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- All Subjects: Men
- Creators: Hayford, Sarah R.
- Creators: James, Mark A.
Description
The study of son preference in India has been the focus of research for a few decades. The desire for sons leads to unfavorable consequences for daughters such as unequal access to resources, abortion, and female infanticide. Work on men's education and son preference is relatively scarce and this dissertation contributes to existing literature by exploring this relationship from a life course perspective. I have argued that education changes men's attitudes towards son preference by encouraging them to re-evaluate traditional gender roles and that this relationship is mediated by wealth. I use the National Family and Health Survey-III to examine fertility intentions and behaviors as measures of son preference. I have found support for some of my hypotheses. The findings from three studies walk through the different phases of reproduction for the Indian man. They show that son preference manifests itself at the beginning when there are no children, is strongly present after the birth of children, and then shows itself again at the end when the man wishes to stop childbearing. Being educated leads to the preference of sons being weaker and this is perhaps due to traditional gender roles being challenged. Wealth may mediate the relationship between men's education and son preference at the beginning, but does not act as a mediator once children are born.
ContributorsSabharwal, Rebha (Author) / Hayford, Sarah R. (Thesis advisor) / Agadjanian, Victor (Committee member) / Yabiku, Scott T (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This dissertation investigates a subtle yet complex contemporary issue of colorism in India that traces its ideological roots back in the British colonial period or even prior to that. It focuses on the issue of skin-color discrimination in urban Indian men, which is significantly under-researched. This project aims at investigating the issue of skin-color discrimination through analyzing a small corpus of thirteen YouTube commercials dating from 2005 to 2017 for men’s skin-lightening products of a popular skin-care brand called “Fair and Handsome” from a multimodal critical discourse analytic perspective. This study further aims to understand how the discourse of colorism is operating in these Indian commercials for men’s skin-lightening products, what kinds of semiotic and socio-cultural (discourse) elements are naturalizing the notion of “fairness,” and finally, how the construction of male gender is facilitated. Although the project’s main theoretical arc is critical discourse analysis (CDA), the methodological needs necessarily require drawing upon theoretical tools from advertisement analysis, multimodal analysis, gender studies, social psychology, history, cultural anthropology, race theory, and other related fields of study. After successfully facilitating an exhaustive analytical undertaking, this dissertation contributes to the understanding of colorism as more than intra-group racism in India and situates this perpetuating issue as a contemporary research target in the socio-cultural contexts of globalization and urbanization.
ContributorsMukherjee, Sayantan (Author) / Adams, Karen L. (Thesis advisor) / Gelderen, Elly van (Committee member) / James, Mark A. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019