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- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
Description
This dissertation focused on the links among micro-enterprise development (MD), social capital building, and the accompanying social lives of Chinese female entrepreneurs in two China's urban areas—Nanjing and Haikou. It engaged with a few important discussions concerning China’s liberal politics during the reform era, the global trend of neo-liberal capitalism, and the social construction of a new worker-subject—the Chinese urban female entrepreneur shaped by the hybrid marriage of state politics and global capital. The research findings from this research project contributed to the tradition of feminist theories, which endeavors to explore the relationship between neo-liberalism and gender. In particular, gender was found to concretize the ways in which neo-liberal ideological forces have attempted to capture and exploit the productivity of women’s labor
Drawing upon the data from in-depth interviews, participatory observations, and secondary data gathering, I examined the diffusion of the Western-centric concept and phenomena of social capital building in order to answer the question how Chinese women's life was inscribed in the larger context of China's relationship to global capitalism. My research findings manifested that the respondents considered affections (e.g., inter-dependence, obligation, and mutual trust) to be the foundation of establishing and maintaining their social networks regardless of the government's emphasis on market principles and the utility-based social capital conception. This opened up a new way of re-theorizing social capital. This dissertation also focused on how China’s integration with the global economy has affected women’s social identity construction. It emphasized the interaction between gender and class as one of the most salient sites where ideal citizens of China are imagined. Drawing from the perspectives of the respondents, I found that femininity has never been eliminated by the Chinese government. It has existed in China’s MD to challenge the government’s attempt of promoting the agendered (gender-neutral), universal model of women’s participation in self-employment. Moreover, I asserted that class was individualized while penetrating into other dimensions of identity (especially gender). The transformed dimensions of identity constituted a set of stratification schemes that constantly reshuffled social stratifications for maximizing the state’s profits from the control of citizens.
Drawing upon the data from in-depth interviews, participatory observations, and secondary data gathering, I examined the diffusion of the Western-centric concept and phenomena of social capital building in order to answer the question how Chinese women's life was inscribed in the larger context of China's relationship to global capitalism. My research findings manifested that the respondents considered affections (e.g., inter-dependence, obligation, and mutual trust) to be the foundation of establishing and maintaining their social networks regardless of the government's emphasis on market principles and the utility-based social capital conception. This opened up a new way of re-theorizing social capital. This dissertation also focused on how China’s integration with the global economy has affected women’s social identity construction. It emphasized the interaction between gender and class as one of the most salient sites where ideal citizens of China are imagined. Drawing from the perspectives of the respondents, I found that femininity has never been eliminated by the Chinese government. It has existed in China’s MD to challenge the government’s attempt of promoting the agendered (gender-neutral), universal model of women’s participation in self-employment. Moreover, I asserted that class was individualized while penetrating into other dimensions of identity (especially gender). The transformed dimensions of identity constituted a set of stratification schemes that constantly reshuffled social stratifications for maximizing the state’s profits from the control of citizens.
ContributorsZhang, Dongling (Author) / Jurik, Nancy (Thesis advisor) / Quan, H.L.T. (Thesis advisor) / Mackinnon, Stephen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
This dissertation examines automobile title lending practices to interrogate debt as an embodied experience. Alternative financial services such as title lending provide a way to link socio-economic inequality to instruments of financial debt. The predominant research on inequality focuses on wage, income, and asset wealth; rarely is a direct connection made between socio-economic inequality and the object of debt. My interest lies beyond aggregate amounts of debt to also consider the ways in which different bodies have access to different forms of debt. This project examines how particular subprime instruments work to reinforce structural inequalities associated with race, class, and gender and how specific populations are increasingly coming to rely on debt to subsist. Using in-depth interviews, geospatial mapping, and descriptive statistical analysis I show the importance of recognizing debt not only as a conditional object but also as a lived condition of being. I conclude with discussions on dispossession and financial precarity to consider how the normative discourse of debt needs to change.
ContributorsSugata, Michihiro (Author) / Quan, H.L.T. (Thesis advisor) / Talebi, Shahla (Committee member) / Catlaw, Thomas (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
This dissertation investigates the convergence of the nation-state, biomedicine and (bio)capital around the construction of sickle cell disease as a subaltern disorder in the caste-based society of India. It inquires how sickle cell disease that developed evolutionarily due to environmental factors—and that is also globally racialized as a “Black disease”—has come to be associated with subaltern communities, particularly the indigenous, traditionally non-Hindu Adivasi communities of India. Such a subaltern association characterizes Adivasi biologies as inherently genetically “risky” thereby providing a biopolitical mandate to the Hindu-majoritarian Indian State to carry out biomedical interventions through promissory biocapital in the name of democratic inclusion. I center on the illness narratives of subaltern sickle cell sufferers to highlight how the caste-ization of sickle cell bodies in biomedical and policy discourses, and the attendant biocapital prospecting of subaltern biologies, are nonetheless challenged by communities through their lived experiences. Viewing this association from the Adivasi standpoint—marked by continuous dispossession and displacement—illuminates not only the biopolitical governance of subaltern reproduction by the Indian State. A primary objective of my dissertation project is also to use precarity as an epistemic site for interrogating the scopes and limits of a novel biopower formed by the nexus between the State, national biomedicine and transnational biocapital. This dissertation is therefore an attempt at unearthing the subjugated knowledges of Adivasi communities regarding alternative modes of existing in the world that continuously resist the assimilatory power of race, caste and capital. In ethnographically centering narratives of suffering among doubly (socially/economically) marginalized communities, the project illuminates the contradictions between public health measures that emphasize on sickle cell management through biomedical technologies of reproductive screening and the material conditions of sickle cell sufferers struggling to access basic medical care. This dissertation therefore juxtaposes policy interventions against community articulations of reproductive freedom that posits community health work as the fulcrum for developing reproductively just ecologies. At the same time, in utilizing multi-modal and multi-sited ethnographic methods, the project also contributes towards developing decolonial and digital ethnographic methods that are attentive to the aggravated precarity of marginalized communities in a pandemic prone world.
ContributorsDas, Sanghamitra (Author) / Smith, Lindsay A. (Thesis advisor) / Quan, H.L.T. (Committee member) / Maienschein, Jane (Committee member) / Prasad, Indulata (Committee member) / Robert, Jason (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
In recent years, privately owned and operated residential programs for troubled youth have been at the forefront of national discussion on institutional child abuse in state-sanctioned carceral facilities. Survivors and their advocates have argued that these programs should be regulated by state agencies and closed because they are harmful to residents and divert resources from effective treatment options. In opposition to the survivor movement stand owners, practitioners, and “tough on crime” politicians, who claim that that state intervention in the Troubled Teen Industry (TTI) would curtail effective treatment options for families, and in the case of faith-based programs, violate their constitutionally protected religious freedoms. Guided by the fields of Mad Studies and Critical Prison Studies, this research offers a political history of the TTI, focused on the faith-based residential facilities of Lester Roloff and Herman Fountain. It also draws on first-person interviews with three survivors of a faith-based bootcamp called Bethel Boys Academy, of the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs to delineate how these survivors make sense of their experiences before, during, and after being held captive. I conclude by arguing that the TTI survivor movement and prison abolitionists should cooperate to dismantle white supremacist political structures and improve access to meaningful treatment options for vulnerable youth.
ContributorsBrown, Andrew Gordon (Author) / Quan, H.L.T. (Thesis advisor) / Gomez, Alan E. (Committee member) / Talebi, Shahla (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
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 examines the San Diego border region to understand migrant construction worker’s mobility, autonomy, and labor power. San Diego County is enclosed by a network of internal immigration checkpoints and roving patrol operations that constrain migrant worker’s labor power to the territorial boundaries of the county. The project uses ‘differential mobility’ as a strategic concept to highlight the ways in which borders differentiate, sort, and rank among noncitizen migrant construction workers to meet local labor demands. The project reveals worker’s collective struggle to evade and cross border enforcement operations to maintain consistent employment across a border region that is marked by internal immigration checkpoints, roving patrol stops, and state surveillance measures. In addition, the project examines migrant men’s emerging workplace narratives about the body and penetration that symbolize workers’ understanding of social domination in a global economy. These expressions open up a critical space from which migrant men begin to critique a global economy that drives men northbound for employment and southbound for retirement—inhibiting a future that is neither entirely in the United States or Mexico.
ContributorsAvalos, Diego (Author) / Gomez, Alan (Thesis advisor) / Quan, H.L.T. (Committee member) / Yellow Horse, Aggie (Committee member) / Téllez, Michelle (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
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
Description
Critiques of mass incarceration and its far-reaching effects have become a growing field of study in academia, drawing attention to the inequities and injustices created by prisons and the systems of white supremacy and patriarchy underlying the carceral logics of the prison. Prisons, as a form of social control, are not only to police and regulate individual bodies and spirits, but entire communities. While people of color are locked into systems of incarceration, their families (spouses, partners, parents, and children) are also caught up with the financial and emotional burdens of incarceration. This dissertation focuses on a population I call Mainline Mamas: Black women with relationship to prisons—through visitation or incarceration—while engaging with family, children, partners, and other women. Drawing on autoethnography and interviews with seven women who have navigated prisons as visitors, and some as incarcerated persons, this dissertation, therefore, interrogates how Black women are forced into a relationship with prisons, through incarceration and/or visitation, define, practice, and experience mothering. Our stories show how Mainline Mamas form communities as they navigate the entrenched hierarchies of the prison industrial complex. Mainline Mama, as a population, practice, and theory, is therefore a reimagining of possibility from the margins; a particular form of precarity that also searches for joy, family, and connection in the midst of a carceral state violence.
ContributorsHarris, Keeonna (Author) / Quan, H.L.T. (Thesis advisor) / James, Stanlie (Committee member) / Cheng, Wendy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021