Browsing by Subject "Feminism"

In the aftermath of the #MeToo moment, we are called to revisit old conversations about human dignity, gendered power, and the conditions under which consent can be freely given. To date, the shape of this discourse in the mainstream has lacked sustained analysis through the frameworks of critical feminist and queer theory, particularly these fields’ insight that gender, sexuality, and behavior mutually inform each other. I argue that to understand and begin to repair the sexual politics of our present moment we must take seriously these fields’ contention that sex, like gender, is a historically and socially determined category and, therefore, that its definition is malleable. Only by understanding what we mean when we say “sex” can we begin to disentangle the role sex plays in shaping social conventions and power differentials.

My dissertation reads the narratives of 20th- and 21st-century American popular culture through the lens of the emerging field of asexuality studies. Asexuality studies constitutes a growing body of cultural as well as scientific inquiry. As Kristina Gupta (2015) suggests, asexuality can act as a useful critical foil to compulsory sexuality, that is, to the unspoken social imperative to desire and to engage in sexual activity with other people. We see evidence of compulsory sexuality not just in the omnipresence and presumption of the (heterosexual) couple in cultural and social institutions, but also in our own assumption, for instance, that a single individual must be in want of a partner.

Reading against the grain of compulsory sexuality, whose discursive dominance Ela Przybylo (2011) has termed sexusociety, in this dissertation I analyze three figures of asexuality that exists on the on the margins of sexual culture. The figures of the Spinster, the Child, and the Robot do not operate outside the limits of sexusociety but rather trouble it from within. More often than not the resistance they face is indicative of the hidden mechanisms of compulsory sexuality at work in sustaining the society they exist in. These figures of resistance, canonically asexual or not, serve as inflection points where the (il)logic of compulsory sexuality begins to fray. All three figural types are all slurs that have been levelled against asexuals, and are figures that, when they present in fiction, are presumed asexual until proven otherwise. I examine the way that they resist compulsory sexuality rather than claiming a straightforward asexual identity for them, because I am uninterested in the question of whether asexuality should be thought of as a distinct sexuality, or outside of sexuality altogether. Rather, embracing a relatively capacious definition of asexuality as my analytic expands the archive available to me and allows me to identify limit cases of compulsory sexuality where its operations fail to cohere.

Starting from existing groundwork laid in the intersections between asexuality studies and queer and feminist scholarship, as in Cerankowski and Milks’s Asexualities: Queer and Feminist Perspectives (2014) and Ela Przybylo’s Asexual Erotics (2019), I use these figures to illustrate how compulsory sexuality masks the ways we have been preconditioned to allow our own sexual objectification and to participate in the objectification of others. To read asexually is to make a vital intervention into a conversation about the ways compulsory sexuality constrains our quotidian interactions with each other and with the world. It is to begin to imagine a new, more just way of relating that does not transform the other into an object of desire, but rather, as radical feminist Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz puts it, comprises “a relationship of whole to whole.” I offer no definitive way out of sexusociety in these pages. I extend an invitation, though, to think of asexuality not as an absence or withdrawal, but as a potential to disturb patterns by offering new perspectives on old patterns of objectification, complicated consent, and self-denial in the service of adhering to unfulfilling narratives.

* Designated as an Exemplary Master's Project for 2014-15*

Gendering Anti-Francoism reinterprets Spain’s tradition of protest music, offering the first monographic study of Iberian female singer-songwriters (cantautoras). Implementing an interdisciplinary methodology—based on the combination of textual and sonic close readings, oral history interviews, criminal records, and extensive archival research—this dissertation demonstrates that cantautoras played a major role both in the anti-Franco struggle and in the second-wave feminist movement, between 1952 and 1986. Songs were crucial for community-building, for bearing witness to different forms of violence, and for steering feminist progress. They soon became instrumental in raising individual and collective consciousness. Existing scholarship has mainly examined the lives and work of white, heterosexual, male singer-songwriters, from Paco Ibáñez’s first recordings (1956) until Franco’s death in 1975; and it has also organized cantautores by territories, e.g., studying all Catalan singers together, in isolation from their counterparts elsewhere. My periodization foregrounds a new-found group of over 70 female performers playing since the ‘50s; it extends through 1986 to include a decade of feminist activism previously overlooked. Furthermore, my analyses offer a new Iberian multilingual, multicultural, and intersectional approach, placing minoritized languages among other interconnected identity struggles involving gender, sexuality, and class. Adopting a cultural-historical perspective, I demonstrate how cantautoras confronted together the status quo, i.e., the far-reaching effects of the ultra-Catholic, sexist, and nationalist ideology of Francoism. I track how performers endured state repression and music censorship in several multi-artist tours in the 1970s. Meanwhile, concert-goers protested concert cancellations, as well as fines, arrests, and incarcerations that targeted singers. I further argue that most cantautoras put forward a feminist way of thinking that qualified and sought to inflect the priorities of left-wing political parties during the years of clandestine activism, and later, during Spain’s Transition to democracy. Thus, cantautoras performed for the left-leaning political parties and the feminist movement, pushing forward multiple struggles. During the Transition, many cantautoras sang to denounce all discrimination against women remaining from Francoist legislation. I also investigate collaborations between cantautoras, writers, and other female artists; the potential of ambiguous love songs for the LGTBIQ+ community; and the political ideas that cantautoras conveyed through children’s music.

This dissertation draws on American literature from the Industrial Revolution to the Great Depression to fashion a theory of abandonment, a term that designates both a material reality and a conceptual framework; abandonment names what remains unincorporated into the governing economic, political, gender and racial logic. This study examines, therefore, literary representations of poverty, homelessness, forms of working-class labor, and the work that race and gender do within these conditions of existence. It arises from the intersection of the Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist, and queer theory that has sought not only to account for the inequitable economic distribution of goods but also to confront the deeper problem of injurious power structures and hierarchies.

The literature of abandonment discounts the practice of seeking recognition within a dominant structure of power; rather, abandonment brings to light the spatial practice of the subject’s struggle for re-signification of such structures. Thus, one can begin to conceive of the abandoned subject by asking what one produces when one inhabits a space typically deemed uninhabitable—by discovering forms of being where one’s being is impossible or illicit—because it is in this act that subjectivity for the otherwise abject becomes possible. This study asks more specifically how literature as an aesthetic practice imagines the production of an abandoned subjectivity and, by extension, alternative social, economic and political structures.

The driving question of this dissertation is, how can a concept such as abandonment allow one to address without interpellating its subject? That is, can one value the abandoned as such, without incorporating it into an injurious system of evaluation or the prevailing neoliberal discourse of recognition? This entails asking how these processes are represented as being deeply aesthetic and what the relationship is between literary form and “habitat.” That the fact of abandonment is not quite available for representation, at least not without recovering it from itself, but is available for inhabitation, is illustrated in each of the texts this dissertation examines. In bridging socioeconomic material and thematic readings with a study of literary form, this dissertation argues that literature itself performs the very calling into being and inhabitation of this spectral space; which is to say, literary form lays bare the spatial underpinnings of narrative, allowing one to enter into the currents of dispossession rather than their fixed social positions.

In an ethnography of queer women’s (lala) activism in China, I tell the story of a social movement from its effusive beginning to disillusionment and pose the difficult question of what went wrong. I trace the dissolution of a key organization, the Chinese Lala Alliance, in which I played a leadership role for over ten years, and examine the pattern of interpersonal drama that frequently erupted between lala activists throughout China. With “glass hearts” that easily shatter, many activists air their grievances and angrily demand redress with an affective intensity that further escalates conflict and fractures sociality. I argue that trauma results from the chronic, systemic oppression that impact the lives of most queer women. The intimate kinship bonds formed between lala activists also leads to deeply felt pain and injury when conflict erupts.Delving into the in-fighting, the break-down of social bonds, and the demise of an organization, I point out the problems with the tools of critique and confrontational politics, which have defined queer and feminist politics around the globe. Utopia is a vision of the social, but those with utopian fantasies of safe space in the activist community are inevitably disappointed when interpersonal conflicts arise. Perceiving their experience of injury and pain as abuse and oppression inflicted by another, activists with glass hearts deploy the powerful tools of confrontational politics against other activists, with devastating consequences. To build sustainable social movements, we need a different activist culture that prioritizes healing and reparative work. I also situate “movement trauma” in the national landscape and draw parallels between the temporal arch of lala activism and the Chinese Dream. The pursuit of progress, in both capitalism and activism, follows a trajectory from effusive optimism and hope to disenchantment a decade later.

In this essay, I reexamine the anti-pornography argument put forward by feminist scholars such as Catherine MacKinnon and Rae Langton in the contemporary context from a culturally distinctive perspective. In my analysis, I take issue with two problems in the anti-pornography argument: its arbitrary distinction between pornography and erotica, and its oversight of how the regulation of pornography could potentially reinforce women’s subordination. As such, I conclude that the regulation of pornography is neither pragmatic given its prevalent digital distribution in the contemporary world, nor beneficial to its cause. As an alternative, I propose that we open to the possibility of feminist pornography, which potentially enables women to express their sexuality and regain control of their bodies.

Tolerance is considered foundational for a multicultural society to defuse tensions over race, religion, and sexuality. However, critics of tolerance point out that its reliance on the consent of the majority to extend equal rights to a minority, along with its liberal method of individualizing prejudice, does not result in equality. This project historicizes tolerance by examining the trajectory of its adoption by leftist political parties in Mexico to address concerns over sexual identity and difference. It demonstrates that the embrace of tolerance was not only a political strategy for electoral gain, but also a method to maintain a masculinist party. By endorsing a policy of tolerance through the expansion of the principle of private life, leftist parties claimed solidarity with the feminist and sexual liberation movement rather than engage with their criticisms of the heterosexism of leftist militancy.

Issues of sexuality, particularly homosexual and reproductive rights, were in an uneasy, if not antagonistic, relationship with the revolutionary politics of left-wing organizations such as the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) since their foundation. However, between 1976 and 1981, leftist parties shifted their stances. Adopting a policy of tolerance, party leaders hoped to reconcile the growing lesbian, gay and feminist movements with their rank and file because these social movements provided the potential votes that could launch the Left out of electoral obscurity. Revolution in the Sheets traces the limits and outcomes of this strategy. Tolerance did little to stem homophobia or sexism among leftists in Mexico. Furthermore, militants rejected the tolerance policy because sexual politics were the primary outlet for rank and file leftists to dispute intra-party tensions, vocalize intimate grievances, and distinguish themselves from one another for political gain. In the end, the shift to tolerance – a defining feature of the conflicts over the cultural turns that marked the last decades of the twentieth century – was a contingent product of intimate feuds, electoral strategy, and interpersonal relationships.

In this thesis, I mainly discussed the commonalities and differences between two representative authors of Chinese and Japanese aesthetic literature in the early 20th century: Yu Dafu and Tanizaki Junichiro, in terms of the female figures, from the perspective of feminism and interrelations between different genders. Also, I tried to look into the possible reasons for these similarities and differences and how we could understand them within the socio-historical background of East Asia in a shifting period. To achieve a deeper and more comprehensive discussion, I took the combined methods of socio-historical discussion and textual analysis in my thesis. The three chapters were based on the analysis and reference of historical materials, data, journals, original and translated literary texts, and academic research papers. Through the textual analysis of representative literary works of Yu and Tanizaki that engaged in aestheticism and a broad discussion of the women’s movements and political environments of Chinese and Japanese society from the late 19th century to early 20th century, I achieved the conclusion that while both revealing an imbalanced male-female relationship as a result of the traditional culture in East Asia, Yu expressed some different ideas on women’s status from Tanizaki. Affected by the relatively open and free political environment and the improved participation of women in public affairs, Yu revealed the possibility of the further improvement of women’s independence. While Tanizaki was far more devoted to the appreciation of women’s body as a fulfillment of male desires.

As Christians in the United States struggle to sustain hope in the face of global economic, environmental, military, and poverty crises, the most popular source of theological hope for preachers and congregations is that of Jürgen Moltmann and the Moltmannian hope that draws on his work. Moltmannian theology eschews close connections with more-canonically established doctrines of hope, claiming instead on a future-based, this-worldly eschatology that hopes in the God who suffers. An exclusive reliance on a Moltmannian theology of hope deprives the church of crucial resources for a robust eschatological hope and its practices. Critical attention to additional streams of of theologial hope, and to applicable discourses within and without Christian theology, provides the church with strength and resilience to sustain a distinctly Christian theological hope through and beyond disaster, despair, suffering, and death. Jesus Christ, the perfect hope, embodies the life -- earthly and eternal -- of humanity and its eschatological end, a life in which humans can participate, through grace and discipleship.

To make this argument, I survey characteristics of Moltmannian hope and then identify costs of a theological hope that relies exclusively on Moltmannia resources. I review a Patristic and Thomistic grammar of theological hope and its accompanying grammar of God; and I explore possible contributions to theological hope from an assortment of contemporary conversations outside conventionally-identified areas of Christian hope. I conclude with two suggestions for ecclesial formation of Christians in theological hope.