Women's Studies

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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).
“Baby Miles”: Reproductive Rights, Labor, and Ethics in the Transnational Korean Reproductive Technology Industry
(2018) Kim, Sunhye; Kim, Seung-kyung; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation examines the transnational circuits of the assisted reproductive technology (ART) industry in South Korea to demonstrate how the concepts of reproductive rights and labor have been contested, negotiated, and reconstructed by various actors—including infertile couples, gamete donors, gestational surrogates, state agents, and medical professionals—across national boundaries. This study envisions reproductive ethics as part of a transnational feminist agenda by examining the ethical issues raised by the complicated relationships between intended parents and gamete donors/surrogates. Although feminist scholars and bioethicists address issues of how intended parents practice their reproductive rights and how egg providers/surrogates’ bodies are commercialized and exploited as they navigate the transnational ART industry, very little exists in the way of an integrated framework that allows us to understand the interdependent relationships between intended parents and gamete providers/surrogates, even though both are “users” of ART technologies as well as “patients” of medical procedures. Furthermore, while current research successfully examines the ethical problems of the transnational ART industry, it unintentionally reinforces the binaries between Asian women as exploited objects and White Westerners as liberated subjects. In order to address these issues within the current literature, I position this project to dispute the unilateral understanding of ART by focusing on the complex relationships between Korean intended parents and non-Korean gamete providers and surrogates. In order to analyze the transnational circuits of the ART industry, I use the term “baby miles” to show the great distances people, capital, and technology travel as they interact in the baby-making process. Drawing on three years of multi-sited ethnographic research conducted in Seoul, Bangkok, Taipei, and Kiev, which included in-depth interviews with 60 people as well as participant observation, I argue that while the increased baby miles create unprecedented legal, social, and ethical issues, prohibiting commercial baby-making industries and returning to a “local baby” is not a solution as it reinforces both the ideology that motherhood is “natural” and the stratified reproduction system.
Barriers and Facilitators to Homeownership for African American Women with Physical Disabilities
(2016) Miles, Angel Love; Thornton Dill, Bonnie; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation fills an important gap in the literature by exploring the social, economic, and health characteristics and experiences of members of a social group that has been otherwise under-examined: African American women with physical disabilities. It raises questions about homeownership to facilitate a better understanding of the relational aspects of gender, race, class, and ability related inequalities, and the extent to which African American women with physical disabilities are, or are not, socially integrated into mainstream American society. It uses grounded theory and develops a Feminist Intersectional Disability analytical framework for this study of homeownership and African American women with physical disabilities. The study found that African American women with physical disabilities experience barriers to homeownership that are multiple, compounding and complex. It suggests a research and social policy agenda that considers the implications of their multiple minority status and its impact on their needs.
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.
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.
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.
BODY OF KNOWLEDGE: BLACK QUEER FEMINIST THOUGHT, PERFORMANCE, AND PEDAGOGY
(2012) Lewis, Mel Michelle; Rosenfelt, Deborah; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation, "Body of Knowledge: Black Queer Feminist Thought, Performance, and Pedagogy," considers the ways in which the body, identity, and performance function as "equipment" for teaching and learning in the college classroom and beyond. The project identifies, names, and examines the ways in which the body functions as a text for some instructors who self-identify as Black queer feminist women, as they draw attention to or deflect attention from their own corporeal presence as racialized, gendered, and sexualized subjects in the feminist classroom and in the broader campus community. For pedagogues whose "embodied text" highlights the nexus of race, gender, and sexuality, identity informs and constructs the classroom. These intersections can disrupt the classroom, and shape the pedagogical project. This dissertation explores the ways in which such pedagogues work to harness their "otherness," or differences from expected teaching identity, and to engage their creative pedagogical power through embodiment and performance. Using two feminist case studies and a self -study, I employ an intersectional feminist approach that envisages the body as a text for teaching about race, gender, and sexuality in higher education. This project theorizes and applies a framework for studying the intersection of creative pedagogy and subversive identity by emphasizing the utility of embodied performance as an instructive tool. The work draws from and contributes to scholarship on intersectionality, the lived experiences of women of color and queer women; and the traditions of feminist studies, Black studies, LGBTQ studies, and feminist and critical pedagogies, particularly addressing the experiences and concerns of teachers in higher education with multiple intersecting identities who work across multiple disciplines. Documenting, the experiences, challenges, and reflections of three Black queer feminists for whom teaching itself is both a commitment and an identity, is as much a contribution as more abstractly theorizing a Black queer feminist pedagogy.
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.
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/.
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.
Cooking with Mama Kim: The Legacy of Korean Women (Re)Defining Cultural Authenticity
(2018) Sprague, Justin; Bolles, Augusta L; Kim, Seung-kyung; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
What is considered “authentically Korean,” how those concepts are imagined, and in what ways authenticity is constructed through the vehicles of food and Korean motherhood is the core focus of this dissertation project. This study employs visual and discourse analysis, utilizing historical archives, vlog personalities, cookbooks, web portals, and various forms of food branding and packaging. Within the interdisciplinary field of Food Studies, the conversation regarding authenticity is a fundamental one, with varying work being performed to examine what and how it is employed, and who/what are the gatekeepers that determine the parameters for something as “authentic.” The intervention into this conversation is to explore the ways that authenticity as a theoretical model has intersectional, subjective, or adaptive, potential. This entails employing the term “plastic authenticity,” which is a model of authenticity that favors the positioning of non-normative bodies (i.e., multiracial and diasporic) as brokers of cultural authenticity. In the end, this dissertation contributes to scholarship in Women’s Studies, Food Studies, and Ethnic Studies by pushing the boundaries of how cultural/racial authenticity is constructed, and the ways that women and food have direct impacts as gatekeepers on this process. Analyses range from a historical timeline of Korean immigration to the U.S. with a focus on Korean women, an analysis of a popular YouTube chef, Maangchi, and her employments of the concept of authenticity, analysis of Korean food branding strategies and their claims of authentic Korean food in the U.S., and the website analysis of a mixed-race Korean community to explore the ways that authenticity is invoked by persons not traditionally deemed “authentically Korean.” This research is critical, as it expands the field of research in Korean Studies to not only focus on women and mixed-race Koreans as historical objects, but as active agents in cultural production, meaning-making, and history writing.
Decolonizing anthropology
(Wiley, 2023-07-14) Bolles, A. Lynn
Thirty-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.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RUSSIAN COUNTER-TRAFFICKING MOVEMENT: THE ANGEL COALITION AND INTERNATIONAL POLITICS ON CIVIL SOCIETY, FEMINISM, AND HUMAN TRAFFICKING
(2014) Shupiko, Denise; Moses, Claire G.; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
In recent decades, transnational advocacy networks (TANs) for women's rights have become major players in the international arena, but have also struggled to maintain egalitarian and democratic practices within their ranks, as members from different world regions attempt to have their voices heard. In this dissertation, I question what strategies TANs can employ to more effectively and democratically push states for change on important social issues. To address this question, I carry out a case study of the development of the Russian movement against human trafficking from 1998 to 2008, with particular focus on the organization that served as leader of this movement, the Angel Coalition. To better understand the global forces that gave rise to this development, I examine two transnational movements that collided in Russia in the late 1990s: the contemporary transnational movement against human trafficking, and the movement by the United States and other Western governments to promote the growth of civil societies in developing and post-socialist countries as part of democracy aid programs. This dissertation contributes to transnational civil society theory and transnational feminist theory. The Angel Coalition, an organization run by activists from Russia, other countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States, and Western countries, and which received the majority of its funding from Western governments and foundations, overcame obstacles both to organizing across cultural and power differences and to influencing policy of the Russian Federation, a state known to reject the influence of foreign governments and foreign-funded civil society. I argue that two factors were especially important to the success of the Angel Coalition, as part of a transnational counter-trafficking network, in pushing the Russian state to take action against human trafficking: 1) counter-trafficking activists demonstrated a practiced understanding of the political environment of Russia; and 2) activists effectively communicated to the state how it would benefit from collaboration with civil society. Finally, I argue that organizational practices of the Angel Coalition, as a multinational NGO, facilitated its ability to implement these strategies. Most importantly, activists utilized their differences as resources and expressed respect for the unique contributions of all members of the coalition.
Dissonant Belonging and the Making of Community: Native Hawaiian Claims to Selfhood and Home
(2016) Soon-Ludes, Jeannette; Kim, Seung-kyung; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
In 1898 the United States illegally annexed the Hawaiian Islands over the protests of Queen Liliʽuokalani and the Hawaiian people. American hegemony has been deepened in the intervening years through a range of colonizing practices that alienate Kanaka Maoli, the indigenous people of Hawaiʽi, from their land and culture. Dissonant Belonging and the Making of Community is an exploration of contemporary Hawaiian peoplehood that reclaims indigenous conceptions of multiethnicity from colonizing narratives of nation and race. Drawing from archival holdings at the University of Hawaiʽi, Mānoa and in-depth interviews, this project offers an analysis of public and everyday discourses of nation, race, and peoplehood to trace the discursive struggle over Local identity and politics. A context-specific social formation in Hawaiʽi, “Local” is commonly understood as a multiethnic identity that has its roots in working-class, ethnic minority culture of the mid-twentieth century. However, American discourses of race and, later, multiethnicity have functioned to render invisible the indigenous roots of this social formation. Dissonant Belonging and the Making of Community reclaims these roots as an important site of indigenous resistance to American colonialism. It traces, on the one hand, the ways in which Native Hawaiian resistance has been alternately erased and appropriated. On the other hand, it explores the meanings of Local identity to Native Hawaiians and the ways in which indigenous conceptions of multiethnicity enabled a thriving community under conditions of colonialism.
Feelin Feminism: Black Women's Art as Feminist Thought
(2014) Judd, Bettina A.; Barkley Brown, Elsa; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation contends that the systems of racism, (hetero)sexism, and classism are felt in the body, mind, and spirit and that resistance to these systems must be felt as well. Feelin, a term rooted in U.S. Black culture and derived from Black speech (as in "I'm feelin that!"), is deployed as a way of knowing through which Black women engage and create life-affirming art. I argue for understanding black women's creative production as a site of Black feminist thought, one that continuously negotiates, shares and acknowledges emotion as a form of knowledge that, in Audre Lorde's terms, galvanizes radical thought into "more tangible action." In this project I negotiate these issues through close reading and analysis of the work of three artists: photographer Renee Cox, poet Lucille Clifton, musician Avery*Sunshine. In Cox's photography I examine the ways in which she re-imagines racial shaming and Black motherhood through her own body and mothering practice as represented in her work. Through Clifton's words, poetry, and spiritual and creative practice, I trace a theology of joy. And, I analyze expressions of sacro-sexual ecstasy in Avery*Sunshine's genre ambivalent music. These themes of shame, joy, and ecstasy are prominent not only in the work itself, but also in the artists' experiences of creating that work and in the artists' discussions of their work and worldview. Feminist scholarship and affect theory frame my engagements with feelings and emotions as knowledge. Finally, I propose a methodology for engaging Black women's knowledge production that mandates that we take Black women's anger seriously and interrogate from there. This project practices the modes of knowledge production that it presents. Furthering its argument that Black women's art is a site of feminist knowledge production, research is conducted and presented through poetry, mixed media, and personal narrative in addition to academic research methods and prose.
FEMINISM À LA QUEBEC: IDEOLOGICAL TRAVELINGS OF AMERICAN AND FRENCH THOUGHT (1960-2010)
(2012) Page, Genevieve; Moses, Claire; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation examines the travelings of three concepts central to feminism - gender, queer, and intersectionality - as they move between the United States, France, and Quebec. The concept of gender, central to U.S. feminism, is relatively absent from feminist theory in France and Quebec until the 1990s; rather, drawing on Marxist and existentialist traditions, French and Quebec feminists will deploy the term "rapports sociaux de sexe" to identify that differences among women and men are grounded in social structure and, further, that the two classes, women and men, are constituted in hierarchicized relation. The term queer, linguistically subversive in English but lacking this potential when translated into French, is mainly resisted by French materialist feminists and feminist scholars in Quebec on the basis that it displaces social reality focusing instead on resistance through performance. Nonetheless, in Quebec, activists groups such as Les panthères rose are able to present a version of queer that also addresses systemic oppressions. Finally, the concept of intersectionality, theorized first by feminists of color in the U.S. trying to reconcile their allegiances to multiple struggles, provides a useful tool for analyzing the interaction between different systems of oppression and how they shape the lives of people differently located. In France, a similar desire to theorize multiple oppressions led to the development of the concept of "consubstantialité des rapports sociaux," whereby social "rapports" of sex and of socio-economic class are co-constituted. Yet, in the context of changing immigration patterns and a debate on the headscarf, French feminists re-examine the concept of intersectionality to enhance their understanding of racialization and its interaction with gendered structures. In Quebec, a look at three different moments reveals an early theorization of the interaction of multiple oppressions by capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism with feminists, drawing on their experiences as separatist movement participants, self-identifying as "racialized" based on the model of Third World national liberation struggle. In the 1990s and again in 2007, however, feminists will struggle to develop new models of pluralism that address the marginalization, within society in general and also within feminism, of women from minority ethnocultural or religious groups.
FEMINISTS TRANSFORMING THEIR WORLDS: A COLLECTIVE ORAL-HISTORY OF SALVADORAN PROTAGONISTS
(2018) Patt, Yh; Stromquist, Nelly P.; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Working from the premise that we cannot understand how feminism can transform societies without examining it as a multi-leveled project, this dissertation explores how a group of Salvadoran feminists were introduced to feminist ideas, became feminists, and are transforming themselves, communities, and nation. The object of study is how feminists in organizations became protagonists transforming their worlds. Using a collective oral-history approach, the dissertation examines 40 oral-histories with a two-pronged theoretical framework. The first prong is a theory of empowering feminism—which draws from Stromquist’s theory of empowerment (2014, 2015), definition of feminism (2015), and description of Latin America feminist organizations (2007). The second prong is Bourdieu’s theory of capital (1977). With that framework, the study examines the factors, dynamics, and actions of Salvadoran feminists transforming their worlds. The study found the following in the feminists’ trajectories to becoming protagonists: (1) being introduced to feminist ideas by other feminists, who had experienced patriarchal oppression; (2) becoming a feminist often involved either learning gender theory or a collective gender consciousness-raising process; (3) transforming their homes and workplaces by participating in groups where they read their lives with a feminist lens; (4) developing their own capital—knowledge, skills, networks, and collective feminist experiences; (5) increasing their levels of formal education, from high-school to graduate; (6) learning and teaching feminist topics—such as, gender as a social construction, gender-based violence, sexual and reproductive rights, and symbolic violence against women; (7) intervening to change culture with tools—like murals, stencils, festivals, popular theatre, street demonstrations, cyber-feminism, and media; and (8) lobbying governments and pressuring corporations. A key finding is that these oral-histories suggest an association between the feminists who had leftist social movement capital and those who were most successful in their feminist work. Thus, this dissertation found that the Salvadoran feminists in this study transforming themselves into protagonists changing their worlds through feminist praxis exercised in feminist organizations that involves individual and collective empowerment, and entails producing knowledge. Finally, the study highlights the contention that there is exponential potential for feminist social change in communities with a culture of leftist social movement capital.
Food on the Move: Gendered Representation, Cultural Sustainability, and Culinary Practices of Gullah Women
(2015) White, Katie M.; Bolles, Augusta Lynn; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Food on the Move: Gendered Representation, Cultural Sustainability, and Culinary Practices of Gullah Women connects Gullah women and foodways with processes of migration, cultural heritage, sustainability, and memory. Drawing on women’s studies, history, anthropology, literature, film, and food studies, this interdisciplinary project looks at the preparation and presentation of food as an integral part of a sustained Gullah culture. Using Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust alongside contemporary imaginaries of the senses, the work discusses how movement of peoples into and out of the Sea Islands of South Carolina complicates the relationship between the sensory, particularly taste, memory and home. Most importantly, through food-centered stories combined with analyses of cookbooks and other culinary notations, this dissertation examines the vital role women have played in maintaining Gullah culinary history and the dissemination and sustenance of Gullah culture. It enhances not only our understanding of Gullah culture but also of the processes of social and cultural changes necessary to sustain it. This work argues that the Gullah Geechee National Heritage Corridor is a critical site for cultural sustainability particularly in regard to food. Food becomes a site for mapping the traditions, pressures, changes, adaptations, and resistances within a particular racial-ethnic community as it encounters dominant cultures, as well as a site of creativity, pleasure, and survival.
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.
GLOBAL ASSIMILATION AND GLOBAL ALIENATION: LIVES OF PROFESSIONAL WOMEN IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA
(2012) Song, Jing; Kim, Seung-Kyung; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation examines the careers and family lives of "professional, white-collar women" in contemporary China in order to understand the ways in which labor markets, state policies, and gender expectations affect these women's lives in an era of rapid globalization. Drawing on multidisciplinary methods including in-depth interviews with twenty women, content analyses of the biweekly, pop-culture magazine Zhiyin, and the literary analyses of two feminist novels, Wei Hui's Shanghai Baby (2001), and Mian Mian's Candy (2003), I discuss how professional women articulate the meaning of their careers and their family lives, and make sense of their experiences as part of China's path to globalization. Analyzing the ways that professional women construct themselves as "women,"--complying with traditional ideologies of womanhood that historically devalued their achievements in the workplace--I interrogate a category of identity, "professional white-collar women." Thus, I present how these "professional white-collar" women's experiences in their multinational workplaces show that their lives are intricately intertwined with the simultaneous process of being assimilated and alienated as a result of the globalization of China. By arguing that, for these women, instead of increasing their personal agency as independent individuals, their careers serve to develop their desire for materialism and capitalist modernity, I present the irony of China's participation in globalization.