) / Tsuda, Takeyuki Gaku (Thesis advisor) / SturtzSreetharan, Cindi (Committee member) / Flores-González, Nilda (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
“The Moral Sense of Touch: Teaching Tactile Values in Late Medieval England” investigates the intersections of popular science and religious education in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the project draws together a range of textual artifacts, from scientific manuals to private prayerbooks, to reconstruct the vast network of touch supporting the late medieval moral syllabus. I argue that new scientific understandings of the five senses, and specifically the sense of touch, had a great impact on the processes, procedures, and parlances of vernacular religious instruction in late medieval England. The study is organized around a set of object lessons that realize the materiality of devotional reading practices. Over the course of investigation, I explore how the tactile values reinforcing medieval conceptions of pleasure and pain were cultivated to educate and, in effect, socialize popular reading audiences. Writing techniques and technologies—literary forms, manuscript designs, illustration programs—shaped the reception and user-experience of devotional texts. Focusing on the cultural life of the sense of touch, “The Moral Sense of Touch” provides a new context for a sense based study of historical literatures, one that recovers the centrality of touch in cognitive, aesthetic, and moral discourses.
ContributorsRussell, Arthur J. (Author) / Newhauser, Richard G (Thesis advisor) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Malo, Robyn (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
This study examines the ways in which translators writing in two contemporary medieval languages, Old Norse-Icelandic and Middle English, approached the complicated doctrine of the bodily Assumption of Mary. At its core this project is dedicated to understanding the spread and development of an idea in two contemporary vernacular cultures and focuses on the transmission of that idea from the debates of Latin clerical culture into Middle English and Old Norse-Icelandic literature written for an increasingly varied audience made up of monastics, secular clergy, and the laity. The project argues that Middle English and Old-Norse Icelandic writing about the bodily Assumption of Mary challenges misconceptions that vernacular translations and compositions concerned with Marian doctrine represent the popular concerns of the laity as opposed to the academic language, or high Mariology, of the clergy.
ContributorsNajork, Daniel (Author) / Bjork, Robert (Thesis advisor) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Maring, Heather (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
It has become something of a scholarly truism that during the medieval period, gluttony was combatted simply by teaching and practicing abstinence. However, this dissertation presents a more nuanced view on the matter. Its aim is to examine the manner in which the moral discourse of dietary moderation in late medieval England captured subtle nuances of bodily behavior and was used to explore the complex relationship between the individual and society. The works examined foreground the difficulty of differentiating bodily needs from gluttonous desire. They show that moderation cannot be practiced by simply refraining from food and drink. By refiguring the idea of moderation, these works explore how the individual’s ability to exercise moral discretion and make better dietary choices can be improved. The introductory chapter provides an overview of how the idea of dietary moderation in late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English didactic literature was influenced by the monastic and ascetic tradition and how late medieval authors revisited the issue of moderation and encouraged readers to reevaluate their eating and drinking habits and pursue lifestyle changes. The second chapter focuses on Langland’s discussion in Piers Plowman of the importance of dietary moderation as a supplementary virtue of charity in terms of creating a sustainable community. The third chapter examines Chaucer’s critique of the rhetoric of moderation in the speech of the Pardoner and the Friar John in the Summoner’s Tale, who attempted to assert their clerical superiority and cover up their gluttony by preaching moderation. The fourth chapter discusses how late Middle English conduct literature, such as Lydgate’s Dietary, revaluates moderation as a social skill. The fifth chapter explores the issue of women’s capacity to control their appetite and achieve moderation in conduct books written for women. Collectively, the study illuminates how the idea of moderation adopted and challenged traditional models of self-discipline regarding eating and drinking in order to improve the laity’s discretion and capacity to assess its own appetite and develop a healthy lifestyle for the community.
ContributorsLee, Sun Young (Author) / Newhauser, Richard (Thesis advisor) / Bjork, Robert (Committee member) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
ABSTRACT
Much attention has been given to food justice in both academic and activist communities as of late. This project adds to the growing discourse around food justice by using creative works produced by members of the black community as case studies to analyze the relationship between food justice and the criminal justice system in their neighborhoods. In particular, this project examines two unique sources of creative expression from the black community. The first is the novel Been ‘Bout Dat, the story of a young boy Fattz, who is born into the projects of New Orleans and takes to street life in order to provide for his siblings and struggling single mother. Written in prison by Johnny Davis it offers a valuable perspective that is combined with historical context and statistical support to construct an understanding of how concepts of food and criminal justice influence each other. The second source is the lyrical content of several hip-hop songs from rappers such as Tupac Shakur, Mos Def, Nas, and Young Jeezy. Comparing the content of these works and the lived realities expressed in both brings new and useful insights about food justice and criminal justice as experienced in poor minority communities. Recognizing this relationship may illuminate solutions to food justice issues through criminal justice reform as well as inform fresh efforts at community renewal.
Much attention has been given to food justice in both academic and activist communities as of late. This project adds to the growing discourse around food justice by using creative works produced by members of the black community as case studies to analyze the relationship between food justice and the criminal justice system in their neighborhoods. In particular, this project examines two unique sources of creative expression from the black community. The first is the novel Been ‘Bout Dat, the story of a young boy Fattz, who is born into the projects of New Orleans and takes to street life in order to provide for his siblings and struggling single mother. Written in prison by Johnny Davis it offers a valuable perspective that is combined with historical context and statistical support to construct an understanding of how concepts of food and criminal justice influence each other. The second source is the lyrical content of several hip-hop songs from rappers such as Tupac Shakur, Mos Def, Nas, and Young Jeezy. Comparing the content of these works and the lived realities expressed in both brings new and useful insights about food justice and criminal justice as experienced in poor minority communities. Recognizing this relationship may illuminate solutions to food justice issues through criminal justice reform as well as inform fresh efforts at community renewal.
ContributorsDennis, Matthew (Author) / Delmont, Matthew (Thesis advisor) / Adamson, Joni (Committee member) / Killsback, Leo (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017