Mallary Allen

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ACCOUNTING FOR THE TROUBLED STARLET: MEDICALIZATION AND FEMININITY IN THE AGE OF NEWS PUNDITRY By

This article examines contributions of television news media to the dominant cultural dialogue re... more This article examines contributions of television news media to the dominant cultural dialogue regarding young women’s deviance as demonstrated by pundit commentary concerning the criminal behavior of young female celebrities. Using a case study of actress Lindsay Lohan, I examine the accounts that pundits offer for the deviance of these young women and whether medical and psychological explanations enter discourse in a significant way. Additionally, I examine the extent to which feminine mental health issues contribute to the creation of a cultural stock character evocative of tragic, female literary archetypes. I find that mental and psychological health dialogue is

format_quoteMental illnesses like depression have become culturally prominent means to explain deviance, reflecting societal shifts in understanding behavior.format_quote

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Pro‐Choice Movement in the United States

The struggle for abortion rights in the United States is a complex history spanning more than one... more The struggle for abortion rights in the United States is a complex history spanning more than one hundred years. That history encompasses early feminist anxieties in regard to what birth control would mean for the status of women in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, efforts to expand abortion access in the 1960s through policy reform, feminist struggles for abortion on demand in the 1970s, morally centered prochoice rhetoric in the 1990s, and a mainstream cultural presence amid new communication technologies as well as growing attention to the reproductive experiences of marginalized women in the 2000s. Keywords: Abortion; Movements; Feminisms

Narrative Diversity and Sympathetic Abortion: What Online Storytelling Reveals About the Prescribed Norms of the Mainstream Movements

Symbolic Interaction, 2015

Social movement scholarship demonstrates the importance of formula stories in raising awareness f... more Social movement scholarship demonstrates the importance of formula stories in raising awareness for social causes. The stories put forth by the opposing sides of the abortion rights issue in the United States utilize sympathetic narratives in furthering their arguments for and against abortion rights respectively, but differences in each side's narrative strategies are instructive in understanding current reproductive debate discourse. This article is a qualitative examination of abortion narratives published on two websites, one pro-life and one pro-choice. Chief among my findings are that narratives for each cause support opposed views of women's appropriate contemporary social roles and that authors' reported approaches to pregnancy and abortion are instrumental in constructing these broader understandings. Narratives posted by pro-choice authors are confined by circumstantial norms surrounding unintended pregnancy (such as young age, student status, and first-time pr...

The Social Construction of Deviance, Activism, and Identity in Women's Accounts of Abortion

The mainstream abortion rights debate in the United States, its opposing factions popularly ident... more The mainstream abortion rights debate in the United States, its opposing factions popularly identified as pro-choice and pro-life, is reliant upon identifiable narratives of abortion's value to women and society and, alternately, its harms. This dissertation traces more than one hundred years of evolution of popular rhetoric surrounding the practice of elective termination of pregnancy in the U.S. and identifies the understandings of abortion and the women who have them which are most prominent in our culture today. This dissertation DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated with gratitude to my dear friend, Jenn Schweitzer, and to all of the women who shared their stories with me. It is with a hopeful spirit that I also dedicate this work to my children, Victor and Mica, and to the next generation of feminists and critical thinkers. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you to my inspiring committee members: my chair Jennifer Dunn whose work and ideas have shaped my research, Rachel Whaley whose mentorship and encouragement kept me going, Kristen Barber whose methodological and writing tips vastly improved this dissertation, Janet Fuller whose insights helped me to ask the right questions, and Christopher Wienke whose vision helped to light my path. Likewise, thank you to Jenn Schweitzer and Kate Niman, my colleagues and friends, for many insightful conversations. I am grateful to have learned from all of you. Thank you also to my children, Victor and Mica, without whom I may not have finished this degree. Thank you for your love, your patience, your inspiration, all of your wonderful distractions, and everything you have taught me. And thank you especially to my husband, William Stodden, who encouraged me to pursue this degree and knew that I could do it all along. Finally, thank you to all of the women who participated in this research and granted me interviews. I am deeply grateful that you shared your stories.

format_quoteInterviews with 29 women reveal a disconnect between idealized abortion narratives and lived experiences, reflecting shared emotional complexities.format_quote

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Accounting for the Troubled Starlet: Medicalization and Femininity in the Age of News Punditry

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