Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Dalits, "type-scripted" as lowly people (untouchables), have developed a variety of reasonings, rationalizations, and behavioral responses against the traditional caste norms and ideology in their strivings to overcome their degraded status and realize equality with higher caste persons. These adaptations are to help improve their self and communal esteem. This paper examines how they oppose, flout, and violate these norms through their ideational and behavioral responses in order to test avenues for equality, to force equality on those who discriminate against them, and to impose selectively their sense of equality on those who are powerless, by sometimes harassing them openly and sometimes secretly when "appropriate." Such deviance is investigated within various types: ideational deviance (as expressed in stories, narratives, speech, songs, drama, and gossip), behavioral deviance (as expressed in physical behavior in intercaste contexts), individual deviance, and collective deviance.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Early socialization of gender scripts and an analysis of the gender role theory contribute to the understanding of contemporary dating scripts. According to
Rosa and Frieze (1993) gender roles are acquired during early childhood and adolescence. As children we are largely influenced by cultural schemas of appropriate behavior and if gender differences are apparent it is during these times that they are most exaggerated and expected. Sexual scripts are “mutually shared conventions” that direct people to behave interdependently and are composed of three components: cultural scenarios, interpersonal relations, and intrapsychic scripts (Dworkin and O’Sullivan 2005). Using these scripts innate women and men to confirm to the stereotypic dichotomy of gendered roles (Eagly 1987). The social role theory carries that women and men conform to these stereotypic roles because these different male dominant and female dominant roles place different social pressures on each gender (Vogel, Wester, Heesacker, and Madon 2003). “Situational factors influence the extent to which women and men confirm gendered stereotypes.” (Vogel 1993: 520) People use social responses such as gendered scripts, especially in the dating context, because little information is known about each other during early relationship development (Wiederman 2005).

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper argues that a culture of psychiatry has constructed a new subject of health, who needs to continually self-scrutinize for mood and behavioral flaws. A concise history of health policy and related business health marketing activities is provided to establish the dominant depression discourse now circulating in American culture. This discourse contends that most Americans possess distresses that can be termed “symptoms“ which distinguish them as “at risk” of major depression and other mental disorders. This new cultural epistemology has created a ready population for on-line health information and self-help technologies, serving primarily, a new middle class population of mental health subjects. The paper reveals a common logic among broad spectrum discourses of health policy, advocacy groups and a broadening recovery industry. The paper details how some industry technologies, ranging from consumer health sites to cybertherapy, target a middle class niche markets of consumers, constructing them as needing

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Building on Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of la mestiza, I will explore a borderland rhetoric of whiteness that exists for many white allies working for anti-racism. Those who find themselves between the river bank of a coming to consciousness of whiteness privilege (a consciousness that does not appear one day, but is a lifetime process of awareness), a legacy of family and social circle racism, and within a dominant culture of other ignorant and/or complacent whites are ideologically torn by the racialized discourses into which they are born and move. Where should they practice listening, and where should they engage the argument?

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Drawing on debates running through queer economies, performance studies, and women of color feminisms, I argue that The Global Fund’s Product (Red)™ campaign sets up a continuum of human valuation whereby certain gendered and racialized bodies have access to commodified social justice while others are ignored, made invisible, or left off the spectrum. Specifically, (Red)™ meets its limit to provide social justice at the point where producers are erased from the process, creating a story of “ethical” consumers who bestow life upon ghost-like recipients of their “good deeds”, and re-scripting class power along lines of nation, race, poverty and morality.