This dissertation examines how postcoloniality affects identity formation in contemporary women's immigrant literature. In order to do so, it must interrogate the critical fields that are most interested in issues of national and cultural identities, migration, and the appropriation of women by both Western and postcolonial projects. By examining the fiction of Bharati Mukherjee, Elizabeth Nunez, and Jhumpa Lahiri through the triple lens of ethnic American studies, postcolonial theory, and transnational feminism, I will argue that theorizing postcolonial women's writing in the United States involves sustained analysis of how particular socio-political experiences are translated into the context of American identity. I am particularly interested in the manner in which female subjects in these texts navigate between the various and often contradictory demands placed on them by their respective homeland cultures and their new immigrant positions in the United States. Although each of these writers depict immigrant women protagonists who adapt to these demands in their own particular ways, a study of these characters' gendered and cultural identities reveals a powerful relationship between the manner in which women are figured into the preservation of the postcolonial nation-state and the ways in which these women utilize immigration as an occasion to appropriate and subvert this role in the establishment of a new, negotiated identity. This project draws on three important and current fields of interest to both cultural and literary studies. Postcolonial studies, which has been central to the study of literature by minority writers, provides a useful foundation for understanding hybrid identities, dislocation, and the ways in which empire gave rise to nationalisms that utilized women in the formation and preservation of the nation-state. Transnational feminist theories are critical to understanding the implications of nationalism's appropriation of women and their bodies in it projects, and are especially useful in establishing feminisms that are not limited by American or European definitions and that defy homogenizing the experiences of postcolonial women. They affirm that there are many strategies for employing female agency, and that we must consider the particular circumstances (economic, cultural, racial, national, gender) that allow women of color to favor one strategy over another. Finally, U.S. Ethnic studies will inform my readings of texts that are, at their core, narratives of immigration to the United States and the seeking out of the American Dream. However, this dissertation suggests, the precarious position of immigrants in a nation whose ideals and dominating mythology are marred by a dark history of racism and exclusionary practices plays an important role in the establishment of an ethnic American identity in the United States.

This dissertation analyzes the political and expert discourses behind the legalization of abortion from the first attempt to decriminalize it in 1920 when democratic Czechoslovakia was established to 1986 when the institution of abortion commissions was banned during socialism. Drawing on biopolitical theories and critical feminist and disability studies that problematize the liberal understanding of rights, choice and autonomy, I shed a new light on reproduction policies by drawing parallels between the socialist and democratic regimes. Instead of assuming the mutual exclusiveness of the two systems, my inquiry starts from a different position and destabilizes the boundaries between East and West, active and passive, liberal and totalitarian. My main research question explores what sustains the continuity of the 1986 law, which allowed abortion on demand, in the new post-1989 capitalist and allegedly more democratic system. The aim is not to answer why the law was enacted, but rather what it unleashes in terms of citizenship practices. Through a geneaological intersectional lens, I go back in Czechoslovak history and follow the simultaneous paths of women’s liberation from a patriarchal order of things and their subjection to the ableist desire to achieve a nation full of strong and capable citizens. I deconstruct how the ideal female citizen-subject – the white, bourgeois, healthy, well-off modern woman of reason who individually plans her reproduction and has children only when and if she can – was constructed throughout the different historical discourses; and with what effects for the “other” categories of women – the poor, young, old, sick, the disabled, ethnically different. I argue that from their onset abortion rights were conceptualized as a regulatory strategy of power aimed at maintaining a certain population optimum by redefining women’s responsibilities as mothers who were to deliver a healthy child into a healthy environment. I am thus concerned with a certain type of biopolitical rationality, which defied tradition and religion and started to fear the degeneration of a collective more than its depopulation. Hence not every pregnancy was desirable, especially when seen as a threat to women’s or children’s health. I identify three stages of this epistemological shift when women’s health and sexuality collided into law and children’s health: its building efforts after WWI, developing spasms after WWII and functioning as a normalized structure of recognition from the 1960s onward. I demonstrate how eugenics trespassed into population politics and together with planned parenthood created a complex system of socio-biological classes of (un)desirability, determining who should belong to the nation, who should reproduce, whose life is worth living, loving and thus worth of protection. By elaborating on what I have termed female biological citizenship – that women function as civilizational identifiers and (self-)regulators of the quality and health of the nation, I suggest they are never free in regard to reproduction regardless of the political system. I conclude that this focus on the biological erases the distinction between socialism and capitalism, integrating women’s will as a governing tool to achieve societal progress.

The purpose of this project was to examine how Afro-Caribbean girls from the island of Sint Maarten narrate, navigate and negotiate their girlhood experiences. As a Black woman from Sint Maarten, this project is important due to the lack of sociological scholarship surrounding Black girls in the Dutch West Indies. This project utilized a qualitative approach that involved interview participant photography and semi-structured audio and video recorded interviews with 9 Afro-Caribbean girls who were 14-, 16- and 17-years old living in Sint Maarten. I analyzed the interview data and interpreted it using a combination of Black, Caribbean and transnational feminist frameworks which I named Afro-Caribbean transnational feminism. This framework specifically centers the lives and lived experiences of the girls. The findings show that Afro-Caribbean girls in Sint Maarten navigate their social worlds by negotiating different aspects of their lives, including their hair, appearance and food consumption to in various ways resist heteronormative ideas in Sint Maarten. This data serves as an important starting point and experiential reference to understand Afro-Caribbean girlhood in the Caribbean broadly, and specifically in the Dutch West Indies. / Master of Science / The purpose of this project was to examine how Afro-Caribbean girls from the island of Sint Maarten narrate, navigate and negotiate their girlhood experiences. As a Black woman from Sint Maarten, this project is important due to the lack of sociological scholarship surrounding Black girls in the Dutch West Indies. This project utilized a qualitative approach that involved interview participant photography and audio and video recorded interviews guided by a set of questions. There were 9 Afro-Caribbean girls who were 14-, 16- and 17-years old living in Sint Maarten who participated in the project. I analyzed and interpreted their responses using a combination of Black, Caribbean and transnational feminist frameworks which I named Afro-Caribbean transnational feminism. This framework specifically centers the lives and lived experiences of the girls. The findings show that Afro-Caribbean girls in Sint Maarten navigate their social worlds by negotiating different aspects of their lives including, hair, appearance, and food consumption to in various ways resist heteronormative views, which aligns biological sex, sexuality, gender identity and gender roles, in Sint Maarten. This data serves as an important starting point and experiential reference to understand Afro-Caribbean girlhood in the Caribbean broadly, and specifically in the Dutch West Indies.

This dissertation examines the conventions used to frame and represent sweatshops in and to the U.S. Employing qualitative research methods this dissertation examines U.S. anti-sweatshop discourse, analyzing how the sweatshop and the sweatshop worker are made into exceptional objects of inquiry, and considers what kinds of truths and subjects are garnered from them. This dissertation argues that U.S. anti-sweatshop discourse frames sweatshops as an inherently foreign problem, and that this framing contributes to U.S. exceptionalism and savior ideology. This framing positions U.S. subjects as the primary agents of change whose relation to sweatshops is crucial to their eradication, and renders causal blame upon the racialized poor within the U.S. I argue that this framing undergirds the proliferation of new ethical markets that reproduce dislocation, dispossession, and displacement within U.S. borders via retail gentrification. Ultimately, this dissertation asks what truths are made possible through a mobilizing discourse whose foundational premise is contingent on the imagery of the sweatshop and the sweatshop worker.

Thesis advisor: Ali Banuazizi / Thesis advisor: Sarah Babb / This dissertation focuses on the intersection of global and indigenous advocacy strategies in feminist women’s movements in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). I explore strategies of resistance and innovation in three contexts: (1) Globally, I analyze a sample of MENA NGOs in a transnational women’s rights network, Women’s Learning Partnership (WLP) and their interactions in the international funding sphere; (2) Domestically, I examine a local Moroccan NGO’s strategy development process and their domestic and regional partnerships when organizing to reform the Moudawana (1999-2004); and (3) Regionally, I analyze inter-organizational collaboration and coalition building between three NGOs in the Campaign to Reform Arab Women’s Nationality (2001-2008). I locate the dissertation in a feminist activist framework and draw from diverse data sources, including years of fieldwork with WLP (2004-2008); participant observation and notes from five transnational women’s rights meetings (2005-2008); a content analysis of a sample of international funders’ and MENA feminist NGOs’ websites; and two in-depth case studies with data derived from historical analysis, three months of fieldwork in Morocco, interviews with Moroccan, Lebanese, and regional activists, and secondary document analysis. The findings provide deeper clarity into the strategic action of MENA feminist movements and the variety of social, political, and economic forces that shape their discourses and practices for achieving social change and gender equality. The findings contribute to the scholarly literature on transnational feminism and social movements and its intersection with the law. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology. / Discipline: Psychology.

In this thesis, I am interested in transnational feminist scholarship and dialogue. Through close readings of Helena Maria Viramontes's texts, I place her writing in conversation with several transnational feminist scholars and themes. I begin with home, a frequently discussed topic within transnational feminism, as the experiences of diasporic and migrant populations challenge the notion of home. I locate the multiple homes presented in Viramontes's texts, arguing that these homes are unreliable spaces for their residents. I then consider male characters and masculinity in Viramontes's stories, as these men significantly influence the homes of women. In Viramontes's later texts, some of these characters support the women in their lives, as well as embrace the multiplicity of masculinity. I also explore invisibility and hypervisibility, two themes which figure prominently within transnational feminism and Viramontes's texts. Viramontes makes visible women, workers, and youth, challenging their invisibility and hypervisibility. In my analysis, I include Viramontes's two novels, Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) and Their Dogs Came With Them (2007), as well as two short stories, "Growing" (1983) and "The Jumping Bean" (1992). By analyzing these works, which were published over a period of twenty four years, we can more intricately see Viramontes's exploration of transnational feminist themes.

Conventional wisdom holds that civil society building always strengthens democracy, and that civil society gains by undermining the state. Many studies have taken the case of democratic countries, such as the United States and India. However, the emerging civil society within authoritarian China raises an interesting question to the neoclassical hypothesis. Does civil society building necessarily leads to democracy? How do we evaluate the work of local civic groups and why does that matter? This thesis seeks answer through a case study of women’s organizing around the issue of domestic violence in China, exploring to what extent the growth of women’s organizing challenges or strengthens the hegemony of state, and in what ways transnational feminism facilitates the development of feminist activism in China. The case study finds a positive correlation between the increasing women’s organizing around the issue of domestic violence and the level of state intervention. Through closely examining the work of local women’s groups in China, it identifies the structural barriers and the state regulations limiting women’s organizing, but it also explores mobilizing strategies by women’s groups and the changes they have made despite the authoritarian setting. Ultimately, this thesis attempts to argue that civil society building is a political process structurally depended on the political economy of the state, and that the state also plays a significant role in “producing” certain kind of civil society. A situated analysis suggests that local groups adopt certain political strategies and prioritize certain issues over others under political, economic, and social constraints of their living environment, meaning that the strategies and focuses of civil society groups under the authoritarian setting in China will be different from the groups in the developed, democratic countries. Meanwhile, transnational feminism provides women activists with alternative discourses on gender issues and alternative sites for mobilization.

This dissertation brings an interdisciplinary methodology to bear on the rhetorical analysis of women's sport and health social movements in the twenty-first century. Specifically, I read "sports feminism" as a rhetorical discourse that engages ongoing feminist struggles for women's rights to both their bodies and public space. Drawing on transnational feminist rhetorics, I network sports feminist arguments to international policy documents, like the Brighton and Beijing Declarations, to illustrate how the topoi of sport, health, and fitness function as commonplaces in global gender mainstreaming policy. In applying the metaphor of the network to the communicative infrastructure of global sports feminist advocacy, I also draw on new media rhetorics to analyze the role of the wireless Internet and social networking in the rhetorical practice of networking sports feminist policy and arguments across transnational lines of difference. Yet, in reading the rhetorical practices of the Women's International Sports Movement and Nike's Girl Effect through transnational feminist rhetoric, I illustrate how sports feminism is neither a homogenous discourse nor singular feminist identity, and thus, must be analyzed as a pluralistic political praxis with competing rhetorical objectives and audiences. Thus, the final chapter situates sports feminist rhetoric locally in the context of US-based girl power media culture, analyzing the impact of sports feminist rhetoric on the embodied perceptions of gender and gender relations of adolescent American girls. The project thus demonstrates the importance of understanding sports feminist rhetoric's global sociopolitical and economic roles and its impact on gendered identity and labor in the twenty-first century.

This dissertation investigates discourses of anti-violence strategies in the context of international development. While violence against women is, of course, an urgent problem, this dissertation explores how the urgency to end violence against women is socially, culturally, economically, and politically constructed. I consider the manufacturing of urgency in three case studies of contemporary anti-violence initiatives: i) American foreign policy including what has been branded as “The Hillary Doctrine” and proposed International Violence Against Women Act; ii) the World Bank’s report entitled The Cost of Violence; and iii) the United Nation’s UNiTE To End Violence Against Women and Say NO campaigns. In doing so, I argue that World Bank, the United Nations, and American foreign policies are too often technocratic, narrow, depoliticized, and are executed in an urgent manner in the interest of neoliberal economic growth, security concerns, and “feel good” aid at the expense of more holistic, effective and accountable responses to global violence against women.

abstract: Transnational feminist scholars have increasingly recognized the need to interrogate the dominance of the US and the global north in transnational transactions. Chandra Mohanty argues that transnational feminist scholarship needs to “address fundamental questions of systemic power and inequities and to develop feminist, antiracist analyses of neoliberalism, militarism, and heterosexism as nation-state-building projects” (2013, p. 968). Following this call for analyzing power from feminist, anti-racist stances, this dissertation interrogates Title IX as a nationalist discourse with global reach. As a law created in the era of liberal feminism, Title IX still operates today in neoliberal times and this dissertation makes sense of Title IX as an instrument of neoliberalized feminism in transnational sporting contexts. The following three case studies focus on Title IX as it travels across nation-state borders through 21st century ideas of equity, empowerment, and opportunity. This dissertation begins by exploring at how transnational sporting policy regarding the participation standards of transgender and intersex athletes operates under the neoliberalized feminism of Title IX. It then moves to a discussion of a Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) project--Women Win’s digital storytelling project. In analyzing SDP projects, I map the cultural logics of Title IX’s neoliberalized feminism in the context of training girls and women to record their stories sport participation. Finally, the dissertation connects the context of the first Saudi female Olympians to Oiselle’s branding campaign of Sarah Attar, one of the first Saudi Olympians. It traces her image as an import-export product for the Olympic Committee and Oiselle through equity, opportunity, and empowerment. Finally, these case studies are bridged by networking the discourses of investing in a girl (commodifying girls becoming autonomous actors through education and economics) to Title IX’s focus on gender equity in order to show how these discourses simultaneously increase and negatively impact participation in sports by women from the global south. Moreover, it offers how future research in women’s transnational sports can more ethically incorporate the standpoint of women from the global south in sport policy, SDP projects, and branding campaigns. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2016