This dissertation consists of the musical score for my work for voice and ensemble, "Voices from the Killing Jar," and an accompanying paper. "Voices from the Killing Jar" was written for the Wet Ink Ensemble in 2010-2011, and takes as its subject seven female characters from literature, history, and myth. In the paper, a musical analysis of each of the work's seven movements is accompanied by brief literary analyses of the characters and their sources. This is followed by relevant details of my history as a performer, composer, and Wet Ink Ensemble co- director, and a discussion of the unique instrumentation and performance practice encapsulated in this piece as a result of my close work with Wet Ink over the last several years. The paper concludes with an examination of my dual role as a composer and performer in this piece and in my work in general, and with a brief discussion of social and gender-theoretical issues that inform my work as a female composer.

With women's increased education and labor market participation in the last few decades the labor market has changed considerably. At the same time the interaction between household activities and work have been constantly evolving, affecting household dynamics and family outcomes, such as fertility, marriage and divorce. The first chapter explores the effect of unrestricted access to the birth control pill on young people's career plans, using annual surveys of college freshmen from 1968 to 1980. In particular it addresses the question of who was affected by the introduction of the birth control pill by looking at career plans of both men and women, and by separating the effect by level of academic ability and race. The results show that unrestricted access to the pill caused high ability women to move towards occupations with higher wages, higher occupational prestige scores and higher male ratios. The estimated effects for women with low grades and from low selectivity colleges are in the opposite direction. Men were also affected by unrestricted access to the pill, as their aspirations shifted towards traditionally male dominated occupations, across all ability groups. The biggest effect of unrestricted access to the pill is found to be on non-white students, both among men and women. The paper uses Census Data to compare the changes in career plans to actual changes in labor market outcomes. When looking at the actual career outcomes, early access to the pill affects both men and women -- shifting their careers towards traditionally male dominated occupations associated with higher wages. Early access to the pill is also associated with significantly higher actual income for men. In the second chapter I look at the relationship between increased access to reliable fertility controls and men's disappearance from teaching. As the pill has been found to have a substantial effect on women's family responsibilities, career investments and labor market outcomes, men's bargaining position in the marriage market is likely to have changed considerably. Teaching stands out among the career choices of male college freshmen in terms of average income and prestige. The effect of the shift in bargaining power on men's career choices is hence likely to be prominent in the teaching sector. Between 1968 and 1980, the ratio of male college freshmen planning to become a teacher fell from 12.4% to 2.4% and the share of males among those who aspired to teach dropped from 30.6% to 19.7%. Using nationally representative data on the career plans of college freshmen I find that unrestricted access to the birth control pill bears a negative relation to the likelihood that men plan to teach, while changes in the strength of teacher unions and relative wages of teachers have limited effect on their career plans. Men's aspirations shift away from teaching towards occupations that are associated with higher average income like accounting and computer programming. The results are supported by equivalent findings looking at actual career outcomes in the Census Data. The third chapter focuses on the role of discrimination and the possibility that education as a tool to reveal ability is more important among women than men. As social networks tend to run along gender lines and managers in the labor market are predominantly male, it may be more difficult for women to signal their ability without college credentials. Moreover, women may use education to signal their labor market attachment. A game theoretical model of racial discrimination and educational sorting, introduced by Lang and Manove (2011) is applied to examine the gender gap in schooling attainment. As the gender gap differs between demography groups, being more prominent for blacks and Hispanics, the model is estimated separately for each race or ethnicity group. Using data from the NLSY79, the results in the paper are consistent with a model where education is more valuable to women, due to signaling. As predicted by the model, education as a function of ability (measured with AFQT scores) is more concave for women than for men. For over 88 % of the whites in the sample women choose higher level of education given their ability, than do men. On the other hand, the model fits the data better for whites than for blacks and Hispanics, and therefore fails to explain the observed differences across race and ethnicity groups.

This dissertation considers discourses bearing on the social dynamics of immigration and postcolonial diversity in contemporary France in light of their interconnections with issues of sexuality and assimilation. Synthesizing and building on recent work by anthropologists, sociologists and cultural theorists it explores the current debate over French identity--a debate that has to a considerable extent revolved around the impact of recent postwar immigration to France and the "integration" of immigrants on the cultural level, and of which a recent symptom has been the Sarkozy government's launch of a public national debate about "l'identité nationale" (national identity). Overall, my project focuses on the intermingling of the cultural and the political in cultural representations of immigrants and their descendants. Specifically, I consider the highly charged terrain of the representation of sexuality. In the discourse on laïcité (secularism) and integration, gender norms and tolerance of homosexuality have emerged as key components and are now often employed to highlight immigrants' "un-French" attitudes. I argue that, as French and immigrant identities have been called into question, sexuality has constituted a favored prism through which to establish the existence of difference. Through the study of cultural representations of immigration, I will explain how the potential of immigrants and their descendants to assimilate is often judged according to the "fitness" of their attitudes about sexuality. I will further argue that the successful assimilation of immigrants often follows a "required" phase of sexualization, in which the sexuality of the immigrant becomes his or her main marker, the primary factor through which the immigrant is intelligible, beyond other possibly relevant criteria.

This study examined the relationship between perceived workgroup sexual orientation dissimilarity and participant perceptions of group process and withdrawal. Based on the theory of relational demography within groups (Riordan, 2000) and recent research on moderators of the dissimilarity-outcome relationship (e.g., Stewart and Garcia-Prieto, 2008), the study argued that: (1) perceived sexual orientation dissimilarity would be associated with negative group process effects and increased withdrawal for all study participants, (2) that the relationship between perceived sexual orientation dissimilarity and outcomes would be stronger for heterosexual individuals than for those who identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LBG), and (3) that participants' level of sexual orientation identity development would moderate their responses to increased sexual orientation dissimilarity in their workgroups. Three hundred and ninety-eight graduate students at Columbia University were asked to respond to an online questionnaire designed to assess their perceptions of workgroup dissimilarity, communication, conflict and peer relations as well as their individual levels of withdrawal. Hypotheses were tested using hierarchical multiple regression analysis. Results indicated that perceived dissimilarity was positively related to increased relationship conflict, task conflict and withdrawal and negatively related to peer relations among all study participants. Additionally, the effects of perceived dissimilarity on task conflict and withdrawal were moderated by participant sexual orientation and participant sexual orientation identity development, consistent with study hypotheses. Slightly different patterns of findings emerged when the results were examined for LGB and heterosexual individuals separately. Though not hypothesized, values dissimilarity was found to mediate the relationship between perceived sexual orientation dissimilarity and several of the group process outcomes, particularly for heterosexual individuals. The contributions and implications of these findings for relational demography and sexual orientation workplace research are also discussed.

This research focuses on the underrepresentation of minoritized groups in scientific careers. The study is an analysis of the relationships between race, gender, and those with careers in the sciences, focusing on the lived experiences of Black women physicists, as viewed through the lens of women scientists in the United States. Although the research is geographically localized, the base-line question is clear and mirrors in the researcher's own intellectual development: "How do Black women physicists describe their experiences towards the construction of a scientific identity and the pursuit of a career in physics?" Grounded on a critical race theory perspective, the study uses storytelling to analyze how these women build their identities as scientists and how they have negotiate their multiple identities within different communities in society. Findings show that social integration is a key element for Black women physicists to enter study groups, which enables access to important resources for academic success in STEM. The study has implications for physics education and policymakers. The study reveals the role of the different communities that these women are part of, and the importance of public policies targeted to increase the participation of underrepresented groups in science, especially through after-school programs and financial support through higher education.

In recent decades, several countries have experienced a rapid increase in their sex ratios at birth. This dissertation examines the causes and consequences of these imbalances in the Indian context. Lower desired fertility can translate into more male-biased sex ratios if son preference remains strong, especially with greater availability of prenatal sex-selection technology. Chapter 1 investigates whether financial incentives can simultaneously decrease fertility and the sex ratio at birth. I build a model where the effects of incentives on child-bearing and sex-selection are determined by the degree of son preference and the costs of children and sex-selection, relative to the size of incentives. I test the theoretical predictions in the context of Devirupak, a scheme adopted by the Indian state of Haryana. Devirupak incentivizes parents to have either one child or two daughters. Parents of one girl receive a larger benefit than one-boy or two-girl families, who receive the same amount. I construct a woman-year panel dataset from retrospective birth histories and exploit variation in the state and the timing of implementation and the composition of pre-existing children to estimate the causal effect of this scheme. Devirupak lowers the number of children by 0.9 percent, but mainly through a 1.9 percent decrease in the number of daughters. I find no evidence for an increase in the demand for daughters in response to a decrease in their relative price in the overall sample. However, the proportion of one-boy couples and the sex ratio of first and second births increased significantly. Thus, schemes that induce parents to choose either sons or daughters may lower fertility, but have unintended consequences for sex ratios, despite larger incentives for girls, if a minimum number of sons is desired. Chapter 2 examines the impact of tariff decline on fertility, the sex ratio at birth, and infant mortality in rural Indian districts. In relative terms, women more exposed to tariff cuts are more likely to give birth and these births are more likely to be female. These results are primarily driven by low-caste, low-wealth, and uneducated women. Moreover, infant mortality decreases for girls (but not boys) born to these low-status mothers. On the other hand, fertility decreases and female infant mortality increases for high-status women. They also exhibit a weak increase in the sex ratio at birth. Differential effect of the tariff reform on the relative economic opportunities of women across socioeconomic groups is the most likely mechanism for these results. Chapter 3 analyzes the effects of sex ratio imbalances on pre-marital investments and marital outcomes in India. Changes in the availability of pre-natal sex-selection technology differentially altered the mating pool of individuals born in different states, cohorts, and endogamous social groups. I show that increases in the male to female sex ratio at birth are associated with a decrease in educational attainment, age at marriage, and labor force participation rates, and an increase in spouse's age for women relative to men. These findings are consistent with an improvement in the position of women in the marriage market due to their relative scarcity.

This dissertation examines the themes of rape and domestic violence in Zionist literature on the "Arab Question" published in Hebrew from the last years of Ottoman rule in Palestine through to the 1929 riots that erupted during the British Mandate. By bringing to light the import of rape and domestic violence in works by authors such as L.A. Arieli, Yehuda Burla, Aharon Reuveni, Yitzhak Shami, and Shoshana Shababo, I demonstrate that Zionist motions of race and gender developed in an intertwined manner as writers imagined the future of Jewish-Arab relations in Palestine. Moreover, while scholarly treatments of gender in the yishuv have thus far largely concentrated on questions of masculinity, I show how reading for masculinity and femininity together reveals Zionism's horror-stricken sexual underbelly; as authors do away with early fantasies of Jewish-Arab interweaving in an increasingly volatile political climate, they translate pogrom-associated fears of bodily violation from Russian and Eastern European settings into the Palestine arena. In novels, short stories, poetry, medical literature, and propaganda pamphlets Zionist intellectuals also urge reform of Jewish family life, sexual partnering, and hygiene education--this, all the while that they mount a case against turning to the Arabs as a viable folk source and partner for the New Jew.

This dissertation investigates how Japanese-language literature by Korean writers both emerged out of and stood in opposition to discourses of national language, literature, and identity. The project is twofold in nature. First, I examine the rise of Japanese-language literature by Korean colonial subjects in the late 1930s and early 1940s, reassessing the sociopolitical factors involved in the production and consumption of these texts. Second, I trace how postwar reconstructions of ethnic nationality gave rise to the specific genre of zainichi (lit. "residing in Japan") literature. By situating these two valences together, I attempt to highlight the continuities among the established fields of colonial-period literature, modern Japanese literature, and modern Korean literature. Included in my analyses is a consideration of literature written by Japanese writers in Korea, transnational media and publishing culture in East Asia, the gender politics of national language, and the ways in which kominka (imperialization) policies were neither limited to the colonized alone nor completely erased after 1945. Rather than view the boundaries between "Japanese" and "Korean" literature as fixed or self-evident, this study examines the historical construction of these categories as generative discourses embedded in specific social, material, and political conditions. I do this through close analytical readings of a wide variety of primary texts written in Japanese by both Korean and Japanese writers, while contextualizing these readings in relation to the materiality of the literary journal. I also include a consideration of the canonization process over time, and the role literary criticism has played in actively shaping national canons. Chapter 1 centers around the 1940s "Korean boom," a term that refers to the marked rise in Japanese-language works published in the metropole on Korea and its culture, written by Japanese and Korean authors alike. Through broad intertextual analyses of major Japanese literary journals and influential texts by Korean writers produced during the "Korean boom," I examine the role played by the Japanese publishing industry in promoting the inclusion of Koreans in the empire while simultaneously excluding them from the privileged space of the nation. I also deconstruct the myth of a single "Korean" people, and consider how an individual's position within the uneven playing field of colonialism may shift according to gender and class.Chapter 2 deals with the ideologies of kokugo (national language; here, Japanese) and kokumin bungaku (national literature) during the latter years of Japan's imperial rule. The major texts I introduce in this chapter include Obi Juzo's "Tohan" (Ascent, 1944), first printed in the Japanese-language journal Kokumin bungaku based in Keijo (present-day Seoul); a comparison of the kominka essays written by Yi Kwangsu in Korean and Japanese; and the short story "Aikoku kodomo tai" (Patriotic Children's Squad, 1941), written by a Korean schoolgirl named Yi Chongnae. Through these texts, I show how kokumin bungaku depended upon the inclusion of colonial writers but simultaneously denied them an autonomy outside the strictures of the Japanese language, or kokugo. In Chapter 3, I move to Occupation-period Japan and the writings of Kim Talsu, Miyamoto Yuriko, and Nakano Shigeharu. While Koreans celebrated Japan's defeat as a day of independence from colonial rule, the political status of Koreans in Korea and in Japan remained far from independent under Allied policy. I outline the complicated factors that led to the creation of a stateless Korean diaspora in Japan and highlight the responses of Korean and Japanese writers who saw these political conditions as a sign of an imperialist system still insidiously intact. In looking at Kim Talsu's fiction in particular, I am able to examine both the continuities and discontinuities in definitions of national language, literature, and ethnicity that occurred across 1945 and map out the evolving position of Koreans in Japan. Chapter 4 compares the collaboration debates that occurred in post-1945 Korea with the arguments over war responsibility that occurred in Japan in the same period, focusing on the writings of Chang Hyokchu and Tanaka Hidemitsu. Although the works of both individuals have been neglected in contemporary literary scholarship, I argue that their postwar writings reveal how Korean collaboration (ch'inilp'a) and Japanese war responsibility (senso sekinin) emerged as mutually constitutive discourses that embodied - rather than healed - the traumas of colonialism and empire. Finally, in the epilogue of this dissertation, I introduce the writings of the self-identified zainichi author Yi Yangji in order to consider how all of the historical developments outlined in the previous chapters still exist as lived realities for many zainichi Koreans even today.

This dissertation traces the discourse of emotion embodied in the lineage novel (kamun sosŏl 家門小說), a genre that circulated from the late seventeenth until the early twentieth century and was intimately related to the flourishing women’s culture of Chosŏn Korea (1392-1910). Sagas in hundreds of manuscript volumes, lineage novels trace the lives of multiple generations of established civil lineages. Comprised of stories of rise and fall of family fortunes, foreign expeditions, court intrigues, and personal confrontations that often reach cataclysmic dimension, the lineage novel is an encyclopedia of human experience and a literary form that developed in parallel to the establishment of Korea’s patriarchal lineage structure in the seventeenth century. Just as it valorizes the fundamental premises of the patriarchal lineage, the lineage novel affirms private feelings as inalienable ingredient of authentic personal histories and the fabric of domestic life. While sharing its origin with other genres of writing lineage, such as genealogies, family histories, and commemorative texts, the material shape of the lineage novel, which circulated exclusively in manuscript form, is embedded in women’s practice of vernacular calligraphy: manuscript inscriptions reveal the untiring work of female scribers who reproduced these massive texts. The novels themselves create a sophisticated conception, in which the patriarchal vision of people’s relationships is extended to account for intimacies and passions that are omitted from the Confucian norm. The early-twentieth-century chapter of the lineage novel’s history, moreover, tells us of the curious metamorphoses of literary genres and reading audiences of the time, while also providing a comparative hermeneutic angle upon the discourse of emotion in “modern” Korean literature and particularly its harbinger, Yi Kwangsu’s 1917 novel The Heartless (Mujŏng).

Although the incidence of heroin addiction among women may be rising, knowledge concerning the rates by which use is initiated and terminated remains sparse. In response to this gap, a secondary analysis has been conducted on a sample of Black methadone-maintained addicts. As the individuals included in this study are clearly self-selected, it is not possible to investigate the etiology of their addiction. Hirschi, Matza, Sutherland and Cloward provide the theoretical framework for a descriptive analysis of gender-related differentials. Bivariate and multiple discriminant analysis show significant differences between male and female clients in ties to conventional society, associates cultivated and patterns of drug use. Women in this sample develop stronger ties to the family while men are more likely to participate in the labor force. Men have more extensive criminal histories and are involved in violent and property-related crimes at greater levels than women. However, women report more extensive exposure to heroin use within the family. As anticipated, women in this sample first tried heroin at an older age and have been addicted for a shorter period of time before attempting methadone maintenance. A further series of regression and multiple discriminant analyses identifies several different patterns of experiences, centered around the clients' current living arrangements and labor force participation. These patterns may be suggestive of what can be expected while a client is maintained on methadone. The first pattern identified appears to fit into the framework provided by Hirschi. Men and women not living with family at entry to treatment, in the "fast life", have fewer ties to family and the labor force prior to addiction. They are more involved in crime. Although not indicated in the data, this pattern most likely preceeds an earlier age of addiction. Their socialization is truncated. Further ties to conventional society are not established or cultivated and criminal activity remains extensive. These clients appear to use treatment as a respite from the rigors of "hustling" and purchasing drugs. Once this life is viable again, they leave. A second set of patterns may be closer to Matza's conceptualization of drift, characterized by relatively conventional behavior along with the intermittent commission of deviant acts. Men living with their family attempt to fulfill the traditional role assigned to males, despite the difficulties faced by minority group members living in the inner city. These men have the strongest employment histories and are relatively uninvolved with the criminal justice system, both before and during addiction. They are most successful in treatment. Women who head their households apparently establish a pattern of behavior reminiscent of traditional gender-role expectations. They typically marry prior to addiction, drop out of the labor force and remain relatively removed from crime. These women appear to leave treatment only when another program offers a higher level of maintenance, perhaps due to their limited legal and illegal options. Female clients living with their spouse at entry to treatment are not clearly distinguishable from those living with children, but evidence a few distinctive aspects worth exploring. With one exception, these women have not expanded their families to include children. Their employment history is more extensive, and their marriage more likely to be established after addiction. Their higher levels of heroin use while remaining in treatment may indicate ambivalence. Several theoretical and programmatic implications can be drawn from the findings presented above. (1) The distribution by sex of the lifestyles described suggests that they "fast life" might be less accessible to women. As hypothesized by Cloward and Piven, the manner in which an addiction career is carried out may be molded by widely held expectations associated with gender. (2) While the findings indicate that female clients may have special needs, the similarities among males and females choosing a specific lifestyle could indicate specialized programs might not be the answer. Clearly, female clients in this sample have a greater need for assistance with children and may wish to train for different jobs compared with men. Yet, if program counselors are properly sensitive, these clients may be as well served within a heterosexual environment. The needs of clients in this sample to create and strengthen ties to family and the labor force go beyond sex. Given current fiscal constraints, it might be prudent to strengthen existing programs, especially in the area of vocational training, rather than establish separate facilities.