Browsing by Subject "Gender and sexuality"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Decolonial Embodied Historiography: Female Performing Bodies, Revolutions and Empires in Ethiopia
    (2018-11) Abebe, Surafel
    This dissertation is about the struggles of Ethiopian female performers like Telela Kebede, Asnakech Worku, and Merry Armde. It examines the resistance that women artists enacted on inter/national stages, in the nightclubs of red-light districts, and in their everyday lives. Ethno/national discourses take Hegelian and Rankean historiography for granted making identity politics the only avenue to citizenship/subjectivity. Deployed to create a neoliberal structure of belonging, this politics obfuscates multiple articulations of freedom particularly feminist struggles in the past and closes off epistemic and embodied multi-genre possibilities in the present (1991-2018). Using performance as a mode of thinking, as an object of analysis and as a site of struggle, my dissertation probes into the staging of a ‘burden of history’ that moves around in Ethiopian historiography just as an issue of longue durée. I argue that history needs to be interrogated as a colonial/modern discipline and profession. Then, I re-singularize the 1974 Marxist revolution to show how Ethiopian female performers articulated their desires in collaboration with male revolutionaries such as the prolific playwright and thinker Tsegaye-Gabre-Medhin. Though he staged Ethiopian socialism (negritude) to create possibilities, Tsegaye rendered female performers as ‘impure’ bodies that ‘obliterated’ the socialist progress because they had nightclubs in the red-light districts. These women fought to change their condition enacting tactical resistance on and off stage by expanding the notion of the performative and the political. In order to complicate the notion of ‘abject’ body, the dissertation genealogically looks into the emergence of the raced, classed, gendered, sexualized, commodified, and dis/abled female bodies at the beginning of the twentieth century. Ethiopia’s position as un-colonized yet colonized country (in terms of coloniality of power) informed participation of performance in the invention of dangerous liaisons and translations of governmentality. Nevertheless, female performers negotiated empires’ (global-local) spatial segregation through multiple performances as other women of red-light districts joined the resistance as spect-actors. Using decolonial embodied historiography as a concept, method, and praxis, that attends to the undoing of the Eurocentric model of the human (Man), open spatiotemporal dialectics, and ethico-political act, my dissertation opens epistemic avenues to endlessly co-recreate a better humane world.
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    “Presence in Our Own Land:” Second Wave Feminism and the Lesbian Body Politic
    (2019-08) Gambino, Elena
    This dissertation reconstructs the political theorizing of lesbian feminists ranging from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. It argues, in contrast to the popular “wave narrative” of feminist theory, that theirs was a uniquely intersectional and coalitional politics; moreover, it suggests that the wave metaphor both covers over and forecloses many of the intersectional and coalitional insights that lesbian feminists developed during this period. Since the early 1990s, queer theorists have raised serious concerns about lesbian feminism, arguing that its central assumptions are essentialist, exclusionary, and homogenizing. In contrast to this commonplace reading of lesbian feminism, however, I argue that lesbian feminism was neither essentialist nor exclusionary; in fact, lesbian feminists promoted a political praxis grounded in confronting and repairing the harms of racism and inequality within their movement. I develop my argument in three parts. First, I show that not only is the widespread view of lesbian politics as reactionary and undemocratic largely inaccurate, but that queer theorists’ central argument – that queer theory is a more exemplary approach to intersectional politics – paradoxically erases and reduces the contributions of lesbians of color, even as it claims them as antecedents. Second, I reconstruct the diverse political claims made by lesbian feminists by turning to archives often overlooked by political theorists, such as the magazine Sinister Wisdom. I show that the practice of racial responsibility developed in the pages of Sinister Wisdom by lesbian feminists such as Cherríe Moraga, Audre Lorde, Maria Lugones, Adrienne Rich, and Monique Wittig, among others, offers valuable insights for theorists grappling with how to imagine more radical and accountable coalitions. Finally, I argue that while the political challenges posed by lesbians have historically been considered less sophisticated than queer theories, the lesbian conception of accountability is a point of contact with contemporary theories of grounded responsibility that contest central concepts of political theory such as the social contract. I conclude by arguing that by challenging these central concepts and by advocating for a politics of grounded responsibility, lesbian feminism offers a promising path towards exceeding some of the intractable impasses of contemporary political theory.
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    “Queering Borders”: War, Diaspora, Gender And Sexuality Among Afghans In The United States
    (2019-08) Munhazim, Ahmad Qais
    How did a nation known for a gender-neutral language and celebration of same-sex love through literature and poetry became a masculinist landscape as it learned to live through wars, and how do these wars continue in people’s lives thousands of miles away from their homeland? How was the sense of community and safety created by Afghans who settled in the United States during the political turmoil of the Cold War crushed by the US’s “War on Terror”? How did the lives of Afghans become engulfed by a continuous regime of surveillance that produces unsettling conditions; temporary and fragile homes marked by frequent violence; subjects defined by mistrust, anxieties and fears, and ultimately vigilant masculinities where the surveilled subjects surveil themselves? In this dissertation, I address these and many other entangled questions through stories of people who have lived through multiple wars and displacements, and who have actively refused imposed borders. Through these stories of lived experiences and border crossings, this work asks that we rethink rigid meanings of wars, diasporas and their complex relationships with gender and sexuality, while also complicating the imaginary borders between the researcher and research subjects. My particular contribution is a rich ethnographic study of gendered subjectivities among war diasporas. I argue that it is not possible to adequately understand the norms and performances of gender and sexuality and the profound ways in which they shape the lived experiences of diasporas, without first learning to listen carefully to the nuanced stories of these diasporic communities. These narratives offer complex ways to understand performances of gender and sexuality in the context of war and displacement. Grappling with these stories and narratives of many Afghans in diaspora, I use the pages of this dissertation to queer stable borders of nations, war, peace, gender and sexuality both methodologically and conceptually. Through a critical ethnography of war, diaspora and performances of gender and sexuality, this work strives to become deeply attentive to a wide variation of experiences and differences that accompany people’s lives as they become displaced, as they cross borders, and as they form a diaspora out of these ever-unfolding events and processes. I hope that this dissertation will help to strengthen the foundation for interdisciplinary scholars who are interested in advancing this critical and desperately needed research.