Sarah Lawrence College
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Please Pull My Nightgown Down When You Are Through: Marital Rape Activism, Opposition, and Law, 1974-1989
Get PDFMarital rape remained a legally sanctioned crime in the United States until the 1970s. This absence in rape statutes was known as the marital rape exemption. This thesis integrates the legal and social perspectives of marital rape activism, opposition, and laws with a focus from 1974-1989. At its core, the marital rape exemption prioritized the protection of certain rape victims, over others and allowed perpetrators of violence against women to be exonerated for their actions. Some U.S. states still retain privileges for marital rapists, including paying fees and attending counseling in place of incarceration, require physical force in order for the crime to be considered rape, and allow the marital relationship to aid in the defendant’s case. Understanding the complex history and prejudices of marital rape is essential to completely abolishing the marital rape exemption and other loopholes in rape statutes in the United States
Separation Versus Relationality: Settler Policies, Indigenous Storytelling and their Ways of Being in the World
No full textThis thesis explores the ideological basis of Canada’s settler colonial project and the ways that stories held in Indigenous film speak back to or refute it. Using a framework that looks to their philosophical representations, I trace the ways of being in the world represented in Canada’s tactics and policies of settler dominion and compare them to those held in the Indigenous stories I regard. Such an exploration demonstrates how Canada’s colonial project is rooted in and buttressed by a Cartesian separation of human life from the world that surrounds it. By contrast the films that I regard represent worlds premised not on separation, but a radical form of ultimate relationality. Ultimately, I argue that the relational worlds represented in the films inherently contest and destabilize settler dominion and in doing so provide instructive ways to bring about Indigenous resurgence and decolonization
Colonial and Patriarchal Discourse(s) Interrogated: Indian Muslim Women’s Voices as Critique
No full text“Colonial and Patriarchal Discourse(s) Interrogated,” is a critique of dominant knowledge production about India and its people. I argue that the insertion of Muslim women’s voices and texts operates as a critique of colonial and patriarchal narrations about women while elucidating their multifaceted lived experiences. Examining colonial discourses together with women’s voices allows us to re-present such narrative constructions as contested spaces. Organized around three key themes - representations of Indian society and its people, the zenana and women’s place in the home, as well as women’s participation in public life - this study goes beyond any simplistic understanding of women and their lives and instead challenges its readers to look deeper at the complex experiences of Indian Muslim women. In sum, I argue that by using Muslim women’s self-representations we can find evidence of a resistance, and a break with dominant colonial and local patriarchies and ideologies, as well as signs of lives marked by contradiction
