Digital Commons Network^™

“She Too ‘Omanish’”: Young Black Women’S Sexuality And Reproductive Justice In Bluefields, Nicaragua, Ishan Elizabeth Gordon-Ugarte

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Most never-married young “Creole” (Afro-Caribbean) women in Bluefields, Nicaragua are raised in fundamentalist Protestant families and institutions that emphasize sexual abstinence before marriage. In this context, abstinence is required to maintain social standing and “respectability.” Nevertheless, women in Bluefields, the administrative center of Caribbean Nicaragua, exhibit what Creoles themselves understand to be high rates of sexuality and pregnancy among post-menarche unmarried teenaged women (USAID, 2012; Mitchell et al. 2015). Such young women’s pregnancies occur at an important developmental stage of their lives and have long been associated by social scientists with adverse social, emotional, and health situations. These scholars have …

Bodies On The Line: The Politics Of Regulating Pornography In Los Angeles, Christopher J. Baum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the regulation of sexually explicit media in the United States – specifically in Los Angeles – and the site used to understand it is the modern pornography industry at its points of production. I argue that since the industry's formation in the early- 1970s, regulatory efforts have focused on controlling porn worker’s bodies as a way of enacting broader social transformations and reshaping the domains of erotic life. Drawing from eighteen months of ethnographic research, I explore several interlocking forms of regulation. I begin by examining the formation of pornographic production cultures during what I call the …

Hybrid Ethnobotanical Practices: Afro And Indigenous Place-Making In The Contemporary Colombia Andean Pacific, Rafael A. Mutis Garcia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an ethnography of Indigenous and AfroIndigenous ethnobotanical practices in four communities in Cauca, in the Andean Pacific region in the Western Amazon of Colombia. Through collaborative field work, including interviews and active participant observation, I document the use of herbs and food as medicine, and agricultural and land tenure practices that depart significantly from those of racial-capitalist agribusiness. These ethnobotanical practices recuperate precolonial and ancestral knowledge as one of many efforts to build community autonomy and self-determination in Colombia as it fitfully enters the post conflict period.

Through an intersectional and topographic analysis, I show both the …

Dangerous Exhibitions: Erotic Justice And Comparative Constitutional Law, Elena Cohen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The beginning of the 21^st century is widely seen as a time of great progress for LGBTQ people. Gay marriage, gay sex, adoption by same sex couples, and gay people serving in militaries have all been legalized in many countries in the past two decades, often through the decisions of constitutional courts. However, these constitutional protections of sexuality have been found in limited contexts and applied to a limited class of people, such that many are still vulnerable to repression by governments and majoritarian politics. In order to resist this sexual oppression, I widen the focus from gay and …

Desexualizing Queer Identities: Methods To Validating Non-Sexual Romantic Attraction And Relationships, Unnati Patel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is an increase in the negative views of queer and LGBT+ people in America, and I argue that it is, in part, due to the sexualized connotations of, and sexual association with, queer and LGBT+ identities. Innocuous acts by queer or LGBT+ people, such as being an out school teacher or holding hands in a public space, is enough for non-LGBT+ people to become uncomfortable to varying degrees and, sometimes, even cause verbal abuse or violence. When we look at queer or LGBT+ representation through the possibility of queerness, and by reading representations of queer and LGBT+ romantic attraction …

Truth Telling: Exploring Sexuality In Widowed And Single Older Black Women, Margaret A. Salisu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Interest in older adults’ sexuality is reflected in the significant growth of literature on sexuality and aging, especially in the last few decades, and in growing media interest in this topic. Clinicians, researchers, educators, journalists, policymakers, and other stakeholders continue to highlight the importance of sexuality and sexual health in the older population. However, available studies in this area pertain to older married people almost exclusively and the few available studies on widows focus exclusively on White women. To address this gap in knowledge, this study focused on older widowed and single Black women aged 65 to 75 years. Feminist …

Everyday Violence: Catcalling And Lgbtq-Directed Aggression In The Public Sphere, Simone A. Kolysh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation aims to expose how women and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) people are barred from full participation in the public sphere and public life because of catcalling and LGBTQ-directed aggression on the streets of New York City. The harmful, cumulative, and long-lasting effects of these interactions make it difficult for marginalized people to belong and benefit from a supposedly inclusive and democratic society. Focusing on the public sphere of New York City, this dissertation is a qualitative study of catcalling and LGBTQ-directed aggression. I analyze interviews with catcallers and sixty-seven recipients of everyday violence as well …

War And Peace In American Seduction: Seduction Communities, Heterosexual Masculinity, And Mediated Intimacy In New York City, Anders Wallace

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Don Juan clearly didn’t need any training in flirting skills, but many American men feel they need help. In nearly every major city of North America exists a seduction community: a community of men who train each other to pick up women. Along with digital means for meeting strangers, these communities have emerged over the past 15 years from a subculture to become a globalized industry in seduction training spanning from Brooklyn to Beijing. From online forums and subscription-based clubs to week-long intensive training courses known as bootcamps, hundreds of thousands of men participate in these groups at different levels …

Dolls Who Speak: Sex Robots, Cyborgs And The Image Of Woman, Victoria E. Pihl Sorensen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the emerging phenomenon of sex robots from a feminist materialist perspective. I explore the current scholarly and popular debates on sex robots, and suggest a reading of sex robots in their machinic, literary and cinematic expressions to move beyond the moral-ethical impasse that seems to dominate sex robot discussions. Employing Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Myth” on a methodological and theoretical level, I argue for an interdisciplinary approach to studying sex robots, which proceeds carefully so as to avoid contributing to sex panic, and which thinks critically about what it might mean to assess sex robots from a feminist …

Embody: The Transformation Of Intimate Knowledges Through Generations In Liberal Societies, Lisa Kronberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis project aims to examine how intimate knowledges[1] are transferred and communicated between generations in Western, liberal societies. By ‘Intimate knowledges’ I mean to encompass diverse knowledge of emotional intelligence, sexual identity, and gender.

Intimate knowledges evolve with human life circle everywhere and at all times, but in Western popular discourse of today, are treated with confusion and repression; they thus emerge as a “loud display of simultaneously silent sexual desire.” (Fine and McClelland, 2006) I explore this tension through a critical, feminist lens that sheds light on the ways in which political economy creates cultural norms that …

Race, Sexuality, And Masculinity On The Down Low, Stephen Kochenash

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In a so-called post-racial America, a new gay identity has flourished and come into the limelight. However, in recent years, researchers have concluded that not all men who have sex with other men (MSM) self-identify as gay, most noticeably a large population of Black men. It is possible that a tainted history of Black enslavement in this country that is inextricably linked with ideas of space, surveillance, subversion, and survival inform a Black male’s self-identification as being “on the down low” (DL). This begs the question: What does mainstream society view as gay-ness and how is the DL constructed …

Real Gender: Identity, Loss, And The Capacity To Feel Real, Hannah Wallerstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project concerns gender and feeling real. It begins with a seeming paradox: on the one hand, since Judith Butler (1999; 2011) we can no longer think gender as ontological in any simple sense; on the other, clinical experience and the voices of transgender and gender-queer individuals shows gender to function on the order of reality, and one exceeding the social. In other words, if feeling real depended entirely on being read as such, how would we account for the many who pass easily as “real” men or women and yet feel unreal, or come to feel more real by …

I Didn't Consent To That: Secondary Analysis Of Discrimination Against Bdsm Identified Individuals, Larry Iannotti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sadomasochism (BDSM) sexual behavior is an understudied phenomenon within the social sciences generally, and social work in particular. While BESM sexuality encompasses a wide variety of activities a community of individuals interested in BDSM is identifiable and has coalesced around organized groups, events, political activism, and shared sexual interests. This community has experienced discrimination, violence, and harassment (DVH) as a result of social approbation and stigma associated with BDSM practices. The study examines results of a secondary analysis of data from the Survey of Violence & Discrimination against Sexual Minorities, conducted in 2008. Severity and frequency of various types …