The “Dread Sex Cases:” Community, Citizenship, and the Regulation of Adult Theaters in the 1970s

Through an innovative examination of scale (local, state, and national regulatory structures), space (the location of theaters, the spatial arrangements inside them) and place (the cities and suburbs in which these battles took place), my dissertation on the regulation of adult theaters in the 1970s raises compelling questions about sexuality, space and the various levels at which citizenship is enacted and policed. I utilize three Supreme Court cases, Paris Adult Theater v. Slaton, which dealt with consent and the application of community standards, Erznoznik v. Jacksonville, which addressed bans on nudity and pornography at drive-in theaters, and Young v. American Mini-Theatres, which validated exclusionary zoning laws as a constitutionally appropriate regulation of adult theaters, as the foundation of my project. While these three cases were litigated at the national level, they emerged from local contexts where the physical presence of adult theaters served as visible reminders of the ways that sexual commerce was remapping the American landscape. Adult theaters in particular offer a way to interrogate the ways visual and physical space complicate notions of public and private. I explore the local contexts of these laws, emerging from Atlanta, Georgia, Jacksonville, Florida and Detroit, Michigan, placing these cases in the wider history of how these cities and suburbs negotiated both the use of space and racial, sexual and ideological differences in their populace. I consider descriptions of the communities that patronized the theaters against the perceptions of reformers, while also interrogating the possibilities and limitations of the legal system and the imbrications of municipal, state, and national regulatory structures

Beasts of the Southern screen: race, gender, and the global South in American cinema since 1963

“Beasts of the Southern screen: race, gender, and the global South in American cinema since 1963,” explores the role that the Southern imaginary has played at the crux of national, media, and personal mythmaking. This dissertation argues that the Southern imaginary—here defined as filmic images of Southernness—has helped Americans manage a series of crises from the late Cold War period to the current moment. Repudiating an allegedly recalcitrant South allowed the United States to see itself as a democratic, progressive place (via downward comparison) even as events like the Civil Rights movement, feminism, and the Vietnam War imperiled the coherence of national identity. Imagined sojourns through the South have also helped filmmakers glimpse the alternative, unauthorized fantasies and fears that swirl just underneath “official narratives” of national and personal identity. Films set in the Southern imaginary are thus crucially important to processing the traumas that connect nation and subject. As a fantasy space, the Southern imaginary allows subjects to confront overwhelming events that can only be endured when “staring over the fence” into a region at once a part of and distinct from the nation. The first two chapters argue that filmmakers use images of an antiquated South to process Vietnam War-era traumas. Slavery epics like The Beguiled and Southern horror films including Deliverance allegorize white anxieties over the political influence of minority populations. Later chapters contend that Southern-set films continue to appropriate stories of marginalized peoples, but now under the mantle of tolerance. The third chapter argues that Hollywood films starring Southern, queer cowboys demonstrate the ascendancy of American progressivism even in the once-repressive South. However, these films often exclude minority subjects from their purportedly tolerant landscapes. The final chapter of this dissertation therefore turns to films made within Southern communities like Moonlight, analyzing how the filmmakers use silence and visual obscurity to resist the objectifying gaze of the camera. In the films analyzed, the Southern imaginary emerges as fertile site for trenchant social critique and fantasies that connect the personal to the political

Broadcasting Birth Control: Family Planning and Mass Media, 1914-1984

The history of the birth control movement in the United States is traditionally told through accounts of the leaders and organizations that campaigned to legalize the distribution of contraception. Only recently have historians begun to examine the "cultural work" of printed media including newspapers, magazines, and even novels in fostering support for the cause. This dissertation builds on this scholarship, to examine the films and radio and television broadcasts developed by birth control advocates, and the communications experts they increasingly turned to for guidance, over the course of the twentieth century. As advocates tried to mimic the efforts of commercial advertisers to "sell" health-related behaviors to a wide audience, they crafted the new academic specialty of health communication. I argue that mass media was central to the campaign to transform the private subject of fertility control into one fit for public discussion in the United States. Moreover, the international family planning movement played an instrumental role in establishing and expanding health communication in the promotion of contraception around the globe. As they negotiated for access to cinema and radio platforms from which to promote their cause, birth control advocates toned down their feminist rhetoric of sexual liberation. After the legalization of contraception, censorship and broadcasting conventions affecting educational messages further diluted the kinds of representations they could promote over the radio and on the nation's television sets. As commercial media became increasingly explicit in the 1960s and `70s, family planning promoters conversely expunged sex from their broadcasts for domestic and foreign audiences. In this way, media helped to shape the messages of the movement. Seeking greater creative freedom, some of the family planning community began to cultivate informal partnerships with entertainment media producers, perfecting a strategy abroad that would be brought home to the U.S. The Mexican "education-entertainment" approach has since become the most influential model of family planning communication, replicated around the world in efforts to reintroduce the context of sex and relationships to the promotion of contraceptive use. This history is thus a transnational narrative of the dissemination of messages and the technologies and techniques that delivered them

Dirt Circus: Queering sports and home through filth

This monograph accompanies the MFA Thesis Exhibition, “Dirt Circus”. I outline the history of circus and carnival culture and the ways in which queer identities are expressed through these artistic modes. I describe the nonconforming expressions of gender in these arenas through bearded ladies, aerialists, clowns, and the freak show. I then explore various groups from the 70’s to present day, including Bread and Puppet Theater, The Cockettes, and Split Britches, who utilize performance to further their ideologies of gender freedom, anti-capitalism, and sexual liberation. I compare our differing uses of cheap art and public engagement within the realm of performance and activism. I then discuss how these elements of queer activism and performance can be displayed in a domestic space through nostalgic home goods and carnivalesque game play. I end by investigating the social construction of the definition of ‘dirt’ and ‘freak’ and how these concepts relate to the queering and camping of intimate spaces

Watching the Girls Go By: Sexual Harassment in the American Street, 1850-1980

From women’s first prolonged entrance into American urban space in the antebellum period, male strangers have harassed women in public places with uninvited sexual remarks, stares, and touching. These intrusive behaviors have been a persistent and pervasive feature of women’s experience of the urban United States ever since. Drawing on a wide range of archival materials—including newspapers, legislation, ethnographic interviews, personal papers, and women’s published and unpublished writings—“Watching the Girls Go By: Sexual Harassment in the American Street, 1850-1980” details the emergence, persistence, and normalization of men’s harassment of women in public space, today commonly known as street harassment. It argues, firstly, that despite significant initial resistance to street harassment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mainstream American discourse deemed behaviors like ogling or catcalling as the “right” of white, middle-class, heterosexual men by the mid-twentieth century. Meanwhile, men of color, and especially Black men, faced harsh, often violent, consequences for the same behaviors seen as trivial in white men. Secondly, mainstream public discourses generally portrayed targets of street harassment as “respectable” white women, where respectability hinged either on a woman’s middle-class or elite social status or on her perceived virtuousness. The construction of the ideal victim of street harassment as a respectable white woman obscured the experiences of women of color and the often more extreme or violent harassment they endured in public space. Thirdly, this dissertation argues that men’s harassment of women in public places had a material impact on women’s ability to navigate public space freely. Men’s harassment contributed to women’s discomfort and fear of sexual violence in public space and thus curtailed women’s freedom of mobility in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. Throughout, this dissertation considers how idealized masculinities change and adapt in the face of opposition, absorbing attacks and reconstituting critiques into new versions of idealized masculinity. Thus, though women’s groups and law enforcement denounced street harassment from white men in the early 1900s, by the mid-twentieth century, behaviors like ogling and catcalling became part of the construction of an idealized white masculinity. “Watching the Girls Go By” suggests that a focus on trivialized violence can provide insight into the way white supremacist hetero-patriarchy has persisted over centuries.PHDHistory & Women's StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163191/1/mmbrook_1.pd

Gender, human rights and activisms: proceedings of the Fifth International Congress in Cultural Studies

ISBN 978-­989­-99682-­0­-2It is becoming increasingly necessary in contemporary societies to build bridges between activism and academia in both theory and practice regarding gender inequality. From femicide to transphobia, from equal marriage to the adoption of children by same-sex couples and assisted reproduction, the recognition of gender identity of transgender people, the right to pleasure and free expression of affection, gender issues multiply , intersect and, of course, overlap, but without losing their specificities