http://hdl.handle.net/1903/2809 Tue, 21 May 2013 15:18:21 GMT 2013-05-21T15:18:21Z http://hdl.handle.net/1903/13281 Title: BODY OF KNOWLEDGE: BLACK QUEER FEMINIST THOUGHT, PERFORMANCE, AND PEDAGOGY Authors: Lewis, Mel Michelle Abstract: This dissertation, "Body of Knowledge: Black Queer Feminist Thought, Performance, and Pedagogy," considers the ways in which the body, identity, and performance function as "equipment" for teaching and learning in the college classroom and beyond. The project identifies, names, and examines the ways in which the body functions as a text for some instructors who self-identify as Black queer feminist women, as they draw attention to or deflect attention from their own corporeal presence as racialized, gendered, and sexualized subjects in the feminist classroom and in the broader campus community. For pedagogues whose "embodied text" highlights the nexus of race, gender, and sexuality, identity informs and constructs the classroom. These intersections can disrupt the classroom, and shape the pedagogical project. This dissertation explores the ways in which such pedagogues work to harness their "otherness," or differences from expected teaching identity, and to engage their creative pedagogical power through embodiment and performance. Using two feminist case studies and a self -study, I employ an intersectional feminist approach that envisages the body as a text for teaching about race, gender, and sexuality in higher education. This project theorizes and applies a framework for studying the intersection of creative pedagogy and subversive identity by emphasizing the utility of embodied performance as an instructive tool. The work draws from and contributes to scholarship on intersectionality, the lived experiences of women of color and queer women; and the traditions of feminist studies, Black studies, LGBTQ studies, and feminist and critical pedagogies, particularly addressing the experiences and concerns of teachers in higher education with multiple intersecting identities who work across multiple disciplines. Documenting, the experiences, challenges, and reflections of three Black queer feminists for whom teaching itself is both a commitment and an identity, is as much a contribution as more abstractly theorizing a Black queer feminist pedagogy. Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1903/13281 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1903/13167 Title: GLOBAL ASSIMILATION AND GLOBAL ALIENATION: LIVES OF PROFESSIONAL WOMEN IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA Authors: Song, Jing Abstract: This dissertation examines the careers and family lives of "professional, white-collar women" in contemporary China in order to understand the ways in which labor markets, state policies, and gender expectations affect these women's lives in an era of rapid globalization. Drawing on multidisciplinary methods including in-depth interviews with twenty women, content analyses of the biweekly, pop-culture magazine Zhiyin, and the literary analyses of two feminist novels, Wei Hui's Shanghai Baby (2001), and Mian Mian's Candy (2003), I discuss how professional women articulate the meaning of their careers and their family lives, and make sense of their experiences as part of China's path to globalization. Analyzing the ways that professional women construct themselves as "women,"--complying with traditional ideologies of womanhood that historically devalued their achievements in the workplace--I interrogate a category of identity, "professional white-collar women." Thus, I present how these "professional white-collar" women's experiences in their multinational workplaces show that their lives are intricately intertwined with the simultaneous process of being assimilated and alienated as a result of the globalization of China. By arguing that, for these women, instead of increasing their personal agency as independent individuals, their careers serve to develop their desire for materialism and capitalist modernity, I present the irony of China's participation in globalization. Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1903/13167 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1903/12740 Title: FEMINISM À LA QUEBEC: IDEOLOGICAL TRAVELINGS OF AMERICAN AND FRENCH THOUGHT (1960-2010) Authors: Page, Genevieve Abstract: This dissertation examines the travelings of three concepts central to feminism - gender, queer, and intersectionality - as they move between the United States, France, and Quebec. The concept of gender, central to U.S. feminism, is relatively absent from feminist theory in France and Quebec until the 1990s; rather, drawing on Marxist and existentialist traditions, French and Quebec feminists will deploy the term "rapports sociaux de sexe" to identify that differences among women and men are grounded in social structure and, further, that the two classes, women and men, are constituted in hierarchicized relation. The term queer, linguistically subversive in English but lacking this potential when translated into French, is mainly resisted by French materialist feminists and feminist scholars in Quebec on the basis that it displaces social reality focusing instead on resistance through performance. Nonetheless, in Quebec, activists groups such as Les panthères rose are able to present a version of queer that also addresses systemic oppressions. Finally, the concept of intersectionality, theorized first by feminists of color in the U.S. trying to reconcile their allegiances to multiple struggles, provides a useful tool for analyzing the interaction between different systems of oppression and how they shape the lives of people differently located. In France, a similar desire to theorize multiple oppressions led to the development of the concept of "consubstantialité des rapports sociaux," whereby social "rapports" of sex and of socio-economic class are co-constituted. Yet, in the context of changing immigration patterns and a debate on the headscarf, French feminists re-examine the concept of intersectionality to enhance their understanding of racialization and its interaction with gendered structures. In Quebec, a look at three different moments reveals an early theorization of the interaction of multiple oppressions by capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism with feminists, drawing on their experiences as separatist movement participants, self-identifying as "racialized" based on the model of Third World national liberation struggle. In the 1990s and again in 2007, however, feminists will struggle to develop new models of pluralism that address the marginalization, within society in general and also within feminism, of women from minority ethnocultural or religious groups. Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1903/12740 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1903/12717 Title: Lifestyle Sex Selection: Reproduction, Transnational Flows, and Inequality Authors: Bhatia, Rajani Abstract: This dissertation examines new practices and technologies of sex selection with a particular focus on the interrelationship between the scientific products that enable these practices; the discursive production of these practices through news media, promotional literature and self-help communication; and the institutional operations of U.S. clinics both within and across national borders. In the late 1990s mass print and television media began heralding the emergence of new technologies as the answer to a long quest for scientifically proven methods for selecting the sex of a child. MicroSort and preimplantation genetic diagnosis gained considerable attention as methods of sex selection that diverged from earlier technologies because they do not require an abortion. Instead, both methods are applied before pregnancy and must be used in conjunction with assisted reproduction such as in-vitro fertilization. Along with the technologies appeared new discourses that make-meaning of these practices and new institutional mechanisms that embed them within a larger phenomenon of cross-(national) border reproductive practices. Using a genealogical approach, I trace how these three processes (material, discursive and institutional) configure a new form of sex selection at the same time as they construct a stratified system of global sex selection practices, contrasting reasonable, lifestyle motivations in the West with gender-biased forms in the East. The research uses qualitative, multi-sited modes of analysis and extends feminist STS scholarship on reproductive technologies by shifting focus to a transnational realm as manifested in what is currently conceptualized as "cross-border" reproductive practices. Against a shifting terrain of transnational reproductive practices, the study aims to displace a dichotomous framing of global sex selection practices that polarizes western from eastern practices with the more varied and complex movements that take place in cross -bordered sex selection. The study examines an emerging form of sex selection as an optic through which to theorize and reframe the meanings and interconnections among reproduction, transnational, and inequality, thereby generating new directions in feminist theorizing on reproduction. Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1903/12717 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z