Dissertationen zum Thema „Gendered studies“

This project explores the constructions of gender, intimacy, and race and the ways these issues are informed by history and the law. The idea of consent, while originally described in texts as a legal concept between citizens, transformed into a way to navigate intimate relationships in the private sphere. This muddied the ways women and men were understood to form relationships and the limits of those relationships. In the same ways that gender was arbitrated through legal language, race is often ensnared in the same processes and institutions. Tolerance has been offered as one approach, but instead of mitigating this violence, it has more firmly entrenched it into the democratic process. Hannah Arendt’s description of the social frames an understanding of intimacy and narratives. Arendt’s work critically creates a space for the category of the social, something found around but outside of the public and private. Instead of working to make the private seen as a sphere for political action, I will focus on the potential of the social as a method of political action. While Arendt has obvious racial bias, I will use her own response to anti-semitism to develop a different approach to Black politics that allow for identity-based responses. Lauren Berlant’s Intimate Publics addresses the potential for coalition building in the social. Using the sorority system as a way of teasing out notions of femininity, discipline, sexual violence, and intimacy, I will describe the ways that a woman subject is produced and how this then works to shape our notions of race. Women’s identities, particularly white women, are constructed through an association with race and sexuality, by unpacking this development, its possible to see how this is socially and institutionally enforced. Part of this enforcement will focus on the narratives of sexual violence. Rape is an issue that not only confronts legal questions, but also the nature of a woman’s ability to participate in democracy. Tying this together will be the importance of political theory. This serves to define the contemporary issues, solutions that have been offered and new potential approaches to intimate violence.

In this thesis we investigate gendered dimensions of the war in the former Yugoslavia. We do this with the help of gender theory, as well as theories about the construction of identities and the role of the identity aspect in contemporary warfare. By combining these theoretical points of departure we hope to shed light on how gender can be used by political and military leaders and by the media in times of war. We explore how underlying gender assumptions in the Yugoslav society affected the course of war as well as how gender relations were altered just before and during the war.

We come to the conclusion that gender was central to the construction of collective identity in the Yugoslav wars. Women were pushed in to traditional gender roles and constructed as carriers of culture and mothers of the nation. Further the symbolic values associated with women made them vulnerable to sexual violence, since an attack against enemy women were considered to be an attack on the entire nation. The intersections between gender and identity aspects in the Yugoslav wars made women strategic targets of military violence.

This study explored organizational learning from a feminist perspective, similar to feminist critiques of organizational culture, and offers an analysis of individual’s perceptions of gender dynamics in organizational learning. Mainstream literature on organizational learning is based upon gender-blind assumptions in theory and practice. This study examined those assumptions with a feminist lens. Constructivist epistemology, a feminist interpretive lens, and phenomenological and feminist methodologies guide this research, which asks, what does gender equal organizational learning look like? Fourteen senior leaders of a small New England college were interviewed to better understanding their experience of gender and collective learning at a small liberal arts college. Feminist analysis of the in-depth interviews revealed patterns of gender dynamics and a distinction between informal and formal organizational learning. Informal learning affected elements of formal organizational learning, raising questions about the ways culture is enacted in organizations. Gendered experiences of voice, participation, and power are among the key findings that problematize mainstream organizational learning theory and suggest that different genders have dissimilar experiences of the participatory and strategic development of their organization. This research sheds light on the emancipatory potential of organizational learning, showing the ways organizational learning is both aa reflection of the culture and a means to change culture and advance gender equality.

As the workplace has diversified with the inclusion of women and minorities holding positions throughout all levels of the organization hierarchy, the question remains if gendered racism exists in the 2014 workplace for women managers with minority group background. Gendered racism, described by Philomena Essed in her 1991 book, Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Theory, is a unique female experience due to their race and being a woman. Visible at this intersection of race and sex, women of color may experience the sexist and racist stereotypes dually assigned to women and minorities. This research provides a qualitative view of the experiences of gendered racism using Moustakas' transcendental phenomenology method. Data were collected from eight women who self-identified as Hispanic ( n=2) and Black (n=6). All the women with the exception of one were college graduates, managers in an organization of 50 or more employees, between the ages of 35 to 62 years old. The study findings validated the experiences of gender racism in the workplace through the lived experiences of women interviewed. The women revealed their experiences with gendered racism, which affected their workplace interactions with others, manifest psychological stressors, and tainted the vision of themselves. Additionally, all of the women developed coping skills to combat gendered racism, which allowed them to pivot their careers to higher levels in their organizations. The emerging themes revealed from the study's participants experiences of gendered racism are psychological effects, feeling discounted, acceptance or justification, disrespect, and self-confidence. This research provides a phenomenological description of the lived experiences of the gendered racism and the impact of these experiences in the workplace as reveal by women of color.

RATHBONE, RITA J., Ed.D. Teacher Leadership, Power, and the Gendered Space of Teaching: Intersections and Discourses. (2015) Directed by Dr. Carl Lashley. 172 pp. Relying on critical feminist understandings of power, this study explores how the gendered expectations and intersectional identity of women teachers impacts their negotiation of power in the practice of teacher leadership and social justice advocacy. This study takes a critical stance towards the existing body of literature and challenges the current feminized and patriarchal understanding of teacher leadership. Using a collaborative autoethnographic approach, a group of practicing teacher leaders examined their lived experiences as teacher leaders. The participants reported experiencing gendered expectations in their teaching contexts of support/nurturing, passivity, collaboration, normative gender expression, and all-encompassing teacher identity. Practicing teacher leadership in this gendered environment was a balancing act that required the ability to be a ?chameleon.? The complexity of teaching and intricate nature of connections and networks allowed teachers to pick and choose a variety of strategies and resources with which to negotiate power. The study finds that much of the work of teacher leadership involved negotiating the interpersonal and cultural domains of power in order to develop coalitions of diverse stakeholders to resist the oppressive forces found in the structural and disciplinary domains. The teachers reported often having to ?play against? negative assumptions of their ability to be leaders based on race and gender. The study concludes that the scholarly understanding of the practice of teacher leadership must be redefined to include the social justice focus of much of its practice, the intricacy of teachers? networks, an understanding of power as multidirectional and multidimensional, the nuance of gendered norms found in teaching, and the unresolved paradoxes that teacher leaders face every day.

Postcolonial theory, while often reserved for analysis of modern political conditions, is often overlooked in biblical studies. The purpose of this thesis is to employ postcolonial analysis to the book of Ezekiel and demonstrate its value in biblical studies. Postcolonialism critiques national origin myths as political propaganda; seeks to retrieve the voices of those suppressed by hegemony; explores the power relations involved in ethnic and religious representation and authority; and examines how gender is used in hegemonic discourse. This study begins with an interrogation of the imperial politics behind several biblical national origin myths. A polyphony of contrapuntal voices are retrieved through archaeological, textual, and comparative evidence, demonstrating a plurality of Israelite religions for both the popular, illiterate, agrarian majority, as well as for officially state-sanctioned religions of the literate, urban, male elite. Finally, portions of the book of Ezekiel, a byproduct of imperialism itself, are analyzed for its use of gendered and sexualized language in continued polyphonic conflicts over religious representation and authority during a period of imperial crisis.

The popularity of the iPhone generated a barrage of digital comments, complaints, and articles about how the trendy phone didn’t fit in women’s pockets, from articles like the one in the Atlantic titled “The Gender Politics of Pockets” to a vlog called “Girl Pockets” by popular vlogger Hank Green. Why are women protesting about the inadequacy of their pockets, and how is this indicative of sexism and inequality? An examination of the gendered history of pockets answers this question, and is rooted in the literature of the Victorian era. I use thing theory to reveal how the pocket was both an agent and a symbol of economic change in this period. This dissertation considers the importance of the pocket, not only as an item of fashion, but also as an object that carried symbolic and representative meanings in Victorian society.

Much like women’s fashion in general, pockets in the Victorian period were used as disciplinary forces. The increase in technology and the rise in consumerism meant that women were leaving the house, and a female buying force became immensely important to the British economy. Part of the effort to counter this threat was to make women’s fashion debilitating and limiting. As the receptacle of money and object of convenience to a mobile shopper, the pocket was an important part of the effort to curtail feminine power, and this can be seen in Victorian literature. A fashionable woman was forced to use separate tie-pockets, which were exposed to theft or ransacking, and were also inconvenient. This meant that women’s pockets were more vulnerable, and in economic and psychological terms, women suffered for this. The comparison with men’s easily accessible and secure pockets worked to reassert the traditional hierarchy in the Victorian patriarchal system. Consequently a tension was created: the female shopper represented a much-needed potential economic force, but because of the threat to patriarchy that she represented, this force was constantly being constrained and controlled.

Through an examination of Victorian literature, art, and advertisements, we can see that women’s pockets, then as now, were unsatisfactory.

This study added to the literature on pathways to prison by examining a sample of federal inmates to assess whether the pathways identified predicted future antisocial behavior, i.e., prison misconduct and post-release criminal activity. Previous research has generally focused on only one point in the criminal justice system, either identifying pathways to prison, analyzing behavior while incarcerated, or focusing on post-release offending. This research examined all of these points. The research presented here identified both unique and overlapping pathways to prison for men and women, as well as similarities and differences in the risk factors that predicted prison misconduct and recidivism for women and men.

While the latent class models, which identified the pathways to prison, relied heavily upon indicators highlighted in the gender-responsive literature, the final misconduct and recidivism models included those factors along with traditional, gender-neutral items. The methods in this research moved beyond previous studies that relied primarily on bivariate analyses of female inmates.

Four pathways emerged for both men and women each. Three of the pathways overlapped for both groups: drug, street, and the situational offender pathways. Males and females each had one unique pathway which represented opposite ends of the criminal experiences spectrum. A first time offender pathway emerged for women; a more chronic, serious offender pathway emerged for men. When the pathways to prison were the only predictors in the misconduct and recidivism models, the pathways consistently and significantly predicted antisocial behavior. Once the socio-demographic and criminal history factors were added to the models, however, the vast majority of the pathway effects on antisocial behavior were no longer statistically significant.

Because the current literature presents mixed results as to whether the same factors predict offending for men and women, this study analyzed gendered aspects of prison misconduct and recidivism. There were more differences than similarities in the factors that significantly impacted these antisocial behaviors.