Women's Studies
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Item Decolonizing anthropology(Wiley, 2023-07-14) Bolles, A. LynnThirty-two years after the publication of Faye V. Harrison's edited volume, Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology of Liberation, I take stock of the book's origins and its impact on the discipline. Despite intellectual barriers and postmodernist critiques, Decolonizing Anthropology has influenced a generation of anthropologists who carry forward the book's original spirit. Focusing on the third edition, I show that Decolonizing has both reflected and incited changes in the discipline. Finally, I turn to some recent work in which scholars continue to push the boundaries of what decolonizing anthropology can mean. Throughout, I emphasize the importance of decolonization as a practice in anthropology and highlight the ongoing struggles and successes of scholars working in this tradition.Item MAINTENANCE ART FOR OTHER POSSIBLE WORLDS: Rehearsing a Pedagogy of Care(2023) Peskin, Eva; Lothian, Alexis; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)MAINTENANCE ART FOR OTHER POSSIBLE WORLDS: Rehearsing a Pedagogy of Care brings together stories, moves and activations for approaching access and difference as preconditions for belonging. Both a text and an enactment, the project offers a framework for interdependent creative practice and care-oriented collaboration, doing multiple things at once: it demonstrates an ethic and technique of play-based learning, offers a story about maintenance as the work it takes to keep caring together, and embraces lunacy as a method for creative resistance. Drawing on Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ premise that attention to maintenance can pause the perpetual motion machine of capitalist consumption/production and Ruth Wilson Gilmore's insistence that freedom is a place we make together in the present, the dissertation stages a confrontation of the multiple trainings that have formed my ethical, aesthetic, and relational processes of learning – both within and beyond the academy, both amateurish and professional – in order to lean into the fissures and ruptures one might ignore that the other can see. This inquiry takes shape in a spiral geography of four repeating moves, a conceptual fractal which gives rise to the action of the work: Unsettling, Dwell, Meanwhile, Sensuousness. The project rehearses this repertoire of moves as a means to center consent, access, self-determination, deep listening, and joy – necessities for the creativity required to undo/step away from/dismantle the many intersecting projects of empire which conspire unendingly against life itself, and to collectively transform into a culture of care.Item Like I'm Kin to Him: Black Trans Publics, Relational Bonds, and Collective Creation(2023) Lundy-Harris, Amira Naima; Lothian, Alexis; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Like I’m Kin to Him: Black Trans Publics, Relational Bonds, and Collective Creation traces a history of Black trans relationality in the United States since the 1970’s, investigating what possibilities these connections offer, examining what challenges they present, and exploring what they might mean for the making of the self. This dissertation utilizes a mixed-methods approach, bringing together archival readings, literary analysis, and interviews to theorize the creation and cultivation of Black trans kinship bonds. Taking up Black trans studies, digital studies, public spheres theory, and kinship studies across disparate yet interconnected media contexts, the project tracks how Black trans people meet each other (from support groups to parties to YouTube), how we come to see each other as family, and how these connections help shape who we understand ourselves to be. This dissertation looks to four different sites— a home built for trans youth, a memoir, a social media platform, and a contemporary movement—and explores what kind of shelter they may offer. To this end, the chapters of Like I'm Kin to Him weave together to elucidate a genealogy of Black trans community and life over the last 50 years.Item SOME OF US ARE STARING AT THE STARS: SPECULATIVE FICTION, FANDOM, AND TRANS IMAGINATION(2023) Hagen, Damien; Lothian, Alexis; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Some of us are staring at the stars: Speculative Fiction, Fandom, and Trans Imagination takes up the multiple ways that trans and nonbinary people have used speculative fiction as a survival strategy and worldbuilding tool. Through engagement with trans and nonbinary fans and creators of imaginative works, Damien shows how speculative fiction has powerful material effects for trans lives. Primary attention is given to the possibilities contained in media that was not created to be explicitly “transgender,” but was experienced and read as such through a “trans imaginary.” Damien’s research methods are interdisciplinary, incorporating the use of autoethnography, focus groups, close readings, and thematic analysis. Chapters include an analysis of regeneration as trans possibility in the TV series Doctor Who, an inquiry into shared experiences among trans and nonbinary fans deriving from focus group interviews, an examination of the ways the genre of “body horror” in film and television has been used as a tool for processing and dealing with experiences of body dysphoria, and an analysis of the trans world building possibilities in Blue Delliquanti’s Oh Human Star and Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt.Item Beyond role strain: Work–family sacrifice among underrepresented minority faculty(Wiley, 2022-06-29) Zambrana, Ruth Enid; Hardaway, Cecily R.; Neubauer, Leah C.Objective This study describes the perceived work demands and family caregiving obligations associated with work–family life among URM faculty and the coping strategies used to negotiate the integration of roles. Background Past research on families focuses primarily on professional majority-culture families and often fails to include traditionally and historically underrepresented minority (URM) families. The study of how URM professionals negotiate work and family obligations and economic and institutional constraints remains relatively absent in the family science discourse. Method In-depth individual and group interviews (N = 58) were conducted with US-born African American, Mexican American, and Puerto Rican faculty at research universities. Results The overarching theorizing anchor that grounded the themes was sacrifice. Three themes emerged: excessive work demands/role strain; commitments and caregiving obligations to family of origin and nuclear family; and few coping strategies and resources to maintain a balanced life. Conclusion This analysis offers insight into the multiple factors that affect the experiences of URM academics in their workplaces that deeply influence work roles and self-care and its impact on family roles. These data fill a gap by applying alternative frameworks to explore the work–family nexus among racialized groups. Implications New research frontiers are offered to study the work–family nexus for URM faculty and how higher education can respond to alleviate excessive work demands and work–family life conflicts.Item Women's Studies Worldwide: Cartographies of Transnational Academic Feminism(2023) Montague, Clara; Tambe, Ashwini; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation retells the history of women’s studies from a global perspective, challenging traditional U.S. and Eurocentric narratives about this emerging interdisciplinary field. Beginning with questions about why women’s, gender, and sexuality studies has incited backlash across a range of cultural and geographic locations, this study draws on transnational feminist theory and higher education research to argue for a more broadly situated understanding of academic feminism. Chapter One describes the creation of a digital map featuring more than nine hundred women’s studies degree programs and research centers in seventy countries. Using cartography software including ArcGIS and StoryMaps, this component offers a broader perspective on the field’s distribution than has previously been documented in the scholarly literature, revealing new insights about how women’s studies has grown and contracted as a result of shifting geopolitical trends. Chapter Two examines several examples of collaborative autobiographic writing to show how variously situated authors construct particular narratives about this field. Drawing on the concept of political grammar, this section demonstrates how edited collections about the founding of women’s studies and articles about cross-border collaborations use credentializing and contextualizing discourse in contrast with ideas of development and colleagueship. Chapter Three discusses three international institutes that grew from the University of Maryland’s Curriculum Transformation Project using archival research and oral histories. Involving academic feminist scholars from China, South Korea, the Caribbean, South Africa, Israel, and Hungary, this case study of international exchange demonstrates the complexity of enacting women’s studies across difference. The dissertation concludes with recommendations for how practitioners in the United States might better enact ethical collaborative relationships with colleagues and institutions situated in other national, cultural, and linguistic contexts. Rather than viewing U.S. women’s studies as a blueprint than can be exported and applied elsewhere, this study concludes by arguing for mutual accountability, centering connections across the Global South, and sharing resources as strategies for building effective coalitions that will nurture the field moving forward.Item WHEN SURVIVING IS ILLEGAL: BLACK WOMEN AND THE ENTRAPMENT OF U.S. INCARCERATION AND WELFARE(2021) Hoagland, Tangere L; Rowley, Michelle V; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The institutions of welfare and incarceration are central in poverty governance. My dissertation builds on the work of scholars who deem the relationship between these two systems to work in a coordinated effort through discourse, policy, and practice under a penal-welfare regime. My research considers the following questions: (1) What realities and vulnerabilities does a contemporary understanding of this regime produce for Black women (2) What kinds of violence do Black women become vulnerable to under this current landscape? (3) How are Black women navigating daily vulnerabilities that lead to or perpetuate their risk of state-sponsored entrapment? This research finds that the state uses the penal-welfare regime to script Black women for erasure by creating conditions of suffering and punishing those who attempt to survive. However, Black women create and locate resources that simultaneously aid in their survival and help them resist the ways the state renders them disposable. My project examines poverty governance to re-think state-sponsored violence against Black women—on both macro- and micro-levels. I explore oppressive systems, the barriers they create, and individual responses to them. My project begins at the macro level with a review of shifts in US welfare policies and prison reform—specifically the 1996 welfare-to-workfare shift and the skyrocketing rates of female incarceration—to understand the vulnerabilities these shifts created for Black working-class women. It then moves to legal case-study analyses of Black women accused of welfare fraud and arrests made in welfare offices to understand how the two distinct systems operate co-dependently. I conducted life-history interviews with twenty Black single mothers currently using welfare or formerly incarcerated. These participants, from Prince George’s County, Maryland, illuminate vulnerabilities experienced in the wealthiest African American county in the nation. Focusing on Black women in this county emphasizes the production of class fluidity within this terrain as participants with middle-class backgrounds—who believe themselves exceptional—found themselves unexpectedly navigating poverty. Overall, my research illuminates the disposability of U.S. Black women whose experiences can be described as a slow death once they are entrapped by the penal-welfare regime, but it also emphasizes their multifaceted tools of survival.Item Transversal Media: Power, Peril, and Potential in the Ever-Expanding 3D Multiverse(2021) Bauer, DB; Lothian, Alexis; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Transversal media move. They move with ease across a variety of interfaces, communities of practice, and applications. With highly compatible file formats, they move across a multitude of 3D-friendly devices, like virtual reality, holograms, and augmented reality projections, and now with the 3D printer, can enter the physical world, more often than not, as plastic. Transversal technologies, like 3D scanning and computer-aided design (CAD), grant an unprecedented control and access, in both magnitude and kind, to the spatial, material, and physical world. Because of this, media illustrate the biopolitical complexity and nuance of the term capture—long used in media praxis—whose meaning can imply both a desire to do justice to a subject, often by means of representational accuracy, and also a desire to do violence to by means of seizing, possessing, or trapping. In turn, this project explores the many affective, epistemological, and aesthetic contours of meaning and impact when transversal media are read through the lens of capture. Organized by five major keywords—making, transversal, play, capture, and preservation—this project illustrates the far-reaching impact of this particular media type that does particular things in this particular moment. Specifically, this project coins the term, transversal media, to discuss this unique media ontology and concretize it through hands-on creative practice and the work of artists, designers, scholars, and activists by centering the methodological richness of hands-on making, creativity, and play. It also addresses the connections between technical affordance and theory, culture, and ethics, as media scholars have modeled with other emerging media formats of the past, like McLuhan on television, Deleuze on film, and Sontag on photography. This approach reveals how various interface affordances and applied practices converse with, and with varying implications, the people, places, and things they mediate. Overall, this project addresses how cultural ideologies are reflected in the design, practice, and rhetoric of 3D transversal media, and how this media genre pushes notions of materiality, embodiment, and power into new realms of thinking, doing, and being.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 WHICH TEAM DO YOU PLAY FOR?: VISIBILITY AND QUEERING IN BRAZILIAN SOCCER(2019) Snyder, Cara Knaub; Tambe, Ashwini; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Brazilians designate their country “O País de Futebol” (The Country of Football) with a singular vigor. But from its earliest years, the sport has been defined along masculine lines; women in Brazil were actually banned from playing soccer for four decades (1940 - 1979). The exclusion of women, gay men, and trans athletes has come under considerable challenge in the past two decades. This dissertation traces how marginalized groups have claimed access to soccer, and what it means for processes of visibility, assimilation, and ultimately, queering the game itself. Combining ethnographic, archival, and visual methods, the project unfolds over three case studies focused on women, trans, and gay players, respectively. The first chapter presents a history of Brazilian women’s soccer: using media sources and interviews, it tracks tensions between women athletes’ demands to be seen and the gendered forms of disciplining that have accompanied their increased visibility. Such disciplining has contributed to the whitening and feminization of women’s soccer, as seen in the case of the Paulistana tournament, and to the subsequent migration of Brazil’s top athletes. These migrant players have since used their transnational networks to jockey for recognition and a more equitable distribution of resources. My second chapter offers an ethnography of Brazil’s first trans men’s soccer team, the Brazilian Meninos Bons de Bola (MBB, or Soccer Star Boys), to explore futebol as a site for combating invisibility and violence, creating transness, and queer worldmaking. Using a combination of focus groups, ethnographic observations, and interviews, I explore how team members theorize oppression, survive transphobia, and thrive. My third chapter analyzes the challenges facing the Brazilian BeesCats, a cis gay men’s soccer team, as they form the first Brazilian contingent to participate in the international Gay Games. Drawing from ethnographic data from the 2018 Paris Gay Games, I examine the ethnosexual frontiers of this international LGBT sporting event. Ultimately, I argue, the athletes described in this dissertation make claims on their national sport as part of deeper struggles for belonging. In the context of a culturally rightward turn in Brazil, they are also queering futebol and subverting gender ordering.