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Title: "Readin' sistahs after school : counterstories from an all black girl book club"
Creator: Carey, Carleen
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This study uses ethnographic tools to analyze one after-school Black girl book club. It addressesthe question, “How do the students construct raced and gendered identities as they engage withtexts?” While some studies highlight the need for teachers to employ culturally relevantcurricula, more studies are required to illuminate how students themselves define which texts areculturally sustaining. Drawing on Gee’s model of discourse as type of toolkit, this studyinvestigates the stories...
Show moreThis study uses ethnographic tools to analyze one after-school Black girl book club. It addressesthe question, “How do the students construct raced and gendered identities as they engage withtexts?” While some studies highlight the need for teachers to employ culturally relevantcurricula, more studies are required to illuminate how students themselves define which texts areculturally sustaining. Drawing on Gee’s model of discourse as type of toolkit, this studyinvestigates the stories narrated by six female African American1 seventh-graders over the courseof one school year in a large Midwestern city. Using critical discourse analysis, this studyillustrates how written and oral story-telling can support students’ critical literacy development.This dissertation expands the literature on identity and literacy. It expands our knowledge aboutan oral narrative in conversational response to text, thus uncovering the potential of narrative andconversational response to text as a tool for both young adult identity development and teachereducation, especially among young women of color studying English in urban settings.
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Title: Killing the berdache and raising the two-spirit : continuing and emerging roles of American Indian two-spirits
Creator: VanDeCar, Kathryn Lynn
Date: 2002
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: High school masculinity and gender politics : submerged voices, emerging choices
Creator: Kehler, Michael Duncan
Date: 2000
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: More Than A Way Station : Ground-Level Experiences in the Field Trials of Oral Contraceptives and IUDs in Puerto Rico, 1956-1966
Creator: Lankford, Kathryn Danielle
Date: 2021
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Large-scale, field trials of emerging contraceptives occurred in Puerto Rico between 1956 and 1966. Most famously, the largest trials of the first Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved birth control pill, G.D. Searle & Company’s Enovid, occurred in Río Piedras and Humacao, Puerto Rico during this period. Despite scholarly attention to the pill and intrauterine device (IUD), relatively little is known about the trials that begot these consequential forms of birth and population control....
Show moreLarge-scale, field trials of emerging contraceptives occurred in Puerto Rico between 1956 and 1966. Most famously, the largest trials of the first Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved birth control pill, G.D. Searle & Company’s Enovid, occurred in Río Piedras and Humacao, Puerto Rico during this period. Despite scholarly attention to the pill and intrauterine device (IUD), relatively little is known about the trials that begot these consequential forms of birth and population control. When historians of medicine and science, women and gender, Puerto Rico, and the modern US have attended to the contraceptive field trials, they have narrowly focused on the tests leading to the 1960 FDA-approval of Enovid, and thus render the trials as a way station in broader historical processes. This dissertation responds to this shortcoming in the historiography by offering a longer history of the field trials in Puerto Rico. It argues that the trials of contraceptive pills and IUDs were no mere way station in the history of birth control, medicine, and Puerto Rico, but rather a generative event heralded by local actors and organizations in Puerto Rico in conversation with collaborators elsewhere. By narrating a longer history of the field trials, new insights into the nature of medical research in colonized spaces are elucidated. Ground-level physicians, allied health professionals, and women taking contraceptives come to the fore as the trials’ architects. Mainland US-origin physicians Edris Rice-Wray and Adaline Pendleton Satterthwaite worked in concert, and at times at odds, with Puerto Rican professionals like Iris Rodríguez and Noemí Rodríguez. These professional women worked during a time in which Puerto Rico was grappling with changing meanings of modernization and an evolving colonial relationship with the US. As such, the public and private agencies that sponsored their work promoted modernization and contraceptives amid the tension created by US colonialism. Trial leaders’ personal and professional aspirations also influenced the trials. Their motivations were circumscribed by gender norms from the US mainland, which were in turn shaped by Puerto Rican modernization projects and the US colonialism that undergirded it. These dynamics only come to light by focusing on the ground-level happenings. By exploring the trials well beyond 1960 and at the level of day-to-day doing of medical science, this dissertation makes it clear that the trials’ success depended upon the women taking the pill and IUD. To better understand these women and their consequential role in the creation of medical science, this dissertation uses the notion of trial “participant” in specific ways. In so doing, this dissertation attempts to go beyond the established dualism of patients and experimental subjects, reconsider the doctor-patient relationship discussed in the scholarship, and more fully attend to the subjectivity of people enrolled in field trials. This approach allows us to understand how day-to-day aspects of medical science, as much as colonial domination, shaped decisions that women made in their reproductive lives. The use of “participant” also helps us to articulate what we can and cannot know about the trials from the existing historical sources. The dissertation comprehensively examines the decade from 1956 to 1966. The field trials were initiated to answer questions on the safety and efficacy of Enovid. They expanded to address these concerns for multiple contraceptive pills and IUDs. By the mid-1960s, researchers investigated safety and efficacy, conducted basic science research, and aimed to create a public birth control program. That a public birth control program, offering many contraceptives, seemed possible by 1966 represented a sea change from the beginning of the field trials, indicating the important roles that the trials played both before and after the FDA-approval of Enovid.
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Title: Genderism : transgender students, binary systems and higher education
Creator: Bilodeau, Brent Laurence
Date: 2007
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: QUEER LESSONS IN SUBJECT FORMATION : LEARNING FROM AIDS & SEX
Creator: Travers, Jessica
Date: 2022
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: My dissertation investigates the formation of the subject. The subject I refer to here is the person, the individual who is shaped by language and discourse, is hailed by interpellation, and is affected by ideological social, cultural, and political forces. I poke and prod at how and why the subject is constructed, and during my analysis of the subject and its formation, I use AIDS literature and art as a lens. While doing so, I discover there is a tight knot around how the subject can define...
Show moreMy dissertation investigates the formation of the subject. The subject I refer to here is the person, the individual who is shaped by language and discourse, is hailed by interpellation, and is affected by ideological social, cultural, and political forces. I poke and prod at how and why the subject is constructed, and during my analysis of the subject and its formation, I use AIDS literature and art as a lens. While doing so, I discover there is a tight knot around how the subject can define and experience itself; thus, I work to loosen that knot, opening more space and air for novel ways the subject is formed—ways that do not encourage conformity, ways that give the subject more agency and creativity in how they become and who they are. Through my analyses and interpretations of works from the AIDS art archive, I uncover queer lessons that confuse, interrupt, and destabilize strict notions of what the subject is, how it is constructed, and how it can express and experience itself. Furthermore, I find that queer and perverted sexualities—erotically-driven desires that exist outside of dominant cultural norms—are an extremely powerful force that destabilizes normative ways that drive and determine how the subject is formed. Ultimately, I argue for a rescripting of how the subject is constructed and offer alternative approaches to subject formations—what I refer to as queer modes of self-authorship. Each of my four chapters narrows in on a queer mode of subject construction: queer interpellation, contact relationality, bearing witness, and desire and pleasure, respectively. These modes buttress my call for a proliferation of ways the subject can be authored and be read.
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Title: GENDER EQUITY IN COMMUNITY SUSTAINABILITY : BREASTFEEDING AND INTIMATE PARTNER ABUSE
Creator: Bomsta, Heather D.
Date: 2022
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: We live within a web, connected to our family, friends, communities, societies, nations and ultimately, the greater biome of the Earth. Healthy, thriving women and children benefit their communities; healthy women work to contribute to and help care for their families and friends, and healthy children are able to learn well at school and are best positioned to develop into healthy, able citizens. Unfortunately, the presence of intimate partner abuse (IPA) negatively impacts maternal and child...
Show moreWe live within a web, connected to our family, friends, communities, societies, nations and ultimately, the greater biome of the Earth. Healthy, thriving women and children benefit their communities; healthy women work to contribute to and help care for their families and friends, and healthy children are able to learn well at school and are best positioned to develop into healthy, able citizens. Unfortunately, the presence of intimate partner abuse (IPA) negatively impacts maternal and child health, resulting in lost productivity, missed schooling, increased healthcare costs, and in some cases the deaths of women and infants. IPA is a critical issue in community well-being and sustainability. This dissertation presents three studies focusing on better understanding dynamics around IPA that impact women and their children. The first two studies focus on how abuse impacts breastfeeding. Providing human milk for an infant has benefits for infants, lowering all causes of infant mortality and resulting in increased IQ and lifelong health benefits (Victora et al., 2016). Nursing an infant also benefits mothers by reducing postpartum hemorrhage, lowering the risk of postpartum depression and their lifetime risks of nine different types of cancer (Stuebe, 2009). These benefits accumulate across individuals, resulting in healthier mothers and children, better able to contribute to their families and communities. The first study uses a nationwide dataset from the Centers for Disease Control, the Pregnancy Risk Assessment and Monitoring survey (PRAMS), to quantitatively explore the relationship between reported physical abuse and breastfeeding initiation. The relationship between IPA and breastfeeding initiation is complex and the literature is not yet settled. This study contributes to the literature by using an alternate approach that is not definitive, but points toward new areas for future research. Working to resolve this question can help healthcare providers, IPA advocates and policy makers with better information to begin to shape interventions to support mothers coping with abuse. Breastfeeding matters to these mothers for health reasons, but also because it is one of the first major decisions they make for an infant and if they do not meet their breastfeeding goals, they often experience guilt, question their value as mothers (Jackson, DePascalis, Harrold & Fallon, 2020) and face a higher risk of postpartum depression (Gregory, Butz, Ghazarian, Gross & Johnson, 2015; Borra, Iacovou & Sevilla, 2015). The first hypothesis explored is that mothers reporting physical abuse will initiate breastfeeding at a lower rate than mothers reporting no physical abuse. Logistic regression confirmed mothers reporting physical violence initiate breastfeeding at a lower rate than their unabused counterparts. The relationship remains significant when controlling for race and maternal education, but marital status reverses the effect. Subsequent subgroup analyses show married women’s decisions around breastfeeding initiation to be significantly impacted by physical abuse, while unmarried abused mothers initiated breastfeeding at roughly the same rate as unmarried mothers reporting no physical violence. The second hypothesis focuses only on mothers reporting physical abuse and explores whether a ‘dose’ effect exists. Logistical regression again shows mothers who report physical abuse at two time points initiate breastfeeding at a lower rate than mothers reporting physical abuse at only one time point. This finding remained significant even when controlling for maternal education, race/ethnicity, and marital status. The second study is a qualitative exploration of mothers’ experience of living with an abusive partner while breastfeeding. While quantitative studies can estimate the size and direction of a phenomenon it does not tell us what is happening in the day-to-day life of people experiencing it. Qualitative research can raise the voices of women coping with abuse during the breastfeeding phase, who are the experts on their situations. It is also essential for those working to end abuse to understand how mothers and their decisions are constrained by abuse and how they use their agency to resist and survive. This study uses semi-structured interviews with thirteen mothers with infants under one year of age who lived with an abusive partner for some amount of time while breastfeeding/pumping. Using thematic content analysis, themes emerged around mothers using gender performativity, successfully and unsuccessfully, to attempt to stem the violence and chaos in their relationships. Mothers attempted to fulfill traditional female roles to appease abusive partners, used breastfeeding to protect themselves and their infants, and drew strength from family, friends, and medical/support professionals by fulfilling the ‘good mother’ role through breastfeeding. The third study examines organizational resilience for nonprofits, which often function as a key part of the social safety net by providing services to vulnerable populations and strengthening communities. Despite their essential nature, organizational resilience (OR) among nonprofits is not well studied. Finding no models specific to nonprofits, a model of OR from the for-profit sector was adapted and extended. The model adaptation focuses on financial resources, technical resources and social resources and expands each category to cover unique aspects of nonprofits that the for-profit OR model does not contain. The gap between OR and social-ecological resilience (SER) was also examined, and several SER concepts were added to enhance our nonprofit OR model. The adapted model is then illustrated through a case study of intimate partner abuse (IPA) agencies. Managers and frontline staff from eight IPA nonprofits in a Midwestern state were interviewed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The adapted model can be used by researchers and practitioners to better understand and evaluate OR not only in IPA agencies, but all nonprofits.
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Title: MISTRAL Y EL MAR MATERNIDAD CUIR, NATURALEZA E INTIMIDAD EN LA POESÍA DE GABRIELA MISTRAL
Creator: Arimany, Vivian
Date: 2022
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Esta tesis plantea que a través de la naturaleza (el agua, las plantas, etc.) la voz femenina en los poemas de Gabriela Mistral “Meciendo” de Ternura (1924), las dos primeras secciones de “Canciones en el mar” y “El suplicio” de Desolación (1922) al igual que “La otra” de Lagar (1924), alude a nuevas maneras de encarnar la maternidad y los roles de género. Se puede leer maternidad cuir al igual que un desafío de los discursos patriarcales sobre la feminidad y la mujer, y también se retratan...
Show moreEsta tesis plantea que a través de la naturaleza (el agua, las plantas, etc.) la voz femenina en los poemas de Gabriela Mistral “Meciendo” de Ternura (1924), las dos primeras secciones de “Canciones en el mar” y “El suplicio” de Desolación (1922) al igual que “La otra” de Lagar (1924), alude a nuevas maneras de encarnar la maternidad y los roles de género. Se puede leer maternidad cuir al igual que un desafío de los discursos patriarcales sobre la feminidad y la mujer, y también se retratan diferentes maneras de vivir la feminidad. Asimismo, existe una búsqueda de la intimidad, que se define a partir de las propuestas de Francisco Cruces y Lauren Berlant, como una experiencia que puede suceder tanto entre dos cuerpos autónomos como en la relación personal con uno mismo. La naturaleza es un nudo conector entre estos poemas porque funciona como trasfondo escénico, así como un vehículo para que la voz poética rompa los esquemas sociales tradicionales con el fin de vivir la feminidad y la maternidad de manera alternativa a los dictámenes patriarcales.
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Title: The queer critical research and video editing practices of The Gender Project : consent, collaboration, and multimodality
Creator: Miles, Casey
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The Gender Project is a collection of four short documentaries about gender, gender identity, and sexuality. As a collection, the documentaries offer broad representations of queer identities as they intersect with race, class, education, geography, sex, and more. Each documentary was made in collaboration with participants, meaning their ideas, feedback, and time were required for completion. The purpose of working collaboratively is to bring more balance in the research relationship, with...
Show moreThe Gender Project is a collection of four short documentaries about gender, gender identity, and sexuality. As a collection, the documentaries offer broad representations of queer identities as they intersect with race, class, education, geography, sex, and more. Each documentary was made in collaboration with participants, meaning their ideas, feedback, and time were required for completion. The purpose of working collaboratively is to bring more balance in the research relationship, with participants having agency over their involvement and representations. The methodological framework for theorizing the critical making of this project includes critical praxis, queer techne, a lesbian collective aesthetic, and researching from friendship, which structure a set of queer critical research and editing practices – consent, collaboration, and multimodality. These practices are a response to a fundamental understanding of research as inequitable, that participants bear more risk than researchers, and are left out of their own authoring. Practiced together, the contextualized and situated queer critical research practices of The Gender Project work toward a critical theory of making with implications in how we do research, specifically how researchers position participants, and what more robust participation can contribute to research projects.
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Title: Between creation and crisis : Soviet masculinities, consumption, and bodies after Stalin
Creator: Miller, Brandon Gray
Date: 2013
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The Soviet Union of the 1950s and 1960s existed in a transitional state, emerging recently from postwar reconstruction and on a path toward increasing urbanity, consumer provisioning, and technological might. Modernizing rhetoric emphasized not only these spatial and material transformations, but also the promise of full-fledged communism's looming arrival. This transformational ethos necessitated a renewal of direct attempts to remold humanity. Gender equality--or, at the very least,...
Show moreThe Soviet Union of the 1950s and 1960s existed in a transitional state, emerging recently from postwar reconstruction and on a path toward increasing urbanity, consumer provisioning, and technological might. Modernizing rhetoric emphasized not only these spatial and material transformations, but also the promise of full-fledged communism's looming arrival. This transformational ethos necessitated a renewal of direct attempts to remold humanity. Gender equality--or, at the very least, removing bourgeois strictures on women--remained a partially unfulfilled promise. Technological advances and the development of Soviet industrial capacity offered a new means of profoundly altering the lives of Soviet men and women. As other scholars have noted, Soviet women were the most obvious targets of these campaigns, but they were not alone in these projects. This dissertation argues that the Soviet state also directed intensive campaigns to remodel male consumptive and bodily practices in order to rid them of politically and socially destructive tendencies, making them fit for the modern socialist civilization under construction. Rooted in, but divergent from, Bolshevik novyi byt campaigns and Stalinist kul'turnost efforts, Soviet authorities actively sought to craft productive male citizens of a modern mold freed of the rough and coarse habits associated with working-class and village masculinities. Many of men targeted in these campaigns fell short of these stated aims. Instead, they pursued and produced their own images of masculinity outside of these official reconstructive efforts. Thus, this dissertation places malleable images of masculinity at the intersection of post-Stalinist politics, economics, material culture, and sexuality by analyzing a wide range of recently declassified Komsomol archival documents, letters to the Supreme Soviet, Soviet state records, published memoirs, newspapers, and literature.
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Title: Les Chef·fes : Une analyse genrée des films de haute cuisine
Creator: McNabb, Erin R.
Date: 2022
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Le modèle français du·de la chef·fe professionnel·le a été adopté dans les restaurants du monde entier, et avec lui, un système engendré. Bien que des recherches historiques et sociologiques (Black 2021, Ferguson 2004, Haddaji 2017, Trubek 2000) aient été menées sur la façon dont les cheffes ont été marginalisées dans les restaurants de haute cuisine peu d’analyses ont été faites sur la façon dont le genre dans la cuisine française est représenté dans les films de culture populaire. La...
Show moreLe modèle français du·de la chef·fe professionnel·le a été adopté dans les restaurants du monde entier, et avec lui, un système engendré. Bien que des recherches historiques et sociologiques (Black 2021, Ferguson 2004, Haddaji 2017, Trubek 2000) aient été menées sur la façon dont les cheffes ont été marginalisées dans les restaurants de haute cuisine peu d’analyses ont été faites sur la façon dont le genre dans la cuisine française est représenté dans les films de culture populaire. La représentation joue un rôle important dans l'image de la profession telle qu'elle est présentée aux Français·es, mais aussi à un public international. Ces représentations constituent la principale source d'informations culturelles sur la haute cuisine, et les images fictives des chef·fes définissent les attentes à l'égard de la profession dans le monde.Cette étude examine le rôle qui joue le genre dans la représentation des chef·fes de haute cuisine dans les films de culture populaire par un analyse des personnages, scènes, et intrigues de six films : Comme un Chef (2012), Burnt (2015), Les Saveurs du Palais (2012), The Hundred Foot Journey (2014), No Reservations (2007) et On a failli être amis (2016). En examinant comment les chef·fes de la haute cuisine sont représentés d'un point de vue genré et féministe, je montre que les représentations renforcent la dominance de la masculinité normative et l'exclusion des femmes dans la profession, ce qui contribue donc à la marginalisation des femmes dans la haute cuisine.
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Title: Law, justice, and gender : (re)gendering the legal system in ogidi, igboland
Creator: Reyelts, Tara Lindsay
Date: 2020
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: In this study, I use the town of Ogidi as a case study to examine how female-centric law in Igboland became eclipsed by male-centric colonial law oge ndi ocha chilu, during the time that the British ruled. I privilege indigenous knowledge as part of my methodological approach to write an Igbo history from Igbo perspectives. For this reason, I engage in frequent use of Igbo words, phrases, periodization, and proverbs to explain both change and continuity in Ogidi and Igboland over time. This...
Show moreIn this study, I use the town of Ogidi as a case study to examine how female-centric law in Igboland became eclipsed by male-centric colonial law oge ndi ocha chilu, during the time that the British ruled. I privilege indigenous knowledge as part of my methodological approach to write an Igbo history from Igbo perspectives. For this reason, I engage in frequent use of Igbo words, phrases, periodization, and proverbs to explain both change and continuity in Ogidi and Igboland over time. This dissertation is structured around three broad arguments. First, all forms of law that the people of Ogidi followed tupu ndi ocha bia (before the arrival of the British) were gendered female, as the Igbo earth goddess oversaw all legal pronouncements, judgments, and punishments, and as she designated women's councils to be judges of morality. Second, British colonial officials and their male Igbo collaborators restructured the legal system in Ogidi by imposing a male-centric law and by endowing men with novel, privileged positions of legislative and judicial authority. Third, the women of Ogidi did not simply accept the re-gendering of law that disenfranchised them and marginalized Igbo deities; rather, they attempted to reassert their judicial authority through various long-established practices that pre-dated the British arrival. While Igbo women's efforts to stop or reverse the male-centric takeover of the law were unsuccessful, the details of their protests against the colonial government and its collaborators represent evidence of the judicial authority that they had once wielded in their communities.
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Title: THE COMMODIFICATION OF INTIMACY AND GENDER INEQUALITY WITHIN SOUTH KOREAN DATING RITUALS
Creator: Glayzer, Edward James
Date: 2021
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The economic boom of the 90’s promised increased gender equity for South Korean women through their new ability to “find employment off the land and outside of the family economy,” gaining some level of autonomy from their families. However, South Korea now has the widest gender income gap among OCED nations. I argue that, while women have gained the power to choose their own marriage partners, the hyper-commodification of dating rituals has left them as unequal partners in the negotiation of...
Show moreThe economic boom of the 90’s promised increased gender equity for South Korean women through their new ability to “find employment off the land and outside of the family economy,” gaining some level of autonomy from their families. However, South Korea now has the widest gender income gap among OCED nations. I argue that, while women have gained the power to choose their own marriage partners, the hyper-commodification of dating rituals has left them as unequal partners in the negotiation of romantic courtship. Additionally, the commodification of intimacy has also increased inequality between men and women within the South Korean sexual field, hardening class hierarchies. This has had negative effects on men’s ability to materially express their feelings of interest, love, and intimacy with their dating partners during a time of slow economic growth, concentration of wealth among elites, and high unemployment among South Korean youth. I found that a reversion to a reliance on South Korean singles’ parents class status and economic clout in the competitive South Korean sexual field has taken place despite tremendous economic development, and advances in women’s rights and education. While the democratizing effects of capitalism that have allowed South Korean women to choose their own marriage partners would seem to have increased gender equality, my study calls this assumption into question and asks how this shift instead creates new inequalities. I investigate how the development of a consumer economy has affected gender inequality through the commodification of intimate relationships within dating and marriage rituals. I use dating and courtship rituals in South Korea as a lens through which to examine how the commodification of intimacy has affected gender and class inequality. Unequal access to income between genders and classes unevenly effects the expression of intimate relationships that are heavily mediated by the hyper-consumption of commodities. I argue that inequity in the economic market creates analogous inequity in dating, marriage, and intimate markets with especially negative repercussions for those who do not fit what that market has deemed ideal feminine or masculine actors. Class inequalities within the sexual field are most apparent between men whose evaluations are based on breadwinner masculinity; strongly correlated with their incomes and the class background of their parents. Women too ascend or descend the hierarchy of the South Korean sexual field through their adherence to marketable ideals of femininity and a “good wife,” namely their education, docility, and erotica capital. The emancipatory power of new technologies of intimate consumption such as the internet are interrupted by both commodification and the threat of abuse by South Korean singles with the ability to weaponize their higher incomes within their intimate relationships. Online matchmaking agencies who perform such screening services are expensive and reintroduce economic inequalities and hegemonic male power back into intimate relationships. South Koreans exploit the internet to discover new social groups and extend the reach of their existing social networks through meetup groups and hobbies rather than deploying dating applications more directly to find a dating partner. However, I argue that the rise of online dating in South Korea and its intensive commodification has actually led to the retrenchment of existing gender norms and ideals rather than their subversion.
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Title: Gender identity and defensive styles in homophobic heterosexual males
Creator: Euchner, Ruth Ellen
Date: 2002
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: Conceptualizing gender, contextualizing curriculum : a case study of teacher education coursework
Creator: Kean, M. Eli
Date: 2017
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This study explores and theorizes around issues of transgender curriculum in teacher education courses. Using a conceptual framework informed by both transgender theory and curriculum theory, I propose a Critical Trans Framework to analyze what trans-related curricular materials are currently used in teacher education courses and what factors influence teacher educators’ curricular choices. Gender-expansive syllabi were identified as those that contained required readings utilizing anti...
Show moreThis study explores and theorizes around issues of transgender curriculum in teacher education courses. Using a conceptual framework informed by both transgender theory and curriculum theory, I propose a Critical Trans Framework to analyze what trans-related curricular materials are currently used in teacher education courses and what factors influence teacher educators’ curricular choices. Gender-expansive syllabi were identified as those that contained required readings utilizing anti-oppressive, humanizing, intersectional, or justice-oriented characteristics. Data sources for this study include course syllabi, surveys with Likert-scale and open-ended questions, one-on-one interviews, and a group interview with all participants. Findings explore how participants were understanding or conceptualizing gender, queer, and heteronormativity in relation to trans. Participants had a somewhat similar approach to teaching gender as a concept, but had divergent and multiple understandings of queer. Heteronormativity was understood to be the overarching system of oppression targeting all non-heterosexual and non-cisgender people. In describing how they teach trans, the participants described attempts to complicate dominant trans narratives, establish class norms that created an environment ripe for gender exploration, and represent trans people through first-person narratives. Influential contextual elements outside the classroom include institutional and/or programmatic supports or constraints, the instructor’s own understanding and experience with transgender issues, and state or local policies.
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