Women's Studies
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Item 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.Item 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.