Women's Studies

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Open Access
Falling Through the Cracks? An Exploration of the Conditions of Care Experienced by Younger Residents Living in Long-Term Care Facilities
(2023-03-28) Seeley, Morgan Alison Robinson; Armstrong, Pat
This dissertation examines the situation of younger residents living in long-term care facilities (LTCFs) in Ontario in the decades leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic. Adults under the age of 65 with disabilities and chronic health conditions were impacted by neoliberal processes of long-term care (LTC) reform and the closure of provincial residential institutions for people with disabilities. Gaps in public health and social care associated with these changes led some non-senior adults to turn to LTCFs when their needs were not being met. Very little is known about the situation of younger residents, who comprise less than eight percent of the total resident population in Ontario’s LTCFs. I address this gap by exploring non-senior residents’ “conditions of care”—the practices, interactions, relationships, and structures that make up their everyday experiences living in a LTCF. My study asks: What are the conditions of care for younger residents, do they align with their needs and preferences, and what factors account for the value of and problems with these conditions? Guided by a relational feminist disability perspective, I address these questions by drawing on data from semi-structured interviews with younger residents, direct care workers, and administrators, as well as from a focus group with family members, field notes, and facility-specific documents. I analyze the data as informed by intersecting relations of difference and inequality associated with gender, disability and age, and as situated within a particular set of contexts. My findings demonstrate that for non-senior residents, the promise of LTCFs lies in relational care—the presence of favourable interpersonal care relationships and the practice of care in relational ways. However, relational care is often prevented by the structures of LTC, particularly those associated with public funding inadequacies and the application of strategies associated with new public management (NPM). Addressing these barriers is key to transforming LTCFs into places that are better for younger residents. But LTCFs will not be appropriate until a range of accessible, high quality, public LTC and social services are also made available.
Open Access
Poland for Poles: Nationalist Imaginaries and the Reproduction of Sexual and Racialized Otherness
(2021-11-15) Rogula, Weronika; Agathangelou, Anna M.
This dissertation examines the complex relationships between both sexual (LGBTQI and otherwise) and racialized (subjects who are read as neither white nor Catholic) others and nation|empire-building. It theorizes Poland as concept (meaning sociological entity shaped by multiple competing actors with shifting degrees of definitional power) and method (meaning process and reading theory) while also seeing it as a site of experimentation of power relations (where these actors are vying for different projects) in order to trace its multiple social reproductions (as transitional; postcolonial; fascist; eastern other within) which are theorized in co-production with EUropean global order (Jasanoff, 2004). It argues that doing so allows us to understand the (necro)political significance these social reproductions hold for the nation-state (on a global scale) and its O/others. This project brings together and in conversation transnational feminist and queer and postcolonial scholarship and Edward W. Said's (1993) method(ology) of contrapuntal reading, Reiner Keller's (1993) sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD) with Teun A. van Dijk's (1993) critical discourse analysis (CDA) while engaging in-depth interviewing and participant observation. In doing so, it shows how centering post-socialist Poland moves us to question tensions between national and transnational as well as local and global political and economic forces, and, in this particular space and time (meaning current geopolitical moment as interconnected to my understanding of the site of Poland), LGBTQI|racialized subjectivity and Polish national identity which is framed against these O/others by the (far-)right.
Open Access
Tracing Responses to Femi(ni)cide in Postconflict Guatemala: A Transnational Feminist Analysis
(2021-03-08) Doiron, Fabienne Danielle; Crosby, Alison D.
In the first decade of the 2000s, feminists and human rights activists in Guatemala began to call attention to an increasing number of murders of women in the country. Mobilizing the discourse of femicidio / feminicidio that was circulating in many parts of Latin America at the time, they advocated for womens right to live free from violence and pressured the state to address the conditions that infringe on this right. This dissertation addresses state and civil society responses to femi(ni)cide, examining the assumptions embedded in these responses and their implications for questions of justice and accountability in Guatemalas postconflict and post-genocide context. It draws on interviews with 33 key informants (activists and advocates, representatives of NGOs and state institutions) as well as textual analysis of reports on and campaigns against femi(ni)cide. Grounded in an antiracist and transnational feminist framework, it offers a historicized and contextualized analysis of femi(ni)cide as embedded in social relations of power and structures of exclusion, privilege, and marginalization. The dissertation uncovers a tension between everyday and exceptional violence running through anti-femi(ni)cide activism that is largely sustained by the idea of a continuum of violence against women. Such a continuum links more common and normalized forms of gendered violence to headline-grabbing murders exhibiting signs of torture and overkill by explaining them as violence that affects all women as women. While sustaining this tension was central to activists success in pressuring legislators to adopt a law that criminalized several forms of gendered violence, it has also contributed to the erasure of the particular women targeted by more exceptional forms of violence: those marginalized by constructions of class, race/ethnicity, gender expression, sexuality, and proximity to sex work, gangs, and criminality— whether real or presumed. Contextualizing the Guatemalan states responses to femi(ni)cide within its historical treatment of sexual and gendered violence in law reveals the gendered, racialized, and classed constructs as well as the structural barriers that together mediate access to justice. Given that state responses to femi(ni)cide have largely been limited to the realm of criminal law, these findings warn against relying on the state to address gendered violence.
Open Access
Stereo/Types: Canadian Women DJs Sound Off
(2021-03-08) Hancock, Maren Jane; Jenson, Jennifer
There has been a significant increase in the number of women DJs since the turn of the twenty-first century due to advances in technology resulting in increased access to cheap or free digital music and software, inexpensive and user-friendly hardware (such as controllers), and the networking and promotional opportunities afforded by the Internet. Moreover, emergent local, regional, national, and international initiatives to advance women in DJ culture are converging with established underground networks and actions, resulting in the increased visibility and influence of BIPOC and womxn DJs and producers, who continue to organize collective resistance to misogyny, sexism, racism, and heteronormativity within DJ cultureboth generally, and specific to Canada. This multi-dimensional studyconducted from the insider perspective of a professional DJexplores the ways in which Canadian women DJs positionality in DJ culture is impacted by the social construction of gender, race, and sexuality. Particular attention is paid to the effects of homosociality and heteronormativity on womens engagement with DJ technologies, and how we resist these forces by forming networks to establish our own physical and digital spaces in Canadian DJ culture. Although womens access to DJ culture and our representation within the culture in terms of media portrayal, diversity, and sheer numbers has improved, the underground and activist scenes propelling these institutional changes are increasingly vulnerable to commercial cooptation that threatens to dilute any revolutionary potential. This study analyzes how women have been excluded from the majority of academic and popular culture discourse on the history of DJ culture, and the importance of documenting our contributions in order to push for a reconfiguration of this history. The research design for this project consists of a mixed-methods approach incorporating qualitative and quantitative data generated from an online survey of 113 womxn DJs, personal interviews with thirty-five womxn DJs, and participant observation. This rich ethnographic data is explored in detail throughout this study.
Open Access
Dis-orienting Polyamory: Preserving Poly's Transformative Potential
(2020-08-11) Cheshire, Liane Celine Marie; Noble, Bobby J.
Drawing on the narratives of 21 people practicing polyamory in the city of Guelph, ON, this study explores how participants define and conceptualize polyamory, in general, and in relation to their self-concept. Drawing on grounded theory, autoethnography and narrative analysis, this study presents a range of definitions and subjective meanings of polyamory. This dissertation argues that people understand polyamory in a range of ways and that there is no single unified definition of polyamory nor a standard way of conceptualizing polyamory in relation to self-concept. The narratives demonstrate that the fluidity and diversity of definitions and conceptions of polyamory afford participants the opportunity to adapt polyamory to their individual situations. While some participants define polyamory in ways that reproduce sexual normalcy by claiming essentialist identities and privileging love, other participants define polyamory in ways that enable them to resist heteronormative and homonormative monogamy and transform their relationship dynamics. Some participants understand polyamory as interconnected with their queer, feminist, and anarchist politics. Participants who identify as asexual, or who have mental health challenges, conceptualize polyamory in ways that allow them to transform their relationships in non-normative ways. The narratives reveal that none of the participants constructs polyamory as a sexual orientation or as one distinct thing. Resisting the move to define polyamory as a sexual orientation, what I call dis-orienting polyamory, preserves the radical politics and transformative potentials that polyamory offers polyamorists.
Open Access
Shimmy, Shake or Shudder?: A Feminist Ethnographic Analysis of Sexualization and Hypersexualization in Competitive Dance
(2020-08-11) Sandlos, Lisa Anne; Luxton, Dr. Meg
A sexualized aesthetic for dance has been becoming increasingly prevalent in privately-operated dance schools and competition performances across Canada and the United States since the early 1990s. Interacting with a complex constellation of social factors including gender, sexuality, race, class, age, and dis/ability, this aesthetic is fuelled by the persistent presence of sexualized images of girls and women in mass media and dance studio training that focuses on preparing students for competitions. Parents and particularly mothers of young dancers sometimes also contribute to the sexualization of their daughters either through their expectations that the dance studio will reproduce dancing they have seen in reality television shows, films, or YouTube videos or by accepting potentially negative consequences of sexualized dancing to reap other benefits from participation in dance. Not only are heightened levels of eroticization problematic for many girl dancers and the development of their self-identities, but they can be detrimental to the art of dance as stereotypes of dancers as sexualized objects become further entrenched in public thinking about dance. A significant effect of practising and performing repetitive, sexualized movements for girl dancers is that they are constructed and reiterated as objectified bodies. Feminist scholarship pertaining to bodies, sexualization, girlhood, and mothering reviewed in this dissertation contextualizes the current sexualized aesthetic in dance within cultural and historical processes that objectify girls and women. Dance studies literature deepens the conversation about how eroticization of dancing bodies is reinforced through embodiment and repetition of sexualized movement patterns. Qualitative data from feminist ethnography informs theoretical analysis throughout this thesis, supporting my assertion that social-cultural processes of sexualization acting on the bodies and lives of young girls who dance should be of concern to all who are involved in dance education. As modelled in this dissertation, performance ethnography, movement analysis, embodied somatic research, and other forms of body-based research can add to public awareness and discourses within dance studio communities about the issue of sexualization of young dancers. Indeed, dance choreography, performance, and embodiment can give young dancers opportunities to have a stronger voice in the conversation about sexualization.
Open Access
Between Heteropatriarchy and Homonationalism: Codes of Gender, Sexuality, and Race/Ethnicity in Putin's Russia
(2019-11-22) Davydova, Darja; Mitchell, Allyson
This 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.
Open Access
What is Critical Yoga Studies?: Gender, Health, and Cross-Cultural Consumption of Yoga in Contemporary North America
(2019-03-05) Mintz, Judith Rebecca; Michaud, Jacinthe
This feminist ethnography of contemporary yoga communities in North America represents my exploration of inequalities in the yoga world. Through conversations about how we experience our bodies, our abilities, and social locations, I ask questions about inclusion and exclusion, body normativity, and authenticity. Yoga offers an intersectional lens through which to examine and shift intersecting inequalities not only in the yoga studio, but in the health and fitness milieu as well. Key questions examine the factors that have led to the dominance of white, able bodied women in yoga. What makes yoga, yoga? How do we know what we are doing as yoga students is authentic, and what marks authenticity in a diverse climate of hybridity and transnational cultural exchange? This dissertation examines the ways in which contemporary yoga practitioners take up the issues of identity in yoga sites, particularly with regard to race, gender, embodiment, and class. It asks, how are ideological gender norms and embodiment produced and reproduced in North American yoga communities, and how do practitioners resist or conform to them? Multi-site ethnography is the central research method. The fieldwork consisted of participant observation in yoga classes, one-on-one interviews with yoga teachers and students, a participatory action research group, and discourse analysis of social media conversations about yoga. As the dissertation takes up questions around race and authenticity in yoga, the Race and Yoga Conference in Oakland, California was an important site of investigation. Research results showed that yoga in North America is not a unified practice, despite much debate as to what is considered valid and authentic in terms of what people think is the real yoga. Yoga is not a monolithic entity, and many approaches to yoga can function for those committed to social justice. The thesis also concludes that accessibility in yoga is multivalent, because people consider access to yoga in a variety of ways. Affordable yoga classes are great, but if people with disabilities can not get up the stairs to the studio, they miss out. Intersectional feminism in yoga is one powerful way to address these issues.
Open Access
Feminist Perspectives on the Brain Drain and Social Reproduction in Transition Economies: Romania's Highly Skilled Post-Communist Migration to Canada
(2019-03-05) Petrica, Oana Lia; Agathangelou, Anna M.
Starting with the 1990s, economies worldwide entered a knowledge-based phase of growth as part of the neoliberal project of development. In order to absorb the best well-trained workforce internationally, Canada re-organized its immigration programs. One of the products of this re-organization was a prioritization, enlargement and increased focus placed on the Federal Skilled Worker Program (FSWP). In my dissertation, I examine the effects and outcomes of the movement of highly skilled individuals on their origin developing and transition countries - Romania, in this case. Insofar as contextualizing Romanias post-communist transition to a capitalist market, the thesis contributes to the understanding of the transnational dimensions of social reproduction through Romanian mothers investment in the migration of their children to Canada, as well as the gendered foundations of certain Canadian immigration policies that make such movements possible. While the existing feminist literature on social reproduction has not made visible enough how womens paid and unpaid work in transition states enables the migration of young people, the brain-drain migration scholarship misses out completely the social reproductive work from developing countries that makes such movements possible. By analyzing Canadas Federal Skilled Worker (FSWP) immigration program and Romanian mothers investment in the migration of their children to Canada (mobility enabled by such programs), my aim is to fill in such gaps in the current literature, in an attempt to expand both the brain-drain migration and social-reproduction literature. In asking these questions, I hope to bring forward arguments about how Canadian neoliberal projects of growth and development are indirectly subsidized by Romanian womens work, and how the overall processes accentuate and intensify inequalities in different parts of the world.
Open Access
Trans Necrointimacies: Affect, Race, and the Chalky Geopolitics of Trans Memorialization
(2019-03-05) Bhanji, Nael Nasir; Dua, Enakshi
This dissertation explores the centrality of racialized trans death in structuring whiteness as emblematic of contemporary trans(normative) life. Taking my point of departure from the chalk outlines of dead bodies that frequently appear during rituals of trans memorialization, I analyze how the circulation of necropolitical affects coheres a form of trans-homonationalism within the Trans Day of Remembrance (TDOR). Held annually, TDOR events are global vigils that publicly mourn the victims of anti-trans violence. By analyzing narratives about trans-identified people of colour who have been memorialized by TDOR, I place the affective circulations of racialized, necropolitical violencea phenomenon I have termed trans necrointimaciesin conversation with TDOR to illustrate how racial decay is central to the securitization of both whiteness and trans homonationalism within the nation-state. Through participant observation at TDOR vigils in Toronto and New York, interviews with trans people of colour, and content-analysis of the TDOR website, this research highlights complex ways in which practices of trans memorialization circulate trans necrointimacies in the service of transnormative narratives of affective belonging within the nation-state. Tracing the affective worldings that occur through the spectacularization and consumption of ordinary racialized trans death, this dissertation seeks to animate the seemingly disparate narratives of counter-terrorism and trans politics, the trans body and the terrorist body, and vigilant reactions and the vigil that re-acts ordinary violences.
Open Access
The Neoliberal Politics of the Child: Violence Against Women and Mother/Child Welfare, 1990-2012
(2018-11-21) Breton, Patricia Louise; Newton, Janice I
This thesis examines violence against women, mothers and child welfare in Canada and Ontario from 1990 to 2012. It explores policy evolution during this perfect storm of intensified neoliberalism and the turn to the child in policy agendas, tracing the complexities of politics and policy at federal, provincial and institutional levels. Feminist political economy, feminist standpoint epistemology and intersectional theorizing provide a complimentary race, gender and class analysis of the structural and systemic inequalities encountered by women and their children seeking violence-free lives. Mixed methods of policy mapping, forty semi-structured qualitative interviews with state and non-state actors and two focus groups with abused mothers are used to connect policy to the lived experiences of abused mothers, single fathers, social workers, and managers. This study shows the decentralization of federal policy power to the provinces, the withering federal investment in income inequality, and the narrow focus on early childhood education bode ill for women fleeing violence. The restructuring of Ontario policies and practices around the at-risk child under the Harris Conservatives that continued under the McGuinty Liberals, depoliticized violence against women initiatives and retrenched colonial, gendered and racialized violence against women and children. Furthermore, the policy shift to the child eclipsed womens equality issues, such as ending violence against women, redressing womens poverty, and mitigating the structural inequality of womens unwaged caring labour with children. With the rise of a child welfare state focused on child risk, objective managerialism, and failure to protect policies, social workers and managers supporting families criticize these anti-feminist policies and practices that promote the hyper-responsibility of mothers to protect their children to the exclusion of fathers. As women with children flee violence transition to single mother families, their futures are seriously constrained by state-mandated child protection work and increased state monitoring of their lives. Alternative visions for transformative change include hybrid models of state and non-state engagement that place survivor alliances at the centre of policy agendas and policy development. This gives us hope for a different future for women with children facing violence.
Open Access
"It actually made me feel like I didn't even want to stay here": Experiences of "Voluntary Return" in a Sanctuary City
(2018-11-21) Aberman, Tanya Aviva; Giles, Wenona
During the near decade of Conservative rule in Canada, from 2006 2015, rancorous anti-refugee and anti-migrant discourse and policy were circulated, which manifested in a large-scale overhaul of the immigration system. Social, economic, and physical exclusions increased as a reassertion of state sovereignty through the reconstitution and solidification of borders, as well as the increased precariousness of migrant bodies. The primary goals of my dissertation research have been to learn why some migrants chose to leave Canada voluntarily and to understand the factors that have forced them to do so. Among the key questions this dissertation attempts to answer are the following: 1) What factors push migrants to make decisions on the spectrum of forced voluntary return? 2) How does gender, as it intersects with other identities and social relations, influence migrants experiences of forced voluntary return? 3) What does the addition of forced voluntary return, a non-binary concept, offer to current research on voluntary and involuntary migration? This research proposes that particular spaces and relationships became laden with feelings of exclusion and criminalization, which for the migrants centred in this dissertation, resulted in a loss of hope for a future in Canada. Participants identified loss of hope as one of the primary factors that pushed them to leave voluntarily, so as to relieve the pain associated with staying. The exclusions were importantly impacted by gender, class, racialization, age and ability, which came together in ways that pushed some into a forced voluntary return. I offer the spectrum of forced voluntary return to capture some of the tensions and messiness within migrant experiences of return that are neither completely voluntary nor forced.
Open Access
"Pagod, Dugot, Pawis (Exhaustion, Blood, and Sweat)": Transnational Practices of Care and Emotional Labour among Filipino Kin Networks
(2018-11-21) Leon, Conely De; Philip Kelly, Philip
While the global care chains literature presupposes that care work flows unidirectionally along a hierarchical chain from the Global South to the Global North (Hochschild 2000; Parreas 1998, 2000), this dissertation argues for a reconceptualization of transnational care and emotional labour that goes beyond links in a chain. Drawing on multisited ethnographic research conducted with a total of seventy participants in the Philippines, Canada, and Hong Kong, this study offers a more expansive approach to understanding transnational care and emotional labour as multiphased, multidirectional, multirelational, and multilocational in scope. This dissertation makes some key interventions in gender, migration, and care scholarship. First, it understands that transnational care occurs in multiple phases in order to account for reconfigurations of care across the life course, such as migrants performing end-of-life care for elderly kin. Second, in contrast to the global care chains literature, which frames care as unidirectional, it highlights the ways in which care flows in multiple directions, showing how those who receive care also give care. Third, it moves away from an exclusive focus on the mother-child dyad, thereby decentering the Western heteronormative nuclear family structure and demonstrating how transnational care is multirelational, involving several generations and broader communities of carers. Fourth, it underscores the ways in which transnational care is multilocational by acknowledging how migrant networks often shift locales and perform care labour from multiple sites at once. Finally and most importantly, this dissertation foregrounds Pinay peminist kuwentuhan, or Filipina feminist talkstory - a dynamic, collective, inclusive, participatory storytelling and storybuilding process that activates Pinay ways of knowing and being in the world. Pinay peminist kuwentuhan guides readers on a journey towards understanding the ways in which transnational Filipinos maintain kin solidarity and support the collective survival of migrant carers over time. Tracing the transnational caring practices of four Filipino migrant networks specifically, their innovative use of traveling artefacts and information and communication technologies (ICTs) this dissertation provides a more culturally nuanced approach to understanding transnational practices of care and emotional labour.
Open Access
Contagious History: Affect and Identification in Queer Public History Exhibitions
(2018-08-27) De Szegheo Lang, Tamara Ondine Elisabeth; Mitchell, Allyson Amy
For LGBTQ people, history is never simply the past, what has passed, or what is dead and gone. Uncovering neglected LGBTQ pasts has been heralded not only as a project for historians but as an explicitly political endeavour. Histories that document LGBTQ lives and cultures have not traditionally been included in school curricula, collected in government archives, or passed down through family narration. Instead, their development and dissemination have been taken on primarily by LGBTQ individuals and communities themselves. This dissertation examines how community-based LGBTQ archives and public history projects reach out to broad publics. It focuses on the role of affect, feeling, and emotion in fostering interest in and connection to these histories. This dissertation explores three sites: the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History (Brooklyn, New York), the GLBT History Museum (San Francisco, California), and the site-specific art exhibition, Land|Slide Possible Futures, which was exhibited at the Markham Museum and Heritage Village in 2013 (Markham, Ontario). Research at these sites involved analyzing exhibits in terms of both content and form, interviewing curators and others involved in creating the exhibits, and writing reflective field notes. These three sites speak to a contagious public history that is necessarily critical. This is because contagious public history questions dominant historical narratives, demonstrates the construction of historical narratives and public history exhibitions, and questions traditional forms of expertise. This work highlights three factors that enable this form of public history: the encouragement of amateur historians; the use of objects in relationship-formation; and the creation of affective atmospheres. As a whole, this dissertation argues that there is much we can learn from community-based LGBTQ archives and public history projects. It insists that considerations of affect and emotion are central, not incidental, to a critical public history project. Though this work focuses primarily on representations of LGBTQ history, its contributions can reach into other areas because affect and emotion are central to all public history, whether or not they are recognized explicitly. History is political, but it is also emotional.
Open Access
Queer Feeling: Affective Bonds, Intimate Possibilities
(2018-08-27) De Szegheo-Lang, Naomi Indigo Justine; Mitchell, Allyson Amy
Taking a broad and shifting definition of intimacy, this dissertation looks to queer and/or unexpected forms of intimacy that have taken hold of the public imaginary through contemporary popular cultureprofessional cuddling, feminist pornography, interspecies friendships, and object-oriented sexualities. By analyzing representations of these intimate connections that are found in online public cultures and in responsive forms of queer and feminist art, this project offers a way to rethink our approach to intimate knowledge formation, including challenging dominant structures of relation, kinship, and affection. Through grounded sites of intimate encounter, this project suggests that critically valuing unexpected or dissenting moments of affective connection is fundamental in resisting oppressive and restrictive social orders, including intensified neoliberalisms, ongoing colonial and imperial state projects, and renewed heteronormativities and homonormativities. Methodologically, this work blends scholarly writing with personal narrative and practice-based research methods in a proposal of practice-based affective research: a hybrid methodology which accounts for the ongoingness of affect-based research and values the personal sparks that guide ones objects of study. Located at the crossroads of cultural studies, digital humanities, queer theory, and affect theory, this research aims to diversify the scope of what we understand to be intimate knowledge by augmenting marginalized knowledges, re-imagining intimate futures, and broadening possibilities for living lives in resistance to the status quo.
Open Access
"If It Is Sincere, It Will Rouse Hostility": The Freewoman, Feminisms, and Print Culture in Early Twentieth-Century England
(2018-03-01) Milo, Sage M.; Brooke, Stephen J.
This dissertation is an examination of The Freewoman (1911-12) as a feminist publication, and its editor Dora Marsdens (1882-1960) particular role in the journal. It examines periodical culture and feminisms, and the possibilities that periodicals open up for feminist thought and politics through the characteristics of this publishing genre. These include a focus on the emotional community created in and through The Freewoman, as well as its self-reflexive grappling with its role as a periodical. Using The Freewoman and archival collections and life-writing related to it, this dissertation asks: how did periodicals function as sites for articulating feminist thought in ways that reached beyond the limitations of formal politics like suffrage? How did they foster the diversification and expansion of feminism in progressive directions? How might attention to the emotional aspects of periodicals and the communities created in and through them enrich the historical narratives of first-wave feminism, and feminisms more broadly? And what possibilities does a reflexive and intentional use of the capacities of a medium and genre (in this case the independent periodical) open for feminist politics? This dissertation highlights the importance of dissent and conflict to feminism, through The Freewoman. I argue that the periodical contributed to the diversification of early-twentieth century feminism not only through its subject matter but importantly through insisting on dissent, conflict, and difference as essential to the progress, if not the very existence, of feminism. Using the characteristics of the periodical as a publishing genre, The Freewoman created a space and a community that were intensely political, while allowing for the expression of opinions and emotions that were perceived as destructive. It is in the alternative space that The Freewoman created, I offer, that its uniqueness and importance lie. Through its resistance of artificial unity and its emphasis on dialogue and conflict as a constant state, rather than a troubled moment that should be resolved, I see The Freewoman also as creating a queer space or counterpublic, in the sense of challenging normativity in a range of areas.
Open Access
"Empowered to Change the World for the Better": Gender, Citizenship, and Justice in Three Environmental Education Programs for Girls
(2018-03-01) Lowe, Leyna Shay; Sandilands, Catriona A. H.
This dissertation explores possibilities for environmental citizenship for girls. When environmental education emerged as a field of study in the 1970s, it articulated an environmentalism for young people based in the language of citizenship. However, environmental justice and feminist environmental education researchers have pointed out that this citizenship was homogenized, with little consideration given to gender, race, class, and sexuality, and that this citizenship was based on obedience to normative environmental prescriptions rather than on democracy and justice. At the same time, girls are often excluded from the vocabularies of citizenship because of their age, gender, and other intersecting factors, and their marginalization has been exacerbated by the myriad of programs for girls which, since the 1990s, have been empowering them with the message that they must change themselves rather than struggle for their social rights. This dissertation argues for a feminist project of environmental citizenship that politicizes gender and the intersecting categories of difference in girls lives, and also taps into environmental educations democratic potential to argue that girls need to be exposed to possibilities of social transformation and justice. To bring gender and girls into environmental education, this dissertation rests on evidence gathered in field observations, interviews, and focus groups conducted with three environmental education programs for girls: the Girl Guides of Canada-Guides du Canada (Toronto), Green Girls (New York City), and ECO Girls (Ann Arbor), to demonstrate that gender, race, and class matter in girls access to the sciences, the outdoors, and environmental programming. Using a feminist environmental justice lens, it assesses each of the programs different models of ecological citizenship, arguing that an intersectional perspective and an openness to analyzing power, privilege, and difference generate more robust environmentalisms and ecological citizenships for girls. Specifically, the research considers that individual approaches to empowerment will not achieve the kinds of social change that are necessary for gender equality and environmental justice, and that forms of public engagement that are rooted primarily in service, leadership, and civic-mindedness as opposed to activism, advocacy, and collective mobilization are alone not enough to expose girls to the possibilities of full citizenship, social transformation, and democratic engagement.
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.
Open Access
Downers: Crip Affect and Radical Relationalities
(2017-07-27) Neuman, Sydney Rachel; Karpinski, Eva
Taking up prior formulations of crip affect, I explore the positionality of the downer as one whose body complicates global economies of social and political encounter. Engaging with neoliberal formulations of embodiment and the co-constitutive forces of heteronormativity and compulsory able-bodiedness (McRuer, 2006), I look at the ways in which many theoretical and political disability justice projects position disability as complementary to consumer capitalism, producing normative frameworks into which certain abnormal embodiments can be incorporated. I propose that the downer, as a relational body that proliferates social dis-ease and economic dysfunction, mobilizes crip affect ironically and creatively. Through processes of becoming (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Kim 2015; Puar 2015), downers resist assimilation into biomedical frameworks, and in doing so, propose generative forms of social, economic, political, and corporeal unintelligibility. This article is, itself, an exercise in becoming downer. It renders habitable an ostensibly uninhabitable positionality.
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.