Between Dec 19, 2024 and Jan 2, 2025, datasets can be submitted to DRUM but will not be processed until after the break. Staff will not be available to answer email during this period, and will not be able to provide DOIs until after Jan 2. If you are in need of a DOI during this period, consider Dryad or OpenICPSR. Submission responses to the UDC may also be delayed during this time.

Browsing by Subject "Feminist Studies"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Bodied knowledges (where our blood is born): maternal narratives and articulations of black women's diaspora identity
    (2010-12) Crump, Helen J.
    My dissertation titled Bodied Knowledges (Where Our Blood Is Born): Maternal Narratives and Articulations of Black Women's Diaspora Identity is an intervention in black diasporic criticism and black feminism. It highlights black women's diaspora literature, maternal narratives, and interrogations of identity. I employ a black feminist diaspora literary lens to identify, define, trace, and speak to the African Diaspora as it functions in black women's diaspora fiction and informs our understanding of black women's diaspora identity. My study considers three authors and novels by women of, in, and across the African Diaspora. In my thesis, I center Sandra Jackson-Opoku's The River Where Blood Is Born as a primary site of analysis of diaspora formation and theorization, and I examine Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon and Maryse Condé's Desirada as comparative textual and theoretical sites. I contend that black women writers, with a certain intentionality, use their novels to articulate a woman-centered generationality located inside and throughout the African Diaspora, doing so in order to theorize both the structure of that diaspora and black women's identity within and as part of it. To address this theory, I focus on motherhood / mothering, a common role associated with women, and name and discuss specific maternal narratives as sites through which to delineate and interrogate the intersection of identity and Diaspora. Drawing on specific diaspora frameworks, such as that proposed by Kim Butler in "Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse" and Brent Hayes Edwards in "The Uses of Diaspora", I conduct a close examination of the primary novels, addressing the maternal discourse and the Diaspora construction in each. Moreover, these texts are woman-centered, which, I argue, re-locates diaspora from a traditionally male-centered and male-dominated situated-ness to one that focuses on black women's readings of and experiences within the Diaspora.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    “Grinding the walls to dust”: feminist media praxis
    (2010-01) Raimist, Rachel Amy
    This manuscript examines feminist media praxis as a site of knowledge production by exploring two distinct yet interconnected sites: a critical poetry workshop in a men's prison in Stillwater, Minnesota and a high school social justice theater program in St. Paul Central High School in St. Paul, Minnesota. The author, a feminist filmmaker and scholar, filmed both the prison poets and the high school students, and critically "read" still frames of the video footage, to show how educational practices in public schools and prisons can work to subvert mainstream narratives of the "white teacher" as inner-city savior. This project interweaves feminism, film theory, prison studies, pedagogy, and video-making practices, to produce knowledge that prioritizes both critical inquiry and creative media making. Through praxis, knowledge is produced using art (poetry, performance and video), to work in resistance to Minnesota's school-to-prison pipeline.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Integration, Erasure, and Underdevelopment: The Everyday Politics and Geographies of Gitano NGOization
    (2008-06) Chu, Margalit
    This critical fieldwork study interrogates the sociocultural and political economic production of underdevelopment through an analysis of the difference-based development politics occurring “on the ground” in and around Gitano non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Specifically, I propose that dominant development discourses and practices have promoted the desire for sociocultural integration and a nationalist politics of sociocultural erasure among targeted ethnic minority communities. Rather than encouraging serious political and cultural dialogue between ethnic (non- Gitano and Gitano) communities, state development agencies have employed strategies of contracting out social services to Gitano NGOs, thereby facilitating the dispersal of political accountability. This stopgap tactic has generated an increased dependence of targeted communities on flighty state handouts and dwindling sociocultural livelihood strategies for them to confront marginalization. Gitano NGOs have adopted the role of go-betweens wherein, on the one hand, normalized Gitano elites enact dominant development praxis and, on the other hand, they advocate apparently progressive Gitano nationalist and feminist politics. Community residents, for their part, have generally employed a defensive politics of active non-participation. That is, they seek the socioeconomic incentives of state development policies via NGOization while implicating themselves as little as possible in processes of sociocultural integration. The prevailing scholarship presents a top-down view of development praxis wherein state and global political economic processes act upon more or less passive, culture-trapped locals. In contrast, I contend that the everyday tensions between state agents, NGO members, and local residents reveal politically, economically, and socioculturally interested actions and contention on all sides that have nonetheless had the cumulative deleterious effect both of creating some Gitano (desire for) integration and generalized marginalization via development, or “underdevelopment.” My analysis is drawn from over two years of fieldwork at two Gitano NGOs located in a social housing community of the southern Spanish city of Granada. This project contributes to debates on the difference-based production of development, feminist geographies of NGOization, and critical feminist praxis.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Now that's a good girl: discourses of African American women, HIV/AIDS, and respectability.
    (2010-08) Weekley, Ayana K.
    Now That's a Good Girl: Discourses of African American Women, HIV/AIDS, and Respectability draws upon black feminist theory, black queer studies, and HIV/AIDS cultural studies to examine discursive representations of African Americans in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This dissertation argues that the discursive production of the HIV/AIDS epidemic takes place at multiple sites within the nation-state. Combining a analysis of biomedical discourses and African American popular discourses, this dissertation interrogates the ways these discourses have worked to support normative constructions of race, gender, and sexualities. Now That's a Good Girl illustrates both how state discourses of HIV/AIDS drew upon racist and gendered ideas of black women and men in its construction of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and how African American HIV/AIDS discourses attempted to counter these discourses. It argues that African American HIV/AIDS discourses revitalized a politics of respectability in an effort to shield African American women, families, and communities from racist stereotypes of deviancy. Finally, this dissertation attempts to read past these politics of respectability in order to question the queer possibilities these discourses attempt to repress.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Orientalist knowledges at the European periphery: Norwegian racial projects, 1970-2005.
    (2010-05) Myrdahl, Eileen Muller
    In this dissertation I examine recent Norwegian racial formations. I argue that whiteness has become an increasingly central aspect of productions of Norwegian national identity. Furthermore, I show that the racializing processes first established in the early 1970s continue to be reproduced and shape Norwegian society today. The dissertation focuses on three disparate but interlinked sites. First, I discuss the experiences of postwar Southern and Eastern European migrants in Norway, based on interviews with 12 migrants. I argue that these migrants are produced as white in a qualitatively different way from non-migrant Norwegians who are seen as white. Furthermore, I suggest that the apparent production of the migrants' children as white and Norwegian shows that Norwegian forms of whiteness are less dependent on tracing descent to Norwegian territory than has previously been suggested. Secondly, I trace the changing discourses of race and migration that culminated in the 1975 "immigration stop" legislation. I argue that at the beginning of the decade Norwegian understandings of immigration were not heavily dependent on constructions of race, but that they became so within a few years. Using close readings of policy documents, the Parliamentary debate on the "immigration stop" and newspaper coverage from the entire period, I show that the development and passing of the legislation was dependent on, and in turn codified, racial constructs that saw some migrants as always already excessively different. Lastly, I argue that imperatives to love-and romance-based marriage that is evident in Norwegian family reunification law constitutes a racial project - one that can be seen as an extension of the processes of racialization that were established in the 1970s. I also suggest that arranged marriages queer in relation to Norwegian heteronormativities. In the conclusion I point both to the continued reiteration of race in Norway, and to forms of opposition to the racial productions that I have discussed. I argue that international perspectives on racial formation provide analytic dexterity that is necessary if Norwegian racializing processes are to be interrupted.
  • Thumbnail Image
    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.