Browsing by Subject "patriarchy"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Contesting Husbands and Masters: Law, Society, and the Marital Household in Colonial Lima
    (2015-07) Wisnoski III, Alexander
    This dissertation examines marital relations, and specifically marital conflicts, in early colonial Lima in order to analyze gender and power in the Spanish Empire. Through my reading of cases held before the ecclesiastical tribunal, I show how wives and their supporters resisted and questioned husbands’ authority primarily through reifying of patriarchal norms, in the form of the ideals of manhood. Rather than challenges based on the perceived rights of women, the citing of failures of marital masculinity dominated the discourse of these trials. This marital masculinity encompassed the nature, characteristics, and actions expected of a married man. This manhood was rooted in broader early modern Catholic ideals and comprised expectations of provision, protection, and fidelity. In addition to following Church prescriptions on appropriate behavior for men, the patriarchal expectations found in these cases involved upholding the racial hierarchy of colonial society. Wives and witnesses highlighted instances such as the use of racial epithets and infidelity that crossed racial lines as further failures to live up to the masculine ideal. This dissertation approaches the dynamics of gender domination from a number of perspectives. In chapter 1, I examine the petitions by women seeking a divorcio (ecclesiastical divorce which dictated the separation of bed and board) and analyze how they criticize their husbands for falling to fulfill their marital masculinity. Chapter 2 shows how mothers and brothers intervened in marital conflicts and reveals their investment in gendered authority. Looking beyond parents and siblings, chapter 3 highlights how community members, and especially neighbors and enslaved Africans, helped to police the duties of husbands through their testimonies to the court. Chapter 4 analyzes the conflicts between married slaves and their masters over relocation that would separate the couple to further demonstrate the link between race and manhood, one in which white masculinity trumped black masculinity. Throughout these trials, arguments based on marital masculinity proved to limit the power of patriarchs, namely husbands, but, as I demonstrate, did little to mitigate the extent of gender domination ingrained in the patriarchal structures of Lima and the broader Spanish Empire, as the patriarchal authority shifted from husbands to Church officials.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    “It’s Really Hard to Pump as a Teacher!”: An Inquiry into the Embodied Experiences of Lactating Teachers
    (2022-09) Toedt, Elise
    This qualitative research study is the first in education to explore the daily, visceral experiences of K-12 lactating teachers in the United States. Across disciplines, scant research has been conducted that focuses on the embodied and emotional experiences of lactating people at work (Gatrell, 2019; Ryan, et al, 2011; Stearns, 1999). Bodyfeeding is a marker of “good” citizenship and “good” parenting, yet teachers, charged with reproducing state ideologies of citizenship, don’t have the space or time needed to express milk at work. This research fills a gap in cross-disciplinary literature focused on remedying the ways capitalist, patriarchal institutional structures sidestep the bodily needs of workers for the sake of workplace efficiency. It shows how lactating teachers navigate and make sense of two conflicting imperatives: On the one hand, the engrained ways they have learned to orient their time towards the reproduction of schooling norms, and on the other, their embodied need to produce milk. Informed by feminist approaches to qualitative research, I conducted 20 in-depth qualitative interviews with teachers in the Twin Cities metro who have expressed milk at work since 2010, and another 15 interviews with union leaders, administrators, and public health officials across Minnesota. I frame my study using social reproduction theory (Bhattacharya, 2017; Federici, 2014) to show how reproductive labor like expressing milk is framed as “not-work” within a capitalist understanding of production. I use poetic transcription to foreground the firsthand accounts of teachers and to demonstrate the embodied and emotional resonances across participants’ accounts (Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2018; Faulkner, 2016). For data analysis, I take up cultural historical activity theory (Engeström, 2001) to argue that the need to express milk functions as a crucial moment because teachers cannot fulfill their role as professionals as mapped out by current expectations. I take up Garland-Thomson’s (2011) concept of misfits and Sarah Ahmed’s (2017) subsequent application of this concept to show how the onus is put on lactating teachers to navigate incompatibilities between their bodily needs and the school day regime and positions them as “misfits” in schools. I draw from the concepts of outlaw emotions (Jagger, 1989), pleasure activism (brown, 2019), and the uses of the erotic (Lorde, 1984) to highlight the how the emotional experiences of lactating teachers need to be considered when creating policies and practices about lactation. Findings illustrate how patriarchal, capitalist logic is at play in how time and space are organized in schools, and how lactating teachers’ bodies are positioned by this logic, while they also resist and transform the organization of schools. My study shows that a lack of structural support for lactating teachers contributes to an inequitable work environment in schools. Implications include that individuals, buildings, and districts can create more humane conditions for lactating teachers by enacting modest reforms like creating school lactation spaces and providing additional time, outside of existing break times, to pump. Yet while stop-gap reforms in schools such as creating lactation spaces are one step in the right direction, more sweeping change is necessary.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Making a Big Deal out of Nothing: White Supremacy, Patriarchy, and Teacher Preeminence
    (2017-11) Godsey, Chris
    My experiences as a teacher, student, and co-facilitator of critical dialogue among men arrested for using violence against women tell me teachers who feel entitled to compliance from students share fundamental beliefs with men who feel entitled to compliance from women and with white people who feel entitled to compliance from people of color and indigenous people. White supremacy entitles white people to dominance, patriarchy entitles men to it, and teacher preeminence entitles teachers. Teacher preeminence resembles white supremacy and patriarchy in four habits of mind: obliviousness, denial, ignorance, and smugness. Doing autoethnography – understanding cultural experience by analyzing personal experience – creates opportunities to problematize teacher preeminence while challenging dominant epistemological notions of what and whose knowledge is of most worth: my intention was not to affect objectivity or authoritativeness; it was to practice rigorous subjectivity. My inquiry – conducted by reading personal essays I wrote between 1991 and 2017 and considering them on their own, cumulatively, and in relation to Chapter 2 theory about white supremacy, patriarchy, and teacher preeminence – confirmed I have enacted white supremacy since I was very young. It exposed that I have done it far more subconsciously and constantly than I realized, which leads me to believe I have also relied on entitlements to dominance as a teacher – I have often believed I am teaching from a place of openness when I am really just seeking compliance and trying to enforce it despite sincerely opposing dominance as a teachers’ entitlement. It also suggested most other teachers would find a lot they don’t want to see if they interrogate their methods and intentions for evidence of entitlements that allow us all — that often require us — to think about and treat students almost exclusively according to whether or not they comply with what we want.