Indigenous and Latinx communities have always used storytelling to pass along ancestral histories and memories, whether it be through the act of speaking, performing or other types of artwork. This thesis examines the ways that queer Latinx artists are retelling the stories that have been mistold to erase, repress and...
Stories of the Guatemalan Civil War, which lasted from 1960 until 1996, have often focused on only encapsulating the violence indigenous people experienced at the hands of the Guatemalan government and military. Although these stories contributed to the many civil rights organizing and calls for justice that followed, these types...
This thesis explores the gendered histories of slavery through the concept of haunting in two neo-slave narrative novels: Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. I offer readings of these texts through slavery’s geographic and temporal implications, in order to argue that the logics of antiblackness remain a fundamental...
The purpose of this study is to examine the lived experiences of women small-scale entrepreneurs in Qingdao, China by placing their collective experiences within relevant social and economic frameworks. This study, conducted in 2011 over a six-month period, applies an ethnographic approach based in modified grounded theory to bring together...
In the current armed conflicts that have become known to the international community since the sweeping attacks on northern Iraq on Aug. 3, 2014, the Islamic State (ISIS) perpetrated extreme forms of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) against a small ancient ethno-religious conservative Yazidi group. ISIS has used SGBV against...
This thesis offers a feminist perspective on the stories and representations of Hijra individuals and gender non-conforming communities in Bangladesh. It considers these stories for how they represent resistance to dominant gender normative discourses and cultural values in Bangladesh, and I explore how they figure both the struggles and survivals...
Shan-Mei, a Tsou aboriginal village in Taiwan, is widely known as a legend of environmental conservation, where ecotourism has been successfully combined with integrated community development. Indigenous knowledge containing "ecological wisdom" and decision-making based on consensus are perceived to be the greatest contributors to this achievement. I conducted three months...
The LGBTQ population is widely recognized as an at-risk demographic—as a result ofstigma, studies report sexual and gender minorities experience elevated risk for depression,suicide, anxiety, and substance abuse, as well as greater exposure to sexual, physical, andinterpersonal violence (Logie 1244). Asexuality, a marginalized population traditionallyexcluded from the LGBTQ acronym, poses...
This study looks at how gendered language circulates affect in order to coerce gender binary conformity. I analyze the ways gendered phrases like “sit like a lady”, “don’t be a bitch”, and “man up” communicate binary gender expectations within a U.S. context, and what they have to do with larger...