Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Beyond Revolutionaries, Victims, And Heroic Mothers. Reproductive Politics In War And Peace In Colombia, Vanesa Giraldo Gartner

Doctoral Dissertations

During the 2016 peace negotiations between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), reproductive policies in this guerrilla group became a site of contestation in producing new discourses about peace, gender, and nation. This dissertation addresses this controversy and explores the implications of reproductive politics in war and peace among ex-combatant women. The data for this project was collected through archival research and a multi-sited ethnography in Caquetá-Colombia. It discusses the role of contraception in the transformation of the FARC from a grassroots guerrilla movement to a revolutionary army and analyzes the multiple discourses produced about …

Organizational Variation In Federal Agencies’ Gender Pay Gaps, Karen M. Brummond

Doctoral Dissertations

Although previous research has identified differences in the gender pay gap by employment sector, existing research on the causes of employer variation in the gender pay gap, particularly in the U.S. Federal Government, is limited (Smith-Doerr et al. 2019; U.S. Government Accountability Office 2020). This dissertation fills that gap by exploring organizational characteristics contributing to varying inequality regimes (Acker 2006) and subsequent pay equity variation. Using a linked employer-employee administrative dataset covering over 2 million federal employees, I measured governmentwide and agency-level gender pay gaps and explored organizational characteristics that explain agency-level differences. I found a governmentwide gross gender pay …

Grammars Of Identity: Political Languages Of Activism In Argentina And The United States, Ana M. Ospina Pedraza

Doctoral Dissertations

In recent history, democratic popular assemblies have played a significant role in political organizing worldwide. Contemporary theorists and social movement scholars see a global ethos of collective action in the growth of the assembly form. This dissertation studies the language of collective action in two movements that illustrate the global significance of assemblies: the neighborhood assemblies of Buenos Aires in 2002 and the New York General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street in 2011. These movements were connected by transnational networks of activism and a commitment to internal democracy now prevalent in the global left. This research asks two questions: what …

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 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 …

Raising Global Elites From A Distance: Transnational Parenting Of South Korean Students, Juyeon Park

Doctoral Dissertations

Drawing on interviews with 74 South Korean (hereafter Korean) students and 34 parents at ten elite U.S. colleges, I examine how elite Korean parents seek to reproduce and extend their family privilege through children’s transnational education. I analyze how each group – children, mothers, and fathers – interprets and represents their views of the elite transnational parenting they experienced or practiced. By triangulating the narratives of three groups, I explore the family dynamics of the transnational families of high-achieving Korean students abroad. Well-educated yet opt-out mothers intensively managed their children’s early education, often relying on gender-segregated networks. In contrast, cosmopolitan …

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 …

Job Mobility, Gender Composition, And Wage Growth, Youngjoon Bae

Masters Theses

To explain the gender wage growth gap, sociologists tend to focus on gender segregation among/within jobs whereas economists put emphasis on individual job mobility. This study adopted a concept combining both segregation and mobility. The concept helps to take the gender segregation before and after job mobility into account to strictly measure the mechanisms of wage growth. For analysis, this study used 6-year personnel data of a firm, which allows researchers to track employees’ job mobility, wages, and job information at the most accurate level. The concept of combining segregation and mobility was operated through the gender composition of jobs …

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

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 …

Discourse, Meaning-Making, And Emotion: The Pressure To Have A “Feminist Abortion Experience”, Derek Siegel

Masters Theses

During interviews with self-identified feminists (n=27), respondents express discomfort when their abortion experiences fail to match perceived expectations from the pro-choice movement. They describe a “feminist abortion experience” as eliciting a sense of relief, empowerment, and detachment. An “anti-feminist abortion,” on the other hand, involves sadness, ambivalence, and a high attachment to the pregnancy. Respondents not only self-police this boundary but also perform emotion work to change an undesirable emotional state. First, I ask how pro-choice norms and constructed and perpetuated? I find that people learn what is expected of them from the contents of pro-choice discourse and learn about …

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

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 “ …

Three Essays On “Doing Care”, Gender Differences In The Work Day, And Women’S Care Work In The Household, Avanti Mukherjee

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation provides a theoretical perspective on why women’s responsibility for care work lengthens their workday relative to men due to subsistence requirements, and draws attention to the relevance of other female family members. Building from theories of institutional bargaining research insights from “doing gender”, I develop a theoretical perspective on “doing care” that considers both bargaining power and social norms as determinants of differences in time allocation across and within gender. Conventional bargaining models predict that women who earn incomes can substitute hours of paid work for unpaid work. Using qualitative field work from India, and my theory of …

Negotiating Race, Work And Family: Cape Verdean Home Care Workers In Lisbon, Portugal, Celeste Vaughan Curington

Doctoral Dissertations

In Portugal, high levels of women’s labor force participation, rapidly aging populations, along with the retrenchment of welfare states, has led to the expansion of publicly subsidized private care work such as home care. Much of this caring work is carried out by low-paid citizen and migrant women from the former Portuguese colony of Cape Verde, an independent archipelago nation off the West African coast. At the same time, Portugal is a “post-colonial” setting, with comparatively progressive policies around family settlement for migrants, and where the language of “legal race” does not exist. Taking the lived experiences of Cape Verdean …

Transgressive Acts: Adapting Applied Theatre Techniques For A Transgender Community, Theo F. Lefevre

Masters Theses

This MFA Thesis traces my work as a joker (a la Theatre of the Oppressed) and facilitator through a three-year-long project with a trans applied theatre troupe. The troupe explored several techniques, including Image Theatre, Playback Theatre, storytelling exercises, and somatic movement. In three semester-long workshops, the troupe focused work around three sets of techniques. In the first workshop, the troupe explored the community-based interview process of Undesirable Elements, as designed by Ping Chong in collaboration with Talvin Wilks and Sara Zatz. These techniques were interrogated using queer and trans temporalities. In the second unit, the troupe practiced Augusto …

Z-Cube: Mobile Living For Feminist Nomads, Zi Ye

Masters Theses

Homes proclaim our social standing and reflect the trend of the times. This project seeks to explore and redefine the relationship between modern homes and modern women who strive for mobile life styles.

Modernism and globalization have brought us a new way of living that could have never been imagined before— our workspace and homes are no longer limited to a specific unit but have extended to the entire globe. The physical changes compelled by modernity have also complemented the changing role of women. Since the beginning of the 20th century, modern women have expanded their lives outside of their …

Factors That Shape Arab American College Student Identity, Abdul Rahman F. Jaradat

Doctoral Dissertations

Arab American identity has not yet received the research attention and scholarship that it deserves. In this dissertation, I have qualitatively studied the narratives of young Arab American college students and recent graduates. The research questions that I explored include what makes them Arab Americans, and what are the factors that help them identify as such. By focusing on Arab Americans and their identity factors, I have presented the narratives of those women and men who self-identify as Arab American and quoted their accounts of how they navigate this undervalued, misunderstood, and stereotyped identity. I have used ethnic and racial …

Seguimos Luchando: Women Educators’ Trajectories In Social Movement Based Popular Education Projects In Buenos Aires, Argentina, Jennifer Lee O'Donnell

Doctoral Dissertations

Through a multisite ethnographic investigation, I provide a look at the vision and practices of women teaching in the popular education sector, particularly those who impact social, economic, and political public spaces in Buenos Aires, Argentina. As an alternative to Freirean based education theory, which may overshadow the collective work of women in popular projects, this work highlights women’s commitments to education that contests neoliberal reform, transforming not only curriculum and pedagogies, social practices, and discourses inside classrooms, but the communities where they live as well.

Distributing Condoms And "Hope": Race, Sex, And Science In Youth Sexual Health Promotion, Chris A. Barcelos

Doctoral Dissertations

This project uses discursive, visual, and ethnographic approaches situated in a critical feminist methodology to understand how ways of knowing about youth sexuality and reproduction influence community health work. I understand the “problem” in this inquiry as the discursive contexts that limit critical ways of knowing about young people’s sexual subjectivities and practices and about the design of policies and programs. Although race, class, gender, and sexuality are understood in the public health literature as important social determinants of health, there is a lack of research that applies a critical, feminist lens to these constructs. I draw on three years …

The Professionalization Of Male Circumcision In Turkey, Oyman Basaran

Doctoral Dissertations

Male circumcision is seen as a cultural and religious event and a rite of passage for boys in Turkey. It is surrounded by public rituals and as there is no equivalent rite of passage for girl children, circumcision signifies a crucial marker of not only religious but also gender differentiation between boys and girls. Circumcision is a men’s affair and performing circumcision bestows economic privilege and social status on circumcisers (sünnetçi). In this dissertation, I trace the practical and discursive changes in the experience of male circumcision from the perspectives of practitioners. I argue that while circumcision was always a …

Boys Just Want To Have Fun? Sexual Behaviors And Romantic Intentions Of Gay And Straight Men In College Hookup Culture, Randy J. Barrios

Masters Theses

Scholars studying college student sexual culture in the United States largely frame men as being detached from emotions, unconcerned with relationships, and in pursuit of sexual conquests. Through an examination of college sexual culture, an environment often associated with meaningless sexual encounters, this paper tests those stereotypes in both gay and straight men. By analyzing sexual behaviors, social opportunity structures, and romantic attitudes of gay and straight males in college, this paper finds evidence that both supports and contradicts existing literature on masculine stereotypes for both groups of men.

A Mixed Methods Analysis Of The Intersections Of Gender, Race, And Migration In The High-Tech Workforce, Sharla N. Alegria

Doctoral Dissertations

Despite public policy initiatives and private sector investment to recruit more women, women’s participation in high-tech work has decreased since 1990. I use interviews with tech workers and nationally representative quantitative workforce data from the American Community Survey to examine the consequences of race, gender, and immigration for tech workers’ experiences and wages. While previous research shows a decrease in the proportion of women in tech work, these conclusions are somewhat misleading as they do not consider the intersections of race and migration with gender. I find only modest change in the absolute numbers of women. Rather, as the field …

Gender Inequality: Nonbinary Transgender People In The Workplace, Skylar Davidson

Masters Theses

Most research on employment gender inequality focuses on differences between men and women, reinforcing a binary conception of gender. This study uses the National Transgender Discrimination Survey to evaluate the employment outcomes of nonbinary transgender people (those who identify as a gender other than man or woman). The results of this study suggest that being out as a nonbinary transgender person negatively affects nonbinary transgender people's employment outcomes. Though all transgender people have higher unemployment rates than the general population, outness has different effects on nonbinary transgender people based on sex assigned at birth, with those assigned male at birth …

The Shifting Structure Of Chicago's Organized Crime Network And The Women It Left Behind, Christina Smith

Doctoral Dissertations

Women are underrepresented in crime and criminal economies compared to men. However, research on the gender gap in crime tends to not employ relational methods and theories, even though crime is often relational. In the predominantly male world of Chicago organized crime at the turn of the twentieth century existed a dynamic gender gap. Combining social network analysis and historical research methods to examine the case of organized crime in Chicago, I uncover a group of women who made up a substantial portion of the Chicago organized crime network from 1900 to 1919. Before Prohibition, women of organized crime operated …

Reading Queerly In The High School Classroom: Exploring A Gay And Lesbian Literature Course, Kirsten Helmer

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore how teaching an English literature curriculum centered on the stories, experiences, cultures, histories, and politics of LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex) people constitutes a meaningful site for teaching and learning in a high school classroom. The dissertation offers insights on how the teaching of LGBTQI-themed texts in English language arts classes can be reframed by bridging the goals, practices and conceptual tools of queer theory to critical literacies teaching. The project follows principles of critical qualitative research and employs an ethnographic case study approach with the purpose of transforming educational …

A "Greedy" Institution With Great Job Benefits: Family Structure And Gender Variation In Commitment To Military Employment, Karen M. Brummond

Masters Theses

Scholars describe both the military and the family as “greedy institutions,” or institutions that require expansive time and energy commitments, and alter participants’ master status (Segal 1986; Coser 1974). However, the military’s employment benefits may counteract its greedy elements. I use data from the 2008 Survey of Active Duty Members to examine commitment to military employment in wartime, accounting for greedy elements of military service (such as geographic mobility, risk of bodily harm, and separations), job benefits, family structure, and gender. The results show that women in dual-service marriages, unmarried men, and those who experienced separations reported lower career commitment …

Cohort And Gender Differences And The Marriage Wage Premium: Findings From The Nlsy79 And The Nlsy97, Misun Lim

Masters Theses

Past research has established a marital wage premium among men, and more recently, among women of the baby boom generation. It is unknown whether: 1) the marriage premium holds among more recent cohorts of men and women, 2) it differs by intensity of work hours among husbands and wives, and 3) cohabiters receive wage bonuses. Using fixed-effects models and data from the 1979-1989 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) and the 1997-2010 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97), this paper compares cohort differences in the gendered marriage premium. While both women and men receive …

Parents' Gender Ideology And Gendered Behavior As Predictors Of Children's Gender-Role Attitudes: A Longitudinal Exploration, Hillary Paul Halpern

Masters Theses

This longitudinal study examined the association between parents’ early and concurrent gender ideology and gendered behaviors and their children’s gender-role attitudes at age six. Specifically, parents' global beliefs about women's and men's "rightful" roles in society, as well as their work preferences for mothers, were considered in relation to the gender-role attitudes held by their first-graders. In addition, parents’ gendered behaviors, including their division of household and childcare tasks, division of paid work hours, and job traditionality were examined as predictors of children’s gender-role attitudes. Based on previous research, it was hypothesized parents’ early and concurrent behavior and ideology would …

Navigating Paid Work And Parenthood: New Parents’ Long-Term Employment Pathways In The United States, Irene Boeckmann

Doctoral Dissertations

Mothers have contributed disproportionately to women’s rising employment rates in the United States, and contemporary fathers spend more time caring for children compared to previous generations of men. Still, parenthood continues to shape women’s and men’s employment participation patterns in profoundly gendered ways. Changes and continuities in aggregate labor market participation patterns raise questions with regard to the variation in mothers’ and fathers’ employment participation, and in the ways in which different-sex couples organize engagement in paid work after they become parents. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this dissertation examine the variation in new parents’ long-term …