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Jewish Conversion During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Victoria Davide Mar 2022

Jewish Conversion During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Victoria Davide

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

March 2020 saw a stark change to daily life and religious practices for many individuals because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Those converting to Judaism, or in the process of wanting to convert, found themselves physically isolated from their Jewish communities. This thesis dives into what aspects are important when creating a Jewish identity and how individuals circumnavigate these changes in crisis. Through the use of qualitative interviews this thesis illuminates the many different changes and experiences that individuals went through converting to Judaism during the COVID-19 pandemic. I bring many different groups for comparisons including different branches within Judaism and …


Love From The Machine: Technosexualities And The Desire For Machinic Bodies, Ann-Renee Clark Jun 2019

Love From The Machine: Technosexualities And The Desire For Machinic Bodies, Ann-Renee Clark

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the dimensions and practices of "technosexualities" - human desires for machinic bodies. For the purposes of this project, technosexualities are defined as sexual and/or other intimate desires for technologically enhanced or constructed humanoid bodies ("machinic bodies") or the desire to be such a machinic body. A machinic body may be mechanical (robotic) and/or digital, techno-biological (as per biological computing and/or a laboratory-“grown” or built body), or “cyborg” (cybernetic organism, a partially technologically-modified, partially biological body.) Rather than interpreting technosexuals as troubled or disturbed “fetishists” who are attracted to the unnatural, or imposing suppositions of feelings of impotence …


Transnational Sex-Positive Play Parties: The Sexual Politics Of Care For Community-Making At A Kinky Salon, Christina Bazzaroni Mar 2019

Transnational Sex-Positive Play Parties: The Sexual Politics Of Care For Community-Making At A Kinky Salon, Christina Bazzaroni

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

To date, feminist geographers and geographers of sexualities have yet to fully interrogate post sexual revolution society. In this dissertation I examine the politics of sex-positive play parties, through the case study of Kinky Salon (KS) – a global organization that claims to catalyze a contemporary sex culture revolution. This project expands on previous feminist geography and geographies of sexualities scholarship centering queer, kinky sex, demonstrating that non-normative sexual practices are informed by and contribute to sexual revolution legacies. I extend feminist geographies’ theorizing of affect and emotion to show how sexual intimacies are care-work, with the emotional power to …


Material Girls: Consumption And The Making Of Middle Class Identity In The Experiences Of Black Single Mothers In The Washington, Dc Metropolitan Area, Aysha L. Preston Ph.D. Nov 2018

Material Girls: Consumption And The Making Of Middle Class Identity In The Experiences Of Black Single Mothers In The Washington, Dc Metropolitan Area, Aysha L. Preston Ph.D.

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the ways in which black single mothers in the Washington, DC metropolitan area use material goods and consumption practices to inform their identities as members of the middle class. Black middle class women are challenging stereotypes surrounding single mother households, the idea of family, and class status in the United States, as more women overall are having children while single, delaying or deciding against marriage, and are entering the middle and upper-middle classes as a result of advanced education and career opportunities. Because of these demographic and sociocultural shifts, the romanticized “nuclear family” which consists of a …


Jewish Women’S Transracial Epistemological Networks: Representations Of Black Women In The African Diaspora, 1930-1980, Abby S. Gondek Mar 2018

Jewish Women’S Transracial Epistemological Networks: Representations Of Black Women In The African Diaspora, 1930-1980, Abby S. Gondek

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates how Jewish women social scientists relationally established their gendered-racialized subjectivities and theories about race-gender-sexuality-class through their portrayals of black women’s sexuality and family structures in the African Diaspora: the U.S., Brazil, South Africa, Swaziland, and the U.K. The central women in this study: Ellen Hellmann, Ruth Landes, Hilda Kuper, and Ruth Glass, were part of the same “political generation,” born in 1908-1912, coming of age when Jews of European descent experienced an ambivalent and conditional assimilation into whiteness, a form of internal colonization. I demonstrate how each woman’s familial origin point in Europe, parental class and political …


"I Am A Teacher, A Woman's Activist, And A Mother": Political Consciousness And Embodied Resistance In Antakya's Arab Alawite Community, Defne Sarsilmaz Nov 2017

"I Am A Teacher, A Woman's Activist, And A Mother": Political Consciousness And Embodied Resistance In Antakya's Arab Alawite Community, Defne Sarsilmaz

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Often pointed to as the region’s model secular state, Turkey provides an instructive case study in how nationalism, in the name of conjuring ‘unity’, often produces the opposite effect. Indeed, the production of nationalism can create fractures amongst, as well as politicize, certain segments of a population, such as minority groups and women. This dissertation examines the long-term and present-day impacts on nationalist unity of a largely understudied event, the annexation of the border-city of Antakya from Syria in 1939, and its implications on the Arab Alawite population. In doing so, it deconstructs the dominant Turkish narrative on the annexation, …


The Gender Problem Of Buddhist Nationalism In Myanmar: The 969 Movement And Theravada Nuns, Grisel D'Elena Apr 2016

The Gender Problem Of Buddhist Nationalism In Myanmar: The 969 Movement And Theravada Nuns, Grisel D'Elena

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses transnational and Black feminist frameworks to analyze Buddhist nationalist discourses of gender and violence against religious and ethnic minorities in Myanmar. Burmese Buddhist nationalists’ marginalization of the Muslim Rohingya ethnic minority is inextricably linked to their attempts to control Buddhist women. Research includes interviews with U Ashin Wirathu, the leader of the monastic-led nationalist group, the 969 Movement, and with other monks of the organization, as well as with non-nationalist monks, nuns and laywomen. I also analyze Theravada textual discourse as read by my subjects in light of the history of Myanmar to understand the ways the …


In Search Of Safety, Negotiating Everyday Forms Of Risk: Sex Work, Criminalization, And Hiv/Aids In The Slums Of Kampala, Serena Cruz Oct 2015

In Search Of Safety, Negotiating Everyday Forms Of Risk: Sex Work, Criminalization, And Hiv/Aids In The Slums Of Kampala, Serena Cruz

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation offers an in-depth descriptive account of how women manage daily risks associated with sex work, criminalization, and HIV/AIDS. Primary data collection took place within two slums in Kampala, Uganda over the course of fourteen months. The emphasis was on ethnographic methodologies involving participant observation and informal and unstructured interviewing. Insights then informed document analysis of international and national policies concerning HIV prevention and treatment strategies in the context of Uganda. The dissertation finds social networks and social capital provide the basis for community formation in the sex trade. It holds that these interpersonal processes are necessary components for …


"New" Social Movements: Alternative Modernities, (Trans)Local Nationalisms, And Solidarity Economies, Mamyrah Prosper Mar 2015

"New" Social Movements: Alternative Modernities, (Trans)Local Nationalisms, And Solidarity Economies, Mamyrah Prosper

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation is the first project on the Haitian Platform for Advocacy for an Alternative Development- PAPDA, a nation-building coalition founded by activists from varying sectors to coordinate one comprehensive nationalist movement against what they are calling an Occupation. My work not only provides information on this under-theorized popular movement but also situates it within the broader literature on the postcolonial nation-state as well as Latin American and Caribbean social movements. The dissertation analyzes the contentious relationship between local and global discourses and practices of citizenship. Furthermore, the research draws on transnational feminist theory to underline the scattered hegemonies that …


Gender In Motion: Negotiating Bengali Social Statuses Across Time And Territories, Mayurakshi Chaudhuri Jan 2014

Gender In Motion: Negotiating Bengali Social Statuses Across Time And Territories, Mayurakshi Chaudhuri

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Hindu Indian Bengalis as an ethno-linguistic and transnational group have negotiated their social locations historically, contemporaneously, and transnationally. In this dissertation, I examine and argue how transnational migration is the most recent in a long line of Bengali strategies to negotiate their social location vis-à-vis other populations in India. Since the early years of the nineteenth century, in Bengal specifically, a series of socio-political dynamics have reshaped and reconstituted Bengali social status. These dynamics can be observed across various geographic scales - national, regional, and local -- and have continued to inform their contemporary gender relations. En route to this …


Women Of African Descent: Persistence In Completing A Doctorate, Vannetta L. Bailey-Iddrisu Nov 2010

Women Of African Descent: Persistence In Completing A Doctorate, Vannetta L. Bailey-Iddrisu

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the educational persistence of women of African descent (WOAD) in pursuit of a doctorate degree at universities in the southeastern United States. WOAD are women of African ancestry born outside the African continent. These women are heirs to an inner dogged determination and spirit to survive despite all odds (Pulliam, 2003, p. 337).This study used Ellis’s (1997) Three Stages for Graduate Student Development as the conceptual framework to examine the persistent strategies used by these women to persist to the completion of their studies.