Questions of the relation between race and nationality are at the center of Israel's defense narrative, its violence, its deployment of blood and its domination of land and bodies. Usually, the discourse of violence and the concept of victim in a nation's logic involve images of penetration to borders and land. However, this dissertation is about internal violence, about the reproduction of the state not through land, but through babies and identities, narratives and memory, knowledge and censorship. I revisit Said's Orientalism (1978) and the way it was applied to the analysis of Israeli cinema by Ella Shohat (1989). I also use the framework of ‘The West and the Rest’ developed by Stuart Hall (1992), thereby relocating the different ways in which Orientalism and Eurocentrism internally work within the Israeli nation state. In this dissertation I argue that Israeli national identity is constructed on a notion of imagined unity as articulated in the Zionist ideology, while in practice denying and oppressing cultures and identities of Oriental Jews. This notion of unity, I claim, was achieved under a false sense of emergency by the Arab threat, and thereby advocated the need for a strong Jewish state. This logic is used continuously in public discourses to justify the state's overlooking of internal conflicts. To demonstrate my argument I analyze in depth the case of the Kidnapped Yemenite Babies Affair. This case study, I argue, reveals how the media, who play a central role in Israeli society (Caspi and Limor, 1986), articulate and shape inner conflict and how they define and reproduce identities while maintaining national unity and hegemony. Through this analysis I wish to re-define the relationship between the state of Israel, minority groups and the Arab ‘enemy’. I also discuss the essence of national identity, citizenship and unity and how, from the states' standpoint, such inner conflict interrupts and threatens the wholeness of the Israeli state. In my work I engage with such theoretical concepts as articulation, representation, nationhood and national identity, Orientalism, race and ethnicity, colonial and post-colonial discourse, identity politics and community.

The question that guided my research was: Are alternative, non-idolatrous, discourses and uses of the computer discernible in Puerto Rican society? In Puerto Rican culture, the idealization of modernity and technology has strong historical and cultural roots (Álvarez Curbelo, 2001). In order to gain a better understanding of the multiple connections between modernity and technology, I explored the philosophy of technology, particularly the works of Heidegger. This exploration proved fruitful in deepening my understanding of technology as a cultural and historical phenomenon. Using this understanding as a point of departure, I engaged in a “conversation” with other authors and the insights I gleaned included: the recognition of technology as a space for ideological struggle; the contemporary subordination of political freedom to the promise of technology; consumption and consumerism can usefully be considered manifestations of the promise of technology; consequently consumption has gained importance as a form of communication and of citizenship. This comprehension of consumption as an increasingly significant social phenomenon, led me to explore the specificities of the ways in which goods are socially endowed with meaning. I attempted to apply the general interpretations of the social significance of objects to the personal computer, an object that became a mass consumer good in the United States and Puerto Rico during the decade of the 90s. Early studies of the computer in the 60s and 70s had already pointed to this object's polysemic richness. I selected Thompson's (1990) depth hermeneutics as my methodology because of its usefulness in exploring the meanings given by social subjects to their world and because hermeneutics attempts to liberate rationality from permanent reduction to means-end thinking. Since meaning was a central concern, I appropriated Schrag's (1986) hermeneutical concept of communicative praxis. This concept assigns equal weight to speech and action in the creation of meaning. The search for contestatory communicative praxis led me to analyze written—political party programs and newspaper articles—and oral discourses—generated through interviews and focus groups—on the personal computer in Puerto Rico. Notwithstanding the dominance of discourses of technological idolatry in Puerto Rico, my research found glimmers of contestatory views.

This study explores the online embodied experiences of gay men, contending that these experiences deconstruct naturalized physical world understandings of the attractive and healthy erotic body. In particular, this study examines discourses emerging from three distinct queer-identified IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channels: #gaymuscle, a community formulated around images of the muscular male body; #gaychub, a community celebrating male obesity, where—in diametric opposition to #gaymuscle—fatness holds considerable value; and #gaymusclebears, a space representing the erotic convergence of the obese and muscular male body. Constructed by gay male interactants, each of these three IRC channels represents an affirming space for the discussion, exploration, and eroticism of the male body. Utilizing the methods of critical ethnography, I analyze not only the terms and forms prevalent to these online communities, but the deeper intricacies concerning the negotiation of embodied identity and eroticism in cyberspace. In doing so, I demonstrate how interactions in the virtual can provide significant embodied experiences while subverting naturalized conceptions of physical beauty and normative sexual practices.

Utilizing the paradigm of social constructionism, this research project inquires how the North American Free Trade Agreement is co-created, managed and transformed in communication. Articles and editorials about NAFTA in Mexican and U.S. newspapers provide the topoi where narratives of cultural identity are sought. Rather than treating communication as a variable whose amount determines the quality of NAFTA, this dissertation takes the communication perspective, arguing that persons in conversation co-create, manage and transform such social realities as that of an international economic trade agreement. The practical and critical theory of the Coordinated Management of Meaning is selected as the method to approach three sets of research questions: (1) What stories do Mexican and U.S. newspapers tell about the official position in order to justify their actions to the population? What sorts of stories are told about nationalism, patriotism, economic development, capitalism? (2) How is the "self" and the "other" presented by the storytellers of different countries and the different newspapers in each country? Did the presentation in the U.S. have any repercussions on the stories told in Mexican newspapers and vice versa? and (3) What is the role of communication theory in issues of economic development and international cooperation? Can viewpoints such as Social Constructionism and the critical and practical communication theory of the Coordinated Management of Meaning provide a heuristic to examine this type of issues? As with any piece of interpretive and critical research, the findings are not so exclusively significant as is the process by wh ich researchers arrive at them. In addition to this concern for process over product, the conclusion discusses the un/intended consequences of interpolating theories of development with the Coordinated Management of Meaning to address the inter(in)dependence between Mexico and the U.S.

Drawing on a rich archive of print and electronic sources, in-depth interviews and participant observation in three Slovak lesbian and gay nongovernmental organizations Ganymedes, Museion and Altera, this ethnography presents a culturally and historically situated analysis of the conditions and effects of the emerging visibility of sexual minorities in post-1989 Slovakia. At the core of this study is Foucault's theorizing of sexuality as an effect of discourses, and his genealogical approach to studying the links between discursive practice and different modalities of power. Through uncovering multiple and diffuse sites where heteronormativity is challenged, this study disrupts dominant narratives of social change that efface sexual-political struggle, and situates the emerging visibility of sexual minorities in Slovakia within the larger contexts of postsocialist transformations, European integration and globalization. This dissertation examines the following questions: How can we explain the rise of visibility of sexual minorities in post-1989 Slovakia? What are the sites of heightening visibility? How do various discursive practices effect the formation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer sexual-political subjectivities and activist networks in the context of Slovak language and culture? How do postsocialist transformation, European integration and globalization affect the "queering" of civil society in contemporary Slovakia? Slovak sexual minorities emerged from invisibility with the establishment of LGBT nongovernmental organizations and periodicals in a period of societal crisis triggered by the collapse of communism in 1989 and ensuing political, economic, and cultural change. During Slovakia's accession to the European Union, LGBT activism was further mobilized by access to new knowledge and resources, marginal participation in transversal decision-making, and transnational activist networking. While Slovak LGBT activists still struggle with movement participation, they continue to establish themselves as producers of counter-knowledge and as political force that can no longer be ignored. This study documents their communicative and political intervention as a record of a social movement taking shape, and as an analysis of contested sexual discourses at a key historical juncture. It aims to contribute insight and intellectual energy to future activism and to the evolution of queer culture in Slovakia.