Women's Studies
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Browsing Women's Studies by Subject "Activism"
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Item Open Access Between Heteropatriarchy and Homonationalism: Codes of Gender, Sexuality, and Race/Ethnicity in Putin's Russia(2019-11-22) Davydova, Darja; Mitchell, AllysonThis dissertation examines two simultaneous and convergent processes. One is the mechanism of heteropatriarchal nationalism in Russia, in which white ethnic Russian heteronormativity is idealized and employed for maintaining symbolic and physical boundaries of the state. Another is the process through which Russias heteropatriarchal nationalism interacts, diverges from, or overlaps with homonationalism and homotransnationalism on a global scale. In order to unravel these complex processes four political case studies are presented: Chapter 1 explores how Russian gender and sexuality studies were affected by the Western gaze and the Russian governments repression on queer and feminist scholars and discusses the resistant practices in academic contexts. Building on this foundation, Chapter 2 employs visual analysis to examine the links between notions of patriotism and representations of gender and sexuality in Russian popular culture. Chapter 3 applies semiotic analysis to examine the use of sexual signs and metaphors in political cartoons in the context of RussiaUkraine war. Finally, Chapter 4 applies critical discourse analysis to investigate the discursive and representational practices embedded in oppositional media reporting on the persecution of Chechen gay men. These political case studies demonstrate how codes of gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity are employed to sustain the physical and symbolic national borders in the Russian centre and in two peripheral militarized zonesthe Republic of Chechnya and the recently annexed Crimea. This thesis argues that both nationalist sexual politics and resistance to it are saturated by the concomitant processes of racialization/ethnic othering and the ascendancy of white Russianness. Located at the crossroads of Russian studies and transnational sexuality studies, this dissertation expands our understandings of the intersections of nationalism and sexuality, global homonationalisms, and the links between sex, gender, and race/ethnicity in the post-Soviet region.Item Open Access Intersections of Welfare and Child Welfare Systems and Single Mothers' Activism in the U.S.(2017-07-27) Nakagawa, Shihoko; Gazso, Amber M.This study examines the lived experiences of single mothers involved with child welfare services and mothers activism against child welfare services, in order to more deeply understand the intersections between and meanings of the welfare and child welfare systems in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the U.S. This study had two research questions: 1) how have the material and symbolic dimensions of change worked together in shaping the post-1990 restructuring of both areas of welfare services? And 2) how have mothers responded to these reforms? Specifically, what is the nature of mothers activisms against child welfare services given post-1990 welfare restructuring? This study used a theoretical framework that draws on scholarly understandings of governance, feminist theorizing of policy change, and anti-racist feminism and decolonizing theory. This qualitative study employed a mix of data collection and analysis strategies. The primary data was collected through in-depth, faceto-face semi-structured interviews with 16 study participants, who were parents (mostly mothers) involved with child welfare services and/or activism and their advocates. My analysis of the interviews was directed by strategies of critical discourse analysis and narrative analysis, based on feminist standpoint epistemology. The findings of this study reveal that the combination of two systems after welfare reform created the material and symbolic conditions that blame and punish single mothers for having children without resources. Enacting a neoliberal gender order that expects that women assume social reproduction privately, children can be removed from single mothers when they cannot uphold this expectation. This study also found that mothers activism against child welfare services showed their feminist struggle to demand welfare rights as social and economic justice. This study highlighted that patriarchal gender orders have been institutionalized through the implementation of social welfare policy, and mothers have organized activism to challenge such gender orders.Item Open Access Personal Touches, Public Legacies: An Ethnography of LGBT Libraries and Archives(2017-07-27) Cooper, Danielle Miriam; Murray, David A. B.Personal touches, Public legacies: An ethnography of LGBT libraries and archives examines lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) information organizations in Vancouver, Canada and surrounding areas. In order to develop a deeper understanding of the diversity in, changes to and challenges for LGBT information organizations, a multi-sited ethnography was conducted between June and September 2014. Organizations featured in the study include: two autonomous LGBT information organizations (the BC Lesbian and Gay Archives and Out on the Shelves Library), two LGBT information organizations founded within universities (the Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony at Simon Fraser University, the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria), an LGBT-focused collection within Vancouvers public municipal cultural milieu (the Ken Brock collection at the City of Vancouver Archives and the Museum of Vancouver) and, a temporary, autonomous home library with a queer mandate (the STAG Library). This study puts feminist, LGBT and queer studies in dialogue with archival studies and library and information studies (LIS). The chapters are organized by overarching themes associated with information organizations and address specific theoretical discussions that accompany those themes: location (Chapter 2), collection development (Chapter 3), organization and dissemination (Chapter 4) and mandate(Chapter 5). The findings not only explore how LGBT information collections and organizations interrogate and reimagine the definitional boundaries of what constitutes an information collection and information organizations more broadly but also examine how concepts of gender, sexuality and queerness are understood in the realm of the information organizations under study. The divide between normative and non-normative information collection and organizational practice is not simple or stable, but, like the concept of queer, is ever shifting. The findings demonstrate that queer information organizing persists in LGBT information organizational contexts, but not in ways necessarily anticipated by existing literature on the topic. This study also highlights how the relationship between the LGBT communities and the public is in great flux as some LGBT communities become increasingly considered a part of the mainstream public. It is precisely this oscillation and tension between concepts of the personal and the public that define LGBT information organizing activities in this current moment.