Women's Studies

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Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of Saint Luke
(University of Chicago Press, 1989) Barkley Brown, Elsa
Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom
(University of Chicago Press, 1994) Barkley Brown, Elsa
Theorizing Structures in Women's Studies
(Katie King, 2002-05) King, Katie
This essay was written in the midst of my local feminist community's struggles to create a new Ph.D. program in women's studies, and as we labor over the difficulties of communication across disciplines and generations. Local historical developments contextualize these struggles.
Reviewing United Nations World Conferences on Women for Korean Women's Empowerment
(2004-04-13) Bae, Geum-Joo; Moses, Claire; Women's Studies
This thesis explores the historical shifts of the United Nations world conferences on women, considering what is at stake in "thinking globally and acting locally," especially for the Korean women's movement. The following questions are addressed: How have the main issues shifted from the first conference in 1975 to the final one in 2000? What were the linkages between practical issues and epistemic discourses during this process? What kinds of power dynamics have been working in the global arena in terms of transnational feminism? In what context could diverse women's groups succeed in negotiating and producing a consensus? How has the Korean women's movement interacted with the international process? And, in conclusion, what concrete measures might Korean policymakers and women's movement activists undertake as feminists pursuing gender equality?
The Construction of U.S. Camptown Prostitution in South Korea: Trans/Formation and Resistance
(2006-11-28) Lee, Na Young; Kim, Seung-kyung; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation examines the historical construction and transformation of U.S. camptown prostitution (kijich'on prostitution) in South Korea. Wrought by Japanese colonialism, U.S. military occupation, national division, and the Korean War, camptown prostitution has been historically constructed and reconstructed within a complex web of dynamic power relations between/among nation-states, subjects, and NGOs. This is a study of U.S. camptown prostitution, however, which is not just about military prostitution. Rather, it is a study of the power dynamics inherent in the material basis and the discursive formations that make the phenomenon, kijich'on prostitution, substantial. As such, this study analyzes the multiple intersections of structures of power that constitute the kijich'on. The purpose of this study is 1) to provide a geneology to explain the socio-historical phases of camptown prostitution, 2) to gauge the impacts of inter-state relations, U.S. military policy, and (inter)national policies on the kijich'on and kijich'on prostitution, 3) to trace the roles and activities of Korean NGOs and women's organizations with regard to kijich'on prostitution, and finally 4) to understand the triangular relationship among the nation-states, women subjects, and movement organizations in (re)constructing kijich'on prostitution as both material reality and symbolic metaphor. Thus, the research questions at the center of this dissertation are directed towards four themes: historicizing kijich'on prostitution, understanding the role of the nation-states and NGOs in the process of construction and transformation of the kijich'on, deconstructing the policies that have impacted kijich'on prostitution and the women's movement against kijich'on prostitution. In order to answer these questions, this study employs multiple methods of gathering information and analysis, including archival research, participant observation, in-depth interviews, and textual analysis. Utilizing gender as a crucial analytical category, this dissertation contributes not only to an understanding of camptown prostitution, but also to the theoretical conceptualization of military prostitution, feminist radical theories of gender, race, and nation, and the trans/national feminist movements.
Performing Fatness and the Cultural Negotiations of Body Size
(2007-04-27) Tillery, Sarah M.; Struna, Nancy; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
In his thoroughly researched work, Transmen and FTMs: Identities, Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities (1999), Jason Cromwell states for the communities of transmen and FTMs, "The limits on the uses of bodies, and on what types of bodies are considered legitimate, is regulated through the body politic (judicial, medical, and political systems) Furthermore, through the body, the body politic dictates what constitutes legitimate sex and gender, normal sexuality, and even what identities are considered appropriate" (32). Similarly, our cultural understandings about and personal relationships to fatness are informed by an intricate configuration of medical, legal, political, and visual messages that convey notions of "acceptable" and "unacceptable" body size. This dissertation will examine multiple instances wherein the negotiation of these messages produces complicated subject positions for bodies of size. It will investigate how the fat body operates to reveal both hegemonic as well as counter-hegemonic significance by drawing upon the authority of medical, legal, and political narratives produced about fatness and body size. By analyzing the performative texts of the film, Real Women Have Curves, the photography collection Women En Large, and a political performance group of fat cheerleaders, called F.A.T.A.S.S., this project will examine the representations of fat women to illustrate how fat subjectivities are neither merely accommodating nor simply resistive. Denying any construction of a one-dimensional story about resisting bodies or hegemonic narratives, this dissertation seeks to highlight the nuanced and complicated subjectivities produced by and for fat women within various contexts. And by analyzing the complexity of these moments, "Performing Fatness" will attempt to elevate body size as a major point of consideration within the analysis of all bodies. In so doing, body size will be revealed as interconnected and inseparable from our understandings of race, class, gender, sexuality, as well as, other points of identification, and ultimately transform the ways in which we theorize and understand bodies altogether.
The Maze of Gaze: The Color of Beauty in Transnational Indonesia
(2007-05-25) Prasetyaningsih, Luh Ayu S.; Moses, Claire; Kim, Seung-kyung; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
What are the effects of transnational circulations of people, objects, and ideas on our understanding of skin color, as it intersects with and complicates other categories of identity such as race, gender, nationality, and sexuality, in a transnational context? This dissertation addresses this question by providing evidence for the ways in which meanings of skin color, as it intersects with race, gender, sexuality, and nationality, are constructed transnationally through people, objects, and ideas that travel across national boundaries from pre- to postcolonial Indonesia. This dissertation uses "beauty" as an organizing trope to limit its analysis, ensuring analytical depth within each chapter. This analytical depth is further ensured by choosing specific sites of analysis to highlight particular historical periods and countries from which specific people, objects, and ideas travel. The sites I examine include Old Javanese adaptations of Indian epics (to understand the workings of "color" in precolonial times); beauty product advertisements that functioned as propaganda for Dutch and Japanese colonialism; skin-whitening ads published after 1998 in the Indonesian edition of American women's magazine Cosmopolitan; and an interpretive reading of the Buru Tetralogy novels (Bumi Manusia, Anak Semua Bangsa, Jejak Langkah, and Rumah Kaca) by Indonesia's best known author, Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Interviews with Indonesian women are also integrated in this dissertation. This dissertation aims to help us understand the semiotics of skin color: 1) as a transnational construction; 2) as a signifier for constructing distinctions and justifying gender discrimination; 3) as it is signified by (rather than a signifier for) race, gender, sexuality, and nation; 4) as a site where women articulate their resistance to or complicity with dominant racial, color, and gender ideology; and 5) as a "boundary object" that perpetuates racial and gender hierarchy in a global context.
Ad/ministering Education: Gender, Colonialism, and Christianity in Belize and the Anglophone Caribbean
(2008-01-28) Rellihan, Heather; Bolles, Augusta L; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation looks at the relationship between educational achievement and power in the Anglophone Caribbean, with particular emphasis on Belize. Girls are outperforming boys at every level of education, but women still have higher unemployment rates and hold the lowest paying jobs, while men are in more decision-making positions in every sector of the economy. This project considers one major question: Why do women remain in less powerful positions even when they are better educated? To explore this question I look at the role that missionary groups played in administering education under British colonialism. I focus on Belize where religious groups maintain a high level of control over education in the postcolonial era. I use twentieth-century Caribbean literature to suggest the effects of Christian ideology on the hidden curriculum and on women's social, economic, and political power. The literature I discuss includes George Lamming's In the Castle of my Skin (Barbados), Austin Clarke's Growing Up Stupid under the Union Jack (Barbados), Merle Hodge's Crick Crack, Monkey (Trinidad), Merle Collins's Angel (Grenada), Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John and Lucy (Antigua), and Zee Edgell's Beka Lamb (Belize).
An Intersectional Gaze at Latinidad, Nation, Gender and Self-Perceived Health Status
(2008-04-25) Logie, Laura Ann; Zambrana, Ruth E; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This study's main objective is to examine selected health care factors that are associated with self-perceived health status. Five research questions guided this study: Are there differences by gender on health access, English language proficiency, literacy levels, health behaviors, perceived discrimination and depression? Are there differences in reported number of chronic conditions, sources of health information and complementary/alternative medicine (CAM) used by gender? What factors are most likely to predict self-perceived health status by gender? What complementary and alternative medicines are Central and South Americans most likely to use by gender? And what sociodemographic factors distinguish Central and South Americans from other Latinos subgroups? The study used a cross-sectional design. Data was collected using a survey instrument that obtained sociodemographic information, and measured literacy, health behaviors, perceived discrimination and self-reported presence of chronic conditions, sources of health information and use of CAM. Multi-methods were used to analyze data: descriptive, univariate and bivariate analytic techniques; content analyses and regrouping of responses into thematic categories; and comparative analyses of socio-demographic and access indicators of study sample to national data. The major findings of this study are that few gender differences were found on the major study variables. However, women are less likely to drink alcohol and smoke but have higher rates of depression. Reported number of chronic conditions, sources of health information, and complementary/alternative medicine showed no difference by gender. The strongest predictor of self-perceived health status was higher education level. Sociodemographic factors that distinguish Central and South Americans from Latinos subgroups include: the study sample has significantly less income than the national sample although similar education levels; self-perceived health status of fair/poor is higher among study sample than other Latino subgroups with Central and South American women respondents having higher rates than male respondents. This study contributes to knowledge in the field of Women's Studies and Latino Studies by expanding the lens of the study of women's health by theorizing the importance of the intersection of race/ethnicity and class as experienced by Latinas.
Casualties of Cold War: Toward a Feminist Analysis of American Nationalism in U.S.-Russian Relations
(2008-07-24) Williams, Kimberly; Moses, Claire G; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Using a feminist transdisciplinary research approach, this dissertation interrogates the discursive configurations that constituted the framework of meaning within which the United States conducted its relationship with the Russian Federation between 1991 and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It calls attention to the production and operation of what I refer to as "gendered Russian imaginaries" (i.e., the range of masculinities and femininities that have been assigned to narrative and visual depictions of Russia and Russians in American political and popular culture) that have been invoked as part of American cold war triumphalism to craft and support U.S. foreign policy. The dissertation has two parts. While much has been written about the consequences of U.S. Russia policy, I explore its ideological causes in Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4. Chapter 1 enumerates the foundational precepts upon which my project relies, while Chapter 2 offers some necessary background information concerning the evolution and deployment of gendered nationalisms in the Russian Federation and in the United States. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the metaphors and analogies deployed throughout the congressional hearings that led to two pieces of U.S. legislation, the Freedom Support Act of 1992 and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000. Through visual, narrative, and discursive analyses of several popular culture texts, including 1997's animated feature film Anastasia (Chapter 5), NBC's hit television series The West Wing (Chapter 6), and Washington, D.C.'s popular International Spy Museum (Chapter 7), part two explores the ways in which Russia and Russians were visually and narratively depicted in U.S. popular culture at the turn of the twenty-first century. Given the Russian Federation's status as the world's second-largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia, the importance of Russia to contemporary U.S.-Middle East politics can no longer be in any doubt. Consequently, the mistakes, assumptions, and triumphalist arrogance of the United States since 1991 must be reckoned with and accounted for. This dissertation contributes a feminist analysis to that endeavor by drawing attention to the links between cultural and national identities, the gendered politics of knowledge production, and the circulation of power in transnational contexts.
SARS Discourse Analysis: Technoscientific Race-Nation-Gender Formations in Public Health Discourse
(2008-10-28) Jen, Clare Ching; Zambrana, Ruth; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This study's main objective is to analyze public health urgencies as socio-cultural phenomena produced in public health discourses with a focus on severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). Five questions guide this study: What claims do different social worlds make to constitute public health discourses that produce biopolitical subjects in raced-nationed-gendered formations? What are the central concepts in each social world's SARS discourse? In what ways is the socio-cultural construction of risk central to the discursive construction of SARS? In what ways does each of the social worlds produce biopolitical subjects in raced-nationed-gendered formations? What are the underlying public health ethics in SARS discourse? This study analyzes data sources across three arenas--science, media, and public policy--and specifically four social worlds--government-science, non-government-science, mainstream news media, and government-public policy. Data sampling units consist of written text and visual images published in public health reports, scholarly papers, newspaper and magazine articles, Congressional Hearing transcripts and prepared witness testimonies. The conceptual and methodological framework draws from numerous areas of inquiry: critical race studies; feminist studies of science; public health ethics and social inequalities in public health; media framing; grounded theory; and discourse analysis. Several discursive frames and configurations prominently emerge: (1) the War on SARS; (2) Oppositional Metaphors and Analogies; (3) Ir/Responsible Global Biopolitical Citizens; (4) SARS Risk Discourse; (5) Biopolitical Subjectivity in the "New Normal"; and (6) Face Masks and Metaphors of Un/Masking. In confluence, these frames yield a Trio of Human-Technology Figures. I consider this Trio an analytic construct in an APACrit-informed, feminist technoscience approach to public health discourse analysis. The overall SARS discourse, contoured by already existing narratives of race, nation and gender, rearticulates these narratives as a technoscientific race-nation-gender project. As an expression of public health ethics, SARS discourse manifests ethical tensions in relation to theorizations of justice. This study contributes to knowledge in women's studies, critical race studies, feminist studies of science, and public health ethics, by demonstrating the richness of public health discourse as an object of inquiry and the necessity of a critical race, feminist technoscience analysis of ideological formations that have social justice implications.
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.
SLAVE SHIPS, SHAMROCKS, AND SHACKLES: TRANSATLANTIC CONNECTIONS IN BLACK AMERICAN AND NORTHERN IRISH WOMEN'S REVOLUTIONARY AUTO/BIOGRAPHICAL WRITING, 1960S-1990S
(2010) Washburn, Amy Leigh; Rosenfelt, Deborah S.; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation explores revolutionary women's contributions to the anti-colonial civil rights movements of the United States and Northern Ireland from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. I connect the work of Black American and Northern Irish revolutionary women leaders/writers involved in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Black Panther Party (BPP), Black Liberation Army (BLA), the Republic for New Afrika (RNA), the Soledad Brothers' Defense Committee, the Communist Party-USA (Che Lumumba Club), the Jericho Movement, People's Democracy (PD), the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), the National H-Block/ Armagh Committee, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), Women Against Imperialism (WAI), and/or Sinn Féin (SF), among others by examining their leadership roles, individual voices, and cultural productions. This project analyses political communiqués/ petitions, news coverage, prison files, personal letters, poetry and short prose, and memoirs of revolutionary Black American and Northern Irish women, all of whom were targeted, arrested, and imprisoned for their political activities. I highlight the personal correspondence, auto/biographical narratives, and poetry of the following key leaders/writers: Angela Y. Davis and Bernadette Devlin McAliskey; Assata Shakur and Margaretta D'Arcy; Ericka Huggins and Roseleen Walsh; Afeni Shakur-Davis, Joan Bird, Safiya Bukhari, and Martina Anderson, Ella O'Dwyer, and Mairéad Farrell. These women address similar themes in their work either through direct communication (i.e., political communiqués and personal correspondence) and/or indirect expression (i.e., news coverage and auto/biographical responses to it). I document moments of transatlantic solidarity among them. This project also draws on interviews with selected writers for supplemental data in interpreting their personal histories and writings. This dissertation is concerned with tracing and analyzing the politics and prose/ poetry of Black American and Northern Irish women. Their cultural expressions concern revolutionary struggle. I use their work as a source of data and an object of analysis. My work establishes links between several areas: nation and anti-colonialism, race and anti-racism, gender and feminism, literature and genre, content and analysis, and theory and praxis.
Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species
(2010) Tsing, Anna
This web page is part of a festschrift for philosopher and scientist Donna Haraway, edited by Katie King. It is also available at http://partywriting.blogspot.com/.
Pastpresents: Playing Cat's Cradle with Donna Haraway
(2010) King, Katie
This web page is part of a festschrift for philosopher and scientist Donna Haraway, edited by Katie King. It is also available at http://partywriting.blogspot.com/.
How Like a Reef: Figuring Coral, 1839-2010
(2010) Helmreich, Stefan
This web page is part of a festschrift for philosopher and scientist Donna Haraway, edited by Katie King. It is also available at http://partywriting.blogspot.com/.
Ciliated Sense
(2010) Hayward, Eva
This web page is part of a festschrift for philosopher and scientist Donna Haraway, edited by Katie King. It is also available at http://partywriting.blogspot.com/.
Modest Witness: A Painter's Collaboration with Donna Haraway
(2010) Randolph, Lynn
This web page is part of a festschrift for philosopher and scientist Donna Haraway, edited by Katie King. It is also available at http://partywriting.blogspot.com/.
Ron Eglash Offers a Reframing of Technophilia
(2010) Eglash, Ron
This web page is part of a festschrift for philosopher and scientist Donna Haraway, edited by Katie King. It is also available at http://partywriting.blogspot.com/.
Black South African Women Writers: Narrating the Self, Narrating the Nation
(2010) Boswell, Barbara; Bolles, Lynn; Rosenfelt, Deborah; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation examines the ways in which Black women writers construct the South African nation in their fiction. Based on analyses of four novels, Miriam Tlali's Muriel at Metropolitan (1979), Lauretta Ngcobo's And They Didn't Die (1989), Zoë Wicomb's David's Story (2000), and Sindiwe Magona's Mother to Mother (1998), it examines how those most disenfranchised by the policy of apartheid in South Africa articulated, configure and re-imagine the nation through their writing. It also investigates how these women writers construct themselves as writing subjects in a society that has historically denied them creative and personal agency. I view Black women's writing as a form of activism and resistance to apartheid, and situate the production of their novels within the larger political context of twentieth century South Africa. The dissertation thus focuses on the ways in which the apartheid doctrine affected Black women's lives politically and as producers of writing. Drawing theoretically on Mamphele Ramphela's conceptualizations of space, Carole Boyce Davies' formulation of Black women writers as "migratory" subjects, and life course theory, I analyze life history interviews with four writers in an attempt to map the ways they transcended their "received" identities as laborers and reproducers of labor for the apartheid nation, to become authors of their own lives and works. I expand traditional feminist definitions of agency, arguing that, for these women, writing became an act that was cumulatively agentic, instilling in them increased personal agency. This outcome was the opposite of the apartheid's state intended goal of oppressing and silencing these writers. I further argue that in writing, the authors were engaged in creative re-visioning - a subject's ability to re-envision or reimagine what is possible for her to achieve within her lifetime. The dissertation then goes on to examine four novels produced by Tlali, Ngcobo, Magona, and Wicomb, emphasizing the ways in which these texts undermine unitary, masculinist forms of nationalisms, be these apartheid or emerging African nationalisms. I conclude by proposing a Black South African feminist literary criticism as a means for producing literary texts about Black women and as a methodology for interpreting such texts.