Browsing by Subject "Kinship"

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    Princess Power: Uncovering the Relationship Between Disney’s Protagonists, their Mothers, and their Fictive Kin
    (2018-04) Hurley, Cameron
    This paper analyzes the kinship relationships displayed in Disney princess films produced between 1937-2010. By exploring the various parental figures in the films, or the fictive kin who supplement their absence, the paper highlights the ways in which anachronistic thematic plots continue to affect modern children. The paper is divided into four chapters: I) Just Around the Riverbend, which discusses the familial sacrifices made in Pocahontas and Mulan; II) Motherless, which examines the consistent lack of biological maternal figures in the majority of the films, along with the witches who supplant them; III) Fairies, Forest Creatures, Father Figures, and Fictive Kin, which explores the single-fathers in the films and the anthropomorphic fictive kin that guide the protagonists in Cinderella and The Little Mermaid; and IV) Married Ever After, a chapter detailing Disney’s marketing tactics, consumerism, and the evolution of a woman’s relationship with the Walt Disney Company.
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    Queering Oocytes: Laboratory, Body, Cell
    (2020-05-01) Zussman, Jay
    Recent advances in stem cell technology enable new possibilities for biological reproduction among same-sex couples and transgender people who have undergone medical or surgical transition. Despite this promise of revolutionary queer futurity, biomedical science has been harnessed to marginalize the reproductive capacity of the poor, colonized, and people of color for eugenic and capitalist aims. This study draws upon firsthand experiences working in a reproductive biology laboratory and integrates perspectives from feminist science and technology studies, Black feminism, and queer and transgender studies. The work explores how the formation of scientific knowledge (re)produces racialization of reproductive bodies, capitalist manipulation of reproductive potential, and normative temporalities of reproductive bodies. Examining the dynamic plasticity of sexing and gendering gametes within the laboratory reveals a mechanism by which researchers instill their own internalized sex and gender norms onto their research subjects, essentializing sex and gender hierarchies across species, tissue, and cell boundaries. In vitro gametogenesis, an assisted reproductive technology on the horizon of human use, invites a politics of multiplicity through which to understand all mammalian tissues as potentially reproductive. This novel reproductive future elucidates the interconnections between human and animal reproduction within and beyond the laboratory context and enables groundbreaking new opportunities for interspecies reproductive intimacy and queer reproductive futurity. Ultimately, the work takes an ambivalent view of emergent reproductive technologies, acknowledging their reinforcement of eugenic and economizing racial logics even as they queer human and animal bodies, tissues, and cells and revolutionize kinship and reproductive capacity for bodies deemed non-normative.
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    Survival of a Perverse Nation: Sexuality and Kinship in Post-Soviet Armenia
    (2016) Shirinian, Tamar

    Survival of a Perverse Nation traces the ways in which contemporary Armenian anxieties are congealing into the figure of the “homosexual.” As in other post-Soviet republics, homosexuality has increasingly become defined as the crisis of the times, and is understood by many as a destructive force linked to European encroachment. In Armenia, a growing right-wing nationalist movement since 2012 has been targeting LGBT and feminist activists. I suggest that this movement has arisen out of Armenia’s concerns regarding proper social and biological reproduction in the face of high rates of emigration of especially men in search of work. Many in the country blame this emigration on a post-Soviet oligarchy, with close ties to the government. This oligarchy, having quickly and massively privatized and liquidated industry and land during the war over the region of Nagorno-Karabagh (1990-1994) with Azerbaijan, created widespread un(der)employment. A national narrative attributing the nation’s survival of the 1915 Genocide and dispersion of its populations to strong morality preserved by institutions such as the Church and the family has now, in the post-Soviet era, ruptured into one of moral “perversion.” This dissertation is based on 15 months of ethnographic research, during which I participated in the work of two local non-governmental organizations: Public Information and Need for Knowledge, an LGBT rights organization and Women’s Resource Center, a feminist organization. I also conducted interviews with 150 households across Yerevan, the capital city, and did in-depth interviews with other activists, right-wing nationalists and journalists. Through psychoanalytic frameworks, as well as studies of kinship, I show how sovereignty – the longed for dream for Armenians over the last century – is felt to have failed because of the moral corruption of the illegitimate figures that fill Armenian seats of authority. I, thus, examine the ways in which a missing father of the household is discursively linked to the lack of strong leadership by a corrupt government, producing a prevalent feeling of moral disintegration that nationalists displace onto the “homosexual.”