Browsing by Author "Hasso, Frances Susan"
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Item Open Access Figuring a Queer Aesthetics and Politics of Urban Dissent in Istanbul(2020) Goknur, Sinan CemThis dissertation is a theoretical and art/archival practice-based exploration of aesthetic-affective resistance to neoliberal recuperation of urban space that not only constitutes a physical manifestation of capitalist accumulation by dispossession, but also serves to aesthetically valorize affluent middle-class normativity. Through archival research, I discuss the rise of aesthetic-political dissidence against the rent-seeking displacement of the minoritized in Istanbul, and follow its trajectory from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. Using visual analyses, I theorize the aesthetic strategies of cultural-political dis-identification from the presiding logics and affectations of neoliberalism. These aesthetic strategies include satire, valorization of the obsolete, discarded, devalued and superfluous, and the fragmental provocation of memory to keep the lived history of Istanbul active against neoliberal erasure without monumentalizing a particular historical narrative. The art practice component of this dissertation provides self-reflection on my art works that draws upon aesthetic-political developments in Istanbul. In my discussion, I also put my art practice in conversation with queer temporality, utopian realism, and a queer-feminist ethic-erotic that orient us to social practices of production, reproduction, and subjectivization based on relational principles driven from sensuous reciprocity that go beyond the familial and the naturalized, and that the dominant political-economic order renders unfeasible.
Item Open Access Reconsidering Occupy Oakland and Its Horizons: Media Misframing, Decolonizing Fractures, and Enduring Resistance Hub(2021-04) Alvarado, MadisoonReconsidering Occupy Oakland and Its Horizons is an archival study of the creation, reception, evolution, and remembrance of Occupy Oakland using a feminist lens. I investigate how Occupy Oakland’s radically democratic mobilization against economic violence, racism, and police violence was undermined by local and regional news coverage—namely in the San Francisco Chronicle and Oakland Tribune—through framing devices that demonized protesters and delegitimized the movement. I nevertheless found differences between local and regional coverage. Occupy Oakland challenged existing hegemonic boundaries regarding participatory democracy as its activists –seasoned and less experienced people from multiple generations – experimented with horizontal world-building through community structures, methods, and processes. This horizontal radical movement nevertheless struggled with the same divisions and inequalities that existed outside its camps: heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and classism. The “stickiness” of embodied and structural inequalities persisted in Occupy Oakland camps despite efforts to create a radically egalitarian community. The nature of this stickiness can only be understood by taking seriously the local material and institutional conditions, obstacles, and histories that shaped the spaces of protest and its participants. Though news coverage often describes the movement as a failure, several new projects and coalitions formed during and after Occupy Oakland, illustrating its dynamic legacy and challenging social movement scholarship that reproduces temporal demise frameworks in its analysis. A feminist examination of these projects demonstrates how stories of Occupy Oakland’s “failure” or “death” miss the nature of projects attempting to radically reimagine a patriarchal, racist, neoliberal social world along more egalitarian and just lines. The problems Occupy Oakland struggled against and challenged have only intensified during the CoVid-19 pandemic.Item Open Access "The Door that Cannot be Closed": Citizens bidoon Citizenship in the United Arab Emirates(2016-03-08) Alqadi, DialaThis project traces how and why people "without" [bidoon] citizenship emerged as a problem in the United Arab Emirates in the 2000s. It examines the reasons the government refuses to grant them citizenship despite regular complaints that citizens are "outnumbered" by migrants. Chapter 2 draws on archived British documents and other sources to show the new forms of sovereignty over territory and population that emerged as colonial interests shifted from control of waterways to control of land and fossil fuels. It analyzes the shifting power dynamics between British colonial powers and local rulers, and the legal developments that preceded the formation of the federation in 1971. The historical approach demonstrates the fluidity in power relations and the later tensions produced by multiple jurisdictions that were in fact encouraged by British colonial rule. Chapter 3 draws on scholarship, government sources, news, laws and decrees to show how the bidoons were casualties of a larger population project related to consolidating "federal" rule. It considers citizenship-related UAE laws and procedures between 1971 and 2011 and discusses turning points and major sources of demographic and political tension and the ways these have produced the problem of the bidoon in the UAE. The chapter also discusses state “security” discourse and cultural anxieties felt by Emirati citizens in relation to non-citizens and migrants and how bidoons articulate their frustrations and make claims for citizenship online. Chapter 4, which relies on blogs and news outlets, focuses on the dominant explanatory accounts for why bidoons, who speak the regional Arabic dialect and have lived there for generations, are refused citizenship. Ultimately, these accounts are insufficient as explanations for why the bidoon problem remains.Item Open Access Working on the Inside, Living on the Outside: Migrant Domestic Workers in Jordan(2017-05-11) Dai, DianaMigrant workers are often seen as the archetypical excluded figure. This image becomes even more vivid and convincing when the worker is identified as woman, non-white, and poor. In response to this excluded figure, public and scholarly discourse has been focused on the language of inclusion and integration, which often implies expanding citizenship, amnesty, legal status, and other forms of juridicial clemency. This thesis pushes against the tendency to see exclusion and inclusion as a natural binary and with clearly demarcated borders. Instead, I argue that spaces and conditions of exclusion and inclusion are contingent upon and subject to state power and dominant discourses. What this means in relation to migrant domestic workers in Jordan is that being “included” -- whether by the law, by the family, by the state -- can often yield ambiguous results. Using the notion of inclusion as a starting point, my thesis investigates the complex dynamics of labor migration in Jordan and the Philippines, the role of both these states in the governance and “inclusion” of migrants/citizens, and the role of capitalist ideology in the exploitation of migrant domestics. I find that, on the one hand, being included into the law, family, or state subjects one to more control, surveillance, and discipline. On the other hand, being “excluded” from the law, family, or state can open up possibilities for more autonomy, choice, and consensual relations.