This dissertation examines the participation and regulation of African American and Mexican women in the sex industry during the Progressive period of Texas to complicate ideas of womanhood. Between 1889 and 1925, sex workers survived, resisted, and contended with several shifts to their industry caused by the interventions of religious leaders, civil servants, community members, and reformers. Red light and related vice districts were socially- and legally-sanctioned tolerated forms of amusement and leisure throughout the state. Although black and brown madams, inmates, and prostitutes were not the most visible sex workers, they were often pivotal to that social and cultural fabric of numerous cities such as San Antonio, Fort Worth, Houston, and Laredo. The white slavery and antivice campaigns reshaped the discussions and reforms from the local to federal level. They created a social, economic, and political climate of stringent policing of vices that led to the eventual abolition of commercialized sex, where prostitutes of color embodied the worst tenets of womanhood. In contrast, the Mexican anarcho-socialist and African American progressive women’s club movements more broadly enhanced the views of women of color, demonstrating the ways that they (re)defined themselves. In this study, I argue that the intersection of prostitution and progressivism in the South/west represents a peculiar juncture in race- and sexual-making. At stake were the contested meanings of sexuality, race, and modernity under the growing vilification of vice by the national government and local groups in the Jim Crow Borderlands. While this dissertation contributes to the diverse historiographies of progressivism, the New South, and U.S. West, it also has important implications in enriching and facilitating the intersection of the histories of Mexican American and African American women in new and unconventional ways. Its significance is that it advances knowledge in topics of sexuality, race, and gender formation from a transborder and transregional framework. Moreover, it expands conceptual and methodological paradigms that presently exist in the field of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, by coupling them with the study of Jim Crow segregation of the Southwest. / text

This thesis attends to recent calls and decades of demands to de-whiten and de-colonise the discipline of Geography and higher education more broadly. This manuscript contributes unique empirical research and analysis on race, gender, sexuality and everyday life to geographies of intersectionality, visceral geographies of (micro)aggressions, and toxic geographies. Intersectionality is a Black Feminist framework that centres the entanglement of race and gender, (micro)aggressions are often unconscious and subtle insults experienced at the scale of the body by marginalized people, and toxic geographies are spaces with high concentrations of (micro)aggressions. The main objectives are to explore the co-constitutive nature of (micro)aggressions and space, engage intersectionality in practice through Participatory Action Research (PAR), and to centre the lives and promote the agency of students of colour, women, queer, transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) students in US higher education. The empirical research of this thesis is a PAR project and team composed of eleven people, myself included, on race, gender, and sexuality based (micro)aggressions at an elite US residential institution of higher education. The PAR team collectively curated a public art event where the university community was invited to share stories of (micro)aggressions experienced, witnessed, and produced. The PAR team’s efforts resulted in a powerful encounter that led to changes in policy and practice to mitigate toxicity in one particular place. The analysis of the empirical research involves an exploration of the fluidity, fixity, and spatiality of toxic geographies along the axes of race, gender and sexuality and within the context of the academic-military-prison industrial complex (AMPIC), a framework of structural violence. In addition, this thesis applies the higher-level analytic of intersectionality to the empirical research, connecting the micro level of (micro)aggressions, the meso level of the PAR team, and the macro level of the AMPIC to provide an empirical example of the complexity of toxic geographies, and an avenue for future research, by highlighting the material impact of the neoliberal university on the mental health of students of colour, women, queer, and TGNC students.

This thesis widens the application of intersectionality into the study of visual media. This study examines representational patterns on GQ magazine covers issued in the US with specific regards to gender-race-sexuality intersections. Also, this study seeks to grasp what meaning is conveyed via those representational patterns in conjunction with the visual and linguistic modes, and what social effect it imparts. The study employs a mixed-method approach combining the quantitative content analysis with the social semiotics, and the inter-categorical methodological approach to intersectionality. The findings show that GQ magazine employs the same representational patterns acknowledged in culture and the magazines’ market. Those patterns manifest in the sexual objectification of women, racial exclusion, and emphasis on white heterosexual maleness. Additionally, the intersectional analysis revealed that women of colour and sexual minorities are in the least favourable position regarding representational patterns on GQ magazine.

Submitted by Jorge Silva (jorgelmsilva@ufrrj.br) on 2018-02-07T16:47:37Z No. of bitstreams: 1 2017 - Tarciso Manfrenatti de Souza Teixeira.pdf: 3974204 bytes, checksum: 8e67a847e6f7ea213dcf86c16762a2df (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-02-07T16:47:37Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2017 - Tarciso Manfrenatti de Souza Teixeira.pdf: 3974204 bytes, checksum: 8e67a847e6f7ea213dcf86c16762a2df (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-02-14 / I grew up writing private diaries. However, when I got my masters degree, I was invited to re-read my writings. As I re-read it I realized that I did not write about the racial issue. This absence became a highly relevant fact that made me realize and question myself about the powerful of schooling that taught me to be a man, or rather to be male, white, heterosexual and christian, fundamentally. So today, I visualize that a "pedagogy" circulates within different educational spaces (at school, in the family, in religious spaces, in leisure spaces, in the media, in the street, at work, etc.) that ends up (re)producing inequalities of race, gender and sexuality. In this perspective, social markers of race, gender and sexuality will be presented in a vision, intersectional, polymorphic and polyphonic. According to Narrative Studies; I conjugate the verb to write/search attached to the verb to exist. And so, I'm narrating what happens to me, I write what touches me as a minor people, bastard, always unfinished. / Eu cresci escrevendo di?rios ?ntimos. No entanto, quando cheguei ao mestrado, fui convidado a re-ler os meus escritos. ? medida que ia re-lendo percebi que n?o escrevia sobre a quest?o racial. Essa aus?ncia, tornou-se um dado altamente relevante que fez com que eu percebesse e me questionasse sobre os poderosos ?instrumentos de escolariza??o? que me ensinaram a ser homem, ou melhor, a ser macho, branco, heterossexual e crist?o, fundamentalmente. Ent?o, hoje, visualizo que no interior de diferentes espa?os educativos (na escola, na fam?lia, nos espa?os religiosos, nos espa?os de lazer, na m?dia, na rua, no trabalho, etc) circula uma ?pedagogia? que acaba por (re)produzir desigualdades de ra?a, g?nero e sexualidade. Nesta perspectiva, os marcadores sociais de ra?a, g?nero e sexualidade ser?o apresentados em uma vis?o, interseccional, polim?rfica e polif?nica. Baseando-me na ?pedagogia narrativa?; conjugo o verbo escrever/pesquisar atrelado ao verbo existir. E, assim, vou narrando aquilo que me acontece, escrevo o que me toca enquanto um povo menor, bastardo, sempre inacabado.