Browsing by Subject "citizenship"
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Item Citizenship, Gender, and Intimacy: First Ladies in the Television Age(2017-09) Jurisz, RebeccaThe figure of the first lady of the United States (FLOTUS) initially gained visibility thanks to the media technologies of the industrial age, but in the TV era this visibility exploded, and with it came a stark intensification of the potential for intimate connection between figures at the highest levels of national governance and citizen subjects watching at home. In the same years that broadcast television was at the height of its power, neoliberalism and post-identity politics were on the rise, and worked to refigure definitions of citizenship to be more concerned with the health and prosperity of individuals and families, and less concerned with collective struggle against structures of injustice. For women, this privatized and atomized regime of intimate citizenship fit with the contours of traditional femininity, even as they were being updated to reflect postfeminist imperatives that called women to engage in civic and economic life while still maintaining the primacy of their commitments to home and family. FLOTUS TV became an essential technology of citizenship for women viewer/voters working through these ever-more complex formulations of ideal femininity. This project traces both real and fictional representations of first ladies on television from the inception of the medium in the 1950s, to the declining hegemony of broadcast and cable in the 2010s, to demonstrate how the heightened visibility of first ladies made FLOTUS TV a site of both instruction and debate over definitions of femininity and citizenship that were increasingly narrow, frequently contradictory, and did little to pose substantial challenges to structures of injustice. Ultimately, these apolitical politics of intimate citizenship seem to have worked to (partially) defuse progressive and feminist challenges to power, and disciplined the ambitions of women who wished to rule.Item Re-Enfranchising Felons: The Right Choice(2013-06-04) Hull, ThomasRoughly six million convicted felons cannot vote in America in 2013, a consequence of the condition of “civil death.” This study examines the issue from an historical and philosophical perspective, looks at current laws and practices in various states, and concludes that felons should be able to vote. Re-enfranchising felons will strengthen American democracy by allowing universal suffrage; it will provide for lower recidivism rates and more public safety; and it will assist the efforts of felons to both re-enter society (become a meaningful part, helping to choose candidates and decide policy) and become fully rehabilitated.Item A Republic of Lost Peoples: Race, Status, and Community in the Eastern Andes of Charcas at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century(2017-08) Weaver Olson, NathanThis dissertation explores a period between the 1570s and 1620s when the Audiencia of Charcas (Modern Bolivia) was beset with problems. During this time, the Eastern Andean frontier emerged as an idealized space where the chaotic social elements that plagued Charcas, both within and without, might be more effectively placed under royal authority. The discovery and exploitation of resources in the Viceroyalty of Peru, particularly silver mines, had set in motion new patterns of human migration and mixture that would fill Spain’s Peruvian cities with a rabble that some would parse as la gente suelta: the Empire’s loose or lost peoples. This growing throng, including ambitious immigrants and disaffected children of the conquistadores, seemed to threaten the fragile order that Spanish officials had established. Moreover, Spanish control of Peru remained incomplete and tenuous. Just east of Potosi, raids of the Chiriguano and other unconquered indigenous groups crippled the development of the region’s emerging agrarian hinterland. In the frontier, idealized cities and their jurisdictions were seen as sites where royal authorities would knit together the region’s growing Spanish and mixed-race transient population, fugitive African and indigenous slaves and servants, and unconquered peoples, into an orderly republic, a community bound together under the rule of law. Over six chapters, this dissertation explores how a diverse set of actors applied Iberian ideas about vagrancy, urban planning, racial difference, and frontier geopolitics to the specific conditions of Potosí and its eastern hinterlands. I find that royal officials and prospective city founders often weighed the social reputation of frontier settlers against the realities of recruitment, allowing for social mobility by people of African descent. Unlike previous studies, which have analyzed either tensions within Potosí itself or Spain’s often violent relationships with unconquered peoples, this dissertation redefines the Eastern Andes as a contested internal space, shaped by the localized aspirations of the many people who strove to possess the region’s land and resources. In the frontier, low-status colonists elaborated new notions of collective honor, rooted in a shared heritage of frontier service, to pursue individual rights and privileges unavailable to them in Charcas’s urban core.Item The Rhetorical Dimensions of Citizenship: Undocumented Immigrants Defining Their Identity and Place in the “Nation of Immigrants”(2018-06) Trifonov, SvilenThe idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants has been a focal point of citizenship and immigration discourses in the latter half of the 20th and early 21st centuries. At the same time, unauthorized migration became a political concern in the nation-state’s regime of governmentality. The regime defined the terms of admission, concurrently producing the conditions of illegality, ascribing them to those deemed unwanted and unwelcome, the ever-so-popular “illegal aliens.” As the political regime continues to increase its efforts to place rhetorical and material borders around what is perceived as “American,” citizenship has become an increasingly contested term. In this dissertation, I examine the rhetorical efforts of undocumented immigrants and their allies to protest the dominant discursive regime of illegality. The dissertation posits that the mythic framework of “nation of immigrants” has come to define the different ways in which citizenship and belonging are understood in the United States. Through examinations of speeches by immigrant rights activists, the three case studies of the dissertation present several ways in which undocumented immigrants and their allies approach the concept of citizenship. My examination reveals how some activists strategically appeal for marginal inclusion through documentation; other activists demand a path to citizenship as a strategy for inclusion; yet others rely on decolonializing rhetorics that seek to redefine cultural and formal citizenship in the United States. The three contrasting strategies illustrate the complexity of immigrant rights activism in the early 21st century, showcasing how undocumented immigrants unmask, challenge, reconfigure, but also sometimes reaffirm, the powers of the nation-state to determine the norms of citizenship. In its entirety, the project advances our understanding of the rhetorical dimensions of citizenship and offers insights into how the coalition building efforts of immigrants are often limited by their contrasting and competing visions of inclusion and membership in a national community.Item Seeing the National Body: Racialization and Belonging in Germany(2016-05) Olstad, AshleyMy dissertation explores the role of the visual, in particular seeing the national body, in discussions of migration, integration, and belonging in post-unification Germany. I provide an exploration of what is considered to be specifically German about the German body, as it is remembered, imagined, represented, and reproduced, and I show the prevalence of the notion of German as a physical type. The visual—in terms of the national body as seen and unseen in the German public—underlies even the more mundane areas of immigration, integration, and belonging. Focusing on the “visible yet unseen” German national body, I critique official visual representations of integration that fix categories of migrant/German. In order to identify the broadest extent of racialized thinking on the national body, I also use ethnographic modalities such as interviews, conversations, and participant observation, as well as the analysis of visual content, specifically modes of representative seeing in literature and popular music. Drawing creatively on government posters, pop musicians, and conversations with Russians, to name a few of my sources and texts, I cross genres, disciplines, dominant discourses, and various minority groups to uncover the national imagination. It is critically important to reveal the unreflected way we see the national body, calling our attention to how modes of seeing function in a variety of settings: mass culture, political propaganda and everyday essentialisms in private, interpersonal contexts. I explore the trope of the white German body, but my dissertation also explores more broadly the way race, and thus national belonging, is conceptualized—beyond skin color—in Germany. My research on the contingency of racial categories in Germany therefore contributes to the critical discourse of race and ethnicity and interrogates how the complicated intersection of cultures and “looks” might be brought to bear on discussions of migration in German Studies. I argue that assumptions about the link between looks and nationality persist into the present day and that “German” often functions as a racial label. Despite globalization and migration to Germany, the country still struggles with the idea that Germanness is defined by origins and associated with a particular look.Item State of Terror, States of Mind: Ladinas, Mental Health and Systems of Care, in Guatemala City(2014-12) Figueroa, ChantalThis ethnography conducted in Guatemala City from October 2012 to April 2013 is based on in-depth interviews of mental health professional and women rights advocates, and the testimonios of Silvia and Teresa, two Ladinas having been diagnosed with a mental illness and having been interned in the system of care. This research brings to light the discrimination of mental health in a context of state terror. I critique the categories of mental illness and call instead to understand them as mental health needs in a context of acute everyday violence of post-peace accords Guatemala. The interviews provide the political context of in which the high demand for mental health services is met with a lack of investment in the mental health field and a neglect of policy and legislation. The testimonios of Teresa and Silvia give voice to the gender violence that leads Ladinas' to express mental health needs and the ways in which the system of care perpetrates this violence. I argue that the mental health care system is part of the mechanism of feminicide that discredits and silences Ladinas to secure the impunity of the state. Concluding with the finding that expressing a mental health need in Guatemala is related to the ability to exercise citizenship rights, I call for the development of a gendered citizenship project in order to resist state terror and promote mental health.Item To Enlist or Not, for the Empire: The Citizens of the British Isles and Stories of War from the Four Kingdoms 1798-1853(2020-08) Sol, Yon JiI examine the British military activities to reconsider how people of the British Isles formulated concepts of citizenship and nationhood during the earlier half of the nineteenth century. Arguing that literary history of British Romanticism should give stronger recognition to Britain’s internal and external colonies, I investigate how Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, Sir Walter Scott, and Charles Dickens incorporate dissenting voices in their fiction to problematize the British Empire’s nation-building process driven by militarism. I aim to offer a postcolonial, feminist, and ecocritical interpretation of the canonical British writers against the conventional narrative of literary history that reads mass mobilization during anti-French military conflicts as a nation-forming experience. My first chapter on Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) examines Fanny Price’s desire to participate in the British imperial project. Because overseas military activity is inaccessible for women, Fanny’s admiration for her brother’s naval accomplishment is mixed with envy and suspicion about the foreign elements that British officers may bring back to England. I suspect that Austen projects her own relationship to her brothers to that between Fanny and William. Austen supports the Royal Navy as a loving sister, yet she withholds a wholehearted consent to British imperial activities as an English gentlewoman. Austen’s admiration for Captain Charles Pasley’s Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire (1811) suggests her own frustrated aspirations. My second chapter investigates Edgeworth’s colonial antimilitarism revealed in her Irish national tale, The Absentee (1812) and her story for children, “The Prussian Vase” (1801). As an Anglo-Irish woman writer, Edgeworth negotiated clashing demands of gender, class, and national/ethnic loyalties during the French Revolution, the 1798 Irish Rebellion, and the Napoleonic Wars. When Anglo-Irish aristocrat Colambre pushes away Pasley’s Essay to read the family genealogy of Grace Nugent, this gesture translates as Edgeworth’s own repudiation of Britain’s colonial expansionism. A truly responsible Anglo-Irish gentleman prioritizes Ireland’s domestic prosperity over British imperial military conflicts. Edgeworth’s children’s tale “The Prussian Vase” (1801) provides an earlier example of her antimilitarism in ambiguous treatment of the young Polish count in the Prussian court, whom I view as Colambre’s (negative) prototype. My third chapter on Guy Mannering (1815) reassesses the traditional militaristic evaluation of the historical novel of Sir Walter Scott’s brand. I reevaluate Scott focusing on his colonial consciousness. The hybridity of Julia Mannering, an English girl born and raised in India, undergirds my reading. The novel’s soldier-artists and the imperial cultural artifacts they produce are scrutinized under the critical eyes of the Colonel’s daughter. On the other hand, the Scottish-born, Dutch-bred soldier Harry Bertram debunks the military participation’s empty promise of equal status with England for Scottish or other non-English British subjects. My final chapter examines William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1830) and Dickens’ Bleak House (1853) to consider how nineteenth-century British press journalism and the realist novel challenge British imperialism and its military. Deeply influenced by Cobbett’s radicalism and antimilitarism, Dickens condemns the ruling class that, preoccupied with affairs overseas, neglect the domestic affairs. Dickens associates the military with qualities detrimental to personal and national prosperity. Britain’s future depends on the middle-class domesticity personified by Esther Summerson and her physician husband Allan Woodcourt. Focusing on the characters returning to Britain such as Mrs. Bagnet, I explore how Dickens redefines femininity and masculinity to offer a renewed vision of domestic and national duty.