Browsing by Subject "Gender studies"
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Item Open Access A Descriptive Study of Emotional Well-Being Among Women in Ghana(2012) Kyerematen, VictoriaMental illness is prevalent worldwide in all cultures with varying manifestations. Its socioeconomic impact cannot be underestimated. Mental health accounts for as much as 14 percent of the global disease burden (Prince, et al. 2007) and depression is ranked as the fourth leading contributor to the global disease burden. Nevertheless, mental health remains largely ignored worldwide, especially in developing nations.
This cross-sectional study, examines depression in two rural districts in Ghana, West Africa. Ghana, like many African nations, consists of many ethnic groups, with lineage networks that dictate personal and public behaviors. Ghana is unique in that approximately half of the population belongs to the Akan, matrilineal clan. The study hypothesized that by examining two clan groups (the Akan and Ga-Adangbe) that differed in lineage a statistically significant difference in rates of depression would be ascertained.
Upon receipt of ethical board approval from the Duke University Institutional Review Board in Durham, NC and Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research Institutional Review Board in Ghana, researchers using the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales Short form (DASS-21) in a geographically randomly selected sample to measure depression as well as anxiety and stress among the participants and a demographic survey, researchers compared the prevalence of depression between the matrilineal Akan clan and patrilineal Ga-Adangbe clan. Data was analyzed using STATA 11.0.
The results indicate a rejection of the null hypothesis. There is a statistically significant difference in depression score between the women in the Ga-Adangbe clan and Akan clan. This study reports high co-morbidity of anxiety and stress with depression. Further research should expand to include other tribes in Ghana and other mental illnesses.
Item Embargo A Meta-Physics of Sexual Difference: The Quantum Gravity Matrix and Embryogenesis of Our Universe(2021) Murtagh, Mitchell DamianThis dissertation makes a case that sexual difference, to date, has been a deeply misconceptualized philosophical concept. Too often reduced to only one expression of itself—the difference between the sexes—critiques of sexual difference as essentialist, heterosexist, transphobic, and race-blind are based on this limited definition of it as an identity category. Its scope, however, expands far beyond its anthropomorphic or human-centric expression and, I argue, it is only by opening up the concept as an ontology that we can begin to conceive new, nuanced, philosophically-grounded ways out of sexist, racist, transphobic, capitalistic and colonialist metaphysics whose roots run so deep that their foundational frameworks are often left unchallenged. This requires stretching sexual difference from an epistemological project that centers “the knower,” often “Woman,” to an ontological framework that constitutes the condition of possibility for epistemology itself. In other words, sexual difference is not reducible to the sex of the knowing subject but founds the logic that there are always at least two ways of knowing, thinking, and being that are irreducible to, or non-collapsible into each other. An ontology of sexual difference requires moving beyond the concept’s historical basis in feminist critiques of psychoanalysis, and even beyond feminist theory itself, where—in its current form—it remains trapped in a tired and boring binary debate between social constructivists and new materialists.
A Meta-Physics of Sexual Difference aims for a way out of this dualism within feminist theory by proposing sexual difference as the organizing, incorporeal principle of reality itself. Open-ended throughout—neo-finalist rather than teleological—this takes sexual difference further than it has ever been taken before—beyond its role as the engine of evolution proliferating life, even beyond inciting the emergence of life itself from non-living matter. Sexual difference, if it is to be a truly revolutionary metaphysics or first philosophy, must begin from the very beginning, with the origins of space-time For this reason, this project engages deeply and seriously with contemporary physics, and in the spirit of Irigaray, has both critical and creative components.
The first half critiques contemporary Western physics for its unconscious but undergirding phallocentrism—an unacknowledged commitment to a logic of replicating self-sameness, containment, and unification. This is most palpable in the practically unanimous desire to unify all the “self-contained” structures of physical reality—from the smallest subatomic particles to the large-scale cosmological universe itself—into a totalizing “theory of everything.” Doing this, however, would require solving for “quantum gravity,” the biggest challenge the field faces today. It implies overcoming the logical contradiction at the heart of physics—the incompatibility between two theories of nature—general relativity, which governs large and very massive structures, and quantum mechanics, which governs small and light structures. Our best current theory for gravity—Einstein’s general relativity—refers to the curvature of space-time on which quantum fields emerge, but it cannot, and has never been quantized itself. Ever-elusive and enigmatic, quantum gravity is a feminine symptom that seems to situate itself at the boundaries between the physical and the meta-physical, i.e., what is before the Big Bang, above the speed of light, below the Plank scale, and inside black holes. Posed at these thresholds, we may begin to think of quantum gravity as the interval itself.
It is precisely here, in the second half of the dissertation, that sexual difference stages its constructive intervention. As a logic of co-constitutive “twoness,” it emphasizes the relation from which two things emerge rather than trying to enclose two things into one container. Applying this to the “incompatibility” between general relativity and quantum mechanics, I propose embryogenesis, a philosophical concept borrowed from Raymond Ruyer, as a new “model” for physical reality that emerges only by beginning from this different logic or meta-physics for physics: sexual difference rather than phallocentrism. As the condition of possibility for physics, meta-physics itself is the maternal-feminine par excellence, opening physics and feminist theory to an ontological alliance via sexual difference. “Embryogenesis” could be conceived of as an alternative framework to the “theory of everything” for physicists to take up in the future, which may even change the way the problem of quantum gravity is conceptualized. In embryogenesis, quantum reality is not stuffed inside our gravitational universe as it is framed by the epistemological Copenhagen formulation that centers the observer. Inversely, this proposal relies on the only ontological interpretation of quantum mechanics that exists—Hugh Everett’s Many Worlds. Many-worlds theory makes the case that fundamental quantum reality is a Hilbert space in which our universe is represented by a quantum mechanical wave-function that decoheres—splits or branches or sexuates—each time the self-entanglement of the system as a whole evolves. Hilbert space is therefore the “quantum womb” within which our embryonic universe makes itself by evolving and expanding the local geometry of space-time. Quantum gravity, in this context, may be the interval between realms that nourishes this process of embryogenesis, perpetually self-differentiating the realms from each other, but also supplying their mutual growth and development, by crossing the threshold from the non-local, virtual, “in-formational,” or trans-spatial maternal matrix into our gravitational universe and converting itself into the mysterious “dark energy” that supplies the ongoing growth and development of its structuration.
Item Open Access A Toolbox for Observing and Modulating the Gut-Brain Axis(2022) Garrett, Aliesha DanielleAn estimated 10% of people worldwide have an enteric nervous system (ENS) related illness including irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), diabetes, colorectal cancer, fecal incontinence, and chronic constipation or diarrhea. Current drug treatments have severe side effects and often do not adequately address symptoms; a new approach is needed. ENS stimulation is a promising therapy for these patients, but a major limitation to this approach is our lack of knowledge. The human ENS is comprised of 5 million neurons and drives the digestive system, but its normal function and connections to the central nervous system (CNS) remain poorly understood. One of the major canonical signaling pathways between the ENS and the CNS is the vagus nerve, but the neural circuits involved are still under investigation. Better understanding of these circuits would provide a potential method of treatment for ENS related illness, with neurostimulation serving as an alternative to pharmaceutical treatments. Herein I describe a project which addresses these needs via development of new imaging tools to better understand the gut-brain axis, as well as demonstrating its utility as a target for treatment of gastrointestinal (GI) illness, specifically cancer-associated cachexia. Leaders in enteric neuroscience note that the continued inconsistencies in GI electrotherapies are driven by a fundamental lack of understanding of gut innervation and circuitry. New tools to directly observe colonic innervation and neuronal response, as well as a map of the whole peripheral nervous system, will reveal crucial targets for stimulation and enable more efficient targeting selection for neurostimulation or other local interventions, which will reduce off target effects and improve efficacy. To address these issues, I have developed an intravital window for direct imaging of the colon, enabling observation of colonic ENS response to stimulation in vivo for the first time. Additionally, I have developed an embryonic window, allowing visualization of embryonic GI development from E9.5 through birth. Finally, I have generated a mouse peripheral nerve map based on Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DT MRI). Using novel scan parameters and post-processing algorithms, I identified nerve fibers throughout the body and generated quantitative tractography which specifically highlights GI innervation via the vagus nerve. Cachexia is a multi-systemic syndrome which produces weight loss, muscle atrophy, adipose wasting, fatigue, and anorexia. Affecting an estimated 1% of the global population and up to 80% of all cancer patients, cachexia is fatal in roughly 30% of cases and is incurable. Cancer-associated cachexia (CAC) is particularly devastating as in addition to resulting in decreased quality of life, CAC reduces tolerance and efficacy of cancer treatments and higher overall mortality. As many as half of all cancer deaths are attributed to CAC. There are currently no clinically meaningful treatments for CAC, despite attempts to employ dietary support, physical therapy, anti-inflammatory medication, appetite stimulants, and other supportive therapies. Herein I describe potential therapeutic approach for treatment of CAC via vagal perturbation – either by vagotomy or ultra-low frequency vagal block with an implanted stimulator. This intervention significantly attenuates weight loss, skeletal muscle atrophy, anorexia, urea cycle dysregulation, and circulating inflammatory cytokine elevation. Most importantly, it increases survival time in mice injected with tumor cells, suggesting this could be a clinically meaningful approach for treatment of CAC.
Item Open Access Against Compulsory Sexuality: Asexual Figures of Resistance(2022) McDowell, MaggieIn 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.
Item Open Access Agencies of Abjection: Jean Genet and Subaltern Socialities(2009) Amin, KadjiThis dissertation explores the concept of agential abjection through Jean Genet's involvement with and writings about the struggles of disenfranchised and pathologized peoples. Following Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler has argued that modern subjectivity requires the production of a domain of abjected beings denied subjecthood and forced to live "unlivable" lives. "Agencies of Abjection" brings these feminist theories of abjection to bear on the multiple coordinates of social difference by exploring forms of abjection linked to sexuality, criminality, colonialism, and racialization. Situating Genet within an archive that includes the writings of former inmates of penal colonies, Francophone intellectuals, and Black Panther Party members, I analyze both the historical forces that produce abjection and the collective forms of agency that emerge from subaltern social forms. I find that the abjected are often able to elaborate impure, perverse, and contingent forms of agency from within the very institutions and discourses that would deny them subjecthood.
"Agencies of Abjection" carefully situates Genet's writing within the discursive fields in which it intervenes, including that of the memoirs and testimonies of former inmates of the boys' penal colonies, of Francophone decolonizing poets and intellectuals, and of Black Panther prison writings. This method illuminates subaltern genealogies of thought on the problems of abjection, subjection, and subaltern agency so central to Genet's writing. By charting the twists and turns between Genet's writing and that of other subaltern writers of abjection, "Agencies of Abjection" reads Genet as a thinker continually involved in a process of exchange, intervention, borrowing, and revision concerning the specific histories and experiences of social abjection.
Item Open Access An Invisible Conundrum: Visualizing “Queer Immobility” in the Contemporary PRC(2022) Lou, QionglinUntil the end of the 20th century, with the deepening of the Opening-up and Reform movement under the context of globalization and advancement of communication methods, both culture and economy in the PRC have achieved unprecedented success. Due to this mobilized improvement, the queer community in the PRC seems to have gained more and more visibility at the same time. In this case, the increasing queer activities in the PRC may be associated with a Westernized sense of “queer mobility”, which indicates an expanding space of recognition, identification, and presence for queer individuals. However, regarding the specific post-socialist context in the contemporary PRC, the economic, cultural, or social mobility may directly result in the phenomenon of “queer mobility”, since such progression in other aspects may potentially neglect or conceal the marginalized backwardness that has been embedded in the process of development. In other words, the sense of queer mobility cannot fully represent the intricate reality of queer subjects in the PRC. Thus, this thesis will primarily focus on the concept of “queer immobility” as an alternative to interpret the queerness in the contemporary PRC. Specifically, this queer immobility may not be understood as negative or an outright opposition to the sense of queer mobility; instead, the stress of “immobility” may offer us a novel lens to re-investigate the underlying circulation of loss and continuous melancholy structured by the spatial and psychological constraints within Chinese queer subjects. Also, the intervention of “immobility” may tentatively break the illusion of queer activism structured by the economic, cultural, or political prosperity. To visualize such queer immobility, the thesis will focus on four films in the contemporary PRC. Through the analysis of the immobilized psychological and geographical space, the thesis intends to reveal the multifaceted conundrum of Chinese queer subjects, who struggle between the mobilized illusions and uncompromising restrictions.
Item Open Access Between Boys: Fantasy of Male Homosexuality in Boys’ Love, Mary Renault, and Marguerite Yourcenar(2018) Chou, Jui-an“Between Boys: Fantasy of Male Homosexuality in Boys’ Love, Mary Renault, and Marguerite Yourcenar” examines an unexpected kinship between Boys’ Love, a Japanese male-on-male romance genre, and literary works by Mary Renault and Marguerite Yourcenar, two mid-twentieth century authors who wrote about male homosexuality. Following Eve Sedgwick, who proposed that a “rich tradition of cross-gender inventions of homosexuality” should be studied separately from gay and lesbian literature, this dissertation examines male homoerotic fictions authored by women. These fictions foreground a disjunction between authorial and textual identities in gender and sexuality, and they have often been accused of inauthenticity, appropriation, and exploitation. This dissertation cuts through these critical impulses by suspending their attachment to identitarian thinking and a hierarchical understanding of political radicality in order to account for the seduction of fantasy in these texts.
Exploring narrative strategies, critical receptions, textual and extra-textual relationalities produced by the three bodies of works, this dissertation delineates a paradigm for reading cross-gender homoerotic texts that is neither gay nor queer, neither paranoid nor reparative, and instead focuses on fantasy and how it produces pleasure. Fantasy is used in two senses here: as a preoccupation with relationships in romantic fantasies and as a desire to depart from the here and now. By thinking through both forms of fantasies, I examine the misalignments between identity and identifications in Boys’ Love, Renault’s historical novels about ancient Greece, and Yourcenar’s cross-identifications with gender, temporal, and cultural otherness. Close readings of not only the texts in question, but also discourses around them reveal erotic relationalities both within and outside of male homoerotic fantasies. The end of the dissertation reroutes my discussions back to Japan and debates about gay authenticity in order to foreground fantastical connections that would otherwise be overlooked in a reading that focuses more on identity than disidentifications, cross-identifications, and relationalities.
Item Open Access Big House: Women, Prison, and the Domestic(2019) Issacharoff, JessicaBig House: Women, Prison, and the Domestic, addresses the development of the contemporary US carceral state, foregrounding the confinement and control of women and the evolving ideological frameworks and disciplinary techniques that guided women’s incarceration beginning with the inception of state-run women’s prisons in the nineteenth century. These new prisons for women reproduced and refined modes of capture intrinsic to the modern domestic home and, in turn, served as a laboratory for the further development of domestic forms of discipline, making up what I term “the carceral domestic.” By focusing on the women’s prison, and on women’s confinement more generally as it relates to the home and housing, this project expands the critical archive that accompanies contemporary critiques of mass incarceration. The dissertation consists of three sections. The Birth of the Carceral Domestic, A Women’s Prison in Three Acts, and Home Economics, covering the early period of the sex-segregated women’s prison in the nineteenth century, the development of gendered forms of carceral control through practices of confinement and exclusion over the twentieth, and the contemporary women’s prison in the age of mass incarceration and neoliberal privatization. I draw on a broad range of materials and genres, including personal narratives, domestic homemaking manuals, TV shows, judicial opinions, prison policy codes, and acts of Congress. Through these varied accounts of the intersecting spheres of prison and home, Big House contests the fixity of the boundaries between them, and writes gender into conversations about mass incarceration.
Item Open Access Boccaccio's Women Philosophers: Defining Philosophy, Debating Gender in the Decameron and Beyond(2020) Granacki, Alyssa MadelineThis 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.
Item Open Access Brown Sugar and Spice: Exploring Black Girlhood at Elite, White Schools(2019) Young, Bethany JBlack girls who attend elite, predominantly white schools face a host of unique challenges and tasks in achieving a positive, resolved gendered-racial identity; they must learn to reconcile external and potentially negative definitions of Black girlhood while making their own meaning of being a young, Black woman. I take an intracategorical approach to understanding the development and experience of this intersectional identity in a predominantly white, elite independent school. This study highlights Black girls lived experience in this specific context to reveal how their multidimensional identities develop, shape and are shaped by their schools. First, I explore the sources on which the girls relied to better understand their Black girl identities. Second, I examine the relationship between school context and the girls’ romantic experiences and romantic self-concept. Last, I investigate whether and in what manner school settings influence second-generation, Black immigrant girls’ identity development. Using data collected from fifty semi-structured, narrative style interviews, I find that in elite, white school settings, (i) Black girls were the most influential figures in one another’s identity development process; (ii) their white school contexts limited Black girls’ romantic opportunities in ways that contributed to a negative romantic self-concept; and (iii) in elite, white school settings, second-generation Black immigrant girls developed hybrid identities that integrated their ethnic heritage, their experiences in America as Black girls, and their experiences of difference and desire for racial community at school.
Item Open Access Carnival Is Woman!: Gender, Performance, and Visual Culture in Contemporary Trinidad Carnival(2009) Noel, Samantha A.While great strides have been made in the study of Trinidad Carnival, there has yet to be a robust inquiry into how women have contributed to its evolution. One major reason for this shortcoming is that the dominant cultural discourse relies on a reductive
dichotomy that recognizes the costumes created prior to the 1970s as creative and those made after the 1970s as uncreative. This arbitrary division of the costume aesthetic reflects a distinct anti-feminist bias that sees women's spirited emergence in Carnival
territory in the 1970s as apolitical.
My dissertation exposes this dilemma, and seeks to undermine this
interpretation, by its focus on how women's bodies, their presentation, and their acknowledgment of the body's potential for non-verbal articulation impacted the evolution of performance practices and the costume aesthetic in Trinidad Carnival. I
explore how the predominance of women in Carnival since the 1970s and the bikinibased costume aesthetic that complements this change is suggestive of women's urgent need to manipulate the body as an aesthetic medium and site of subversion. Critical to
this argument is a close examination of certain female figures who have had a sustainable presence in Trinidad Carnival's history. My project acknowledges the jamette, a working class woman who defied Victorian tenets of decorum in preindependence
Trinidad. This figure has been overlooked in the predominant scholarship of Trinidad Carnival history. Another section of my dissertation explores the influence of the Jaycees Carnival Queen competition. Women of mostly European descent participated in this Carnival-themed beauty pageant that remained popular until the
1970s. I also examine the legend of soucouyant (an old woman who turns into a ball of fire at night and sucks the life blood from unsuspecting victims) and how this figure can be deployed to reinterpret Jouvay (the ritual that marks the beginning of Trinidad Carnival).
Item Open Access Corporeal Resurfacings: Faustin Linyekula, Nick Cave and Thornton Dial(2013) Bradley, Rizvana"Corporeal Resurfacings: Faustin Linyekula, Nick Cave and Thornton Dial," examines art and performance works by three contemporary black artists. My dissertation is opened by the analytic of black female flesh provided by Hortense Spillers in her monumental essay, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book." Drawing on Spillers, I argue that it is not the black female body but the material persistence and force of that body, expressed through the flesh, that needs to be theorized and resituated directly with respect to current discourses that take up black ontology, black subjectivity and black aesthetics. I expand Spillers' conclusions to an analysis of how the materiality of this flesh continues to structure, organize and inflect contemporary aesthetic interventions and performances of blackness in the present. The five chapters that comprise the dissertation map a specific set of problems that emerge from a tangled web of gender, race and performance. I argue that black female flesh, forged through desire and violence, objection and subjectivity, becomes the ground for and the space through which black masculinity is fashioned and articulated as open, variable, and contested within artistic practices.
Examining the work of these artists, I identify a set of practices that channel this neglected black flesh as a site of aesthetic reclamation and recovery. Focusing on the art of collage and assemblage and its techniques of cutting, pasting, quoting and tearing I demonstrate how black identity is always assembled identity. Moreover, I demonstrate how artistic assemblage makes visible the dense and immeasurable compressions of race, gender and sexuality that have accumulated over time. I argue that these practices offer us unique opportunities to inhabit this flesh. The dissertation expands upon connections between visibility, solidarity, materiality and femininity, bringing them to light for a critical discussion of the unique expressions and co-productions of blackness and sexuality in the fields of visual art and performance. I draw upon thinkers who help me think about the material status of black female flesh and its reproductive value. The project aligns itself with current black scholarly work that treats not simply black subjectivity but blackness itself as central to an understanding of a history of devaluation that subtends the historical construction of modern subjectivity. I theorize how the degraded materiality of blackness, linked to the violent rupturing of black flesh, indexes a deeper history of devaluation that becomes the very condition for and means of qualifying and substantiating our definitions of subjectivity and personhood. I conclude by tracing an aesthetic community or aesthetic sociality grounded in the recovered, lost materiality of Spillers' ungendered black female flesh, a community that I argue, may be glimpsed through particular instantiations of the flesh in art and performance.
Item Open Access Crisis: Masculinity and an Ethic of Care in American Literature(2023) D'Addario, MichaelThis dissertation takes three crisis periods that have occurred throughout American history—times of war, times of disease, and times of apocalypse—and examines how such periods simultaneously provoke what can be called “traditional” masculine responses of toughness, independence, and executive action along with an alternative gender expression contemporary sociologists refer to as caring masculinity. Rather than consider caring masculinity a new phenomenon, Crisis: Masculinity and an Ethic of Care in American Literature seeks to establish the extended and underexplored history of manhood’s intersection with relational forms of care as expressed in popular literature. By analyzing literary works spanning from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, Crisis argues that such patterns of practice have existed in many forms, across a variety of situation, and for a long time.
Item Open Access Double Exclusion to Double Embrace: Caring for the Spiritual Care Needs of Transgender, Gender Non-Conforming, and Nonbinary People and Communities(2022) Collie, Angel CelesteTransgender, gender non-conforming, and nonbinary people have historically had a bad relationship with Christianity. We have experienced rejection, physical harm, and spiritual violence justified in the name of faith. Such a history of trauma means it is hard for transgender, gender non-conforming, and nonbinary people to find refuge and sanctuary in the church. Those who have reconciled or remained connected to faith are often looked upon suspiciously by others within our communities. Even the most affirming churches fail to recognize the unique needs of transgender, gender non-conforming, and nonbinary people. Many others stand by and remain complicit in the harm done in the name of faith. Using memoirs and resources written by and about the lives and experiences of transgender, gender non-conforming, and nonbinary people, this resource equips pastors and lay leaders to understand better the spiritual needs of transgender, gender non-conforming, and nonbinary people and communities.
Item Embargo Expanding Worlds: Italian Women Artists and Cross-Cultural Encounters in Early Modernity(2024) Hogan, Dana VictoriaBridging the disciplines of art history and cross-cultural studies using a feminist interpretive lens, this dissertation challenges historical narratives of exceptionalism and Eurocentrism through analysis of patterns in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women’s engagement with expanding worlds through their networks and visual representations of world-traveling people and imported objects. To arrive at an inclusive understanding of the significant relationship between the visual arts and cultural exchange, this dissertation offers a new perspective on the cross-cultural circulation that hallmarked early modern Europe by foregrounding women artists, who as a group have been traditionally excluded from the historical record. A data-driven methodology is used to analyze European women’s access to cross-cultural encounters with cosmopolitan courtiers, enslaved people, and imported curios of Asia, Africa, and the Americas through a database of 249 artists designed and populated for this dissertation. Visual analysis of artworks by a subset of these artists is conducted to understand the relationship between women’s worldly encounters and their subsequent creative choices in depicting artistic subjects that came to be considered exotic, thus positioning the artist as cultural mediator. This research makes a dual contribution: first, it challenges persistent narratives that frame women artists’ access to the world as unavoidably limited by gendered social norms. Second, it constructs a new narrative centered on cross-cultural exchange that moves beyond the limits imposed by traditional accounts that focus exclusively on male artists or treat women artists as anomalies. The first key finding of this dissertation challenges popular narratives that present early modern women artists as “magnificent exceptions” or as products of unusually tolerant environments. This project decenters traditional focal points of individual artists and cities through a database used to map artists’ connections and sites of encounter. The data visualized through maps, graphs, and tables demonstrate the geographic breadth and continuity of European women’s artistic activity. These analyses evince many nodes of activity to support the artists’ cross-cultural exposure. The volume of representations in which women artists engaged with wider worlds demonstrates that they actively participated in the history of cross-cultural circulation, rather than existing outside it. By restoring women’s rightful places in this history, we gain the opportunity to assess whether women artists challenged pre-existing imagery and attitudes of cultural imperialism. The second key finding stems from case studies organized by scales of physical and cultural distance, a structure that enables assessment of the relationship between the intimacy of the artist-subject encounter and the quality of the resulting representation. First, investigation of portraits of world-travelers artists encountered in courtly settings addresses whether women’s depictions aligned with conventional representations of the same subjects. Then, examination of women’s representations of manufactured curiosities and naturalia from Asia, Africa, and the Americas explores how such depictions distinctively relate to European desires for universal power and possession. Finally, this dissertation works to center the erasures of Black figures in visual constructions by women artists in early modern Italy by assessing how women’s representational choices participate in the perpetuation or subversion of pre-existing cultural narratives. These three lines of analysis circumvent the draw to exceptionalize certain figures by focusing on sets of relationships and bringing unnamed figures into the framework. Ultimately, although the artists’ choices conform to some racially biased conventions, they also open the possibility of collaboration with foreign individuals; pay homage to the production of artists from different continents; and create expansive roles for imaginary characters represented as Black. This analysis contributes to our understanding of women’s complex intersectional positions in matrices of variable power and access, and to the debate on their roles as producers of knowledge and culture.
Item Open Access "For Better or Worse: Divorce and Annulment Lawsuits in Colonial Mexico (1544-1799)(2013) Bird, Jonathan Bartholomew"For Better or Worse: Divorce and Annulment Lawsuits in Colonial Mexico (1544-1799)" uses petitions for divorce and annulment to explore how husbands and wives defined and contested their marital roles and manipulated legal procedure. Marital conflict provides an intimate window into the daily lives of colonial Mexicans, and the discourses developed in the course of divorce and annulment litigation show us what lawyers, litigants and judges understood to be appropriate behavior for husbands and wives. This dissertation maintains that wives often sued for divorce or annulment not as an end in itself, but rather as a means to quickly escape domestic violence by getting the authorities to place them in enclosure, away from abusive husbands. Many wives used a divorce or annulment lawsuit just to get placed in enclosure, without making a good faith effort to take the litigation to its final conclusion. "For Better or For Worse" also argues concepts of masculinity, rather than notions of honor, played a strong role in the ways that husbands negotiated their presence in divorce and annulment suits. This work thus suggests a new way to interpret the problem of marital conflict in Mexico, showing how wives ably manipulated procedural law to escape abuse and how men attempted to defend their masculine identities and their gendered roles as husbands in the course of divorce and annulment lawsuits.
Item Open Access Graphic Intimations: Postwar to Contemporary Asian Diasporic Art and Writing(2019) Douglas, KitaGraphic Intimations: Postwar to Contemporary Asian Diasporic Art and Writing follows the oblique tensions in Asian diasporic creative compositions between art and writing, performance and inscription. Identifying the graphic—written and/or drawn—as a preeminent form for Asian diasporic artists and writers in North America, this project connects scholarship in Asian American literary studies on questions of form and social formation with the material histories of Asian diasporic visual culture. From postwar graphic internment memoirs to New York City subway writing, this dissertation traces the Asian diasporic graphic’s investments in embodied creative practices that intimate the sensible and sensual in queer, interracial, and cross-cultural liaisons.
Charting the history of the graphic as a twinned positivist technology of measurement and a visceral aesthetic response, this dissertation proposes that the Asian diasporic graphic intimates social possibilities formed in, but not necessarily of, the purview of nation and the state regulation of Asian North Americans as populations. Accordingly, this work examines how these artists’ staging of the graphic encounter might enact disruptive performances of unforeseen social intimacies and political affiliations during these decades that trouble the fidelity of visual documentation.
Item Open Access "If You Don't Take a Stand for Your Life, Who Will Help You?": A Qualitative Study of Men's Engagement with HIV/AIDS Care in Rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa(2015) Zissette, SethThe needs of South African men with HIV are often overlooked in providing healthcare for people living with HIV/AIDS, leading to unique needs and experiences for men seeking HIV/AIDS healthcare. Compounding this phenomenon are norms of masculinity guiding these men's behaviors as they navigate health and healthcare systems. The aim of this study is to provide new insight on which components of masculinity interplay with healthcare access in South Africa. The study took place at one primary health care clinic in a peri-urban township in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. In-depth individual interviews were conducted with 21 HIV-positive men recruited from the clinic. Direct observations of the HIV clinic waiting area were also conducted. Data was analyzed using a grounded theory-informed memo-writing approach. Participants expressed a range of ways in which masculine ideals and identity both promoted and inhibited their willingness and ability to engage in HIV care. Notions of masculinity and social identity were often directly tied to behaviors influencing care engagement. Such engagement fostered the reshaping of identity around a novel sense of clinic advocacy in the face of HIV. Our findings suggested that masculinities are complex, and are subject to changes and reprioritization in the context of HIV. Interventions focusing on reframing hegemonic masculinities and initiating treatment early may have success in bringing more men to the clinic.
Item Embargo Imaging "Comfort Women": Girl Statue of Peace (2011) in the Expanded Field(2024) Park, SaeHimThe Statue of Peace (2011), known as the Girl Statue in Korean, memorializes the “comfort women,” victims of military sexual violence in the colonial and occupied territories under the Japanese Empire (c.1931-1945). Created by artists Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung, the Girl Statue is a life-size, bronze, freestanding sculpture of an empty chair next to a seated girl, confronting the site of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. Since its installation in 2011, the Girl Statue image has proliferated across media, scale, form, and function by artists and the public. The Girl Statue has been reproduced as replicas, watercolor paintings, logo images, gigantic balloons, plastic miniatures, coinage, soft dolls, bracelets, 3D toys, wooden DIY models, LEGO, performances, AR Challenge on social media, and even tattoos.
This dissertation explores the expansion of the Girl Statue over the ten years (2011-2021). Despite its aim to raise awareness of the “comfort women” issue and foster solidarity, the Girl Statue has served the desires and motivations of its makers, consumers, and participants. The multiplication of the Girl Statues symbolically compensated for the dwindling numbers of “comfort women” victims. The narrative of vanishing victims is exemplified by novels and films that underscore the decreasing numbers of the last “comfort women” as an endangered group in need of rescue. The immediacy and intimacy of the Girl Statues as collectible souvenirs grant a sense of satisfaction that one is contributing to an important cause for justice. Through a close analysis of site visits, conversations, newspapers, television, social media, archives, and symposia, this research explores how our engagement with the Girl Statue shapes and reflects our values regarding humanity. The uncomfortable burden persists for the “comfort women,” who, in becoming images, continue to comfort the present.
Item Open Access In Transit: Women, Photography, and The Consolidation of Race in Nineteenth-Century America(2017) Casey, Brenna CaseyIn Transit: Women, Photography, and the Consolidation of Race in Nineteenth-Century America charts the accretion of historical and often obscured memory upon our textual and visual world. Rapid innovations in transportation and photographic technologies developed alongside processes of violent racialized conflict in the antebellum United States. The coincidence of these phenomena in the long nineteenth-century elaborated racial and gender differences through textual and visual production. This dissertation analyzes the evidences of these naturalized narratives in the oscillating movements of women required to navigate multiple, indiscrete, and often unconventional identity categories.
In Transit traces the physical, textual, and imagistic movements of three figures of intrigue—colonial Peru’s tapada limeña, the sensational white captive Olive Oatman, and the famed abolitionist Sojourner Truth. It does so at three flashpoints of United States policy that mark the violent refinement of racial and gender formations: the specter of Latin American independence, Indian Removal, and the protracted Abolition of Slavery. This project demonstrates the ways in which white Americans of the nineteenth-century turned to cultural and commercially available representations of gendered and racialized difference to make sense of their quickly shifting world. These cultural products of Enlightenment-era Europe—travelogues and art works that could help piece together the meaning of new persons represented by new media—are deeply implicated by long histories of colonialism, enslavement, and empire. This project contends that formations of race and racist ideology in the United States are the outcome of the dense transfer of interracial intimacy across global networks. By demonstrating the permeability of narrative and photographic frames for these women and others like them, this project exposes both penetrable national borders and porous boundaries of abiding racial identities.
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