Browsing by Subject "Borderlands"
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Item Borderland Masculinities in Higher Education(2018-12) Rodriguez, FernandoThe Latino male experience in higher education often assumes a heteronormative masculinity framework without critically considering the experiences of gay Latino men as they negotiate heteronormative and heterosexist spaces within the institutional environment. Internalized masculinity constructs that begin within the familial space, and are shaped by cultural tradition and gender norms, are not complicated in the extant literature to consider the ways masculinity is internalized uniquely in the lives of gay Latino men. This dissertation examines the internalized masculinity constructs of six first-generation Mexican American gay undergraduate men to understand the ways that their internalized masculinity expectations shaped their college experiences. Over the course of two calendar years, participants engaged in a series of in-depth reflective interviews and were asked to consider their upbringings, family lives, social influences, and campus environments to understand the ways they have come to understand and embody masculinity within the campus environment. Utilizing Gloria Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness and border theory as the method of theoretical consideration and analysis, the study interrogates the six participant experiences to uncover how they navigated masculinity expectations within the campus setting and how they reconciled their gay identity within heteronormative campus spaces.Item "Her extraordinary sufferings and services": women and war in New England and New France, 1630-1763(2012-05) Martino-Trutor, Gina MichelleIn the border wars that wracked French and English colonies in northeastern North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women assumed visible, often violent roles in frontier communities that blurred the lines between military and domestic actions as well as settler and soldier identities. Scholars who have noted incidents in which women take up arms in these conflicts largely see their actions as anomalous due to a lack of context and a fragmented source base. Using sources such as petitions, diaries, laws, sermons, newspapers, letters, and chronicles, this dissertation demonstrates that, far from anomalous, these incidents resulted from government policies and cultural beliefs that prompted and even encouraged women to assume central and supporting roles in these wars. This comparative approach in studying Euro-American women in New England and New France, as well as Native women when sources permitted it, is relatively new. Women in the "northeastern borderlands" of seventeenth and eighteenth-century New England and New France remain poorly understood. This is particularly true regarding women's participation in the border wars. Often forbidden from evacuating to safety, women kept watch, worked directly with officials in administering forts, and fought alone and with their husbands when under attack. Far from marginalizing these women's actions, most important men in Euro-American societies met their activities with approval and encouragement. Political and religious leaders even used accounts of women's participation in the border wars as propaganda that served local, regional, and imperial agendas. In the eighteenth century, a greater European military presence resulted in an increased separation of the home and the front. In response, debates arose in New England over the role of the Crown in protecting settlers whose fortified towns had previously acted as a first line of defense. In New France, where the danger shifted from the St. Lawrence River Valley to the coast, women's economic and bureaucratic roles increased, while their physical participation in the defense of the colony decreased. Stories of women's participation in these conflicts were culturally persistent, and nineteenth-century authors employed these accounts to express new identities and agendas. Appearing in both local and regional histories, stories of women's participation in the border wars both reflected and shaped a new ideology of separate spheres while justifying past, present, and future colonization of the continent. In examining women's participation in the wars of the northeastern borderlands, this dissertation complicates commonly held assumptions regarding the roles of women in early modern societies. It also argues that these roles may have been more flexible than previously recognized.Item “This is our home!” Chicana Oral Histories: (Story)telling life, love and identity in the Midwest(2010-12) Creel, Kandace J.Tracing the lives of eight Midwestern Mexican American women, my dissertation interrogates the role of stories and storytelling in familial relationships and community building. I engage with Chicana feminist understandings of identity through these Midwestern Chicanas' stories of growing up in the Midwest (in the 60s and 70s) and their lives as women – while paying particular attention to the intersectional categories of gender, race, class and sexuality. Chapter One situates a “mestiza methodology” and the process of collecting oral histories with three women who are immediately related to me and five who are not. Weaving in women's stories, Chapter Two deals with Gloria Anzaldúa’s conceptualization of the borderlands (as an in–between space of creative strategies for survival and affirmation) in relation to Midwestern Mexican American woman's experiences. By situating Anzaldúa’s metaphorical borderlands in the Midwest (Kansas and Minnesota), I argue that while the physical border may be miles away the cultural clashes/borders that exist due to isolation, racism, and initially small communities of color have nevertheless mapped the borderland onto Chicanas in the Midwest and yet, their narratives are full of opportunities for re–envisioning politicized identities through the firm planting of roots, self–definition, and claiming an alienating space as home. Chapter Three uncovers the complicated understandings of silence in relation to Chicana sexuality and la familia. I explore how these women often resist the gendered roles they might feel constrained by in order to move the reader to think about their actions as underground feminist acts. Lastly, the conclusion synthesizes these eight Midwestern Chicana voices around the theme of storytelling. It reiterates the importance and value of the family and how storytelling has served as a means to pass on cultural knowledge. In exploring the bonds that women specifically build through storytelling I characterize the sharing of stories for these greater purposes as actos de amor, (acts of love). I assert that through dissolving the strict borders between ethnography and oral history, or testimonio and storytelling we can write Midwestern Chicanas into larger histories and explore alternative meanings of feminist identities in these geographic places far from the U.S./Mexico border.