Browsing by Department "Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    On Latinx Poetics: Black Feminist Interventions with the Latinx "X"
    (2018-05) Sanchez Bressler, Alexander
    The term "Latinx" has proliferated in the last ten years for several reasons. Some view the term as a gender inclusive alternative to Latino and Latina; others see the term as an anti-essentialist tool that highlights the tenuousness of "latin" identity. This thesis examines the interaction of myriad definitions of "Latinx" in the context of black feminist debates on terms such as "intersectionality" and "assemblage theory." The thesis takes two literary texts and their use of poetic language as a basis for understanding the complexities and contradictions of queer and/or of color subjectivities in an exciting political and cultural moment marked by "Latinx."
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    Queering Oocytes: Laboratory, Body, Cell
    (2020-05-01) Zussman, Jay
    Recent advances in stem cell technology enable new possibilities for biological reproduction among same-sex couples and transgender people who have undergone medical or surgical transition. Despite this promise of revolutionary queer futurity, biomedical science has been harnessed to marginalize the reproductive capacity of the poor, colonized, and people of color for eugenic and capitalist aims. This study draws upon firsthand experiences working in a reproductive biology laboratory and integrates perspectives from feminist science and technology studies, Black feminism, and queer and transgender studies. The work explores how the formation of scientific knowledge (re)produces racialization of reproductive bodies, capitalist manipulation of reproductive potential, and normative temporalities of reproductive bodies. Examining the dynamic plasticity of sexing and gendering gametes within the laboratory reveals a mechanism by which researchers instill their own internalized sex and gender norms onto their research subjects, essentializing sex and gender hierarchies across species, tissue, and cell boundaries. In vitro gametogenesis, an assisted reproductive technology on the horizon of human use, invites a politics of multiplicity through which to understand all mammalian tissues as potentially reproductive. This novel reproductive future elucidates the interconnections between human and animal reproduction within and beyond the laboratory context and enables groundbreaking new opportunities for interspecies reproductive intimacy and queer reproductive futurity. Ultimately, the work takes an ambivalent view of emergent reproductive technologies, acknowledging their reinforcement of eugenic and economizing racial logics even as they queer human and animal bodies, tissues, and cells and revolutionize kinship and reproductive capacity for bodies deemed non-normative.
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    Reconsidering Occupy Oakland and Its Horizons: Media Misframing, Decolonizing Fractures, and Enduring Resistance Hub
    (2021-04) Alvarado, Madisoon
    Reconsidering 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.
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    Tweeting Feminism: African Feminisms, Digital Counterpublics and The Politics of Gendered Violence
    (2019-05) Kanyogo, Mumbi
    Tweeting feminism is a digital ethnographic and archival study of the ways in which Kenyan feminists appropriate Twitter as a site for community building. Firstly, I explore the mutually enabling modes of gendered violence that have been deeply engrained in Kenya’s public sphere for the duration of its existence as a nation-state – what I call a continuum of patriarchal violence. These modes of harm ultimately short-circuit women’s engagement in mainstream politics and therefore the use of public political space to contend with harm exacted on women. In the wake of this violence, I then contend that a “digital feminist counterpublic sphere” emerges – a term which I use to describe the alternative publics that radical Kenyan feminists have developed to survive their exclusion from formal public sphere engagement. I argue that in this online space, radical Kenyan feminists use disrespectability, care, solidarity practices and archival practices – what I call digital ululations – to generate and strengthen feminist community.