Many scholars in the field believe that identities are fluid without question. Butler’s “fluidity of identities,” for instance, describes the numerous variations in gender identities that denaturalize gender, but not consider its racial dimensions (179). Butler analyzes drag performance as a model to show how gender identities are fluid, suggesting agency and social mobility in everyday life. But what is most striking to me about fluidity of identities is the assumption that everyone has fluid identities with scarcely any regard for how racialized stereotypes fix identities (Hall 1997, 258). Fixity is the repetition of colonial power over racialized subjects rendering them without agency and access (Bhabha 94). Fixity uses stereotyping, which is a process of constructing “composite images” about groups of people, and that hold certain identities within “symbolic boundaries” (Brantlinger 306). As a result, this dissertation challenges the universality in a fluidity of identities by examining three case studies in Caribbean racialized gender identities, often thought to be fluid because of multi-ethnicity, but discriminate against, and erase blackness or “Africanness,” in race theories of “whitening” (blanquemiento), “darkening” (negreado), color-casting, and colonial stereotypes of “miscegenation” throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Through performance analyses of three black and "miscegenated" Anglophone Caribbean performers Denise “Saucy Wow” Belfon in Trinidad carnival crossdressing, Carlene “The Dancehall Queen” Smith in Jamaican dancehall transvestism, and Staceyann Chin in American performance poetry with racialized “androgyny,” I examine the figures of Creole, La Mulata, Dougla and “half-Chiney” by these women in their performance genres in order to investigate whether identities are as fluid as Butler suggests, and to chart their fixities. Focusing on fluidity alone risks denying inequalities and the lack of social mobility restricting access to marginalized people. Belfon, Smith and Chin manipulate racialized “drag” by simultaneously crossing race and gender in masquerade traditions of Trinidad carnival, Jamaican dancehall, and in the orality and embodiment in American performance poetry in performances I call black liminal displacements, defined as self-stereotyping and self-caricaturing. However fluid racialized gender identities may appear to be, I argue that racialized gender identities are not definitively fluid because racial stereotypes fix identities. / text

The issue of ‘race’ and policing has generated considerable public controversy. I draw the work of Norman Fairclough in analyzing online public comments responding to three Winnipeg incidents from the summer of 2008: the detainment of Robert Wilson, the inquest into the death of Matthew Dumas and the tasering death of Michael Langan. My main research questions are 1) what characterises these discourses? 2) what processes of social struggle are evident? and 3) what can this tell us about power relations and ideology in society? The analysis of 3342 comments demonstrates power dynamics in discursive struggles over the definition of the relationship between racialized group-members and the police. Specifically, a conservative discursive formation was found to have three interrelated ‘stages’: support for the police, denial of racism and mediating discourses of responsibilization/criminalization. The conclusion considers how a transformative discourse of racialized policing might mitigate prevailing justifications of racial privilege and inequality.

The issue of ‘race’ and policing has generated considerable public controversy. I draw the work of Norman Fairclough in analyzing online public comments responding to three Winnipeg incidents from the summer of 2008: the detainment of Robert Wilson, the inquest into the death of Matthew Dumas and the tasering death of Michael Langan. My main research questions are 1) what characterises these discourses? 2) what processes of social struggle are evident? and 3) what can this tell us about power relations and ideology in society? The analysis of 3342 comments demonstrates power dynamics in discursive struggles over the definition of the relationship between racialized group-members and the police. Specifically, a conservative discursive formation was found to have three interrelated ‘stages’: support for the police, denial of racism and mediating discourses of responsibilization/criminalization. The conclusion considers how a transformative discourse of racialized policing might mitigate prevailing justifications of racial privilege and inequality.

Grounded in a historical, socio-cultural consideration of Indigenous women’s theatrical production, this dissertation examines representations of gendered violence in Canadian Indigenous women’s drama. The female playwrights who are the focus of my thesis – Monique Mojica, Marie Clements, and Yvette Nolan – counter colonial and occasionally postcolonial renditions of gendered and racialized violence by emphasizing female resistance and collective coalition. While these plays represent gendered violence as a real, material mechanism of colonial destruction, ultimately they work to promote messages of collective empowerment, recuperation, and survival. My thesis asks not only how a dramatic text might deploy a decolonizing aesthetic, but how it might redefine dramatic/literary and socio-cultural space for resistant and decolonial ends. Attentive to the great variance of subjective positions occupied by Indigenous women writers, I examine the historical context of theatrical reception, asking how the critic/spectator’s engagement with and dissemination of knowledge concerning Indigenous theatre might enhance or impede this redefinition. Informed by Indigenous/feminist poststructuralist and postcolonial theoretical perspectives that address the production and dissemination of racialized regimes of representation, my study assesses the extent to which colonialist misrepresentations of Indigenous women have served to perpetuate demeaning stereotypes, justifying devaluation of and violence – especially sexual violence – against Indigenous women. Most significantly, my thesis considers how and to what degree resistant representations in Indigenous women’s dramatic productions work against such representational and manifest violence.

In this thesis I explore the theoretical, ethical, and practice-based implications of doing research with Indigenous, racialized, and LGBT2SQ+ youth and young people. This research traces participant conceptualizations of decolonial love, through arts- and land-based methods, within the context of ongoing settler colonialism. Through an Indigenous-led and participatory research project called Sisters Rising, I engaged in intimate conversations and facilitated research workshops with young Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC) who reflected on their understandings of decolonial love as related to their own experiences, knowledges, and teachings. Their conceptualizations of decolonial love as inextricably tied to land, sovereignty, and resurgence disrupt settler colonial narratives that attempt to violently displace and disenfranchise BIPOC communities and undermine Indigenous intellectual knowledges as inferior or simplistic, particularly in Euro-Western academia. Through this research BIPOC young people’s understandings of decolonial love guide my praxis and ongoing learning as a frontline practitioner who is committed to cultivating and nurturing a politicized ethic of decolonial love in my child-, youth-, and family-centered praxis. / Graduate / 2022-07-05

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For young people of African descent in Argentina, their belonging and claim to the nation are largely negated by public denial of their existence. While the concept of mestizaje, or cultural and ethnic mixing, was prominent in the nation-building projects of many other Latin American countries (Sutton 2008), Argentina remains profoundly shaped, both demographically and ideologically, by nineteenth-century “blanqueamiento” policies aimed at “whitening” the nation by encouraging European immigration and obscuring its Afrodescendant and indigenous populations (Gordillo and Hirsch 2003). In the last decade, however, transnational Afrodescendant social movements and Argentina’s adoption of multicultural policies and rhetoric (Rahier 2012; Geler 2016) have fueled local activism and led to hard-earned achievements for Argentina’s Afrodescendant communities, such as the addition of an “afrodescendiente” category in the census of 2010. Within this context of shifting national policies and racial ideologies in contemporary Argentina my dissertation examines Afrodescendant young people’s civic-identity formation across institutional and community-based educational environments, where youth are emerging as key interlocutors in the relationship between the state and their diasporic communities. As students, Afrodescendant youth spend much of their time within Argentine educational institutions—institutions founded with the explicit mission of cultivating a “civilized” citizenry within a culturally and ethnically homogeneous nation (Ocoró Loango 2016). In 2005, the Argentine state promulgated a “Plan nacional contra la discriminación” (National Plan against Discrimination) that denounced the predominance of ethnic nationalism in education, but this has led to few institutional changes. Classrooms remain principal sites where Afrodescendant youth encounter various forms of racialization and exclusion, from peer bullying to Eurocentric history textbooks (INADI 2015). Meanwhile, outside the classroom, growing Afrodescendant social movements have opened up new spaces for youth to develop critical consciousness and advocate for their cultural belonging and political rights. I draw on a year of observations, interviews, and youth participatory action research (YPAR) with an Afrodescendant youth organization in Buenos Aires to illustrate how diasporic community-based activism provides Afrodescendant youth with a type of counter-classroom—a space for an alternative civic education that enables them to “imagine their social belonging and exercise their participation as democratic citizens” (Levinson 2005). While formal educational environments are imbued with racializing practices and national narratives that circumscribe citizenship in ways that place Afrodescendants outside the nation, young Afrodescendants are learning to craft broader definitions of Argentine citizenship through counter-storytelling (Solórzano and Yosso 2002) and praxis-based learning (Freire 1970; Ginwright and Cammarota 2007) in their diasporic community. Ultimately, this dissertation traces, contrasts, and connects the diverse educational experiences of Afrodescendant youth, both within their schools and in their diasporic communities, in order to provide a nuanced examination of how these young people are engaged in what Ong (1996) has called the “dual process of self-making and being made” as citizens. / Anthropology

The purpose of this project is to examine how contemporary contexts of Islamophobia contribute to shaping notions and performances of Muslim womanhood. I center Muslim female social media influencers in my analysis and examine how they perform and (re)define Muslim womanhood through fashion, aesthetic labor, the hijab, and modest embodiment practices online. The specific research question that undergirds this project is, "How do contexts and discourses of Islamophobia contribute to shaping notions and performances of Muslim womanhood?" My data is derived from interviews with Muslimah social media influencers in the US, UK, and Canada; a survey with their social media followers, and a content analysis of their photo and video posts on Instagram and YouTube. Findings suggest that racialized and gendered expectations of Muslim womanhood emerge on the one hand, from the western non-Muslim community's racialized perceptions and understandings of Muslim women and Islam, and on the other, from the western Muslim community's reaction to its racialization in the global war on terror. The result of these expectations is the imposition of representational and moral responsibilities on Muslim women, who are regarded as visible and public representations of the Muslim community and of Islam as a faith. Findings also suggest that in response to the burden of these expectations, Muslim women exercise their agency to mobilize Islamic feminisms to their advantage in order to negotiate with, resist, and critique western Muslim and non-Muslim expectations of modesty, piety, empowerment, and the hijab. Consequently, Muslimah influencers are forcing western Muslim and non-Muslim communities to reevaluate their expectations of who fits within the category the 'Muslim Woman' while also opening up a discursive space for the possibility of new formulations and conceptualizations of Muslim womanhood that are more aligned with egalitarian Islamic feminist interpretations of Muslimah ways of living and being. / Doctor of Philosophy / In this research study, I examine how Islamophobia has contributed to shaping western Muslim and non-Muslim community perceptions and expectations of Muslim women. I focus specifically on Muslim female social media influencers to understand how they perform Muslim femininity, modesty, piety and the hijab on Instagram and YouTube. I collected data from interviews with Muslim female social media influencers in the U.S., UK, and Canada, a survey with their social media followers, and photos and videos posted by Muslim female influencers on social media. My findings show that Muslim women must contend with expectations from western non-Muslim communities, whose perceptions of Muslim emerge from Islamophobic understandings of Muslims and Islam. Simultaneously, Muslim women must contend with certain moral and representational responsibilities imposed on them by Muslim communities in the west, who are currently working to address and counteract Islamophobia, by posing a positive image of Muslims and Islam in the eyes of the western public. My findings also show that in response to the burden of these expectation, Muslim women critique these gendered burdens by exercising their agency to interpret Quranic scripture on modesty, the hijab, and gendered behaviors with an Islamic feminist lens. In doing so, they are forcing Muslim and non-Muslim communities to reevaluate the moral and representational burdens placed on Muslim women's shoulders, while also offering a space where others can conceptualize and perform Muslim womanhood in ways that align more with egalitarian Islamic feminist interpretations of Muslim women's ways of living and being.

Thesis advisor: Ana M. Martínez-Alemán / College students today are the most connected and social media savvy generation in the history of higher education (Junco & Cole-Avent, 2008) and maintain constant connections to online platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (Clem & Junco, 2015). Social media are now understood as a central component of campus and student life across colleges and universities (Martínez-Alemán & Wartman, 2009). Coinciding with the proliferation of social media use has been a rise in racialized hostilities on online settings. These offenses often target racially minoritized students, and scholars have become increasingly interested in understanding the ways this antagonism on social media impacts college student experiences (Tynes, Rose, & Markoe, 2013), including Asian Americans (Museus & Truong, 2013).         This dissertation uses a critical race theory framework to examine the racialized environment on social media, how Asian American college students experience racialized aggressions, and how their sense of belonging is impacted by racially hostile online encounters. This dissertation addresses the following question: How do encounters with racialized aggressions on social media impact Asian American students’ sense of belonging at a PWI? 29 participants from a predominantly white institution, East Oak University, engaged in individual interviews, participant observations, artifact collection, and focus groups as part of this study. The findings of this study suggest that the encounter of racialized aggressions on social media, especially those on the anonymous platform Yik Yak, are detrimental in facilitating positive sense of belonging among Asian Americans at East Oak. These online racialized encounters are asserted to be rooted in the endemic nature of racism at East Oak, and the claiming of social media as a property that enabled Whites to define and dictate campus culture by engaging in racist discourse. The nature of these online communications speaks to the ways that social media is suggested to influence both sense of belonging and institutional racial climates on today’s college campuses. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

A presente pesquisa tem como objetivo realizar um mapeamento da discussão de propostas de ações afirmativas voltadas para a população negra no Brasil. Ainda que incipiente, esse debate já suscita diversas polêmicas e leva a questões sobre o que são essas ações, onde existem, o que propõem e por que. A informação corrente no país traz como principal referência a experiência norte-americana, hoje com quase 40 anos, e identifica as ações, fundamentalmente, com o sistema de cotas, como é o caso de alguns projetos de lei que visam a melhoria do acesso da população negra ao ensino superior. Entretanto, à medida que políticas desse tipo vão sendo mais amplamente discutidas e propostas, torna-se necessário um debate mais detalhado definindo seus limites e possibilidades. Através da análise do processo de denúncia, reconhecimento e, principalmente, das formas de combate ao racismo, observa-se que as particularidades da realidade social, política, econômica e racial brasileiras são apreendidas na formulação de ações afirmativas que vão assumindo significados específicos. / The current research has as subject mapping the discussion about affirmative actions proposals toward black population in Brazil. Even tough incipient, that debate already raise a roll of controversies and brings questions about what are this actions, where they exist, what they propose and why. The generally information in the country brings the north american experience, today with almost 40 years, as main reference and identify the actions, basically, with the quotas system, like the case of some law projects that aim to improve the access of blacks to higher education. However, as this kind of politics are more widely argued and proposed, a detailed debate becomes necessary to define their limits and possibilities. Analysing the process of denunciation, recognition and, mainly, the forms of combating racism, is observed that the particularities of brazilian’s social, political, economical and racial reality are included in the formulation of affirmative actions that are assuming specific meanings.