American Studies
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Item Zero-Sum Game: GamerGate and the Networked Discourse of Hate(2019) Meyer, Joseph Bernard; Farman, Jason; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Zero-Sum Game utilizes GamerGate – a 2014 harassment campaign against prominent women in the video game industry – to develop a close reading of networked publics in order to understand how power manifests and is enacted online. I combine Actor Network Theory and Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis to first map and archive GamerGate’s participants, targets, platforms, and media followed by platform-specific feminist readings of discourse occurring across the map. Each chapter focuses on how hate and harassment transform (and are magnified) across platforms, an analysis that is further refracted through multidisciplinary, theoretical frameworks. These frameworks are 1) the gamer technicity that subsumed overt white supremacist heteropatriarchy into developing neoliberal individualism that replaces embodied identity with identity through consumption, 2) the ecology of social media and the interaction of platforms that amplify and transform digital expressive media, 3) a phenomenology of information exploring the mediation of lived experience via networked publics that challenges dominant ideology while also providing the tools for the denial of alternative subjectivities and the construction of alternative information networks, and 4) a consumer choice model of online harassment that builds on the previous three theories to provide consumption of an “apolitical” identity that allows for the abdication of responsibility for the actions of hate groups and harassment they have allied themselves with. I argue that the driving force behind GamerGate is the reactionary impulse by those who benefit from structures of power to the challenges posed by broadcast experiences and identities unfiltered by hegemonic processes of traditional media structures. GamerGate thus signifies the violent reaction by those in power to the loss of control faced in the digital age as discursive constructions of identity are challenged across platforms.Item Collossus of Rutgers: The Visual and Print Media Legacy of Paul Leroy Robeson(2019) walsh, shane bolles; Williams-Forson, Psyche; Corbin- Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)One of the most celebrated African American figures known worldwide, Paul Leroy Robeson was primarily erased from history books for almost a decade after he began speaking out about injustices stemming from the second Red Scare. Fewer still know of his formative years and early influences. This erasure can only be counteracted with targeted scholarship. As a project of reclamation, this American Studies dissertation joins scholarship in other fields that aim to restore Paul Robeson to his proper place in history with the hope of prompting a new wave of research on the subject. The youth and early career of Robeson is the targeted era (before his matriculation at the University of London in 1934) of this work. The central question around which this dissertation is organized is this: Through a close examination of the role that the skin and masculinity of Paul Robeson played in his early life and career, how can we come to understand the ways that the resulting gaze was imposed on his body, and how did Robeson himself cultivate the gaze of his own public image and cultural representation as a performance icon and “race man,” launching him on his way to becoming an advocate for rights of black people worldwide? To engage this research question, the methodologies of textual critical discourse analysis, Mora Beauchamp- Byrd's exhibition categorization and methodology, and Frederick Douglass's lectures on visual theories are utilized. All of these have directly assisted in the interpolation of the printed and photographic legacy of Robeson. Given the early career focus of this dissertation, archival materials from the following institutions provided the primary sources for this work: the Rutgers University libraries Special Collection and Archives, Temple University's Charles L. Blockson Afro-American collection, and the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. With Robeson as an example of a multi-talented black cultural icon, textual discourse analysis demonstrates how to construct specific views of the social world that Paul Robeson inhabited in the early phase of his public life and how his career developments were portrayed in both the Black American and majority print media outlets of the era.Item An American River: Discourses of Ecocatastrophe, Sustainability, and Belonging in the Potomac River Basin and Beyond(2019) Kier, Bailey; Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)An American River: Discourses of Ecocatastrophe, Sustainability, and Belonging in the Potomac River and Beyond is a queer ecological intervention in American, Queer, Trans(Gender), and Popular Culture Studies. It critiques the primary reliance on the category of culture to analyze the ways media, science, public policy, and the state make knowledge assumptions about sex, gender, and reproduction to construct stories about environmental catastrophe, species, and kind. Transdisciplinary methods are used to uncover the ecologies, relations, adaptations, and resiliencies that might not otherwise be possibly investigated and known, and challenge conventional popular discourses of environmentalism and conservation in an effort to create the intellectual equivalent of biodiversity. Three distinct but interrelated cases are considered. First, an examination of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Island interrogates how sex, gender and reproduction were intimately tied to discourses of wilderness, nature and nation, and the ways in which those concepts have been sanitized for consistency with modern sensibilities about an appropriate memorial for an “environmental” president. Next, a consideration of the popular discourse around the emergence of “transgender fish” in the Potomac River leads to an analysis of how trans-related language and concepts can be used to enrich human understanding of transformations and interactions across ecologies, species, and populations. I offer “interdependent ecological transsex” as a term broadly defined through a hormonal, metabolistic, and adaptive prism to imagine other bodies—not just transsexual human bodies, but fish, bodies of water, and any other kind of body that experiences change in relation to a larger ecology. Third, I examine the possibilities for queering agriculture, or envisaging alternatives to mainstream rhetorics of agriculture, food security, and farming. An American River concludes arguing human knowledge about nature, environmentalism, race, reproduction, and transsexuality is laden in antroheterocentric assumptions about progress, degeneracy, and evolution that is problematic for ethically and equitably addressing social and environmental problems. A queer eco ethic is presented to offer ways humans might begin to imagine nature and the environment differently.Item ‘EXPERIENCE THIS LOVE GIVING ENERGY’: PARENTING AS ACTIVISM, AFFECTIVE LABOR, AND THE DEPLOYMENT OF BLACK LOVE IN CONTEMPORARY BALTIMORE(2018) Leathers, Tanesha Anne; Struna, Nancy L.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Baltimore City uprising of 2015 was in part a reaction to the death of Freddie Gray, but also a response to the repression of this current neoliberal moment. The city’s Black citizenry is one which is profoundly impacted by the school-to-prison pipeline, abject poverty, entrenched neighborhood violence, police aggression and hyper surveillance, underemployment, family stress, health issues, and a host of other challenges and manifestations of violence. Considering this, how does anyone provide a message of hope and engage Baltimore’s largely Black population? This dissertation is a case study that explores the activism of one Black man in contemporary Baltimore and his manifold approaches to the strong, social and economic headwinds that continue to blow through the city. It discusses his efforts to educate and empower his children, other Black youth, and the greater community; his parenting and “otherfathering” as activism; and his deployment of love—Black love—as an important and powerful intervention in spaces where there is often a dearth of resources, opportunity, and hope. This study also considers the everyday life and struggles of a contemporary African-centered organic intellectual and the affective labor involved in his pursuit of transformative change in his community and others like it. This includes a lack of support both in finances and labor, among other challenges. And lastly, with the featured activist’s intended audience in mind, this work explores the subjectivity of Black youth in Baltimore and discusses them as engaged witnesses, artists, and resisters in the face of pervasive violence.Item City of Hope and the 1968 Poor People's Campaign: Poverty, Protests, and Photography(2017) Bryant, Aaron E; Sies, Mary Corbin; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Scholars have produced rich materials on the civil rights movement since Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968. These resources generally offer the familiar narratives of the period, as they relate to King’s earlier campaigns as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). This includes research on demonstrations in Alabama, Mississippi, Washington, and Memphis. Few studies offer insights on King’s final crusade, the Poor People’s Campaign, however. As an original contribution to civil rights research, the following study offers an overview of King’s antipoverty crusade to contextualize the movement’s impact on America’s past and present. This study presents new insights on the movement by introducing previously undiscovered and unexamined archival materials related to the campaign and Resurrection City, the encampment between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial that housed campaign participants. Photographs, architectural drawings, and other visual materials supplement evidence collected from primary documents and other archival sources. While the investigation of written records and printed materials helps the study construct a chronology of events to frame a historical narrative of the campaign, graphic materials presented in the study add eyewitness perspectives and visual evidence to help shape the study’s conclusions. Perceptions of the Poor People’s Campaign were unfavorable as media coverage fed national fears of riots and civil disorder. Additionally, national memory recorded the efforts of the campaign’s leadership as inadequate in filling the void left by King’s assassination. King’s antipoverty campaign, however, had its merits. It was a microscope on poverty and a critique that focused public attention on poverty nationwide. It was a catalyst to important federal and grassroots programs that laid the groundwork for later legislation and social change. The campaign was also a precursor to subsequent civil and human rights movements. In addition to bringing social concerns related to race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic justice to the public fore, King’s antipoverty crusade introduced age, gender, and quality-of-life issues to a national discourse on equality. Additionally, the campaign represented a change in sociopolitical activism as protest movements shifted from civil rights to human rights campaigns. Equally important, however, the campaign was the final chapter of King’s life and, conceivably, his most ambitious dream.Item BLACK REMOVAL AND INVISIBILITY: AT THE INTERSECTIONS OF RACE AND CITIZENSHIP IN THE 21st CENTURY(2018) Benjamin, Tatiana; Wong, Janelle; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation, Black Removal and Invisibility: At the Intersections of Race and Citizenship in the 21st Century, uses the experiences of Black immigrants as a lens to examine anti-Blackness and citizenship within the contemporary U.S. immigration system. I explore how Black immigrants sit at a unique intersection of Blackness and (un)documentation that produces significant vulnerabilities. Black undocumented immigrants occupy an ambiguous and often untenable position within the U.S. nation-state. They are simultaneously included in the broad category of “Black American” and excluded from the category of “American” by virtue of their lack of citizenship. Their exclusion, I contend, is based both on Blackness and status as unauthorized immigrants. I examine their exclusion by addressing the following questions: How does an emphasis on “invisibility” help us to better understand how immigrant rights organizations in the U.S. address and represent the needs of Black immigrants? In what ways have the experiences of Black immigrants been rendered marginal to social justice movements? What are the consequences of their marginalization for political representation? Lastly, how are Black immigrants responding and transforming the immigrants’ movement? I rely on qualitative methods, including participant observation and in-depth interviews to explore these questions.Item BETWEEN F* WORDS: RURAL & GAY LIBERATIONIST REFRAINS IN THE SOUTHEAST, 1970-1981(2017) Ezell, Samuel Jason; Hanhardt, Christina; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Between F* Words is an affective history of how gay liberationism persisted through its intersections with back-to-the-land movements in the 1970s Southeast. In telling an affective history, I show how liberationism is best understood as more than a reasoned political choice; rather, it crucially involves specific ways of viewing and feeling in an increasingly globalized world. Specifically, its politics complemented critiques of a divisive system with lateral strategies for staying connected. By tracing gay liberationist networks from rural Ozark and Appalachian sites to cities like New Orleans and Atlanta, I prioritize a regional analytic which, unlike models predicated on the urban “gay ghetto,” hinges on rural-urban connection. This project, then, sets gay liberation both within everyday life and in unexpected places as a way to imagine expanded LGBT political cultural maps. Employing analysis of oral history interviews, newly available archival materials, and the print culture of RFD (a rural gay serial published in the Southeast from 1978-2009), Between F* Words is a description of the subject formations of Southeastern gay liberationist collectives who felt the word gay no longer represented their political cultures. Using Felix Guattari’s concept of the refrain, I read the words and images of those in the culture to characterize the orientational, emotional, psychic, and corporeal dimensions of improvised subjectivities like the faggot, sissie, gentle man, and Radical Faerie. At the same time, I show how these regional refrains emerged in contrast to similar West Coast ones. Their Southeastern networks were acutely aware of their proximity to the fomenting Moral Majority which would become a conservative cornerstone of the Reagan-era national political economy. Galvanized by the racism, sexism, and homophobia at the heart of the conservative political culture which they saw taking root in the Jim Crow geography around them, these gay liberationist subjectivities were shaped by regional forces. Between F* Words draws upon this history not only to propose the regional as a crucial scale for any radical analysis responsive to economic development schemes but also to imagine radical LGBTQ political subjectivities to be affectively formed within the daily experience of such divisive regional development.Item LURKING IN THE SHADOWS OF HOME: HOMELESSNESS, CARCERALITY, AND THE FIGURE OF THE SEX OFFENDER(2017) Wooten, Terrance; Hanhardt, Christina B; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is a multi-methodological and interdisciplinary project that examines how those who have been designated as "sex offenders" and are homeless in the Maryland/DC area are managed and regulated by various technologies of governance such as social policies, sex offender registries, and civil commitment statutes. By looking at the cultural, social, and political geography of shelters, the suburbs, and the city, I challenge scholars to reconsider how we understand stigma, belonging, and home. More broadly, I consider how the very construction of home is bound up in processes of sexual regulation and management that produce certain people as homeless by virtue of their proximity to sexual impropriety, deviance, and blackness. Put otherwise, some people are made to be or kept homeless as a result of their sexual practices or non-normative gender presentations, particularly when they are in direct conflict with dominant discourses about and legal definitions of acceptable sexual and gendered behavior. Access to home is equally mitigated by race. There has been, and continues to be, a long history of racial minorities searching for, being denied, and yet building home in geopolitical spaces that often articulate them as outside of home—as, in fact, homeless. I examine how those processes happen in tandem with and in contradistinction to modes of regulation organized around sexual deviance and difference. Drawing on scholarship in African American studies, carceral studies, and gender and sexuality studies, this project makes three critical interventions: 1) it frames sexuality as a central category of analysis necessary for understanding homelessness; 2) it offers new perspectives on the ways homeless sex offenders navigate and resist modes of racialized hypersurveillance; and 3) it argues that the structure of homeless shelters and housing policies are inherently designed to manage deviance. I draw on interviews of homeless service providers and homeless sex offenders, placing them in conversation with sex offender laws, public media, and popular film to map out the multiple contexts that structure the lives of homeless sex offenders. In doing so, I offer an alternative framework for policy interventions that attempt to address homelessness without centering the issue of race and sexuality.Item Designing the Sick Body: Structuring Illness in the Techno-Material Age(2016) Moesch, Jarah; King, Katie; Farman, Jason; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)How might we pivot and turn towards outsider bodily knowledges to learn how bodies come to matter within and through the extended medical industrial complex? Using the concept of the embodied constellation, I examine what it means to know as and through our sick bodies -- in relationship to data, information, knowledge -- and what it means to claim that these kinds of knowing matter. Embodied constellations enable us to recognize that what we perceive as flattened constructs and single systems are instead a multiplicity of pathways and systems that may or may not interact with each other, thus knowing them in one way rather than another. Using a methodology I call AutoEthnoGraphics I put the researcher’s embodiment at the center of the research as analysis itself. Such analysis demonstrates the chemical, biological, and organic processes of the sick body, and includes poetry, images, and drawings from 30 years of my personal graphic journal. AutoEthnoGraphics thus draws our attention to just how we are implicated in the thinking, molding, structuring of end results. I speak to and share methods from ranging forms of trans-disciplinary scholarship. Grounded in my own work as an artist, I add American studies methods of ethnography and discourse analysis, mix in women of color feminisms' narrative storytelling; queer theory's analysis of outsider status, time, and failure; critical race theory's unpacking of institutionalized structures; science and technology studies' questioning of categories and their risks and credibility; and finally, media studies' deconstruction of images and sound. These tools, methods, and concerns come together in Queer Justice Design, my set of counter-practices for pivoting towards the outsider while making these embodied knowledges central to communities of care. The central tenets and values inform how we move through and co-create these practices with others to shape more livable lives. Those who would benefit from a practice of Queer Justice Design are those scholars and community organizers working towards universal or participatory design, and towards feminist and queer justice. Those I invite into these conversations work in such fields as disability studies, digital humanities, queer theory, feminist praxis, and cultural studies.Item “WELCUM, OONA. TIME FA WE LAAN BOUT GULLAH” (WELCOME, EVERYONE. TIME FOR US TO LEARN ABOUT GULLAH): PENN CENTER’S ROLE IN THE PRESERVATION OF GULLAH GEECHEE’S CULTURAL HERITAGE(2016) Chaplin, Jennie; Williams-Forson, Psyche; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Welcum, Oona. Time Fa We Laan Bout Gullah” (Welcome, Everyone. Time for us to learn about Gullah): Penn Center’s Role in the Preservation of Gullah Geechee’s Cultural Heritage focuses on the historic Penn Center, formerly the Penn School, on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, as a selected site of analytical inquiry and as a premier cultural institution that preserves Gullah history and heritage. This project makes use of interdisciplinary methods from several fields—material culture, museum studies, self-ethnography, visual analysis, and historic preservation, among others—to illuminate the history and culture of the Gullah people. I use these methods to argue that the Penn Center presents a competing “voice” to prevailing discourses because it rewrites and revalues Gullah history. This dissertation delineates how the Gullahs have responded to the dominant discourses through counter-narratives, cultural practices, and individual and community activism. It argues that the Penn Center disrupts discourses seeking to stereotype the Gullah culture by functioning as a site of resistance to mainstream definitions, as a site of the reclamation of voice and agency in the process of self-definition, and as a site for the preservation and celebration of Gullah Geechee culture and cultural identity. In demonstrating the contribution of the Penn Center, this dissertation renders attention to issues related to race, class, and gender as these issues have surfaced in the history and culture under discussion. This project also offers analysis of material culture housed at the Penn Center’s York W. Bailey Museum. Drawing upon the theories of Stuart Hall on cultural identity and E. McClung Fleming on material culture analysis, this study offers analysis of cultural objects and photographic images found in this museum space. This dissertation concludes with oral history narratives that further illuminate the competing “voices” found that shed light on Gullah cultural identity and the manner in which Gullah people must navigate and negotiate the larger American sociopolitical landscape.