CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF WOMEN IN SOCIETY

Annual Review 2011

Will you join us?

CSWS celebrates its 40th anniversary in Fall 2013
Photo of Jane Grant courtesy the Jane Grant Photograph Collection, PH141, UO Libraries Special Collections.

Plans are underway now for:

Friday-Saturday symposium on feminist research and pedagogy A major feminist keynote speaker Special 40th anniversary edition of the CSWS Annual Review Airing of oral history documentaries featuring CSWS founders Joan Acker, Barbara Corrado Pope, and Marilyn Farwell

We would like to hear from you...

Former CSWS grantees, Womens and Gender Studies alumni and faculty, former feminist student activists, Oregon nonprofits devoted to women and womens rights ... we want your stories ... your memories ... your photographs ... your ideas .... your bookcovers .... your contact information ... your attendance at the celebration .... and your financial backing for our ongoing efforts to support and disseminate research on the complexity of womens lives and the intersecting nature of gender identities and inequalities. E-mail csws@uoregon.edu

csws.uoregon.edu

CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF WOMEN IN SOCIETY

FROM THE CENTER

Each year, I look forward to reading the draft of this annual review. Reading the articles and interviews reminds me of the amazing environment CSWS has helped to nurture at the University of Oregon for feminist research. This year in particular we get to focus on research conducted on Asia by scholars as disciplinary diverse as film studies, anthropology, international studies, and history. Whats more, I get to know so much more about my colleagues here, like Sangita Gopals experience in off-off Broadway theater and Bryna Goodmans interest in a suicide case that preoccupied early twentieth-century Shanghai newspapers. I count myself lucky to have a job where I get to talk to people like this on a daily basis and help to support the research that goes on at UO in the humanities and the social sciences. I hope youll have the opportunity to hear some of them speak at our noon talks, Road Scholars programs, or public lectures in the coming year. As we begin our planning for our 40th anniversary celebration in 2013, we are eager to create new opportunities for feminist research on our campus. I should also add that I count myself lucky to have the amazing staff who help to coordinate the events you see described in the following pages, and who do the work of CSWSs accounting, event planning, and coordination. We all owe thank yous to the continuing hard work of Alice Evans, the creative force behind this and CSWSs other publications; Peggy McConnell, who figures out how to fund everything; and Shirley Marc, who wrangles speakers, plans events, gets us rooms, and tends to a complex range of day-to-day details.

Cover photo: Rural women in Bangladesh. Photo by Shafiqul Alam Kiron / www.mapfoto.com.bd ANNUAL REVIEW CSWS OCToBER 2011

1201 University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403-1201 (541) 346-5015 csws@uoregon.edu

csws.uoregon.edu
OUR MISSION

Carol Stabile, Director

Generating, supporting, and disseminating research on the complexity of womens lives and the intersecting nature of gender identities and inequalities. Faculty and students affiliated with CSWS generate and share research with other scholars and educators, the public, policymakers, and activists. CSWS researchers come from a broad range of fields in arts and humanities, law and policy, social sciences, physical and life sciences, and the professional schools. DIRECTOR Carol Stabile ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR Lamia Karim OFFICE AND EVENTS COORDINATOR Shirley Marc ACCOUNTING AND GRANTS Peggy McConnell RESEARCH DISSEMINATION SPECIALIST Alice Evans EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE Joan Acker, Professor Emerita, Sociology Miriam Abelson, Graduate student, Sociology Sarah Cheesman, Director of DevelopmentNatural Sciences, CAS Alisa Freedman, Associate Professor, East Asian Languages and Literatures Lisa Gilman, Associate Professor, Folklore and English Gina Hermann, Associate Professor, Romance Languages Lamia Karim, Associate Director, CSWS; Associate Professor, Anthropology Rupa Pillai, Graduate Student, Anthropology Ellen Scott, Associate Professor, Sociology, and Director, Womens and Gender Studies Carol Stabile, Director, CSWS; Professor, English and Communication Cynthia Tolentino, Associate Professor, English CSWS Annual Review is published yearly by the Center for the Study of Women in Society. While CSWS is responsible for the content of the CSWS Annual Review, the viewpoints expressed in this publication are not necessarily those of the organization. EDITORS Alice Evans, Carol Stabile LAYOUT & DESIGN Alice Evans COPYEDITING & PROOFING CSWS staff PRINTING UO Printing Services
The University of Oregon is an equal-opportunity, affirmative-action institution committed to cultural diversity and compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. This publication will be made available in accessible formats upon request.

CONTENTS
Capitalism, Politics, and Gender: A Suicide in Shanghai
research by Bryna Goodman

2 4

Studying Bollywood: An interview with Sangita Gopal

by Alice Evans

Heavenly Desires: Tablighi Jamaat and the Regulation of Women in Bangladesh

research by Lamia Karim

6 8

Pakistan: Gathering Stories of Women in the Valley of SWAT

research by Anita Weiss

Female Stars Are Born: Gender, Lighting Technology, and Japanese Cinema
research by Daisuke Miyao

10 12 13 14

Paean to CSWS: for Giving Me a Career and a Book

an essay by Louise Bishop

New Women Faculty Introductions Fighting for Forests: Gendered Conflicts in Mozambiques Forest Landscapes
research by Ingrid L. Nelson

Feminism and Ecology: The Gendered Politics of Food According to Vandana Shiva
by Margaret Hallock

15

Complex Lives: Interviews with Transmen in the Southeastern United States

research by Miriam Abelson

16

Pathways and Fences: Gender, Violence, and Mobility in El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Jurez, Chihuahua
research by Ren Kladzyk

17 18 19 20 24

Bolivian Entrepreneurs, Water Rights, and Roller Derby

Graduate Road Scholars Share Their Research

2011 UNIVERSITY oF OREGoN

Undergraduate Research: Jane Higdon Winners Highlights from the Academic Year Looking at Books

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Capitalism, Politics, and Gender:

A Suicide in Shanghai
This essay relates a legal drama at the center of the authors CSWS-supported book project, Stained with Spots of Blood: The Dream of a Bourgeois Public in 1920s Shanghai.

by Bryna Goodman, Professor of History and Director of Asian Studies

On September 8, 1922, a mysterious and inexplicable suicide took place in Shanghais International Settlement, the Anglo-American-dominated foreign enclave that constituted one territorial authority in a city of multiple and fragmented jurisdictions. A young female secretary who worked at the liberal, politically outspoken Shanghai Chinese newspaper, the Journal of Commerce, was found hanged on the premises. Discovering her missing at an office dinner, a coworker summoned her family members and pushed open the office door, finding her dangling from the cord of an electric teakettle that had been looped around a window frame. The circumstances of the suicide and the series of events that followed in its wake would, for many Chinese observers and residents of the city, call into question the modernity that Shanghai embodied for China. Since the late nineteenth century, in Chinese novels, in journalism, and in the miscellaneous jottings of intellectuals, semi-colonial Shanghai, for good or ill, represented business and industry, novelty, decadence, Western ideas, fashions, transformations in material life, and new modes of urban organization, management, and political life. In the last decades of the Qing dynasty the foreign settlements of Shanghai sheltered a vibrant Chinese press that swiftly rose to national influ-

flourishing economy and capitalist growth, particularly during the First World War, fueled this public political discussion and social mobilization, funding the press through advertisements and providing capital for the patrons and contributing members of the multiBryna Goodman on a recent trip to Iceland. On the slope to the left are Chinese tudinous public assocharacters serendipitously encountered on the landscape. ciations. Politically, however, the new ence as the medium for the circulation Chinese republic was a disaster, with the of what was new, dynamic, andto use new parliament disbanded by a stronga term that captures the uniquely mod- arm government and central control ern combination of novelty and value lost increasingly to dispersed regional newsworthy. satraps. But republican notions noneAfter 1912, when China became a theless took root, propagated broadly republic at least in name, Shanghai grew across the country through the new as the preeminent center of economic print culture that emanated from the and cultural dynamism. A rapidly pro- semicolonial conditions of Shanghais liferating press and a plethora of new International Settlement. Establishing urban associations together constituted themselves within this zone, Chinese a growing public realm that circulat- newspapers enjoyed some protection ed ideas and practices associated with from Chinese authorities despite the republican citizenship. These included risks of censorship by the foreign municideologies of popular nationalism, dem- ipal government. ocratic participation in governance (parIt was these urban developments ticularly for a propertied elite), family the capitalist economy, the social and reform and gender equality, legal reform, institutional arrangements of the puband judicial independence. Shanghais lic realm it materially endowed, and imaginative links between transformed familial and gender relations and the associated construction of a new political orderthat seemed to be called into question by the suicide of the young female secretary named Xi Shangzhen, and the subsequent trial and imprisonment of her employer, the influential U.S. educated businessman, political activist, and journalist Tang Jiezhi. Xi Shangzhen was twenty-four and unmarried when she committed suicide at her workplace. Her nuclear family was poor but she was a member of an influential lineage. The lineage members were prominent in Shanghai financial

Confucius Institute at the University of Oregon

The UO Confucius Institute for Global China Studies was initiated by the UO Office of International Affairs in 2009 as part of a growing national and international trend to expand educational ties with China, to promote Chinese language training, and to further intercultural understanding. It was inaugurated in fall 2010. The institute is made possible with the support of UOs partners in China: The Chinese Language Council International (Hanban), and East China Normal University in Shanghai. Recognizing Chinas cultural, educational, economic, environmental, political and technological role in the world, the UO Confucius Institute highlights activities related to four themes: Chinese culture across borders China futures/global futures Chinese culture on a world stage China and global sustainability

Website: confucius.uoregon.edu
2 October 2011

ly shook public opinion, that, in the course of the tremendous social furor that ensued, not a pen remained dry. This event is at the center of a book I have been working on for the past decade that disentangles the particulars of the case, the factors leading to it, the events set in motion by Xis act, and the multiple threads of discussion that followed in their wake. The book takes as its subject the possibilities and limitations of the liberal public culture that was enabled by the economic bubble and the semicolonial framework of Chinas early republican era, a public culture that was fueled by an expansive print culture and an associated plethora of new voluntary associations. The case provides a point of entry, as well, into individual lives, male and female, that negotiated the tangle of ideas, networks, institutions, and administrative structures of a place and an era more commonly defined through abstractions: nationalism, imperialism, warlordism, the anti-traditionalism and cultural cosmopolitanism of the New

Culture movement, capitalism. For contemporary commentators, the suicide emblematized the contradictory nature of semicolonial governance and the citys precariousness as an island of imagined modernity within a sea of political fragmentation and military realpolitik. The case glaringly displayed the fragile and contradictory nature of Shanghais new economic formations, new cultural aspirations to gender equality, and political aspirations for popular democratic governance, a dynamic public sphere, and legal sovereignty exercised through an independent judiciary. Bryna Goodman received a 2006 CSWS Faculty Research G rant, and is very grateful for CSWS support. CSWS also supported her earlier coedited volume, Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China (2005). Goodman currently serves as executive director of the UO Confucius Institute for Global China Studies.

1922 book cover photo of Xi Shangzhen.

and journalistic circles. Her family members accused her employer (who many saw as an outspoken political upstart) of two crimes: first, of defrauding Xi of funds on the new Shanghai stock exchange, and second, of pressuring her to be his concubine, and thereby so aggrieving her modern sensibilities that she was provoked to commit suicide. Within months, Tang was tried and sentenced to prison for fraud by a Chinese court. In the course of the trial, a multitude of public associations agitated on both sides of the case. On Tangs side, business, commercial and native-place associations created a human rights association that protested the corruption of Chinese courts. In the meantime womens associations agitated for his prosecution and a lengthy prison sentence. Five years after coming across mention of the case in an obscure journal, while researching another project, I was drawn back to Xis suicide when I discovered that it was the subject of a searching essay by the early Chinese Marxist intellectual, Chen Wangdao, translator of Marxs Communist Manifesto. The moment I looked into newspapers from the period, I encountered many hundreds of articles, essays, cartoons, advertisements and even poems that were dedicated to the case, and I realized the scope of the public scandal that it inspired. In the pronouncements of Xis interpreters and contemporary arbiters of Shanghai society, this suicide so great-

1921 Shanghai newspaper cartoon illustrating the mechanism for producing a new woman: education, new culture, employment, and self-sufficiency.

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Studying Bollywood
Q
: Can you talk a little about your interest in studying film? My interest in film is linked to my long-standing interest in theatre arts and performance. I did a lot of acting and directing in college. In between finishing up coursework for my PhD and writing my dissertation, I took three years off and managed an off-off-Broadway troupe in New York. I managed the budget, set the schedule, did publicity, liaised with the press, oversaw the nitty gritty of productionswe had bigbudget productions such as Brecht, Shakespeare, Ibsen. I loved that job. Q: How does song and dance factor into your work? I have always been interested in theatricality and certain types of performance, especially those tied to music and dance. My first scholarly book was on Hindi film music, a collection of essays that I coedited, and for which I wrote a long introduction based on original research I did in the National Archives on Hindi film music. Song and dance is such an invariable part of Hindi popular cinema and has been since the beginning of sound. It is the one factor that people associate with the cinema but

Globalization, isolation, couples, and changing gender roles

Sangita Gopal, recently tenured associate professor of English, grew up in Calcutta and moved to the United States to attend graduate school at the University of Rochester in upstate New York, where she studied literary theory and film studies. She joined the University of Oregon faculty in 2004. Her book Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema, is due out in fall 2011 from the University of Chicago Press. She coedited the book Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance (Gopal & Moorti, University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
that also becomes the hardest impediment for Western viewers attuned to thinking of the musical as a separate genre. It is also an impediment for middle to upper middle class Indian viewers, who see the excesses of song-dance as remnant of a degenerate, pre-modern mass form that only appeals to naive viewers. Thats what got me interestedthe persistence in song-dance on the one hand and the resistance to song-dance on the otherthis push and pull. Q: How do the processes of globalization affect Indian filmmaking? I came to believe that one reason why the Indian film industry has been so successful in warding off the competition, i.e. Hollywood, is precisely because it has crafted its own unique form that borrows on the Hollywood model but is quite distinct from it. Only 5 percent of the Indian market has been penetrated by Hollywood in its 110-year film history 95 percent of the Indian film market watches the domestic product, and Hindi cinema is one of the dominant cinemas among Indian popular films. So if youre looking for an example of a popular industrial film culture that is equal to Hollywood, you have to look at Bollywood. Bollywood fought off the cultural imperialism of the U.S. film industry within its own domestic context. France and Germany failed. They had highly sophisticated and early film cultures. Japan failed. The only other film industry that comes close as far as numbers go is South Korea. More than 60-65 percent of South Korean cinema is domestic cinema. The other example is Iran where imports are effectively banned. Under situations of extreme protectionism its not that interesting why the domestic film industry flourishes, it flourishes because no other cinema is imported into the culture. But in the case of India, the Indian film industry took off during the colonial period, when the British administration was flooding the market with western film, particularly Hollywood film. The Indian film industry specifically erected itself as an industrial product that was part of the fight against anti-colonial images that the British and the Hollywood film industries were propagating. Part of that package of an anti-colonial cultural product was finding a unique cultural form that drew on the song and dance traditions already existing in Indian theater at the time. This alternativecrafted out of a marriage between a modern technology, film, and an already existing more pre-modern formprovides a really exemplary instance of a kind of post-colonial cultural formation that offers an effective counterpoint to Hollywood. It does so by offering its viewers what matters to them, as far as images, as far as cultural codes, and as far as the form itself, including song and dance. As I got into researching the project, I found that it also did really well in other societies like India that were battling between tradition and modernity. Q: When did Bollywood films hit this country? In the late 90s through two routes: one was a sort of hipster route of music, primarily. DJs began to be interested in Bollywood music because it had a kind of kitschy, exotic quality that then got remixed by DJs as part of a global club scene. Another was through the immigrant population: ex-pat Indians for whom these movies represented a kind of contact with home, and their children, who might have been born in the U.S. These films represented their one viable window into that world.
At a 2010 CSWS reception, Sangita Gopal (left) talks to colleagues Gabriela Martnez and Cecelia Enjuto Rangel while her daughter, Mohini, looks on (photo by Jack Liu).

Q: You have a new book coming out. What is the focus of your research? The time period of the last two decades. Hindi cinema starts out being

4 October 2011

primarily a domestic product, made for Hindi-speaking people within India, and develops a kind of global following in all kinds of unexpected placesthe Middle East, North Africa, China, South America, and Greece, particularly among Turkish immigrants. All sorts of fandoms. But the product is not for these other people at all. They like it, because it has some resemblance to their own situations. We notice in the 1990s the increasing sort of visibility of people of Indian origin living in the west and their greater buying power. The greater the say they begin to have in the cultures where they live begins to give greater visibility to Indian cinema, which is intimately tied to its reception in the Indian diaspora globally and the prominent position of that diaspora. If they were struggling illegal immigrants Indian cinema wouldnt necessarily see this kind of upward mobility. Its tied to the fact that these are wealthy, professional groups. The film industry begins to incorporate these non-resident Indians, or NRIs, as a part of its own storyline and plots. Here is where I got really interested because of the kind of gender politics around issues of the nation, nationalism, who belongs, and who doesnt that we see being effected through these movies. The stakes for Indian people who have grown up in another country often becomes, How do you hold on to that home culture? These stakes are visited upon the children in a very intense wayhow do you still be Indian despite having been born in America and lived here all your life? How can you continue to have a relationship with your parents that resembles Indian family relations? How do you conduct dating and sexual life that resembles a more traditional way of being? The movies began to play a critical role. They provide models of behaviorhow to be Western and Indian. They do so often in an interestingly gendered way whereby not only are women often the carriers of this sort of national identitythat is to be expected; we see that in all cultures to some extentbut what I find even more fascinating is a certain rethinking of the issue of patriarchy itself. We notice in these films a father who begins by being extremely rigid but over time comes to accommodate the desires and wishes of his children on condition that they respect certain cultural norms ... a negotiated settlement between the generations. This playing out of generational conflict on the one hand doesnt really destabilize gender roles in any serious way, but nonetheless calls for a rethinking of patriarchy. We see the emergence of a hyperemotional herothis hero to some extent has always existed in Indian cinema but gets really front and center in the 90s. He cries easily; he will go to the ends of the earth to get his lady love, and so on. A hero who almost resembles a woman in certain performance rubrics and in the way that his body and facial expressions are useda melodramatic female figure. The emergence of this type of hero, almost an hysterical figure, trying to work out these conflicting demands, simultaneously disturbs the traditional gender arrangements and reinforces them in that women are pushed somewhat to the sidelines, and men begin to assume the emotionality and the affects of women. Something similar is going on in American comedy. The 90s Hindi NRI films really did this in a kind of concerted way, both to soften patriarchy up and in softening it to extend its reachand women have to cede representational space to men. This kind of screen politics is closely linked to real politics. If on the one hand we dont want women to be objectified or to be primarily creatures who are crying or throwing a fit, we at least want to see them. In these films we barely ever see them. Hindi films of this era have done this, and I see this becoming more and more a trend in global cinema. The girl becomes pregnant but all the attention ofOh my god, whats going to happenis on the guy. The girl is the sensible one who is okay, who believes things will work themselves out. Its great that shes reasonable and rational, but it relocates the problem and all the attention onto the male figure. You wonder, Why am I feeling sorry for him? He got her pregnant. Q: Can you tell me more about the importance of couples, romance, and evolving gender roles as reflected in your new book? My book is interested in a reformulating of the romantic. The marital relationship that we see ongoing in Bollywood film of the last ten years is intimately linked to certain broader developments. I look at the industry and changes coming about in the industry, including changes in produc-

tion, exhibition and consumption of film, and how movies are watched. That on the one side and society on the other. I start with the argument that in Hindi film for many decades, we have a peculiarly hybrid couple formation, where the couple has the right to choose his or her own partner, but may only do so after seeking the blessings and sanction of the family and society. This sort of compromised form of modernity is the normative form in Hindi film up into the 90s. As a result, movies are not so much about the heterosexual couple as a private entity, but more about this modern mode of partner selection, which stands in for all kinds of other relations, like the notion of capitalist choice itself, and other aspects of consumer modernity. Issues of romantic choice get invested with these other issues, including leaving the traditional family, village life, and so on. How the couple chooses, and what kind of accommodation the couple makes to these larger social frameworks, is the most important matter of investigation in these movies. Even at its most private moment, the couple is providing a public role, this negotiated form of the modern. This is in commercial Hindi film. Art cinema, and alternative cinema, pushes it at the same time. Q: Are there women writers or directors who are making artistic films that are more truly feminist? Some the industry itself is not particularly known for this. The only film industry in the world that has lots of women directors is Iran. The percentages in India are comparable to anywhere else in the world. They are not like Iran, but they are not below or over. Women do lots of editing. Women directors are found more in art and alternative cinema. Lately there have been more commercial filmmakers who are women. I would say a handful. I looked at several in my book. In other chapters, I write about movies made by women filmmakers who work in the commercial film industry. But traditionally, art movies and alternative film have had several female directors who continue to work in the present. Mira Nair is one. She started her career as a documentary filmmaker in India and has returned there to make her movies from time to time. There are others like Aparna Sen. In these other films, women are shown to have much greater autonomy; or at least the struggle for autonomy is a big part of the thematic of these films, where there are women directors and more alternative main directors. Commercial Hindi cinema does not show that to the same extent. Until the last two decades or so, but significantly the last decade, this older, negotiated couple form is completely dissolving and yielding its place to what we understand as the modern nuclear couple. In the modern couple, the main struggle is not between the couple and society or the couple and the family, but in between the two figures, the man and the woman. They struggle for autonomy and respect, or for psychological reasons as you might have in any other situation where two people are so different from one another but trying to live together, or because of the sexual past that theyve had. Another thing rare in Hindi film is the idea that either the man or the woman might bring with them a sexual past. So, from a situation where you have a couple trying to form itself as an autonomous unit against all these pressures of community and tradition, that struggle seems to have yielded place to the couple itself as a site of individuals struggling. I call this the privatization of the couple. The couple is now a private unit with its own psychology, its own history. Q: You were saying because of the diaspora, the movies are appealing to people who are no longer in India and who feel isolated. They are isolated, and for them the family is a kind of autonomous unit; it doesnt really have reference to the bigger societies that they inhabit because those societies have other norms. That is one of the reasons why this has developed. But the other reason, which I try to show in my book, is that private couple struggling to define itself vis--vis each otherthis bid for greater individuality on the part of the women, but also on the part of the men, really. It is linked to issues like the diaspora, but its also linked to privatization as a model for the arrangement of social and economic life under globalization. One thing that India was required to do in order to globalize was give up public sector enterprises, so all companies like utility companies or

Sangita Gopal interview, continued on page 11

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Heavenly Desires: Tablighi Jamaat and the Regulation of Women in Bangladesh

In 2009, I went to Bangladesh with a National Science Foundation research grant to conduct four months of ethnographic research among a group of women who belonged to a pietist movement known as Tablighi Jamaat. The Tablighi Jamaat is a global missionary movement that was started by Muhammad Ilyas in 1926 in India. It is a spiritual movement that seeks to bring Muslim conduct in line with the life and teachings of Prophet Muhammad. The movement seeks to create the golden age of Islam (Khilafat) through non-violent means, that is, by invitation (tabligh) to nominal Muslims to return to the fold. Its largest presence is in South Asia. With the migration of South Asians to North America, Europe, and Australia in the 1960s, the movement spread to all parts of the world. Today, Tablighi Jamaat is present in 150 countries. Bangladesh has a robust Tablighi Jamaat movement. Bishwa Ijtema, the largest gathering of the movement, is held annually in Bangladesh with over two million members from all over the world in attendance. In recent years, women all over the Muslim world have increasingly turned to religion and morality, and have rejected Western ideas of liberalism, secularism, and materialism. This turn toward religion poses a challenge for feminists, many of whom view religion as a source of gender oppression. Anthropologist Saba Mahmood has argued in The Politics of Piety (2005) that religion offered women a form of agency that Western liberalism failed to deliver. Based on my research, I have come to different conclusions from Mahmood. I found that although piety was a factor, Bangladeshi women primarily joined the Tablighi Jamaat movement for economic and sexual security. My research focused on the induction of women into the Tablighi Jamaat ideology through weekly instructions on its six pillars: kalima (belief in the oneness of Allah), salah (daily prayers), ilm and dhikr (remembrance of Allah and fellowship), ikraame-Muslim (to treat fellow Muslims with respect), ikhlasi-niyaat (to reform and devote ones life to Islamic ideals), and dawah (to preach the message of Allah). I conducted the research with two research assistants, one female and one male. The women we met were leaders in their group. They were collegeeducated and were drawn from the upper-middle classes. Because
6 October 2011

by Lamia Karim, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, and Associate Director, Center for the Study of Women in Society

Lamia Karim (r), with research assistant Farzana, in Rangamati, Bangladesh (2009). Men and women belonging to Tablighi Jamaat do not allow themselves to be photographed, as it is considered idolatry.

the movement emphasized ones withdrawal from public life, it attracted wealthier women to join the movement as they had the wherewithal to dedicate themselves to a private life. The research was based on interviews with women, participation in their weekly seminars, and analysis of the sermons (boyans) that addressed Muslim womens social roles and obligations. The central mosque of the Jamaat movement is located in Dhaka, the capital city. The mosque leadership directed all aspects of life of its followers. The central command at the mosque was made up of seven male leaders. All of the members were drawn from Quomi madrassah-educated clergy, that is, an orthodox school of Islamic interpretation. The mosque was organized around a strict hierarchy. All mosque communication was topdown. Members were not allowed to question the decisions of the leaders. Anyone who raised objections or critical questions would be asked to leave the group. This was a written rule of Tabligh leadership. The leaders decided on the topics of the weekly sermons that were to be preached to the group members. The central mosque sent these sermons to the clergy at the local mosques. Hence, all across the country, all Tabligh members listened to the same sermon every week. The local preachers were not allowed to change the content of the sermon. There were separate sermons for women and men because men and women were seen as fulfilling different social roles. The womens sermons focused more on the private aspects of life, especially with regard to a womans duty toward her husband, in-laws, and children. It also emphasized the importance of observing purdah for women, and the sexual conduct of Muslim women. Within Muslim societies, there are divergent interpretations regarding sharia laws, but the Tablighi Jamaat follow an orthodox interpretation. In my conversations with women, it emerged that the women supported sharia laws to govern their private lives and rejected the notion of a Universal Civil Code that is advocated by Bangladeshi feminist groups. Yet, when probed deeper on the question of sharia, it became apparent that the women had little or no knowledge of sharia and its implications. For example, when women were asked if a woman was accused of infidelity, should

she be stoned, they said, yes. When they were asked if a woman who had been raped and could not produce four male witnesses as required under sharia laws, should she be stoned for fornication, the women became uncertain. Some of the older women said they were not aware of this condition. Others said that it was a question for their mosque leaders, while some younger women found this requirement unacceptable. What emerged from these conversations was that the mosque leadership did not discuss sharia laws and their implications with the women. Instead, the women were told that sharia was Allahs Laws, and they were expected to follow the interpretations of these laws as mandated by their mosque. The mosque leadership represented itself as the final arbitrator in all moral matters, and kept the women in ignorance through its hegemonic control over their social lives. The social life of the women and their families was organized around the mosques teachings. The Tabligh followers wanted to replicate the life and times of Prophet Muhammad and the four Caliphs. Thus, in their homes, they eschewed furniture, and instead had carpets and cushions to sit on. TVs, radios, newspapers, and magazines were not allowed in their homes. The men had access to the media since they participated in public life; women, because they stayed at home, did not have such access to information. Social and sexual life was strictly regulated. The women wore simple clothes and always kept their heads covered, although some of the women wore substantial amounts of gold jewelry. Space was gender segregated. Husbands and postpubescent sons would not come into a room if non-kin women were present. The giving and sharing of food, and hospitality toward strangers, was widely practiced within the community, an ideal they termed ikramm-e-Muslim. Within the group, richer families did provide for the poorer families, or helped them in times of distress. Overall, Tablighi Jamaat members had a sense of community and belonging that was absent in wider Bangladeshi Muslim society. Women joined the movement primarily for two reasons, personal trauma (death of a family member) or through marriage. Many of these women were highly educated (up to the MA level in many instances.) In most cases, their husbands brought them into the movement. Following their induction, the women observed a strict code of Islamic bodily comportment in attire and attitude. A woman who had brought her husband, an ophthalmologist, into the movement, described her success in recruiting him as I finally found peace. When I probed deeper into this notion of peace, I discovered that she no longer worried about her husband examining the eyes of women as part of his professional duties. In Muslim societies, where women keep their bodies covered and show only the eyes, the female gaze is considered a source of enchantment. Her husbands recruitment into the Tablighi Jamaat made her feel less insecure, both sexually and economically, because his behavior was regulated by strict Islamic precepts. Women as mothers were in the vanguard of inculcating Tablighi Jamaat values to their children. Most of the women were stay-at-home mothers, and they primarily socialized with women in their group. Their sons were sent to madrassahs (Islamic seminaries) with the expectation that they would later join the clergy. This
Research assistant Anwar.

was no doubt an odd career choice in the twenty-first century. But as my male research assistant pointed out, the sons of the leaders within the mosque hierarchy received technological education and many went to the United States, United Kingdom, and mainland Europe to study. This educational divide resulted in a twotier society: the religious technocrats who ran the leadership, and those with madrassah education who were the followers. While men were encouraged in business and technology, the education of young girls was restricted. Many of the women who had a college education themselves had withdrawn their daughters from schools and home-schooled them in Quranic studies. They were primarily raised to be good Muslim mothers for future generations. Prior to the 1990s, women were not brought into the mosque movement. With globalization, there has been an increase in Islamic TV shows from the Middle East and Malaysia that cater to Muslim women by offering them varying Quranic interpretations and advice. Womens access to global media alerted the male leadership to include the women in their mosque activities. Otherwise, they recognized that they risked losing their members to competing ideas about Islam. This resulted in the womens mosque where women met weekly. This has ensured that the women remained within the interpretations of the Tabligh leaders and did not stray from the fold. Women were encouraged to form neighborhood committees so they did not have to travel out of their neighborhoods and encounter non-kin men. The womens lives were organized around weekly mosque and neighborhood meetings. These neighborhood group formations allowed certain women to emerge as leaders within Tablighi Jamaat womens groups. It also created a close network of women who monitored the activities of the women in these neighborhood committees. If a woman failed to show, especially if her husband was away on a religious tour, the other women in the group visited her home to find out about her welfare, offer her assistance, and also monitor her fidelity. An important duty for male members of the movement is to spend a mandatory 120 days a year traveling away from home to spread the word of Allah. Because men were absent from their families for such long periods, it was important to include their wives in the movement. This ensured that other women in the group would look after their wives and children and also function as a surveillance mechanism. Similarly, women felt that because their husbands were devout men they were less likely to spend time with another woman or take a second wife while they were on their missionary work. In fact, during the 120 days of missionary work, the men travel together, stay in their mosques, and listen to regular sermons. Mosque activities keep the men busy and within the regulation of the mosque. I also found that poorer women joined the movement because marriages take place within the group and dowry is not exchanged. Often an older woman became the patron of a poorer woman and helped her get married. Marriages within the Tablighi Jamaat were inexpensive affairs that made it attractive for lower-income women to join the group. Thus, belonging to the mosque movement not only provided members with piety, but also provided a social safety net for men and women. Lamia Karim is the author of Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh, University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

csws.uoregon.edu 7

PAKISTAN
Gathering Stories of Women in the Valley of Swat
by Anita Weiss, Professor and Head, Department of International Studies
An elderly Swati woman telling her experiences to Anita Weiss.

The majestic Valley of Swat has endured many challenges and transformations in its storied history, but none may have the lasting impact on space and society as the occupation of the area by the Pakistan Taliban in the mid-2000s and the subsequent invasion by the Pakistan military to root them out in May 2009. The winding road to Swat, up through the Malakand Pass in the Provincially Administered Tribal Area (PATA) of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, makes for a formidable barrier from the rest of Pakistan. I traveled to various areas within Swat twice in 2010 to meet with women and hear their stories of what they endured during that period. Whether meeting with returned refugees or a group of widows in Saidu Sharif, or women who remained during that time despite horrific living conditions in Manglawar, or displaced teachers and healthcare workers in Matta in Upper Swat, the message that emerged was similar: confusion over the causes of the crisis combined with an eagerness to share their ideas on how to move past it. A woman captured this sentiment when she said to me, Were still afraid: afraid of the unknown, and we dont know how it all happened. I conducted this research to try to give these women a voice, to facilitate their brainstorming of what was possible in their futures. The majority of women with whom I met were uneducated, largely illiterate, and all were enthusiastic to share their stories with me. They responded with a clear need for income opportunities, investment in schools, the state to maintain security in Swat, and especially to enable them to facilitate their own empowerment. Swatis need jobs, and wages paid for doing those jobs. Many women know how to sew; they want womens centers
8 October 2011

set up where they can access sewing machines and cooperative marketing of their products. While smaller NGOs have tried such programs, its the larger ODA donors who have the resources to support such projects on a large scale but are largely unresponsive to these womens words. Rather than recognizing womens empowerment as foundational to rising above the strife that has plagued Swat, their focus has been on other things (madrassah education, military support and engagement, political institutions), many of which are less tangible and often irrelevant to womens immediate needs. Swat had remained a semi-autonomous princely state until 1969 when it finally acceded to Pakistan. Its ruler, the Wali of Swat, had governed the area through a combination of Islamic law (shariah) and paternalistic decrees. For roughly twenty years, Swat underwent a period of adjustment. The two most significant changes included the arrival of numerous government bureaucratspeople not indigenous to the area, didnt know the local people and practices, took seemingly forever to effect change, and could be bribed, in contrast to the Walis retinueand the British-based system of law, a legacy of the Raj used throughout Pakistan today. Gradually, Swatis began to miss the speedy justice of the days of the Walis rule, albeit it had been autocratic and paternalistic. The longer that disputes remained unresolved, the more they festered and prompted violent clashes between groups. Sufi Mohammad and his supporters founded the Tehreek-eNafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) in 1989 with the goal to

A Swati woman in the nontraditional shuttlecock burqa.

reinstate shariah as the primary legal system in Malakand and Kohistan in PATA. The movement quickly gained support in Swat; legal delays remained incessant and outcomes became widely perceived as influenced more by bribery and intrigues than by justice. Imprisoned upon returning to Pakistan from fighting alongside

Were still afraid: afraid of the unknown, and we how it all happened.
the Taliban in Afghanistan in January 2002, Sufi Mohammads son-in-law, Maulana Fazlullah, took up the leadership of the Swat faction of the TNSM in 2003. Notably, this was shortly after a coalition of Islamist political parties, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) had won the provincial election in the NWFP in October 2002. The social reform agenda of this Islamist coalition was built largely on limiting womens movement and choices.1 Indeed, the presence of the MMA government from 2002-07 played an important role in opening a space for groups such as the TNSM and related Taliban factions to gain a foothold and build upon their influence in the province. Fazlullah began broadcasting programs on Islam and instructions on how to live as a good Muslim via FM radio in 2004. Women, in great numbers, tuned into Fazlullahs programs. For many, this was a legitimate form of entertainment and connected them to a kind of global modernity where people use mobile phones and listen to the radio. Women became Fazlullahs most enthusiastic supporters. Within a few years, the TNSM was targeting police stations and other official offices in their quest to get shariah declared the legal system in Malakand district. People were confused about the seemingly mixed messages emanating from the FM station, and were reluctant to act against Fazlullah. In December 2007, he and his followers helped found the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP, often referred to as the Taliban by Swatis), headed overall by Baitullah Mahsud but headed locallyin Swatby Fazlullah. As the influence of Fazlullah and his TTP grew in Swat, three things occurred: the bazaarall public trading areaswas closed; women had to be in full purdah and wear the shuttlecock burqa; and girls were discouraged from going to school. In early 2009 Fazlullahs TTP turned to destroying girls schools on the warped assumption that neither tradition nor Islam support girls education. A climate of fear was created. Swats economy was particularly hard hit as tourists were now avoiding Swat, given the unrelenting violence perpetrated by the TTP. Threatening goods transporters and shopkeepers alike, the TTP destroyed commerce in Swat. As the economy condensed only the TTP could offer employment, hiring young men to serve as recruits, paying a bit more if a man agreed to be a gunman, and paying quite a bit more to families when a son was successful as a suicide bomber. They actively restricted women from work and travel, stopping rickshaws and other modes of transport, demanding women within to wear the burqa and go home. Between the beheadings, school bombings, and the closing of most bazaars, somehow the impetus to fight back eluded the Swatis.

What women endured during the time the Pakistan Taliban controlled Swat and when the Pakistan army announced in May 2009 to leave the area or risk being killed as Taliban, is inconceivable in the West. Husbands were killed who were in the police, the army, and the Taliban, and even those who were innocent bystanders: one woman told me her husband was killed dont know by a flying shell when he went out of their house to fetch water. Given the tradition of marrying off girls just after puberty, tragic numbers of young women below the age of twenty are widows with multiple children and no source of income. Rebuilding from the devastation continues in Swat. Regardless of class, women had lived sheltered lives cared for by fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons, many of whom are no longer there. The militarys ongoing presence in Swat is important to women as the role of protector is now being shouldered by the military. It will take generations for Swatis to get past how their country has been transformed and militantized during the past decade. Movements like the TTP exist on fear and repressing the disempowered. Women in Swat are now organizing to envision a future, one consisting of completing their education, getting married and remaining married, being able to bring in a reasonable income, and not living in constant fear as women still do today.
1. My earlier research on the MMA, its social reform agenda and effects on womens rights, is available in A Provincial Islamist Victory in NWFP, Pakistan: The Social Reform Agenda of the Muttahida Majlis-iAmal in John L. Esposito and John Voll (eds.) Asian Islam in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 145-173) and in Straddling CEDAW and the MMA: Conflicting Visions of Women's Rights in Contemporary Pakistan in Kenneth M. Cuno and Manisha Desai (eds.) Family, Gender & Law in a Globalizing Middle East & South Asia (Syracuse University Press, 2009, pp. 163-183).

Anita Weiss, right, with colleague Falak Naz Asfandyar in Swat. Both are wearing chadors.

Anita M. Weiss is a longtime CSWS associate. She has published extensively on social development, gender issues, and political Islam in Pakistan. Her current research project is analyzing how distinct constituencies in Pakistan, including the state, are grappling with articulating their views on women's rights. Professor Weiss is a member of the editorial boards of Citizenship Studies and Globalizations, is on the editorial advisory board of Kumarian Press, and is the incoming vice president of the American Institute of Pakistan Studies.

csws.uoregon.edu 9

Female Stars Are Born

Gender, Lighting Technology, and Japanese Cinema
by Daisuke Miyao, Associate Professor, East Asian Languages and Literatures
ers sensory perceptions of materiality. Thus, contrary to onnagata, Aokis newness was based on the image of physical sexuality, using photographic technologies to enhance physical characteristics. Onnagata express their emotions in the movement of entire bodies, special configuration with other Yukios stepmother, known as Tsuru Aoki, actors, and surrounding was a renowned actress in early American cindcor; long shots and flat ema. In fact, Aoki was the first female Japanese lighting are more suitmotion picture actor. In Japan, the first female able to display their permotion picture actor did not appear until arguformance than close-ups ably as late as 1918 when Hanayagi Harumi with make-up and special starred in Sei no kagayaki [Radiance of Life]. lighting. The March 1917 Before this film, the majority of female characissue of Katsudo Gaho, ters in motion pictures were played by onnaan early Japanese film gata, female impersonators in kabuki. Even in magazine, for instance, 1919, only three films out of about 150 films juxtaposes a still photo of released in Japan during that year used female Tachibana Teijiro, popular actors for female roles.2 onnagata in a 1917 film Aokis stardom had different modes of recepFutari Shizuka, and a portion and complicated meanings in varied geotrait of Myrtle Gonzalez, a graphical and historical sites. Initially formed in Hollywood star. While the the early period of the American film industry, latter is a sensual closeAokis star image was rearticulated within vari- Tsuru Aoki and Sessue Hayakawa in Hollywood. Picture-Play 4.1 (March 1917): 64. up of the actors face and ous and contradictory political, ideological, and naked shoulders in low-key cultural contexts in the United States and in Japan during the period of lighting, dramatically highlighted with sidelight from the left, the former public circulation. Within Aokis star image, there was a transnational is a flat-lit long shot. Even though it is not clear how faithfully this still war of images about Japan, Japaneseness, and Japanese woman- photo represents the actual scene in the film, this example implies how hood among the actor herself, the filmmakers, and the various audi- the Japanese film with onnagata emphasizes visibility of the theatrical tabences. In the United States, despite her skillful acting, she became the leaux in diffused lighting, rather than dramatically enhancing fragmented first of the line of the Orientalist depiction of Asian women in Hollywood body parts or anything within the frame via lighting and make-up.3 cinema, preceding such actors as Anna May Wong, Shirley Yamaguchi, The images of female stars in Japan, therefore, needed to skillfully Lucy Liu, and Zhang Ziyi. Japanese reception of Aokis stardom was comincorporate Hollywood-style close-up and make-up in the tableaux-style pletely different. Being a successful actor in early Hollywood, Aoki was a composition and flat lighting of a kabuki convention. As such, Aokis representative of modernism and Americanism. professional achievement in the United States had a tremendous impact The technology of cinematic lighting is one of the fascinating issues on the discourse of modernization of cinema in Japan. In the early 1910s, behind the emergence of female stars in Japanese cinema. Despite cin- it was primarily young intellectualsranging from film critics and filmemas innate status as a technological medium, scholars of film studies makers to government officialswho began to criticize mainstream have focused more on analyses of stories and themes, and their relations commercial films in Japan. They decried films made in Japan as slavish to sociopolitical and economic contexts. Integration of theory and prac- reproductions of Japanese theatrical works. They promoted a reform tice via analyzing technologies of female stardom will bring the discipline of motion pictures in Japan through the production of modern and of film studies into the next stage. purely cinematic films. Their writings and subsequent experimental When Aokis stardom was formulated in Hollywood, such photo- filmmaking are often noted as the Pure Film Movement. graphic techniques as close-up, artificial three-point lighting, and soft The Pure Film advocates criticized mainstream commercial Japanese focus were used for film stars both in their films and publicity photos in motion pictures for being uncinematic because, for the most part, they order to emphasize actors physical characteristics and convey sensual were merely reproducing stage repertories of kabuki, most typified by the attraction and psychological states, which could go beyond the logic of use of onnagata for female roles. Behind their words lay their irritation the film narratives. While serving for the narrative clarity and consistency that Japan was far behind European countries and the United States in the on one hand, these photographic techniques could also enhance the view- development of motion pictures as a modern art form.4 They eventually It is no comparison. My mother had a much better acting skill than my father. My fathers acting was like, I will show you how I can perform, but mothers was so natural that we were able to watch it in a relaxed manner. My father knew about it very well.1 The late Hayakawa Yukio, son of silent film superstar Sessue Hayakawathe first and arguably the only Asian matinee idol in Hollywoodthus talked about his famous father and lesser-known stepmother, Aoki Tsuruko (1891-1961). 10 October 2011

intended to export Japanese-made films to foreign markets and affirm Japanese national identity internationally and domestically. These critics claimed that the only way Japanese film would become exportable to foreign markets was to imitate the forms and styles of foreign films. This rather contradictory attitude was in accordance with the political discourses of modernization in Japan. In order to obtain recognition as a nation in international relations, the Japanese government had adopted policies showing their movement toward modernization to Western standards since the late nineteenth century. This dual attitude of the Japanese government between modernization and nationalism was indicated by their slogan, Japanese Spirit and Western Culture (Wakon yosai). The film reformists insisted on the mutual development of Japanese cinema and Japanese national identity, using the American style of cinema. These film reformists responded favorably to Aoki in terms of Americanism and nationalism. Her films were ideal products for the reformists because they used cinematic forms and techniques, especially continuity editing, naturalistic lighting and expressive pantomime, that were both understandable to foreign audiences and successful in the American market. Kinema Record journal noted, [Aokis] eyes and mouth move as if she were European or American.5 Katsudo Shahin Zasshi magazine placed a portrait of Aoki in its photo gallery section and noted, Miss Aoki Tsuruko is a Japanese actress in the American film industry and she is one of the most popular stars. We are fascinated by her sensual body and gorgeous facial expressions.6 In early twentieth-century Japan, there was a Caucasian Complex in the discourse of physical appearance. Japanese bodies were considered shameful compared with well-built and well-balanced Western bodies. Aokis body presented a promising future for Japanese cinema that Western audiences would also appreciate.

Cinema has always been at the forefront of transnational culture form from the early period of its history. Aokis career in the global film culture reveals that stardom is an ongoing process of negotiation, a transnational negotiation, in particular. Tsuru Aokis stardom, which provided a template of a female stardom in Japan, reveals the historical trajectory of American images of Japan and of Japanese self-images in the world.

NOTES

1. Qtd., in Nogami Hideyuki, Seirin no o Hayakawa Sesshu [King of Hollywood, Sessue Hayakawa] (Tokyo: Shakai shiso sha, 1986), p. 62. 2. Saso Tsutomu, 1923 Mizoguchi Kenji Chi to rei [1923 Mizoguchi Kenji Blood and soul] (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, 1991), p. 19. 3. See Hideaki Fujiki, Canonising Sexual Image, Devaluing Gender Performance: Replacing the Onnagata with Female Actresses in Japans Early Cinema, in Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, eds. Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim (London: Wallflower, 2006), pp. 147-60. 4. See Aaron Gerow, Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 5. Kinema Record 51 (November/December, 1917), p. 14. 6. Katsudo Shashin Zasshi 3, no. 12 (December 1917), n.p. Daisuke Miyao received a 2010 CSWS Faculty Research Grant Award in support of his research on this topic. He is the author of Cinema Is a Cat: Introduction to Cinema Studies (Eiga wa neko dearu: Hajimete no cinema studies), Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2011 (published in Japanese).

Sangita Gopal interview, continued from page 5

water companies that were owned by the government had to be deregulated and opened up to the free market. The education system had to be rendered over to the free market and to private agencies. This privatization of the society and the economy from a welfare, socialist state to a fully capitalist, free market state also has a reflex at the micrological level of the family and the couple. We see these concerns reflected repeatedly in the films, reflected as urbanization, reflected as the fact that one of the reasons why the couple seems to struggle so much is that they no longer have those social nets to rely upon and be answerable to. At the same time they dont necessarily even have the welfare state to provide the place of the missing social net. So when a child is lost, that child is truly lost. They no longer have grandparents and an extended family. Nor do they have good, state-run, funded childcare. So this utter isolationfrom the governance of the family or of the state, from both these networksis precisely one of the emerging realities of globalization everywhere. Hindi cinema via the couple and its radical isolation enables us to track this. I have a chapter that looks at the rise of a genre of horror movies that focused on couples. Horror is a genre that helps us to isolate what a culture sees as problems of the family. Children who are imperiled, who return to haunt, who return to killis a typical trope of horror. Urbanization and nuclearization, it almost seems, makes horror possible. Whereas in the old horror films, horror occurred in the context of the countryside, or some deserted lake, or temple, or ruin, here, repeatedly horror occurs in the heart of the urban metropolis. Restoration of normality often involves calling upon the extended family from the village who come in and help to restore order. A film Bhoot, which means ghost, is really fascinating. This couple is out househunting, rejects a bunch, but takes one that is really modern, totally chic. It turns out to be haunted by the ghost of a woman killed by her lover when she was pregnant. The woman becomes haunted by the ghost of this sad tragic figure who had lived there before. What is so interesting is that the solution of the mystery and what is ailing the woman is linked to leaving the city, going to the village and finding an ancient reli-

gious, shamanic figurea woman, againwho comes and says, Here is what is going on and here is how we are going to heal you. The film says repeatedly this type of isolated living is not enough. You have to retie the bonds that were broken, return to the village and the belief systems that you have lost, and only then can you secure your household. In some ways, horror as a form and its emergence as a form at this moment, in this particular instantiation, which is urban and nuclear, is both a diagnosis of a particular condition and also a nostalgia for a different mode of life. Q: Would you tell us a little about the ways in which CSWS support has helped you? CSWS provided me with an excellent community of other colleagues and students, with whom I discussed my work, and from whose work I learned so much. Coming here in 2004 as a young faculty member, I found that intellectual community right away at CSWS. I attended a reception, met these women, and we became friends over the years. We met formally through RIGSI was part of two different RIGS, but I would say even more significantly we met informally. Also, I was fortunate to win a fellowshipa CSWS Faculty Research Grantand that aided the writing at a time when I really needed the time, because our department doesnt have that much support. I was able to take off one term when I didnt have to teach. I benefited from being a part of those two RIGS, and also the big conference that Professor Lamia Karim and I organized on media, gender, and empire. That allowed me as a junior scholar to meet senior people in the field, to interact with them at a wonderful level, and to become quickly abreast of the main currents of thought in my field, this broad field to which we belong that we might call feminist studies. This is my great hope for something like CSWS. I know it plays significant roles on campus by supporting faculty and student research. But these broad conversationswe all get really involved in our book projects and so forth, and very rarely do we have the chance to step back and say what are the big questions animating feminism today. This I feel is incredibly hepful for you regardless of your discipline and regardless of what stage of your career you may happen to be in. Alice Evans interviewed Sangita Gopal in June 2011. csws.uoregon.edu 11

for giving me a career and a book

Im of a generationmaybe there are others of you, and maybe its not as generational as I might thinkwhere we made do with whatever sorts of academic career we could cobble together. Sometimes it could mean trailing a spouse, sometimes it could mean working in a non-tenure-track position, sometimes both; always it seemed to mean that there was no local automaticallyand immediatelyavailable berth to support the intellectual growth and research that a PhD seemed to promise. Those of us in non-tenure-track positions had to make our own time for reading and writing, including the necessity to share that reading and writing since departmental resources were minimally available. Keeping up a scholarly life was an uphill battle. The lifeline that sustained me and others in life-situations like mine was CSWS. CSWS provided a number of things vital to the unplaced: a placeHendricks Hall a vibrant and diverse community of scholars from across campus activities, mainly through its RIGs, that included reading groups, visiting scholars, writing exchanges through works-in-progress; and, especially significantly monetary support in the form of travel grants and course release. I was lucky: just a couple of years after I arrived in Eugene, the UO hired, almost accidentally, a cadre of talented feminist medieval scholars to join one of the fields most venerable feminists, history professor Mavis Mate, who had been instrumental in the founding of CSWS. The medieval group cohered as medievalists and as feminists: over the course of two decades we had reading groups, works-inprogess, and dynamic visitors through CSWSs support of the Reclaiming the Past RIG. All of us, tenure-track or not, benefited from CSWSs resources in the form of travel grants and release time. We coalesced during the early 2000s into the Feminist Humanities Project, and our traction on campus was considerable. The Medieval Studies major at the UO, created from energies that included us feminist medievalists, earned respect for its strong feminist scholarship in European languages and English, as well as medieval history. Feminism continues to inflect the research of the UOs medievalistsincluding Gina Psaki, Barbara Altmann, Lisa Wolverton, and Anne Laskayaas well as the courses offered by Medieval Studies, now an academic major for UO students. 12 October 2011

PAEAN TO CSWS
My book, Words, Stones, and Herbs: The Healing Word in Medieval and Early Modern England (Syracuse University Press, 2007) had its genesis in the Reclaiming the Past RIG. At one of our work-in-progress meetings in 1997 I first outlined my beginning research into womens roles in medieval medical practice, seeking out the meanings of womens medical practice to Middle English literature. A CSWS grant supported a 1999 course buy-out (which, when youre teaching seven courses a year for about $17,000, means a lot) and, through the support of another RIG, Healing Artswhich brought medieval feminist medical historian Joan Cadden to campus in 2005I received research support and effective sustenance in the form of talks, conversations, editing, and encouragement from CSWS and my feminist colleagues. Like the Reclaiming the Past RIG, the Healing Arts RIG included feminist scholars whose work, while remote from either the Middle Ages, or from medieval England, complemented my own, especially because, like the School of Music and Dances Marian Smitha member of the Reclaiming the Past RIG who studies nineteenth-century operBodleian Library, 2001From left: Louise Bishop; Barbara Altmann, UO Professor of French, Romance Languages; Gina atic balletthe Healing Arts RIG members, Psaki, UO Professor of Italian, Romance Languages; and Jan which include Dorothee Ostmeier, Marjorie Emerson, Feminist Humanities Project staff member. Woolacott, Jonathan Seidel, Shirley Marc, and Susan Andersoncould engage my work with Medieval Studies got where it did, and contin- interdisciplinary eyes, and let me know where ues to find traction on campus, in part because of I needed to unpack assumptions and produce a CSWSs support. I especially remember a scintil- clear through-line. lating visit in the late 90s from the eminent femiWhile we may take feminist and queer nist medievalist Carolyn Dinshaw, who talked theory for granted, we do so at our peril. with the Reclaiming the Past RIG not only about Without a place, a scholarly community, and medieval gender studies but about medieval the real-time exchange of research that the visits queer studies well before queer studies reached of feminist and queer scholars energizesnot the status of a program on campus. Dinshaw to mention the financial support individual helped us with programmatic considerations as scholars, especially those without the solidity well as research avenues, and remains an ally to and rewards of a tenure-track berth, desperately this day. That alliance and research connection needthe vital social critique that feminism wouldnt have happened without CSWS. and queer studies offers would be lost on this Tenure-related faculty have other perks campus. It takes a village to raiseand keep on campusreduced teaching loads, summer raisinga theory. That villagein all the ways research funds, other internal grantsfor which it enacts feminism and supports its traction on non-tenure-track faculty are de facto and de jure campusis CSWS. I know that, even with the ineligible. Because CSWS founded its research support I was given once I did attain a tenuremission, not on rank, but on the quality of the track position, I wouldnt have completed my project, non-tenure-track faculty can apply for book, let alone produce a book that treats the and receive CSWS grants: the primary consider- healing word through a feminist lens, without ation is merit, not rank. In all of my interactions the sustained contributions of CSWS and my with CSWSwith its directors, staff, affiliates feminist colleagues. My debt to CSWS is as I was never treated as a second-class citizen (a deep and wide as its presence needs to be on relatively constant feature of life on the non- the UO campus. tenure track).

by Louise M. Bishop, Associate Professor of Literature, Robert D. Clark Honors College

texts, novels, poems, and memoirs, the seminar fostered disThis year, CSWS welcomed as one of its newest faculty affiliates cussion of the uses, meanings, Courtney Thorsson, assistant professor of English. A specialist and migrations of foods in the in African American literature and foodways literature, Thorsson African diaspora, particularly in earned her PhD from Columbia in 2009. She spent the 2009-10 the United States. When asked academic year researching and teaching at Rutgers, having won a about her experience teachprestigious one-year post-doctoral fellowship in African American ing at UO, Thorsson explains literature. Her first year at UO has been no less impressive: she has that she enjoyed her first year quickly distinguished herself as a scholar, teacher, and citizen. teaching tremendously and Thorsson is an active and productive scholar. She has already found students at all levels to published two articles in Callaloo, the premier scholarly journal be enthusiastic about the study on African American and African diaspora literature (on Paule of African American literature. Marshalls Praisesong for the Widow and on Why Now?: Recent Professor Thorssons comWritings on Black Power and the Black Panther Party). She mitment to community led has another article forthcoming in African American Review (on her to take on an unusual James Baldwin and black women's fiction) and two others out for amount of service for a new review (on Acts of Inscription in Toni Morrisons Paradise and on faculty member. She moderGwendolyn Brookss black aesthetic of the domestic). Thorsson ated a round table on New has also nearly completed a book manuscript, which epitomizes Approaches to the Study of her scholarly focus on race, gender, and women. Womens Work: Slavery and Abolition in the Nationalism and Contemporary African American Womens Novels Americas for UOs Center for examines novels published in the last two decades of the twentiLatino/a and Latin American eth century by Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Studies. She served on a sucCourtney Thorsson up close and personal with Abe. Ntozake Shange, and Toni Morrison; the book argues that these cessful search committee for writers use their novels to reclaim and revise cultural nationalism as a new assistant professor in the everyday and extraordinary work of women building African American Native American literature for the Department of English. And she organized community. Thorssons scholarly promise has been recognized by a UO New a visit and public reading by award-winning African American author Mat Faculty Award and a CSWS travel grant. Johnson, who read from his novel Pym and discussed African American literReflecting her expertise in African American literature, women, and genature, black superheroes, and his work writing graphic novels Acknowledging der, Professor Thorsson taught a range of courses this year: undergraduate her successful service, the Department of English faculty recently elected introductions to African American literature; an upper division course on conThorsson to serve a three-year term on its advisory council. She has been temporary African American women novelists; an independent study graduate impressed with the intellectual range and enthusiasm of her colleagues, course on African American literature to 1900; and a graduate seminar on whether in English, the Ethnic Studies Department, or the Department of African American foodways. The seminar gives a sense of the interdisciplinWomen and Gender Studies, and looks forward to playing an increasingly ary nature of Thorssons teaching and her particular interest in the contribuactive role in CSWSs mission to promote research on women and gender. tions of women to society. Sampling texts from the enormous body of African American culinary writing, including cookbooks, cultural histories, religious by Paul Peppis, Associate Profesor, Department of English

Introducing Courtney Thorsson

I am delighted to introduce Roco Zambrana, who joined the faculty in the Department of Philosophy this year as a specialist in nineteenth century continental philosophy and German idealism, especially Hegel, and Frankfurt School critical theory. Dr. Zambrana received her PhD from the New School for Social Research in 2010. Her dissertation, entitled The Logic of Critique: Hegel, Honneth, and Dialectical Reversibility was the winner of the Hans Jonas Award in Philosophy from New School for Social Research. We have been thrilled to have Dr. Zambrana with us this year, as she has been a remarkably generous and effective department citizen as well as doing a wonderful job during her first year of teaching. Dr. Zambranas areas of expertise cover what many consider some of the most difficult philosophical work in the Western canon. Her scholarship includes articles and book chapters such as: Love in Hegels Logic, forthcoming in Love and the Philosophy of Hegel; Hegels Legacy, invited submission; The Logic of Critique: Axel Honneth and Dialectical Reversibility, under review; Hegels Logic of Finitude, under review; Hegels Hyperbolic Formalism, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain; and Struggle and

Introducing Roco Zambrana

Transgression in Hegels Jena Writings, in Women in Philosophy Journal, among others. Before she got lost in Hegel, as a young student in her native Puerto Rico, Zambrana concerned herself with questions of political identityand she hopes to get back to these questions in her work here at the University of Oregon. In Puerto Rico, she co-wrote Disparidad de gnero en la niez: El caso de Puerto Rico y El Salvador, in Memorias del Cuarto Congreso Nacional Sobre las Mujeres, Humacao, Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, with Anyra Santory, Luis A. Avils, Bair Soto, Joyce Gonzlez, and Roxana Romn. In her first year, the department was happy to have her teach a topics seminar on Frankfurt School Critical Theory, an authors course on Hegel focused on the Phenomenology of Spirit, a course on Global Justice, and a course on the History of Nineteenth Century Philosophy focused on Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. Dr. Zambrana did not waste any time becoming actively involved in the university at large and in department service. She is a member of the Latin American Studies Committee, an affiliate of CSWS and a member of the Women of Color Project of CSWS, while directing the distribution of graduate travel awards through the Philosophy Department Placement Committee and serving on the Undergraduate Studies Committee. It has been a total delight for me to work with Roco this year. She is gracious, responsible and generous with her colleagues. She is a brilliant intellectual interlocutor and a capable and committed department citizen. I look forward to working with her for years to come, and with excitement to her future research.

by Bonnie Mann, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy

csws.uoregon.edu 13

FIGHTING FOR FORESTS

Gendered Conflicts in Mozambiques Forest Landscapes
My research combines the issues of forest resource rights, land rights, and gender. I am studying how rural families are negotiating new inheritance rights for women (due to recent feminist legislation) within their communities, particularly where communities have mapped their land rights according to the countrys progressive land and forest laws. My research also provides a portrait of how deforestation of native specieslargely due to illegal logging and reforestation of nonnative species such as eucalyptus, together are transforming forest ecology and mens and womens livelihoods. Thus far, my project has consisted of three overlapping phases between September 2009 and November 2010. One phase involved interviewing leaders in the feminist and environmental movements in Maputo concerning their experiences in raising mens and womens awareness of their land and forest rights. I spoke with these organizations about their visions for the future of their movements and the future of the countrys forests and forest dwelling populations. A second phase involved observing and interviewing the staff of a development organization, Rural Association for Mutual Assistance (ORAM), in Zambzia. Aside from community radio, NGOs such as ORAM are the primary source of civic education in rural communities. Very few women are using formal law to pursue rights to their land, fields, or goods beyond asking for help from local leaders on an individualized basis. Recent programs by organizations such as ActionAid International, however, are beginning to train community paralegals to educate their own community members and to work as liaisons with district judges and other authorities. Gender is now a central focus of these programs. The majority of my time in the field involved a third phase of observing, interviewing, and conducting questionnaires in two communities in Zambzia province. I studied the ways that community forested land is appropriated, and the linked social and ecological impacts of this appropriation. One community in Maganja da Costa district has been trying to establish an association to sell their timber commercially with the help of ORAM, but legal and illegal timber buyers are in an intense turf war with this community association. As precious timber such as chanfuta, pau ferro and panga panga are

by Ingrid L. Nelson, Department of Geography

low-growing miombo woodlands, which have supported rural Mozambicans with fuel, food, and fodder for centuries, are being decimated by two recently emerging global forces: Chinas illegal timber extraction, and the indirect impacts of large-scale land acquisition by transnational corporations, especially for biofuel and fast-growing monoculture eucalyptus plantations. This is altering the sustainability of and ownership rights over thousands of hectares of forest and farmland. While rural Mozambicans have historically faced significant challenges to their livelihoods, the scale and pace of these two processes is unprecedented since colonialism, and raises serious concerns for Mozambican farmers who often do not hold secure tenure rights, and who lack access to the negotiating table with national elites, private companies, and illicit timber traders. Such imbalanced power can be even more pronounced for women, whose rights to land and forest resources are often not acknowledged or supported.

With GPS unit in hand, Ingrid L. Nelson sets out on her bicycle to survey farmers fields for the day.

taken for as little as $3 each, the surrounding resources such as mushrooms, insects, medicinal herbs and wild vegetables, upon which men and women survive, are becoming scarce. As mens masculine identities change with their new jobs as timber carriers (earning $3.95 per day), the burden of farming increasingly falls upon women. The cash earned by the men will not be enough to supplement the drop in food production in these families. Conflicts over forest resources tie local ecology with trade and politics across international borders, as Chinese domestic markets and consumers in North America and Europe serve as destinations for these rare hardwoods. The second research community lies farther north in Guru district, is predominantly matrilocal, and has little to no forest and a heavy dependency on its land for subsistence agriculture, with some men participating in migrant labor. ORAM helped one part of the community map its land rights, but many in the community are struggling with land conflicts. Some men in the community recently threatened and burned down a campsite run by a company establishing teak timber plantations (implicated in a form of land grabbing through re-forestation). Recently, the governor created a new plan to insert timber monocultures into particularly resistant communities. Local leaders must now each have their own forest (consisting of at least one hectare of eucalyptus). In this community male leaders are taking their wifes or sisters land, cutting the regenerating native tree species, and planting eucalyptus provided by state and private companies. In August 2011 I will return to Mozambique to bring my preliminary results back to the rural

A traditional healer or curandeiro cuts bark from a medicinal tree with her hoe. She will boil the bark with several other herbs to give to a child ill with malaria. The nurse on a government salary in the community hospital has been absent for several weeks and the community cannot access the malaria drugs locked in the hospital.

14 October 2011

Feminism and Ecology: The Gendered Politics of Food According to Vandana Shiva
by Margaret Hallock, Director, Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics
The future of food needs to be reclaimed by women, shaped by women, and democratically controlled by women. Only when food is in womens hands will both food and women be secure.Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, introduction to 2010 edition by South End Press Dr. Vandana Shiva, internationally respected author and activist, visited the UO as occupant of the Wayne Morse Chair of Law and Politics during winter quarter 2011. She headlined a major conference on Food Justice: Community, Equity and Sustainability sponsored by the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics and cosponsored by CSWS. The conference, held February 19-22, 2011, attracted over two thousand university and community participants and highlighted the growing food justice movement. In numerous appearances at the conference and around the community, Shiva inspired food activists with her call for a return to authentically community-based food systems that lead to food security. Shiva has spent her career as a scientist and activist battling the globalization of agriculture, driven by agribusinesses seeking global markets for their non-renewable seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. Her crusade is a feminist crusade. Ecology and feminism are inseparable for me, she states. Why? Because women are the worlds major food producers. Most food producers, farmers, in the world are women, and most girls are future farmers. For millennia women have been preserving seeds, maintaining genetic diversity, and producing healthy and sustainable food. Womens knowledge and livelihoods, and the security of their families, are threatened by the growth of commercialized and privatized seeds and sanitized packaged foodstuffs. Dr. Shiva rails against Monsanto and other corporate giants who patent ancient wheat seeds and then require farmers to purchase new seeds every year. Shiva created Navdanya, or 9 Seeds in India to work with farmers to save
Vandana Shiva headlined the Food Justice conference (photo by Jack Liu).

seeds and reduce their dependence on global agriculture for seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides, which has lead to an epidemic of debt and farmer suicides in India. In her recent edition of Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, Shiva demonstrates the many ways that the politics of the food system is gendered. Vandana Shiva has helped spark a movement of food activistsfarmers, scientists, activists, and intellectualswho are bringing a new food system into being, a system in which agriculture belongs to the commons. But she is quick to remind us that this movement must be tied to issues of gender equality and environmental justice. It is not enough for rich countries to create local agriculture systems when so many in the world, particularly women, suffer food insecurity. Her ethics demand an alternative to the structural adjustment policies of international organizations and authentic food systems that create food security and environmental and social justice. Dr. Shiva is also a prolific and admired writer having authored dozens of books, including Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Change (South End Press, 2008); Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (South End Press, 2005), Water Wars: Pollution, Profits, and Privatization (South End Press, 2001), Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (South End Press, 2000), Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (South End Press, 1997), and Monocultures of the Mind (Zed, 1993). friend the Mozambican environmental organization Justia Ambiental on Facebook to follow their campaigns). Forests and gender are fundamental to food sovereignty and land and resource rights campaigns. A gender perspective continues to be crucial to environmental and social justice, because so many women are experienced collective organizers, farmers, and forest resource experts. Without support from the UO Center for the Study of Women in Society, writing up my dissertation would not be possible. Ingrid L. Nelson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography. She is also pursuing a graduate certificate in the Department of Womens and Gender Studies. The U.S. Student Fulbright and the Society of Woman Geographers Evelyn Pruitt fellowships supported her fieldwork. She is a 2010-2011 Jane Grant Dissertation Writing Fellow (CSWS) as she finishes writing her dissertation. csws.ureogon.edu 15

Fighting for Forests, cont. from previous page

communities where I worked, in order for community members to critique my research findings. When they have an opportunity to refute, modify, reiterate, and emphasize key themes in the research, they create new ideas, questions, and strategies. Returning is important for building a long-term working relationship with these families over many years as resource pressures shift and as civic education and better implementation of the law expand. In the final week of the month-long trip, I will return to the capital, Maputo, to reach out to the broader public at the national and international level. I plan to deliver a presentation and develop several debates with policy, private, activist, civic, academic, and other interest groups at the national Womens Forum offices, inviting national television and community radio reporters to the events. These debates

will highlight the points of conflict and agreement within the environmental and feminist movements concerning the gender dynamics of illegal logging, plantation forestry, and changing land rights. These discussions are crucial to my dissertation analysis of how different interest groups are shaping the goals for the future of the countrys forests and land rights. I analyze these debates together with the debates that I observed at the World Banks conference on Land and Poverty in Washington D.C. in April 2011 and the International Land Coalitions membership meeting in Tirana, Albania, in May 2011. There is a growing global movement of activists, farmers, scholars, and practitioners who are strategizing together for food sovereignty, land rights, and supporting more ecologically sustainable practices (check out the work of GRAIN at www.grain.org, the International Land Coalition at www.landcoalition.org, and

Complex Lives

Interviews with Transmen in the Southeastern United States

by Miriam Abelson, Department of Sociology
view transmen, people whose bodies had been assigned as female at birth who transitioned to live as men. I traveled a total of 3,000 miles within the Southeast in three weeks to conduct interviews and field observations in Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The sixteen men I interviewed were ages twenty-one to forty-nine, came from urban to rural backgrounds, and represented a range of socioeconomic backgrounds and incomes. Through in-depth interviews I found that these men were able to survive and thrive in a sometimes hostile climate by accessing support through online transgender resources and communities, inperson transgender support groups, and family, friends, and neighbors. The men often needed medical and legal advice and resources during their transitions, as well as other forms of advice and support no matter their transition status. Online communities and transgender-related websites were the best means to access this information for most of the men. Those that had access found local in-person support groups or medical clinics valuable for this advice and other forms of support. Not all men had local access to in-person support and those that were able traveled to find it through groups in other areas and by attending national and regional conferences. Family, friends, neighbors, and others also provided key supports for the men in matters related to being transgender, but also in everyday circumstances. For example, one man spoke of how his neighbors in the small rural community where he lived would call him and help him round up his horses if they had gotten out of their pasture. He demonstrated that this kind of assistance is a necessary part of rural life and gave him a feeling of belonging that he did not think he could find in an urban setting. Nearly all of the men encountered barriers to support at some time, which involved lack of economic resources and medical access, religiousbased transphobia, and conflicts over gender ideals. Nearly all the men said that other U.S. regions would likely be more hospitable to transpeople, yet nearly all of them desired to continue living in the Southeast or, due to family or other connections, did not view it as an option to leave. For many of them the desirable features of the region outweighed the fear of harassment or violence. Their stories about their lives provided rich information about regional and more localized ideals of masculinity. This study is part of a larger project in which I seek to compare the lives of transmen and masculinities more generally between U.S. regions. In comparison to an earlier study in the San Francisco Bay Area, perhaps unsurprisingly, a majority of the men in the Southeast described more traditional expectations for the roles and behaviors of men and women. For example, one man described how men and women are expected to behave in his hometown. He said, He takes care of the women, and they take care of the children, the woman takes care of the house and you, uhthe man brings home the bacon, hunts, fishes. These traditional ideals were consistent when they discussed regional ideals and did match personal ideals for some men, but they also expressed a variety of actual gender practices in their relationships and communities and held alternative ideals. While the image of a poor, rural, white, redneck masculinity emerged in nearly all of the interviews the image was employed in diverse ways. For example, some men connected it to politically conservative and transphobic rural men, while others claimed it as a selfidentity that had to do with self-sufficiency and independence. Overall, the interviews revealed that while these men expressed complex masculine identities and practices they all did so by interacting with fairly consistent regional ideals of southern masculinity. Further regional comparisons will allow a deeper understanding of how the lives of transmen and masculinity are unique to the southeastern United States. Miriam Abelson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology in addition to working toward a graduate certificate in the Department of Womens and Gender Studies.

Miriam Abelson reviews maps of her route through the southeastern United States. Below right: A trip bonus proved to be delicious barbecue and country cooking.

hen I told people of my proposed research project with transgender people in the Southeast I met with disbelief from many quarters. That disbelief stemmed from the idea that there were few, if any, transgender people in the Southeast and that those that lived there must live in such constant fear that they would never expose themselves by consenting to an interview. This was one of the many previously unexamined ideas held by colleagues, friends, family, and myself that I encountered when I started talking with others about the Southeast. When I actually traveled there I found many of the things I expecteda profusion of Confederate flags, delicious BBQ and country cooking, old oaks draped with Spanish moss, and revisionist Civil War history to name a fewbut the reality of the place was far more complex than these simple images. Not only did I find a number of transgender people willing to speak with me, but I encountered queer politics, modern cities and hip small towns, and complicated relationships to historical and contemporary social inequality. The lives of the transmen I interviewed reflected this complexity and challenged my notions of southern masculinity. Funds from a CSWS Graduate Research Grant and a grant from the UO Center on Diversity and Community (CODAC) allowed me to travel to the southeastern United States in summer 2010 to inter16 October 2011

Pathways and Fences

by Ren Kladzyk, Department of Geography
July 16, 2010: I squeeze into a bar in El Paso that sits near the university, a ten-minute drive from the downtown Paso del Norte bridgea thirty-minute walk. It is a Friday night, and all the kids here are from Jurez. It is hot, loud, and packedbarely room to stand, let alone dance or hold a conversation. My friend Inez and I shout at one anothershe too is from Jurez, and seems to know everyone. Its a big city, but this is a small enough scene, I presume. Outside the bar, cars occupy every possible space, and the majority of them are fronchi cars. Fronchi, an abbreviation of Frontera Chihuahua imprinted on Jurenses license plates, makes discerning the national distribution of a place fairly easy. This is not a nice bar, per say, but everyone is dressed to kill. It is a sea of black; black lace and black heels and long black hair mark so many beautiful young women. Black gelled curls, black rimmed glasses, black tattoos adorn laughing boys. Why do I call them boys and not men? I suppose they remind me too much of my younger brothers to evoke some stature of manhood to me, talking about playing guitar and video games. Why do I call them women? How could I not? Feminine sexuality is discernible from somewhere deeper than skin-tight garments and dark lipstick; the movements and energies of the women here are very conscious and grown up. But they are kids nonetheless, the whole lot of them. What does youth mean anyway, when your world is dying? Can you call a year a year if you live each day as though its your last? Together, El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Jurez, Chihuahua comprise the largest binational metropolis in the world. While El Paso was recently ranked the safest large city in the United States, escalating violence in Jurez has placed it among the worlds most dangerous locales. We frequently conceive of the U.S. and Mexico borderlands in terms of difference, emphasizing political and economic barriers imposed by transnational forces; however, the goal of my masters research project is to reveal and share the stories of interconnectivities among fronterizos (or borderlanders) in this tumultuous urbanism. During the winter and summer of 2010, I conducted some thirty-one interviews of women in El Paso and Jurez, whose lives straddle the borderline. Using local maps to frame our dialogue, we discussed how patterns and perceptions of day-to-day mobility have shifted due to the rampant lawlessness of Jurez. I spoke solely with women in order to shed light on gendered aspects of mobility in this area (which carries a grim history of gender-based violence), and to reflect upon the ways in which women in particular are maneuvering through public spaces. By identifying shifts in fronteriza daily geographies, I work to demonstrate how borderlander identity is shifting in this context of militarization and impunity. I hope to convey the resilience

Gender, Violence, and Mobility in El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Jurez, Chihuahua
and humanity of those who are frequently lumped in as faceless casualties of the drug war, paying keen attention to the living, and highlighting the myriad ways in which perceptions, experiences, and seemingly mundane choices are being influenced by the complex geopolitics embedded in this international cityscape. As part of my discussion of emerging border identities, I focus on upper-class Juarense youths who now are a fixture of El Paso nightlife. Termed Ninis, short for ni trabajan ni estudian (meaning they neither work nor study), this category refers to those not following the typical trajectory of adulthood, and is gaining increasing attention in Mexico with estimates of as many as eight million Ninis in the nation (AP, 2011). Although Ninis are more commonly discussed in terms of lower class as targets of cartel recruitment, I have become interested in upper class Nini culture, and how it is performed on the moonlit streets of El Paso. The stories of this burgeoning demographic, particularly those of Juarense youth and their nightly escapades in El Paso, provide

Above: View from Paso del Norte International Bridge, Jurez, Mexico. Top left: Wall of Black Market bar, El Paso, Texas (photos by Ren Kladzyk).

valuable insights into livelihoods of reaction and resistance produced through Mexicos current crisis, demonstrating how altered patterns of movement can become translated into a sense of self, collectively redefining a place. This project will discuss what Nini subculture, marked by attitudes of violent nihilism and patterns of excess, can tell us about local visions of the future. More broadly, by focusing on gendered mobilities in the U.S. and Mexico borderlands, my study engages with cultural implications of the recent drug-conflict fueled exodus from Jurez into El Paso, articulating the negotiation of identities and daily geographies that characterize the double life of the borderlander. Ren Kladzyk is a second-year masters student in the UO Department of Geography, concurrently pursuing a graduate certificate in nonprofit management through the Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management (PPPM). She completed her fieldwork from JuneAugust 2010 with the support of CSWS and the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies, and received a SYLFF Graduate Fellowship for International Research for the 2010-2011 academic year, during which she has been composing her thesis.
csws.ureogon.edu 17

Bolivian Entrepreneurs, Water Rights, and Roller Derby

For the second straight year, the CSWS Road Scholars program sends graduate students to the public schools to talk about their researchand this time adds other public venues.
GENDER ROLES IN RURAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP: A BOLIVIAN EXPERIENCE Presenter: Alejandra Garcia, masters student, UO Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management; M.A. Gender and Women Studies, Armstrong Atlantic State University.
The focus of my research is to bring to light the efforts and struggles of indigenous Bolivian women in rural areas. I provide testimony of some of the inequalities along gender lines in Bolivia. In particular, I focus on womens struggle to become more independent by being entrepreneurs while still being able to be good wives and mothers. The resulting balancing act proves difficult when faced with wage disparity, discrimination, and lack of participation in business opportunities. Nevertheless, women find their calling when they begin a business and are able to generate their own income. Consequently, their self-esteem drastically improves, and they feel greater equality to their male counterparts. I made multiple presentations to both high school students as well as the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. Since the audiences were of different demographics, I altered my presentation style to fit each individual audience. The adults received more in-depth information about Bolivia and microfinance, while the students received more information concerning the testimonials and economy. The students were very interested in understanding the solidarity economycommunity

CSWS Road Scholars Program Going into its tenth year, the CSWS Road Scholars program offers entertaining and informative faculty and graduate student presentations based on scholarly research Visit the CSWS website for more information.

csws.uoregon.edu
based organizations that come together to create greater bargaining power for products. On the other hand, the adults wanted to learn more about microfinance and names of nonprofit organizations that were doing poverty reduction work. Many adults had been donors to microfinance organizations. Both audiences were strongly engaged with the topic. After the adult presentation, some audience members indicated that they had traveled to Bolivia, and one person had been a Peace Corps volunteer. The high school students were intrigued with development projects. It became clear that this was a good starting point to prepare them for their next lesson on development and the United Nations. The presentations helped me to improve my oral skills enormously. At the same time, it was great to see how many people enjoyed the topic. I was impressed with the questions that I receivedparticularly from the students. One asked: Why dont women just rise up and say something? The presentations provided me the opportunity to teach others about my country and its heritage.

However, the most significant part of going on the road was the ability to talk about gender and womens issues in spaces that typically do not have the resources to do so. I learned that the public is hungry to learn about gender, to understand the issues women around the world are facing, and to have a place to discuss them. The Road Scholars program thus gave me a way to bridge the gap between university walls and the community.

ROLLER DERBY: IDENTITY AND CULTURAL STUDIES Presenter: Rebecca Toews, M.S. student, UO School of Journalism and Communications
In academic research it seems that sometimes the audience can be forgotten. We can so easily get caught up in talking about our participants, interviewees, or informants that we lose touch with why we were curious about a topic in the first place. My own studies about roller derby, feminism, and representation in alternative sports began as a simple observation of a unique subculture but evolved into something much bigger. I found, however, that along the way I had become so caught up in the literature I had almost lost the ability to explain to people the central focus of my studies! The Road Scholars program serves as a unique bridge linking the towers of academia to the people who our research can affect. I know the program is meant to offer the community a chance to learn about new research, but it is equally valuable to those who participate. Audience members provided a lot of positive feedback about my presentation. They said they came away knowing more about the topic, and I am, of course, very pleased with this. What I am more excited about, however, are the conversations my topic sparked among audience members. High school audiences grappled with complicated issues of sexualization and empowermentthe dialogue was lively, honest and fascinating to me as a facilitator. The seniors in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute were inquisitive about many parts of the presentation as well. The program keeps our research honest. I was faced with several experts in different fields in my audiences. For instance, some of the OSHER seniors in my audience were active during the second wave of feminism, some were audience members of roller derby bouts in its early years. Speaking to the women and men who were there is an invaluable aspect of this program; I gained new insight into my topic and was able to give back some of that knowledge to others.

WATER RIGHTS ARE WOMENS RIGHTS Presenter: Megan Burke, masters student, UO Department of Philosophy; M.A., Womens Studies, San Diego State University
As a Road Scholar I gained valuable pedagogical experience presenting my research about the relation of water and the consumption of bottled water to womens freedom and health to high school students at South Eugene High School. My lecture addressed the use and production of bottled water and how it impacts women and girls around the globe in different, and often more direct, ways than men and boys. This experience provided me with the opportunity to develop my presentation into a lecture for a class I teach on campus in the Department of Womens and Gender Studies. And, based on the questions that were raised by my audience during my Road Scholars presentation, I plan to pursue this topic in new areas of research, namely, thinking through the issue of water rights as womens rights within the framework of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals.

Alejandra Garcia helps facilitate a focus group session with microfinance clients in Sucre, Bolivia.

18 October 2011

Undergraduate Research
Jane Higdon Senior Thesis Scholarship Winners
A Womyns Work Is Never Done: Reforming Traditionally Gendered Work in Lesbian Separatist Communities
Co-winner of the 2011 Jane Higdon Scholarship, Shelley Annette Grosjean is an undergraduate history major. Her senior thesis focused on several lesbian separatist intentional communities created in the 1970s in southern Oregon, including WomenShare Collective near Grants Pass, Rootworks Community in Sunny Valley, and OWL Farm near Roseburg. Grosjean used the UO Libraries Special Collections & University Archives. Grosjean won two other awards for her research: the Joan Nestle Prize from the Committee on Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender History, and a UO Knight Library 2011 Undergraduate Research Award. During the early 1970s groups of lesbians began to settle in the hills of southern Oregon. Driven by ideals stemming from the rapidly expanding counter culture of the time, these women were drawn to southern Oregon in order to manifest their separatist utopian dreams. Through hard work and community building, they were eventually able to form a loosely knit but far-reaching network of womens lands that has supported and nurtured the community even to this day. I focused my research on the physical labor of building the communities as well as their social formation. Women who did not necessarily have any familiarity with the tools and skills required to succeed rurally built these communities from the ground up. For example they not only built homes and various other buildings, but also installed water, bathroom facilities and in some cases solar power systems. While predominantly raised in traditionally gendered households, the women who populated these lands transcended the traditional roles of women and through skill sharing and creativity were able to build and maintain their new country lives. Written for my senior seminar class in the history department, my paper is based on primary source historical research conducted in several collections in the Knight Library at the University of Oregon, including the Southern Oregon Country Lesbian Archival Project (SO CLAP Collection), the Tee Corinne Papers and the Ruth Mountaingrove Collection. These collections all contain first-hand documentation of the formation of these lesbian separatist intentional communities. Predominantly collected by the women themselves, the stories of these lands are now contained not just in the memories of the women who did, and still do, live on them, but also in these archives. Broadly, these womens experiences in the isolated hills of southern Oregon are connected to the social radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s. Their experiences are a prime example of the intersection of several of these movements, including the back-to-the-land movement, the emerging environmental movement, the womens liberation movement, and the gay liberation movement of the 1970s. With lesbian feminism as their political backbone, they saw themselves as, in the words of Jean Mountaingrove, creating nothing less than a new culture. Individually, trying to create lives that fully reflected their political and social beliefs was both fulfilling and difficult. While some were more successful than others, the women sought to overcome the patriarchal structure they had been raised in. Though not without conflict and struggle for many of them, their utopian dream was realized for a time. by Shelley Grosjean

International Solidarity and Indigenous Female Empowerment in Post-War Guatemala

Co-winner Sara Quinn graduated from the University of Oregon and Clark Honors College in June 2011 with a degree in cultural anthropology. Quinn moved to North Carolina and works with the FoodCorps program to help create school gardens at elementary schools and increase farm-to-school connections. The majority of my research was conducted in the rural, highland communities of Ftima and Nuevo San Jos. I had no prior experience in the area and only a working knowledge of Spanish. I spent four months living, learning, and volunteering in Guatemala and began to put my thoughts and experiences on paper upon my return. In the face of the lingering effects of a 36-year internal armed conflict, an ineffective and corrupt government, powerful repression, and deep poverty, community organizing and international solidarity in rural Guatemala play an essential role in constructing a society in which the indigenous reality of the nation is recognized and womens empowerment is realized. As part of the monthly tarde cultural, or cultural afternoon event, women in the rural Guatemalan community of Nuevo San Jos performed a skit where a drunken husband, played by a woman in the community, refused to let his wife attend a meeting about food security. The womans friend and children encouraged her to go regardless, arguing that the husband was too intoxicated to notice her absence. The woman went to the meeting and learned important information about malnutrition and childrens health. While these gatherings are fun and interactive, they also address important topics and empower women to address controversial issues. In this skit, the women addressed not only the importance of the health of their children, but also issues surrounding power dynamics in the home, mens abuse of alcohol, and the need for women to have autonomy. The new health houses in the rural Guatemalan communities of Ftima and Nuevo San Jos represent a culmination of community organizing, womens empowerment, and international solidarity. Both of the health houses have a room for giving birtha space exclusively for womenand a room for community meetings, an important step in the realization of collective rights. The research I conducted in the communities of Ftima and Nuevo San Jos suggests that the words and active participation of indigenous women in the process of voicing collective goals confronts deeply rooted gender roles and opens up a space in which womens rights can be articulated. Through organizing that stems from traditional gender roles tied to health, education, and community celebrationbut that can lead to more formal and widespread involvementwomen can obtain a voice in the construction of communities that meet their needs and respect their intersecting identities. International solidarity can have an important role in supporting organized communities by filling in the gaps left by ineffective social programs. by Sara Quinn

Many thanks goes to the Jane Higdon Foundation for funding this scholarship. Applications for the 2012 scholarship are due Feb. 10, 2012.
csws.ureogon.edu 19

H i g h l i g h t s from the Academic Year

NAS Taps Geraldine Richmond
UO chemist Geraldine Geri Richmond was among 72 U.S. scientists elected into membership of the National Academy of Sciences. Richmond joined six other UO faculty among the academys current roster of 2,000 active members. Membership in the NAS is one of the highest honors given to a scientist or engineer in the United States. A longtime affiliate of CSWS, Richmond is co-founder and chair of the Committee on the Advancement of Women Chemists, which develops and provides professional development programs for women in technical fields.

APA Recognizes Jennifer Freyd for Her Trauma Research

The American Psychological Associationss Division 56 chose Jennifer Freyd for the 2011 Outstanding Contributions to Science in Trauma Psychology Award. Freyd is a UO psychology professor and faculty affiliate of the CSWS. Her research incorporates cognitive, clinical, developmental and social / personality psychology as she explores the impacts of trauma, particularly betrayal trauma theory. The award recognizes distinguished contributions based on a particular discovery or for a sustained body of research and scholarship. Freyd is the fifth winner of the award.

Chair Elect of ASA Section on Asia and Asian America

In July, Lynn Fujiwara was named chair elect of the Section on Asia and Asian America for the American Sociological Association. Co-coordinator of the Women of Color Project at CSWS, Fujiwara is an associate professor in the Department of Womens and Gender Studies and the Ethnic Studies Department, where she is also department head.
More than 700 people crowded into the EMU Ballroom to watch Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Sheryl WuDunn deliver the inaugural Lorwin Lecture on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (photo by Jack Liu).

Writing and Promotion Workshops

Held in June 2010 and again in June 2011, these workshops included assistant and associate professors. Sessions with peer reviewers from external institutions offered a rare opportunity for participants to get feedback and build networks with scholars around the country. In addition, workshops allowed UO participants to benefit from each others editorial abilities, as well as to get to know the research of their cohort of feminist scholars. Outcomes from the 2010 Writing and Promotion Workshop include:

Lorwin Lecture on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties

May 11, 2011The greatest unexploited resource in the world today isnt oil or gold or wind. Its women, says investment banking executive and best-selling author Sheryl WuDunn, who talked about the unrealized civil rights and economic promise of women in the developing world at the inaugural Lorwin Lecture on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. The first Asian-American reporter to win a Pulitzer Prize, WuDunn shared journalisms top honor with her husband, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, for their coverage of the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Beijings Tiananmen Square. Their bestselling book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, compares the worldwide oppression of women to past struggles against slavery and calls it the paramount moral challenge of current times. In her lecture as in the book, WuDunn used examples from the lives of women around the globe, detailing what humankind stands to gain by educating girls so they can take on more leadership in the worlds poorest countries.

Articles
Charise Cheney, associate professor of ethnic studies, Blacks on Brown: Intra-community Debates over School Desegregation in Topeka, KS, 1941-1955 in Western Historical Quarterly Fall 2011. Ellen Scott, associate professor, sociology, and head, womens and gender studies, I feel as if I am the one who is disabled: the emotional impact of changed employment trajectories of mothers caring for children with disabilities. Gender & Society 24 (5): 672-696, 2010.

Book Projects
Melissa Stuckey, assistant professor, history, is working with editor Larin McLaughlin at University of Illinois Press. Phaedra Livingstone, assistant professor, arts & administrationAAA, has continued to revise her book material and met with prospective publishers at a conference in May.

CSWS Associates Receive Martin Luther King, Jr. Awards

Michael Hames-Garcia, professor and head of the Ethnic Studies Department; Janis Weeks, professor of biology; and Tina GutierezSchmich, a professional development specialist in the Center on Diversity and Community, were among the winners of the 2011 Martin Luther King, Jr. Awards at the University of Oregon. Hames-Garcia and Weeks are both CSWS faculty affiliates. Weeks and Gutierez-Schmich, a Ph.D. student in Critical and Socio-Cultural Studies in Education, are both members of CSWS research interest groups. 20 October 2011

Awards
Yvonne Braun, assistant professor, WGS and international studies, won the Enloe Award for her essay Left High and Dry: An Intersectional Analysis of Gender, Dams and Development in Lesotho.

 Kate Mondloch, associate professor, art historyAAA, American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship to support full-time work on her second book next year, tentatively titled Eye Desire.

ACLS Fellowship Goes to Ellen Herman

Ellen Herman, professor, Department of History, was awarded an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship to research the topic, Autism: Between Rights and Risks. Herman is a CSWS faculty affiliate.

Booklet: The 33-page bilingual Latino Roots: in Lane County, Oregon/ Raices Latinas: del Condada de Lane, Oregon booklet reflects the content of the panels and can be used with classes who view the panels. Documentary: Latino Roots in Lane County: Contemporary Stories of Settlement in Lane County, Oregon is a 33-minute bilingual documentary that uses in-depth interviewing in the tradition of Latin American testimonio and oral history and includes video interviews with six of the families featured in the Latino Roots exhibit panels. Producer and Director: Gabriela Martnez, associate professor, SOJC.

Dealing Head-on with Issues of Environmental Racism

February 2, 2011As part of the Lorwin Lecture Series, Dr. Beverly Wright, founder and director, Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, spoke on The Perilous Consequences of Public Policy Decisions: Weathering the Storm of Natural and Man-made Disasters in the Gulf. When Dr. Wright was studying environmental sociology at the University at BuffaloSUNY in the late 1970s, she worked with a professor known for her case study of the Love Canal. The story of this toxic waste dump in New York awakened a nation to issues of poverty and environmental hazards. After she graduated and returned home to Louisiana to embark on her own academic career, Dr. Wright began seeing a patternoften the communities situated in or adjacent to environmentally hazardous areas are poor and black. She began developing a system to track the demographics of Cancer Alley. Her Dr. Beverly Wright (center) with CSWS Director Carol work to document and Stabile (l) and CSWS Associate Director Lamia Karim. expose environmental racism was path-breaking, said Margaret L. Paris, professor and then Philip H. Knight Dean of the UO School of Law in her introduction to Dr. Wrights lecture. Now at Dillard University in New Orleans, the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice expanded its focus following the disaster of Hurricane Katrina by educating and training hurricane survivors to remediate and reclaim their homes. After the oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, many of Wrights trainees became involved in hands-on remediation efforts.

Research Interest Groups at CSWS

Diversity Initiative RIGHosted a series of presentations of psychological case studies during spring term focused on addressing diversity issues in therapy. Advanced graduate students presented on clients they worked with where diversity (i.e., age, developmental and acquired disabilities, religion, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, indigenous heritage, native origin and gender) issues were relevant and discussed how diversity was addressed over the course of therapy. Feedback from members and attendees suggests the case presentations are extremely helpful and fill a gap in students current clinical training. Feminist Philosophy RIGOrganized fall readings around Ofelia Schutte ending with a visit by this important Latin American feminist philosopher. Cosponsored with Department of Philosophy an event with noted feminist philosopher, social critic, and Simone de Beauvoir scholar, Dr. Nancy Bauer. More than 200 undergraduate and graduate students and faculty attended Dr. Bauers talk, Hook-Up Culture and Lady Power. Dr. Bauer gave an additional talk, Simone de Beauvoir on Motherhood and Destiny, sponsored by this RIG. The RIG was involved with the 19th International Conference of the Simone de Beauvoir Society hosted by the philosophy in the spring. The RIG extended its reach beyond university walls in conjunction with one of its critical, ongoing projects, the Society for Interdisciplinary Feminist Phenomenology (SIFP). SIFP has been hard at work organizing a new research project in Feminism, Phenomenology, and Politics (Fenpol). Fenpol aims to integrate a phenomenological approach in gender and feminist theory, focusing on the theme of political judgment. The outcome

Latino Roots Project Continues to Grow

The Latino Roots Project, which had its beginnings in CSWS when Lynn Stephen (distinguished professor of anthropology and ethnic studies) served as associate director for program development, recently won a $12,500 grant from SELCO Community Credit Union. The project continues to add new components and gain greater visibility. Latino Roots grew out of Gender, Families and Immigration in the Northwest, a completed research project of the CSWS initiative Women in the Northwest. Now administered by the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies (CLLAS), the Latino Roots Project is also a part of the Americas in a Globalized World: Linking Diversity and Internationalization big idea at UO. CLLAS was incubated and housed at CSWS and continues to share space and some staff. Latino Roots in Lane County projects were cosponsored by CLLAS and CSWS. More details about them can be found at < http://cllas.uoregon.edu/latino-roots>. They include: Exhibit Panels: These fifteen bilingual (Spanish/English) panels feature a timeline of Latino presence in what is now the state of Oregon beginning in the 1700s, maps, demographic information, information about Latino youth, and stories of families who came at different times to Lane County from California, Texas, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Chile.

Symposium: Womens Activism, Womens RightsFebruary 27, 2011 Vandana Shiva (right) served as moderator for this Lorwin Lecture Series symposium. Presenters, from right, were: Michele Gamburd, professor, Anthropology Department, Portland State University, Sri Lankan Migrant Workers: Obstacles and Challenges to Activism; Eileen Otis, assistant professor, UO Department of Sociology, From Masters to Servers: The Emergence and Struggles of Chinas Feminized Service Workforce; Guadalupe Quinn, Immigrant Rights Advocacy program coordinator (Amigos), Immigrant Women Workers In Oregon; and Abby Solomon, homecare coordinator, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Women Healthcare Workers in Oregon. csws.ureogon.edu 21

Symposium: Womens Rights, Microfinance, and Entrepreneurial Solutions to Poverty

October 19, 2010Antonia Lydia Nalunga, project officer, FRIENDS Consult Ltd., Kampala, Uganda was one of five speakers at this Lorwin Lecture Series symposium. Moderator Ron Severson, UO Business School; Maple Microdevelopment was also joined by Lamia Karim, associate professor, UO Department of Anthropology; Cricket Keating, assistant professor, Department of Womens Studies, The Ohio State University; Julianne Pacheco, Kiva.org. (photograph by Jack Liu). of the project will be two workshops, the publication of a book on political judgment and the preparation of a book on phenomenology and gender theory. SIFP and the Feminist Philosophy RIG will host the first workshop in June 2012. The second will take place in 2013. The work of Fenpol will draw on the works of key feminist thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Iris Marion Young, and Judith Butler. The Social Sciences Feminist Network RIGThe RIG worked all year toward completing its multi-year study The Burden of Invisible Work. Members gathered for a retreat during fall quarter to begin the data analysis process. Teams completed a final draft for the American Sociological Association annual meeting paper deadline, which was accepted for the August meeting. RIG members committed to continue work on this paper and submit it for peer-reviewed publication under the SSFN-RIG name. The RIG conducted a second round of data collection for the Were All In It Together paper, in May participating in a focus group on the experience of completing a collaborative research project, from inception to drafted paper. The data from the focus group and previously collected survey data will serve as basis for the collaborative paper. The RIG sponsored a full day symposium in May, using funding from CSWS and other university groups, which brought together graduate students and faculty from UO and throughout Oregon to discuss issues surrounding inequalities in academia. Dr. Dana Britton, professor of sociology at Kansas State University, delivered the keynote address, presenting data from this most recent research on faculty promotion. She helped place both her research and the SSFN-RIGs research within the broader context of inequalities in academia. She also focused on some issues around gender disparities in rank and promotion at UO. The symposium included a panel on the successes and pitfalls of collaborative work and another on Preparing for Careers in the Academy, which highlighted how to balance work and private life, handle the needs of students, teach and do research, and fulfill service obligations without overdoing it. Amricas RIGHeld three RIG reading and discussion sessions all centered on the Race, gender and coloniality theme supported by a RIG Development Grant. The third such meeting was linked to the Development Grantsupported speaker Erica Lorraine Williams. RIG members read Williams article manuscript Geographies of Blackness: Sex Work and Exclusion in the Tourist Districts of Salvador, Brazil (under review). Her public talk on January 20 was well attended. Gabriela Martnez continued her work on a documentary exploring the ethnohistory of women in MesoAmerica, a project supported previously by a RIG Development Grant. First Peoples of the Northwest RIGSponsored a talk by Nichole Maher, executive director of the Native American Youth and Family Center in Portland, Ore. Maher spoke about NAYAs efforts to enrich the lives of Native youth and families through education, community involvement, and culturally specific programming. The RIG is also working on a documentary about Native American children in foster care. Indigenous Women of the Northwest: Culture, Community, and Concerns RIGA community-based play about the Klamath River Watershed, Salmon is Everything was performed in February at the Many Nations Longhouse and by Theatre Arts in the Miller Theatre Complex during May 22 October 2011 and June. The play was developed by Theresa May, UO assistant professor (Theatre Arts), with Karuk, Hupa, and Yurok community members. Supported by CSWS, the RIG sponsored a pre-play lecture by Marcie Rendon, playwright and member of the White Earth Anishinabe Nation. Gender, New Media, and Technology RIGOver the past year, CSWSs Gender, New Media, and Technology RIG has been working on the Fembot Project. Designed to re-imagine academic writing and research, the Fembot Project participates in the ongoing revolution in academic publishing, taking seriously the advice of scholars like John Wilensky to democratize our publications by embracing open access, open source publications. In terms of its content, the Fembot Project will fill a gap in scholarly research in the humanities. Currently, there is no journal on gender, new media, and technology. The Fembot Project centrally includes a new journalAda: Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technologythat will be broadly accessible, both in terms of physical access and in terms of its content. The interdisciplinary focus of the Fembot Project as a whole will extend conversations about gender, technology, and new media beyond the traditional boundaries of scholarly inquiry insofar as its publications will be written so as to be intelligible to a broader audience of intelligent, but not necessarily academic readers. One of the most important lessons of humanistic research on fandom and online communities is that there are interested and vibrant non-academic communities of creativity, criticism and research. The Fembot Project intends to learn from those online communities how to improve its own online practices, while at the same time engaging in dialogue and, eventually, collaboration with them.

Collaborative RIG Projects

Service and ServitudeDesigned to strengthen feminist intellectual inquries and interdisciplinary collaborations on the historical and contemporary nature of care work in the Americas, this project brings together members from three RIGSAmricas, U.S. Third-World Feminisms; and Law, Culture and Society. The RIGs plan two symposiums for the coming academic year. Place and Displacement in African American Literature is scheduled for March 2012 and is being coordinated by Courtney Thorsson, English. Domestic Slavery and Servitude in the Americas is scheduled for May 2012, and is being coordinated by Michele McKinley, Law. Events and activities will examine the gendered nature of domestic work, the class and ethnic dynamics between servants and mistresses, the enduringly racialized character of the care economy, the impact of globalization on womens work, and the states role in criminalizing and facilitating sex and care work.

Many thanks to the Mazie Giustina Women in the Northwest bequest for continuing to fund valuable research, including CSWS research interest groups on indigenous peoples.
New Research Interest Groups at CSWS
Food in the Field RIGinvestigates ideas in the field of food studies, the operations of cultural fields related to food consumption, and the gendered labor that takes place in the farm fields of food production. RIG coordinator Jennifer Burns Levin, an instructor of literature in the UO Clark Honors College, says: We welcome faculty and graduate students working in social science and humanities fields, and encourage cross-pollination between the two. For 2011-2012, this RIG plans to build on the success of the interdisciplinary Food Justice Conference in 2011 and ongoing sustainability initiatives at UO. Indigeneity in Teacher Educationwill work to build a community of people interested in exploring the work of women indigenous scholars in the field of education. The field of teacher education still operates through the language of patriarchy, imperialism, and colonialism, says coordinator and graduate student Shadiin Garcia. This exploration of indigenous teacher education includes challenging the impact of feminism on indigenous women and teacher education. We would like to envision how to revolutionize education so that the Western patriarchal paradigm is not the norm for pre- and in-service public teachers. Women Writers RIGThis newest RIG revives an earlier effort and is aimed toward exploring local, regional, and university collaborations, most notably a women writers conference in 2013. The RIG seeks to foster and enhance opportunities for women writers on campus, in the community, and throughout the Pacific Northwest; to bring distinct voices of published women writers to campus; and to support the work of creative writing by bringing together writers from different disciplines.

Research Matters
CSWS published three issues of Research Matters during the 2010-2011 academic year. Copies can be accessed through the CSWS website or requested by phone or e-mail. Fall 2010: The Built Environment, Social Justice and Gender: A study of the housing conditions of single mother headed households in the Portland Metropolitan Region using 1995 and 2002 American Housing Survey Data by Yizhao Yang, assistant professor, Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management. Winter 2011: Salmon, Women, and Rivers: Community-Based Performance Research by Theresa J. May, assistant professor, Department of Theatre Arts. Spring 2011: Reproductive Justice on the Ballot by Daniel HoSang, assistant professor, Departments of Ethnic Studies and Political Science.

A thank you to 2010-11 CSWS Committee members

Lorwin Advisory Committee: Joan Acker, Ina Asim, Yvonne Braun, Bryna Goodman, Lamia Karim, Lise Nelson, Carol Stabile, Roz Slovic, Tania Triana, Janis Weeks. Graduate Research Award Committee: Linda Fuller, Melissa Stuckey, Lamia Karim. Faculty Research Award Committee: Lisa Wolverton, Eileen Otis, Lamia Karim. Higdon Award Committee: Lara Bovilsky, Ellen Herman, Helen Southworth, Carol Stabile. Research Development Grant Committee: Carol Stabile (chair), Gina Herrmann. Road Scholars (Presentation Grant for) Graduate Students Committee: Alice Evans, Peggy McConnell, Carol Stabile. RIG Development Grant Review Committee: Lamia Karim, Kate Mondloch, Sarah Ray Rondot, Carol Stabile. Outgoing members of the Executive Committee: Lynn Fujiwara, Shari Huhndorf, Lisa Wolverton, Lynn Stearney.

Womens Opportunity Worldwidea fruitful collaboration

Womens Opportunity Worldwide (WOW) was established during spring 2010 to include locally based nonprofit organizations and individuals that work for the benefit of women and their families, locally and internationally. WOW brings together individuals who share a common vision to explore ways that networking and supporting each other can provide better economic opportunities, education, health care and more to women and families. In late summer 2010, several WOW steering committee members met with Carol Stabile, CSWS director, because of our shared vision for the work we hoped to accomplish. This meeting was the beginning of a fruitful collaboration. WOW benefited from CSWS faculty and staff ideas, information and support on many of WOWs events and activities during 2010 and 2011, including: In collaboration with CSWS, WOW hosted its first symposiumFinding the Money: Strategies and Networking for Nonprofitson October 5, 2010 on the UO campus. More than fifty people representing fifteen different local nonprofits participated. The afternoon Connect and Collaborate included these participants and UO students who learned from and about each other. CSWS staff helped secure the location and UO maintenance-staff support. WOW participants recruited representatives from eight local nonprofits to contribute a blog on issues regarding womens rights in a global worldthese were published on the CSWS blog Womens Rights in a Global World <http://cswswomensrights.wordpress.com/> each month. CSWS events and lecture series were posted throughout the year on the WOW Facebook page and website. WOW events were posted Roz Slovic, left, speaks to a participant at the WOW event Open Community Conversation: Half the Sky on the CSWS website. CSWS staff participated in a WOW gathering held at Tsunami Books in April 2011. at Tsunami Books, where more than a hunTransparency hosted by WOW. These slides will dred participants learned about the needs and be used again during WOW events. accomplishments of women locally and globally, CSWS posted on its website several accombringing attention to the work of WOW, CSWS, plishments of local nonprofits that participate and many other local nonprofits. with WOW. WOW steering committee members distributed WOW has several events and activities planned throughout the community information about for the remainder of 2011 and into 2012 and each of the CSWS lectures, including the talk looks forward to a continuing collaboration with by Sheryl WuDunn in May 2011, and attended CSWS. each event. One steering committee member Reported by Roz Slovic was among UO participants to meet WuDunn at a dinner prior to her lecture. Facebook and Website info: CSWS produced a PowerPoint presentation http://www.facebook.com/womensopportunitythat featured many of the nonprofit organizaworldwide.org tions which participate in the WOW network. http://womensopportunityworldwide.org/ This PP was displayed at the WuDunn lecture http://cswswomensrights.wordpress.com/ and at a subsequent meeting on Trust and

csws.ureogon.edu 23

Looking at Books

FOR MORE BOOKS BY CURRENT AND FORMER AFFILIATES, GO TO CSWS.UOREGON.EDU/?PAGE_ID=8191

Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex, and Stardom, by Priscilla Pea Ovalle, Assistant Professor, English (Rutgers University Press, 2010). In this fresh examination, Priscilla Pea Ovalle convincingly probes the racial dynamics and sexual politics that shape the paradoxical figure of the dancing Hollywood Latina.Rosa-Linda Fregoso, author of meXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands. Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader, edited by Michael Hames-Garca, Professor, Ethnic Studies, and Ernesto Javier Martnez, Assistant Professor, Ethnic Studies and Womens and Gender Studies (Duke University Press, 2011). ... a startlingly original collection of essays on the culture and social worlds of gay Latinos. Using a wonderful format that pairs essays with response pieces, the book as a whole reads like a sparkling conversation full of wit, insight, cultural relevance, and political critique. Covering topics from gay shame and shamelessness, to dance and sexual identity, to the impact of HIV on gay Latino communities, Gay Latino Studies will quickly find its way onto bookshelves and into classrooms around the world. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California, by Daniel Martinez HoSang, Assistant Professor, Ethnic Studies and Political Science (University of California Press, 2010). With narrative fluency and deftness, constructed on a bedrock of prodigious archival research, HoSangs book provides a sorely needed genealogy of the color-blind consensus that has come to define race and recode racism within US politics, law and public policy.Nikhil Pal Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism, edited by Helen Southworth, Associate Professor, Honors College (Edinburgh University Press, October 2010). This multi-authored volume focuses on Leonard and Virginia Woolfs Hogarth Press (1917-1941). Scholars from the UK and the US use previously unpublished archival materials and new methodological frameworks to explore the relationships forged by the Woolfs via the Press and to gauge the impact of their editorial choices on writing and culture.publishers synopsis Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers: Redefining Feminism on Screen, by Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, Professor, English (University of Texas Press, 2011). A companion to her earlier work, The Unruly Woman, this book studies the ways popular culture and current debates within and about feminism inform each other. Surveying a range of films and television shows that have defined girls in the postfeminist era ... Karlyn explores the ways class, race, and generational conflicts have shaped both Girl Culture and feminisms Third Wave. Tying feminisms internal conflicts to negative attitudes toward mothers in the social world, she asks whether todays seemingly materialistic and apolitical girls, inspired by such real and fictional figures as the Spice Girls and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, have turned their backs on the feminism of their mothers or are redefining unruliness for a new age.publishers synopsis

Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh, by Lamia Karim, Associate Professor, Anthropology (University of Minnesota Press, March 2011)) It is precisely because the microcredit mantra has been so endlessly repeated, often in place of actual empirical documentation to back its claims, that Microfinance and Its Discontents is so compelling. This is an outstanding, courageous, and path-breaking piece of scholarship; one that will doubtless unsettle the microcredit establishment, and by extension, key presumptions of neoliberal research agendas. Kamala Visweswaran, University of Texas, Austin The Aroma of Righteousness: Scent and Seduction in Rabbinic Life and Literature, by Deborah A. Green, Associate Professor, Religious Studies (Penn State University Press, 2011) The Aroma of Righteousness makes highly original and important contributions to two subject areas that do not normally meetrabbinic scriptural interpretation, particularly of the Song of Songs, and the religious employment of physical senses, herein scentespecially by locating both in their broader Jewish and general cultural settings. Steven D. Fraade, Yale University Media, Minorities, and Meaning: A Critical Introduction, by Debra L. Merskin, Associate professor, School of Journalism & Communication (New York: Peter Lang, 2011) With her intriguing basis in myth and focus on Otherness, Debra Merskin presents an exciting, novel approach to her grounded critical analyses of media portrayals of minorities, and her engaging balance of scholarly style and conversational manner offers students and professors a genuine textbook that is accessible and relevant.Mary-Lou Galician, School of Journalism & Mass Communication, Arizona State University Tokyo in Transit: Japanese Culture on the Rails and Road, by Alisa Freedman, Assistant professor, East Asian Languages and Literatures (Stanford University Press, 2010) Freedman has produced an engaging literary ethnography, using the vast writings of the times centered on transportation and its effects on social mores during Tokyos dizzying jazz age. Commuter rail, department stores, cafes, and dance halls bustle with people on the move, and Freedman captures the excitement of modern life through writers who celebrated (or deplored) the new city.Theodore C. Bestor, Harvard University Memoirs of Scandalous Women, edited by Dianne Dugaw, Professor, English (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011) A five-volume annotated edition of life-writings by eighteenth-century British women, surveys the period from 1740 to 1808 in six narratives that span social class from subaltern to aristocratic milieus. These courtesans and disguised, cross-dressing soldiers, active in Britain, Europe, India, and the Americas used life experience and life-writing to wrest control of their public images and speak in their own voices. Dugaws general introduction and individual bio-critical headnotes frame the theoretical issues presented by these lives that drew admiration in their day in publications that subsequently became unfashionable, ideologically illegible, or unacceptable under later moral filters and fell out of print. This edition, in the Chawton House Series Womens Memoirs, makes them available after two centuries of oblivion. 24 October 2011

BOOKS by CSWS Grant Winners

Stretched Thin: Poor Families, Welfare Work, and Welfare Reform, by Sandra Morgen, Joan Acker, and Jill Weigt (Cornell University Press, December 2010)
Stretched Thin gives an on the ground account of doing welfare reform from the perspectives of clients, agency workers, and administrators. Authors Sandra Morgen, Joan Acker, and Jill Weigt assess the outcomes and suggest new policies to deal with poverty and economic disparities. The study, a project of the CSWS Women in the Northwest Research Initiative, was partially funded by CSWS and the Mazie Giustina bequest, and with other funds from the Oregon Department of Human Resources. This book is based on a three-year, multi-method study of welfare restructuring in Oregon. Sandra Morgen is a former director of CSWS and is now vice provost for graduate studies/associate dean of the UO Graduate School and professor of anthropology. Joan Acker is professor emerita of the UO Department of Sociology and was the first director of CSWS. Jill Weigt is an associate professor of sociology at California State UniversitySan Marcos.

Congratulations to Sandra Morgen, Joan Acker, and Jill Weigt whose book was a finalist for the 2010 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
In actuality, the CSWS grants got me my job at CSUSM and tenure. Many thanks to CSWS!Jill Weigt, 2001 Jane Grant Dissertation Fellowship winner for The Work of Mothering after Welfare Reform and 2000 Graduate Student Research Grant awardee for The Process of Combining Motherhood and Paid Work after Welfare Reform. Business Girls & Two-Job Wives: Emerging Media Stereotypes of Employed Women, by Jane Marcellus (Hampton Press, October 2010).
As a graduate student in the UO School of Journalism and Communication, Jane Marcellus was awarded a 2002 CSWS Graduate Student Research Grant for Women, Work and Femininity: Representation of Female Wage-Earners in U.S. Womens Magazines, 19181939. Now an associate professor at Middle Tennessee State University, she recently published a book based on this research. Her publisher describes Business Girls & TwoJob Wives as an historical examination of how popular magazines portrayed wage-earning women during the critical interwar years [when] the passage of womens suffrage, postwar business expansion, and changing social mors put the cultural conversation over womens employment into high gear. The book identifies a number of emerging stereotypes and argues that women were reinscribed into a domestic discourse. Moreover, those stereotypes are echoed today in print media, television, film and the Internet.

Seneca Possessed: Indians, Witchcraft, and Power in the Early American Republic, by Matthew Dennis (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
Winner of a 2001 CSWS Faculty Research Grant for Seneca Possessed: Witchcraft, Gender, and Colonialism on the Frontier of the Early Republic, Matthew Dennis is a UO professor of history and environmental studies. From the publisher: Seneca Possessed examines the ordeal of a Native people in the wake of the American Revolution. ... Seneca communities sought to preserve their territories and culture amid a maelstrom of economic, social, religious, and political change. ... [The book] explores how the Seneca people and their homeland were possessedculturally, spiritually, materially, and legallyin the era of early American independence.

A YEAR OF CSWS EVENTS

Noon Talks, Symposia, Research Interest Group Lectures and Seminars, Workshops, and the Inaugural Lorwin Lectureship on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF WOMEN IN SOCIETY