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This thesis uses online ethnographic methods to analyze the impact of patriarchal values on the illness experiences of women with endometriosis. Current literature suggests that negative impact on patients with endometriosis with regard to cultural discourse surrounding menstruation and chronic illness. Utilizing a combination of critical discourse analysis and constructivist grounded theory, the results of this research demonstrate that patients engage in a form of performance that is reactive to normalization and dismissal of pain by doctors and wider social support due in part to cultural stigmas of menstruation and chronic pain, as well as the inherent power imbalance in the doctor-patient relationship. This performative role as a patient also creates a reclamation of power by participants in the form of strong medical familiarity and casual use of medical terminology. The intent to benefit future research are discussed with the limitations of this study.

This dissertation examines a commercial media culture as articulated by a television production company in Stockholm, Sweden, and is based on nine months of extended fieldwork. The dissertation discusses the production process, its problems and constraints, and the role of the producer using a theoretical framework elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu. The TV producers are involved in a constant process of interpretation, evaluation and negotiation related to the symbolic and economic power relationships that determine the field. The practical production cannot be reduced to a one-way communication system. Commercial TV production involves more than supplying the channels with those programs they demand and attracting the desired target groups; programs produced at the company must be "good" and give a "value" to the viewers. The production process implies a tightly interwoven relationship between the producer and the audience, conceived of in terms of "the average person". The producers create an image of an audience based on statistical figures, reference persons, viewer ratings and of themselves functioning as surrogate audience. This constructed viewer wants something more than pure entertainment. The public-educator ideal that has been a reason for the Swedish public-service-television's authority and legitimacy, has come to be an important component of the television produced at the described television company. A public-service tradition is reformulated to fit into a modern, commercial context, at the same time as it legitimizes and gives meaning to its own enterprise. The created viewer's demand for entertaining knowledge and information is satisfied.

In 2013, the Dominican Republic’s highest court ruled to revoke birthright citizenship for over 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent. Ruling TC 168-13 prompted dialogue about race and racism in the country, breaking the racial silence that accompanies mestizaje (racial mixture). Scholars viewed this ruling through the lens of “Black denial” whereby Dominicans’ failure to adopt Black identities, despite being largely afrodescendant, fuels the racialization of Haitians as Black. Less evident in examinations of Dominican racial politics are anti-racist and anti-xenophobic organizing. Addressing the gap in scholarship on Dominican blackness, this dissertation project adopts an ethnographic approach to examine how Domicans of Haitian descent, most notably through Reconoci.do, a movement of denationalized youth, as well as the natural hair movement, engage with race. As one of the few well-articulated areas of Dominican society engaged with blackness, the natural hair movement provides a useful counterpoint for examining the intersections between blackness and Haitianess. In this work, I propose that natural hair has the potential to destabilize Haitian racialization yet, concurrently threatens to decouple the anti-racist movement from Dominico-Haitian struggles. These intersections illuminate the complex relationships within the heterogenous anti-racist movement. Through a historically rooted examination of constructions of race and nation in immigration policies, censuses, and national identity cards, this dissertation asserts that immigration policies were designed to benefit the dominant sugarcane economy at the expense of migrants and thus state efforts in 2014 to address indocumentation continued earlier discriminatory patterns, disproportionately impacting the Haitian diaspora. These practices are best understood as spectacles (De Genova 2013) that produce migrant illegality and, in particular, an inherited illegality for Dominican-born children that violates their constitutional rights to citizenship. Furthermore, the state constructs the population as non-black while publicly undermining anti-racist organizing and this research finds that activists draw on transnational images of blackness to challenge national representations of a modern blackness. Identifying mestizaje and the color continuum as obstacles to organizing, many activists conceptualize blackness as hypodescent, whereby any African ancestry engenders a Black identity. I argue that, while essentialist, this strategy broadens identification with Dominico-Haitians.

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