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- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
Description
There is currently a proliferation of images of transgender youth in popular discourse, many of which reflect the threat to capitalist heteronormativity that transgender young people pose to contemporary U.S. society. This veritable explosion in media visibility of transgender youth must be critically examined. This dissertation explores media economies of transgender youth visibility by examining media and self-represented narratives by and about transgender young people in contemporary U.S. popular discourse to uncover where, and how, certain young transgender bodies become endowed with value in the service of the neoliberal multicultural U.S. nation-state. As normative transgender youth become increasingly visible as signifiers of the progress of the tolerant U.S. nation, transgender youth who are positioned further from the intelligible field of U.S. citizenship are erased.
Utilizing frameworks from critical transgender studies, youth studies, and media studies, this project illustrates how value is distributed, and at the expense of whom this process of assigning value occurs, in media economies of transgender youth visibility. Discursive analyses of online self-representations, as well as of online representations of media narratives, facilitate this investigation into how transgender youth negotiate the terms of those narratives circulating about them in U.S. contemporary media. This project demonstrates that increases in visibility do not always translate into political power; at best, they distract from the need for political interventions for marginalized groups, and at worst, they erase those stories already far from view in popular discourse: of non-normative transgender youth who are already positioned outside the realm of intelligibility to a national body structured by a heteronormative binary gender system.
Utilizing frameworks from critical transgender studies, youth studies, and media studies, this project illustrates how value is distributed, and at the expense of whom this process of assigning value occurs, in media economies of transgender youth visibility. Discursive analyses of online self-representations, as well as of online representations of media narratives, facilitate this investigation into how transgender youth negotiate the terms of those narratives circulating about them in U.S. contemporary media. This project demonstrates that increases in visibility do not always translate into political power; at best, they distract from the need for political interventions for marginalized groups, and at worst, they erase those stories already far from view in popular discourse: of non-normative transgender youth who are already positioned outside the realm of intelligibility to a national body structured by a heteronormative binary gender system.
ContributorsReinke, Rachel Anne (Author) / Switzer, Heather D. (Thesis advisor) / Aizura, Aren (Committee member) / Anderson, Lisa (Committee member) / Himberg, Julia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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
The theoretical basis of the proposed study is drawn from an ecological-transactional (Lynch & Cicchetti, 1998) systems approach to development, which focuses on contexts, and correspondingly, overlays the gender affirmative model’s (GAM) transactional model of support (Keomeier & Ehrensaft, 2018) to reveal protection in the school ecology. Combining these two approaches provides unique insights into protective factors in the school ecology, distinct from developmental systems approaches driven by the minority stress model (Meyer, 2003), which are designed to highlight the multidimensional quality of risk (Eisenberg et al., 2019). The dissertation had two central aims: 1) to report on the development of the Gender Affirmative School Climate (GASC) scale, a self-report survey designed to capture high school climate specific to the domain of gender, and 2) to explore how gender affirmative school climate (GASC) relates to student self-esteem and school belongingness. Unique from risk factors approaches the central aims sought out to identify protective factors within a developmental system ecology of the high school context.In two pilot studies (N=12; N=758; trans = 413, non-trans = 344) and primary study (N=813; trans = 482, non-trans = 328) results for scale development provide evidence to validate assumptions that the proposed (GASC) construct captures what was intended, that is, school climate specific to the domain of gender. However, measurement invariance procedure showed that not all items operated equivalently across trans and non-trans groups, and confirmed that the proposed scale meets criteria for “weak measurement invariance”. High school students that reported more positive school climate reported lower self-esteem scores. Only one protective moderator was consistent with hypotheses: More feelings of similarity to peer group gender (boys) emerged as a protective factor for transgender identified high schoolers attenuating the negative relationship between perceptions of school climate and self-esteem. Latent measurement models for each gender group demonstrated that the school belongingness construct is highly related to the proposed (GASC) construct. This demonstrated domain overlap with “feelings of school belongingness” signals that the proposed scale showed good convergent validity. The results provide insight about ways high schools can be pro-active to promote a healthier school climate for transgender students.
ContributorsScrofani, Stephan (Author) / Martin, Carol L. (Thesis advisor) / DeLay, Dawn (Thesis advisor) / Lindstrom-Johnson, Sarah (Committee member) / Low, Sabina (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Teachers represent important agents of gender socialization in schools and play a critical role in the lived experiences of transgender students. What remains less clear, however, is whether the gender of the teacher impacts their response to transgender bullying and specifically how threats to gender identity might influence men who teach to respond negatively. The current study used a 2 (gender) x 3 (gender identity threat, no gender identity threat, and control) experimental design to assess whether the masculine overcompensation theory helps explain how men who teach respond to transgender victimization experiences. It was hypothesized that men in the gender identity threat condition would endorse more anti-trans attitudes (e.g., higher transphobic attitudes, lower allophilia [feelings of liking] toward transgender individuals, more traditional gender roles, less supportive responses to a vignette about transgender bullying, less support for school practices that support transgender students, and less likelihood of signing a petition supporting transgender youth rights) compared to the other conditions. It was also expected that they would endorse more negative affect but higher feelings of self-assurance. Women in the study served as a comparison group as no overcompensation effect is expected for them. Participants (N = 301) were nationally recruited through word of mouth, social media, and personal networks. Results from the current study did not support the theory of masculine overcompensation as there was no effect of threatening feedback. There were a number of significant gender differences. Men reported lower transgender allophilia, higher transphobia, more traditional gender role beliefs, less likelihood of signing the petition supporting transgender youth rights, and more self-assurance than women. No gender effect was found for negative affect or support for school practices supporting transgender students. There were also no observable differences in participant responses to the vignette by gender or condition. The implications and limitations of the current study were discussed.
ContributorsMintert, Jeffrey (Author) / Tran, Alisia (Thesis advisor) / Bernstein, Bianca (Committee member) / Carlson, David (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020