Women's Studies Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2809
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Item A Host of Memories: Mixed Race Subjection and Asian American Performances Against Disavowal(2020) Storti, Anna; Lothian, Alexis; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation develops the concept of racial hosting to conceptualize mixed-raceness as an embodied palimpsest of past, present, and future. A Host of Memories: Mixed Race Subjection and Asian American Performances Against Disavowal argues for the importance of uncovering the disavowed, residual, and violent conditions of racial mixture. The project situates queer theories of temporality and feminist theories of situated knowledge in relation to Asian Americanist critiques of memory. I contend that the Asian/white subject is both an index to track the colonial condition across time, and a host that harbors the colonial desires we have come to name as hybridity, multiracialism, and post-racism. Each chapter builds towards a methodology of memory to, on the one hand, track the sensorial life of mixed-raceness, and on the other hand, document how the discourse of multiracialism obscures mass violence and the colonial ideology of racial purity. Chapter one advances the framework of white residue through an examination of the case of Daniel Holtzclaw, the Japanese/white police officer serving 263 years in prison for assaulting 13 Black women. I then narrate the life of Elliot Rodger, the Chinese/white mass shooter and involuntary celibate. Opening the study in this way dispels the notion that racial mixture renders racism’s past obsolete. I then shift to mixed race artists whose performances of desire, memory, and time include a fervent belief in queer and feminist possibility. Chapter two illuminates how a femme aesthetic of retribution surfaces as a response to racial fetish. This chapter spotlights performances by Chanel Matsunami Govreau and Maya Mackrandilal. Chapter three forwards the concept of muscle memory to study how the accumulation of history is deposited into the body and enacted through movement. Here, I contemplate the queer and trans dance of Zavé Martohardjono. Chapter four de-idealizes hybridity through the oeuvre of contemporary artist Saya Woolfalk. To end, I refer to the photography of Gina Osterloh to force a reckoning with the pressures to remember and claim ancestry. Mixed race subjection, I conclude, is an embodied phenomenon with reverberating implications for the structure of racial form writ large.Item SUFIMINISM: THE SEXUAL, THE SPIRITUAL, THE SELF(2018) Haq, Sara; Tambe, Ashwini; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation addresses the question: what does an exploration of sexual politics within Islam look like if the mandate of respectability is refused? It explores the possibilities of Sufi thought as an epistemological approach to thinking about sexuality studies and reframing the relationship between Islam and sex. Existing scholarship on Sufism, Islam, and feminism tends to overrely on legal framings of sexuality and heavily exegetical engagements with religion, and offers too many unstated concessions to respectability politics. I argue that by centering the poetic, the everyday, and the transgressive, Sufism can offer alternative understandings of counter-hegemonic Islamic traditions. I use an expansive range of texts such as Sufi qawwali (spiritual songs), Sufi poetry, Qur'anic exegeses, hagiographical texts, and oral storytelling to explore pivotal concepts in sexuality studies: heteronormativity, consent, and the divide between licit and illicit sex. In addition to textual analysis, I present interludes of experiential narratives that are drawn from semi-structured interviews with sexually marginalized Muslims as well as from autoethnographic reflections; they illustrate the complex relationships between religio-spirituality and sexual expression. Each analysis chapter is focused on distinct Sufi tropes, such as wisal/firaq (union/separation), niyyat (intentionality), ‘ubudiyya (servanthood), pain-and-pleasure, kanjri (whore), zaat (being), and izzat (honor). Together, these chapters challenge imperatives of marriage and sex, make the case for affective consent, reflect on unconventional sexual practices such as kink/BDSM, and reframe a conversation about sex work beyond the binary of licit versus illicit sex. I conclude by discussing the possibilities of future research on the contemporary resurgence of feminism and Sufism in South Asian popular culture, as well as my vision for a queer and interdisciplinary approach I call Sufiminism.Item Life Uncharted: Parenting Transgender, Gender-Creative, and Gay Children(2016) Vooris, Jessica Ann; King, Katie; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Gender non-conformity is often seen as an indication of a future queer sexuality, but children are thought to be too young to actually be gay or trans. Life Uncharted: Parenting Transgender, Gender-creative, and Gay Children seeks to answer questions about what it means to be a "transgender," "gender-creative," or "gay" child, and examines the experiences of families who parent against the norm, raising children who break assumptions about the body, gender, identity and desire. Drawing from media analysis, ethnography of parent blogs and family gender conferences, along with interviews with 28 families, I argue that these parents engage in "anticipation work" as they manage anxiety and uncertainty about their children's behavior, attempt to predict and manage their children's futures, and explain their decisions to others. While television documentaries offer simple narratives that often reify binary expectations of gender, and explain that transgender children are "trapped in the wrong body," my ethnographic research and interviews shows that defining a transgender or gender-creative or gay child is more complex and it is not always clear how to separate gender expression, identity, and sexuality. As children socially transition at younger ages, when memory is just beginning to form, their relationships to the body and the notion of being "transgender" is in flux. Parents emphasize being comfortable with ambiguity, listening to children and LGBTQ adults, and accepting that it’s not always possible to know what the future brings. These children’s lives are unfolding and in process, changing our notions of childhood, queerness and transness.Item Bodies on the Line: Violence, Disposable Subjects, and the US-Mexico Border Industrial Complex(2016) Perez, Cristina Jo; Rowley, Michelle V; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Bodies On the Line: Violence, Disposable Subjects, and the Border Industrial Complex explores the construction of identity and notions of belonging within an increasingly privatized and militarized Border Industrial Complex. Specifically, the project interrogates how discourses of Mexican migrants as racialized, gendered, and hypersexualized “deviants” normalize violence against border crossers. Starting at Juárez/El Paso border, I follow the expanding border, interrogating the ways that Mexican migrants, regardless of sexual orientation, have been constructed and disciplined according to racialized notions of “sexual deviance." I engage a queer of color critique to argue that sexual deviance becomes a justification for targeting and containing migrant subjects. By focusing on the economic and racially motivated violence that the Border Industrial Complex does to Mexican migrant communities, I expand the critiques that feminists of color have long leveraged against systemic violence done to communities of color through the prison industrial system. Importantly, this project contributes to transnational feminist scholarship by contextualizing border violence within the global circuits of labor, capital, and ideology that shape perceptions of border insecurity. The project contributes an interdisciplinary perspective that uses a multi-method approach to understand how border violence is exercised against Mexicans at the Mexico-US border. I use archival methods to ask how historical records housed at the National Border Patrol Museum and Memorial Library serve as political instruments that reinforce the contemporary use of violence against Mexican migrants. I also use semi-structured interviews with nine frequent border crossers to consider the various ways crossers defined and aligned themselves at the border. Finally, I analyze the master narratives that come to surround specific cases of border violence. To that end, I consider the mainstream media’s coverage, legal proceedings, and policy to better understand the racialized, gendered, and sexualized logics of the violence.Item From "Quare" to "Kweer": Towards a Queer Asian American Critique(2009) Sapinoso, J. Valero (JV); King, Katie R.; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)It is insufficient to think of multiple dimensions of difference in merely some additive fashion--what is needed is a fundamentally different approach. E. Patrick Johnson and Roderick A. Ferguson, respectively, offer such approaches as well as inspiration for this dissertation. More specifically, they posit interventions into queer theorizing and queer studies that attempt to disrupt the (over-)emphasis on whiteness and instead turn the focus to racialized subjectivities. The centrality of African American racial formations in their queer of color critique, however, must be taken into account. Given the vastly different histories between African American and Asian American racial formations, including, but not limited to the ways in which these racial groups have historically been pitted against one another (for the betterment of privileged whites), it is especially important that we consider how the specificities of Asian American subjects and subjectivities might account for distinct queer of color critiques. At the heart of my dissertation is the movement towards a queer Asian American critique, or "kweer studies," that directs attention to nationality and national belonging as a way of expanding beyond the black/white binary which currently predominates. In particular, the key components of nationality and national belonging for queer Asian American subjects and subjectivities that my study foregrounds are cultural, political, and legal citizenship. To this end my dissertation asks, what is needed to imagine and entrench understandings of queer Asian American subjects and subjectivities that are not rendered as alien, always already foreign, or simply invisible within discourses of cultural, political, and legal citizenship? Specifically, through participant observation, critical legal theory, and textual analysis I investigate kinging culture and discourses of U.S. immigration, revealing limits of existing formations that, respectively, have naturalized blackness as the sole focus of queer of color critique, and have narrowly sought queer immigration through seeking asylum and recognition of same-sex partnerships for family reunification, in order to posit a queer of color critique that helps imagine and create more expansive formations and better accounts for the material existence of a fuller range of queer bodies of various colors.