Browsing by Subject "Sexuality"

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Brokering Identity: Exploring The Construction Of Lgbt Political Identity And Interests In U.S. Politics, 1968-2001
(2016-08) Murib, Zein
This study introduces a theoretical framework grounded in intersectionality to the study of identity-based groups in politics, raising and addressing the following questions: how within group marginalization develops, why within group marginalization occurs, and to what effect? By focusing on the construction of the LGBT group and through discourse analysis of three bodies of archival evidence from 1968 through 2001 – the institutional records of several national LGBT interest groups and social movements, a variety of LGBT publications, and transcripts of germane debates from the Congressional Record – this study shows how political actors framed the representation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender identities as a cohesive and unified coalition by presenting LGBT people as a minority group defined along a single axis of identity: sexuality. The unity of this new LGBT minority group – organized exclusively around sexuality – was achieved by foregrounding the political interests of gender-normative lesbians and gay men, particularly those who are white, middle-class, able bodied, and gender normative. Consequently, issues such as marriage and second-parent adoption were elevated as the predominant political interests on behalf of the LGBT group, while others, such as the passage of gender-inclusive employment anti-discrimination legislation or political mobilizations to end the documentation of sex on state documents, were deprioritized. Throughout this study, attention is drawn to the ways in which this projection of LGBT group unity obscured intersecting identifications, such as race, gender, class, nation, ability, and immigration status, with significant political and material consequences for the most marginalized members of the LGBT minority group: people of color, people who are transgender, lesbians, people who are gender nonconforming, people who are poor or homeless, people with disabilities, and people who are undocumented.
Casual Encounters: Constructing Sexual Deviance on Craigslist.org
(2017-05) Reynolds, Chelsea
Despite the prevalence of dating websites and hookup applications, mass communication scholars have largely ignored news coverage of sex in the digital age. Research about online sexuality has built on early theories of cyber identity, in which the Internet was conceptualized as a great emancipator. Online, it was argued, people could explore “disembodied” sexualities with little interference from offline reality. This dissertation builds a research line that investigates journalistic discourse about online sexuality using more than a decade of coverage of Craigslist sex forums as a case study. It also examines user activity on Craigslist sex forums, testing dominant theories of online identity. For journalists, Internet-mediated sexuality represents a compound moral threat. Since 2003, national U.S. newspapers have consistently identified the classified ads website Craigslist as a hotbed for sexual deviants — people whose sexual interests mainstream culture deems immoral or even illegal. Newspaper journalists call on police and government sources to frame Craigslist users as prostitutes, violent criminals, and cheating politicians. By relying on elite sources, news media surveil social deviance for the public. This is an outcome of normative reporting practices. Representational scholars have argued that media made by marginalized groups will provide more nuanced narratives than the mainstream press. But in stories about Craigslist sex forums, alternative media reproduce stigma about online sexuality. Popular LGBTQ and feminist online magazines describe Craigslist sex forums as catalysts for illegal and immoral activity. They sometimes privilege sex workers’ voices and cover the experiences of sexual minorities, but they contribute to the same deviance-defining discourse about Craigslist sex forums as does the mainstream press. Media across the ideological spectrum police social deviance and reinforce cultural norms — online and off. Mass media surveillance of online sexuality encourages people to surveil their own behavior online. Ads on Craigslist sex forums reflect dominant cultural norms about sex despite posters’ attempts to explore their “unusual” fantasies. The Craigslist Casual Encounters forum provides a productive outlet for people to fantasize about kink, non-monogamy, race, and sexuality. But it also reflects the politics of its white male user base. Sexism, homophobia, and gendered logics saturate the forums. Offline stigmas about sexuality bleed into online sexual expression. This dissertation theorizes the role of normalizing judgment in determining media representations of online sexuality. It offers perspectives from journalism sociology and cultural studies to help explain why media paint Craigslist sex forums as spaces that foster illegal and immoral sex. The dissertation concludes that online sexuality must be added to definitions of deviance in news. It problematizes theories of representations of sexuality by alternative media, and it demonstrates that online sexuality is deeply intertwined with offline identity.
Children and Sexuality: The Observations and Opinions of Family Daycare Providers. Results and Technical Report.
(Minnesota Center for Survey Research (MCSR), 1992) Gladchild, Patricia
Feeling Healthy: Media, Affect, and the Governance of Health
(2016-05) Butler-Wall, Karisa
This dissertation examines the role of media technologies in the emergence of new forms of health governance over the course of the past century. Even as “feeling healthy” has become a desirable affective state associated with wholeness, fulfillment, and satisfaction, discourses and practices of health continue to serve as the basis for regulating race, gender, sexuality, and dis/ability. In chapters on WWI-era sex hygiene films, midcentury women’s televised fitness programs, 1980s’ safer sex videos created by gay and lesbian AIDS activists, and contemporary interactive technologies designed to confront the obesity “epidemic,” I demonstrate how media technologies have enabled the management of bodies and populations by linking new techniques of health governance to individual desires to feel better. While important historical and sociological studies of health and medicine have brought attention to the role of public health in regulating race, gender, and sexuality, this work has rarely considered the relationship between popular media in not only reflecting but actively shaping individuals and populations around practices of health. I suggest that we need to look beyond institutional histories of public health as a site of discipline to explore the role of film, television, video, and new media in the emergence of what I call the “affective governance” of health: a system of biopolitical regulation that appeals to individuals’ desires for their own well-being, producing affective investments in normative practices of “healthy living.” Intervening in a larger set of theoretical and political debates that cross disciplinary boundaries to ask what makes a “livable life,” this project questions what is at stake in the pursuit of health as a normative ideal. I argue that “health” has historically been promoted as the condition of possibility for greater freedom, happiness, and fulfillment at the same time that it justifies ever more insidious forms of surveillance and control.
Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in Secondary Statistics
(2022-06) Parise, Megan
Statistics and data analysis have been part of the K-12 mathematics curriculum for the past few decades, and in conjunction with mathematics standards documents, the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education report clarified learning progressions for statistical content in K-12 mathematics (Franklin et al., 2007). Yet many secondary mathematics teachers struggle with teaching statistics because of its dependence on context and its use of variability (Cobb & Moore, 1997). Because of this struggle, secondary mathematics teachers who teach statistics may rely heavily on textbooks and pre-packaged curricula to drive their instruction. However, as I will demonstrate in the first paper of this dissertation, commercially published secondary statistics curricula in the United States often project a narrowed view of the world with respect to the types of contexts they use to develop statistical understanding. The first paper was the impetus for this three-paper series on statistics curricula. In this study, I used queer theory and critical mathematics education to examine the exercises, examples, and other text from three widely circulated statistics textbooks. I then applied critical discourse analysis to develop overarching themes related to the way in which the identities of gender, sex, and sexuality are developed through the sample textbooks. I found that, in addition to defining sex and gender as conflated and binary, the textbooks also construct identities of in ways that maintain strict boundaries between women/females and men/males, and these boundaries uphold heteronormative ideologies. This paper has implications for textbook publishers, teachers, and researchers and has been published in a special issue on Gender in Mathematics in Mathematics Education Research Journal (Parise, 2021). Based on the findings from this paper, I wanted to explore how statistics students and teachers interacted with these identity constructions. Therefore, in the second paper, I examine how statistics students are implicated in telling a heteronormative narrative through statistics textbook word problems that use gender, sex, and sexuality as context. I draw from Gerofsky’s (1996) research which establishes mathematics word problems as genre with specific story-like components. I then apply Wortham’s (2003) work on discursive parallelism to demonstrate how the statistics student engaging in the problem is complacent in completing a heteronormative narrative to be academically successful. As the problem progresses, and the parallelism between the two students is solidified, the real student doing the problem merges with the fictitious student in the word problem. The real student confirms the stereotype that women only date men who are taller than they are and then removes an “abnormally” tall woman from the data set. This narrative is then reinforced by a statistical calculation, the correlation coefficient. This paper has implications for teachers who aim to counter the overwhelmingly heteronormative ideologies present in mathematics and statistics textbooks. The third paper builds on the first two by examining how statistics teachers enact curriculum and analyzing teachers’ commitments and actions that disrupt heteronormative and gender/sex binary narratives in their curricular resources. For paper three, I review background literature on teachers’ use of curriculum as well as on how statistics teachers committed to justice-oriented teaching use curricular materials to attend to social issues in their classrooms. As a theoretical lens, I employed Gutstein’s (2006) teaching mathematics for social justice to create a justice-oriented statistics teaching framework. I interviewed Advanced Placement Statistics teachers who align their teaching philosophies toward justice-oriented statistics teaching and asked questions related to how they use or modify their curricular materials to address issues of sex, gender, and sexuality in class. I found that the type of curricular material mediated the teachers’ perceived authority over modifying the resource, particularly when they use Advanced Placement practice items. Lastly, I discuss how secondary statistics teachers can encourage their students to apply a critical lens to Advanced Placement practice items in order to develop critical statistics literacy.
Hidden In Carceral Sight: A Qualitative Examination of Sexual Violence in Youth Detention
(2022-07) Powell, Amber
State-sanctioned sexual violence has long plagued the criminal punishment system, from the rape and lynching of Black men and women during Jim Crow, to the sexual exploitation of Native youth in U.S. boarding schools in the early 20th century. This sexual exploitation of criminalized communities continues today through the mass incarceration of millions of men, women, trans, and gender non-binary people of color under the carceral state. While sociological scholarship has neglected sexual abuse against all incarcerated communities, the impact of sexual victimization on the 48,000 youth warehoused in juvenile, adult, and immigration detention centers remains particularly troubling given the power structures that shape their coexisting status both as children and as incarcerated persons. Despite the recent closing of several youth detention centers and the implementation of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), both punishment scholarship on incarceration and feminist research on sexual violence have overlooked youth confinement as a site of state sexual violence and rape law mobilization. Drawing on punishment, critical legal, and intersectional feminist scholarship, my three-paper dissertation, Hidden in Carceral Sight: A Qualitative Examination of Sexual Violence in Youth Detention examines how carceral institutions that house youth (re)produce, construct, and respond to youth claims of sexual misconduct. I further explore how structures of gender, race, and sexuality shape these institutional processes. To answer these questions, I conducted 76 interviews with legal actors, including 23 formerly incarcerated men, women, and trans survivors, and 53 PREA personnel (i.e., compliance managers, investigators, etc.), youth correctional workers, sexual assault advocates, and anti-prison activists across the U.S. I triangulate interviews with a textual analysis of roughly 150 legal documents (e.g., written sexual harassment and abuse investigations, lawsuits, congressional testimonies), news media articles, PREA resources (e.g., webinars, handbooks, etc.), virtual observations of PREA-related events, and secondary survey data from the National Survey of Youth in Custody (NSYC) and the Survey of Sexual Victimization (SSV). Together, these data provide an in-depth analysis of how incarcerated youth experience sexual violence, the cultural and institutional barriers that hinder their disclosure, and how carceral institutions construct and respond to their claims of sexual victimization.
Interrogating Intimacies: Asian American and Native Relations in Colonial Alaska
(2013-08) Pegues, Juliana
Interrogating Intimacies examines intersections between Asian and Native peoples in Alaska during the American territorial period in order to critically understand the formation of settler colonialism. In four case studies that touch on the historical periods of Alaskan purchase, the Gold Rush, incorporated territorial status, and World War II, I demonstrate how the colonial project racialized and gendered Native and Asian people in Alaska in different yet interdependent ways. Interrogating Intimacies utilizes an expansive archive of texts (historical documents, interviews, travel narratives, literature, and photography) to inform how settler colonialism defines and delimits its proper subject. I contend that the narrative of Alaska as a democratic state rather than a colonial territory depends upon the disavowal of both Asian labor and Native land claims, made possible through the spatial and temporal logics of settler colonialism. Tracing the multiple violences rendered by these interlocking disavowals, as well as possibilities for creative resistance, underscores the crucial benefit to bringing Asian American and Native studies into closer conversation.
Queer Refugeeism: Constructions of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Hmong Diaspora
(2017-08) Pha, Kong Pheng
Queer Refugeeism examines how the “refugee” figure relates to Hmong American racial, gendered, and sexual formation, belonging, and politics in the U.S. Examining various discourses around gender and sexuality such as rape, abusive transnational marriages, polygamy, and underage marriages, Part I crafts out ideological formations of race, gender, and sexuality in Hmong American communities. Queer Refugeeism uses texts such as newspaper documents, Hmong American ethnic cultural productions, and legislative bills to explicate a discourse of hyperheterosexuality that renders Hmong American culture and Hmong Americans as racially, gendered, and sexually deviant subjects. Part II turns to the material as I weave in youth narratives and community activism with secondary sources to expound how queer Hmong American youths are intertwined within dominant and Hmong American cultural discourses regarding race, gender, and sexuality. I argue against essentialist framinings of culture that posit Hmong Americans as perpetual refugees incompatible with queer modernity while showcasing how queer Hmong American youths are remaking culture and belonging on their own terms. Overall, Queer Refugeeism tackles how race, gender, and sexuality are integral to Hmong American refugee and queer youth belonging within the U.S.
Queer texts and the Cold War: how nationalism shaped U.S. lesbian and gay writing, 1945-1960.
(2009-06) Galik, Angela E.
This dissertation explores the impact of mainstream discourses of nationalism, gender, sexuality, race, and class on the development of lesbian and gay identities and communities in the United States in the early Cold War period (1945-1960) by analyzing the literary productions of several lesbian and gay writers. Placing neglected and forgotten texts alongside works by authors considered "canonical," I show how these writers responded in different ways to the dominant, anti-homosexual discourses that characterized the era. During this critically under-examined period in U.S. LGBT history, paranoia about Communist expansion led to the conflation, in the national imagination, of homosexuals with enemy agents, and government, mass media, the self-help establishment alike promoted the suburban nuclear family headed by a married heterosexual couple as an important line of national defense. Simultaneously, the 1950s saw the formation of the first public gay and lesbian rights organizations in the U.S., the publication of the country's first nationally-distributed lesbian and gay magazines, and an unprecedented flurry of novels published by gay and lesbian authors, ranging from high art to pulp paperback romance. In these conditions of seeming contradiction, of heavy state repression combined with optimism and new possibilities for self-expression, lesbians and gay men participated, through published writing, in a broad national conversation about the meanings of homosexuality. Gay and lesbian writers wrestled with the question of what it meant to be homosexual in the early Cold War United States, contested exclusionary and discriminatory understandings of the homosexual's place in society, and challenged the validity of rigid gender roles - as well as the United States' moral authority as the self-declared protector of democracy. The ways in which each individual author interacted with and responded to these hegemonic national discourses depended, to a great degree, on the author's specific social positioning within the interlocking hierarchies of privilege based on gender, sexuality, race, and class, as well as their larger ideological perspectives and political commitments. My dissertation teases out these specificities, illuminating previously unrecognized contributions to the national conversation about the meanings of homosexuality, examining the ways an author's multiple points of reference often led to the reproduction of competing ideologies within a single work. This project contributes to the work, within the field of LGBTQ Studies, of reclaiming and expanding the boundaries of a queer U.S. literary tradition by re-examining the textual productions of an era usually seen as a "dark age" between the social upheavals of World War II and the emergence of the gay liberation movement in the late 1960s. At the same time, by placing the discursive processes by which the meanings of homosexuality were negotiated during this period, highlighting the state of flux itself, my analysis makes it impossible to refer to a unitary gay, lesbian, or "homosexual" experience, viewpoint, or identity.
“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.
“You Will See Yourself In This Class”: A Case Study of Rendering Absent Narratives Visible
(2020-02) Bordwell, Daniel
Gender and sexuality are taught in schools through explicit, implicit, and null curricula (Thornton, 2002). In social studies, this teaching reifies a problematic status quo presenting as a false binary between male-female or masculine-feminine (List, 2018) and sexuality through heteronormative lenses (Thornton, 2002, 2003; Schmidt, 2013). This creates a discourse of invisibility (Ladson-Billings, 2003) whereby students are forced to subtract (Valenzuela, 1999) part of themselves when they enter the school building or interact with the social studies curriculum. In this study, I explore a case study (Merriam, 1998; Stake, 1995) of Mr. Jones, a cis-gender straight white male social studies teacher as he teaches gender, sexuality, and other aspects of identity in two social studies courses, an elective Multicultural Perspectives course and a required U.S. History Course. Through observations, interviews, and exploring student work, I look at how he teaches about identity and contrast the two courses. My analysis is driven through queer theory to expose the problematic assumptions of binary thinking within normative culture. I find Mr. Jones to be more successful in disrupting binary thinking and challenging assumptions and values in the elective course than in the U.S. History course. However, both classes had moments where Mr. Jones challenged student thinking on the topics of gender and sexuality. I specifically explore the themes of positionality, resonance, subject/object, and relationships to unpack Mr. Jones’s teaching. This study shows what happens as one social studies teacher attempts to teach beyond the binaries and create a space where all voices can be heard and absent narratives rendered visible.

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