Latinas for Housing Justice: The Fight for Rent Control in Unincorporated East Los Angeles

The hyper privatization of housing and gentrification in Los Angeles has dramatically shifted the racial, class, and cultural landscape of aggrieved neighborhoods. The timely need to address housing injustices––eviction, landlord harassment, and drastic rent increases in gentrifying neighborhoods is needed to further address mechanisms of capitalism that dehumanize and commodify housing. In this thesis, I analyze how Latina Mothers transform moments of housing injustices into empowerment and activism Focusing on LA County's rent control campaign led by local Los Angeles tenant coalition, Unincorporated Tenants United (UTU), I highlight the role of the Latina Mother canvassers. It was witnessed and analyzed that the Latina Mother canvassers enacted forms of placemaking, which I describe as homemaking while engaging with vulnerable tenants facing different forms of housing injustices. Informed by previous housing trauma, the Latina Mother canvassers displayed forms of homemaking, that I describe as: testimonio sharing, comadriando (gossiping), and (re)imagination of community through housing justice. Applying a homemaking framework to Woman of Color (WOC) Mother activism in aggrieved communities then allows for a nuanced analysis of social order, mechanisms of dispossession that influence local organizing, and collective community care that sustains a movement

Sex Exceptionalism in Criminal Law

Sex crimes are the worst crimes. People generally believe that sexual assault is graver than nonsexual assault, uninvited sexual compliments are worse than nonsexual insults, and sex work is different from work. Criminal codes typically create a dedicated category for sex offenses, uniting under its umbrella conduct ranging from violent attacks to consensual commercial transactions. This exceptionalist treatment of sex as categorically different rarely elicits discussion, much less debate. Sex exceptionalism, however, is neither natural nor neutral, and its political history should give us pause. This Article is the first to trace, catalog, and analyze sex exceptionalism in criminal law in the United States. Through a genealogical examination of sex-crime law from the late eighteenth century to today, it makes several novel contributions to the debate over how criminal law should regulate sex. First, this Article casts doubt on the conventional account that rape law’s history is solely one of sexist tolerance, an account that undergirds contemporary calls for broader criminal regulations and higher sentences. In fact, early law established rape as the most heinous crime and a fate worse than death, but it did so to preserve female chastity, marital morality, and racial supremacy. Sex-crime laws were not uniformly underenforced but rather selectively enforced—a tool used to entrench hierarchies and further oppressive regimes from slavery to social purity. Second, this Article employs this history to suggest that it is past time to critically examine whether sex crimes should be exceptional. Indeed, in the 1960s and 1970s, the enlightened liberal position was that rape law should be less exceptional and harmonized with the law governing “ordinary” assault. Third, this Article spotlights the invisible but powerful influence sex exceptionalism exerts on scholarship and advocacy. Sex exceptionalism has flourished despite the liberal critique, and today it is adopted without hesitation. Sex dazzles theorists of all types. For sex crimes, retributivists accept exorbitant sentences, utilitarians tolerate ineffective ones, and critics of mass incarceration selectively abandon their principled stance against expanding the penal state. Denaturalizing sex exceptionalism and excavating its troubling origins forces analysts to confront a detrimental frame underlying society’s perpetual enthusiasm for punitive sex regulation

Anti-transgender discrimination and oppression in New York City and San Francisco during the Gay Liberation Movement, 1965-1975

Transgender and gender non-conforming people in San Francisco and New York City were oppressed in many ways during the 1960s and 1970s. Due to employment discrimination, many were homeless and worked as prostitutes. While living on the streets, transgender and gender non-conforming people frequently faced arrest and police harassment due to laws against cross-dressing and solicitation. Transgender and gender non-conforming people were also oftentimes the victims of hate crimes. Even gay liberation activists oppressed transgender and gender non-conforming people. They did this by excluding transgender and gender non-conforming people from gay liberation organizations and refusing to support transgender causes. Despite the obstacles they faced, many transgender and gender non-conforming people of San Francisco and New York City carried out some of the most fearless activist efforts of the gay liberation era

You gotta fight for your right(s): street harassment and its relationship to gendered violence, civil society , and gendered negotiations

This Thesis explores particular dimensions of street harassment against women in Cairo, Egypt investigated in three ways: Paying attention to how gender, race and class intersect, I found Egyptian and foreign women utilize various strategies in order to cope with street harassment such as verbal silence, modifications their bodily movements and appropriated styles of dress which in turn strives to maintain a sort of mobile private space that maintains their respectability. However, paying attention to the discontinuities found within normative ideas of gender, I argue that women at times transgress the boundaries of it and fight back to the harassment they unwillingly receive by employing violence and class-motivated forms of protectionism. Secondly, I explored the relationship between street harassment and masculinity. I identify how social constructs of gender in Egyptian society are used to reinforce and at times encourage particular behaviors among men and women. Those notions normalize violent behaviors of men unto women and restate an ideal women\u27s subjectivity to simultaneously remain silent and honorable. Arguably, street harassment against women is a form of violence, which, enacted by men serves to reinforce notions of a hegemonic masculinity. I like others, argue that the preoccupation with women\u27s bodies in and outside of the Middle East, de-limits both their rightful access to public space and to safety. Lastly, I examined civil society\u27s role in particular feminist desires of space. Focusing on an Egyptian NGO, The Egyptian Center for Womenâ s Rights-ECWR, I examined their relationship to the Egyptian state and their role in aligning themselves with particular Western feminist ideals. I grapple with their overarching platform of naming harassment, \u27Sexual Harassment.\u27 I maintain that although they champion women\u27s rights, they must be careful in how they construct particular terminologies. I argue that the problem needs to be understood and tackled in cultural-specific terms designed by Egyptian women themselves. If not done carefully, we fall into the theoretical trap of representational politics of non-Western women and Egyptian society will continue to be split in believing that harassment is a problem worth solvin

Can a \u27Dumb Ass Woman\u27 Achieve Equality in the Workplace? Running the Gauntlet of Hostile Environment Harassing Speech

Sandra Bundy may have guessed that her new job with the District of Columbia Department of Corrections would be a challenge. What she may not have expected was that she would have to meet the challenge under very different conditions than those faced by her male coworkers. Ms. Bundy\u27s work was continually interrupted by one of her supervisors, who kept calling her into his office and forcing her to listen to his theories about how women ride horses to obtain sexual gratification. He repeatedly asked Ms. Bundy to come home with him in order to view his collection of pictures and books on this topic. Another supervisor repeatedly propositioned her, asking her to come with him to a motel or on a trip to the Bahamas. None of Ms. Bundy\u27s male counterparts, in contrast, had to listen to their boss\u27s sexual fantasies and proposals. When Ms. Bundy tried to remove this gender-based obstacle to her job performance by reporting it to a third supervisor and pleading for help, he only exacerbated the problem, telling her that any man in his right mind would want to rape you, and asking her to have sex with him. Ms. Bundy successfully sued the Department of Corrections for sexual harassment in violation of Title VII, the federal statute outlawing workplace discrimination. The implicit holding of the Bundy case-that speech alone can create a discriminatory hostile work environment-went unquestioned for many years. Recently, however, defense attorneys have challenged the constitutionality of this principle, arguing that a prohibition on discriminatory workplace expression violates harassers\u27 First Amendment rights

“You Talking To Me?” Considering Black Women’s Racialized and Gendered Experiences with and Responses or Reactions to Street Harassment from Men

This thesis explores the various discursive strategies that black women employ when they encounter street harassment from men. To investigate the ways in which these women choose to respond to men’s attention during social interactions, I examine their perception of social situations to understand how they view urban spaces and strangers within these spaces. Drawing on qualitative interviews that I conducted with 10 black women, I focus on how the unique convergence of this group’s racial and gender identities can expose them to sexist and racist street harassment. Thus, I argue that black women face street harassment as a result of gendered and racialized power asymmetries. I found that black women rely on a variety of discursive strategies, including speech and silence, to neutralize and negotiate these power asymmetries. They actively resist reproducing racialized and gendered sexual stereotypes of black women by refusing to talk back to men who harass. Understanding silence as indicative of black women’s agency, not oppression, remains a key finding in this research

An Analysis of Sexist Communications: Women’s Resistance to Harassment

This paper analyzes the nature of sexism, sexual harassment, and women’s resistance and coping strategies. Sexual harassment takes on many different forms, and the specific types of harassment impact how a women will respond to the perpetrator. Harassment consists of verbal and nonverbal interactions, microaggressions, and other forms of sexual objectification. Previous research has concluded that women’s imagined reactions to harassment vary from their real responses. In actual situations of sexual harassment, women feel fear more than anger. Psychological distress was a repeatedly reported repercussion of sexual harassment. The current study focuses on specific sentiments of insults, such as age, appearance, intelligence, sexual experience, and mental stability. I expect that specific sentiments will elicit one of the four reactions: behavioral engagement, behavioral disengagement, cognitive engagement, or cognitive disengagement. I hope that this research will contribute to reducing sexism through better understanding of women’s subjective experiences of resistance to misogyny

A Qualitative Study of Anti-Feminist Discursive Strategies in Online Comment Sections

This thesis uses multiple analytic categories drawn from the literature to identify discursive strategies used in online comment sections that function to undermine feminism. The work has two purposes: to provide a qualitative, critical discourse analysis of anti-feminist discourse in asynchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC), and to describe the ways in which the frameworks drawn from the literature complement one another in the analysis. This is done by analyzing comments from several North American websites, and describing occurrences of anti-feminist discursive strategies in terms of individual occurrences, and as they intersect with one another. Previous research has shown that the ability to identify anti-feminist discursive strategies allows feminists to resist silencing. Thus, in addition to adding to the literature on anti-feminist discursive strategies and asynchronous CMC, it is my hope that this work may be useful in denaturalizing and demystifying these strategies