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Browsing by Author "Chatterjee, Sushmita, committee member"

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    I kin sea slugs: awkward kin, inhuman horror, and queering encounter in Octavia Butler's Dawn
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Witter, Genevieve, author; Badia, Lynn, advisor; Claycomb, Ryan, committee member; Chatterjee, Sushmita, committee member
    Anthropocentrism is rooted in narratives of evolutionary teleology and the human/nonhuman binary which exalts the human, homo sapiens, as the dominant Earth species, and taxonomizes nonhuman species according to human value systems. Octavia Butler's science-fiction novel, Dawn, raises important questions about the human as an identity category, according to anthropocentrism, and as a species. By introducing a multispecies encounter with an extraterrestrial species, Butler troubles our understanding of what it means to be human. Butler queers human-centric notions of ecology and evolutionary teleology through her protagonist, Lilith, as she attempts to adapt to a radically different, and at times hostile, environment. Lilith's horror for both the Oankali, humanity's alien rescuers, and the potential for an inhuman future, prompted by a hybrid-species zygote, introduce an opportunity to dissect human abjection for the non-/in-human and to overcome anthropocentric discomfort with human vulnerability to the nonhuman. Joining the conversation with Lee Edelman's theory of reproductive futurity, Donna J. Haraway's concept of sympoiesis, and Julia Kristeva's essay on abjection, this argument examines Lilith's fear for the inhuman to discuss the ways in which anthropocentric ideology jeopardizes humanity's ability to take action amidst the worsening climate crisis. As nonhuman Earth species' fate becomes increasingly tied to humanity's ability to responsibly address climate change, we need to reevaluate the way that humanity situates itself in multispecies Earth ecologies.
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    This is how it was
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Pagliari, Nicole, author; Altschul, Andrew, advisor; Ausubel, Ramona, committee member; Chatterjee, Sushmita, committee member
    This Master's thesis is a collection of short stories that interrogate instances of racial aggression against Filipino and Filipino-American women alongside the existential dread of being a young woman and regret and robots in varying quantities and combinations. These stories all share a common goal of analyzing poignant moments of reckoning for their female protagonists of varying physical presentations, socio-economic statuses, and stages of life while also experimenting with speculative elements and voice.
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    Three essays on gender inequality in Latin America: understanding labor market segregation, job quality, and environmental issues from a feminist perspective
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Machado Nunes, Débora, author; Braunstein, Elissa, advisor; Tavani, Daniele, advisor; Chatterjee, Sushmita, committee member; Barber, Edward B., committee member
    For the past three decades, Latin America experienced remarkable progress in educational attainment and health care access for women, combined with decreasing household income inequality and higher wages across the board since 2002, especially at the bottom of the wage distribution for most countries. Yet, gender job segregation in the labor market has increased since the early 1990s. Urban women persistently occupy jobs in the informal sector, where jobs are generally characterized by low wages, lack of benefits, poor working conditions, and no promotion possibilities. Concerning both urban and rural women is Latin America's unique vulnerability to the impacts of climate change and the lack of progress in preventing deforestation, which disproportionally impacts impoverished communities, especially women and children. Despite some progress on reproductive rights in several countries, persistent economic challenges and constraints present serious barriers to the advancement of gender equality and reproductive justice—understood as the right to prevent and terminate undesired pregnancies, carry desired pregnancies, and raise a healthy and happy child to the best of one's ability. Based on the premise that such a complex scenario can only be understood through feminist research methodologies, this dissertation proposes three independent yet connected essays. Each essay focuses on a different research question that helps us better understand the gendered impacts of economic policies in Latin America, how women with different intersectional identities are impacted by them, and how to build useful scholarship for policy makers and activists to advance gender equality and reproductive justice in the region. The first essay focuses on the connections between gender job segregation, income distribution, and real exchange rates in Latin America. For the second essay, we propose a theoretical discussion, focusing on building reproductive justice as a research program within economics. Finally, the third essay focuses on rural women, exploring the relationship between deforestation and hours unpaid care work in the Amazonia rainforest.