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Attack of the Fake Geek Girls: Challenging Gendered Harassment and Marginalization in Online Spaces applies feminist, gender, and rhetorical theories and methods, along with critical discourse analysis, to case studies of the popular online social media platforms of Jezebel, Pinterest, and Facebook. This project makes visible the structural inequities that

Attack of the Fake Geek Girls: Challenging Gendered Harassment and Marginalization in Online Spaces applies feminist, gender, and rhetorical theories and methods, along with critical discourse analysis, to case studies of the popular online social media platforms of Jezebel, Pinterest, and Facebook. This project makes visible the structural inequities that underpin the design and development of internet technologies, as well as commonplace assumptions about who is an online user, who is an active maker of internet technologies, and who is a passive consumer of internet technologies. Applying these critical lenses to these inequities and assumptions enables a re-seeing of commonplace understandings of the relationship between gender performativity and digital cultures and practices. Together, these lenses provide a useful set of tools for methodically resisting the mystique of technologies that are, simultaneously, represented as so highly technical as to be opaque to scrutiny, and as ubiquitous to everyday life as to be beneath critical examination.

Through a close reading of the discourses surrounding these popular social media platforms and a rhetorical analysis of their technological affordances, I documented the transference of gender-biased assumptions about women's roles, interests, and competencies, which have historically been found in face-to-face contexts, to these digital spaces. For example, cultural assumptions about the frivolity of women's interests, endeavors, issues, and labors make their way into digital discourse that situates the online practices of women as those of passive consumers who use the internet only to shop and socialize, rather than to go about the serious, masculine business of making original digital content.

This project expands on existing digital identity and performativity research, while applying a sorely needed feminist critique to online discourses and discursive practices that assume maleness and masculinity as the default positionality. These methods are one approach to addressing the pressing problems of online harassment, the gender gap in the technology sector, and the gender gap in digital literacies that have pedagogical, political, and structural implications for the classroom, workplace, economic markets, and civic sphere.
ContributorsTekobbe, Cindy (Author) / Miller, Keith D. (Thesis advisor) / Rose, Shirley K. (Committee member) / Boyd, Patricia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
The historiography of the Vietnam War's effect on American society and culture often focuses on the public image of its veterans. Historians and other scholars credit liberal and apolitical Vietnam veterans for reshaping Americans' opinions of those who served. These men deserve significant recognition for these changes; however,

The historiography of the Vietnam War's effect on American society and culture often focuses on the public image of its veterans. Historians and other scholars credit liberal and apolitical Vietnam veterans for reshaping Americans' opinions of those who served. These men deserve significant recognition for these changes; however, historians consistently overlook another aspect this topic. Conservative Republicans in the mid-1970s through the early 1990s made a concerted effort to alter how Americans viewed Vietnam veterans and their performance in the conflict. The few scholars who have examined this issue suggest conservatives wanted to quell Americans' distaste for military endeavors after the loss in Southeast Asia, a concept known as the Vietnam Syndrome.



This dissertation argues conservatives' efforts were more complex than simply wanting to break down the syndrome. The war and its loss threatened their understandings of the exceptional nature of the United States. This notion of exceptionalism stemmed from the immense success of the country territorially, economically, and in the international system, accomplishments realized with the assistance of the American military. The performance of the military establishment and its soldiers in the Vietnam War and the negative international and domestic opinions of the country in the wake of this loss threatened those elements of American success that conservatives viewed as imperative to maintaining the idea of exceptionalism and the power of the United States. As a result, a disparate group of conservative Republicans in the post-Vietnam era attempted to alter American understandings of the nation's martial tradition and the concept of martial masculinity, both ravaged by the war. This dissertation adds another layer to the historiography of the effects of the Vietnam War by arguing that conservatives not only shored up Americans' belief in the martial tradition and reshaped the definition of martial masculinity, but that they also significantly influenced Americans' newfound positive opinions of Vietnam veterans.
ContributorsStevens, Jean-Marie (Author) / Longley, Kyle (Thesis advisor) / Rush, James R. (Committee member) / Miller, Keith D. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
ABSTRACT This dissertation focuses on Anne Moody's use of the autobiographical genre as an extension of her political activism. Noting consistent values and conventions that govern the writing of political activists, this study asserts that Moody's narrative is best situated in the genre of political autobiography--a term coined by Angela

ABSTRACT This dissertation focuses on Anne Moody's use of the autobiographical genre as an extension of her political activism. Noting consistent values and conventions that govern the writing of political activists, this study asserts that Moody's narrative is best situated in the genre of political autobiography--a term coined by Angela Davis. Using Margo V. Perkins' text as a base to define autobiography as activism, this dissertation illustrates the consistent values that characterize Moody's narrative as political autobiography, resistance literature, and ultimately Black Power literature. Building on the works of Joanne Braxton, Patricia Hill Collins, Angela Davis, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, bell hooks, Margo V. Perkins, Assata Shakur, and Johnny Stover, this project demonstrates the use of Moody's autobiography as a collective form of resistance that is reflective of autobiography as activism. To frame its argument, this study theorizes how one comes into revolutionary consciousness, demonstrating the move toward activism as a process. Drawing on Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson's autobiographical theory that the "narrated I" is distinguished from the "narrating I," this study asserts, as Francoise Lionnet suggests, that the "narrating I" is the vehicle to deliver recollections relevant to the autobiographer's agenda. This study emphasizes that the early version of the self Moody creates is consciously linked to her role as a future activist, ultimately demonstrating her political evolution through the emphatic linking of the personal and political. Most importantly, this dissertation demonstrates that Moody's text represents a continuity--an autobiographical bridge--between representations of the Christian nonviolent civil rights movement and the Black Power movement of the late 1960's. This study argues that Moody's autobiography is ideologically poised at the intersection of civil rights and Black Power; therefore, it serves as both a civil rights autobiography and a Black Power autobiography. Coming of Age in Mississippi offers a unique contribution to the genre of Black Power autobiography for the way it facilitates unprecedented insight into the transition from non-violent civil rights ideology to revolutionary consciousness.
ContributorsFlanagan, Melissa A (Author) / Miller, Keith D. (Thesis advisor) / Stancliff, Michael (Committee member) / Anokye, Duku (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011