Miranda Joseph
Miranda Joseph is the Coordinator of the Committee on Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual Studies and Director of the Sex, Race and Globalization Project. She is also Associate Professor of Women's Studies and has served on the Executive Committee of the Graduate Program in Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies. Her book, Against the Romance of Community, a study of the relationship between community and capitalism, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press, June 2002. Her other publications include "The Performance of Production and Consumption" Social Text 54 (1998). She teaches queer theory, marxist theory, cultural studies and women's studies.
Panel 1: Human Rights
Anne Betteridge, moderator
Anne H. Betteridge is Executive Director of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) and has been involved with the work of MESA's Committee on Academic Freedom in the Middle East and North Africa (CAFMENA) since its establishment in 1991. MESA is headquartered at the University of Arizona, where Dr. Betteridge was recently appointed Interim Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies for a three-year term. An anthropologist with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, Anne Betteridge has conducted research on Shi'i religious practices in Iran, and women's rituals in particular. She most recently visited Iran in spring 2000.
Jennifer Hyndman
Ordering Disorder: Managing 'the Displaced' as Liminal Subjects
While the line between voluntary and involuntary migration is fuzzy at best, the difference is a critical one. Displacement is a condition that increasingly characterizes large numbers of people today, yet it tends to represent disorder in the organization of states, the regulation of migration, and social organization generally. Displacement may be expressed culturally, socially, and/or viscerally, through physical dislocation. It disrupts social relations including those related to gender, race, sexuality, and political status. Such disruptions are at once openings for change and destabilizing factors that put displaced people at greater risk than before. Discourse on forced migration produces two main subjects, refugees and IDPs (internally displaced persons). Refugees are part of a legal discourse that instantiates certain rights for those eligible to be refugees. The latter group of IDPs is more invisible, outside the scope of international law and often beyond the boundaries of assistance. IDPs are legally the responsibility of the sovereign states in which they reside, despite being terrorized by their own governments in many cases. The regulation of involuntary migrants generates distinct strategies and technologies for managing migrant subjects. Refugee camps represent one technology of care and maintenance for people out of place. Such socio-spatial strategies fix gender and culture in particular ways, within Universal grids of intelligibility and planning modules. Except in cases of sexual violence/exploitation or in relation to reproductive health, sexuality is rarely spoken of. This not-so-subtle heteronormative discourse of assistance organizes displaced persons in particular ways.
Jennifer Hyndman is a faculty member in geography at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. She worked for UNHCR and CARE in relief operations in Kenya and Somalia. Her research examines forced migration using a feminist approach. She is the author of Managing Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) and co-editor of a forthcoming book, Sites of Violence: Feminist Politics in Conflict Zones (University of California Press).
Leslye Obiora
A Refuge from Tradition: Reflections on an Emerging Paradigm
for Asylum Status
Drawing on a vast array of bibliographic materials on human rights and the gender implications thereof, this paper will examine the transformative potentials of the recognition of gender-based persecution as a ground for asylum. Within the framework of an analysis of the critical pull and push factors underpinning the immigration of African women to the United States, the paper will focus on a critique of salient approaches to the invocation of fear of circumcision as a shield against deportation.
Leslye Obiora teaches at the University of Arizona College of Law. She obtained her professional degree from the University of Nigeria and her graduate degrees from Yale and Stanford. She has written extensively on several matters, including human rights and gender equity. She was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies and at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy. She also managed a Gender and Law program for the World Bank. She maintains an active speaking schedule.
Isabel Garcia
Human Rights Implications of US Immigration/Border Policies
US immigration and border policies have had direct impact on the human rights not only of those migrants seeking to cross the border, but also of those who live on the border. Our enforcement policies have led to deaths of approximately 3,000 people since the inception of Operations Gatekeeper, Hold-The-Line, and Safeguard. The militarization of our border with Mexico has not resulted in the decrease of immigration, but rather only to pushing them to areas far from the traditional crossing areas where they risk their lives. We have spent billions on criminalizing migrants while disrupting the lives of those who live in the border region.
Isabel Garcia is the Director of the Pima County Legal Defender. She is a founder and member of Derechos Humanos/Human Rights Coalition, an organization committed to public education regarding anti-immigrant policies and border militarization. Isabel is a national leader on immigration issues: she has served on the Board of Directors of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, presented testimony to the US Congressional Sub-Committee on Immigration, and spoken to the AFL-CIO Regional Immigration Forum in Los Angeles (June, 2000). She was also an organizer of and moderator for the Border Summit held in Tucson in December 2000, which brought together over 600 people from the US and Mexico to create a grassroots plan centered in the right of human mobility and just and peaceful borders by addressing: globalization's impact on human mobility; immigration policy; ending border militarization and vigilantism. Isabel was born and raised in Tucson, Arizona.
Panel 2: Representations
Kamran Talattof, moderator
Kamran Talattof (PhD. University of Michigan 1996) is an Assistant Professor in Persian Literature and Iranian Culture in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona. His works include The Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature, (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999) and collaborative volumes such as Contemporary Debates in Islam: An Anthology of Modernist and Fundamentalist Thought (NY: St. Martin's Press, 2000) and The Poetry of Nizami Ganjavi: Knowledge, Love, and Rhetoric (NY: Palgrave, 2001).
Jasbir Puar
A Crisis of Mobility: Migration and Queer Tourism Post 9-11
This paper traces the shifts in the gay and lesbian tourism industry through its strategies to recover an industry presence within the larger tourism industry that has been badly hit by 9-11. These strategies are in many ways in direct conflict with the increasing restrictions on the mobility of immigrant and colored populations that have also been the result of post 9-11 discursive and legislative shifts. In the global gay and lesbian tourist industry, both private companies as well as national, regional, and city tourist bureaus centralize the white upper-to-middle class gay male traveler as its ideal tourist. Their advertising, statistical, and promotional materials emphasize the consumption of white, gay male tourist practices while erasing the consumption practices of queers of color, queer women, and working-class queers, as well as ignoring altogether the productive roles of people of color, working-class queers, and immigrants employed in tourism service sectors. Meanwhile, the U.S. nation-state also envisions the tourist and immigrant as incongruent and discrete subjects; the queer and the immigrant as incongruent subjects; and the tourist and the queer immigrant as incongruent subjects. Who is the imagined queer tourist? How is this tourist posited against immigrants in post 9-11 efforts to recover the mobility of tourists while simultaneously restricting the mobility of immigrants? This presentation moves between sites of industry production and sites of consumption, seeking to nuance and complicate the connections between queer tourism and (queer and other) migration through posing questions about 'safe space,' tourism, race, immigration, and mobility. Ultimately I argue that the gay and lesbian tourism industry, in its inability to conceptualize its consumers more broadly, on the one hand, and its refusal to contextualize current shifts in entitlements to mobility and travel, on the other, results in a continued "whitening" of the population it addresses as well as represents.
Jasbir Kaur Puar is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Geography at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999. Her recent publications include: "Global Circuits: Transnational Sexualities and Trinidad," Signs(Summer 2001); "Transnational Configurations of Desire: The Nation and its White Closets" (in Matt Wray et al eds., The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, Durham: Duke University Press, 2001) and "Transnational Sexualities: South Asian Trans/Nationalisms and Queer Diasporas" (in David Eng and Alice Hom, eds., Q&A: Queer in Asian America, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998: 405-422.) As a 1999-2000 Rockefeller Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY she began researching the gay and lesbian tourism industry, and she recently guest edited a special issue of GLQ titled "Queer Tourism: Geographies of Globalization" (8:1-2, 2002). She also has an article on lesbian tourism forthcoming in Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography.
Erica Rand
Heritage Sex
Looking at a few constructions of sex and sexuality that do, don't, or might attend current apprehensions of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island--two interconnected and well funded immigration icons that, importantly, both require obfuscations about race and nation to function as such--this talk considers the politics of circulating desexed or unlubricated heritage models.
Erica Rand teaches in the Art Department at Bates College, and is on the board of the journal Radical Teacher. Her work includes Barbie's Queer Accessories, recent essays on activist visuals and gender coercion, and collaborative projects on consumption, censorship, and anti-racist teaching. This paper draws from her current project, which is presently called "The Ellis Island Snow Globe: Sex, Money, Products, Nation."
Radhika Mongia
Sex, Health and the Migrant Body
Using Archival documents on state regulation of Indian migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this paper shows how notions of health, disease, sex, sexuality and sexual morality gain normative state authorized definitions as they are incorporated into regimes of migration control. Rather than assessing the migration of Indians to any one locale, the paper simultaneously addresses migration regulations to numerous sites - in, for instance, Africa, the Carribean, and North America - to argue for a transnational perspective in understanding migration control and, through this, challenges the common diffusionist understanding of liberal state formation.
Radhika Mongia is an Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a Rockefeller Fellow in the Sex, Race and Globalization Project at the University of Arizona (2001-02). She is currently working on two projects: one is a critique of recent feminist efforts (particularly the work of Drucilla Cornell, Alison Jaggar, and Martha Nussbaum) to develop a globally adequate conception of the (feminist) subject. The other, which she will pursue during her fellowship, is Genealogies of Globalization, a book length study on state regulation of international migration. Mongia examines archival documents on Indian migration from 1834 to 1917 to chart the cricual colonial histories for some of the chief technologies for regulating migration--namely, the juridical labor contract, medical and police certificates, the modern passport, and the marriage contract. In contrast to existing literature on migration, her work questions the putative legitimacy of the state in controlling migration and suggests that the institutionalization and routinization of these key technologies helps (re)generate, rather than undermine, the colonial conjunctures between discourses of race, heteropatriarchy, nationality and the state. It thus provides a genealogy of globalization attentive to the sedimentation and palpable residues of colonial histories and structures within formations of contemporary globalization. A portion of this research, "Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport," appears in Public Culture (vol. 11 no. 3, fall 1999: 527-556).
Panel 3: Labor and Geographies of Migration
Laura Tabili, moderator
Laura Tabili teaches European and Comparative Women's History at the University of Arizona. She received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University. Laura's scholarly work has been devoted to finding historical explanations for racial conflict in British and European societies, exploring the ways race, class, and gender relations in these societies have shaped by and in turn been shaped by the intertwined processes of industrialization and Empire-building. Laura's first book `We Ask for British Justice': Work and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Cornell, 1994) explored the institutional construction of racial difference through covert state policies designed to keep colonized workers vulnerable and exploited by barring them from Britain. Her book in progress, tentatively entitled "Workers Without Borders: Outsiders and Insiders in an Industrial Society, 1850-1939" will explore how local and global migration shaped social relations, with particular focus on race and culture, in one rapidly industrializing British port.
Rhacel Parreñas
The Care Crisis in the Philippines: Children and Transnational
Families in the New Global Economy
This presentation looks at the care crisis over the exodus of migrant mothers from the Philippines by examining the plight of their children. Using care as the category of analysis for understanding gender and economic inequalities in the new global economy, it establishes that a care inequality defines the relationship between the South and North as the reduction of the care deficit by the South-to-North flow of domestic workers generates a care crisis over the inadequate care of the children of migrant mothers left behind in the South. I also establish that the gender ideological stall that plagues families of working mothers in both the North and South aggravates this crisis.
Rhacel Salazar Parreñas is assistant professor of Asian American and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work (2001) as well as articles that have appeared in Signs, Feminist Studies, and Gender and Society. Her current project on care, gender, and globalization looks at the experiences of children growing up without their migrant parents in the Philippines. For this project, she has received support from the University of California Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, and the Henry Luce Foundation.
Geraldine Pratt
Family Values, Leaky Bodies, and Double Standards: Filipina
Domestic Workers in Vancouver Canada
Bonnie Honig has argued that depictions of immigrants in the United States function to renormalise heterosexuality; this is one of the ways that immigrants return the nation to itself. The myth of the good immigrant often celebrates their patriarchal familial bonds --indeed the extended family and the entrepreneurial activity associated with it is one characteristic that makes them good. I want to consider the contextuality of this heteronormativity for one immigrant group: Filipino domestic workers coming to Canada through the Live©in Caregiver Program, often leaving their children in the care of extended families in the Philippines for many years. There is widespread disavowal of their right to heterosexual privilege (shared domicile), and their role as mothers is effectively masculinised when they are conceived and valorised as distanced breadwinners. At the same time, they are sexualised and stigmatised within the Filipino community in Vancouver as prospective "husband stealers," as women on the make without the necessary accoutrements of conjugal heteronormativity to make them "good." The perceived "leakiness" of their sexualised and racialised bodies makes it difficult for them to pursue their rights in Canada, but I want to discuss efforts on the part of Filipina activists to refuse the identities on offer by the Canadian state by taking the risky step of refusing immigration through the Live©in Caregiver Program.
Geraldine Pratt is Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia and Editor of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. She is co-author (with Susan Hanson) of Gender, Space and Work (Routledge, 1995). More recent work engages the theme of migration to Canada, especially the migration of Filipino women through the Live-in Caregiver Program.
Jude Fernando
Nongovernmental Organizations, Micro-credit and Empowerment
of Women: Neo-liberal Capitalism and Disciplining of women
The term Sustainable Development (SD) is riddled with ambiguities, semantic confusions and far from delivering on its promises. It does not have a core theory or a single well-defined disciplinary home. Rather, it is defined by whatever the topics researchers and practitioners of development venture into. And in fact it has become a hegemonic concept that has built consensus among a diverse groups of scholars and practitioners with diverse interests such that no issue concerned with the economy, culture and society is beyond its purview. Its demonstrated capacity to restructure and reorganize multiple discourses on social change is a "sure reflection of power," similar to what Edward Said has implied in his discussion of Orientalism. What I propose to do in this paper is to explain the meaning of SD and its implications for social change by examining a concrete case study. The case study involves the micro-credit programs carried out by the two Non-governmental Organizations in Bangladesh (NGOs) in order to empower women. Feminist perspectives on development and environment played a crucial role in the evolution of SD discourse and the empowerment of women is one of its central goals. Consequently, in many sustainable development projects, women have become the man targets micro-credit has become one, if not the instrument of empowerment. Micro-credit--or small loans to the poor for the purpose of promoting small-scale enterprises-are viewed as a veritable panacea for poverty world-wide. A critical examination of this practice is therefore urgent.
Jude Fernando teaches Economics and Anthropology at Arizona International College. Jude has a strongly interdisciplinary background in economics, anthropology, and South Asian history. His research focus is economic development with a special emphasis on gender, environment and child labor in developing countries. As a consultant to the World Bank, he has completed a paper on "Political Economy of Child Labor" that reviewed child labor issues in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In the future, he intends to pursue research in civil society particularly in relation to the social, economic and political process resulting from globalization.
Panel 4: Border Crossing
Arturo Gonzalez, moderator
Arturo González is an economist at the Mexican American Studies and Research Center at the University of Arizona. His research focuses on the education and labor market outcomes of immigrants and Latinos in the United States. His book, Mexican Americans and the U.S. Economy: Quest for Buenos Días (2002), is published by the University of Arizona Press.
Guadalupe Castillo
Women at the Border
The establishment of a political linea, the Border, creates a landscape different and apart from "interiors" of a State(s). This "new" landscape then makes possible the construction of identities that both affirm and deny the " national character" of the Nation State. This presentation will explore women's identities in their encounter with the United States Southern linea/border in the context of indigenous/mestizo historical experiences.
Guadalupe Castillo received her BA and MA at the University of Arizona, where she also carried out doctoral studies in history. She presently teaches history at Pima Community College, West Campus. Guadalupe was among the first professors to develop and teach Chicano/a Studies and was among the first graduate students associated with "El Grito." She has been a long time activist, involved in the Chicano Movement, Raza Unida Party, El Concilio Manzo, Central American refugee work, was a founding member of Pueblo Por La Paz, Borderlands Theater, and Derechos Humanos Coalition. She is recognized as an expert on immigrant rights and border issues and has presented on the topics at many conferences, both academic and grassroots. She is currently writing on the women activists of El Concilio Manzo and on the women of the Movimiento in Tucson.
Raquel Rubio Goldsmith
The Arizona/Sonora Border: Impunity Zone
Generally impunity is connected to underdeveloped political entities. Rarely is the word used to describe conditions in the United States. This paper documents the existence of a zone of impunity both for public officials and US citizens who violate the human rights of migrants on the Arizona/Sonora border.
A native of Douglas, Arizona, Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith completed undergraduate and graduate degrees in Law and Philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She has taught at Pima Community College since 1969 and, since 1983, at the University of Arizona, where her primary focus has been the history of Mexicanas and Chicanas. She has taught courses on Mexican and Latin American history as well as developed curricula on Afro-American, Yaqui and Tohono O'odham histories. She has presented papers on Mexican women on the U.S.-Mexico border before national and international conferences, and published the results of her research in several scholarly articles. Rubio-Goldsmith is currently researching for a book on women who fled the Mexican Revolution to take refuge in Southeastern Arizona. Students and colleagues know her as a community activist devoted to immigration rights, women's rights, and civil rights in general. As a member of several community boards and as a public speaker she constantly presents a Chicana perspective. Since 1994 she has been active in providing information on the Zapatista Revolution in Mexico through Pueblo Por La Paz in Tucson, and the National Commission for Democracy in Mexico.
Eithne Luibheid
The 1875 Page Law: A Blueprint for the Sexual Regulation of
Immigration
In order to historicize and theorize how the U.S. immigration control apparatus regulates, manages and transforms sexual, racial and gender identities, this paper discusses the 1875 Page Law. The Page Law directed U.S. officials to differentiate "real" wives from Chinese women who claimed to be wives but were bound for sex work, and to deny entry to the latter. Although officials failed to reliably differentiate among Chinese women on this basis, their efforts nonetheless had significant consequences. The efforts provided the means through which sexual regulation became incorporated into U.S. immigration control, through the use of techniques such as surveillance, spatial control, elicitation of biographical data, and photography. These techniques did not merely enable diligent officials to uncover pre-existing sexual histories and identities among women, but also, centrally participated in constructing the sexual identities and norms through which people's immigration possibilities were then regulated. As I will show, these techniques were also deeply implicated in the extension of racial, gender, and class relations of surveillance and discipline to immigrants. Although Chinese women were the first targets, sexual regulation-with its constitutive interconnection to gender and racial formation-has since extended to encompass every immigrant who seeks to enter the United States.
Eithne Luibhéid is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. Her research focuses on the intersections of immigration control, sexual regulation, and racial formation. Her book, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border, is forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press. She has published articles in Journal of the History of Sexuality, positions: east asia cultures critique, and Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, and edited collections.
Panel 5: Gender and Sexual Identity
Rosalía Solorzano, moderator
Rosalía Solorzano Torres is a native El Pasoan who has held academic, research, and administrative appointments at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California San Diego, University of Colorado, Boulder, The Center for Inter-American and Border Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. She is Visiting Faculty at the Chicana/o Studies Program at the University of Texas at El Paso. Currently, she teaches at Pima County Community College. Her publications include a co-edited introductory textbook in Survey and Analysis in Chicana/o Studies, book articles and essays in sociology and Chicana Studies, and U.S.-Mexico Border immigration and Gender Issues. She is presently editing a collection of works for an anthology about Chicana identity and sexualities.
Patricia Zavella
Migration, Sexuality and Risk: Mexican Women Farmworkers in
California
This talk will historicize recent migration by Mexican women to northern California, illustrating that racialized, gendered, heteronormative processes are integral to globalization. Drawing on ethnographic research, I will contextualize women's experiences in the context of "Latinization" and the predominance of male workers in California's fields. Upon migration to the US, Mexican women negotiate expectations regarding production and notions of mujeres decentes (good women) in reconfigured Mexican communities. I discuss how socio-cultural constructions related to sexual behavior and the body place women at multiple risks, ranging from sexual harassment on the job to sanctions about their transgressions and the possibility of sexually transmitted infections. I argue that these risks, based in the transnational politics of gender relations, are inscribed upon the bodies of women, who develop survival mechanisms and reconstruct traditional notions of identity.
Patricia Zavella is Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies and Director of the Chicano/Latino Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include feminist theory, the relationship between women's wage labor and family life, sexuality, poverty, and transnational migration of Mexicana/o workers to the US and US capital to Mexico. Her most recent publication is Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios, co-authored with the Latina Feminist Group (Duke University Press, 2001).
Norma Mogrovejo
Self-Exile, Political Exile, or Migration Due to Sexual Preference?
If the personal is political, as feminism teaches, the political is also personal. Social structures of domination are reproduced in interpersonal relationships, but personal identity, in turn, determines to a great extent the conditions under which one may participate in public life. In an autobiographical reflection on sexuality, political activism, and citizenship, Norma Mogrovejo recounts her self-discovery as a lesbian and subsequent struggle to live her lesbianism openly and fully. The oppressive traditionalism of the city where she grew up (Arequipa, Perú) drove her to self-exile in Mexico City, a refuge in which "sexual dissidence" could be expressed with relative openness. But Mexico was not the paradise it first seemed: her status as a "non-immigrant resident" relegated her to a permanent underclass that imposed severe limitations on both her professional and political activities. Furthermore, a series of legal barriers made it impossible for her to obtain the Mexican nationality without masking her lesbianism. Mogrovejo proposes a new analytical category to describe her and others' dilemma: "migration due to sexual preference". In Mexico, she could live as a lesbian only at the cost of relinquishing her national identity; in Perú, she could exercise citizenship, but only by renouncing her sexual identity. She was "neither from here, nor from there." The essay offers a compelling account of the social, psychological, and political dislocation entailed in the quest for sexual liberty.
Norma Mogrovejo, Peruvian feminist, lesbianologist. She initiated the first feminist group in her native city. Immigrated to Mexico to live freely her sexual option. Was a lawyer, now sociologist and has a Ph.D. in Latin American Studies; with her thesis A love who dared to say her name. The lesbian's struggle and her relationship with the homosexual and feminist movements in Latin America, she started the discussion of the lesbian gay theory in the academic place. She founded the Mexican Lesbian Archive.
Nayan Shah
Migrant Governmentality, Sex and Space
This paper explores early twentieth century U.S. liberal rationality-or what Michel Foucault calls "governmentality"-as that rationality was articulated by and through its association with unprecedented human migration. "Migrant governmentality" marks and highlights the centrality of the migrant-as both a discursive and social unit-to the constitution of emerging institutions, discourses, and practices of government. Much critical attention on migrant govermentality has focused on the national and transnational but less on the local and the relationships between localities. I explore this problem by examining the process of race-making through the policing of interracial sodomy and the jurisprudence that developed in a series of court decisions in British Columbia and California in the early 20th century. In these cases, South Asian men were convicted of anally penetrating white adolescents and young men in British Columbia and Northern California from 1910 to 1928. The sodomy arrests and court cases occurred within the context of sexual panics and rising political tensions concerning the settlement of Asian male laborers on the Pacific Coast. Through a close reading of court transcriptions and judicial decisions, this paper probes the use of policing and juridical tactics for producing evidence of sexual activity between South Asian men and white boys and youth. The court testimony reveals the range of methods used to patrol race and sexual crossings and the general suspicion of the activity of Asian men. The Canadian cases showed instances of direct police entrapment while the American cases emerged from a more general racial harassment that led to arrests for sex crimes. All cases demonstrate the authorities' discomfort of intensive social contact between laboring men and boys of all races in rural regions and small towns and an urgency in policing the use of public space, such as streets, wharves, and other locations that working males frequented. In the jurisprudence of sodomy that emerged in California and British Columbia produced racialized gender and age categories to ascertain the commission of crime and culpability. The courts contained and curtailed the effects of these transgressions of race, gender, age and bodily use, by assigning culpability to Asian men and by exonerating the white "boys."
Nayan Shah is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. He received his PhD in History from the University of Chicago in 1995. He is the author of Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in san Francisco's Chinatown (UC Press, 2001). He is currently working on a project entitled, "Sexual Aliens: South Asian Migrants, Law and Contested Citizenship," which explores the local and transnational dynamics of global migration, capitalist economy, citizenship and sexual politics by focusing on the sexual and social lives of South Asian men who migrated to rural areas of the US and Canada from 1900-1950. Drawing upon civil and criminal records, newspaper reports and labor camp investigations, this study will explore how South Asian men participated in a range of non-normative domestic arrangements, gender roles and sexual behaviors. Nayan will pursue this project as a Rockefeller Fellow in the Sex, Race and Globalization Project at the University of Arizona in 2002-03.
Summary Session
Rosemary Hennessy, moderator
Rosemary Hennessy is an Associate Professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. She has written on a range of issues in cultural theory, including gender and sexuality, feminism, queer theory and politics. She is the author of Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (Routledge, 2000); Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse (Routledge, 1993); and co-editor of Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference and Women's Lives (Routledge, 1997). Her current project is Fires on the Border: The Passionate Politics of Collective Organizing on the US-Mexican Frontera. This project addresses the way gender and sexual politics under neo-liberalism can be understood from the vantage point of organizing taking place on the US-Mexican border now. Through interviews with border groups and extensive research on the history of the region and its transnational ties, Hennessy will inquire into the ways heteronorms and sexual identity categories feature either explicitly or indirectly in organizing aims and practices. She is also interested in broaching a more complex way of understanding sexual politics and its role in the dynamics of organizing collective agency. This "passionate politics" is infused with affective investments that are entangled with, mediate, and spill beyond sexual identities. It is articulated through a range of practices, among them bonds to charismatic leaders, "secular spiritualities," and traditional beliefs that feature in the work of organizing. How to evaluate these affective relations, the stories through which they are told and translated, the models of sexual politics they suggest, and their lessons for the formation of collective agency in the transnational spaces of neo-liberalism are among the questions her research pursues.
Radhika Mongia, moderator
Radhika Mongia is an Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a Rockefeller Fellow in the Sex, Race and Globalization Project at the University of Arizona (2001-02). She is currently working on two projects: one is a critique of recent feminist efforts (particularly the work of Drucilla Cornell, Alison Jaggar, and Martha Nussbaum) to develop a globally adequate conception of the (feminist) subject. The other, which she will pursue during her fellowship, is Genealogies of Globalization, a book length study on state regulation of international migration. Mongia examines archival documents on Indian migration from 1834 to 1917 to chart the crucial colonial histories for some of the chief technologies for regulating migration--namely, the juridical labor contract, medical and police certificates, the modern passport, and the marriage contract. In contrast to existing literature on migration, her work questions the putative legitimacy of the state in controlling migration and suggests that the institutionalization and routinization of these key technologies helps (re)generate, rather than undermine, the colonial conjunctures between discourses of race, heteropatriarchy, nationality and the state. It thus provides a genealogy of globalization attentive to the sedimentation and palpable residues of colonial histories and structures within formations of contemporary globalization. A portion of this research, "Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport," appears in Public Culture (vol. 11 no. 3, fall 1999: 527-556).