Browsing by Subject "Gender"

This dissertation investigates the ‘woman philosopher’ in the works of fourteenth-century Italian author, Giovanni Boccaccio. Across his literature, Latin and Italian alike, Boccaccio demonstrated an ongoing interest in both philosophy and women, concepts that were at the center of various intellectual debates in fourteenth-century Europe. I use variations and commentaries found in the manuscript tradition to historically ground my literary analysis, showing how scribes, translators, and early readers drew attention to the relationship between gender and knowledge in Boccaccio’s works. While women have not been absent from critical studies of Boccaccio, existing interpretations often limit their discussion to the feminism or misogyny of his works. Drawing on thinkers who problematize the relationship between women and knowledge, I shift the scholarly discourse away from feminism/misogyny. Each chapter situates one or more Boccaccian figures within textual and material networks and shows how they employ “philosophy,” exploring distinct but related definitions of the term as outlined by Boccaccio. I contend that Boccaccio, in his vernacular masterpiece the Decameron and other works, presents not just one model of a woman philosopher but several, a plurality that challenges our inherited notion of what constitutes philosophy, to whom it belongs, and how we encounter it in our lives.

“Caring for Korea” examines American relief work during and following the Korean War (1950-1953), and the way that humanitarianism shaped American Cold War approaches to empire. Centering aid workers, I highlight the lives and experiences of Americans who expressed concern for Koreans and mobilized that concern to build influence in East Asia. Utilizing records from government agencies, the United Nations, and church and relief organizations, I find incomplete American hegemony, even as the U.S. controlled and utilized many different institutions to exert its will in Korea. My research shows how through humanitarian work, the labor of empire was gendered, soft, and flexible; and that the agents of empire used American influence to work for their own goals.

In 1925, Sigmund Freud wrote a short preface for August Aichhorn’s forthcoming book, Wayward Youth. There, Freud hailed ‘the child’ as the future of psychoanalysis, declaring that “[o]f all the fields in which psychoanalysis has been applied none has aroused so much interest… as the theory and practice of child training. …The child has become the main object of psychoanalysis research” (Freud, p. v). Freud’s observation was prophetic as the figure of the child did indeed become the central focus of psychoanalysis’s theories of psychic life in the decades that followed. Throughout the interwar and postwar periods in Western Europe, child analysis became the most innovative and influential strain of psychoanalysis as child analysts turned their gaze, clinically and socially, to the formative impact of the mother-child relation. As I show, psychoanalysts used the figure of the child to expand the political reach of their work by mobilizing the clinic as a site through which to theorize politics.

In my dissertation, I analyze the ascension of the child as a way into a broader consideration of the political life of psychoanalytic practice in the twentieth century. In the wake of World Wars, mass casualties, and the dramatic reorganization of Europe, child analysts like Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, D.W. Winnicott, and John Bowlby reinvented clinical practice for the child patient according to explicitly political idioms. The analytic exercise of paternal "authority," the cultivation of maternal “reparations,” and the maternal facilitation of an inherent “democratic tendency,” and the provision of maternal “security” were just some of the ways that these child analysts defined their clinical work. Tracing these techniques through the rise and fall of democracy in interwar, wartime, and postwar Europe, I argue that the clinic became a proto-political laboratory where psychoanalysts experimented with different formats of political action and relation. For these analysts, the clinic was anything but apolitical. But, in contrast to analyses that address the abstract connotation of these terms, in my analysis I focus specifically on their gendered dimensions, revealing how political concepts like authority, reparation, democracy, and security were reconfigured in the clinic according to the perimeters of maternity and paternity. As I contend throughout, the child analytic clinic provided a site for explicitly gendered forms of political theorizing.

In Chapter One, “On Good Authority: Anna Freud, Child Analysis, and the Politics of Authority,” I chart how Anna Freud postulated the clinical necessity of paternal authority, situating her work within interwar political debates about the relationship between democracy and authority. In Chapter Two, “Beyond Repair: War, Reparation, and Melanie Klein’s Clinical Play Technique,” I interrogate the ethical status of Klein’s clinical idealization of maternal reparations by contextualizing them within wartime Britain and the effects of German reparations. Chapter Three, “Mothering a Nation: D.W. Winnicott, Gender, and the Postcolonial British Welfare State,” reads Winnicott’s “Piggle” case study in order to elaborate how Winnicott’s theories of good enough mothering and an inherent democratic tendency were grappling with the effects of British decolonization. In chapter four, “States of Security: John Bowlby, Cold War Politics, and Infantile Attachment Theory,” I reveal how the language of maternal security that Bowlby promoted in his clinical work buttressed a growing Cold War emphasis on national security.

Child’s Play contributes to a growing body of scholarship by feminist theorists, historians, and political theorists like Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg (2011), Sally Alexander (2012), Michal Shapira (2013), Eli Zartesky (2015), Daniel Pick and Matt ffytche (2016), and Dagmar Herzog (2017) that showcases how psychoanalysis was influenced by—and, in turn, had a decisive influence on—the political climates it inhabited. My project adds to this work an explicit focus on the psychoanalytic clinic and the gendered scientific techniques developed therein. Although the psychoanalytic clinic has often dismissed for being either politically isolated or irredeemably normalizing, one of the overarching arguments that I make throughout this project is that a keen attention to clinical technique—to the unique scientific methods analysts developed to relate to and treat the psyche of the modern child—is an invaluable resource for understanding the political reach of psychoanalysis. Critically, these child psychoanalytic vocabularies and techniques developed together with the spread of liberal democracies following World War I and, to the extent that they narrate modern political affiliations through psychological narratives of childhood, they are still at the forefront of fervent political contestations today.

Research on the military has historically focused on the potentially de-stratifying effects of service, including reductions of racial inequality and social mobility. Taking a life course approach, this prior research tends to claim that the military is a positive turning point in the lives of disadvantaged men. Scholars point to the educational benefits of the GI Bill, racial integration, and health care to claim that military service, especially during peacetime, is largely beneficial to service members. While it is certainly the case that the military has provided some historical benefits to marginalized groups, recent research has given us strong reasons to question how beneficial military service is to stigmatized groups. Significant racial and gender inequalities remain, and in some cases, are deepening. Drawing on 50 in-depth interviews with veterans this dissertation examines how the organizational habitus of the military, despite organizational proclamations of meritocracy, may contribute to inequality. Focusing on the unintended consequences of military polices surrounding mental health problems, discrimination, and family relations, I create a synthesis of organizational and critical race theories to show how military policies may compound problems for soldiers and veterans. Focusing on the contradictions between stated organizational policies and actual practice, I show how the organizational arrangements of the military normalize overt expressions of racial and gender based discrimination, creating a sometimes-hostile environment for women and minorities and leaving them little recourse for recrimination. When policies protecting the stigmatized undermine the power and prerogatives of commanders or conflict with the militaries mission, it is not the powerful that suffer. Further, I show how military policies promoting family, such as extra pay for married soldiers, are at odds with the multiple deployments and high mental health incidences of this generations wars. Although the military relies on women on the "home front," as a basis of support, the exigencies of service undermine relationship stability.

I argue that traditional findings on the de-stratifying effects of service are partially a product of an analytical frame that neglects internal organizational dynamics.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Great Britain's computing industry led the world in the development and application of computers for business and administrative work. The British government and civil service, paragons of meritocracy in a country stratified by class, committed themselves to implementing computerized data processing techniques throughout the sprawling public sector, in order to modernize their economy, maintain the competitiveness of British high-technology industries, and reconsolidate the nation's strength and reputation worldwide. To succeed in this project, the British government would need to leverage the country's existing expertise, cultivate the heterogeneous field of computing manufacturers, and significantly re-train labor.

By the 1970s, Britain's early lead in the field of computing had evaporated, government computing projects had produced disappointing results, and the nation's status as a world power had declined precipitously. This dissertation seeks to explain why British computing achieved so few of its intended results by looking at the intractable labor problems within the public sector during the heyday of the Britain's proclaimed "technological revolution." The dissertation argues that the interpretation of, and solutions for, these labor problems produced disastrous effects.

Sources used include government documents, civil service records, records of the nationalized industries (the Post Office, National Health Service, Central Electricity Generating Board, Coal Industry, Railways, and others), computing industry records, press accounts, and oral interviews. By using methodologies from the history of technology, institutional history, and labor history, as well as gender analysis, this dissertation shows that despite the government's commitment to both high technology usage and labor meritocracy, competing claims of technological expertise and management tradition led the government to misjudge the role of computing within the public sector and the nation.

Beginning with a labor situation in which women did the majority of computing work, and seeking to achieve a situation in which young men and management-level technocrats tightly controlled all digital computing, the British government over-centralized its own computing endeavors, and the nation's computing industry, leading to a dangerous winnowing of skill and expertise within the already-small field. The eventual takeover of the British computing market by IBM, and purchase of the last viable British computing company by Fujitsu, marked the end of any hope for Britain's computing dominance in either their home market or the global market.

While multiple factors contributed to the failures of government computing and the British computing industry--including, but not limited to, American competition, inability to effectively create a global market for British machines, and misjudging the public sector's computing needs--this dissertation argues that labor problems, arising largely from gendered concerns about technological change and power, constituted a critical, and unrecognized, stumbling block for Britain's government-led computing revolution.

“Guangchangwu,” or what is literally translated as “square-dancing,” is a form of public dance that has been exceedingly popular, albeit controversial, in China over recent years. Most of the participants are elderly women in their late-50s or above, who roughly fall in the category called “dama” (“big-mother”). Usually, a dancing group assembles in the evening and dances on a daily basis to the music played through a portable loudspeaker. Yet, because many dancing sites are in or close to residential compounds, the music played, or, the alleged “noise pollution,” have caused numerous conflicts nationwide. During the summer 2014, I conducted a three-months fieldwork on the dance in China. In this thesis, I first demonstrated how a specific guangchangwu dancing group organized in relation to the space it occupied, then I traced the media discourse of guangchangwu and showed how it became linked with elderly women, dama. I argue that this seemingly new and overwhelmingly women-dominated public dance emerges from a series of long existing activities, the embedded gender politics of which articulates China’s recent and ongoing revision of policies and laws regarding birth control and the retirement age. Moreover, it is precisely against the backdrop of such social discourse that the practice and persistence of individual dancing groups becomes meaningful: through an effective organizational structure, these elderly women made their existence visible, audible, and their stories irreducible.

This dissertation examines aspects of the relationship between improved energy access,both in terms of cooking energy and electricity access, and women’s time use patterns, labor productivity, and empowerment in low- and middle-income countries. The first chapter of this dissertation examines the relationship between women’s empowerment and various measures of cooking energy and electricity access across 7 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia using the multi-tiered framework datasets from the World Bank. Since there are many potential facets to women’s empowerment, for example, social standing (i.e., ability to participate in community groups, ability to move freely), employment, or education levels, we use principal component analysis to create an “empowerment index” that captures multiple aspects of women’s empowerment as a singular value. We then use simple regression analysis to study the correlation between women’s empowerment and energy access measures. We find positive associations between empowerment and measures of energy access, though this pattern is not consistent across all countries and contexts.

After descriptively establishing a positive relationship between women’s empowermentand improved cooking energy access, especially in Sub-Saharan African contexts, the second chapter of this dissertation describes an impact evaluation of an improved cookstove distributed in Tanzania, Malawi, and Zambia. We used a quasi-experimental design to survey approximately 3,000 households across three countries, looking for impacts on women’s time use patterns and labor productivity as a result of take up of the improved cookstove. Using a difference-indifferences approach, we find that in most contexts, this improved cookstove intervention does not result in changes to time use patterns, labor productivity, or time use agency, though the lack of positive impacts may be due to sample contamination, too short of a time frame between stove installation and endline surveys, or reporting errors in modules where time use data is collected.

In order to understand these results in the context of prior published evidence of timesavings from improved cookstoves, in the third chapter, we investigate the population and study characteristics that may impact the time saved in fuel collection as a result of the distributed improved cookstove. Specifically, we apply Bayesian linear regression modeling and Bayesian model comparison to investigate whether and how methodological and contextual choices, such as geography, level of remoteness of a region, fuel use behaviors, the type of time use elicitation method used, and respondent characteristics affect estimates of time savings in fuel collection derived from the cookstove distributed in Chapter 2. Our prior is constructed from 34 estimates of time savings from the improved cookstove literature, while our sampling data is provided by the quasi-experiment in Chapter 2. The approach provides insight on how different sources of variation impact time savings estimates and allows us to make predictions of potential time savings in new settings. Results suggest that the potential for time savings from this improved cookstove is highest in poorer, less educated populations.

In this dissertation, I contribute to the literature by first describing the relationshipsbetween forms of energy access, including improved cooking technologies, and women’s empowerment, and describing those patterns across countries. I then test this relationship using quasi-experimental methods to find causal impacts of improved cooking technologies on outcomes pertinent to women’s livelihoods, including women’s time use patterns, across four countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Finally, I provide insight into how population and study characteristics impact time savings results from improved cooking technologies, and in what contexts we might find maximum impact.

Genocide studies typically emphasizes economics, law, history, political science, and sociology as the disciplines most relevant to understanding the phenomenon of premeditated mass slaughter, and the scholarship has been dominated by men, both as subjects and authors. Engendering Genocide intervenes in a field traditionally dominated by the social sciences, illustrating how U.S. literary and cultural texts provide a space for their creators and their audiences to imagine the transnational, gendered, and often quotidian nature of genocide. Weaving together literary criticism, feminist theory, and a transnational American Studies methodology, this project analyzes representations of the crime in the twentieth-century United States. Unbound to the empirical protocol of social sciences, my objects of study—which include novels, memoirs, manifestos, photographs, and film—allow for the imagination of political possibilities unafforded to other disciplines. I demonstrate that by giving this crime a name and telling its story, the figures in my project relied on both word and image in order to make visible a specific kind of violence they saw repeating in different iterations throughout human history, and in turn, to instigate nations to interfere in the domestic affairs of other sovereign powers. By chronicling their efforts, Engendering Genocide considers the ethical and aesthetic challenges and consequences involved in these acts of representation. Based on this analysis, I ultimately conclude that the horror of genocide cannot be fully represented—and that’s precisely one of the factors that makes the crime so dangerous: it can hide, so to speak, in plain sight.

Background: Intimate partner violence is a global burden that disproportionately affects women and has more severe outcomes in women as well. Our objective was to explore the epidemiologic profile for intimate partner violence and preliminary patterns in the underreporting of this burden in Maringá, Brazil. Methods: A community-based cross-sectional study was conducted in Maringá. A convenience sampling method was utilized to recruit participants. 435 women at least 18 years of age who either currently had or had previously had an intimate partner were interviewed about their experiences with IPV. Sociodemographic characteristics were collected at the time of the interview to estimate associations with IPV using univariable and multivariable logistic regression models. Positive IPV cases identified from the community survey were compared with positive IPV cases identified from the Maringá city violence registry using sociodemographic variables and location variables in both datasets to explore patterns of underreporting. Results: Lifetime prevalence of IPV was 53.79%. Significant bivariate associations found between the SES indicator occupation and psychological violence (X2 = 8.688, p < 0.05) and overall IPV (X2 =12.441, p < 0.01) showed differences in distribution of IPV among the different levels of occupation. Significant bivariate associations found between the SES indicator number of children and physical violence (X2 = 6.963, p < 0.05) and sexual violence (X2 = 8.969, p < 0.05) also showed differences in distribution of IPV among the different levels of number of children. Women who had no paid work outside the home seemed to experience all 3 types of violence as well as overall IPV significantly less than women who had paid work outside the home (p < 0.05). Having 4 or more children was noted to significantly increase women's experience with physical and sexual violence (p< 0.01). Patterns of underreporting noted were associated with older age, women racially self-identifying as brown, and women being either illiterate, or completing higher education. Geospatially, IPV cases found through the community survey were ill-represented in the violence registry. Conclusion: IPV is a significant burden in Maringá and some underreporting patterns were noted through this study. These findings highlight the need for further research into conditional and precipitation risk factors of IPV and further exploring the burden and reasons for underreporting of IPV. Care settings can be potential sites for screening communities for IPV and exploring patterns in reporting of IPV.

This dissertation considers the role gender plays in labor markets, household decision-making, and health in sub-Saharan Africa.

The first chapter considers the impact of fast Internet access on employment outcomes and household dynamics. I find the introduction of fast Internet to sub-Saharan Africa significantly increased employment for males, but had little impact on female employment. In addition, it significantly increased perceived acceptability, among both genders, of domestic violence against women.

The second chapter considers the differential impact, by gender, of an experimental labor market intervention in South Africa, which measured skills of workseekers and provided a mechanism for workseekers to communicate their results to potential employers. I find that men experienced a larger effect of the intervention on employment outcomes than did women. This difference is largely explained by pre-existing differences between genders, rather than differential responses to treatment.

The third chapter considers the factors that contribute to female genital cutting (FGC) in Mali and tests various hypotheses to explain the persistence of the tradition. I find that maternal preference is pivotal in the decision to cut daughters. I also find that the marriage market hypothesis and the identity hypothesis of FGC decision-making are alone insufficient to explain persistence.

Social norms can play an important role in economic decision-making. Individuals face costs if they deviate from cultural norms in their families or communities, and firms seek to preserve reputation in order to bolster their position in their market. In this dissertation, I explore the role of cultural norms and reputation in individual, household, and firm decision-making in developing countries. The first chapter is comprised of information and priming experiments on a job search platform in urban Pakistan identifying the role of social norms and workplace attributes on educated women's job search and occupational choice. The second chapter studies the relationship between gold price in year of birth and household decision-making at adulthood using nationally representative data in India. The third chapter combines a lab-in-field generosity game with field-based measures of healthcare provider effort to document that a sizable proportion of healthcare providers in this setting in rural India exert clinical effort with patients in ways consistent with maintaining reputation in their communities.

This dissertation examines the collaborative poetry and poetics of four early modern women writers: Mary Sidney Herbert (1561-1621), Aemilia Lanyer (1569–1645), Katherine Philips (1631-1664) and Mary, Lady Chudleigh (1656 – 1710). It critically recovers women’s poetry and their different modes of literary collaboration at the same time as it explores their unique manuscript and print practices. The critical methods employed are primarily historicist and formal and founded on close reading of revision processes, literary source materials and formal poetics. Additionally, each chapter argues that the contexts of relationship and community are integral to understanding how women writers employed collaborative writing practices as well as the significance of collaboration as an alternative to competition. I conclude that, across the long seventeenth century, the intellectual social agency of women writers grows through their collaborative writing practices, evidenced by publication and print.

While men account for 93 percent of the U.S. prison population, women have seen an increase of over 700 percent in incarceration rates since the 1980s. Despite this, most sociological and criminological research examines the incarceration and reentry experiences and consequences of men. Existing research on system-involved women rarely disentangles the role of race in women’s criminal justice involvement. Thus, this dissertation uses an intersectional approach to explore how formerly incarcerated women navigate various institutions during the incarceration and reentry period. For this project, I use 40 semi-structured interviews with women primarily in North Carolina. The chapters in this dissertation explore the following research questions; 1) How do institutional responses to women’s childhood victimization and adult entrapment shape women’s pathways to prison? 2) How do mothers define and construct their maternal identities while imprisoned? 3) What strategies do women use to navigate reentering the paid labor market?