Department of Gender Studies Graduate Theses
Recent Submissions
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“What’s love got to do with it?” Race, Gender, Nation and the Criminalization of Polygamy in Canada and the United States.
This project interrogates the weaponization of heteronormative marriage in processes of state formation and in relation to practices of polygamy. This dissertation explores how gender and race have been used at the service ... -
Ballet's Legacies: Beyond the Phallic Pointe
This thesis examines how an embodied aesthetic of classical ballet comes into being through modernities’ discourses and material realities of nation, state, colonialism, heterosexuality and their constitutive logics. ... -
When and Where We Enter: Situating the Absented Presence of Black Canadian Art
My thesis situates recent black visual arts practices in the context of exhibition practices and art history. I undertake a content analysis of 10 years of black visual arts reviews in FUSE Magazine and perform a close ... -
Queer (and) Chinese: On Be(long)ing in Diaspora and Coming Out of Queer Liberalism
Being bicultural, Chinese Canadian LGBTQ people face a double jeopardy in navigating a white heteropatriarchal society while striving for acceptance within their own Chinese Canadian communities. My project records the ... -
Policy, Poverty, and Indigenous Child Welfare: Revisiting the Sixties Scoop
I analyse the Sixties Scoop through the lens of Indigenous and feminist scholarship to contextualize the Scoop within the specific historical, political, and cultural moment of the postwar Canadian “welfare state” during ... -
Reworking Canadian Understanding of Transnational Labour Exploitation
Within this thesis, I seek to dismantle the dominant narrative pertaining to transnational labour exploitation of garment workers by using the relationship between Canada and Bangladesh as sites of analysis. Overall, the ... -
Performing Trauma: The It Gets Better Project as a Performance of White Trauma
Taking the It Gets Better Project as its case study, this thesis argues that the ways in which the project represents trauma is through an events-based model that centers the experiences of young, cis, white, gay boys. ... -
Drag, Demons, and Dirt: Centering Indigenous Thought in Critiques of Prairie Queer Settler Colonialism
My thesis takes as its central question ongoing colonialism in white queer settler affective and discursive relationships to the prairies and to “home.” I engage with the works of queer and feminist Indigenous theorists, ... -
Sexual Desire, Modesty and Womanhood: Somali Female Hybrid Subjectivities and the Gabar Xishood Leh Discourse
Extending work that examines Somali female identity, this thesis addresses how gendered subjectivity is articulated and performed within the Somali social imaginary vis-à-vis notions of “tradition,” modernity, colonialism, ... -
Crises of In/Humanity: Posthumanism, Afrofuturism, and Science and/as Fiction
(2016-10-15)This thesis engages black critical thought on the human and its contemporary iterations in posthumanism and transhumanism. It articulates five categories of analysis: displace, interrupt, disrupt, expand, and wither. Each ... -
Exhausting Affects: the Negotiation of Affective Labour, Neoliberal Subjectivity, and Feminist Politics Among Anti-Violence Workers
(2016-10-01)This thesis explores the affective and political life of anti-violence labour, with particular attention to the ways that neoliberalism comes to bear on subjectivity, embodiment, and relationality among women responding ... -
Governmentality gone wild: How the separation of sex workers from 'communities' contributes to violence against sex workers
(2016-08-02)Sex workers are members of our communities, whether they are local or national communities. In law, mainstream media representations, and research sex workers are positioned as outside of or in opposition to communities. ... -
'A Kind of Logic, A Kind of Dominant Logic': Navigating Colonialism, Honoring Black Mobility, and Thinking on Moving Through
(2016-06-22)My thesis thinks through the ways Newtonian logics require linear mobility in order to produce narratives of progress. I argue that this linear mobility, and the resulting logics, potentially erases the chaotic and non-linear ... -
The Canadian Carceral State: Violent Colonial Logics of Indigenous Dispossession
(2016-04-11)This thesis examines the over-representation of indigenous women in Canadian federal prisons. I situate the prison as a site of modernity to draw attention to the ways that the prison is underpinned by the logics of white ... -
White Gatekeeping and the Promise of Shelter: Confronting Colonial Logics within Women's Anti-Violence Services
(2016-03-01)In response to the recent surge in activism surrounding the missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada, the state has attempted to address colonial gender violence through strategies that involve the ongoing support ... -
Revisiting the Sixties Scoop: Relationality, Kinship and Honouring Indigenous Stories
(2015-12-23)During the Sixties Scoop, there was a mass apprehension of indigenous children from their families and communities during the 1960’s and 1980’s within Canada. This unprecedented disruption to the fabric of indigenous ... -
“How Ima Read”: Queer Rap Discourse in Online Music Culture
(2015-10-03)This thesis intervenes into recent online media discourse on queer rap and its attendant queer liberal agenda by situating black queerness, hip hop, and homophobia within colonial and post-slavery contexts. The research ... -
Pinay, Balikbayan, Canadian: The Transnational Trajectories of Filipinas (As Domestic Workers)
(2015-09-26)This thesis examines and critiques how the intersections of race, gender, and class in our current neoliberal environment produce particular complexities that are unique to women within the global chain of care. I will ... -
Reimagining Two-Spirit Community: Critically Centering Narratives of Urban Two-Spirit Youth
(2015-04-29)Since its inception in the early 1990s, Two-Spirit has become an identity category that many Indigenous LGBTQ people have taken up as a way to signal both their Indigeneity and their queerness. In the emerging field of ... -
"I Have No One, I Need Someone": Contextualizing Amanda Todd Within the "My Secrets" Video Genre
(2015-03-19)Using affect theory and feminist content analysis, this thesis situates the social media disclosures of BC teenager Amanda Todd within a larger genre of youth trauma videos on YouTube. Amanda's story has been deployed by ...
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