Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders

If black men and women, and some white women were--to some extent--successful in forming a coalition to fight some sociopolitical battles much as anti-slavery, civil rights, women's movement, etc., it appears that romantic interracial relationships--particularly between black men and white women--are on the verge of undermining this necessary coalition to "cross the bridge to the twenty-first century." Judging from three perspectives: (1) historical sexual-relations between blacks and whites; (2) the black female audience's attitude toward black man and white woman romance; and (3) media (movies and literature) portrayals of black women's reactions to black men who date or marry white women, this thesis argues that some black women appear to incorporate stereotypical themes in their "objectionable" discourse to black man/white woman romantic relationships. It further argues that these stereotypes appear to support the causes of racism and patriarchy through the pitting; of black women against black men and white women, and undermine black men and women relations, as well as racial unity between black and white women.

This thesis examines the rhetorical effects created by political cartoonists through their depictions of Ronald Reagan. A representative sampling of these cartoons demonstrates that the pictorial and symbolic language in their visual dialogue was extrapolated from the heroic, mythic character types Reagan portrayed during his film career and with which he sought to be identified. This thesis argues that because cartoons depicted and caricaturized Reagan as an archetypal hero, they touched a responsive chord in the electorate and persuaded them to regard Reagan favorably.

This study focuses on four major speeches of the final five months of the Gorbachev era. Three are concerned with the putsch of August 1991, and one is concerned with the December 1991 resignation. First the three major speeches given by Gorbachev immediately following the putsch are analyzed using the components of crisis rhetoric. Next the resignation speech is examined using the concepts found in apologia rhetoric. Finally, based on these four speeches, interrelationships between the two rhetorical forms are attempted using clues found within the actual rhetoric.

The issue of oppression becomes all the more complicated when it is realized that the language used by the dominant culture and, to a certain extent, those who are subordinate to that culture, is not only race- and class-biased but phallogocentric as well. It is primarily through language that social customs, beliefs and practices are normalized and viewed as "common sense" by the people engaging in them. Since it plays an integral role in constructing the "reality" for any given group of individuals, language is anything but a benign method of communication among human beings. Certain groups, however, often manage to break with the dominant discourses and rewrite the language. From within the hip-hop subculture, black female rap artists emerge as a challenge to misogyny and racial bigotry by resisting the hegemonic modes which construct and control the human subject.

Fashion and dress have a complex relationship to identity. The clothes we choose to wear can express our identities in terms of gender, race, class, and/or sexuality, among other things. This study examines how gender, race, and class are used to interpellate primarily female shoppers through store window advertising in the city of London, England. Using a feminist cultural and media studies approach, I analyze eight store window display advertisements as texts, and how their portrayals of women are presented to consumers. This study concludes that stereotypical, degrading, humiliating and violating representations of women and femininity abound in store window displays. Women are most likely to be portrayed as sex objects and signs of beauty. By representing store mannequins in sexual and fetishized poses, advertisers commodify female sexuality by associating it closely with beautiful, young bodies and the trappings of a glitzy lifestyle.

This thesis examines how post-communist Romanian women's magazines engender a particular representation of women in transition. This is both a challenge to the previous communist ideology which promoted an asexual type of femininity, and the product of a hegemonically masculine culture revived by the reality of the newly born capitalist Romanian society. By means of a feminist semiotic analysis, the study concentrates on visual and textual discourses of femininity in two popular Romanian women's magazines. It concludes that Romanian women's publications during transition advance a concept of femininity constructed through a passivity/power complementariness. On the one hand, constructed images of femininity, according to Western norms, replicate a patriarchal system of values; on the other hand, agency becomes available to women by their own control over their embodied subjectivity, prompted by anxieties accumulated and repressed during the years of communism.

Recent research has provided evidence that speech-related visual feedback presented to people who stutter may enhance fluency as effectively as well-established forms of altered auditory feedback. This study aimed to explore the effectiveness of visual feedback during speaking conditions that approximated naturalistic conversation. In order to determine what aspects of visual feedback may contribute to fluency enhancement, the feedback was manipulated in terms of synchronicity and linguistic congruence to the original signal. Participants included ten adults diagnosed with developmental stuttering with no concurring conditions. The study consisted of the following four conditions: synchronous visual feedback, asynchronous visual feedback, non-speech related visual feedback, and a control condition. Speech samples were analyzed for the percent of syllables stuttered per condition. Upon analysis of data, no statistically significant effect of visual feedback was found on stuttering frequency, although individual results varied greatly.