This project locates feminist ethnic studies writing, teaching, and learning practices as an archive of psychosocial theory holding insurgent knowledge. Psychosocial theory is defined as an analytic and a reading practice linking structural, historical, and material conditions to intra-psychic- and intersubjective realities. Insurgent knowledges analyze and transform structures of material, psychic, and epistemic violence through nurturing creative power and fostering the collectivities and coalitions that unleash personal and collective transformations. Especially highlighted in this study are the forms of labor—affective, psychic, intellectual, and spiritual—entwined within such revolutionary knowledge in feminist ethnic studies histories. Archives of psychosocial theory analyzed include U.S. Black feminist theory, with attention to the works of Hortense Spillers, Patricia J. Williams, Saidiya Hartman, Barbara Smith, and Barbara Christian. The texts are read through considering historical changes over time within the development of the field of U.S. Black women’s studies. Gloria Anzaldúa’s body of work is also taken up through examining how her writing methods and spiritual practices infused her theories of the psyche, identity, a decolonized sensorium, and trauma. Chicana psychosocial theories of identity, including those by Norma Alarcón, are integrated alongside the analysis of Anzaldúa’s work. Additionally, the psychosocial contributions to learning, teaching, and writing of transnational feminists, namely Chandra Talpade Mohanty and M. Jacqui Alexander, are placed in conversation with feminist psychoanalytic clinicians Deborah Britzman and Lynne Layton, as well as Indigenous studies epistemologies, including work on education by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Sandy Grande, Sandra Styres, and Eve Tuck. Finally, the array of psychosocial theories in this project are used to develop the concept of “contemplative-critical” writing practices that explore “theory in the flesh” (Moraga, 1981) and “threshold identities” (Keating, 1996) in education practices. This dissertation is meant to collaborate in conversations on transformative education practices across several fields including ethnic studies; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; trauma studies; writing studies; and contemplative studies.

The transformative process of adolescence plays an enormous role in shaping personal identity and worldview. Cultural celebrations, like the quinceañera, contribute to this transformation and provide a framework for understanding how the process of growing up is informed by ethnic heritage, socioeconomic status, and family relationships. I examine Sebastian Kadlekic, Emma, Steinkelner, and Kit Steinklener’s comic book Quince, in which a 15-year-old girl receive superpowers at her quinceañera, as a representation of the transformative potential of the quinceañera, and suggest that it can and should be read as a piece of visionary fiction, as popularized by Walidah Imarisha and adrienne marie brown: it is work that creates a new reality paves the way for the physical manifestation of such a reality. Using writings about quinceañeras as a background for visual and textual analysis of the comic itself, I hope to demonstrate the significance of Quince as a cultural product and representation of the future.

In my dissertation, I look at the gendered artistic, aesthetic, and cultural practices that formed a constellation of resistance known as the Syrian Revolution. I argue Syrian women’s gendered resistance express multiple, interwoven critiques against regime authoritarianism, colonial systems, extremism, and heteropatriarchy. I examine the dominant discourses that erase their labors and voices, and frame the misrecognition using the metaphor of siren songs. I look at the pedagogies and theatre performances that emerge from under siege, situate these spaces in the context of the Syrian Revolution, and argue that they express political messages that cannot be divorced from their revolutionary origins. I argue that through these protests, performances, and pedagogies, Syrian women and youth create new worlds, spaces where freedom lives.

"On Counterepic: Feminist and Anti-State Interventions Into the Epic Genre" centers critical intersections of gender, the state, and the epic tradition. This dissertation looks to the work of women and non-binary people writing modern and contemporary epic poems in response to ancient epics' narratives of patriarchal statecraft and teleological narratives of conquering and dismembering the wild or uncontrollable feminine. I argue that these works constitute a radical countertradition of anti-state or anti-patriarchal epic, or what I call modern and contemporary counterepic. In an era of late capitalist market economy and raced and gendered systemic violence, counterepic poems and cross-genre poetic texts reimagine space and time in relation to race, gender, class and structural inequalities. Carefully outlining the uses and critical functions of counterepic as a genre of feminist and anti-state interventions, both within literary communities and within social movements, this dissertation clarifies tropes and repeated motifs of the counterepic genre and the complex ways in which writers of counterepic politically confront past epics' themes and ideologies and create new literary spaces of empathetic imagination and political resistance. This dissertation aims to put the ancient epic tradition and contemporary counterepics into conversation, examining a long countertradition of epics mainly by women and non-binary people within an intersectional, feminist context.

In my dissertation, “The Elite Domestic Sphere: Identity, Memory and Nostalgia in Literatures of U.S. Empire 1885-1915,” I bring together three locations of U.S. empire: California, Hawai'i and Panama, to analyze how women respond to the displacement by U.S. empire through nostalgic representations of the domestic sphere. By looking at a variety of genres including fiction, autobiography and history I argue that the essentialization of elite class status happens through the imagining of a past idealized domestic sphere.

In this work, I define and analyze key examples of wonderlands as utopic spaces. I argue that these youth-oriented fantasy worlds are often more diverse than their adult counterparts, particularly in terms of race, sexuality, and, most importantly, disability. By considering who constitutes the citizens of conceptualized utopias, I further contend that persons with disabilities often offer ideal utopian figures. In order to demonstrate this reality in future literatures, I suggest that authors and readers alike turn to online fan fiction communities as significant sites of crip activism.

Post-Revolutionary Fervor explores the intersection of class and gender politics in Iran over the last eighteen years, within the context of historical revolutionary Iranian consciousness broadly. I center a cohort of mostly women activists who are members of the generation born after the 1979 Revolution. Most of these individuals were among the younger key leaders of the most prominent grassroots campaign of the women’s movement during the 2000s, known as the “One Million Signatures Campaign to Change Laws that Discriminate Against Women,” which took place from 2006-2008. Many of these leaders had cut their teeth among the ranks of a growing left within the broader student movement in the 2000s. Their political consciousness was produced as a result of overlapping spaces and cross-fertilizing activist currents, including women’s rights groups, left student organizations, and illegal workers’ syndicates and labor unions. These activists were shaped both by Iranian intellectual history and transnational traditions of radical political thought. Analyzing a repertoire of oral history, poetry, public intellectual work, and film to explore activists’ political consciousness, I argue that this cohort expanded debates within these organizing spaces beyond both Western liberal feminist and Islamic feminist frames. They are among a generation that came of age during a period which saw ongoing attempts at economic neoliberalization in their country. In this context, I argue that the intersection of Islamic governance, neoliberal ideologies, and U.S. imperialist sanctions have produced gender relations in Iran. Contrary to the Orientalist view that intensified after 9/11 that presented Islam as standing in the way of Western-led market liberalization and capitalist expansion, I argue that neoliberal ideologies hostile to working people and friendly to privatization have intersected often successfully with Islamic governance in Iran. Thus, I also center the stories of working-class and working-poor women who have experienced precarious jobs, the informal economy, and state repression. I ultimately show that Iranians have challenged these forces of interlocking class and gender inequity through persistent popular protest.

"Reclaiming the Future: A Speculative Cultural Study" examines authors of color who use speculative fiction as a tool of resistance and empowerment to (re)imagine the past, present and future for people of color in the US. This dissertation is organized into three parts: 1) Speculative Fictions from the Early 20th Century, 2) Speculative Fictions From the 1970s to Now, and 3) Critical Dystopias in the 21st Century and Beyond. The first part explores two novels from the early 20th century, Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902-03) and Daniel Venegas’s The Adventures of Don Chipote (1928). These chapters explore issues of racist science and experimentation in medicine and science on black people; and the utopian and dystopian symbol of the American Dream for Mexican immigrant laborers during the 1900s-1930s. The second part investigates texts from the late 20th century and 21st century, specifically Octavia E. Butler’s Wild Seed (1980) and Jordan Peele’s film Get Out (2017). These chapters discuss issues of reproductive oppression and sterilization abuse of poor women of color in the 1970s, and the speculative horror of real and imagined criminalization and mass incarceration of black people today. The final part analyzes two texts from 2009, Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer and Rosaura Sánchez’s and Beatrice Pita’s Lunar Braceros 2125-2148. These chapters interrogate issues of the future, such as: surrogate humanity and the invisibility of virtual laborers outsourced around the world; and the remapping of nation-states that use settler colonialism to displace people of color onto neo-Reservations and the moon. Despite these dystopian realities, my analysis emphasizes what science fiction scholar Tom Moylan calls the “enclaves of resistance” that exist in these texts to develop a critical dystopia so that people of color can reclaim these narratives and write themselves into the future. I argue that authors of color use speculative fiction as a practice to explore the lived and living experiences of their present dystopian realities and historically oppressive and violent pasts. My speculative cultural study highlights the social activism of people of color in the rewriting and world making of more equitable futures.

The U.S.-backed Chilean military coup that deposed leftist President Salvador Allende and initiated the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-90) sparked large-scale opposition as Chileans faced torture, disappearance, and exile. The Latinx Radical Imaginary and Chile: Transnational Feminisms, Chilean Exile, and Culture examines the U.S.-based anti-Pinochet movement, with a particular focus on the activism of Latinas. Opposition to the regime in Chile and the United States was spearheaded by women and these transnational feminist networks were at the forefront of challenging the dictatorship. These Chicana, Puerto Rican, and Chilean women’s opposition to Pinochet was rooted in their support for Allende-era politics. I read archives, interviews, and cultural texts for moments that provide insight into how the Allende era impacted what I call the radical imaginary of these activists. I define the radical imaginary as a set of ideas that expand notions of what is possible, invoke hope and creativity, and spark inquiry into people’s perspectives on revolutionary politics.While scholars have noted the influence of the Cuban revolution and the Vietnam war on U.S. activists, much less is known about how activists responded to other events in the Global South. My research suggests that non-Chilean anti-Pinochet activists are a crucial overlooked aspect of the Chile solidarity movement and, conversely, that Chile was important to the revolutionary and anti-imperialist politics of U.S-based activists, particularly the Chicano movement’s transnational turn and the expansion of women of color feminism’s transnational politics. Moreover, while the literature on the Chile solidarity movement has focused almost exclusively on Chilean exiles, I highlight how the U.S. Chilean exile movement cannot be viewed in isolation from a wider network of anti-Pinochet activity. The dissertation is organized around three core chapters that focus on a particular political genealogy for this radical imaginary as well a specific cultural form that shaped it. Chapter One centers Chicana Marxists and their use of nuevo cine chileno produced during the Allende era to highlight Chilean women’s fight for a reorganization of social reproduction. I focus on the contributions of activist Virgina Garza, who traveled to Chile during Allende’s presidency to witness the revolutionary process taking place. When the coup hit a few months later, Garza opposed the Pinochet regime by lecturing in tandem with the exhibition of these films, arguing that working-class women had gained the most during that time. Chapter Two explores opposition to the Pinochet regime in the seminal women of color literary anthologies Cuentos: Stories by Latinas and This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Through collaboration on these anthologies, these U.S.-based feminists forged connections with the anti-Pinochet feminist movement in Chile. Together they exposed the everyday violence of capitalism and patriarchy, framing the dictatorship as a counterrevolutionary attack on people’s desires for a better world. Finally, Chapter Three centers arpilleras, patchwork tapestries, created by women in Chile and in exile. I examine how a multiracial campaign in Austin, Texas to bring Cecilia Ubilla, a Chilean woman who had been imprisoned, into exile helped build the Chilean feminist exile movement in California because she sponsored more exiles and brought them to the region. Together they circulated arpilleras that paid homage to the Allende era and shared their experiences participating in Allende-era revolutionary politics with other racial and immigrant groups here. Overall, my dissertation contributes to literatures on Allende-era politics and culture, the Chile solidarity movement, Chilean immigration and exile, and Latinx feminisms.

Racial Encounters: Queer Affiliations in Black and South Asian Diasporas examines diasporic Black and South Asian cultural production to chart the shifting politics of race, gender, and sexuality in British and U.S. imperial projects. I argue that diasporic Black and South Asian cultural production together comprise an important body of work that collectively archives histories of British colonialism in South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the United Kingdom, and the post-World War II ascendance of U.S.-led global capitalist imperialism. Drawing from the multiple itineraries of the cultural texts themselves, the project traverses a series of historical contexts and geographic locations, including the legacies of African slavery and Indian indenture in postcolonial Trinidad, anticolonial movements in British East Africa, Black British identity formations in Thatcher-era Great Britain, and multicultural discourses in the post-9/11 United States. In each of these contexts, South Asian and Black diasporic subjects are variously positioned in relation to each other in a network of possible configurations: as colonized subjects of empire with differentiated access to the conditions of life and freedom; as workers in racial and sexual divisions of labor; as political actors in anticolonial and anti-racist movements; as partners in various kinds of intimacies; as postcolonial immigrants and racialized minorities. Through readings of an array of 20th and 21st century literary, cinematic, cultural, and historical artifacts, this dissertation investigates how the relational positioning of Black and South Asian diasporic formations expresses the dominant logics of Anglo-American empire, and also reveals the possibilities and limitations of multiracial, anti-imperial solidarities. Employing a queer feminist analytic to foreground the intersectional workings of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation, I read the body of texts assembled in here as an archive of, on the one hand, the differential locations of Black and South Asian diasporic formations under imperialism, and on the other, critically resistant cultural and political practices, including forms of diasporic memory-making and queer feminist modes of affiliation and coalition that refuse the comforts of solidarities forged through analogy and equivalence.