This study is based on 14 months of ethnographic research in a New England strip club featuring female fully nude dancers and primarily male patrons. The male patrons, some of whom are marginalized (economically and socially) and some of whom are not, all come to collectively dominate women workers in the context of the club. The Lion's Den is designed for male patrons to act out and confirm their sense of masculinity and heterosexuality. Typically money, prestige, and power are correlated in jobs, however in the case of strip clubs they are not. In The Lion's Den though stripping is the central activity of strip clubs and the strippers I interviewed make on average $10,000 more annually than the male workers, they fall at the bottom of the work hierarchy in terms of their relative authority and status. In these exchanges there is a tension between strippers' and patrons' wants and needs. These exchanges occur in a context in which interactions are structured by the collective dominance of male patrons and male workers and a social organization of the work that devalues and demeans strippers. While strippers use a variety of coping mechanisms and resistance tactics an examination of these techniques shows the majority women are overwhelmingly unsuccessful in resolving the troubles of stripping work.

Mexico and South Korea share many structural features, yet exhibit diverse patterns in income inequality and human well being. Between 1960 and 1990, the South Korean economy grew rapidly, retaining relative equality in income and enhancements in mass well being, while, in Mexico, in spite of impressive rates in economic growth for decades, income inequality remained substantial. The hypothesis of this study is that state autonomy is key to understanding economic and social outcomes in Mexico and South Korea. States that are autonomous from both internal and external coercion have the potential to enact growth-oriented and more equitable policies. Economic growth and income equality in peripheral countries are contingent upon the state, the internal class structure, and the world economy. Peripheral states that are free from undue pressure from the ruling class and core countries can exercise relative autonomy, and then have the potential to achieve both growth and equality. However, most peripheral countries are like Mexico, which, because they do not enjoy relative autonomy from the ruling class and global capitalism are unable to achieve economic growth and equality mutually. As a consequence of Japanese colonization, South Korea inherited a strong state and underwent a genuine land reform program, leading to a weak and unorganized agrarian elite, which remained ineffective in challenging state policies. In the 1960s and 1970s, South Korea assumed a crucial political position as a bulwark against international communism in East Asia, which further enhanced state autonomy. Both Japanese colonialism and the Cold War shaped South Korea's political economy. Mexico, on the other hand, remained vulnerable to both international capitalism and its internal elite class. Though Mexico underwent a long period of revolution, the class structure remained unchanged, and Mexico never attained a level of political and ideological importance to the United States, remaining vulnerable to U.S. economic interests. Unlike the South Korean state, the Mexican state failed to escape internal and external coercion, and was unable to achieve relative autonomy from international capitalism and its internal elite class, and thus was unable to effectively mandate policies that were beneficial for growth and equity.

This qualitative study investigates the individual, structural, and social systemic interconnections of conflict in a nonprofit organization. It confronts the simplicity of mainstream, popular resolution methods that typically over-individualize and frame organizational conflict as a personal problem. In contrast to traditional organizational diagnoses based on individual self-reporting of past conflicts and the reduction of conflict systems into isolated parts, this study captures organizational conflict interaction in the moment and emphasizes the complex entanglement of organizational conflict networks. In the tradition of ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation captures conflict-rich events over a compressed timeframe of sixteen months. Critical ethnographic elicitation methods filtered through a social justice perspective, probe insider stories to reveal patterns and themes of complex meaning systems that contribute to contextually grounded analyses. This study intimately follows the conflict story within an animal welfare organization that dared to address conflict, and in doing so, managed to clarify organizational identity, identify contradictions between their implicit values and explicit mission, and unravel routines and reform relationships to reorganize and reclaim their organization. Key findings include the role of conflict in revealing significant differences in underlying ideology and the relationship of conflict to gendered organizational processes. The approach to conflict resolution outlined in this study is invaluable to grassroots and social action organizations seeking to maximize conflict for organizational growth and development.

This study combines interviews and participant-observation to explore the negotiation of gender, race, and class in three youth cultural projects: Puerto Rican Wannabes, Goths, and evangelical Christians. While these projects seem very different, they are all examples of local identities mobilized to solve a range of shared problems. These strategies, beyond the personal and idiosyncratic, are all about gender, race, and class locations. They allow young people to navigate gender, race, and class expectations by manipulating or transgressing established gender, race, and class boundaries. Despite variations in these strategies, each project is hemmed in by the intractability of inequality. Thus, these projects show us the possibilities and limitations of intersectionality as it is experienced on the ground.

This dissertation takes a critical standpoint on developmentalism, a theoretical perspective which conceptualizes development as more than an apolitical, socio-economic endeavor: Instead, development is presented as an artificially orchestrated network of institutions and practices which have systematically created the objects of which they spoke. It molds and arranges them in specific and limited ways in order to reproduce relations of dominance. This dissertation will explore the power/knowledge nexus within the Gender, Environment and Development (GED) discourse that has been articulated by the United Nations within the Sustainable Human Development paradigm, to examine the problematization of the concepts of gender and the environment and their subsequent appropriation and bureaucratization to reproduce relations of dominance. French philosopher Michel Foucault through his complex analysis of power and knowledge, lends the most appropriate framework to critically examine the negotiation and balance of power through the analyses of discourse. This dissertation uses Foucault's fundamental insights into the nature and dynamics of discourse, power and knowledge to analyze dominant disciplinary and normative mechanisms, and thereby to illustrate how the West has produced discourses about the Third World to maintain dominance over it. In addition to the analysis of development as a discourse of power, this dissertation studies in depth the complex constructions of gender and the environment within the development discourse of the United Nations using a unique tripartite methodology which reveals the power/knowledge nexus embedded within representative gender, environment and development discursive texts. It emphasizes the objectification of Third World women and the environment as mere resources to the economy via the textual rules of formation and policy. Therefore, through its deconstruction of "underdevelopment" as articulated within the discourse on gender and the environment, this dissertation allows for the anthropologization of this domain in a manner oppositional to those based on liberal and individualistic Western notions of equity, efficiency, rationality, progress, growth and empowerment. In this way, it illustrates the spaces created by the trajectories of the three major strategies through which development has been deployed.

This dissertation examines the ways that pollution taboo affects the life experience of Romany Gypsy women. A cultural analysis is made upon ethnographic data gathered from the Romany Gypsy community in Boston, Massachusetts, combining theories of embodiment with the Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987) "three bodies" critical-interpretive model. Marime, as this taboo is known locally, is experienced as fear, shame and disgust and conceptualized in terms of top/bottom or inside/outside body symbolism which categorizes by analogy the sacred from profane, e.g., Gypsy and Gajo or non-Gypsy. This understanding leads to social praxis which is shown to affect the quality of Gypsy women's lives in personal, social and political domains. Since marime is a bodily experence which is predicated upon pre-existing cultural discourses and results in social action this analysis supports the theoretical view that the body is the ground of culture.

A macroeconomic policy framework of structural adjustment designed to address problems of international indebtedness, adopted by CARICOM countries in the 1980s, has been associated with a major setback in the process of broad-based socioeconomic development that had been launched in the context of representative government and independence. The study examines the influence of these global/regional trends on state policy, with special reference to how the altered political vision of the state, inherent in structural adjustment policies, appeared to impact the welfare and livelihood of rural women and families in St. Vincent. The study also assesses the extent to which an innovative non-formal education project aimed at community development through the empowerment of women in a rural community, served to mitigate detrimental aspects of these policies and related state practices. The study utilized a feminist research methodology with a combination of interviews, focus groups and observation that provided multiple vantage points on macro and micro dimensions of the study. The author's personal involvement in various aspects of development and the non-formal education project during this period serves as an additional lens. The study argues that a policy framework of structural adjustment severely weakens rural and social development, and is inappropriate to goals of broad-based socioeconomic development in a small island state. The non-formal education project which linked university continuing education to community organizing, served to increase human, physical and social capital, as well as enhance community norms and people's capacity to cope in a deteriorating socioeconomic environment. While this intervention was circumscribed by application to a community's immediate context, it does provide clues as to the kinds of intervention required for a fundamental reassessment of policies. The study further argues that non-formal education interventions can be applied to both micro and macro level situations and that their effectiveness in addressing social change depends on their inclusion of political education about macro/micro links and gender conscientization. Such interventions can strengthen advocacy for policies prioritizing human development within a women's human rights framework.