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Moving Beyond The Gender Binary: A Critical Analysis And Review Of Contemporary Scholarship On Nonbinary Gender Identities, Rie Harding Aug 2023

Moving Beyond The Gender Binary: A Critical Analysis And Review Of Contemporary Scholarship On Nonbinary Gender Identities, Rie Harding

Masters Theses

For decades gender scholars have recognized the importance of gender to subjectivity, lived experiences, and life chances. Nonbinary gender identities are becoming more recognized by social, legal, and government institutions. However, currently there is a lack of research and scholarship that focuses on nonbinary gender identities. I demonstrate that the sociology of gender must move beyond the constraints of the hegemonic gender binary system in order to have a full and holistic conceptualization of gender. This paper reviews and critically analyzes contemporary interdisciplinary scholarship on nonbinary gender identities, then sets out a research agenda for moving forward. Within this scholarship …


Reproductive Journeys Of Indo-Caribbean Women From Trinidad And Tobago And Guyana To New York, Tannuja Devi Rozario Apr 2023

Reproductive Journeys Of Indo-Caribbean Women From Trinidad And Tobago And Guyana To New York, Tannuja Devi Rozario

Doctoral Dissertations

Given the lack of support by the U.S. federal government for reproductive health, this dissertation examines a puzzle: why are Indo-Caribbean women from Guyana and Trinidad journeying to New York for reproductive health care? I focus on a global community in Queens, New York, to unravel this puzzle. I conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with 82 Indo-Caribbean women and participant observations in women empowerment groups hosted by activists in New York. Each chapter in this dissertation focuses on various motivations and negotiations during reproductive journeys. First, this dissertation finds that social networks and grassroots organizations in New York facilitated reproductive journeys …


La Circassienne: A Study Of The Female Circus Artist In French Literature, Crystal Menninga Oct 2022

La Circassienne: A Study Of The Female Circus Artist In French Literature, Crystal Menninga

Masters Theses

This study examines how the female circus artist is represented in twelve pieces of French literature ranging from the late nineteenth century to the modern day. The books are divided into three categories by author type: first, authors without a circus background; second, male authors involved in the circus world; and third, women involved in the circus world. Although predicted that the first section would reveal the largest use of stereotypes and misogyny, the second would show the sexist expectations of the circassienne onstage and off, and the third would call out these stereotypes and suggest improvements, there was less …


Embodiment And Gendered Subjectivity In Ukrainian Women’S Film, Poetry, And Prose During Perestroika (1985-1991), Sandra J. Russell Oct 2022

Embodiment And Gendered Subjectivity In Ukrainian Women’S Film, Poetry, And Prose During Perestroika (1985-1991), Sandra J. Russell

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I look to Ukrainian women’s literary and filmic contributions in the final Soviet years of perestroika to recontextualize and reconsider feminist and gendered epistemologies in Eastern Europe. I view the last Soviet Ukrainian filmmakers, writers, and artists as groundbreaking in their conceptualization a new, more “liberal” vision of nation, especially through their increasingly open and subversive critiques of the Soviet state. I locate perestroika as a powerful moment in Ukraine’s histories of resistance to the weaponization of colonialist and imperialist mythologies, past and present. For women in particular, the stakes of this shifting articulation of nation became …


Productive Women: Gender, Sex, And Labor In The Digital Cultural Economy, Kavita Nayar-Jablonka Oct 2022

Productive Women: Gender, Sex, And Labor In The Digital Cultural Economy, Kavita Nayar-Jablonka

Doctoral Dissertations

Explicit sex and sexuality have come to figure more prominently in mainstream media and popular culture in recent years, sparking public concern and scholarly debate on how the “sexualization” of culture particularly affects women. Against this backdrop and amidst digitally reconfigured circuits of media production and consumption, ordinary women participate in, and potentially profit from, the commodification of sexual interactions and relationships. This study compares women’s practices in cultures of cam modeling and sugar dating in order to better understand their meanings and contexts. Whether performed in tandem with romantic dating scripts and roles, as is common in sugar dating, …


Essays On Anti-Discrimination Legislation Enforcement And Sex-Based Discrimination In U.S. Labor Markets, Carly Mccann Oct 2022

Essays On Anti-Discrimination Legislation Enforcement And Sex-Based Discrimination In U.S. Labor Markets, Carly Mccann

Doctoral Dissertations

This project focuses on gender and anti-discrimination legislation enforcement in U.S. labor markets. In this dissertation, I examine the efficacy of existing legal and political institutions in place to redress employer sex discrimination. This work provides new understandings of sex discrimination by focusing on the experiences of pregnant workers, an understudied population that continues to lack adequate workplace protections. My research utilizes new administrative data containing formal charges of discrimination filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to provide new insights into the workplace experiences of pregnant workers as well as employer responses to anti-discrimination enforcement. Chapter 1 analyzes …


Alt-Education: Gender, Language, And Education Across The Right, Catherine Tebaldi Mar 2022

Alt-Education: Gender, Language, And Education Across The Right, Catherine Tebaldi

Doctoral Dissertations

I explore the ideologies of gender, language and education in conservative, Christian Nationalist, and White nationalist mothers groups. I draw on my own family history, as well as on two years of blended ethnographic research in online right wing communities and one year of fieldwork in New Orleans, Louisiana, to look at homeschooling, online schools, and public teachers’ social, linguistic, and educational practices -- what I call Alt-Education. Alt-education is of course a play on alt-right, and refers to the far-right ideology; but it also refers to an alternative to mainstream education, and to education through a broader range of …


By The Numbers: How Academic Capitalism Shapes Graduate Student Experiences Of Work And Training In Material Sciences, Timothy Sacco Mar 2022

By The Numbers: How Academic Capitalism Shapes Graduate Student Experiences Of Work And Training In Material Sciences, Timothy Sacco

Doctoral Dissertations

The neoliberal reorganization of higher education has reshaped the research and education missions of university science. Much of the scholarship examining this shift focuses on faculty experiences. This dissertation centers the experiences of student scientists to explore: (1) how entrepreneurial universities manage marginal academic knowledge workers, including students, through processes that shift responsibility onto individual workers; (2) how universities use mechanisms like internships and Individual Development Plans to shift educational responsibilities onto students; and (3) how performances of masculinity in commercial spaces of university science contribute to durable gender inequalities among students under academic capitalism. Longitudinal qualitative methods were employed …


Three Essays On Labor And Marriage Markets: Farm Crisis And Rural-To-Urban Migration In The United States, 1920-1940, Jennifer Withrow Oct 2021

Three Essays On Labor And Marriage Markets: Farm Crisis And Rural-To-Urban Migration In The United States, 1920-1940, Jennifer Withrow

Doctoral Dissertations

Race and gender create differential responses to, and outcomes of, economic crisis. In this dissertation, I study the intersection of race and gender in the context of steep declines in farm commodity prices during the U.S. farm crisis of the 1920s and 1930s. Against this backdrop, women altered their marriage timing, increased their labor force participation, and migrated off-farm. Previous quantitative studies of this period typically omitted women due to challenges linking women from one historical census to the next after marriage. I create new datasets following women over both decades and draw on archival sources to explore the impact …


Bitten By The Demon Of Cinema: An Examination Of Women-Made Horror, Erica Tortolani Oct 2021

Bitten By The Demon Of Cinema: An Examination Of Women-Made Horror, Erica Tortolani

Doctoral Dissertations

Moving away from a discussion of horror films directed by men, “Bitten by the Demon of Cinema” those films—and, where appropriate, works across media, like on television, the Internet, and in the visual arts—created by women. As I explore in this dissertation, women-made horror has narrative, thematic, and stylistic qualities that borrow from the genre at large but are then transformed into a class of films all of their own. While seemingly diverse, they share enough commonalities to constitute a new mode of filmmaking altogether. The films and filmmakers that I have chosen in this dissertation are cases in point …


Care Work In Chile’S Segregated Cities, Manuel Garcia Oct 2021

Care Work In Chile’S Segregated Cities, Manuel Garcia

Doctoral Dissertations

This project combines diverse theoretical and methodological tools to examine the relationship between space and care work in Chile. The chapters are stand-alone articles that come together to tell a single story. The social production of urban space has marginalized thousands of female caregivers from the labor market as Chile’s care system unravels. I argue that community caregiving could simultaneously improve the conditions of caregivers and dependents. Chapter 1 examines the role of residential segregation in reproducing Chile’s meager female labor market participation rates. I use spatial and econometric analysis to show that the social forces that segregate Santiago create …


Homophily, Gender-Typed Behavior, And Cultural Contexts In Adolescent Friendship Segregation, Chen-Shuo Hong Jul 2021

Homophily, Gender-Typed Behavior, And Cultural Contexts In Adolescent Friendship Segregation, Chen-Shuo Hong

Masters Theses

It is well-documented that adolescents tend to befriend those who share demographic characteristics like gender. Less clear is how culture connects to these homogeneous relationships. This study examines the effects of gender-typed behavior on adolescent friendships at dyadic and school levels. The friendship network data are drawn from the well-known wave 1 ‘saturation school’ component of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. I show that adolescents tend to befriend those who share similar gender-typed behavior, above and beyond simple demographic affiliation. Also, when students in particular schools exhibit more heterogeneous gender-typed behavior, the expression of gender-typed behavior …


The Influence Of Victim Gender And Emotional Expression In Victim Impact Statements On Legal Judgments And Punishment Decisions, Hannah Chimowitz Jul 2021

The Influence Of Victim Gender And Emotional Expression In Victim Impact Statements On Legal Judgments And Punishment Decisions, Hannah Chimowitz

Masters Theses

Victim impact statements (VISs) are written or oral statements detailing the effects a crime has had on a victim. While the practice of having victims present VISs at sentencing hearings has generated much debate for over 25 years, the effects of this practice on victims, defendants, and legal decision-makers remain poorly understood. Prior research suggests that a victim’s emotional expression can affect how victims are perceived, and the legal judgments made in response to their statements. The current research considers how the effects of victims’ emotional displays on sentencing decisions might be conditioned by victim gender. Using audio-recorded VIS stimuli, …


The Voice Of The Other: The Influence Of Capitalism On The Representation Of Gender And Race In Western Classical Music, Marie Comuzzo May 2021

The Voice Of The Other: The Influence Of Capitalism On The Representation Of Gender And Race In Western Classical Music, Marie Comuzzo

Masters Theses

This thesis argues that in order to understand the non-representation of women and BIPOC in the Western musical canon, the analysis of their cultural musical production and reception must start in early modern period, a time heavily influenced by the establishment of capitalism. Intertwining political feminist studies, critical race theory and musicology critique, I argue that the witch hunts and the inhumane colonial practices in Africa and the America (fundamental to establish capitalism as a global system), had an important role in shaping Western musical culture as homogeneous and monolithic. Thus, I first trace the change in female customs in …


Family Dimensions Of Unequal College Experiences: Students’ Talk Of Self And College In Relation To Family Resources And Relationships, Michael Carl Ide Apr 2021

Family Dimensions Of Unequal College Experiences: Students’ Talk Of Self And College In Relation To Family Resources And Relationships, Michael Carl Ide

Doctoral Dissertations

The “college experience” is normatively presented as enacting independence, often while financially relying on parents. This view normalizes white, middle-class models of college and family. The three interrelated papers comprising this dissertation investigate race, class, and gender differences and inequalities at college through the lens of students’ talk of family. These inductive, qualitative studies draw on semi-structured intensive interviews with undergraduates to explore divergent ways they make sense of college, family, and their self-development. Analyses highlight the multifaceted, and sometimes contradictory meanings participants attach to themes commonly presented as simple and objective (i.e. “paying for college,” “independence,” and “adulthood”). Findings …


Criminalizing Childhood: The Politics Of Violence At Delhi's Urban Margins, Ragini Saira Malhotra Jul 2020

Criminalizing Childhood: The Politics Of Violence At Delhi's Urban Margins, Ragini Saira Malhotra

Doctoral Dissertations

The intensification of neoliberal economic reforms and new patterns of middle-class consumption in India have coincided with rising levels of urban inequality and poverty. Yet India’s capital, Delhi, positions itself as a “world-class city,” invoking neoliberal state aspirations to justify widespread violence against communities living and working in state-contested spaces. While much has been written about the reproduction of urban inequality and poverty in India, this body of scholarship under-emphasizes mechanisms of social control and violence, specifically, criminalization by the state.
To understand these dynamics, children’s experiences are particularly important given their age-based potential and vulnerabilities. To give visibility to …


Writing Against History: Feminist Baroque Narratives In Interwar Atlantic Modernism, Annaliese Hoehling May 2020

Writing Against History: Feminist Baroque Narratives In Interwar Atlantic Modernism, Annaliese Hoehling

Doctoral Dissertations

In the decades following the end of the Great War, paranoia and panic about survival and sovereign control were driven by unprecedented death tolls from war, disease, and economic disaster as well as by revolutionary agitation around the globe. This fear was channeled into policing gender, sexuality, and race; and the parameters of white, middle-class womanhood were weaponized for social control in the transatlantic imaginary. In this study, I identify two rhetorical-political figures that helped to shape this imagination: Surplus Women and Trafficked Women. In my analysis of the literature, these figures help to contrast domestic scenes, on one hand, …


Reproductive Journeys: Indo-Caribbean Women Challenging Gendered Norms, Tannuja Rozario Apr 2020

Reproductive Journeys: Indo-Caribbean Women Challenging Gendered Norms, Tannuja Rozario

Masters Theses

Little is known about the factors that influence people from the Caribbean to seek reproductive health services in the United States. In this paper, I focus on Indo-Caribbean women from Guyana and Trinidad who undertake reproductive journeys to New York. I ask: (1) What influences Indo-Caribbean women to begin their reproductive journeys to Richmond Hill, New York? (2) How do Indo-Caribbean women challenge gender norms during their reproductive journeys? (3) How does women’s class inform their decision making in challenging gendered norms? After conducting 30 in-depth interviews with Indo-Caribbean women from Guyana and Trinidad who seek reproductive health services in …


Queering Kinship: Lgbtq Parents And The Creation Of Real Utopias, Laura V. Heston Jul 2019

Queering Kinship: Lgbtq Parents And The Creation Of Real Utopias, Laura V. Heston

Doctoral Dissertations

Parenting in queer families calls into question some of our most fundamental assumptions: that parents are biologically related to their children, that only women give birth, that all fathers are men, that families push away friendships and communities based in anything other than “blood” ties, and that parenting is life-long. In this dissertation, presented through five in-depth family case studies and a series of analytic chapters based on fifty semi-structured interviews with LGBTQ adults in families with children I discuss gay sperm donors, gestational fathers, non-binary foster parents, transwomen dads, queer adopters of kids from queer birth parents, trans step-dads, …


Motherhood Wage Penalty Across Life Course And Cohorts, Misun Lim Jul 2019

Motherhood Wage Penalty Across Life Course And Cohorts, Misun Lim

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the connections between changing family structures and economic inequalities in the United States. While previous research shows that motherhood lowers women’s earnings, few studies explore how wage penalties for motherhood change over women’s lives. Moreover, most research examines only the baby boomer cohort; consequentially, little is known about how millennials experience this wage penalty and how such burdens of motherhood have changed across cohorts. This study investigates whether and how the motherhood wage penalty changes both across women’s life course and cohorts with these questions: (1) Does the motherhood penalty change over women’s lives? (2) What are …


Everything Feels Like The Future But Us: The Posthuman Master-Slave Dynamic In Japanese Science Fiction Anime, Ryan Daly Jul 2019

Everything Feels Like The Future But Us: The Posthuman Master-Slave Dynamic In Japanese Science Fiction Anime, Ryan Daly

Masters Theses

This thesis is an exploration of the relationships between humans and mechanized beings in Japanese science fiction anime. In it I will be discussing the following texts: Ergo Proxy (2006), Chobits (2002), Gunslinger Girl (2003/2004), and Mahoromatic (2001/2002). I argue that these relationships in these anime series take the form of master/slave relationships, with the humans as the masters and the mechanized beings as the slaves. In virtually every case, the mechanized beings are young females and the masters are older human males. I will argue that this dynamic serves to reinforce traditional power structures and gender dynamics in a …


Gender, Class, Caste And Health Status Of Abandoned Elderly Women In Bangalore, South India, Olya Clark Nov 2018

Gender, Class, Caste And Health Status Of Abandoned Elderly Women In Bangalore, South India, Olya Clark

Doctoral Dissertations

The research study centers on issues of health, quality of life, and access to health care among abandoned elderly women in Bangalore, India, specifically focusing on interrelationship of class, caste, structural factors and health. Despite increasing feminization of India’s older population, elderly women’s abandonment and its health consequences has received little attention in existing research literature. The study seeks to explain the causes of elderly female abandonment and concomitant social and health consequences, by examining how their life experiences are shaped, sustained and changed by their class, caste, and gender positions. Elderly abandonment is not unique to India but exists …


Complicating Gender: Gender Inequality In Education And Employment, Skylar Davidson Oct 2018

Complicating Gender: Gender Inequality In Education And Employment, Skylar Davidson

Doctoral Dissertations

Sociologists have always acknowledged the complexity of gender, but despite acknowledging this complexity, much sociological research does not put this knowledge into practice; indeed, a great deal of research focuses on distinctions between men and women with regard to some other variable, reinforcing a narrow and binary understanding of gender. This tendency has two limitations: (1) it does not recognize the variability in men's and women's expression of masculinity and femininity; and (2) it does not recognize gender identities other than those of cisgender man and cisgender woman (i.e., transgender people). This study mitigates this limitation through telling a story …


Communication Is A Two Way Street: Race, Gender, And Elite Responsiveness In U.S. Politics, Mia Costa Jul 2018

Communication Is A Two Way Street: Race, Gender, And Elite Responsiveness In U.S. Politics, Mia Costa

Doctoral Dissertations

At the heart of a representative democracy is the need for open lines of communication between citizens and their representatives. This dissertation is comprised of three stand-alone chapters which examine how responsive American public officials are to constituent communications, Americans' attitudes about elite responsiveness, and how race and gender condition this relationship. In the first chapter, I conduct the first meta-analysis of all experiments that examine how responsive public officials are to constituent communication. I demonstrate at a higher level of precision than any single study the degree to which legislators are biased against racial and ethnic minorities, and find …


Mothering In A Era Of Choice: Race And Gender In Schooling Decisions Of Homeschool And Public School Families, Mahala Stewart Jul 2018

Mothering In A Era Of Choice: Race And Gender In Schooling Decisions Of Homeschool And Public School Families, Mahala Stewart

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation draws from in-depth interview data to compare the schooling choices of 95 mothers living in United States. The sample is split between white and black mothers. Within each racial group, one set teaches their children at home and a second set sends them to public schools. School choice, which places the responsibility of selection on individual families, is central to current U.S. education debates. Yet homeschooling, an option that transfers labor from schools to home, is often overlooked in these debates. To date no research has compared homeschoolers to other schooling families in the same region, or examined …


Apostles Of Abstinence, Katherine Castiello Jones Jul 2018

Apostles Of Abstinence, Katherine Castiello Jones

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation examines three organizations that promote premarital sexual abstinence. These three organizations broadly mirror different strands within the New Right: an evangelical Christian abstinence ministry called Purity Ring Posse, Revolutionary Romance, an elite group of conservatives on an Ivy-League campus, and Stand Up! a group at a Mormon university that seeks to “burst the bubble” and facilitate outreach between pro-family organizations and students. Drawing on participant observation, interviews, and content analysis, my dissertation demonstrates how each group attempts to promote a unique version of abstinence that can be successfully mobilized in the public square. Purity Ring Posse articulates “ …


Two Of The Same? Infants' Conceptual Representation Of Faces Based Upon Gender, Race, And Kind Information, Charisse Pickron Jul 2018

Two Of The Same? Infants' Conceptual Representation Of Faces Based Upon Gender, Race, And Kind Information, Charisse Pickron

Doctoral Dissertations

Infants’ perceptual abilities allow them to distinguish faces of different races and genders from an early age (for a review, see Pascalis et al., 2011). However, it is still unknown when infants begin using these perceptual differences to represent faces in a conceptual, kind-based manner. The current dissertation examined this issue by testing whether 12- and 24-month-old infants represent faces of different races and genders as distinct ‘kinds’ or instead as variations of a single broader category (e.g., ‘human face’). The current dissertation included two experiments each with a different type of violation-of-expectation individuation paradigm. Experiment 1 used a passive …


Wanderers Of Empire: The Tropical Tramp In Latin America, 1870-1930, Jack Werner Jul 2018

Wanderers Of Empire: The Tropical Tramp In Latin America, 1870-1930, Jack Werner

Masters Theses

U.S. public and private imperial interests confronted the problem of labor and labor power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as the U.S. empire expanded into Latin America and the Caribbean. The question of how to make an empire work spurred the creation of new labor regimes reliant on black West Indians who traveled to work in the Panama Canal Zone and on United Fruit Company (UFCO) banana plantations. Just as importantly, new labor regimes engendered new categories for troublesome laborers. One of these classifications, “tramp,” surfaced in the United States after the U.S. Civil War as a …


Motivation And Gender Dynamics In High School Science: The Effect Of Gender Composition On Motivation In Small Group Inquiry And Engineering Tasks, Julie Robinson Mar 2018

Motivation And Gender Dynamics In High School Science: The Effect Of Gender Composition On Motivation In Small Group Inquiry And Engineering Tasks, Julie Robinson

Doctoral Dissertations

While current research shows that the gender gap in science achievement has disappeared (Miller, Blessing, & Schwartz, 2006), girls continue to show declining levels of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) engagement in school. Literature shows that various societal and educational factors impact girls’ STEM motivation disproportionately to boys (Bennett & Hogarth, 2009; Breakwell & Robertson, 2001; Brotman & Moore, 2008; Campbell & Clewell, 1999; Cokadar & Kulce, 2008; Huebner, 2009; Jovanovic & King, 1998; Lee, 1998; Miller, Blessing, & Schwartz, 2006; Osborne, Simon, & Collins, 2003; Solomon, 1997). The onset of this phenomenon occurs in the middle school years …


Multiple Representations Of The Fundamental Theorem Of Calculus As Enacted In The Curriculum, Sense-Making And Gender, Ileana Vasu Mar 2018

Multiple Representations Of The Fundamental Theorem Of Calculus As Enacted In The Curriculum, Sense-Making And Gender, Ileana Vasu

Doctoral Dissertations

Multiple representations of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus (FTC) are deemed essential to creating mathematical habits of mind, but not all classroom instruction includes them. This study articulates the relationship between college students’ experience with multiple representations of the FTC, gained through the enacted curriculum, and their use of multiple representations when problem solving or discussing the FTC. It suggests that students’ use of multiple representations directly relates to their curricular experience, which outweighs a student’s own inclination towards any particular representation. It further suggests that the relationship between classroom experience with a particular representation of the FTC, and its …