Development Begins at Home: Women and the Domestic Economy in Brazil, 1945-1975

A number of historians of twentieth-century Latin America have identified ways that national labor laws, civil codes, social welfare programs, and business practices contributed to a gendered division of society that subordinated women to men in national economic development, household management, and familial relations. Few scholars, however, have critically explored women's roles as consumers and housewives in these intertwined realms. This work examines the Brazilian case after the Second World War, arguing that economic policies and business practices associated with “developmentalism” [Portuguese: desenvolvimentismo] created openings for women to engage in debates about national progress and transnational standards of modernity. While acknowledging that an asymmetry of gender relations persisted, the study demonstrates that urban women expanded their agency in this period, especially over areas of economic and family life deemed "domestic." This dissertation examines periodicals, consumer research statistics, public opinion surveys, personal interviews, corporate archives, the archives of key women’s organizations, and government officials’ records to identify the role that women and household economies played in Brazilian developmentalism between 1945 and 1975. Its principal argument is that business and political elites attempted to define gender roles for adult urban women as housewives and mothers, linking their management of the household to familial well-being and national modernization. In turn, Brazilian women deployed these idealized roles in public to advance their own economic interests, especially in the management of household finances and consumption, as well as to expand legal rights for married women, and increase women’s participation in the workforce. As the market for women's labor expanded with continued industrialization, these efforts defined a more active role for women in the economy and in debates about the trajectory of national development policies.

Eighty years 'Owre the Sea': Robert Burns and the early United States of America, c. 1786-1866.

This thesis represents the first extensive critical study of the relationship between Robert Burns and the early United States of America. Spanning literature, history and memory studies, the following chapters take an interdisciplinary approach towards investigating the methods by which Burns and his works rose to prominence and came to be of cultural and literary significance in America. Theoretically, these converging disciplines intersect through a transnational, Atlantic Studies perspective that shifts emphasis from Burns as the 'national poet of Scotland' onto the various socio-cultural connections that facilitated the spread of his work and reputation. In addition to Scottish literary studies, the thesis contributes to the broader fields of Transatlantic, Transnational and American Studies. Previous studies have suggested that Burns's popularity in the early United States might be attributed to his kinship with 'national' American ideals of freedom, egalitarianism and individual liberty. While some of the evidence supports this claim, this thesis argues that it also wrongly assumes a spatiotemporal unity for the nineteenth-century American nation. It concludes by suggesting that future critical studies of the poet must heed the multifarious complexities of 'national' paradigms, pointing the way to further work on the reception and influence of Burns in other 'global' or, indeed, transnational contexts.

Faithful Genres: Rhetorics of the Civil Rights Mass Meeting

“Faithful Genres” examines how African Americans adapted the genres of the black church during the civil rights movement. Civil rights mass meetings, as the movement’s so-called “energy machine” and “heartbeat,” serve as the project’s central site of inquiry for these meetings were themselves adaptations of the genre of the black church service. The mass meetings served as the space to draw people into the movement, encourage people toward further activism, and testify to anyone watching that the African American community was working toward desegregation, voting rights, and racial equality. In Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words, “Through these meetings we were able to generate the power and depth which finally galvanized the entire Negro community.” In these weekly or sometimes even nightly meetings, participants inhabited the familiar genres of the black church, song, prayer, and testimony. As they did, they remade these genres to respond directly to white supremacy and to enact the changes they sought to create. While scholars have studied the speeches men and women such as King, Ralph Abernathy, and Fannie Lou Hamer delivered at meetings (Wilson; Selby; Holmes; Brooks), scholars have yet to examine how civil rights mass meetings functioned through a range of genres and rhetors. My study addresses this absence and invigorates this discussion to demonstrate how the other meeting genres beyond the speech—song, prayer, and testimony—functioned to create energy, sustenance, and motivation for activists. Examining these collectively enacted genres, I show how rhetors adapted song, prayer, and testimony toward strategic interventions. I also examine how activists took these same genres up outside the meetings to circulate them in broader contexts for new audiences. By recovering and defining the mass meeting as a flexible repertoire of genres and then examining the redeployment of meeting genres outside the meeting, “Faithful Genres” contributes to histories of civil rights and African American rhetorics, genre studies, and histories of religious rhetorics.

Symbiotic Cities: Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Mass Culture, 1910-1960

This dissertation examines how Buenos Aires emerged as a creative capital of mass culture and cultural industries in South America during a period when Argentine theater and cinema expanded rapidly, winning over a regional marketplace swelled by transatlantic immigration, urbanization and industrialization. I argue that mass culture across the River Plate developed from a singular dynamic of exchange and competition between Buenos Aires and neighboring Montevideo. The study focuses on the Argentine, Uruguayan, and international performers, playwrights, producers, cultural impresarios, critics, and consumers who collectively built regional cultural industries. The cultural industries in this region blossomed in the interwar period as the advent of new technologies like sound film created profitable opportunities for mass cultural production and new careers for countless theater professionals. Buenos Aires also became a global cultural capital in the wider Hispanic Atlantic world, as its commercial culture served a region composed largely of immigrants and their descendants. From the 1920s through the 1940s, Montevideo maintained a subordinate but symbiotic relationship with Buenos Aires. The two cities shared interlinked cultural marketplaces that attracted performers and directors from the Atlantic world to work in theatre and film productions, especially in times of political upheaval such as the Spanish Civil War and the Perón era in Argentina. As a result of this transnational process, Argentine mass culture became widely consumed throughout South America, competing successfully with Hollywood, European, and other Latin American cinemas and helping transform Buenos Aires into a cosmopolitan metropolis. By examining the relationship between regional and national frames of cultural production, my dissertation contributes to the fields of Latin American studies and urban history while seeking to de-center the United States and Europe from the central framing of transnational history.

Octavia's Brood: Riding the Ox Home

Octavia’s Brood: Riding the Ox Home was an evening-length dance concert performed October 15 and 16, 2015, at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center in partial fulfillment of the Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Maryland’s School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies. Inspired by the prophetic envisioning of Harriet Tubman and Octavia Butler, it explores race, otherness, ownership and story-telling from the perspective of Black women’s dancing bodies and histories. Borrowing its title from Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, it utilizes visionary story-telling, where science fiction provides a foundation for imagining socially just worlds inhabited by richly diverse protagonists. This paper is a written account of the research by which I composed this immersive dance event, leaping back and forth through time, landing between antebellum Maryland of the mid-1800s and an unknown place at an unknown date of a foreseen future.

The Careers of Two Ritas: Latinas, Hollywood, and the Dilemmas of Anglicization

Senior capstone project for AMST 450.

More Than A Movement: Unpacking Contemporary Anti-Human Trafficking Efforts in Washington, D.C.

Trafficking in persons has attracted seemingly boundless attention over the last two decades and the work aimed at fighting it is best understood when this cause is contextualized against the backdrop of other social forces—economic, social, and cultural—shaping contemporary nonprofit activities. This project argues that the paid and volunteer labor that takes place in metro Washington, D.C., to combat trafficking in persons can be understood as both a movement and an industry. In addition to arguing that anti-trafficking work is part of a nonprofit industrial complex that situates activist and advocacy work firmly inside state and economic institutions, this project is concerned with the ways in which trafficking work and workers conduct their business collectively. As an organizational study, it identifies the key players in the D.C. region focused on this issue and traces their interactions, collaborations, and cooperation. Significantly, this project suggests that despite variations in objectives, methods, priorities, and characterizations of trafficking, thirty organizations in metro D.C. working on this issue “get along” because they are bound by the benign common goal of raising awareness. Awareness, in this context, is best understood as both a cultural anchor facilitating cohesion and as a social currency allowing groups to opt into joint efforts. The dissertation concludes that organizations centralize awareness in their collective activities over more drastic priorities around which consensus would need to be gained. This is a lost opportunity for making sense of the ways that individual bodies—men, women, and children—experience not just trafficking, but the world around them.

ABLE-BODIED WOMANHOOD: DISABILITY AND CORPOREALLY EXCLUSIONARY NARRATIVES IN BLACK AND WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS DISCOURSES, 1832-1932

This project is a feminist disability rhetorical analysis of US black and white women’s rights movements from 1832-1932. Guided by Disability and Feminist Theory, it works to identify the presence and use of patterns of disability tropes in women’s rights discourses. From Lucretia Coffin Mott to Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Mary Church Terrell, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Addie Hunton, this project interrogates the rhetorical work of dominant narratives and lesser known voices in women’s rights discourses. I argue that early black and white women’s rights advocates often utilized and repeated a disability rhetoric that relied on disability metaphor, narrative prosthesis, and corporeally exclusionary narratives in order to construct definitions of womanhood. Their insistence on cognitive ability as a marker of “fitness” and “ability” provided the foundation for rights arguments based on ableist assumptions of autonomy and citizenship. I also argue that this use of disability rhetoric relied on and furthered a pervasive ableist ideology present not only in many of these movements, but in US society. In the process, US black and white women’s rights discourses have continually elided women with disabilities from women’s rights discourses because their bodies (physically, cognitively, and/or psychologically) did not meet the ableist prerequisites set for claiming women’s rights during this time period.

Social engagement and adaptive functioning during early childhood: Identifying and distinguishing among subgroups differing with regard to social engagement

This study tested the hypothesis that social engagement (SE) with peers is a fundamental aspect of social competence during early childhood. Relations between SE and a set of previously validated social competence indicators, as well as additional variables derived from observation and sociometric interviews were assessed using both variable-centered and person-centered approaches (N = 1453, 696 girls) in 4 samples (3 U.S.A., 1 Portuguese). Directly observed SE was positively associated with broad-band measures of socially competent behavior, peer acceptance, being a target of peers' attention, and also with broad-band personality dimensions. Using individual Q-items significantly associated with SE in 3 of our 4 samples, a hierarchical cluster analysis yielded a 5-cluster solution that grouped cases efficiently. Tests on relations between cluster membership and the set of social competence and other variables revealed significant main effects of cluster membership in the full sample and within each individual sample, separately. With the exception of tests for peer negative preference, children in the lowest SE cluster also had significantly lower overall social competence, personality functioning scores than did children in higher SE clusters.

Contested Play and Clean Water: McMillan Park, Race, and the Built Environment in Washington, D.C., 1900-1941

This study focuses on the intersection of the politics and culture of open public space with race relations in the United States from 1900 to 1941. The history of McMillan Park in Washington, D.C. serves as a lens to examine these themes. Ultimately, the park’s history, as documented in newspapers, interviews, reports, and photographs, reveals how white residents attempted to protect their dominance in a racial hierarchy through the control of both the physical and cultural elements of public recreation space. White use of discrimination through seemingly neutral desires to protect health, safety, and property values, establishes a congruence with their defense of residential property. Without similar access to legal methods, African Americans acted through direct action in gaps of governmental control. Their use of this space demonstrates how African-American residents of Washington and the United States contested their race, recreation, and spatial privileges in the pre-World War II era.

Shifting development in mid-childhood: the influence of between-task interference

Performance on the task-switching paradigm is greatly affected by the amount of conflict between tasks. Compared to adults, children appear to be particularly influenced by this conflict, suggesting that the ability to resolve interference between tasks improves with age. We used the task-switching paradigm to investigate how this ability develops in mid-childhood. Experiment 1 compared 5- to 8-year-olds’ and 9- to 11-year-olds’ ability to switch between decisions about the colour of an object and its shape. The 5- to 8-year-olds were slower to switch task and experienced more interference from the irrelevant task than the 9-to 11-year-olds, suggesting a developmental improvement in resolving conflict between tasks during mid-childhood. Experiment 2 explored this further, examining the influence of stimulus and response interference at different ages. This was done by separating the colour and shape dimensions of the stimulus and reducing overlap between responses. The results supported the development of conflict resolution in task-switching during mid-childhood. They also revealed that a complex interplay of factors, including the tasks used and previous experience with the task, affected children’s shifting performance.

Forensic Injustice: Human Rights, Archival Science and Racialized Feminicide in Guatemala

The call to access and preserve the state records that document crimes committed by the state during Guatemala’s civil war has become an archival imperative entangled with neoliberal human rights discourses of “truth, justice, and memory.” 200,000 people were killed and disappeared in Guatemala’s civil war including acts of genocide in which 85% of massacres involved sexual violence committed against Mayan women. This dissertation argues that in an attempt to tell the official story of the civil war, American Human Rights organizations and academic institutions have constructed a normative identity whose humanity is attached to a scientific and evidentiary value as well as an archival status representing the materiality and institutionality of the record. Consequently, Human Rights discourses grounded in Western knowledges, in particular archival science and law, which prioritize the appearance of truth erase the material and epistemological experience of indigenous women during wartimes. As a result, the subjectivity that has surfaced on the record as most legible has mostly pertained to non-indigenous, middle class, urban, leftist men who were victims of enforced disappearance not genocide. This dissertation investigates this conflicting narrative that remembers a non-indigenous revolutionary masculine hero and grants him justice in human rights courtrooms simply because of a document attesting to his death. A main research question addressed in this project is why the promise of "truth and justice" under the name of human rights becomes a contentious site for gendered indigenous bodies? I conduct a discursive and rhetorical analysis of documentary film, declassified Guatemalan police and military records such as Operation Sofia, a military log known for “documenting the genocide” during rural counterinsurgencies executed by the military. I interrogate the ways in which racialized feminicides or the hyper-sexualized racial violence that has historically dehumanized indigenous women falls outside of discourses of vision constructed by Western positivist knowledges to reinscribe the ideal human right subject. I argue for alternative epistemological frames that recognize genocide as sexualized and gendered structures that have simultaneously produced racialized feminicides in order to disrupt the colonial structures of capitalism, patriarchy and heterosexuality. Ironically, these structures of power remain untouched by the dominant human rights discourse and its academic, NGO, and state collaborators that seek "truth and justice" in post-conflict Guatemala.

"Jazz is Back": Alternative Jazz Venues and Gentrification in Washington, D.C.

Gentrification has dramatically changed the urban landscape of Washington, D.C. Non-profit alternative jazz venues have become important sites for negotiating this complex process that is re-shaping the city. Each such venue aligns itself with one of the two primary factions of gentrification: new urban migrants or long-term residents. Westminster Presbyterian Church’s Jazz Night in Southwest fosters a community of repeat-attendees resisting social displacement. The Jazz and Cultural Society unabashedly foregrounds ties to long-term residents in highlighting a black identity and its local interconnectedness. CapitolBop’s Jazz Loft demonstrates the difficulties that come with trying to cater to a young audience, and at the same time, resist gentrification. These venues present three perspectives on gentrification and together bring light to the overlapping complexity of gentrification.

The Promise of Access: Hope and Inequality in the Information Economy

In 2013, a series of posters began appearing in Washington, DC’s Metro system. Each declared “The internet: Your future depends on it” next to a photo of a middle-aged black Washingtonian, and an advertisement for the municipal government’s digital training resources. This hopeful discourse is familiar but where exactly does it come from? And how are our public institutions reorganized to approach the problem of poverty as a problem of technology? The Clinton administration’s ‘digital divide’ policy program popularized this hopeful discourse about personal computing powering social mobility, positioned internet startups as the ‘right’ side of the divide, and charged institutions of social reproduction such as schools and libraries with closing the gap and upgrading themselves in the image of internet startups. After introducing the development regime that builds this idea into the urban landscape through what I call the ‘political economy of hope’, and tracing the origin of the digital divide frame, this dissertation draws on three years of comparative ethnographic fieldwork in startups, schools, and libraries to explore how this hope is reproduced in daily life, becoming the common sense that drives our understanding of and interaction with economic inequality and reproduces that inequality in turn. I show that the hope in personal computing to power social mobility becomes a method of securing legitimacy and resources for both white émigré technologists and institutions of social reproduction struggling to understand and manage the persistent poverty of the information economy. I track the movement of this common sense between institutions, showing how the political economy of hope transforms them as part of a larger development project. This dissertation models a new, relational direction for digital divide research that grounds the politics of economic inequality with an empirical focus on technologies of poverty management. It demands a conceptual shift that sees the digital divide not as a bug within the information economy, but a feature of it.

BLACK, MALE, AND HIGH-ACHIEVING: AN EXAMINATION OF A RISK FACTOR AND CULTURAL RESOURCES FOR BLACK MALE ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT

Black boys are confronted with unique educational circumstances. They are often misdiagnosed and misplaced into special education programs (Bush-Daniels, 2008; Patton, 1998; Terman et al., 1996). Additionally, they are less likely to be enrolled in gifted and talented programs, even if their former achievements reflect their aptitude to succeed (Black Alliance for Educational Options, n.d.; Moore & Flowers, 2012). Given these statistics, a considerable emphasis has been placed on the causes and the consequences of low/under achievement for this population. As a result, the experiences of Black males who are achieving have been greatly neglected. Moreover, little is known about the factors that facilitate academic achievement among high-achieving Black boys. In an effort to bring the heterogenic nature of schooling experiences for Black boys to light, the present study examined the influence risk and protective factors had on the academic experiences of high-achieving Black boys. Grounded in the risk and resilience framework and the Integrative Model for the Study of Minority Youth Development, this study explored whether the high-achieving Black high school boys in this sample (n =88) reported experiencing discrimination (i.e. academic-based) and how this academic-based discrimination related to their 1) academic performance (i.e. GPA), 2) perceptions of math ability, and 3) race-based academic self-concept. In addition to exploring how academic-based discrimination was linked to academic achievement, this study examined how cultural resources such as racial socialization messages and racial identity related to academic achievement. Specifically, cultural socialization, preparation for bias, egalitarianism, private regard and public regard were evaluated alongside the three academic outcomes under study. Finally, the study explored whether aspects of racial socialization or racial identity buffered the effects of discrimination on any of the outcomes. Interestingly, the race/ethnicity of the student mattered for how students perceived their math ability. The risk factor academic-based discrimination was linked to academic performance. Cultural resources cultural socialization, preparation for bias, and private regard were linked to various academic outcomes of interest. There was only one significant moderating effect: a high private regard buffered the relationship between academic-based discrimination and race-based academic self-concept. Limitations and implications of this study are discussed.