Privileged high school girls' responses to depictions of femininity in popular young adult literature

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston UniversityYoung adult literature has been a subject of contention for educators, adolescent psychologists, and critics for decades. Although some commentators maintain that young adult literature can be educationally and developmentally beneficial for adolescent readers, others argue that it often contains negative and potentially harmful messages that could influence its readers during a time when they are most vulnerable. Despite the claims on both sides, little substantive research exists on how older adolescent girls, the intended audience for these books, respond to the texts. This qualitative study examined three popular works of young adult literature to identify the overlapping messages they have regarding the depiction of adolescent females. Five adolescent girls, ages 14-17, read the books and met with the researcher in a series of one-on-one interviews to discuss their responses to the books, specifically the depiction of female characters. The participants also completed journal entries on the books and surveys on their reading habits and responses to the specific characters from the books in the study. The findings indicate these participants interpreted the books in distinctive ways based on their experiences and in keeping with prior research on adolescent development and reader response. The participants also took a critical approach to the books to find parallels to their own lives

Player attitudes to avatar development in digital games: an exploratory study of single-player role-playing games and other genres

Digital games incorporate systems that allow players to customise and develop their controllable in-game representative (avatar) over the course of a game. Avatar customisation systems represent a point at which the goals and values of players interface with the intentions of the game developer forming a dynamic and complex relationship between system and user. With the proliferation of customisable avatars through digital games and the ongoing monetisation of customisation options through digital content delivery platforms it is important to understand the relationship between player and avatar in order to provide a better user experience and to develop an understanding of the cultural impact of the avatar. Previous research on avatar customisation has focused on the users of virtual worlds and massively multiplayer games, leaving single-player avatar experiences. These past studies have also typically focused on one particular aspect of avatar customisation and those that have looked at all factors involved in avatar customisation have done so with a very small sample. This research has aimed to address this gap in the literature by focusing primarily on avatar customisation features in single-player games, aiming to investigate the relationship between player and customisation systems from the perspective of the players of digital games. To fulfill the research aims and objectives, the qualitative approach of interpretative phenomenological analysis was adopted. Thirty participants were recruited using snowball and purposive sampling (the criteria being that participants had played games featuring customisable avatars) and accounts of their experiences were gathered through semi-structured interviews. Through this research, strategies of avatar customisation were explored in order to demonstrate how people use such systems. The shortcomings in game mechanics and user interfaces were highlighted so that future games can improve the avatar customisation experience

Mother what art thou? : a study of the depiction of mother figures in recent Australian and New Zealand fiction for teenagers

This thesis is a study of the representations of mothers and mother figures as found in five contemporary (published between 1984 and 1999) novels for teenagers. The focus is on western constructions of motherhood, as both normalising and universalising discourses. Utilising a variety of critical approaches this thesis examines the socio-cultural issues present in the novels in conjunction with western models of maternity. This study argues the category of mother is interdependent upon the category of child. As children\u27s literature often focuses on the development of the child, the mother figures are often read as the “unconscious” of the texts. I examine the extent to which the mother figures are given a subject-in-processness (Lucas, 1998, p.39) subjectivity. The texts considered are The Changeover(First published in 1984) by Margaret Mahy; Greylands (1997) by lsobelle Carmody; Speaking to Miranda (First published in 1990) by Caroline Macdonald: Touching earth lightly (1996) by Margo Lanagan and Closed, Stanger(1999) by Kate De Goldi. In part, the selection of the texts has been based upon the various and multifaceted relationships between the mothers and the children. I use the Mahy text as a means to establish selected mother and, to a lesser degree, child characteristics. Some comparisons are made with this sole text of the 19805, in order to ascertain if there has been an evolution in the articulation of mother, figures in the 1990s. This study does not adopt a survey approach nor does it claim that the five novels present all the categories of mother . Rather it addresses categories such as, mother as nurturer, as sexual being and, importantly, the dichotomy of the “good/bad mother. Within western discourses of maternity, this latter category is still used as a model by which to label women who mother. This study considers the stability of this binary within the novels. This thesis relies upon close reading of the primary texts. The emphasis is on critical approaches that draw attention to contexts, with particular emphasis on the socio-cultural issues present in each particular novel. My readings suggest that there is the possibility for engagement with the texts\u27 social content/comment, in conjunction with the representations of western models of maternity. I draw from a variety of motherhood discourses and theoretical approaches, including amongst others, the work of Luce Irigaray, HeIene Cixous, Judith Hennan, Martha Fineman, Rose Lucas, and Robyn McCallum

Fat Girls: Sexuality, Transgression, and Fatness in Popular Culture

This dissertation focuses on representations, histories, and personal accounts of fat women’s bodies and sexualities. I address stereotypes and representations of fat women\u27s sexuality in popular culture, including film, advertising, television, and literature. Through this examination, I move beyond one-dimensional representations of fat women\u27s sexualities to a more complex, nuanced understanding of the realities of being fat, sexual, and a woman today. Fat women are often represented as either sexless, miserable, and lonely, or alternately, hypersexual and sexually deviant, with the inability to control their appetites for both food and sex. (see Bordo, Gilman, Farrell, Shaw, Wolf) By parsing through histories of fat representation, I intend to show that these stereotypes can be quite harmful to fat women; they also fail to represent the nuances and contradictions of fat women’s sexual experience and sexual self-image. The project is hybrid style: I include narratives from my own life, as I am a fat women also dealing with these issues. I examine experiences of girlhood in this cultural climate of anti-fatness, as well as images and representations of fat beauty. I close by thinking about efforts to normalize fat bodies in popular culture and their impact

The presentation of self in Massively Multiplayer Online games

This thesis examined the presentation of self in Massively Multiplayer Online games, to investigate how players create and maintain versions of self in these environments. Key research questions concerned the motivation for engaging in these behaviours, the impact of such activities on their offline lives and for those that did not engage in the active presentation of self, why they did not do this. There were three studies in the thesis, employing a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. The first study consisted of interviews (n=29), analysed using Grounded theory, and the second an online focus group (n=13 participants) explored using thematic analysis. These results were combined to create a theoretical model for the presentation of self in MMOs. Based on these concept statements a third study (n=408) was created, using an online questionnaire design. Results indicated that a five factor model was the most satisfactory means of explaining the presentation of self in MMOs – with Presentation of the Existing Self, Social Interaction, Gaming Aesthetics, Presenting Different Sides of the Self, and Emotional Impact as the salient factors

Text world theory and the emotional experience of literary discourse.

This thesis investigates the emotional experience of literary discourse from a cognitivepoetic perspective. In doing so, it combines detailed Text World Theory analysis with an examination of naturalistic reader response data in the form of book group discussions and internet postings. Three novels by contemporary author Kazuo Ishiguro form the analytical focus of this investigation: The Remains of the Dt!)' (1989), The Unconso/ed (1995) and Never Let Me Go (2005), chosen due to their thematic engagement with emotion and their ability to evoke emotion in readers. The central aims of this thesis are to develop cognitive-poetic understanding of the emotional experience of literature, and to advance cognitive-poetic and literary-critical understanding of the works of Ishiguro. As a result of the analytical investigations of the three novels, this thesis proposes several enhancements to the discourse-world level of the Text World Theory framework. In particular, this thesis argues for a more detailed and nuanced account of deictic projection and identification, proposes a means of including readers' hopes and preferences in text-world analyses, and reconceptualises processes of knowledge activation as inherently emotional. Detailed, cognitive-poetic analyses of Ishiguro's novels elucidate literary-critical observations regarding Ishiguro's shifting style, and present new insights into the cognitive and emotional aspects of the interaction between the texts and their readers. This thesis aims primarily to be a contribution to the fields of stylistics and cognitive poetics. It approaches this theoretically through the application and enhancement of cognitive poetic frameworks, analytically through the investigation of Ishiguro, and methodologically through the utilisation of reader response data in order to direct and support the investigations. However, incidental contributions are also made to cognitive and social emotion theories, and the discussion raises several suggestions for continued interdisciplinary research in the future

2016 - The Twenty-first Annual Symposium of Student Scholars

The full program book from the Twenty-first Annual Symposium of Student Scholars, held on April 21, 2016. Includes abstracts from the presentations and posters.https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/sssprograms/1015/thumbnail.jp

"Only the rames of a man": Investigating Masculinities in the Novels of Thomas Hardy.

The aim of this thesis is to illustrate the fluid and evolving nature of masculinities as experienced and articulated by Victorian men, and then to examine critically Hardy's representations of such across his novelistic oeuvre in order to identify how his representations differed from, challenged, or subverted those of his contemporaries. Representations of character are analysed in terms of gendering, and rather than basing my readings of Hardy's characters on hetero-normative constructions of nineteenth-century masculinity, I identify and argue for new discursive categories of Victorian masculinity while engaging with social, psycho-sexual and evolutionary/biological constructions of maleness throughout the century. The first chapter establishes a variety of necessary cultural, scientific and social contexts against which Hardy's projections of masculinity can be interpreted. The second chapter comprises a literature review of extant gender criticism addressed to the Hardy corpus, engaging with various approaches and interpretations while demonstrating the extent to which my own readings differ from the critics selected. Chapter three concentrates upon the figure of the Alpha-male as perceived within the social and evolutionary discourses of the nineteenth century, analysing the discursive categories of the lover, the soldier and the androgyne as they appear in both Hardy's fiction and that of his contemporaries. Chapter four identifies the discursive categories of the male as 'other', the 'unman', and the 'man-girl', and their narrative functions within the textual parameters they each occupy. The fifth chapter investigates representations of misogyny and the homosocial, chapter six explores male psychological instability, and the final chapter discusses the concepts of empathy and Stoicism as understood within Victorian society, and how they influence representations of the New Man in Hardy's novels. I conclude by identifying further possible avenues for investigation with regards to Hardy's oeuvre, including how his male characters are portrayed on film, or delineated within his poetry and short stories

From the Voice to the Violent Act: Language and Violence in Contemporary Drama

Aleks Sierz coined the phrase In-Yer-Face Theatre to categorize a new generation of plays written by a group of upstart playwrights in Britain and America. In addressing these plays, I draw upon recent contributions within the social sciences in order to understand better the interstices of language and violence in this drama. This interdisciplinary approach underscores the social considerations at the heart of these plays. Although frequently criticized for a perceived lack of social consciousness and a seemingly gratuitous use of profanity, prurient sexuality, and graphic violence, these writers in fact continue, and contribute to, a tradition of theater that is serious, ethically based, and socially aware. Specifically, the language represented in these plays is symptomatic of, and complicit in, the violence depicted on stage. I first argue that coercive institutional language subjects the characters in David Mamet\u27s 0leanna to systematic violence long before the infamous moment of violence that concludes the play. The reifying language of consumer capitalism in the plays of Patrick Marber and Mark Ravenhill precipitates violence by rewriting the cultural codes that inform subjectivity and the way that interpersonal relationships are conceived and experienced. Examining the work of David Harrower, Bryony Lavery, David Eldridge, and Tracy Letts, I identify examples of public language and show how they hamper intellectual development and maturity and disengage the cognitive mechanisms that allow individuals to regulate their behavior. I explore the allegiance on the part of those in subcultures of violence to the heavily gendered constructions of identity facilitated by their subcultural languages, and I address the linguistic mechanisms by which the characters in Rebecca Prichard\u27s Fair Game create the sense that violence is necessary. In addition, I interrogate the formal nature of hyper-masculine violence. Finally, in the plays of Martin McDonagh, Judy Upton, and Rebecca Prichard, I discuss the adoption of traditionally male forms of violence by women, focusing on language\u27s role in determining the likelihood and the nature of the violence committed both by and against women

Death, gender, and superheroes

The aim of this thesis is to explore the significance of death in comic books and examine how these representations are said to inform or reinforce cultural views of masculinity and femininity. Using an interdisciplinary, mixed method approach, this thesis utilised photo elicitation via synchronous digital focus groups and a compositional interpretation compiled by the researcher to engage with visual representations of death in order to reveal how these representations are understood by audiences. This thesis demonstrates that there are identifiable differences in the ways that men and women are represented in death. Differences tied to these representations that function to reinforce outdated heteronormative stereotypes regarding both masculinity and femininity. Additionally, this thesis argues that superheroic masculinity and, by extension, the superheroic death, are underpinned by hegemonic masculinity. Within this framework, the deaths of male superheroes are broadly understood as superheroic with participants positioning male superheroes as agentic subjects characterised by demonstrations of heroic action and strength. Furthermore, this thesis reveals that the deaths of female superheroes are characterised by objectification. This functions to deny female superheroes their superheroic status by situating them as violable, sexual objects and undermining their capacity for agency and autonomy, thus positioning the superheroic death as unobtainable