Women's Studies
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Item 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.Item Güeras, Morenas, y Prietas: Mexicana Color Lines and Ethnoracial Sameness-Difference(2013) Perez, Ana Maria; Bolles, Augusta Lynn; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This interdisciplinary study documents the ethnoracial identities and racialized experiences of women of Mexican descent residing in the greater Tampa Bay region and the multiple meanings that they assigned to race and color categories. Tampa's in-between status, straddling North and South and black/white imaginaries provides important insight into the ways that this rural Mexican population negotiate questions of race and color. The study's participants share a history of migrant farm work and by extension experienced familiar tropes of Mexican racialization that connect manual labor, illegality, to low social status. What is less known is the significance of vernacular Mexican color terminology such as morena, prieta, and negra (approximate translation: brown, dark brown, and black) and the migration of meaning of this dynamic and relational lexicon of race, color, and gender. The use of this informal language of race and color suggests an ethnoracial form of cultural citizenship that permits the right to difference in the face of Mexican non- racialism and U.S. color-blindness. The simultaneous practice of tolerance and rejection of racial difference reflects the constant negotiation of mestizaje (race mixture); that has worked to erase a larger history of Mexican multiraciality. The everyday use of this dynamic color terminology serves as embodied testaments to Mexico's overlapping Indian-Black-European histories and cultures. I argue that the ethnoracial location morena works as an idealized and ambiguous middle ground that permits ethnoracial heterogeneity. Most telling, this idealized racial middle ground bends and shifts to accommodate a range of skin colors and tones symbolically located in between a white and black color line. This major finding complicates contemporary theories that presume that Mexican and Latin American racial ideologies reject and eliminate black and white polarizations. The everyday negotiations of color labels among women of Mexican descent offer a window into the translocal movement between and among these fluid categories. This research promises to recast mestizaje as an embodied experience and reanimate color as a category of analysis to consider the significance of the overlap of Indo-Hispanic and Afro-Latin American racial formations in Mexico. .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.