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Trans Women And Reproductive (In)Justice - How Race, Class, And Gender Shape Experiences Of Family Formation And Parenthood, Derek Siegel Jan 2023

Trans Women And Reproductive (In)Justice - How Race, Class, And Gender Shape Experiences Of Family Formation And Parenthood, Derek Siegel

Data and Datasets

The following support document includes demographic data from my dissertation research, disaggregated to preserve the anonymity of respondents. It also includes two separate interview schedules for semi-structured interviews I conducted with trans women who were either currently parents (the first guide) or who want to be parents in the future (the second guide). My dissertation examines how race, class, and gender shape trans women’s parenting journeys. Trans women, and particularly trans women of color, experience high levels of discrimination across the contexts of employment, healthcare, and the legal system, yet remain virtually absent from contemporary research on family and parenting …


Reconstructing The Present/Past: Antimodernism And Early Film Reenactments, Alex W. Bordino Jun 2021

Reconstructing The Present/Past: Antimodernism And Early Film Reenactments, Alex W. Bordino

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the cultural history surrounding early film reenactments and elucidates their relationship with modernity. Beginning in the 1890s, motion pictures became part of modern unreality. In a world that seemed increasingly more abstracted from reality, antimodernism emerged in a variety of sectors as a quest toward authenticity. Early film reenactments, despite being ancillary fabrications of real events, aligned with this antimodern sensibility, which would ultimately, and somewhat paradoxically, inform modern culture. The motion picture’s appearance of reality at a cultural moment of modern disillusion, or in some cases outright discontent, formulated a simulated version of reality distinct from …


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 …


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, …


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 …


The South African War: Implications And Convictions Of Postwar Politics And Policy, Jaffar Shiek Apr 2017

The South African War: Implications And Convictions Of Postwar Politics And Policy, Jaffar Shiek

University of Massachusetts Undergraduate History Journal

Apartheid in South Africa is a widely known tragedy in the realm of history and political science. In order to understand the racism and prejudice that served as the framework of apartheid, it is important to understand it’s inception and the ripe settings for its implementation. The aim of this paper is to trace and depict the events leading up to apartheid, including the Boer Wars and the consequences of Britain’s Scorched Earth policy. Using works such as Professor Higginson’s “Hell in Small Place: Agrarian Elites and Collective Violence in the Western Transvaal, 1900-1907,” and primary documents from Jan Smuts, …


"The Fate Which Takes Us:" Benjamin F. Beall And Jefferson County, (West) Virginia In The Civil War Era, Matthew Coletti Mar 2016

"The Fate Which Takes Us:" Benjamin F. Beall And Jefferson County, (West) Virginia In The Civil War Era, Matthew Coletti

Masters Theses

This thesis analyzes the editorial content of a popular regional newspaper from the Shenandoah Valley, the Spirit of Jefferson, during the height of the Civil-War Era (1848-1870). The newspaper’s editor during most of the period, Benjamin F. Beall, was a white, southern slaveholder of humble origins, who spent time serving in the Confederate military. Beall, however, had also quickly established himself as one of the preeminent Democrats in his home county of Jefferson, as well as both the Shenandoah Valley and the new state of West Virginia. Beall firmly believed in the institution of racial slavery and fought to …


Young Germans In The World: Race, Gender, And Imperialism In Wilhelmine Young Adult Literature, Maureen O. Gallagher Nov 2015

Young Germans In The World: Race, Gender, And Imperialism In Wilhelmine Young Adult Literature, Maureen O. Gallagher

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation shows how popular reading material for young adults was used to craft a new generation of German imperial citizens in the Second Empire (1871-1918). Uniting insights from contemporary postcolonial theory, gender studies, and the global history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, it shows the intersectional development of German national identity in the children’s and young adult literature of Wilhelmine Germany. As literature written by adults for young people, designed both to entertain and instruct, children’s and young adult literature offers a unique window on how Germany built nation and empire simultaneously during this period. Focusing on texts set …


Creating The Ideal Mexican: 20th And 21st Century Racial And National Identity Discourses In Oaxaca, Savannah N. Carroll Nov 2015

Creating The Ideal Mexican: 20th And 21st Century Racial And National Identity Discourses In Oaxaca, Savannah N. Carroll

Doctoral Dissertations

This investigation intends to uncover past and contemporary socioeconomic significance of being a racial other in Oaxaca, Mexico and its relevance in shaping Mexican national identity. The project has two purposes: first, to analyze activities and observations of cultural missionaries in Oaxaca during the 1920s and 1930s, and second to relate these findings to historical and present implications of blackness in an Afro-Mexican community. Cultural missionaries were appointed by the Secretary of Public Education (SEP) to create schools throughout Mexico, focusing on the modernization of marginalized communities through formal and social education. This initiative was intended to resolve socioeconomic disparities …


All-American Vacationland: African American, Puerto Rican, And Italian Resorts In The Catskill Mountains, 1920-1980, Laura A. Miller Nov 2014

All-American Vacationland: African American, Puerto Rican, And Italian Resorts In The Catskill Mountains, 1920-1980, Laura A. Miller

Doctoral Dissertations

In the twentieth century, New York State’s Catskill Mountain resort area was an “All-American” vacationland. Each summer, many different racial and ethnic minorities sought a brief respite from their lives and labor in New York City at boarding houses, resorts, and bungalows scattered throughout the mountains. Collectively, these groups contributed to the development of a highly segregated resort area that reflected, on an exaggerated scale, the racial, ethnic, and class divisions within New York City and the nation as a whole in the twentieth century. This dissertation examines the Catskills resort landscape through a comparative analysis of African American, Puerto …


Resurrection: Representations Of The Black Church In Contemporary Popular Culture, Rachel J. Daniel Nov 2014

Resurrection: Representations Of The Black Church In Contemporary Popular Culture, Rachel J. Daniel

Doctoral Dissertations

From 1997 to 2013, there have been multiple representations of the black church in popular culture. African American artists have always explored spirituality within black communities; in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, however, the increasing fame of Tyler Perry, T.D. Jakes, Steve Harvey, and other prominent African American Christians has placed black church culture on the center stage of American mainstream media. This dissertation examines contemporary black Christian popular fiction, stage performances, black church films, and rap music. These representations demonstrate that black church culture is distinct from secular black popular culture and white evangelical Christian …


Racialized Spaces In Teacher Discourse: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Place-Based Identities In Roche Bois, Mauritius, Elsa Marie Wiehe Feb 2013

Racialized Spaces In Teacher Discourse: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Place-Based Identities In Roche Bois, Mauritius, Elsa Marie Wiehe

Open Access Dissertations

This eleven-month ethnographic study puts critical discourse analysis in dialogue with postmodern conceptualizations of space and place to explore how eight educators talk about space and in the process, produce racialized spaces in Roche Bois, Mauritius. The macro-historical context of racialization of this urban marginalized community informs the discursive analysis of educators' talk at school. Drawing on theories of race that call for the non-deterministic exploration of race relations as they occur in different contexts and times (Hall, 2000; Pandian & Kosek, 2003; Essed & Goldberg, 2000), I explore the spatial racialization of children in Roche Bois as a process …


Technologies Of Racial Formation: Asian-American Online Identities, Linh Dich Sep 2012

Technologies Of Racial Formation: Asian-American Online Identities, Linh Dich

Open Access Dissertations

My dissertation is an ethnographic study of Asian-American users on the social network site, Xanga. Based on my analysis of online texts, responses to texts, and participants' discussions of their writing motivations, my research strongly suggests that examining digital writing through participants' complex and overlapping constructions of their community and public(s) can help the field reconsider digital writing as a site of Asian-American rhetoric and as a process of constructing and transforming racial identities and relations. In particular, I examine how community and public, as interconnected and shifting writing imaginaries on Xanga, afford Asian-American users on this site the opportunity …


Reconstructing Molly Welsh: Race, Memory And The Story Of Benjamin Banneker's Grandmother, Sandra W. Perot Jan 2008

Reconstructing Molly Welsh: Race, Memory And The Story Of Benjamin Banneker's Grandmother, Sandra W. Perot

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Molly Welsh, oral tradition captured in the nineteenth century tells us, was a white Englishwoman who worked as an indentured servant. The same tradition has it that she owned slaves, although she is said to have married (or formed a union with) one of them. I aim not only to recover the life of Molly Welsh Banneker, but also to consider its various tellings—probing in particular at Molly’s shifting racial status. By examining a multiplicity of social and cultural aspects of life for seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Maryland women, I test whether these various narratives are even possible or plausible …