Browsing by Subject "Class"
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Item Br(others) only : Rashid Johnson, class, and the fraternal orders of Afrofuturism(2012-08) Richardson, Jared C. 1988-; Smith, Cherise, 1969-Br(others) Only conceptualizes the wall sculptures of Rashid Johnson as free-standing “altars” that play with different and sometimes divergent brands of black masculinity and classed homosociality. Primarily, I analyze three of Johnson’s sculptures from the late 2000s: I Who Have Nothing (2008); I’m Still in Love with You (2008); and Souls of Black Folk (2010). I argue that, by invoking the history of black renaissance men, gentlemen scholars, and entertainers, Johnson’s work plays with various kinds of black masculinity and homosociality that simultaneously straddle the past and future. By doing so, his art not only enacts a racialized temporality, but it also chips away at monolithic notions of black masculinity by fabricating contradictory amalgams of race, class, and gender. For my analysis of Johnson’s artworks, I utilize Cassandra Jackson’s Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body (2010) as the chief framework for conceptualizing the waxy coats of Johnson’s sculptures as wounded bodies in an effort to “flesh out” the vulnerability of black men. Theorizing the putrescent surfaces of Johnson’s sculptures as violable bodies allows me to consider the ruptures between seemingly impenetrable black masculinity and the always-present vulnerability of the black male body to violence.Item Class negotiations : poverty, welfare policy, and American television(2014-08) Murphy, Nicole Lynn; Beltrán, Mary C.Television impacts the shape of our common culture by depicting our societal fears, myths and hopes in a constantly shifting and negotiated manner. There is a glaring lack of research regarding media representations of children/adolescents in poverty. The study of this intersection is critically important for understanding societal discourse around education, healthcare, government assistance programs and even the opinions and practices of teachers and administrators. Children under 18 years of age represent 24 percent of the population, but they comprise 34 percent of all people in poverty in the United States. Among all children, 45 percent live in low-income families and approximately one in every five (22 percent) live in poor families. In this thesis, I trace discourse in the mainstream news and popular culture regarding children and poverty through welfare debates and policy changes in the U.S. from the 1990s and 2000s through the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. Subsequently, I analyze the construction of this discourse on narrative television in the shows My So Called Life (ABC, 1994-1995) The O.C. (FOX, 2003-2007) and Shameless (Showtime, 2011-). Through this mapping, I examine how gender, sexuality, race, and age are mobilized in constructing televisual representations of poverty; as well as how shifting discourses and depictions make transparent society’s anxieties regarding poverty.Item Coming to America : race, class, nationality and mobility in “African” Hip Hop(2013-05) Adelakun, Abimbola Adunni; Jones, Omi Osun Joni L., 1955-This report examines Hip Hop performance in Africa –with a focus on Nigeria- and analyzes how questions of race, racial identity, class and nationality feature in the works of African artists. The Nigerian/African artists themselves label their works “African Hip Hop” and they employ the aesthetics of the US and those of their local communities in their performances. Lately however, a couple of Nigerian artists –D’Banj and P Square- troubled the “African” in “African Hip Hop” by performing with popular African American Hip Hop artists, Snoop Dogg and Akon. It was a transnationalistic move that among other issues reflects the fluidity of identity. The performances in the videos of “Mr Endowed Remix” and “Chop My Money” also reflect identity (re)negotiation in postcolonial performances like Hip Hop. African Hip Hop, already, borrows the spectacles of US Hip Hop to express itself to African audiences. However, its collaboration with the US brings it in contact with various sociological issues -such as the conflation of race, class, gender and social mobility- that surround US Hip Hop. This report attempts a close reading of the meeting of “African Hip Hop” and “US Hip Hop” to understand how race, identity, and agency are negotiated in “African Hip Hop”Item Defining "normal" in their own image: psychological professionals, middle-class normativity, and the postwar popularization of psychology(2009-12) Hill, Victoria Campbell; Davis, Janet M.This dissertation examines the relationship between the growth and popularization of psychology in American life in the postwar period and Americans’ belief that theirs is a “classless,” or overwhelmingly middle-class, society. I argue that psychology has, until recently, inadvertently naturalized middle-class norms of self-perception, communication, aspirations, and subjectivity. From the 1950s on, the United States has been what observers call a “therapeutic culture.” Psychological ideas have infused the major arenas of American life, including the educational, judicial, commercial, political, personal, and interpersonal realms. This project examines the origins and development of psychological professionals’ views of class, highlighting the professional, economic, disciplinary, and cultural factors that combined to form those views. I analyze a small but persistent thread of dialogue in the professional literature of the period that questioned mainstream psychological assumptions about class, and I explore how that impulse developed into major mental health policy initiatives in the 1960s, then was undermined by political and social conflicts. I also develop a case history of one mental health project that attempted to transcend psychology’s class biases, only to be contained by structural and disciplinary factors. After examining psychological professionals’ views of various publics, this project investigates a series of publics’ views of psychological practitioners. I draw on popular portrayals of postwar psychological practitioners across various media, including one particular working-class medium, postwar men’s adventure magazines, and employ classic cultural studies readings to analyze the significant differences in the portrayals.Item Developing a hauntology of Latinidad(2018-05) Albarrán, Lario José; Gonzalez, Rachel ValentinaIn this thesis I utilize theories of phenomenology and performance to develop a hauntology of Latinidad. By following the specter of Latinidad, I interrogate imaginative sites constructed through the historical, social, and performative facets of colonialism’s impact in the United States. I do this to theorize notions of Latinidad in order to argue that the multi-faceted relationship between Latinidad and colonialism has summoned a specter that manifest historically, performatively, visually, and phenomenally as Latinidad. As a result, the specter of Latinidad positions marginalized individuals that identify with Latinidad in the United States as bodies “haunted” by their own biological and phenotypical disposition to Latinidad. Placing the theory of Jacques Derrida and Kashif Powell in conversation with scholars such as Avery Gordon, Judith Butler, Gloria Anzaldúa, Juana Rodriguez, and others, I evoke the language and metaphor of haunting to consider the profound effect the relationship between marginalized bodies and the lingering specter of Latinidad.Item A disaster on top of a disaster : how gender, race, and class shaped the housing experiences of displaced Hurricane Katrina survivors(2011-05) Reid, Megan Kelly, 1981-; Angel, Ronald; Williams, Christine L., 1959-; Lein, Laura; Rudrappa, Sharmila; Carrington, BenIn this dissertation project, I examine the experiences of displaced Hurricane Katrina survivors in the context of post-disaster housing policies and practices. This research is based on two years of in-depth interviews with Katrina survivors who were displaced to Austin, Texas. I analyze these interviews to understand the raced, classed, and gendered implications of post-disaster housing policies and to consider what these implications reveal about the relationship between social policies, housing, and social inequality more broadly. This project is informed by an intersectional understanding of social stratification systems and inequalities and a critical analysis of neoliberal social policy. First, I outline the gender, family, and class ideologies embedded in government-run post-Katrina housing policies and practices, and show how they specifically disadvantaged people who did not conform to them. I identify temporal domination as a specific aspect of class oppression evident in respondents’ experiences with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) rental assistance programs. Next, I specifically examine respondents’ experiences settling into their new neighborhoods and searching for jobs. I found that many black survivors ended up in segregated remote areas of the city, far from jobs and public transportation. Their job searching experiences suggest that employers used racist stereotypes about Latino workers to coerce them to work for low wages. This reveals the complex and interrelated racial dynamics of low-wage urban housing and labor markets. Finally, I explore how survivors got by in the face of such difficult and in some cases dire circumstances. One primary way survivors coped with the uncertainty caused by their displacement was relying on their social networks. While women tended to depend on adult child - parent and other familial relationships, men tended to distance themselves from the potential support of their mothers and other relatives. Respondents also constructed fictive kin relationships to provide support to others, sometimes for the explicit purpose of ensuring one or both members of the relationship had access to stable housing. This reveals how both gender and family relationships can shape disaster recovery and everyday experiences of poverty. Overall, this project contributes to the study of race/class/gender inequality, social policy, housing, and disaster recovery.Item Gender & Class in the Mexican Revolution(2024-01-17) Ferrante, Lia; Fisher, Augustino; Fisher, JacksonStudents will learn about the Mexican Revolution, specifically about the role class and gender played during this time period, through a four-day unit consisting of three lessons and a final day summative activity. The unit will begin with a broad overview of the major historical events, people, and locations that define this period of Mexican history. The second lesson will focus on prescribed gender roles (combatants, mothers, community leaders, and military support) and stereotypes of women in Mexican society, and what women were doing during the Mexican Revolution to challenge these. The third and final lesson of the unit will explore the role of socioeconomic class as an additional perspective in which we can view how women behaved and participated in the Mexican Revolution. The unit will end with a summative assessment in which students will work in groups to create their own “penny press” publication that includes short articles and visual depictions of the major issues discussed in the unit.Item Gender and class : translation and analysis of "Phislan" and "Lihaaf"(2015-05) Maredia, Farhana Noordin; Hyder, Syed Akbar; Mohammad, AfsarAfter the publication of her short story "Lihaaf" in 1942, Ismat Chughtai was tried by the British Crown on charges of obscenity. Muhammad Hasan Askari's "Phislan," although published a year earlier, was never leveled with these charges and the short story generally flew under the radar in comparison to its notorious counterpart. Throughout the years, both readers and critics alike have simplified and reduced "Phislan" and "Lihaaf" as prime examples of homoerotic Urdu literature. The vast majority of literary criticism and work on gender that references these stories maintains the view that both stories are markedly homoerotic. However, the fact that the characters in both stories negotiate arguably homosocial spaces suggests that it might be more important to focus on the issues of sexuality and gender taking place rather than fixating on labeling the sexuality itself. To refocus this attention more broadly toward these issues exposes the importance of class, an aspect of the two stories that does not receive its due, proportionate interest. This paper presents original translations of Askari's "Phislan" and Chughtai's "Lihaaf," and then undertakes an analysis of the aforementioned issues of sexuality, gender and class.Item Lesson 3: Women and Socioeconomic Class in Early 20th-Century Mexico(2024-01-17) Ferrante, Lia; Fisher, Augustino; Fisher, JacksonThis lesson focuses on how women from different socioeconomic classes experienced the Mexican Revolution.Item Lesson 4: Mexican “Penny Press” Publications(2024-01-17) Ferrante, Lia; Fisher, Augustino; Fisher, JacksonStudents will be introduced to the concept of penny presses and political journals in the context of the Mexican Revolution.Item “Let us forge one path together” : gender, class, and political subjectivities in a Haitian popular neighborhood(2015-05) Selby, Lynn Marie; Gordon, Edmund Tayloe; Strong, Pauline` T`; Costa Vargas, João H; Wilks, Jennifer M; Arroyo Martínez, JossiannaOver sixty years after the introduction of women’s suffrage and nearly forty years after the uneven institutionalization of representative democracy, the majority of Haitian women face mounting challenges to maintaining their livelihoods and playing more prominent roles in politics. This dissertation advances an understanding of poor urban women’s collective potential and the challenges to their self-making as agents of change. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted from 2008 to 2010 in the popular neighborhood of Matisan, Port-au-Prince, I argue how middle-aged and elder women activists are a crucial and overlooked source of hope for Haiti: they have insights, skills, and experience acquired through the political upheavals, environmental crises, and macro-economic developments of the last decades that could inform strategies for social and structural change. After providing a popular history of a prominent women's organization, I use the lives of three individual community organizers as case studies to explore the hierarchies that shape their community and activist roles and detail how their positioning within a micro-social layer also entails negotiations within networks of support and influence. Tumultuous events during my research brought to light the constraints women experience in how social responses and movements develop in spite of their significant involvement and sacrifices. Confounded by class and gender hierarchies and the stigma of residency in a popular neighborhood, these women’s political utterances are selected and filtered by middle-class women advocates and male peers. Finally, I examine how neoliberal policies and foreign intervention in Haiti have privatized the public interest and the postcolonial State and promoted the role of intermediaries in development and politics for women and the poor majority. I describe how interventions carried out in Matisan—ranging from small food donations from wealthier residents to internationally-funded disaster relief—rely on women's passive rather than active participation, exacerbate competition among them as prospective beneficiaries, and provide temporary help at best. Through my research, I aim to make legible the everyday forms of communitarianism and sociality among these women that foster community and animate grassroots politics, and further propose that these practices could be constitutive of a political platform in and of itself.Item New faces changing spaces : how gentrification shapes individual demand for policing(2023-12) Verrilli, Allison; Walker, Hannah L.How does gentrification impact individual demand for policing? Previous research finds that gentrification is associated with more calls to the police but cannot show which residents make these calls or evaluate explanations for why these calls occur. My novel individual-level approach allows me to test common assumptions and ethnographic findings about gentrification and policing. Using a within-subject design that matches 2014-2021 voter file data with administrative police records from Austin, TX, I show that gentrifiers make more calls to the police than long-term residents in gentrifying neighborhoods and that this increasing call volume is associated with the act of moving. Specifically, I show that wealthier, white gentrifiers demand more policing as they move into spaces with relatively higher levels of poverty and more non-white residents regardless of changes in crime. These findings challenge the common assumption that crime alone drives demand for policing, instead highlighting the impact of poverty and race in shaping individual political behavior in gentrifying contexts.Item Spaces of indulgence : desire, disgust, and the aesthetics of mass appeal(2012-05) Kolberg, Stephanie Jean 1976-; Meikle, Jeffrey L., 1949-; Hoelscher, Steven D.; Davis, Janet; Engelhardt, Elizabeth; Smith, Mark; Adams, PaulThis dissertation examines the narratives surrounding spaces that represent a fantasy of democratized pleasure, power, and excess. In looking at the construction of the gentlemen’s club image, the promotion of Carnival cruise ships, and the discourse surrounding Red Lobster, this project explores the way different types of “indulgent” consumer spaces embody tensions between disgust and desire, and serve as examples of the way various anxieties and ideals are formulated and invoked as articulations of/contests over aesthetic meaning. By putting seemingly disparate types of consumer spaces into conversation with one another, this dissertation seeks to analyze underlying interconnections which would otherwise remain cordoned off in separate disciplines and within separate schools of thought. The upscaling of strip clubs into gentlemen’s clubs, beginning in the 1980s, reveals the methods by which so-called elements of disgust have been disguised, and in which aesthetic cues have been employed to minimize feelings of transgression and to bolster a sense of mainstream “normalcy.” Through downplaying elements seen as lower-class, gentlemen’s club owners have attempted to obscure cues of transgression in order to normalize zones of male power. The so-called downscaling of leisure cruising via Carnival Cruise Lines, from an elite option for the wealthy to a popular and growing mass-market vacation for all, demonstrates the desire for an aesthetic of fun and accessibility which meshes with late twentieth-century notions of Americanness as non-pretentious and playful. Carnival cruise ships embody an aesthetic of overflowing juxtaposition and freneticism which seeks to symbolically annihilate class differences and redistribute power. Lastly, the popular discourse surrounding Red Lobster and all-you-can-eat buffets reveals the way spaces of everyday life become fraught symbols of larger cultural tensions. Such narratives embody various concerns with and ideas about “middleness” and serve as barely concealed statements of disgust towards mass culture and abundance, and towards those who are perceived as somehow powerless. Overall, the tense relationship between desire and disgust that persists within American consumer culture reveals a conflicted relationship between access and excess, and demonstrates the way discussions of aesthetics reveal deep-seated views about class.Item Tides of the changing same : race, class, gender and school choice in neoliberal times(2019-05-14) Mott, Michelle Lea; Rudrappa, Sharmila, 1966-; Browne, Simone; Carrington, Ben; Palmer, Deborah; Tang, Eric, 1974-; Young, MichaelIn many public school districts across the nation, the policy of allowing parents to select the school their child attends is gaining greater popularity. Advocates for this policy argue that it enables the public sector to function more like the private sector, putting the onus of success and high achievement on the schools directly. As the theory goes, the market-based policies of competition and tethering funding to performance incentivizes school improvement that will benefit the educational needs and outcomes for all students. Critics of this policy argue that this neoliberal model exacerbates existing inequities in the distribution of economic resources and educational attainments. In this dissertation, I use ethnographic methods to explore what happens when school choice policies and practices intersect with neoliberal urbanism. The research for this project was conducted in an urban school that adopted specialized bilingual English-Spanish immersion programming as both a means to thwart declining student enrollment resulting from neighborhood gentrification and to serve the existing population of working class and low-income, predominately Latinx, students. As the school and the dual-language programming gain greater popularity, and as the neighborhood continues to see higher costs for housing, the school population becomes increasingly middle-class. Basing my study in a two-way dual language immersion school in a rapidly gentrifying urban area, I explore questions of belonging, equity, and resource allocation in neoliberal times. This study looks at the ways that teachers, administrators, and parents of disparate racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, national, and linguistic subjectivities interact and respond to school integration and (re)segregation. In the end, I argue that as the modes for securing middle-class advantages are part and parcel of our educational structure, they work alongside and through other mechanisms of (re)producing social inequalities along racialized, classed, and gendered lines.Item Too foul and dishonoring to be overlooked : newspaper responses to controversial English stars in the Northeastern United States, 1820-1870(2010-05) Smith, Tamara Leanne; Canning, Charlotte, 1964-; Jones, Joni L.; Wolf, Stacy; Thompson, Shirley E.; Forgie, GeorgeIn the nineteenth century, theatre and newspapers were the dominant expressions of popular culture in the northeastern United States, and together formed a crucial discursive node in the ongoing negotiation of American national identity. Focusing on the five decades between 1820 and 1870, during which touring stars from Great Britain enjoyed their most lucrative years of popularity on United States stages, this dissertation examines three instances in which English performers entered into this nationalizing forum and became flashpoints for journalists seeking to define the nature and bounds of American citizenship and culture. In 1821, Edmund Kean’s refusal to perform in Boston caused a scandal that revealed a widespread fixation among social elites with delineating the ethnic and economic limits of citizenship in a republican nation. In 1849, an ongoing rivalry between the English tragedian William Charles Macready and his American competitor Edwin Forrest culminated in the deadly Astor Place riot. By configuring the actors as champions in a struggle between bourgeois authority and working-class populism, the New York press inserted these local events into international patterns of economic conflict and revolutionary violence. Nearly twenty years later, the arrival of the Lydia Thompson Burlesque Troupe in 1868 drew rhetoric that reflected the popular press’ growing preoccupation with gender, particularly the question of woman suffrage and the preservation of the United States’ international reputation as a powerfully masculine nation in the wake of the Civil War. Three distinct cultural currents pervade each of these case studies: the new nation’s anxieties about its former colonizer’s cultural influence, competing political and cultural ideologies within the United States, and the changing perspectives and agendas of the ascendant popular press. Exploring the points where these forces intersect, this dissertation aims to contribute to an understanding of how popular culture helped shape an emerging sense of American national identity. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that in the mid-nineteenth century northeastern United States, popular theatre, newspapers, and audiences all contributed to a single media formation in which controversial English performers became a rhetorical antipode against which “American” identity could be defined.Item A very modern tradition : Costa Rican swing criollo as urban popular folklore(2014-05) Griffith, James Brian; Moore, Robin D., 1964-Over the past ten years, the Costa Rican dance style known as swing criollo has gone from relative obscurity to acceptance as national heritage. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was considered a dance of the urban working-class chusma, or "riff-raff," because of its associations with the working-class music of cumbia and San José's seedy dance salons. Starting in the early 2000s, however, an active campaign of nationalization and folklorization by dance instructors brought the dance to the status of national patrimony. This was achieved through dance classes, festival performances, the creation of a short video documentary, and the work of the dance company La Cuna del Swing to canonize the dancers and stages of swing criollo. The folklorization of swing criollo at first seems to be a top-down phenomenon that suggests little agency among working-class dancers; they have been personified in the national imaginary as exotic Others, an urban folk from an earlier generation that now exists only to perform and embody that tradition. On further examination, the folklorization of swing criollo represents a new sort of folklore, one that is highly contested and engages in a different discourse of authenticity, some influenced by dancers themselves. Swing criollo as a "modern" and "urban" form has allowed for self-mythmaking among the dancers of the self-proclaimed "old guard" that invented the style. It also legitimizes the dance style in its popular form, as opposed to older projections of folklore that that place tradition in opposition to modernity. I examine discourses surrounding the nationalization of swing criollo as well as the negotiations of spaces of culture through which swing's legitimization unfolded. I conclude by suggesting that ethnomusicologists should continue to theorize folklore's changing nature as it is contested and re-defined to include popular, urban, and modern cultural expressions.Item What does money mean? : frames of wealth and economic identity in U.S. politics, 1980-2020(2022-07-28) Park-Ozee, Dakota E.; Jarvis, Sharon E., 1969-; Hart, Roderick P; Stroud, Natalie J; Coe, KevinIn this dissertation, I interrogate the ways political candidates’, elite journalists’, and everyday peoples’ discourses address the U.S. political hierarchy in terms of the role(s) of money in politics and of wealth and wealth-based identities. I am interested in if and how groups in the U.S. use or ignore differences in class and wealth to order who and what is important in our democratic republic. This dissertation focuses on that concern in six chapters. In the first chapter, I overview the historic and contemporary contexts of wealth in the United States, address the place of money in politics, and provide a theoretical framework for the project. In Chapter Two, I present the research design and methodological choices for the three cases that compose my analysis. In the subsequent chapters, I present my results. Chapter Three is an inductive, computer-assisted, quantitative analysis of wealth-based frames promoted by presidential candidates across 40 years of U.S. elections (1980-2020). Chapter Four uses a deductive, human-coded, quantitative content analysis to assess the frames propagated by print and television news organizations across the same period. Chapter Five uses open-ended survey responses from 2020 to inductively and qualitatively examine how the language of everyday individuals frames money and political power. In the closing chapter, I synthesize my findings and compare the wealth-based hierarchies crafted by presidential candidates, elite journalists, and everyday individuals in political and public life in the U.S. In the end, I argue there is a top-down effort to background class-based identities and flatten different socioeconomic experiences to the moniker of middle class, but there is also a ground-up rebuttal to challenge the overdetermining power of money in U.S. political life and use that power to create a moral, equitable democracy.