“Sovereignty in the City” contributes to the historiography of African-American and African Diasporic life an account of how twentieth century black migrant communities’ practices and politics around place shaped the social geography of Philadelphia—a primary testing ground for urban policies, sociological and historical inquiry, and social experiments of reform up through the twenty-first century. The manuscript charts a history of alternative land stewardship and governance in Philadelphia’s black working class communities from 1941 to 1991, which I set in contrast with the urbicidal practices of reformers who worked to enhance the profitability of the region at the expense of black and working class neighborhoods and communities. I name these two very different visions of social affiliation and obligation sanitized citizenship and black vitality respectively. Building on methods and practices that Progressive social reformers, eugenicists, and sociologists co-produced, local housing reformers sought to enforce the normative patriarchal family as the ideal of health and order. This in turn, shaped their assessment of black migrants as potential vectors of biological and social contagion and justified segregation before federal policy insured it. On the other hand, from the margins black working class communities articulated new modes of sociality from within cordoned-off communities, which they refitted to the metropolis from their collective history in the agrarian and mill town South. Although otherworldliness and the tendency to participate in non-normative or queer social affiliations outside the home, often marked working class black migrant communities as criminal or odd, being out of time with the logics of patriarchy and racial capitalism also represented an important, if underappreciated, basis for envisioning a different city and world. In place of dominant conceptions of the normative family as an anchor of orderly governance and investment, black migrant communities re-imagined human belonging and practiced new modes of radical inclusivity in the city. I make the case for a landscape approach to black history, there and in the wider diaspora, in order to bring the methods developed by social, environmental, and architectural historians as well as geographers, to bear in excavating histories of black social activism, in turn, elaborating an idiom of urban ecology in which practices of place and belonging, which are often dismissed or invisible, call into question the notions of urban life and health organized around the individual and the normative patriarchal family.

This dissertation examines the assessment and documentation of sexual orientation and gender identity in the home healthcare setting, specifically patient and nurse perceptions of such data collection, as well as what is documented in nurses’ narrative notes about patients’ sexual orientation and gender identity. Chapter One describes the problem of health disparities among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) patients and how lack of documentation contributes to this problem. In Chapter Two, an integrated review of the literature on patients’ attitudes and perceptions related to the collection of information about sexual orientation and gender identity in the healthcare setting is reported. In Chapter Three, a qualitative study to determine nurses’ experiences, attitudes, and perceptions related to collecting information about sexual orientation and gender identity in the home healthcare setting is reported, and emergent barriers and facilitators discussed. In Chapter Four, a data mining study to examine what is documented about sexual orientation and gender identity in narrative home care nurses’ notes in an electronic health record is described. Finally, in Chapter Five, the findings of the three studies are summarized, overarching conclusions reported and implications for policy, practice and research are discussed.

This ethnography takes place at four of northern India’s most renowned, all-girls’ private boarding schools, established in reference to the British Public Schooling model mainly during the tail ends of colonialism by Indian queens and British memsahibs on the sub-continent. It is a story told from the points of view of founders, administrators, and teachers, but primarily from that of students, based on fieldwork conducted from July 2013 through June 2014. Schools heralded as historic venues of purported upper-caste girls’ emancipation, this study interrogates the legacies of this colonial-nationalist moment by examining how these institutions and their female students engage in newer processes and discourses of class formation and gendered empowerment through schooling. For one, it considers the dichotomous (re)constructions of gendered and classed personhoods enacted through exclusionary modernities, particularly in terms of who gains access to these schools, both physically and through symbolic forms of belonging. It then examines the reclamation of these constructs within (inter)national development discourses of girls’ empowerment and the role of neoliberal privatization in reconstituting elite schooling experiences with gender as its globalizing force. Here, seemingly paradoxical relationships between such concepts as discipline and freedom, duties and rights, collective responsibility and individual competition are explored, arguing that the pressures of academic success, tensions over the future, and role of high stakes examinations and privatized tutoring are contributing to student experiences of performative or fatiguing kinds of empowerment. Through such frames, extreme binary constructions of empowerment are complicated, demonstrating how female Public School students exist more within middling spaces of “betweenness,” of practiced mediation. Empowerment in this sense is not an achievable status, nor unidirectional process, but a set of learned tools or skills deployed in recurring moments of contradiction or in difficult deliberations, whereby students variously buy in, (re)create, opt-out of, or reject proposed models of “successful” or “legitimate,” female personhood. Overall, this ethnography problematizes assumed relationships between empowerment and privilege, questions the alignments between school and the (upper-)middle class home, and suggests that as the reproductive capabilities of elite schooling are challenged in the face of newer venues of capital, these all-girls’ Public Schools and their students are finding unique ways to remain or become the elite of consideration.

O presente estudo se iniciou a partir de uma intervenção de cerca de quatro anos, na área da promoção de saúde, voltada a um grupo de travestis de baixa renda, que realizava encontros em uma instituição pública na região central de São Paulo. O método de pesquisa utilizado foi o da observação participante ativa, priorizando-se o caráter interativo e dialógico na obtenção dos dados. Buscou-se investigar a constituição da identidade social entre as referidas travestis, pela descrição e análise de quatro eixos fundamentais para o entendimento de seu universo - gênero, corpo, trabalho e violência - na perspectiva de transcender o privilégio dado à categoria gênero nos estudos existentes sobre travestis. Procurou-se submeter cada um destes eixos a uma análise social ampliada e referida à realidade brasileira. A partir de uma abordagem critica à categoria \"identidade\", foi proposto o entendimento desta, em relação ao grupo estudado, como uma \"colcha de retalhos\" (\"patchwork\"), formada a partir da assimilação de fragmentos de diferentes identidade sociais presentes em nossa sociedade. Considerou-se que as principais identidades incorporadas pelas travestis estudadas foram as da \"mulher submissa\", da \"puta\" e da \"mulher super-sedutora\", no campo da feminilidade e as do \"viado\", do \"malandro\" e do \"bandido\", no campo da masculinidade. A \"identidade travesti\" resultante mostrou não apenas a ambigüidade masculino/feminina, mas também contradições e tensões entre as próprias identidades femininas - e masculinas - incorporadas. / This study had its origin in a four-year health promotion work, directed to low-income travestis, within a public health institution in the central area of São Paulo, Brazil. The research method comprised active participant observation , with interactive, and dialogical data collection. The social identity formation among these travestis was investigated by description and analysis of four axis; gender, body, work, and violence, each of them fundamental for the understanding of their universe, attempting to transcend the status given to gender category in other studies with this population. Each one of these axis were submitted to a wider social analysis and referred to the current situation in Brazil. The identity category was subjected to a critical analysis and was proposed, in the referred group, the understanding of identity as a patchwork, built by the assimilation of different identity fragments that are common in Brazilian society. The major identities incorporated by the studied travestis were, in the field of feminility, the submissive woman, the puta (whore), and the seductress. In the field of masculinity the viado (queer), the malandro (rogue), and the bandido (bandit). The resultant travesti identity showed not only a masculine and/or feminine ambiguity, but also contradictions amongst the incorporated feminine identities, in the same way as the masculine ones.

Esta pesquisa é uma investigação concernente ao tema do homem e de suas representações de masculinidade. Ela parte de percepções advindas da clínica e do cotidiano de que há homens vivenciando com dificuldades desde incômodos a crises as transformações socioculturais que envolvem a ascensão profissional, financeira e social da mulher. Tais transformações, motivadas por ideais de igualdade social, afetam as relações entre homens e mulheres, dado o histórico de dominação masculina de nossa sociedade, e atingem também as identidades de gênero masculina e feminina, já que colocam em questão as linhas (imaginárias) que separaram algumas representações que permanecem reconhecidas como próprias aos homens daquelas próprias às mulheres. Para realizar essa investigação, entrevistamos cinco homens com idades em torno de trinta anos, moradores da metrópole paulistana, todos de classe média, heterossexuais, casados ou que convivem com a companheira. Esses critérios foram selecionados previamente com a intenção de encontrar sujeitos que se enquadrassem minimamente em pressupostos de uma masculinidade tradicional, para verificar como eles percebem/vivem suas masculinidades em tempos de maior emancipação da mulher. Nossa metodologia consistiu em solicitar a cada um deles que fotografasse a sua experiência cotidiana de ser homem em doze fotos. O conteúdo dessas e a experiência de fotografar foram os disparadores para as entrevistas. Trata-se de um procedimento baseado no método autofotográfico apresentado por Neiva-Silva e Koller (2002). Nossos objetivos centrais foram desvelar as lógicas psíquicas envolvidas nas construções daquelas identidades masculinas, e relacionar a sustentação dessas na cultura de nosso tempo. A Psicanálise é a ciência que sustenta essa investigação através de seu método interpretativo. E na Teoria dos Campos, nome com que ficou conhecido o conjunto da obra do psicanalista brasileiro Fabio Herrmann, foi onde encontramos construções teóricas de grande valor interpretativo para nosso tema e problema / On the grounds of the theme of manhood and representations of masculinity, this research aims to uncover the psychic logics involved in constructions of masculine identities, relating the support of these identities in the culture of our times. The research stems from perceptions gathered from observations of everyday life and the psychoanalytic clinic that there are men living with difficulties ranging from discomforts to crises regarding sociocultural transformations that involve women´s professional, financial and social ascension. Such transformations, motivated by ideals of social equality, affect relationships between men and women, given the history of masculine domination in our societies, also reach masculine gender identities, along with the feminine, as they question the (imaginary) lines that split some of the representations that remain recognized as belonging exclusively to men or to women. To perform this investigation, we interviewed five men, aging around 30 years, living in the Sao Paulo metropolitan area. All of them middle class, heterosexual, married or living with the female companion. These criteria were previously selected, with the intent to find subjects that are minimally framed within assumptions of a traditional masculinity, to verify how they perceive/live their masculinities in times of a broader female liberation. Our methodology consisted in requesting each participant to photograph his everyday experience as a man in twelve pictures. The contents of these pictures and experience of taking them were the triggers of these interviews. This is a procedure based on the self-photography presented by Neiva-Silva and Koller (2002). Psychoanalysis is the science that sustains this investigation through its interpretive method and, specifically, Multiple Fields Theory, the name given to the work of Fabio Herrmann, aided us in finding valuable theoretical constructions for our interpretive efforts regarding our objective

This project follows a thread of citations of the work of Brazilian author Clarice Lispector found in the philosophical feminist texts of four European thinkers: Hélène Cixous, Luisa Muraro, Adriana Cavarero, and Rosi Braidotti. I explore the intersection of material feminisms, Latin American decolonial feminism, and sexual difference theory differentially and multiply across contexts. I revisit histories of women and texts - French, Italian and Brazilian - that are multiply and differentially marginalized in the current Western feminist narrative framework - in order to create sources of alternative knowledge and create an opportunity for something new to emerge symbio-creatively from these points of contact. Chapter One covers the genesis of European feminist approaches to Lispector’s oeuvre in France, the impassioned reading by Hélène Cixous of Lispector’s work, and also provides vital counter-memory, decolonial feminist stories on Brazilian and Latin American feminisms which have been left out of the dominant Anglo-American/Western feminist historical narrative. Chapter Two will focus on the arrival in Italy of Lispector’s texts, Luisa Muraro and the Diotima women’s feminist philosophy group’s readings. Chapter Three then covers Adriana Cavarero, as well as her split from said Diotima group. Finally, Chapter Four brings us to Rosi Braidotti, from her early texts on Lispector to present theoretical horizons. My concluding discussion stems from the idea of connections as posited by Sonia Alvarez: “a translocal feminist politics of translation is crucial to the decolonial turn and a key strategy in building ‘connectant epistemologies’ in order to confront the equivocations or mistranslations that hinder feminist alliances, even among women who share the same language and culture.” I expand on my theory of points of contact and explore possibilities of symbiosis and non-deterministic evolution as a theoretical tool.

This dissertation is a qualitative sociological account of how adults involved in the play of improvisational comedy theatre use gender in their performance. I take play seriously as an important frame of social life where culture is actively maintained, created and put on display. My approach is a micro-interactional one analyzing moments of humor dealing with social categories via video recordings. As my case study I use performances of improvisational comedy theatre at the Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB) Theatre in New York City, one of the world’s premier improv comedy theatres, to observe adults actively engaging in play with each other, a space where men find disproportionate institutional success. Building on the frame theory of Cecilia Ridgeway, I look at when gender stereotypes are invoked in creating spontaneous scenes of human interaction, and in so doing, to what extent performers are able to work through “straitjackets” of social conventions, focusing on the distinction between scenes making fun of sexism verse scenes that are merely sexist. I look at the ways that though people occupy a role, there is room for them to improvise within that role, adopting different strategies for comedic success. To this end, I conclude by comparing Shamus Khan’s range of masculine expressional opportunities theory, as presented in his work Privilege, with Robb Willer’s account of the masculine overcompensation thesis, arguing that the way in which male presenting improvisers are able to adopt the comedic strategies of minority groups under the guise of irony, thereby securing that the number of expressional opportunities available to them is greater than other groups, ensures the continuation of their dominance.

This qualitative, multi-case study examined trans and non-binary singers in the applied voice studio. The purpose of this study was to explore (1) the impact of music participation on the identities of trans and non-binary singers, (2) the experiences of trans and non-binary singers taking private singing lessons, and (3) the strategies and practices of their voice teachers. Purposeful sampling of four singers included two trans men and two non-binary individuals. Four teachers with prior experience in teaching trans or non-binary singers included two teachers identifying as trans men, and two cisgender (one female, one male) teachers. Data were collected through interviews and lesson observations, presented through portraiture analysis to provide an insider’s view of the experiences, perspectives, and practices of the participants. Findings and implications emerged through cross-case analyses. The results indicate that gender impacts musical spaces. While participation in musical activities created an outlet for some singers to explore their trans or non-binary identity, the reification of the gender binary in musical spaces was oppressive for others. Students modeled high self-efficacy by showing perceived competence to change discriminatory policies and practices in music and the performing arts. Teachers demonstrated emotional support in the applied studio by being cognizant of student needs. While the training of each student looked distinct, teachers affirmed students through student-centered pedagogical approaches, allowing students to guide their vocal training and development. Teachers discussed the need for adept understanding of vocal technique in training trans and non-binary singers. All four trans men (two students and two teachers) discussed their voice modification through testosterone replacement therapy. The two non-binary singers, not engaged in medical voice modulation, discussed changes in their voices through singing lessons. The research posits that curricular development in vocal pedagogy courses is needed to educate singing teachers on cultural competency and trans and non-binary vocality. This study revealed the need to examine applied teacher readiness in educating trans and non-binary singing. Research on the longitudinal effects of testosterone on the voice is warranted. Additional scholarship is needed in working with trans or non-binary voices not engaging in hormone replacement therapy.

Tsang, Yat Him. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 126-135). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Introduction --- p.p.117 / Chapter Chapter 1 --- "Spiritual Love, Carnal Sex, and the System Reproduced in Norwegian Wood" --- p.p.20 / Chapter Chapter 2 --- Oedipal lesbianism in Sputnik Sweetheart --- p.p.51 / Chapter Chapter 3 --- "Gaze, Narrative Structure and Female Body in After Dark" --- p.p.82 / Conclusion --- p.p.117 / Bibliography --- p.p.126

The well-documented problem of gender-based violence in South Africa has emerged in a context in which human rights are championed, new economic opportunities are available to some, and structural inequalities persist. Scholars have argued that in modern times, high rates of gender-based violence are due to a ‘crisis in masculinity’. This study reframed the crisis in masculinity thesis by critically examining how South Africa’s current transformative moment has reinscribed ideas around gender, sexuality, race, rights, freedom, and equality into the post-apartheid era. The objective was to analyze how normative, material, and discursive dimensions of the South African context shape young adults’ lives and gender ideals for and experiences in sexual relationships. The study innovates by applying an intersectional lens to explore the context of young-adult lives and sexual relationships in relation to race and class as well as gender. Data collection included 11 single-sex and 5 mixed-sex focus group discussions, and 21 interviews with a diverse – across the axes of race, class, and gender – group of young adults between 20 and 30 years old in Cape Town, South Africa. Focus group and interview data were analyzed in conjunction with field observation that took place during the two and half years that I lived in Cape Town. The study strengthens research that moves beyond reductionist views of culture, rights, inequality, gender, and power. The findings suggest that discourses on human rights, neoliberalism, gendered sexual morality, post-racialism, and personal responsibility have purchase in South Africa’s post-apartheid context and contribute to a contested landscape of transformation. Sexual relationships are a terrain upon which the contested landscape of transformation plays out. Tensions between popular discourses, human rights laws, cultural scripts for gender and sexuality, and structural inequalities allow young adults to deploy them flexibly in organizing their lives and relationships. Young adults use rights and gender as languages of social critique in a context where the ideals of freedom, equality, and justice are contested. I argue that in pluralist “modern” South Africa, cultural scripts that operate within and between a variety of social institutions offer conflicting messages about gender and sexuality that are expressed in young adults’ gender ideals for relationships. Young adults selectively pull from competing scripts and popular discourses to construct masculine and feminine ideals for sexual relationships and decide how power should be negotiated in idealized intimate partnerships. This project also contributes to research on gender and modernity by illustrating how social location shapes who and what is considered desirable in the young-adult relationship market as well as the relationship pathways available for young women and men to pursue. In sum, young adults’ discursive use of rights and their relationship ideals reveal that they are acutely aware of the discrepancies among the values to which they are exposed in South Africa’s contested landscape of transformation. The gendered sexualities they construct suggest that sexual relationships are a key location to articulate these tensions and redefine equality and freedom in their own lives.