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Gender, Feminist and Women's Studies

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  • ItemOpen Access
    Solidarity Wishes: A Cultural Analysis of Political Solidarity, Sovereignty, and Stalled States of Desire
    (2023-12-08) Pelletier, Gary Lee; Luxton, Meg
    Solidarity Wishes argues that political solidarity is prone to getting stuck inside of stalled states of desire, what I conceptualize as “wishes,” for contemporary Canadian and American settler neoliberal subjects. This project illustrates how solidarity wishes commonly act as rhetorical, strategic, and performative psychological devices. I theorize that an ethics – or mentality – of sovereignty that ideologically structures many of these subjects’ social, political, and institutional lives is largely to blame for solidarity’s trapping within wishes. By centering an analysis of political solidarity through the framework of desire I illuminate how solidarity wishes and their expressions can be harvested by both individuals and groups to achieve something other than solidarity itself, a practice I liken to the psychoanalytic concept of “substitutive satisfaction.” Furthermore, as a meditation on solidarity as an object of desire, this dissertation queries what happens in the affective spaces between thinking and doing, feeling and experiencing, wanting and getting. I analyze examples from politics, popular culture, personal experience, academia, and activism to make my arguments, and I rely on queer theory, feminist theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis as my theoretical frameworks. This dissertation gestures toward the political possibilities of rescuing political solidarity from these ambivalent subjective orectic states of wishes. It defends the theory that solidarity, in its most basic sense, is nonsovereignty manifested in a feeling toward another subject, a feeling that can, and hopefully will, ignite into productive solidarity practices. Solidarity Wishes argues that subjects must embrace their interdependency and adopt an ethics of nonsovereignty in order to transition their stagnant solidarity wishes into genuine desires for sociopolitical change and feasible practices toward transformative justice.
  • ItemOpen Access
    LGBTQ Activisms and Hindu Nationalism in India: An Ethnographic Inquiry
    (2023-08-04) Chatterjee, Shraddha; Murray, David; Mongia, Radhika
    Contemporary Indian society is marked by increasingly violent majoritarianism that is redefining India as a Hindu nation. In recent years, the heightened persecution of religious minorities and an ever-expanding definition of “anti-national” has justified violence against a widening range of people. Paradoxically, in this atmosphere of shrinking public freedoms and increasing state-sanctioned ethnic violence, there has been a simultaneous expansion of LGBTQ representation in mainstream English media and nominal advancements in LGBTQ rights. As a result, a distinct form of LGBTQ support for Hindu nationalism has become popular, even as other LGBTQ activisms have amplified their efforts to resist Hindu nationalism. Within this context, this dissertation examines how and why LGBTQ activists support and resist Hindu nationalism, and how this reconfigures what it means to be queer in Hindu nationalist times. I address these questions through a queer feminist digital ethnography of LGBTQ activists in New Delhi and Mumbai, conducted between February and October 2020. My ethnographic findings indicate that LGBTQ support for Hindu nationalism is often advanced without Hindu nationalist support for LGBTQ rights. Based on this, I argue that what we see in India is aspirational homonationalism, where Hindu nationalist rhetoric is buttressed in the present to accrue LGBTQ rights and inclusion into the nation in the future. Further, LGBTQ complicity with Hindu nationalism signals deeper desires for national belonging, especially when juxtaposed against the persistent claim that homosexuality is “alien” to Indian culture. My findings also demonstrate that LGBTQ activists resisting Hindu nationalism are amplifying these efforts despite experiencing the larger atmosphere in contemporary India as dangerous and stifling. Queer feminist and Dalit queer and trans* activisms, in particular, resist the underlying narratives of LGBTQ inclusion that support Hindu nationalism, rejecting the violence of Hindu nationalism in the process. I conclude that LGBTQ complicity with, and resistance to, Hindu nationalism maps onto existing antagonisms between gay rights activisms, queer feminisms, and Dalit queer and trans* activisms. As aspirations for homonationalism become more deeply rooted within LGBTQ activisms, and as its critiques become more stringent, Hindu nationalism deepens pre-existing fissures within these activisms by becoming another axis of difference in larger struggles over what LGBTQ activisms should fight for, and what LGBTQ lives should look like.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Feminist Responses to Right-Wing Governance in Hungary: The Emergence of Anti-Gender Feminism
    (2023-03-28) Rekhviashvili, Ana; Murray, David A. B.
    This dissertation employs ethnographic data about Hungary’s feminist activist and academic circles to explore the impacts of right-wing anti-gender politics on feminist activists and scholars in Hungary. The right-wing anti-gender context presented multiple challenges to the feminist actors, such as increased visibility of their work in a hostile climate and decreased political and financial support. Feminist actors coped with the restrictive political context by either openly opposing the right-wing politics, self-censoring, deploying strategic language and activities, or leaving the country. The right-wing Anti-gender climate also contributed to the intensification of the debates among various feminist groups. The debates focused on finding feminist strategies for surviving within the hostile, right-wing anti-gender context. I argue that the tensions brought to the Hungarian feminist movement by the right-wing, anti-gender climate contributed to the emergence and discursive dominance of what I call anti-gender feminism. Anti-gender feminist discourse is articulated as a “new” and “progressive” feminist strategy for overcoming the critiques of gender-related work by right-wing anti-gender actors. Anti-gender feminism is grounded in a particular articulation of leftist perspectives and claims that the feminist movement must center on the needs of the majority of women and appeal to the sensibilities of “everyday people”. According to this discourse, a leftist perspective allows for overcoming the failings of liberal feminist approaches, for example, West-imposed identitarian struggles. According to anti-gender feminist arguments, such approaches dismiss the structural reasons for inequalities affecting the wider public and result in hostility towards feminist initiatives. In its desire to appeal to the wider masses, and operate without interference from the right-wing government, anti-gender feminist discourse distances itself from other marginalized struggles such as trans and sex-workers’ rights and racial justice. It also brings feminist arguments dangerously close to the white-supremacist, nationalist-populist rhetoric of the Hungarian state.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Across seven seas, I followed you here: Caste, marriage migration and multiculturalism in the Indian diaspora
    (2022-12-14) Yalamarty, Harshita Sai; Das Gupta, Tania
    This dissertation explores the experiences of marriage migrant women from India to Canada in relation to migration policies and changing expectations of education, employment, and domestic and care labour. I engage with the narratives of twenty-four Indian marriage migrant women who arrived in Canada as international students, economic immigrants or as spouses of economic immigrants. Using an intersectional and transnational feminist lens, I unpack their complicated agency in decision-making processes around marriage and migration to Canada, inflected by structures and processes of caste, class, race and gender. Neoliberal and Canadian multicultural discourses consider these twenty-four mostly Hindu, Telugu-speaking, middle-class and upper-caste women as the ‘new Indian woman’, ‘model minority’ and ‘designer migrants’. However, I put these discourses in tension with the challenges presented to the women by the Canadian immigration system and the pressures they face in navigating conjugal, familial, community, and caste norms. I further this analysis with multi-sited and mixed methods, using interviews with bridal grooming schools and critical engagement with diasporic pageant competitions for married women, and media and cultural portrayals of marriage migration. This dissertation further examines caste practices in the Indian diaspora in Canada to understand the intersection of race, caste, class and gender across the transnational space of India, Canada and the Indian diaspora, and the replication of caste discourses in the practices of diasporic communities at various levels – domestic, professional, and at the community level. I argue that the horizontal culturalization of racism within Canadian multiculturalism, in conjunction with an understanding of caste as cultural practice rather than a hierarchical structure, enables a particular privileged configuration of Indian economic immigrants to assume the ‘model minority’ mantle within Canadian society.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Analogical Reasoning and the Regulation of Race and Same-Sex Sexualities in Canada, 1969–2005
    (2022-12-07) Verhaeghe, Av; Wahab, Amar S.
    In this dissertation, I conceptualize the Canadian states regulation of sexuality as a racial project. To do so, I trace the historical development of analogical reasoning as a mode of racial and sexual governance in Canada between 1969 and 2005. I take a case study approach and use critical discourse analysis to examine House of Commons transcripts and Supreme Court of Canada decisions from three moments that are frequently cited as turning points in Canadian LGBTQ2S history: Parliament's 1969 decision to decriminalize anal sex that occurred in private between two consenting adults over 21 years of age; the Supreme Court's 1995 ruling in Egan v. Canada in which the Court decided sexual orientation was analogous to the grounds of discrimination enumerated in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, one of which is race; and Parliament's 2005 decision to legalize same-sex marriage. I analyze how prime ministers, members of parliament, and Supreme Court judges developed and mobilized the analogical logic that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is like racism. I argue that this use of analogical reasoning serves the Canadian states interests in two ways. First, because state actors analogized contemporary discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation to examples of racism that were either based in the United States or in Canadas past, the analogies invisibilized the ongoing realities of racism and white settler colonialism in Canada, securing Canadas self-construction as "post-race" and delegitimizing critiques of Canadian racism. Second, I suggest that the construction of race and sexual orientation as analogical rather than intersecting phenomena has been part of an effort to diffuse more radical demands for justice by people working against multiple and intersecting forms of racial and sexual repression. Ultimately, I argue that the reforms I describe in this dissertation, which were supposedly aimed at enhancing the inclusion of LGBTQ2S people in Canadian society, strengthened, rather than undermined, heteronormativity, racism, and white settler hegemony in Canada.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Girl Music of the Indie Rock Persuasion: Amplifying Indie Through 2000s Girl Culture
    (2022-08-08) Bimm, Morgan Elizabeth Robertson; Rose, Chloe Brushwood
    The 2000s, a decade that is often considered lacking in defining culture or trends, represents a key period for the distillation of ideas about authenticity and access in North American music cultures. A liminal space between analogue distribution practices and the ubiquity of streaming services, the 2000s saw a turn towards television, film, and early internet cultures as the primary spaces of tastemaking and musical discovery. These unconventional sites challenged existing hierarchies and modes of gatekeeping that reproduced particular music genres, and rock music in particular, as the domain of straight, white masculinities. This interdisciplinary research explores the various facets of this cultural mainstreaming, excavating the central role of women, girls, and girl culture in this shift. I draw on qualitative research interviews conducted with female music supervisors, bloggers, and DJs to bolster this analysis of cultural intermediaries; each chapter of the dissertation also focuses on a different cultural site. In the first chapter, I place existing work on indie music cultures in conversation with girls’ studies scholarship on bedroom cultures to argue that an indie rock rhetoric of retreat and marginalization lacks a feminist citational politics. In the second chapter, I explore the shifting role of music supervisors as tastemakers and provide a critique of ‘fanboy auteur’ narratives. In the third chapter, I explore films released as indie crossover hits during the 2000s, connecting indie music and indie film theory but also arguing that, with more distance from the moment of indie rock’s initial cultural mainstreaming, cultural producers could camp its gender politics. In the fourth chapter, I explore girls’ music blogs from a particular music scene (New York City) as resistive sites where the exclusionary legacies of rock music criticism were challenged. In the fifth and final chapter, I explore how the 2000s also expanded physical music scenes into digital space with the meteoric rise of MP3 and file-sharing technologies that offered an important challenge to masculinist music cultures. This dissertation demonstrates that a wider cultural aversion to feminized cultural texts and practices flattens the stories we tell about 2000s indie rock — and the legacies it left behind.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Fattening Queer Femininities: The Pitfalls, Politics, and Promises of Queer Fat Femme Embodiments
    (2022-03-03) Taylor, Allison Elizabeth; Mitchell, Allyson
    This dissertation identifies and documents how women and non-binary people in Canada negotiate and resist fatphobia, heteronormativity, and femmephobia, alongside other oppressions. More precisely, using qualitative research methods— a combination of narrative inquiry, photo elicitation, and autoethnography— this dissertation explores how women and non-binary people in Canada who identify as queer, fat, and femme experience and challenge these intersecting forms of oppression. I argue that queer fat fem(me)ininities are sites of intense regulation and policing and, at the same time, sources of collective resistance, resilience, and healing. I focus specifically on the ways in which queer fat femmes strategies of resistance, resilience, and healing contain glimmers of more livable worlds for queer fat femmes, where they are valued and desired. Ultimately, by bringing together the fields of fat studies, critical femininities, and queer theory, and through the use of interview, photographic, and autoethnographic data, this dissertation offers thickened understandings of the significance of queer fat femme embodiments, first, for queer, fat, and fem(me)inine people themselves and, second, for (re)conceptualizing normative notions of fatness, fem(me)ininity, and queerness more broadly.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Mapping the Oedipus Complex in Nuruddin Farah's Blood in Sun Trilogy
    (2021-03-08) Ali, Hannah; Britzman, Deborah P
    This thesis investigates the presence of the Oedipus Complex amongst transnational families Nurruddin Farah cultivates in his second trilogy. My analysis differentiates the complexs tension from its nuclear structure to examine how the interplay between love, hate, and envy are expressed as geopolitical contradictions during political stress. By methodologically employing psychoanalysis, I centre the social and cultural provisions of the superego and describe transnational subjectivities as developing in a third space marked by resistance and linguistic preservation. Through this, I contribute to postcolonial critiques of psychoanalysis by situating the subaltern as not an exception but as a historical case that politicizes and cultures Oedipalization. Finally, I consider Farahs novels as intergenerational accounts of Somali history that gifts the proceeding generation with unimagined possibilities about civilization and its fate.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Empowered Mothering & Employment: A Study of Employed Myanmar Diasporic Mothers in Greater Toronto Area
    (2020-11-13) Kyawt, Khin May; O'Reilly, Andrea
    My research study focuses on empowered mothering and employment in relation to first-generation migrant women from Myanmar (Burma) who have relocated to Canada. Specifically, I investigate how employed Myanmar diasporic mothers construct their own accounts of good mothering via the perspectives of empowerment and resistance in relation to the challenges associated with motherhood in the Canadian host country through the lenses of two feminist theories: maternal theory and feminist mothering theory. My investigation is based on a review of relevant works of maternal theorists and feminist migration scholars who explore the lived complexities of migrant mothers within the context of South East Asian migration to Western countries, as well as conducting a qualitative survey interview with eight employed Myanmar Diasporic mothers in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). My study has two main objectives: Firstly, it examines the experiences of employed mothers from Myanmar in the GTA who seek to challenge normative motherhood and the patriarchal culture of the sending country via an engagement with empowered mothering. Secondly, my findings will contribute to existing literature on motherhood studies by providing an overall caregiving narrative that focuses on the minority of employed Myanmar diasporic mothers who have been under-researched with regard to their perceptions of successful motherhood. To this end, I argue that the sociocultural constructions of motherhood that are embedded in patriarchal society do not preclude attempts of migrant mothers to actualize power/agency via creative mothering ideologies and practices despite the crossing of borders and continents.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Big, Beautiful Affect: Exploring the Emotional Environment of BBW Social Events and its Relationship to Fat Women's Embodiment
    (2020-11-13) Kotow, Crystal Lee Marie; Mitchell, Allyson
    This dissertation examines the way fat womens experiences in and relationships to their bodies are shaped by the affective environment of Big Beautiful Woman (BBW) social events. Data from the researchers autoethnographic explorations of BBW bashes and 12 interviews with fat women who attend BBW social events is analyzed using a theoretical framework that engages with feminist understandings of how power produces and exerts control over marginalized bodies, how violence is justified and enacted against marginalized communities/individuals, societal forces that influence the various ways fat women experience embodiment, and affective structures that work at a bodily level to shape our understanding of our world. In her work examining fat activism, Charlotte Cooper (2016) identifies BBW subcultures as one of several major sites for fat activism in the West (p. 53). Additionally, BBW subculture has yet to be examined academically in any depth for its contributions to fat activist and body liberation efforts. This dissertation addresses that gap in both activist-oriented and academic research. Furthermore, the stories held within this dissertation reflect voices of fat women about their experiences as fat women, furthering significant efforts within fat studies to prioritize the creation of knowledge about fat people by fat people. Participants shared BBW community experiences ranging from objectification by fat admirers, navigating diet culture in size-acceptance spaces and unabashedly exploring fat sexuality; however, a key finding of this research illustrates the centrality of fat community in fat womens efforts to build resilience against the ongoing trauma of fatphobia.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Reproducing and Resisting the Binary: Discursive Conceptualizations of Gender Variance in Children's Literature
    (2020-11-13) Ali, Ameera; Davidson, Deborah
    This dissertation contends that within the slowly growing representation of gender variant characters in childrens literature, particular subjectivities of gender variance are often emphasized while others remain overwhelmingly excluded. This research encompasses an exploration of gender and childrens literature in an attempt to gain an understanding of the ways gender variance is constituted within 30 childrens picture books featuring gender variant protagonists. By implementing a feminist poststructuralist theoretical orientation, this study utilizes a critical discourse analysis to respond to the following three guiding research questions: 1) How is gender discursively constructed within childrens picture books on gender variance? 2) How do characters constitute and navigate their gender subjectivities and subject positions within the narratives of these texts? 3) What subject positions are available for readers to identify and align themselves with within these texts? Key findings that were elucidated through this analysis include that: 1) these texts emphasize a largely [trans]normative depiction of gender variance, wherein binary forms of gender variance are overwhelmingly overrepresented; 2) non-binary subjectivities were largely underrepresented as they were only marginally present; and 3) agender and genderless subjectivities were wholly non-existent. Considering that childrens literature serves as a tool through which children can learn about themselves, others, and the social world, the overrepresentation of binary subject positions alongside the underrepresentation of non-binary and genderless subject positions has significant implications for the children engaging with these books. Children belonging to the latter two groups are not able to identify with these characters and thus do not find themselves represented within this genre of texts. These children learn that their subjectivity is other, peripheral, and fundamentally erased as they become relegated to the margins of a genre of literature that is already marginalized to begin with. More importantly, the prospect of existing beyond and without gender is not a possibility within these texts as gender itself is principally naturalized and normalized. Given its distinct overlapping emphasis on childhood, gender, and discourse, this dissertation offers a contribution to scholarship within the fields of early childhood studies, gender studies, sociology, and discourse analysis, and thus is largely multidisciplinary in scope.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Low Femme, Low Theory: An Ethno-Archive of Femme Internet Culture
    (2020-08-11) Schwartz, Andrea Justine; Brushwood-Rose, Chloe
    Low Femme, Low Theory: An Ethno-Archive of Femme Internet Culture is a collection of four papers detailing the findings from my dissertation research, a six-month online ethnography of femme internet culture. In the first paper, I develop an understanding of femme memes as particular audiovisual content found online that appropriate and mobilize public symbols to address the devaluation of femininity. I examine three genres of femme memes, and use the frameworks of low theory and bedroom culture to argue that femme memes are a way of doing femme theory, or a way of making sense out of femmes lived experiences and femmes feelings (Halberstam, 2011; McRobbie, 1991; hooks, 1991). In the second paper, I develop an understanding of softness as a contemporary femme aesthetic and poetic that employs hyperfeminine symbols, emotionality, vulnerability, and emphasizes collaboration and interdependence. I use the framework of vulnerability and emotions to argue that softness counters the individualist, masculinist modes of thinking that were introduced by and dominate white, Western thought and continue to permeate existing forms of theory, including existing femme theory and scholarship (Petherbridge, 2016; Mackenzie et al., 2013; Jaggar, 1989). I argue that a soft femme politic makes femme more capacious and inclusive. In the third paper, I develop an understanding of selfies as a practice in vulnerability, a practice that is strategically mobilized by femmes to (re)shape femme identity, create femme connections and communities, and make political claims about femme lives. I draw from feminist readings of selfies as well as perspectives on art therapy to make a case that selfies serve both a political representational and communicative function (Murray, 2015; Pham, 2015; Lupton, 1997). In the fourth paper, I develop an understanding of femmeships as femme friendships that are both political alliances and communities of care. I draw from scholarship on description as method and from queer (sub)cultural theorists to make a case for the importance of describing femme internet culture, in particular the ordinary, everyday interactions or relationships that are its foundation (Marcus, Love & Best, 2016; Halberstam, 2008; Muoz, 1996).
  • ItemOpen Access
    An Intersectional Analysis of Sexual Violence Policies, Responses, and Prevention Efforts at Ontario Universities
    (2019-11-22) Colpitts, Emily Marie; Crosby, Alison D.
    In the context of public scrutiny, heightened media attention, and the introduction of provincial legislation on campus sexual violence, Canadian post-secondary institutions are facing unprecedented pressure to respond. This dissertation critically analyzes how sexual violence is being conceptualized in post-secondary institutions policies, responses, and prevention efforts. Specifically, the dissertation engages with the qualitative findings emerging from discourse analysis of post-secondary institutions sexual violence policies and interviews with 31 stakeholders, including students, faculty, and staff involved in efforts to prevent and address sexual violence at three Ontario universities and members of community anti-violence organizations. The project is grounded in an intersectional analysis of sexual violence, which de-centres the ideal survivor and challenges the dominant depoliticized framing of sexual violence as an interpersonal issue by revealing its structural dimensions and its intersections with systems of oppression. While a number of Ontario universities reference intersectionality in their sexual violence policies, this project examines the extent to which this translates into practice in their responses and prevention efforts and the myriad ways that contemporary neoliberal institutional cultures and the broader political climate limit the possibility of implementing intersectional approaches to campus sexual violence. Drawing on Sara Ahmeds (2014) concept of non-performativity, the dissertation concludes that these sexual violence policies may serve to publicly signal institutions commitment to addressing sexual violence and construct them as progressive for simply referencing intersectionality without necessarily transforming the ways in which sexual violence is institutionally embedded. Failing to ground efforts to prevent and address sexual violence at Canadian universities in an intersectional analysis that addresses its underlying social and structural dimensions may not only limit their effectiveness but also risks reproducing marginalization and systems of oppression by valorizing particular experiences of violence while obscuring others.
  • ItemOpen Access
    The Sexual Politics of Clinical Psychoanalysis and Transgender Mental Health
    (2019-07-02) Wiggins, Tobias B. D.; Britzman, Deborah P.
    Perversion is derived from the Latin pervertere which means to turn around and has been broadly conceptualized as that which deviates or wavers from an original course. One could argue that the perverse is fundamentally constructed through difference; its existence is predicated upon being set up against some norm and its eccentricity is maintained through a continued refusal to adhere to the rule. This dissertation explores questions of gender difference and sexual deviance as they relate to the clinical pathologization of transgender peoples mental health. In particular, it considers how psychoanalytic theories of perversion - in their multifaceted definitions and various clinical applications - can be usefully employed to understand transphobia as it emerges throughout psychiatric institutions. In borrowing from Freuds polymorphous perversity, fetishism, perverse defense, and Lacans perverse structure, this study both contributes to and moves beyond a genealogical account of transgender peoples relationship to psychoanalysis. It uniquely considers the psychical provocations behind clinicians anxious descriptions and treatments of gender variance, as they have emerged since transsexuals nosological coinage in the early 20th century. By combining two disparate contemporary fields of study - psychoanalysis and transgender studies - this project also asks how transgender people may re-narrate their relationship to the perverse. To do so, this research investigates many under-considered objects of study, including surrealist transsexual drawings from the mid 1900s, lineages of psychiatric taxonomies, science fiction literature, contemporary transgender art installations, autoethno-pornographic transition narratives, and transgender accounts of undergoing psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Through a combination of critical historiographies, discourse analysis, content analysis, and narrative research, this dissertation contributes to a rapidly emerging non-pathological conversation about the psychic life of gender variance, both for transgender people themselves and the mental health institutions that serve them. Ultimately, it finds perversion to be quite useful as a floating signifier, as its various theoretical containers and clinical meanings are employed to deconstruct institutionalized transphobias tenacity. Furthermore, this research centers an archive of historically neglected transgender narratives on mental health as they emerge in the clinic, through case study, and in art or aesthetics. Keywords: transgender, psychoanalysis, mental health, perversion, sexuality, visual art
  • ItemOpen Access
    Women Lovin' Women: An Exploration of Identities, Belonging, and Communities in Urban and Rural Guyana
    (2019-03-05) Kumar, Preity Rajanie; Kempadoo, Kamala
    Over the last decade, there has been a surge of LGBTQ human rights movement and activism in the Caribbean region. Guyana, located in South America, and woven into the anglophone Caribbean, is not outside of these shifts and changes occurring in the broader region. Despite the vast research on non-normative sexuality in the region, little is known about the perspective and experience of Guyanese women. This dissertation concerns itself with the sexual praxis, identities, and conceptualizations of LGBTQ rights from the perspective of women who love women (WLW) and LBGQ women in Guyana. This work has three central aims: to investigate the ways in which the intersecting factors of race, class, gender, and space operate to construct and inform womens identity and positionality in urban Georgetown and rural Berbice; to examine the different manifestations of violence within a heteropatriarchal society; and to assess the impact of transnational LGBTQ rights on womens understanding of same-sex marriage and citizenship. To answer these questions, this study utilizes qualitative methods, namely in-depth interviews and participant observations with thirty-three Guyanese women in urban Georgetown and rural Berbice. An analysis of the interviews yields that the womens lives are deeply complicated by their racial, gender, class and spatial positions which, at times, reinforce and challenge our assumptions about their sexual identities, praxis, community and being out and proud in urban and rural spaces. The interviews further reveal and depart from heteropatriarchal theorizations of violence and offer an affectual counterpoint to understanding violence. The final part of this study demonstrates the contradictions in experiences embedded within LGBTQ rights as human rights, particularly same-sex marriage and citizenship. Overall, this dissertation argues that there needs to be a sustained analysis and attentiveness to ways in which differences of race, class, sexuality, gender, and regional positionalities are embodied and shape the lives of WLW and LGBQ women. This study adds nuances to our understandings of who WLW and LGBQ women are in Guyana and simultaneously illuminates the structural socio-political and economic context that impact lives.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Frictions and Flows: Affective Economies of Fire Dance in the Thai Tourism Industry
    (2018-11-21) Pollock, Tiffany Rae; Murray, David A. B.
    This dissertation examines Thai fire dance, a form of labour in the Thai tourist industry, as a platform through which fire dancers confront and negotiate the tensions of increasing tourism, marginalization, capitalist expansion and neoliberal ideologies. In particular, this research highlights the ways in which affective, embodied and spatialized practices in fire art communities form political interventions and group solidarities that are also intimately entangled in the reproduction and recreation of social hierarchies and unequal relations of power. While fire dance communities hold utopic potentials and moments of sharing across spectrums of social difference that allow for the reimagination of geopolitical, cultural and ethnonational boundaries, they are also spaces and practices fully implicated in the issues they seek to address. The affect born and danced into being in these communities is the nexus through which these complex negotiations are worked out through the body, and is the basis for micropolitical and messy solidarities to form in the midst of capitalist and neoliberal times and spaces.