“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

Who Do You Think You\u27re Border Patrolling? : Negotiating Multiracial Identities and Interracial Relationships

Research on racial border patrolling has demonstrated how people police racial borders in order to maintain socially constructed differences and reinforce divisions between racial groups and their members. Existing literature on border patrolling has primarily focused on white/black couples and multiracial families, with discussions contrasting “white border patrolling” and “black border patrolling,” in terms of differential motivations, intentions, and goals (Dalmage 2000). In my dissertation research, I examined a different type of policing racial categories and the spaces in-between these shifting boundaries. I offer up “multiracial interracial border patrolling” as a means of understanding how borderism impacts the lives of “multiracial” individuals in “interracial” relationships. In taking a look at how both identities and relationships involve racial negotiations, I conducted 60 in-depth, face-to-face qualitative interviews with people who indicated having racially mixed parentage or heritage. Respondents shared their experiences of publicly and privately managing their sometimes shifting preferred racial identities; often racially ambiguous appearance; and situationally in/visible “interracial” relationships in an era of colorblind racism. This management included encounters with border patrolling from strangers, significant others, and self. Not only did border patrolling originate from these three sources, but also manifested itself in a variety of forms, including benevolent (positive, supportive); beneficiary (socially and sometimes economically or materially beneficial); protective, and malevolent (negative, malicious, conflictive). Throughout, I discussed the border patrolling variations that “multiracial” individuals in “interracial” relationships face. I also worked to show how people’s participation in border patrolling encouraged their production of colorblind discourses as a strategy for masking their racial attitudes and ideologies about “multiracial” individuals in “interracial” relationships

Shattering Silence and Stereotypes: Rihanna's Lyrical Reaction to Spectacular Violence

In this article, I take up the charge of exploring how the celebrity status of Rihanna allowed audiences to see her humanity, even amidst the dehumanization of her through an objectification supported by media and society.  In the wake of that 2009 incident, Rihanna was denied her privacy specific to these events, largely because of her celebrity status.  In this way, her celebrity proved a double-edged sword, exposing her as a figure provoking the public’s attention and generating cognitive dissonance.  This dissonance stemmed from the illusion that celebrities remain untouched by the harsh realities of everyday life, including intimate partner violence.   That Rihanna became “every woman” even as she remained a superstar held in tension this reality.  This tension speaks to the normalized violence that pervades this society.  Ironically, it is this very celebrity status that helped to shatter the silence of violence

Cooking with Love : Food, Gender, and Power

This work explores the complex relationships between women, food, and power. Engaging the literature of feminist food studies allowed me to record the narratives and examine the experiences of women living in the United States. I take a close look at how women solidify and strengthen their social relationships to family and community through the use of food, or compromise and weaken these relationships through the denial or refusal of food, in the form of cooking or eating. I also consider both local and global contexts for understanding food, in terms of consumption and chores. Finally, I demonstrate how imagery of food allows women to participate in processes of commodification and fetishism

Racial Preferences in Online Dating across European Countries

Knowledge about how race governs partner selection has been predominantly studied in the United States, yet it is unclear whether these results can be generalized to nations with different racial and immigration patterns. Using a large-scale sample of online daters in nine European countries, we engage in the first cross-national analysis of race-related partner preferences and examine the link between contextual factors and ethnic selectivity. We provide a unique test of contact, conflict, and in-group identification theories. We show that individuals uniformly prefer to date same-race partners and that there is a hierarchy of preferences both among natives and minority groups. Notable country differences are also found. Europeans living in countries with a large foreign-born population have an increased preference for minority groups. The ethnically heterogeneous Swiss population displays the strongest preference for minorities, with the more homogenous Poland, Spain, and Italy, the least. Anti-immigrant attitudes are related to stronger in-group preferences among natives. Unexpectedly, non-Arabic minority daters belonging to large-size communities have strong preferences for Europeans. The results have implications for immigrant integration policies and demonstrate that Internet dating allows efficient selection by racial divisions, perpetuating country-specific racial inequalitie

Gender equity and fertility intentions in Italy and the Netherlands

Fertility levels have fallen drastically in most industrialized countries. Diverse theoretical and empirical frameworks have had difficulty in explaining these unprecedented low levels of fertility. More recently, however, attention has turned from classic explanations, such as women’s increased labour market participation, to gender equity as the essential link to understand this phenomenon. The increase in women’s labour market participation did not prompt an increase in men’s domestic duties, which is often referred to women’s ‘dual burden’ or ‘second shift’. Institutions and policies within countries also facilitate or constrain the combination of women’s employment with fertility. This paper provides an empirical test of gender equity theory by examining whether the unequal division of household labour leads to lower fertility intentions of women in different institutional contexts. Italy constitutes a case of high gender inequity, low female labour market participation and the lowest-low fertility. The Netherlands has moderate to low gender inequity, high part-time female labour market participation and comparatively higher fertility. Using data from the 2003 Italian Multipurpose Survey - Family and Social Actors and the 2004/5 Dutch sample from the European Social Survey, a series of logistic regression models test this theory. A central finding is that the unequal division of household labour only has a significant impact on women’s fertility intentions when they already carry the load of high paid work hours or children, a finding that is particularly significant for working women in Italy.fertility, fertility intentions, gender, paid and unpaid work

Family Formation Trajectories in Romania, the Russian Federation and France: Towards the Second Demographic Transition?

This study examines family formation trajectories as a manifestation of the second demographic transition (SDT) in three countries, comparing and contrasting two post-socialist countries (Romania and the Russian Federation) with France as benchmark country advanced in the SDT. By examining combined partnership and fertility sequences and transcending the mainly descriptive nature of trajectory-based studies, the current study expands our knowledge by including key explanatory factors, such as cohort, country, and educational level. Pooled data from the Gender and Generations Survey (N = 30,197) is used to engage in sequence, optimal matching (OM), cluster and multinomial logistic regression analysis. Post- Communist cohorts are significantly more likely to engage in long-term cohabitation, childbearing within cohabitation or lone parenthood. Educational level operates differently across countries, with the highly educated in Romania and the Russian Federation less likely to follow certain de-standardized paths. Non-marital cohabitation with children is associated with lower education in all countries. Strong differences emerge between the shape and stages of the SDT in Romania and Russia, with Russians having a higher probability to experience childbearing within cohabitation, opposed to Romanians who follow childless marriage patterns or adopt postponement and singlehood. The three countries differ in their advancement in the SDT and factors shaping partnering and childbearing choices. We conclude that although the SDT remains a useful construct, it needs to be supplemented with more nuanced contextual accounts of socio-economic conditions

Three facets of planning and postponement of parenthood in the Netherlands

BACKGROUND The age at parenthood has risen by about five years in the last decades in the Netherlands. Previous studies typically focused on the age at which people have their first child, but little is known about desired timing of parenthood and how this desire changes. OBJECTIVE In this study, we examined three facets of postponement: (1) desired age to have a first child, (2) changes in this desired age, and (3) whether the desires are met. METHODS We use data from the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences (N = 2,296), which is a representative sample of men and women in the Netherlands who have been followed for up to ten years. RESULTS Men and women desire to have children at relatively high ages, i.e., around age 30. About half of the respondents update these desires by increasing the desired age as they get older. Half of respondents do not become a parent at their desired time. CONCLUSIONS The high ages at first birth observed are due to a combination of the three facets of postponement. CONTRIBUTION This study contributes to the literature by showing that the high observed age at which people have children nowadays is due to high desired ages, updating these desires upwards, and not achieving their desired timing