College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item Family Rejection and LGBTQ+ Asian Americans’ Psychological Distress and Disordered Eating: The Role of Conflicts in Allegiances and Familial Shame(2024) Pease, M V.; Le, Thomas P.; Ahn, Lydia HaRimLGBTQ+ Asian Americans experience unique psychological health concerns at the intersection of multiple forms of marginalization. White supremacist, cisheteronormative, and colonial ideals and their structural and interpersonal manifestations may encourage family rejection of LGBTQ+ identities within Asian American family units. Family shame, conflicts in allegiances, and internalized anti-LGBTQ+ stigma were hypothesized as mediators in the association between family rejection and psychological distress and disordered eating. The current study examined family rejection and its impacts on psychological distress and disordered eating in a sample of LGBTQ+ Asian American adults (N = 155; MAge = 24.26; 30.3% Gender Diverse) using a cross-sectional survey design and path analysis. There was a significant serial mediation such that family rejection was positively associated with conflicts in allegiances, which was positively associated with familial shame, which was positively associated with psychological distress (B = .12, p = .01). The same serial mediation was nonsignificant for disordered eating (B = .04, p = .26). Results indicate the importance of considering conflicts in allegiances, family shame, and the interpersonal dynamics of LGBTQ+ Asian Americans in understanding experiences of psychological distress and disordered eating. Implications are drawn for further research, clinical work, and broader efforts addressing the larger sociocultural environment that encourages familial rejection of LGBTQ+ identity.Item Intersectional Stereotyping in Political Campaigns(2019) Hicks, Heather Mary; Banks, Antoine J.; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Political scientists have debated whether gender stereotypes influence support for women candidates. Similarly, scholars have examined how racism among whites affects evaluations of minority candidates. Yet, rarely have political scientists considered how racism and gender bias intersect when a female minority candidate runs for office. In this dissertation, I propose a theory of intersectional stereotyping, which argues that evaluations of black women candidates are influenced by unique stereotypes based on the intersection of race and gender. Specifically, I argue that stereotypes associating black women with agentic traits (such as assertiveness, dominance, and anger) put black women at a disadvantage when they run for elected office. I hypothesize that members of racial or gender out-groups will penalize black women candidates when they receive campaign information consistent with these agentic stereotypes. On the other hand, I expect that black women will reward an agentic black female candidate because these traits suggest that the candidate is willing and able to stand up for the interests of black women. I test these expectations using a content analysis and two national survey experiments (one using a sample of whites and the other using a sample of blacks). In my content analysis of the 2018 Democratic primary for governor of Georgia, I find that Stacey Abrams, the black female candidate, was more likely to be described with agentic traits, especially negative agentic traits, in newspaper coverage than Stacey Evans, her white female opponent. My experimental data demonstrates that this media coverage of agentic traits puts black women at a disadvantage among white voters. White voters are more likely to penalize a black female candidate for acting in an assertive manner than identical white female and black male candidates. However, I find no penalty or reward for the assertive black female candidate among black voters. This research underscores the importance of studying the influence of race and gender in politics simultaneously. We cannot fully understand the effects of race and gender on support for minority women candidates by studying these concepts in isolation from one another.Item Body image experiences among Asian American women: A qualitative intersectionality framework(2016) Brady, Jennifer; Iwamoto, Derek K; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Body image concerns are a growing issue among Asian American young adult women and evidence suggests that they experience distinct sociocultural stressors that might heighten risk. This study advanced knowledge through a Grounded Theory qualitative approach and explored the unique experiences of oppression among Asian American undergraduate women (N=20) that influence body image dissatisfaction. Participants completed a one hour semi-structured interview describing their socialization experiences; gender and racial identity development; feelings and thoughts about their bodies; beliefs of Western and cultural beauty norms; and body image management strategies. The core category Body Image was comprised of attitudes and perceptions about body weight, shape, and size, facial features (e.g. eye size) and skin complexion/tone. Numerous contextual, interpersonal, and identity conditions, emerged to produce a range of positive and negative body image beliefs. Results can advance etiological understanding of prominent sociocultural factors that may attenuate or heighten risk for body image concerns.Item SPACE, IDENTITY AND INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY: NEGOTIATING DECOLONIZATION IN THE UNITED NATIONS(2006-05-11) Patil, Vrushali; Korzeniewicz, Roberto P; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Beginning with the colonial and imperial encounters that constitute the early, conflict-ridden moments of trans-territorial contact, this research is interested in the relationship between gender, race, and shifting transnational power relationships. Bringing together work from Sociology, Women's Studies, and Postcolonial Studies, it is interested in the following questions. How are modern constructions of gender and race forged in transnational--colonial as well as 'postcolonial'--processes? How did they emerge in and contribute to such processes during the colonial era? Specifically, how did they shape colonialist constructions of space, identity and international community? How has this relationship shifted with legal decolonization? First, it offers a theory regarding these questions in the European colonial era, the theory of kinship. This theory posits that the colonialist construction of space, identity and international community historically relied on a trope of kinship, which operated by constructing the colonies as 'children' and the metropoles as 'parents.' Even more, kinship actually helped to constitute colonial notions of race (i.e., 'childlike natives') and gender (i.e., 'the lack of the nuclear household in African society as evidence of cultural immaturity'). In this manner, kinship helped to define colonized others as children, thereby to deny the subjectivity of these others (particularly their spatial and identity claims), and thus to ultimately build hierarchical structures of international community. Combining discourse and comparative historical methods of analysis, this work explores how colonialists and anti-colonialists renegotiate transnational power relationships within the debates on decolonization in the United Nations from 1946-1960. It argues that while colonialists continued to use the trope of kinship to legitimate the status quo, anti-colonialists insisted that the colonies had 'grown up' and that continuing colonialism was a humiliation that emasculated fully adult men. Thus, anti-colonialists attempted to reorder global power relationships by renegotiating the kinship trope. In other words, to the politics of paternalism, they responded with the politics of masculinity. Ultimately, then, the complex, shifting, politics of race relied on a politics of gender/sexuality, both of which were central to the changing contours of international community in the mid-20th century.