Matching Items (13)
Description
This project explores the federal government’s efforts to intervene in American Indian women’s sexual and reproductive lives from the early twentieth century through the 1970s. I argue that U.S. settler society’s evolving attempts to address “the Indian problem” required that the state discipline Indigenous women’s sexuality and regulate their reproductive practices. The study examines the Indian Service’s (later Bureau of Indian Affairs) early twentieth-century pronatal initiatives; the Bureau’s campaign against midwives and promotion of hospital childbirth; the gendered policing of venereal disease on reservations; government social workers’ solutions for solving the “problem” of Indian illegitimacy; and the politics surrounding the reproductive technologies of birth control, abortion, and sterilization. Using government records, ethnographies, oral history collections, personal narratives and life histories, and Native feminist theory, this dissertation documents a history of colonial gendered violence, as well as Indigenous women’s activism in protest of such violence and in pursuit of reproductive autonomy.
ContributorsTheobald, Brianna (Author) / Gray, Susan (Thesis advisor) / Koblitz, Ann (Committee member) / Cahill, Cathleen (Committee member) / Rand, Jacki (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
This paper argues that the use of masculine rhetoric in the expansion of the United States derived from a larger ideological system that glorified masculinity through imperialism. The United States relied on the frontier myth, a belief that asserted that the nation was formed through the struggle of settling the frontier. The American man possessed the strength to conquer the wilderness and the people who already inhabited it. This version of masculinity combined not only elements of nationalism but also of race. As the United States continued to expand its borders through imperialism, the masculine identity associated with the frontier myth persisted in the psyche of the American male. The conquering man became the ideal of the American man, and rhetoric regarding the national need for this figure in the continual expansion of America justified wars of imperialism. In order to observe recurring patterns of masculine rhetoric, this thesis adopts a comparative approach to American imperialism by analyzing two wars separated by time and political climate; the U.S.-Mexican War and the Spanish-American War. Systems of ideology are always embodied by people; consequently this thesis applies a biographical approach to the key political figures who influenced the United States’ route to war. These men serve as examples of the internalization and intersectionality of masculine rhetoric as well as the outward expression of those systems in the form of imperialism.
ContributorsAlonso, Andrea (Author) / Hirt, Paul (Thesis advisor) / Gray, Susan (Thesis advisor) / Schermerhorn, Calvin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
This essay examines my work as expert witness in the case of U.S. v. Michigan, a Indigenous use-rights case. I was charged with parsing the intention of a specific article of the 1836 Treaty of Washington compelling land cession by Anishinaabe peoples and with writing a history of land use in the area from that date to the present for the Chippewa Ottawa Resource Authority (my employer). The challenges were not only methodological (how do you estimate use from ownership?) and epistemological (what constitutes proof that will satisfy both historians and lawyers?), but also sociological and psychological: what happens when an associate professor puts her progress toward full professor on hold for the sake of a court case?
ContributorsGray, Susan (Author) / College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Contributor)
Created2015-02-01