Gender, women, and sexuality

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://digital.lib.washington.edu/handle/1773/19654

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Alien Intimacies: Queer Kinships and the Asian Resident Alien
(2025-10-02) Saung, Jey; Reddy, Chandan
This project locates and names forms of alien intimacies in order to make visible the ways conceptions of complicity and resistance within discussions of queer kinships and queer reproductivity are conditioned by questions of race, nationality, and citizenship. By attending to such alien intimacies, this project investigates the limits of queer kinship imaginaries in two distinct forms. The first is characterized by social movements that claim queer alterity and non-complicity to state power, and posit reproductive queer kinship as a vehicle for liberation or radical social change. The second is an anti-normative queer theory approach that works to critique queer kinship's homonormative complicities with the state and consigns queer reproduction to the realm of homorepronormative assimilation to hegemonic family forms. I enter into these discussions of queer kinships and interrogate their limits by reading immigration laws and how they have been used to reproduce the nation and its national imaginaries of racial and sexual purity through family morality. In particular, I read immigration laws as functioning not just through their exclusion of undesirable subjects, but also their production of a contingent class of alien citizenship of those are administratively incorporated into the nation, but nevertheless live under the threat of exclusion due to their detainable and deportable identity/status. Immigration law thus differentially limits and resources the extent to which certain racialized subjects can socially and biologically reproduce family across both exclusionary and inclusionary barriers. The entrance of immigration law into sites of social and sexual reproduction breaks down the public-private divide and provides a different entry point into discussions of queer family making practices as alternative social politics.This project's approach differs from the important ways feminist social reproduction theory and queer theory have broken down the public/private in their respective investigations into both the necessity of under-/unpaid work of social reproduction as the precondition for reproducing the conditions of production, as well as the ways sex, as a purportedly private category of acts and identities, is nevertheless mediated by sexualized publics. Alien intimacies attends to the constitutive racialized conditions that organize feminist inquiries into social reproduction and queer theories of alternative social reproduction. Through its functions as a racializing technology, immigration constitutes the racialized conditions that undergird and organize views of social and sexual reproduction as sites available for radical transformation. By reading these sites of queer kinships through their constitutive racializations as resident alien sexual bottomhood, this project attends to the ways feminist, queer, and critical race studies continue to fail to theorize the ways in which these sites and forms of social change and transformation, which we so heavily invest in the name of liberatory politics, can only operate through investments in certain kinds of complicities with domination. Re-entering these conversations from the perspective of the resident alien bottom, makes it impossible to turn away from such investments in complicity. The resident alien bottom becomes thinkable only through its precarious racialized and sexualized alien citizenship, which can only be understood by acknowledging some level of its complex complicity with the same state that consigned it to its inhabited precarity. This dissertation takes up three major inquiries. The first is a question about how alternative intimacies, such as those imagined through queer kinship, come to reproduce dominant structures of intimacy. The second is a question about how critiques of alternative intimacies' reproduction of dominance often themselves operate through terms of binary complicity and resistance organized by constitutive racial conditions. Lastly is a question of the politics of queer and feminist knowledge production, highlighted by the ways this project's mixed methods approach organizes through Octavia Butler's science fictional short story "Bloodchild," as well as the detours, delays, and impossibilities that emerged from my own identifications with determining forms of racialization that simultaneously catalyzed, barred, and reproduced this project. Revealed in "Bloodchild's" methodological innovation and the autoethnographic form that weaves throughout my subsequent arguments, this project works through a formal intervention into the dissertation genre by exploring my own (dis)identifications with dominant racialized social orders that interrupt my scholarly inquiry into the questions above, as well as become reproduced through my own racialized feminist research anxieties and resident alien intimacies.
At the Seams of the World: Gender and Decoloniality in Hong Kong Contemporary Art
(2024-10-16) Chung, Christina Yuen Zi; Welland, Sasha Su-Ling
“At the Seams of the World: Gender and Decoloniality in Hong Kong Contemporary Art” examines the overlooked relationship between gender and decoloniality in Hong Kong that is visualised through transcultural and translingual examinations of contemporary art. Countering the marginal status of gender-related discourse in Hong Kong, this project unearths its political centrality by relating gender to Hong Kong’s colonial conditions. I articulate and theorise these colonial conditions through my concept of “compound coloniality,” which describes the confluence and compounded effects of British coloniality, Chinese coloniality, as well as Hong Kong’s own expressions of coloniality enacted by the city’s business elites, who have collaborated with both ruling powers. I analyse the work of artists from Hong Kong and its diaspora, including: Sin Wai Kin, Joyce Lung Yuet Ching, Elvis Yip Kin Bon, Beatrix Pang Sin Kwok, Tse Suk-ting, Sara, Jaffa Lam Laam, and Ivy Ma King Chu to surface the ways in which interlocking logics of gender, race, class, and sexuality have been utilised to constitute the city’s ideal subjects and structure its society for the perpetuation of rapacious capital accumulation. At the same time, this analysis also surfaces the ways in which these artists’ works have visualised decolonial ways of being that illuminate alternative horizons for Hong Kong—a city that has functioned as a critical node for the global spread of capitalism since the 1800s and has been conceptualised as a place where “East meets West.” The city’s artists, situated at this “seam” where “East meets West,” illuminate the realities and conditions of possibility that are elided within the seams of the world while envisioning the emergence of other worlds by tearing the fabric of coloniality apart at the seams.
Rethinking Recovery: Reconciliation and Searching for Our Mother
(2024-10-16) Green, Cierra; Habell-Pallan, Michelle
Rethinking Recovery: Reconciliation and Searching for Our Mother is a critical study of addiction that uplifts and centers Black folk. This dissertation utilizes Black feminist and Afrocentric theory, queer of color theory, performance studies, critical ethnography, and critical addiction studies to advance performance studies and to address the relationship between 21st Century Black social life and addiction as it intersects with dominant notions of recovery. I approach my study through an analysis of historical narratives of the term recovery in 20th century U.S. society that produced normative meanings of recovery, deployed by the Recovery Movement, Alcoholics Anonymous and Addiction Studies. I examine how these institutions frame the reduction of addiction to a problem of the individual, the continued pathologization of blackness as diseased, and the normalization of whiteness as the exemplar of a recovered person. These institutions ignore the impacts of state violence such as the continued hyper-criminalization of those with addictions and legacies of neglect by the Federal government in recovery projects such as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina–which left thousands of Black and brown folk dead and millions of others draggled, dislocated, and in complete destitute to this day. While this research primarily deals with narratives of recovery from addiction, addiction cannot be separated from larger themes of social neglect and historic marginalization, thus I recontextualize recovery beyond its relationship to compulsive substance use to broader themes of colonization, land displacement, and systemic racism. My dissertation raises important questions of what is meant by “recovery” when articulated from the margins and how does recovery get redressed from normative notions embedded in power and dominance? How does Black communities “recover” when tasked to reconcile with what may never be able to be regained? How does one return if one has been displaced and has no place to return to? How do we “recover” pleasure? What qualities of African-Diasporic culture are responsible for the retention of Black folk in Alcoholics Anonymous? Chapters argue that “Recovery” is a process of reconciling with loss, which includes the loss of social and spatial connection, time, and pleasure. Additionally, I invoke a critical performance ethnography, which combines critical praxis around ethnography with the performance in order to understand the ways embodied performance illuminate the culture of Black AA. I utilize a social justice orientation toward ethnography and performance as a method of disseminating culturally relevant literature options for Black folk reconciling with addiction: theater and performance.
Storytending is a Verb! Activating Participatory Feminist Media Praxis Through Womxn Who Rock: Making Scenes, Building Communities
(2024-09-09) Macklin, Angelica; Habell-Pállan, Michelle
This dissertation draws on my experience as a filmmaker, scholar, and co-organizer of the Womxn Who Rock: Making Scenes, Building Communities collective to outline a feminist filmmaking and oral history archiving praxis I call storytending. Womxn Who Rock: Making Scenes, Building Communities is a research collective that was launched in 2010 at the University of Washington by Michelle Habell-PallÃ¡n, professor in Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, and Sonnet Retman, associate professor in American Ethnic Studies. The project brings together scholars, musicians, media-makers, performers, artists, and activists to explore the role of women and popular music in cultural scenes and social justice movements in the Americas and beyond. It encompasses three interwoven components: Teaching: project-based coursework at the graduate and undergraduate levels; Convening: an annual participant-driven unConference and film festival; Archiving: an oral history digital archive housed with the University of Washington Digital Libraries Initiatives. My study approaches this project’s interconnected aspects of teaching, convening, and building an oral history archive through the lens of media production and the role it plays in threading these three components together. My research examines feminist participatory digital media practices that disrupt patriarchal story-capturing processes that are the standard for most film and media industries, the academy, community-based media production agencies, and independent practitioners. In so doing, it brings into focus a feminist analysis of gender, power, and labor, in film, media, and oral history archiving, to better understand how digital media production can be used as a tool of emancipation, collective creative practice, and feminist pedagogy inside and outside academia.
Creative Kin-Making Practices Among Queer Youth and Womxn of Color, 1950-2020
(2023-09-27) Morado, Michelle Kritz; Yee, Shirley J; Habell-Pallán, Michelle
My study examines the creative kin-making practices of three community sites to demonstrate the ways kinships and kin-making practices traverse space and time. I locate pachucas, young women of the zoot suit era as demonstrating creative kin-making through their cultivation of a distinctly Mexican American, urban, working class identity. In the development of the subculture of pachuquismo, pachuca identity represented rebellious expressions of femininity and sexuality. A parallel subculture of the mid twentieth century, the butch/femme lesbian communities, also demonstrate the development of political identities of sexuality. The butch/femme communities of the mid twentieth also emerged in the underground spaces of of urban settings, occupied primarily by working class women. I argue that as these women claimed their right to occupy public space, and as they negotiated with the meaning making of identity, both as racialized and gendered subjects through the development of these subcultures, they, created future possibilities of identity exploration, particularly for youth of color in the contemporary moment. Rock Camps operate as a final site of kin-making through creative practices. Music camps for gender marginalized youth facilitate the exploration of gender, sexual, and racial identity formation. The setting of camp nurtures relational identity formation in the kinship formations of bands and within the camp community. I analyze digital and printed archives, oral histories, ethnographic research, and autoethnography in this project to demonstrate not only the kinship formations that developed within these sites of community, but also how the kinship formations remain active in the feminist organizing of the contemporary moment.
Feminista Dance Disruptions in Fandango Temporalities
(2023-09-27) Viveros Avendaño, Iris Crystal; Ginorio, Angela B; Habell-Pallán, Michelle
This dissertation examines fandango practice in Seattle and its transnational collaborations in Mexico within a larger trajectory of participatory traditions as decolonial pedagogies that help to build spaces of dialogue, critical consciousness, and transborder solidarities. These trajectories, of Indigenous and Chicane activism, are reinforced by prior translocal organizing of Mexican immigrants in Seattle since the 1990’s with Grupo Cultural OaxaqueÃ±o. I analyze fandango practice, including its music, as a community space that supports critical consciousness and in turn becomes a support in shaping transnational fandango spaces. Through a decolonial feminist praxis my analysis of fandango explores how women dancers - bailadoras - contribute to the collective fandango soundscape by creating percussive sounds with their bodies, when their rhythmic stomping, or zapateado might be otherwise bypassed by a more standard analysis that would focus only on the fandango music that is played with instruments. As a practitioner, I also know that the music of fandango, and specifically of dancers, involves acute listening to others in the percussive field. Inspired by fandango’s sensorial pedagogies and the learning de a oido, I introduce the concept “radical relational listening” to explore listening on the tarima, platform drum center staged of fandangos, as a decolonial method oriented towards embodying relations––with the community and a larger human and non-human existence. This radical listening is animated by felt epistemologies or sentipensares; the acting of the heart using the head (Botero Gomez, 2019: 302). Bailadoras find pleasure in listening via feminist intimacy and through a willful enactment of collectivity through rhythms. In my study, I use the Indigenous concept of sentipensar to bridge radical relational listening with decolonial temporality. the tarima is a temporal and conceptual space where the ancestral memory of women gathers in the presence of community (human and non-human). As I argue, the cyclical footwork that bailadoras embody on the tarima, is the materialization of a decolonial temporality because, in addition to keeping time in music, the foot percussion that women embody on the tarima is not oriented towards capitalist individualism, but instead invites us to synchronize our bodies in horizontal relationships to one another and the land. In this way, the decolonial temporality that bailadoras sound out on the tarima through our zapateado disrupts colonial logics of consumption and individualized progress marked by the hegemony and monotonous single beat of a clock. Zapateado fandanguero is oriented towards building these relations in real-time and in the present by activating a collective memory that is ancestral and felt. Relational listening conceptualized on the tarima provides a point of entry to engage in dialogue, which is also the foundation of convivencia. I consider the bailadoras’ contributions to fandango not only in terms of the music, but also in fandango’s community building in their roles as the main organizers of the Seattle Fandango Project (SFP). By centering the analytical lens on the tarima, platform drum located at the center of the community music space, I highlight how by providing structure to the music through their cyclical foot percussion, bailadoras also influence the gender politics of the space and our collective consciousness. Lastly, the collective foot percussion of bailadoras provides me with the theoretical platform to explore fandango practice as a catalyst for expanding critical consciousness by building community across borders, which provides a foundation for strategically deploying technologies that counter state violence in Mexico and the US. Through a Women of Color and Indigenous feminist framework, my study of participatory traditions in Seattle’s Grupo Cultural OaxaqueÃ±o and the Seattle Fandango Project––seeks to bring visibility to the strategic organizing of Mexican immigrants and Chicanes fandango practitioners. Translocal fandango communities provide an opportunity to study embodied knowledge, affect, and joy as epistemological tools that facilitate transborder solidarity in response to state violence and capitalist oppression. By making visible fandango’s oppositional pedagogies, this dissertation reconsiders the depoliticization of AfroIndigenous participatory music traditions in the liberal university, and its conventional discourses that frame oppositional movements as exclusively conflictual and disruptive. I argue instead that building communities of social awareness around joy and dignity is a revolutionary act.
Militant Mothers of the Kurdish Resistance: Statelessness, Mothering and Subaltern Politics in Contemporary Turkey
(2023-09-27) Sorma, Mediha P; Reddy, Chandan; Weinbaum, Alys E
This dissertation looks at the ways in which Kurdish women in Turkey produce insurgent bodies,non-statist discourses of resistance, and anti-national forms of kinship through radical practices of mothering and reproduction. Focusing on the politicization/militarization of the domestic space, the reproductive body, children, and racialized grief by Kurdish women, my research takes issue with the scholarship on war and militancy which constructs militancy as an exclusively masculine form of insurgency and sees motherhood and reproduction as private, apolitical sites of affective relations. It also disrupts Global North feminist frameworks that see mothers as vessels of peace by revealing Kurdish mothers’ militant and at times destructive mothering practices.
Insurgent Kinship: Queer P’urhépecha Migrations and Kinship
(2023-08-14) Romero, Fabian; Reddy, Chandan
My doctoral dissertation examines how Indigiqueer P’urhépecha people in Michoacán and the diaspora face precarious presents and futures where their role within a nuclear family, belonging to society, and safety are conditional and based on their cooperation with racialized colonial heteropatriarchal norms. The concept of insurgent kinship weaves together this project, kin made through, as Adele E. Clarke explains in Making Kin not Population, “daily actions that transform partial relations into deeper ones” and “crafted through the exchange of sharing activities and other practices” with humans and more than humans that create “viable presents and futures” for queer P’urhépecha, with humans, more than human species and land. I write about the P’urhépecha migrant diaspora, a largely ignored academic topic. Also, until recently, scholarship on P’urhépecha people was done predominantly by external white and Chicano gazes. My work is among the current resurgence of creative and intellectual work about P’urhépecha people by P’urhépecha people. This research further examines the imposition of colonial heteropatriarchy by looking closely at the history of the P’urhépecha people and pueblos near the P’urhépecha Plateau. This work turns the gaze on the importation of colonial gender and sexuality by examining various ways that the Church, Family, and State have worked to create a dominant and violent heteropatriarchy. Whereas non-P’urhépecha scholars have relied on the P’urhépecha historical archive to theorize on the colonial roots of queer indigeneity, my scholarship intervenes by reclaiming and re-reading the P’urhépecha archive through an intentionally queer P’urhépecha lens. My research can discuss this archive in a way non-P’urhépecha scholars cannot, an essential contribution to queer studies. This project uses the methods of autoethnography, oral history, narrative research, genealogical archival research, and Indigenous Feminist analysis. It is multi-genre and combines conventional academic writing with personal narrative, stories, and poetry. I argue that kinship with biological family, land, ancestors, and more than humans is not a given for Indigiqueer P’urhépecha born in rural communities near the P’urhépecha original pueblos of Michoacán, and kinship must be made with them. Insurgent kinship for Indigiqueer P’urhépecha people is more possible with the matriarchs of the family in part because colonial heteropatriarchy makes matriarchs and gender-diverse and LGBTQ people more vulnerable to violence. Using Lionel Cantú and Chandan Reddy’s work on migration and gender and sexuality, I contend that when P’urhépecha people go through the United States immigration process, the colonial hetero-patriarchy from Mexico is layered with the United States, and Indigiqueer migrants face an emboldened vulnerability to violence based on their sexuality and gender. Insurgent kinship with cities in the diaspora is possible by understanding Indigenous migrants' entanglement with settler colonialism and our position as settlers. The emboldened vulnerability may result in further migration for Indigiqueer migrants who find the city their “homing” place, rather than in their communities, a place of belonging, rebuilding, and strengthening their relationship to P’urhépecha knowledge and land-based practices, especially when insurgent kinship is made with intertribally with other Indigiqueer people. Lastly, insurgent kinship with dogs is made by understanding the eight millennia of relationships that Indigenous people in the Americas had before contact and severed further by ongoing colonialism that normalizes domination over relationships and understanding.
Quieren Mi Labor MÃ¡s No Mi Intelecto They Want My Hands Not My Brains Mapping the Gendered and Racialized Journeys of Adult English Learner Immigrant Latin American Women in the US Higher Education System
(2022-09-23) Ramirez Arreola, Maria Elizabeth; Ginorio, Angela B
University of Washington Abstract Quieren Mi Labor MÃ¡s No Mi Intelecto They Want My Hands Not My Brains: Mapping the Gendered and Racialized Journeys of Adult, English Learner, Immigrant Latin American Women in the U.S. Higher Education System. Maria Elizabeth Ramirez Arreola Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Dr. Angela B. Ginorio Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies This qualitative study examines the gendered and racialized educational experiences of eight nontraditional, adult English learners (EL), Latin American, and immigrant women. The study focuses on those that after migrating as in adults age to the United States, have eventually continued their higher educational attainment, disrupting the conventional narratives about adult immigrants and their lack of aspirations in higher education attainment. Such experiences have been largely excluded from U.S academic literature, as they are a minority within a minority. Nontraditional, adult EL, Latin American, immigrant students entering the United States higher education system are navigating college access in a system new to them as their access path is very different from international students or Latinx peers who attended the K-12 education system. Factors such as age, the digital divide, and typically being monolingual for the first 20-30 years of their lives increase exponentially, often becoming the first barriers on their path to higher education. They are navigating a new education system while facing immigration challenges such as family and financial responsibilities in their country of origin and receptor country. The data collected from eight qualitative testimonio interviews sought to capture information about their access path to higher education and the path access that they followed, the gendered and racialized experiences and their impact on the participants' education, and lastly, to identify how the participants successfully navigated the United States higher education system at the undergraduate and graduate level as they were either recently graduated or currently enrolled in universities and community colleges. The study was intentional in utilizing testimonio as a method of research, a qualitative approach that gave participants a space to share their individual experiences and to collectively reclaim their invisibilized academic journeys as they resonated with one another. Conceptualized through a Latino Critical Race Theory and intersectionality lens framework provided an interdisciplinary perspective to examine how identity markers such as race, class, gender, national origin, phenotype, etc., and complex structures of oppression such as institutionalized racism and white privilege impacted the educational experiences of nontraditional, adult EL, Latin American immigrant, women. Migration studies theory illuminated allowed me to better understand the different contexts for migration from countries in Latin America, and finally, grounded in Chicana feminism allowed me to center the women’s experiences and draw from their experiences as a source of knowledge (Delgado Bernal, 1998). The study provides recommendations for universities administrative & faculty personal in practice & policy, advocating for different ways to positively create educational access for nontraditional, adult English learner students. To perform a thorough analysis of their journeys, the following questions guided the study: a) What were the educational paths that adult Latin American immigrant women followed to access and succeed in the U.S higher education system? b) How do their testimonios reveal the gendered and racialized journey to college attainment? And c) How can an intersectional discussion of their academic journey depict the privileges and barriers that came into place for immigrant Latin American women to defy spaces where they have only been seen as laborers? These questions were informed by my own journey as an adult immigrant woman from Mexico who grew up monolingual and acquired English as a second language to enroll and obtain a college education in the U.S. I am also informed by the minimal literature on the subject and the historical context of the practices of exclusion from higher education institutions and how those continue to affect the experiences of underrepresented students in the United States (Long 2016). My testimonio, joined by eight others of nontraditional adult English learners, Latin American immigrant women, are critically analyzed to shine a light on the intersectional journeys of accessing and surviving in the U.S. higher education system, a system. that, according to the data produced in this study, severely ignores this small but growing population of adult English learners seeking access to postsecondary education (National Center for Education Statistics, 2017).
Cruel Activism: Precarity, Labor, and Affect of Chinese Feminist and LGBT Rights NGOs
(2022-07-14) Wang, Stephanie Yingyi; Ramamurthy, Priti; Welland, Sasha
This dissertation explores a central tension and contradiction between the social reproduction of NGOs and the social reproduction of activist workers in the People’s Republic of China since the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. It investigates how feminist and LGBT rights NGOs are a specifically Chinese formation that is entangled with state regulation and the transnational non-profit funding complex. I theorize the triple mechanisms of moralization, illegalization, and professionalization in which the party-state absorbs the social reproduction function of NGOs while containing their political influence. At the same time, the transnational non-profit funding complex utilizes NGOs for political intervention in China. The party-state’s dynamic relations with the transnational non-profit funding complex foster a shifting enabling or disabling environment for these NGOs to socially reproduce themselves. These processes result in the devaluation and erasure of feminist and LGBT rights NGOs, as well as the labor value of activist workers. In particular, I theorize mental, emotional, communicative, and caring labor as the kinds of social reproductive labor activist workers perform. Though invisiblized and devalued as gendered and racialized labor, I suggest that they are of value because they require labor time socially necessary towards the execution and completion of NGO projects. However, the mechanisms of triple erasure transfer the cost of the social reproduction of NGOs unto the bodies of activist workers. I foreground the affective dimension of precarity which is manifested in the burnout, depression, and trauma of activist workers. The cruel activism lies in that the ways in which the feelings that fuel the activism can also serve to invisiblize and erase the workers’ affective labor, and legitimize power inequalities and disputes in activism. The contradictory affect of hope is precisely how activist workers are exploited at the intersection of state violence and the professionalizing NGO sector. I suggest that the affective struggles of activist workers are the embodied effects of the very contradictions of state-NGO relations in China.
Ecologies of Power: A Feminist History of State Building in the Gond Kingdom of Garha, 1500-1870s
(2022-04-19) Paul Gera, Nastasia; Ramamurthy, Priti
This thesis examines the histories of the Gond kingdom of Garha from the early modern to the early colonial period. In attending to the ecologies of this kingdom within a feminist analytical framework, it makes both historiographical and historical contributions to scholarship on South Asia’s histories. Chapter one demonstrates how the gendering and sexualization of elephants in early modern South Asia was crucial for state building in Garha, embedding the kingdom into the social, political, and economic fabric of the wider region. This chapter also reveals that Garha’s ecologies produced specific meanings for “queen,” who were socially and politically powerful actors in this kingdom. Chapter two examines shifts and continuities as the former kingdom of Garha came under British colonial rule in the nineteenth century. It demonstrates how British colonial actors mobilized gender and sexuality to discursively co-construct Gond people, forests, and the nonhuman animals who inhabited them as primitive, isolated, and unchanging, or “wild,” in the arenas of witchcraft, hard drinking, and hunting. This, then, enabled the production of an elite British colonial masculinity and a paternal British colonial state needed to “tame” the wild, justifying the appropriation of labor and resources from Garha. Nevertheless, this thesis also makes visible the on-going importance of Gond queens and other powerful Gond women, of internal differentiation among Gond communities, and of Gond people’s knowledges of forests and particular nonhuman beings in this region through the nineteenth century.
The Erotics of Pedagogical Spaces: Schools, Sexuality and the Desiring Body in India and Turkey
(2020-10-26) Misra, Akanksha; Ramamurthy, Priti
This dissertation examines how everyday schooling practices in India and Turkey create normative gendered and sexual citizens, erasing the complicated histories of caste, class, race, religion, gender, and national belonging that constitute the sexual body. It draws on theoretical insights from postcolonial and indigenous feminist, feminist phenomenological, sexuality studies, and critical race/caste scholars to conceptualize the historical, racial, desiring body as always becoming and transforming itself and the world. Based on three years of extensive participant observations in schools and interviews with teachers, school administrators, non-profit workers, government officials, and education scholars in Istanbul, Hyderabad and New Delhi, this dissertation places corporeality and erotics at the center of analyses of schooling practices. It makes three major scholarly interventions. First, I argue that the body needs to be understood as a historical racial corporeal schema that is co-constituted by histories and articulations of race and nation and understands itself as such. I demonstrate the limits of the objective, individual, scientific, biological model of the body, which is a historical product of the project of European colonialism, nationalism and modernizing ideologies and institutions, including schools. Understanding the body as objective and biological entails ignoring the consequent biological teleologies of childhood development and civilizational narratives of progress which maintain violent hierarchies of patriarchy, race and heteronormativity. By showing adult educators’ failure to engage with the sensorial ways that children understand self and belonging to each other, nation and the world and their desiring excesses, I reveal how schooling and even progressive lessons like comprehensive sexuality education continue to understand the body as biological and thereby maintain historical biases of race and belonging in the name of development and ‘proper’, moral, sexual citizenship. Secondly, and based on the body as a historical racial corporeal schema, I propose gender as a lived, phenomenological experience. Drawing on in-depth interviews with experienced school teachers, I demonstrate how gender as their lived bodily experience is always shifting subjectivities or “becoming” and is always experienced based on their own historical corporeal schemas and relations to others. While gender maintains articulations of caste and (new) middle class belonging, the corporeal excesses of these women’s lives also challenge hierarchies and linear spatiotemporalities of time and modern schooling. Finally, I draw on the theorization of the body as a historical racial corporeal schema, body becoming, and excess desire and flow of sensorial connections to imagine unruly, uncivilized possible lifeworlds. I urge transnational feminist scholarship to harness a form of critical feminist praxis that doesn’t assume the separation of nation, borders and subjectivities but rather takes the body as the site where the (trans)national is lived and transformed in the everyday and is inseparable from historical articulations and unruly, inarticulable, corporeal excesses.
Western Transnormativity and the U.S. Asylum Process: From Gender-Nonconforming Forced Migrant to Neoliberal Transgender Refugee
(2020-08-14) Velasquez, Catalina; Keating, Christine
This research exposes the ongoing violence from sustaining Western nation-state apparatuses. By considering U.S. asylum processes at the turn of the 21st century, it provides insights on how contemporary Western nation-state exported models of bureaucratized legalities and accompanying social norms produce and (re)produce transgender migrant subjectivities. To do so, this research employs three decolonial feminist methods: 1) critical rhetorical analysis of legal and media sources, 2) personal experiences and testimonio, and 3) a historically materialistic dialogical analysis. Through these methods, this research demonstrates the violent process of conversion of gender-nonconforming Global South subjects into transgender refugee ones.
Informatic Afterlives and Database Erotics: The Performativity of Surveillance in Economies of Fidelity
(2020-04-30) Jarvis, Sean Christopher; Kenney, Nancy J.; Swarr, Amanda L.
Informatic Aterlives and Database Erotics explores the tension between coercive documentation and violent erasure in surveillance studies by centralizing the role of the body in the political and cultural transformations that have accompanied the rise of mass surveillance. Through an interdisciplinary exploration of queer historiography, legal history, and affect theory, I use the surveilled body as a central text through which to explain the rise of a mode of governance in which mass surveillance is preferable not just to the state, but to many of the populations it governs. Using a queer and feminist lens, I argue that, as mass surveillance has permeated the interactions of both citizens and noncitizens with state institutions, surveillance has gained a performative function, in addition to the inquisitive role it has historically served. This performativity means that surveillance isn’t just a means of acquiring information on behalf of state institutions but a mechanism of reification for the power of those institutions to ask invasive questions and collect personal data. The performativity of surveillance has produced a transformation of citizenship and governance that has cleaved wide gulfs between proper and improper ways of providing data to state institutions and private corporations, a cultural shift with which both scholars and activists must contend.
Praxis in the Trenches: A Self-study of feminist assessment of student learning in online education
(2019-10-15) McKenzie, Tylir Jadyn; Yee, Shirley J
This dissertation is a self-study of the development and use of a feminist assessment assignment of student learning in online learning in higher education. This paper opens with an overview of current state online education and situates this project’s timing in the surging growth of online post-secondary education (Allen & Seaman, 2017). Feminist pedagogy played an important role both in the development of the research question, as well having overarching influence on the project’s implementation and theoretical framework. Typically, personal teaching practices are informed by broader pedagogic perspectives and the feminist pedagogic values and characteristics which inform my teaching within the online environment are discussed to provide the reader with deeper insight to these critical influences. This project sought to answer the question: how can I embody feminist teaching within the online environment to be a better teacher? To investigate this I focused my attention on one source of tension within the online environment – assessment, and as a result the post-course reflection [PCRv1.0] assignment was created during the fall of 2014. Using LaBoskey’s (2004) self-study methodology framework, this project traces the development of PCRv1.0, its use, and subsequent revisions PCRv2.0 (winter 2016) and PCRv2.1 (fall 2018). The results of the self-study showed that students responded positively to the final assignment which asked them to incorporate their personal experience into self-reflexive evaluation of their learning process within the online course. Revisions, made between the first and last iterations of the PCR studied here, brought significant clarity to the goals of the assignment. Specifically, through aligning the assignments goals more deliberately with the feminist pedagogic principles as identified in the theoretical framework, such as decentralizing teacher as sole authority, valuing student experience, and teaching as midwife. Perhaps most critically, the assignment and this project both serve to challenge traditional pedagogic norms – a central tenet of feminist pedagogy (Schoeman, 2015). While the primary purpose was to improve my teaching practices, in line with self-study methodology this project seeks to engage the reader in conversations regarding feminist teaching practices within the online teaching environment, as well as having implications for the broader online learning and feminist teaching communities.
Trapped in Time: Bodily Experiences of Family Dependent Workers (jiashu) in Daqing, a Model Industrial City in High-socialist China
(2019-08-14) Tian, Yiyu; Welland, Sasha S
The thesis focuses on the bodily experiences of family dependent workers (jiashu) in Daqing, an industrial city in high-socialist China. Jiashu referred to housewives that were mobilized by the state as temporary “workers” but didn’t enjoy the due social status or welfare. The thesis uses two kinds of materials: life stories of Daqing jiashu who worked in the 1960s-70s, and a drama on Daqing jiashu, The Rising Sun. The Maoist Marxist theorization of women’s liberation prophesied that women would be liberated by fully participating in productive labor. Bound by their housewife identity, jiashu was never included in the state’s imagination of a utopian communist future. The state included jiashu’s productive bodies for socialist industrialization, and excluded jiashu’s reproductive bodies as their own “burden” that should be overcome by themselves. The high-speed economic growth of socialism largely depended on the gendered division of labor and these docile socialist female bodies.
Embodied Writing: Gender and Class in the Graffiti and Murals of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution
(2018-11-28) Khasawnih, Alma; Welland, Sasha
Much of the academic and popular literature on the graffiti and murals of the 2011 Egyptian revolution treats these works as illustrative documentation of the sociopolitical events of the revolution, neglecting to consider this visual culture as an active participant in shaping revolutionary discourse. Moreover, this documentation fails to contextualize these ephemeral works within their geographical location and date of origin. This dissertation asserts that these works of public participation are active sites of civic engagement, as graffiti and mural creators engage, negotiate, and claim public space with and against each other, the general public, and the state. Drawing on archival documentation of graffiti and murals, the project combines close iconographical readings with historical and contemporary contextualization of geographical location, while tracing the palimpsest layers of the revolutionary walls. In doing so, this examination of revolutionary visual culture underscores the ways in which access to public space is fashioned through gender, class, religious, and national identity. This dissertation follows an arc that begins in Chapter One by historically situating the production of visual culture as a tool of both political activism and nation-building. I demonstrate that some of these contemporary works challenge hegemonic state narratives and propose alternative national imaginaries, while at the same time perpetuating patriarchal nationalist ideologies that construct ideal Egyptian womanhood and manhood. Next, in Chapter Two, I turn to two frequently studied murals in order to argue that the choice of geographic site and their temporal context is paramount to our understanding of their meaning, as well as the role of urban visual culture in fashioning public space and access to the street. In Chapter Three, I consider what graffiti and murals reveal about sociopolitical tensions at the intersections of gender, religion, and class. Here I claim that graffiti and murals of the revolution challenge the regime by calling out its use of violence, yet at the same time, the visual iconography utilizes nation-state constructions of acceptable sexuality and gender roles. The final chapter, Chapter Four, focuses on so-called beautification projects where the state, the private sector, and private citizens each practice different levels of authoritarianism within the public space. Such projects, I conclude, transform the streets into sites of erasure in which the state enacts a politic of forgetting by covering up the visual culture of the revolution, thereby repressing the demands of the working-class under the guise of aesthetics. Grounded in feminist studies, cultural studies, and geography, this interdisciplinary project is situated in dialogue with postcolonial studies, urban studies, and political science. Mobilizing visual culture of the Egyptian revolution of 2011 as a case study, this dissertation stakes out a broader argument about the necessity to interrogate the nation-state as a basis for collectivity if we are to truly dismantle the hegemonic national narratives that bind women, rural peoples, and the working-classes into the margins and, in turn, produce other emancipatory imaginaries.
Expressive Struggles: Neoliberal Temporalities and the Social Reproduction of Feminized Labor in South Korea
(2018-11-28) Yulee, Jiwoon; Ramamurthy, Priti
This dissertation examines newly unionized female janitorial workers’ struggle in the process of public sector privatization that has unfolded after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis in South Korea. It offers a critique of the discourse of labor precarity and the universalizing neoliberal temporality under global financial capitalism that is expressed in the post-developmental state. This ethnographic study utilizes the oral histories of women workers in their fifties and sixties to trace their life histories which encompass the developmental state regime (1970s – 1990s) and the neoliberal reform era (1997 – present) in Korea. The elderly female janitors’ life-stories demonstrate how multiple institutions, mainly the state, the law, labor unions, and the family, participate in the process of capitalist social reproduction of feminized labor. Firstly, I argue that labor precarity is not a new accumulation strategy in global capitalism and Korean developmentalism. The newness narrative prevalent in studies of labor precarity forecloses a radical critique of the reproduction of capitalist social relations by erasing histories of the laboring subjects whose lives repeatedly fall into the old and new categories of the Other and the outsiders. Seen from the female workers’ standpoint, labor precarity has intensified from the inception of developmental capitalism to its afterlife under the present neoliberal regime in Korea. This politics of forgetting erases the heterogeneous histories of feminized labor and reinforces the hegemonic neoliberal temporality that is produced by global financial capitalism. Secondly, I contend that the middle-aged women’s struggles at work and in their poverty-stricken homes are emblematic sites of reproductive crises and of a general contradiction immanent in developmental state capitalism and its neoliberal becoming. This view decenters the Western welfare state-centric discourse of labor precarity and suggests rethinking contemporary social struggles from the sites of reproductive contradictions. Lastly, I propose the concept of spatial intimacy as a node for larger coalition building strategies among precarious laboring subjects living under uneven geographies of neoliberal conditions of life. This study suggests that the notion of spatial intimacy that attends to the ways laboring bodies traverse between the realms of production and reproduction to create surplus value enables us to draw a cognitive map connecting various sites of social reproductive crises and to envision a radical feminist politics of care and solidarity.
Before Their Time: Tracing the Emergence of the Figure of La Pachuca, 1910-1930s
(2018-07-31) Morado-Peters, P. Michelle Kritz; Yee, Shirley
The emergence of la pachuca, as an agent in Chicanx cultural production, directs attention to the process of meaning making which draw from elements of the past. The period between 1910 and the 1930s, which span the Mexican Revolution, the interwar period, to the Great Depression provide social and economic contexts to understand the formation subjectivity and identity formation. This essay underscores the role of gender as critical in an analysis of emergent nationalisms; the steady pull of industrialized labor; migration and settler expansion; to consider these as arenas in which historical agents negotiated subject formation amid ideologies of citizenship, belonging, and modernity. By exploring the relationship between these histories of gender, sexuality and identity formation, in relation to overlapping, often competing, nationalisms and the legacies of settler colonialism, we may better understand pachucos as well.
Toxic Animal Encounters: Queer Environmental Threats and Racialized Reproduction Anxieties
(2018-07-31) O'Laughlin, Logan; Ramamurthy, Priti; Swarr, Amanda
This dissertation interrogates contemporary anxieties about environmental toxins and their effects on sex, sexual development, and reproduction in North America. For instance, recent toxicology reports suggest that commonly-used pesticides can cause frogs to develop intersex traits and enact same-sex mating behaviors. Many concerned consumers and residents have described the environmental issues as threats to hetero-nuclear families in their public fears of what might be to come: being infertile, queer, intersex, and/or transgender. Feminist science studies, queer studies, and environmental studies have responded to these anxieties by examining how Western sociocultural myths of queerness as “unnatural” surface most saliently in moments of environmental threat. What remains penumbral in the critiques at the intersection of these fields, however, is how race and species operate in the articulation of these environmental threats. My work intervenes by arguing these toxicity panics are pernicious not only because they make normative judgments about sex, gender, and sexuality but also because they rely on logics of racism and dehumanization. The seemingly innocuous toxin-exposed animal figures are the Trojan Horses that allow these multiply-marginalizing ideologies to circulate. In this dissertation, I argue that animal figures play a crucial role in these environmental anxieties. Human interactions with environmental toxins – what I call “toxic encounters” – leave traces in the form of toxin-exposed animal figures that shape how humans conceptualize environmental disaster and protection. I assert that exposed nonhuman animals act as discursive ambassadors for the longevity of white, heterosexual human families in three scandals: (1) scientific reports of pesticides causing frogs to develop intersex traits; (2) media responses to the 2010 BP oil spill that disproportionately focus on the reproduction of oiled pelicans; and (3) farmers’ anxieties about feral pigs overpopulating North Carolina and bringing illness to their family farms. When culturally-significant animals such as pelicans and frogs in the U.S. are exposed to toxins, researchers and activists use them to warn of “future” environmental harm against white human families. In so doing, they often obscure how these toxins enact ongoing and historical reproductive violence against queer people, communities of color, and queer people of color. I argue that each of the toxic scandals in question must be understood as more than just interfaces in the present moment. By forwarding a multitemporal critical discourse analysis method, this dissertation examines what sitting with ghosts of the figures of frogs, pelicans, and pigs might accomplish. In so doing, I trace how historical and ongoing violence of chattel slavery and colonialism haunts the present in these toxic animal figures. I thus supplement my feminist critical discourse analysis with environmental historical analysis of colonialism’s effects on the North American landscape as well as analysis of how certain animals have come to be valuable in U.S. culture. I also critically analyze scientific literature about environmental toxins in order to understand how each has animal figure been understood as abject in the first place. This research strengthens the complicated links among queer theory, environmental studies, feminist science studies, and critical race theories by tracing how environmental normativity is articulated through biopolitical taxonomies of Human in these animal figures. And it intervenes in the tensions within critical animal studies between the real and the figurative to recognize that the entanglements are where the toxins often reside. As a feminist project, this work explicates how animal figures animate harmful environmental discourses in order to ultimately disrupt them.

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