The focus of my research has been the reverberations of the 2001 Argentine economic crisis, as they affected and were responded to by women in social movements. This dissertation contributes to studies of globalization by highlighting the unintended consequences of neoliberalism in Argentina in the form of the collective empowerment of women in egalitarian social movements. The negative consequences of neoliberalism are well known, but I found that these policies produced more than misery. They also helped to stimulate a new kind of politics—a set of autonomous movements aimed at democratizing society as well as the state. In response to rapidly deteriorating living conditions, contemporary Argentine social movements organized their constituencies in what I have defined as the field of politics by other means. In the context of failed governmental programs and discourse designed to create docile, mobile subjects (governmentality), egalitarian social movements engaged in the creation of movements whose democratic structures contrasted with the dispossessing nature of the neoliberal global power they confronted. In Argentina, this new political culture and methodology fostered, through street theater and pageants, ‘other means’ of making politics, including a concern for internal gender democracy in what has been called the “solidarity economy.” My research suggests that struggles against gender inequities have a synergistic relationship to democratic political structures. I found that receptivity to feminist discourses and opportunities for women's participation were greater in anti-hierarchical opposition movements than in those with a more traditional leftist orientation. In these autonomous movements, women were able to challenge gender inequities, democratizing both the movements and their family relationships. Their struggle for democracy and freedom contrasts with the role of neoliberal policies and practices responsible for the weakening of democratic institutions in Argentina. In this way, my research not only broadens understanding of Argentina's crisis and recovery, but it raises questions about the implications of the present worldwide economic and social crisis on struggles to transform gender relations.

This dissertation is a cultural analysis of Piolín por la Mañana, a Spanish-language radio talk show conducted by Eduardo Piolín Sotelo and broadcast from Los Angeles. The program expands the boundaries of the performing arts as well as the reach and elasticity of literary tropes and study. It connects often geographically disparate "imagined communities" of working class Latino/as by revisiting traditional Mexican theater, joke delivery style, literary genre (e.g., magical realism and the picaresque), and taxonomies of everyday personalities. Central to my discussion of Piolín is listener participation, which stages community formation within the radio-text. The introduction and the first chapter present the trope of the Mojarra, a person that crossed the U.S. border as a mojado/a (an undocumented immigrant), usually swimming or forging a river. Mojarras suffer el Síndrome de la Mojarra, the condition of feeling persecuted, believing that their freedom depends on the ability to evade capture. Mojarra Aesthetics revolves around the representational needs of the persecuted immigrant community; this aesthetic is comprised of artistic techniques that use humor and in particular explosive laughter and mitote. The second chapter explores how Piolín is a medium that connects, as well as creates, Latino communities through radio; it maps "nonce taxonomies" of recognizable immigrant personalities. What follows, explores how Piolín encourages new ways of making and analyzing art, including the use of cantinfleadas and albures as central elements of oral folklore, comprising connections to traditional Mexican joke delivery (e.g., colmos, parecidos, que le dijo, telones, and bombas). The program, via this tradition, includes cultural tropes such as the mojarra, tlacuaches, nopales, nacos, nacas, among others. At the center of this dissertation is the carnival and, relatively new on the scene, the radio carnival. The radio program produces a Mojarra Difrasismo, deconstructing entrenched binaries and creating a new reality, forcing new critical thinking about what reality is or could be in relation to the immigrant experience and the immigrant body.

The cultural productions of Katherine Anne Porter, Anita Brenner, Tina Modotti, Maria Izquierdo, and Juanita Guccione represent a distinctive interweaving of gender and class consciousness, national identification and political resistance, as represented in their artistic work. These five women became transnational carriers of a radical realist and modernist thought, culture, and ideology that became transported through their art when their gendered and classed bodies were left otherwise silenced and boundaried. These women, their cultural productions, and the ways in which their art generates a counter discourse to the dominant and institutionalized conceptions of transculturalism, aesthetics, and re-production, are vital to understanding the co-construction of nationhood as well as the self-determined creation of the individual self. From this overarching framework, I will explore how these women negotiated political conceptions of nationhood, artistic genres such as realism and modernism, and then created their own feminist, transcultural and working-class aesthetics to counter otherwise limited conceptions of individual agency.

This dissertation analyzes three novels by contemporary female Caribbean and Latin American Afro-descendent writers of the diaspora: Peruvian Lucía Charún-Illescas' Malambo (2001), Brazilian Ana Maria Gonçalves' Um defeito de cor (2006), and Puerto Rican Mayra Santos-Febres' Fe en disfraz (2009). In these texts, the old and the new intermingle in the space of the narrative. The colonial past is reexamined and reconstructed out of the need to understand its reminiscences into the present and the necessity to transform the future. These decolonial narratives of the contemporary African diaspora foster an expression of the interconnection between the two colonial spaces: where the African-descendents, especially the black female, were the objects of submission, and the present time, where the remnants of the past persist. I propose a reading of how the writers decolonize via history, memory, myth, and sex by challenging the construction of the colonial patriarchal rule and rewriting a new history to include the marginalized voices. Decolonization here implies a deconstruction of the image of colored people, especially black women in colonial time where they were deprived of their culture, personhood, and subjectivity. The writers propose a social transformation in which colonialism, racism, sexism, and classism are confronted and a new society is created, without the colonial power structure. The writers return to the roots of power and domination and examine the dynamics of the interconnection of gender, race, class, and sexuality and propose a new gender paradigm.

The seventh PopPorn Festival (2017), themed Our Body, Our Rules, revolved around sexual agency and exploration, principles that each film, workshop, and debate addressed in its own way. Inscribed in a transnational feminist and queer-porn film culture, the PopPorn Festival decimated heteropatriarchal norms while creating a space to learn, inspire, and create a variety of sexual perspectives. Epitomizing the concept of cultural cannibalism, these sexual ideas and practices traveled from their country of production to the Brazilian film festival, which absorbed them, thus enriching its own culture. Each film analyzed in this dissertation is itself anthropornophagous, the neologism I devised to express the metaphorical devouring a patriarchal enemy through pornography. These films offer unique avenues of reflection on the place of sexual pleasure and its explicit representation in Western culture, on pornography as a vessel to oppose the heteropatriarchal system, and on the extent to which feminist and queer pornographies can constitute a source of inspiration for shame-free sexual expression. The four films analyzed in this dissertation resist patriarchal oppression on different grounds and react to a state of affairs that is dissatisfying. Not only do they question norms, they also create new ways to be sexually inspired.

abstract: This dissertation examines pro-immigrants' rights activism and advocacy among middle-class White women in and around Phoenix, Arizona, in order to analyze these activists' understandings and enactments of their racialized and gendered citizenship. This project contributes a wealth of qualitative data regarding the operation of race, gender, class, (dis)ability, sexuality, and community in the daily lives and activism of White women pro-immigrants' rights advocates, collected largely through formal and informal interviewing in conjunction with in-depth participant observation. Using a feminist, intersectional analytical lens, and drawing upon critical race studies, Whiteness studies, and citizenship theory, this dissertation ultimately finds that White women face thornily difficult ethical questions about how to wield the rights entailed in their citizenship and their White privilege on behalf of marginalized Latinx non-citizens. This project ultimately argues that the material realities and racial consequences of being a White woman participating in (im)migrants’ rights work in the borderlands means living with the contradiction that one’s specific and intersectionally mediated status as a White woman citizen contributes to and further reifies the gendered system of White supremacy that functions to the direct detriment of the (im)migrants one seeks to assist, while simultaneously endowing one with the advantages and privileges of Whiteness, which together furnish the social capital necessary to challenge that same system of their behalf. The dissertation contends that White women committed to pro-(im)migrants’ rights advocacy and antiracism writ large must reckon with the source of their gendered and racialized citizenship and interrogate to what complicated and unforeseen ends they wield the Master’s tools against the Master’s house. In doing so, the project makes the case that White women's lives, as well as their experiences of citizenship and activism, are inherently and fundamentally intersectional and should be analyzed as such by scholars in Women's and Gender Studies. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Women and Gender Studies 2020

The influence of corporate money in politics is one of the most studied topics in political science in the U.S., although not so much so in recent democracies. Using new and public data from Brazilian elections, this dissertation investigates the process of institutional change that culminated in a 2015 decision by the Brazilian Supreme Court to ban corporate donations as a legal source of financing to politicians and parties. The episode exemplifies the worldwide tendency of judicialization of politics and fits the pattern of change identified by the literature as a critical juncture, understood as a relatively short period of time in which there is a heightened probability that agents' choices will affect the outcome of interest. Under exceptional circumstances of political and economic crisis, actors not institutionally in charge of law making set in motion a process of legislative change whose final outcome was not a faithful reflection of their preferences, but was deeply influenced by contingent elements. Public support in a context of severe revelations of corruption schemes explain how the Supreme Court was able to rule against the immediate interest of politicians and how the latter, having adjusted to find additional sources of money, were unwilling to reinstate corporate donation as a legal means of campaign financing. Having confirmed in Chapter two that incumbency is associated in Brazil with a negative effect on the electoral performance of office holders while the use of corporate money by candidates is legal, the dissertation examines the effects of the Supreme Court decision on municipal elections held after it came into effect. We investigate whether removing this important source of funding for both incumbents and challengers swings the balance in favor of office holders in both majority and proportional elections held in 2016. We find evidence that the ban on corporate donations favored incumbent mayors, suggesting that the historic decision, instead of levelling the playing field between incumbents and challengers, in reality helped office holders to win an additional term. It was not immediately visible due to the particular conditions in which the 2016 elections took place, when voters were particularly angry at incumbents due to the widespread news of corruption involving party officials. These findings indicate that, despite its intention to make Brazilian elections more competitive and open, the historic Supreme Court decision might have had the exact opposite effect, helping perpetuate in power politicians already in office.

abstract: El presente estudio aborda aspectos de la monstruosidad desde una perspectiva integral y transdisciplinaria que combina los estudios poscoloniales, postmodernos, queer pero sobre todo postfeministas en el campo de la producción cultural latinoamericana. Esta combinación permite poner en perspectiva la posibilidades de resistencia al tiempo y espacio en que coaccionan los personajes protagónicos de las obras a analizar: los filmes La teta asustada (2009) de Claudia Llosa y la ópera prima de Rosario García Montero, Las malas intenciones (2011); de igual forma se trabaja con la colección de cuentos Falo de Mulher (2002) y el cuento "Mãe o cacete" (2004) de Ivanna Arruda Leite; y por último, un estudio de la leyenda de la X’tabay perteneciente al sureste mexicano junto con un análisis discursivo de la cobertura de los feminicidios por parte de la prensa yucateca. La monstruosidad al interior de este trabajo será entendida como una posibilidad de aesthet(h)ical encounter, el cual combina, como su nombre lo indica, poéticas, estéticas, políticas y éticas al respecto de sujetos/personajes que se encuentran en resistencia en cuanto al acceso de la subjetividad y en contraposición a, lo denominado como, el tiempo y el espacio del monstruo. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Spanish 2019

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Latino immigrants who lack assimilation into U.S. society often experience discrimination and immigrant backlash. The purpose of this exploration was to better understand the historical lack of assimilation of Latino immigrants, so they may avoid discrimination and have more access to goods and services. Self-determinism helped explain why the Latino immigrant group has a problem assimilating due to exclusionary practices, while segmented assimilation offered explanations on why assimilation is difficult. In this study, assimilation was measured according to English mastery by Spanish speakers. The research question was focused on what extent the level of generational standing, education, and income relate to assimilation for Latinos in the United States. A correlational design with multiple regression analysis was used in this study to analyze the Latino National Survey of 2006 secondary data (N =8634). Results indicated that every variable was significant except grandparents born outside the United States. The implications for positive social change include providing research-based information that might assist policymakers to develop programs and laws that better assist the Hispanic ethnic group to assimilate into United States.