Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

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What happens when bodies are the territory through which geopolitical strategies play out? In the Leh district of India's contested Jammu and Kashmir State, religious identity has become politicized and Buddhist/Muslim conflict is being articulated at the site of the body. This dissertation contributes to political geography by exploring intimacy and fertility as geopolitical practice. In Leh, political conflict between Buddhists and Muslims is being enacted through women's bodies. Activist members of the Buddhist majority are encouraging Buddhist women to maximize fertility and avoid marrying Muslim men in order to maintain Buddhist electoral control. When women's bodies are instrumentalized and geopolitical strategy seeks to control desire, how do women cope with or resist these pressures? Can the body be an effective site of resistance against the politicization of religion and intimacy? My dissertation research consists of over 200 interviews and surveys of Buddhist and Muslim women in Leh district, as well as a participatory oral history project that engaged students in Leh with these difficult questions. The research explores how the politicization of marriage and fertility is affecting decision-making, how women negotiate religious and political pressures to participate in pro-natal territorial struggles, and how emergent geopolitical religious identities shape visions of the future.

Thesis (PhD) -- McMaster University, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 245-264). Also available via World Wide Web.

Central American immigrant women living in the Mexico-Guatemala border city of Tapachula routinely face multiple barriers to availing themselves and their children of rights entitled to them by law. In many cases, these denials unfold at the scale of the everyday, through interactions with low-to mid-level officials. As embodiments of the state, low-to mid-level officials such as bureaucrats, educators, social workers and healthcare officials possess the power to regulate immigrant citizenship and belonging through their everyday actions. However, we know very little about how officials working on the ground interpret and implement their power on an everyday basis; how this impacts immigrant experience and exercise of social and political citizenship rights; and how immigrants in turn respond to and negotiate results of interactions in their lives. Women and their Mexican-born children are disproportionately affected by this phenomenon, inducing consequences, such as exclusion from political and social citizenship, barring of children from the education system, and increased vulnerability to exploitation and domestic violence. Building upon literature on the changing geographies of the state, citizenship and migration in Geography, this dissertation seeks to broaden and deepen our understanding of how interactions between immigrant women and the micro-level state play out at the scale of the everyday and how these processes are significant in the lives of immigrants as well as low-to mid-level officials. Another goal of this work is to go beyond one-sided views of officials, to understand the overarching institutional contexts for their actions. To meet these objectives, I analyze data obtained during over a year of fieldwork conducted in Tapachula. My research consisted of in-depth interviews with low-to mid-level officials and Central American immigrant women, participatory workshops, and participant observation working in a local government agency. My findings suggest that low-to-mid level officials' actions constitute a form of everyday restriction, which, implemented through minute, mundane actions has major impacts on immigrant women's sense of citizenship in Tapachula. However, officials' actions are informed by complex institutional and socio-spatial factors and power-relations, which provide valuable context for our understanding of this phenomenon. / text

This thesis is a theoretical and empirical exploration of Māori women's knowledges and understandings of Papatūānuku in contemporary Aotearoa. The primary focus of this research is on the complexities, connections, and contradictions of Māori women's embodied relationships with the spaces of Papatūānuku - spaces that are simultaneously material, discursive, symbolic, and spiritual. In doing so, I displace the boundaries between coloniser/colonised, self/other, rational/irrational and scientific/spiritual. I demonstrate that Māori women's colonised realities produce multiple, complex and hybrid understandings of Papatūānuku. This thesis has three main strands. The first is theoretical. I offer mana wahine (Māori feminist discourses) as another perspective for geography that engages with the complex intersections of colonisation, race and gender. A mana wahine geography framework is a useful lens through which to explore the complexities of Māori women's relationships to space and place. This framework contributes to, and draws together, feminist geographies and Māori and indigenous academic scholarship. Autobiographical material is woven with joint and individual semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted with nine Māori women in the Waikato region. The second strand, woven into this thesis, is a critical examination of the colonisation of Māori women's spiritual and embodied relationships to Papatūānuku. The invisibility of Māori women's knowledges in dominant conceptualisations of mythology, tikanga and wairua discourses is not a harmless omission rather it contains a political imperative that maintains the hegemony of colonialism and patriarchy. I argue that to understand further Māori women's relationships to space and place an examination of wairua discourses is necessary. The third strand reconfigures embodied and spatial conceptualisations of Papatūānuku. Māori women's maternal bodies are intimately tied to Papatūānuku in a way that challenges the oppositional distinctions between mind/body and biology/social inscription. Māori women's maternal bodies (and the representation of them in te reo Māori) are constructed by, and in turn, construct Papatūānuku. Furthermore, women's spatial relationship to tūrangawaewae, home space and wider environmental concerns demonstrates the co-constitution of subjectivities, bodies and space/place. My hope is that this thesis will add to geographical literature by addressing previously ignored knowledges and that it will contribute to indigenous scholarship by providing a spatial perspective.

This project explores the gender relations among a group of recyclers belonging to a consortium of nine recycling cooperatives in the ABC region of São Paulo, Brazil. Employing a feminist geographical lens and participatory research methodologies I examine these uniquely gendered spaces. This thesis is divided into four sections. Each section is written in an attempt to improve understandings of the ways in which the spaces of the recycling cooperatives are gendered. In the first section I provide information that frames the thesis and the larger research project. I begin this section by providing a geographical and socio-economic overview of the region where the research took place. This is followed by a discussion of my research methodology, a literature review of the relationship between women, solid waste, and labour in Brazil, and a look at my reflexive positioning as a researcher on this project. Section two explores the relationship between gender, empowerment and equity among cooperative recyclers involved with this study. This section poses the question: in what ways has the recycling cooperative allowed for women to inspire personal and social change and have the power to influence the institutions that affect their lives? I argue that the recycling cooperatives involved with this study are spaces where individuals who have traditionally lacked access to power are granted the opportunities to empower themselves. Section three is about performed social relations, specifically the role of hegemonic masculinity in shaping gendered space within the recycling cooperatives. Drawing from qualitative research data, this section critically explores the deployment of power within the lives of the cooperative recyclers. First, I explore the concept of hegemonic masculinity, and suggest its importance for understanding gendered space. Second, I draw on my personal research experiences and qualitative data to provide a spatial examination of the most salient aspects of hegemonic masculinity in the lives of the female cooperative recyclers. Third, I support the notion that masculine domination is not something only established by men and designed to oppress women, but women themselves can construct and reinforce hegemonic masculinities. Section four concludes the study by highlighting apparent shortcomings of the research and implications for future research. Concerned with apparent contradictions between the arguments in sections two and three, I provide a discussion of the multiplicities of space and explain that such contradictions are inherent to the nature of social space. Following this I offer a critical self-reflection of my methodology were I discuss my complicity in reproducing gender binaries and post-colonial research practices. / Graduate

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2007. Graduate Programme in Geography. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 301-324). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:NR32068

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 166-179).