1,720,968 research outputs found
The United States Supreme Court and affirmative action: A critical race, black feminist theoretical and textual analysis
No full textFisher vs. University of Texas was heard before the United States Supreme Court twice: in the October 2012 term (Fisher I) and the October 2015 term (Fisher II). Abigail Noel Fisher and Rachel Multer Michalewicz filed suit against the University of Texas at Austin (UT) claiming that they were denied admission to the University based on their race. Both are white and female. Michalewicz dropped out of the suit after the Texas Fifth District Court of Appeals ruling. Fisher continued participating in the litigation. Fisher sued for equal protection as stated in the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution. The question I immediately asked myself is whether there are racial considerations in the University’s admission process that would have caused Fisher’s application not to be selected? If so, did racial considerations result in her not gaining admission?
My hypothesis was that the Supreme Court was on the cusp of ending affirmative action in education. The research reported on in this thesis suggests that the Court was not seeking to end affirmative action, but seeking to maintain it. This thesis also shows that the litigants in the bulk of the affirmative action suits that made it before the United States Supreme Court are white women. Fisher led me to review Bakke, Grutter, Gratz, and Hopwood, as they were cited as precedent- setting cases in the Fisher ruling. Thus, it’s not Fisher, alone, that raises a question about the role of gender in affirmative action litigation. It’s also Grutter, Gratz, and Hopwood, all of which include female plaintiffs. The only major case with a white male plaintiff is Bakke. The legal petition filed by Fisher leaves plenty of room for debate and analysis. Thus, I explored some of the arguments in the aforementioned legal cases using Critical Race and Black Feminist theories to understand Fisher generally, but affirmative action more specifically
"Warrior mamas": Envisioning Womanist Spiritual Activism to decrease infant mortality disparities
No full textMy dissertation envisions adopting a womanist spiritual activism to bring awareness and change to the disparities of infant mortality among African American women. This secondary data analysis of “365 Days of Infant Mortality: Using PhotoVoice to Understand Infant Mortality as an Issue for Social Change,” is informed by a Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies and Public Health multi-theoretical and methodological framework focusing on six women: five self-identified African American women, and one self-identified as East African, whose babies died before their first birthdays. These women shared their experiences and perceptions of racial injustice that they associated with the death of their babies. Through photographs, journals, and conversation, these women shared their personal and collective experiences of losing their babies before their first birthdays and determined a plan of action, based on spirituality and activism, that they believe could bring awareness of the disparities and help decrease the incidence of infant mortality in their communities
HOME DEPO[R]T: [Un]Documented nostalgia and memories in Vietnamese/American diasporic stories at the center of [Re]Alienation
No full textViet Thanh Nguyen poignantly yet hauntingly recognizes that “all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory” (Nothing Ever Dies 4). The Việt Nam War continues to produce untold ghost stories, or stories from Vietnamese refugees and war survivors who continue to live in the margins and elsewhere, obscured and stilled into ghastly silence as their stories remain untold and undocumented. In this dissertation, divided into three different articles, but with strands threading and intersecting with each other, I examine the many haunted, and haunting, memories and stories of Vietnamese refugees as they become displaced ghosts or citizens inhabiting within the geopolitical borders surrounding the diaspora. The first article is an ethnomusicological and oral historical exploration and rereading of pre-1975 Vietnamese diasporic music. I examine how that compilation of sounds, lyrics, and notes become rhapsodic artifacts to re-member South Vietnamese veterans. Vietnamese music produced and written during the pre-1975 Việt Nam War era are heard as sounds of echoic re-memories during dislocation and displacement. The second article frames an intimate oral historical narrative about my mother and her memories of surviving, navigating, and living through the war as a young South Vietnamese woman who was essentially an invisible citizen. Survivalism during the war should not be gendered, but the war’s ethos centralizes on men’s nationalistic badges of honor while women are left behind. The third article, like the first article, continues to retrace the diasporic sounds of Vietnamese music from the pre-1975 era, while specifically focusing on the lyrics and unsettling images of boats and water, evoking the moment when former Vietnamese citizens became refugees who escaped by boat. In Vietnamese, nước can mean water, nation, country, and homeland, showing a perpetual disconnect and precarity among refugees living in exiled displacement and the continual im/migratory plight of refugees as their memories and stories travel somewhere. Together, the three papers explore the weighted complexities of re-memories, identities, citizenships, wars, displacement, resettlement, ghosts, pervasive hauntology, ethnomusicology, and colonialism
Escaping culpability: An intersectional feminist analysis of gendered whiteness
No full textWhite women’s pivotal involvement in the maintenance of white supremacy in the US points to a necessary exploration of their whiteness. Historically and presently, many white women demonstrate their commitment to uphold their privileged position through their politics, beliefs, and daily interactions with whites and BIPOC. With some exceptions, most research on whiteness is broadly construed, not specific to women, and rarely draws from whites’ perceptions of race. Thus, the purpose of this study was to explore the raced and gendered perceptions of some white women and explore how they enact whiteness. The primary question guiding this study is: how do white women enact whiteness? I employed an intersectional feminist qualitative approach to perform twenty in-depth semi-structured interviews with white women in the South. The participants enacted whiteness through white ignorance, fragility, and innocence. The analysis revealed how these white women refused to implicate themselves within racism. This study brings attention to the ways in which white women sustain white supremacy and offers tools to disrupt whiteness
“Imagining it differently, dreaming it passionately”: Examining women-of-colors science fiction as womanist spiritual activism
No full textIn this dissertation I explore the ways in which women-of-colors science fiction can be regarded as womanist spiritual activism. Building upon the work of Gloria E. Anzaldúa, AnaLouise Keating, and Layli Maparyan, I define spiritual activism as an engaged spirituality directed towards the ending of all forms of oppression that highlights the transformation possible when self and community collaborate in purposeful and interdependent radical change. Using Anzaldúa’s discussion of the path of conocimiento, a spiritual, psychological, intellectual, and even embodied journey that enhances self-reflexivity and self-awareness, I demonstrate how the act of spiritual activism is enacted in the plots of four women-of-colors science fiction novels: The Moons of Palmares by Zainab Amadahy, Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, Storm of Locusts by Rebecca Roanhorse, and Ink by Sabrina Vourvoulias.
In the development of this argument, I rely on textual analysis highlighting the capabilities of fiction in eliciting an empathetic response in the reader and the transformative and visionary capacity of science fiction as a genre. I call for a reading of these women-of-colors novels that is culturally aware and cognizant of both the onto-epistemologies that inform the novel and the way the fantastic, or magical, is a representation of “alternative spiritual technologies” (Lavender III Race 31).
Lastly, I consider how the writing of these four novels is a transformative act in its ability to critique the oppressive realities of current society and imagine new more just worlds. The novels, then, exist as acts of “relanguaging” (Maparyan, Idea 129) which work to rewrite and replace negative thoughtforms which support the status quo. The writing of these artforms, too, is a healing act of spiritual activism. Awakening the imagination and the spiritual, these novels invite readers to consider journeying on their own paths of conocimiento ultimately considering how personal and societal change lead to the healing process of spiritual activism. With this analysis of women-of-colors science fiction novels as spiritual activism, I hope to raise questions about the lack of spirit in our academic conversations about the work of women of colors
Womanism, work, and wealth: (Re)Framing the business administration contributions of Marie Thérèse “Coincoin” Métoyer and Henriette Delille
No full textWomanism, Work, and Wealth: (Re)Framing the Business Administration Contributions of Marie Thérèse “Coincoin” Métoyer and Henriette Delille analyzes the business administration contributions of Métoyer and Delille through a womanist lens. Métoyer and Delille were free during a time in the history of the Americas when women of African descent were generally identified as enslaved laborers. As women-of-color business professionals, their ability to control their own labor and identities (as free women of African descent) offers an alternative perspective on women of color’s experience in leadership and capitalism in the Americas.
In this dissertation, I put Métoyer’s and Delille’s business contributions into conversation with Layli Maparyan’s strand of womanist theory to demonstrate the ways a womanist approach to business administration can enrich the practices of contemporary leaders. In so doing, I underscore the importance of Métoyer and Delille as active and vital business administration contributors in the Americas and offer lessons for both Business Administration and Women’s and Gender Studies scholars to consider
Noticing and naming: Making visible the invisible space and voices of women of colors leading dance within higher education
No full textThis research project examines the experiences of four women of colors in dance leadership in the United States currently, and the problematic patterns of system-wide issues in higher education that affect their lives. To develop that understanding, this study drew upon portraiture methodology to amplify the voices of these women of colors by establishing historical and institutional contexts, by collecting their narrations and experiences, building relationships, searching for emergent themes, and finally composing a narrative as a stimulating whole. The portraits present the experiences as lived to draw attention to stereotypical and discriminatory understandings of women of colors. This study employs the theoretical framework of Black Feminist Thought and Critical Race Theory to guide and enable the many ways to analyze the experiences of marginalized groups, and the importance of the theoretical stance to focus on the different ways of accounting for these experiences.
The argument of this study is the culture of leading in dance can be dehumanizing, disempowering, and marginalizing, can cause isolation, silence one’s voice from discourse, and symbolically stigmatize groups.
The purpose of this project is to expand leadership literature, and dance literature to include women of colors and to bring visibility to their contributions to leadership studies. This study illuminated indicators of the profound obstacles women of colors face in leadership roles in higher education in dance in relation to embodied experiences, marginalization, and isolation as foundational to the structural inequalities and racialized policies that perpetuate issues of race, gender, and class. In this dissertation, I pay particular attention to the relationship of the narrators’ body, mind, and consciousness, their perspectives of living in a racialized body, and women of colors as embodied knowledge producers. Few researchers have addressed embodiment and leadership, and the literature has failed to address how thought and the sense of being cannot be removed from bodily habits in relation to social environments. The study suggests the following implications: that studies of leadership should embrace, the body as a site in the construction of identity in cultural and social practices, the corporeal materiality in the performance of gender, and the embodiment of race in the lived experiences of women of colors in dance leadership
Black-white inequality through the lens of race, class, and gender in North Texas, 1880-1940
No full textUtilizing the three-article format, this dissertation examines the severe inequalities related to race, class, and gender in North Texas from 1880 to 1940. The unifying theme of all three articles is the ways in which inequality was enforced in Black-White relations, including the role of creating and maintaining mainstream cultural memories. Each article investigates a different aspect of Black-White inequality and, while relating to the unifying theme, makes distinct contributions. The first article is a socio-historic examination of anti-Black police violence in North Texas from 1880 to 1930. Patterns of official dereliction of duty, misconduct, abuse, and murder are revealed to have had not only racial elements, but gendered and classed elements as well. The second article takes a comparative approach to a nonviolent community removal in Denton, Texas, and an extraordinarily violent destruction of a community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, both of which targeted economically successful Black neighborhoods and both of which were perpetrated by White Supremacists. Variations in Black resistance and the construction of local cultural memory are also explored. The third article documents experiences with inequality by Black women and girls in North Texas from 1900 to 1940. When read together, these three articles reveal a complex exercise of raced, classed, and gendered power in a region that is often overlooked and understudied
Towards a post-oppositional womanist pedagogy
No full textBuilding on the definitions and work of womanist scholars such as Alice Walker, Layli Maparyan, and AnaLouise Keating, this dissertation explores the possibility of a post-oppositional womanist pedagogy that can serve as a potential solution to the oppositional pedagogies and hyper individualistic cultures in Western education systems. This research discusses the following themes that emerged from interviews: (1) womanism draws people in/feels welcoming because of the spiritual component; (2) spirituality is an important aspect of personal choices, pedagogical choices, and worldviews; (3) self-care and community care are deeply connected; and (4) dialogue and an understanding of interconnectedness/interrelatedness are components of post-oppositional pedagogies. This dissertation offers a more expanded definitions of womanism and explores some possible ways of shifting teaching practices to a more post-oppositional approach
WoCA projects, building communities through exhibitioning: Curating and spaces for women artists of color
No full textIn this dissertation the researcher examines the implications of and strategies for curating exhibitions that feature the works of women of color (WoC) artists. In this study the researcher explores the ways in which viewers interpret exhibitions by the non-profit arts organization, WoCA Projects, an alternative curatorial initiative in Fort Worth, Texas, that highlights the contributions of WoC and underrepresented artists. Responses of visitors to exhibitions at WoCA Projects were evaluated based on on-site and internet surveys. The researcher also reflects on her own womanist approaches to curating WoC artists that are informed by her artist-curator-Women’s Studies scholar identities and compares her womanist approaches to the work of nine curators in Texas, who reflect on their curatorial practice through open-ended interviews.
Throughout this dissertation the researcher discusses the implications of womanist approaches to curatorial practice as methods for incorporating more cultural equity within art institutions. New approaches like womanism were proposed for curators to create art spaces where both WoC artists and communities of color feel welcomed. This dissertation provides an opportunity to consider how the field of Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) can expand the ways in which art exhibitions can be used as platforms for social transformation on behalf of WoC artists and diverse communities. While feminist art and feminist exhibitions have long been the primary methods and approaches used within the field of WGS for engaging with gender within art practice and art history, the researcher proposes the use of social justice perspectives like womanism and women of color feminism as more appropriate frameworks for addressing racial and gender injustices both within the art world and local communities. The researcher also explores ways in which curators could champion cultural equity for WoC artists beyond womanism and how other curators throughout the state of Texas are addressing the issue
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