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- All Subjects: Gender Studies
Description
"Becoming Travesti: A Partial History of Ontoformation" explores the discursive production of the figure of travesti, defined broadly as male-assigned technologies of feminization, as it circulates within public discourse in Mexico. In other words, through ontoformation this project highlights the historical and sociopolitical associations that congeal, through repetition, to give an identitarian category -travesti- a sense of essence. In order to do so, this project analyzes articles within the mainstream Mexican press, ranging from the colonial period to the present. The first phase of this project involved the compilation and analysis of all twenty-first century articles mentioning travesti in the three newspapers with the widest circulation in Mexico in order to determine the primary constitutive elements of the contemporary figure of travesti. The second phase, in turn, involved a historical exploration of these constitutive elements by way of analyzing mainstream news sources dating back to the colonial period. As such, this project explores the work performed by ontoformative narratives that congeal to give the identitarian category of travesti a sense of essence. Among the narratives explored are the detravestification of homosexuality and continued homosexualization of travesti, the criminality of travesti, the spectacularization of travesti, the disposability of travesti, and the affective registers mobilized by and through travesti. Moreover, this project explores the consolidation of the contemporary figure of travesti in relationship to other identitarian categories of sexual and gendered non-normativity in Mexico, such as the homosexual, the transsexual and the transgénero (transgender), suggesting that travesti has been instrumental in the historical production and sanitization of these categories.
Contributorsde la Maza Pérez Tamayo, Andrea (Author) / Koblitz, Ann H. (Thesis advisor) / Quan, H.L.T. (Committee member) / Aizura, Aren Z. (Committee member) / Gomez, Alan E. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
Birthing is an intimate experience and all mothers—regardless of their race or class—deserve to have a variety of birthworker options. Birthwork covers an array of professions related to meeting the physical and emotional needs of expectant mothers and mothers in post-partum. For the purposes of my research, however, I define birthworkers as those working as a doula, midwife, or OBGYN. Without the knowledge of the multiplicity of options available to them, pregnant women of color’s autonomy suffers.<br/><br/>This project explores how birthworkers in Arizona are differentially perceived and hierarchized by expectant mothers. While doulas are assumed to be mystical, OBGYNs professional and midwives a blend of both levels of professionality, this project explores the hierarchy of validity and importance of acknowledging each birthworking discipline as beneficial to expectant and post-partum mothers.<br/><br/>Through the presentation of this work, I aim to educate readers on the benefits of each birthworking discipline, thereby raising awareness about the need for equal respect and access to all types of care providers during the pregnancy journey, as well as a need to place intimacy at the center of birthworking praxis. Throughout this ‘zine you will learn about the importance of integrating terms such as “reproductive justice” and “equity” into general discourse, the racial disparity evident in the quality of care pregnant people receive during delivery of their child, as well as anecdotal information about each birthworking sector—doulaship, midwifery, and obstetrics—from professionals in each field.
ContributorsMurillo, Sofia Elena (Author) / Linton, Mellissa (Thesis director) / Quan, H.L.T. (Committee member) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
Description
This dissertation coheres together over a hundred insurgent testimonies published from within Arizona State Prison Complex – Perryville, the state’s only prison for women. These testimonies tell a people’s history of Arizona’s largest and most public legal intervention for prisoners’ rights: Parsons v. Ryan. In 2009, after Perryville correctional officers left Marcia Powell to bake to death in the Arizona summer sun, prisoners lit their mattresses on fire to proclaim that their lives were in danger, sparking a wave of resistance, including outside from family members and advocates, which prompted a class action lawsuit against the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Re-Entry (ADCRR). After years of prisoners’ calls for a systemic reckoning of the death-producing state punishment system, legal intervention distilled their suffering and demands into a set of discrete allegations. Meanwhile, settlement stipulations continue to implore ADCRR to meet minimum constitutional standards. While the accountability Parsons v. Ryan seeks is limited to the administration of medical care and extreme isolation, testimonies in this people’s history reveal a breadth of systemic violences that encompass and surpass the legal claims. These testimonies, which evidence strategies of care work, protest, and covert documentation, delineate the prison’s function to degrade human dignity and inflict physical and psychological harm in virtually every area of basic survival, including access to food, shelter, hygiene, and personal safety. Through use of the “rebel archive,” the resulting narrative, made possible by virtue of prisoners’ organizing for dignity, invokes a critical analysis of the sublimation of their resistance and demands for a project of liberal carceral care as prison reform.
ContributorsCooper, Ashley Ann (Author) / Quan, H.L.T. (Thesis advisor) / Swadener, Elizabeth B (Committee member) / Talebi, Shahla (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
This dissertation is a collection of three essays that take seriously the knowledge generated through and by communities in struggle in Pakistan. This project reveals how communities in struggle are systematically excluded and power is monopolized in the hands of a few, engages the means through which communities find ways to survive and thrive under harsh conditions. The first essay, “Beyond Bondage: Hari Women’s Communities of Struggle” centers the testimonies of peasant Hari women, or bonded sharecroppers, in Sindh, Pakistan, describing the carceral conditions of labor to which they are subjected. The essay historicizes the ability of wealthy, politically empowered landlords to retain their monopoly over land resources and attempts to make explicit the tacit state support that allows this system of bonded labor to continue unregulated. These testimonies also document the Hari women’s tools for escape and their movement to free others. The second essay, “Khawaja Sira Life Struggles: Is Womanness Really a Loss?” traces the stories of Khawaja Sira Gurus from Lahore, Pakistan, who are engaged in organizing their community to advocate for rights and human dignity, and how they make inroads into the imposed gender regime. It argues that Khawaja Siras create a third space inside a heavily enforced gender binary. It also shows how the Khawaja Sira community provides its members home to exist in their womanness that eases their alienation from their family and society. The final essay, “The Movement for Transgender Rights in Pakistan” traces the history of criminalization of the Hijra/Khawaja Sira community and argues that colonial legal formations set in motion marginalization of trans* lives, which the post-colonial Pakistani state folded easily into its binary understanding of gender. Trans* activists have been engaging the state on its own terrain to make trans* life legible to the state, with the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act of 2018 being the most recent gain.
ContributorsSuhail, Sarah (Author) / Quan, H.L.T. (Thesis advisor) / Leong, Karen J (Committee member) / Toor, Saadia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021