CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Sanchez, Elia |
|---|---|
| Title | Transgressing The Cistem: Gender, Agency And Change In The San Francisco Legal System |
| Summary | This project demonstrates how the legal environment in the city of San Francisco transformed over time with relation to its trans* and gender variant subjects through a dual-component thesis-capstone project. Using a law and society approach, the thesis component constructs a history of legal persecution beginning in the Spanish colonial period and ending in the year 2000, especially focusing on the period 1965 – 2000. It locates three distinct legal regimes in the city: a religious-based Catholic mission system from 1776 – 1848, a common law based anti-vice regime from 1863 – 1974, and a common law based anti-prostitution regime that emerges by 1980. While each regime is defined by its own system of jurisprudence and language of power, the thesis argues that all are effectively similar in their repression of gender variance. Beginning in the 1990s, however, the city’s legalized system of gender enforcement begins to face substantive change due to the advocacy efforts of trans* and sex worker communities. The capstone component is composed of a proposed podcast and attached pilot episode with its script. The podcast addresses a general audience and uses a liberatory pedagogical model in its construction. It is based in a specific case study, that of transgender sex worker Victoria Schneider and her legal case against the city of San Francisco in the latter half of the 1990s. The overall project demonstrates how a pedagogical podcast can be constructed to tell the history of trans* legal resistance to a general audience with an eye towards broader liberation. |
| Supervisor | Ferreira, Sonia; Lafferton, Emese |
| Department | Historical Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/sanchez_elia.pdf |
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