SRG SEMINAR SERIES

 

This series is designed to develop the knowledge and membership of the Sex, Race and Globalization Project.

 

February 25, 2005 / 12-2 pm / Modern Languages Building 451

Maria Josefina Saldana-Portillo, Associate Prof, English, Rutgers University and author of The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development

David Kazanjian, Associate Prof, English, Queens College and author of The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America

 

January 19, 2005 / 12-2 pm / Modern Languages Building 451

Jessica Weinberg, SRG Dissertation Fellow and PhD candidate in the Dept of Anthropology

Global Feminisms and Local Analyses of Sex/Race/Nation in the Women's Peace Movement in Israel

The strength of the women's peace movement in Israel is that the activists offer analyses and critiques of the ways in which discourses of gender, sexuality, race, and nation work together in Israeli society and in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These analyses distinguish the women's peace movement in Israel from the separate peace and women's movements in Israel. In this presentation, I will elaborate the activists' gender/sexuality/race/nation analyses, and I will interrogate the ways in which those analyses are both constituted by and subverting of the tropes of global feminism.

 

November 19, 2004 / 12-2 pm / Modern Languages Building 451

Sallie Marston, JP Jones and Keith Woodward (UA Dept of Geography) presenting their jointly authored paper.

Human Geography without Scale

Fifteen years ago, scale was being lamented as an 'understudied' subject in the discipline of geography. Today, geographic scale has become the "it" word: the concept every critical theorist seems required to attend to in order to be considered au courant with the literature. There is no doubt that the proliferation of research on scale has advanced our theorizing about society and space. And yet, conflicting opinions about how to theorize scale are proliferating such that scale has become more than a chaotic conception. As a result, critical human geography is today faced with a new horizon of scale theorists, ones who are directly challenging the vertical-hierarchical model of scale that circulates widely in public discourse and in the writings of the dominant, if 'critical', social theorists of scale. We applaud, with some reservations, these efforts, and in this paper we contribute to them. First, we argue against definitions of scale that place it within hierarchies such as local, regional, national, and global. These, we believe, are determinately structuralist, conceptually flawed, and politically problematic. Second, we argue that attempts to refine or reconfigure the hierarchical model cannot escape these flaws; instead, geography needs a wholesale rejection of hierarchical versions of scale. Our response, third, is to argue on behalf of an alternative ontology, one that so flattens scale as to render the concept unnecessary for human geography. In place of the vertical-hierarchical, or 'looking up', spatial ontology, we offer a horizontal, or 'looking sideways', alternative. Finally, we conclude by addressing the analytic and political implications of a human geography without scale.

 

October 29, 2004 / 12-2 pm / Modern Languages Building 451

Elif Shafak, Assistant Prof. Near Eastern Studies

Hegemonic Masculinity, Comrade Women and Sissyphobia: Male Gender Roles along the Islamist-Secularist Paradigm in Turkey

 

April 17th, 2004 / 7:30pm / Pima Community College Center for the Arts Recital Hall

A Tail of Two Cities / written and performed by Carmelita Tropicana
For more info, please click here for the original flyer in adobe format.

 

Friday, February 20th, 2004 / 10am-Noon / Special Collections Conference Room

Inderpal Grewal, Director and Professor of Women's Studies at UC, Irvine.

Neoliberalism, Empire, America

The meanings of citizenship in the contexts of neoliberalism and imperialism. Along the way, she offers a critique of Hardt and Negri's Empire and engages the relation of ethnic studies to transnational feminist studies.

and

Caren Kaplan, Chair, Graduate Group in Cultural Studies and Associate Professor, Women and Gender Studies, University of California at Davis

Dead Ends and Dangerous Traditions: Cosmopolitanism, Global Feminism, and the Recuperation of Nationalism

In a time of war, gender is marshalled and deployed as surely as armies and munitions. Gender is intrinsic to the articulation of nationalism in modernity and the disciplining operation of gender is to insist on separate spheres and activities that may or may not correspond to necessity or desire; furthermore, it also creates citizens and subjects who claim rights within civil society. In women's and gender studies, she argues, we need work that addresses the "dangerous traditions" of nation, race, and sex, comprehending the allure as well as the limits of cosmopolitanism without requiring total transparency or truth. If we refuse to accept global feminism as an escape from local patriarchies and if we are unable to endorse the internationalizing of the field without insisting on genealogies of colonialism and imperialism, past and present, we are asking for partial transformations; that is, precisely historical inquiries that proceed without creating foundational subjects.

 

Friday, January 30, 2004 / noon-2pm / Douglass 102 (Reception will follow the lecture.)

Ashley Tellis, SRG Rockefeller Fellow

Distorting Mirrors: The Global Careers of Queerness

In this paper, part of his larger project "Postcolonial Same-Sex Sexualities in India and the Non-West," Dr. Tellis, through a mixture of ethnographic work, literary analysis, cultural studies analysis and critical queer theory, examines three sites of same-sex location in India. These are a) the Indian male same-sex subject as figured round the denomination "gay," b) the Indian female same-sex subject as conceived of through the phenomenon of "lesbian suicides," and c) the hijra subject as delineated through recent hijra attempts at political organizing and representation. Through an analysis of the multiple locations of these subjects and subjectivities, he hopes to interrogate the limits and possibilities of queer subjecthood both in India and in the world of queer theory and politics as a whole.

 

November 19, 2003 / 12-2 pm / Douglass 102 (Lunch provided)

Assistant Professor Laura G. Gutiérrez, Rockefeller Fellow and Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Iowa

Co-sponsored with the Dept of Women's Studies

Feminism's Rendezvous with Melodrama or "fue en un cabaret": Nation, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Mexican Performance

This presentation is part of Gutiérrez's larger project, "Unsettling Comforts: Sexualities in Contemporary Mexicana and Chicana Performance," which examines sexuality as a social and cultural construction, arguing for models of theoretical inquiry that account for the specificities of Mexicana and Chicana/o culture. Here she examines the work of "Mexican" queer performance artists who deploy cabaret político (a mixture of different performative practices from the early twentieth century: teatro de revista, teatro de carpa,and German-style cabaret) to critically intervene in institutionalized and/or naturalized national discourses: economic, political, and sexual. Gutiérrez looks at how these artists -- Astrid Hadad, Jesusa Rodriguez, Liliana Felipe, Regina Orozco, and Tito Vasconcelos -- interrogate identities and political and economic systems from within one of the popular discourses whose mass-mediated characteristics have aided in forging the nation: the melodrama. She argues that melodrama is more than referenced in these performances; melodrama is an intertext that is being continuously re-written in an excessive, humorous, and campy fashion and, from which, new meanings are produced.

 

October 29, 2003 / 12-2 pm / Modern Languages 451 (Lunch provided)

Associate Professor Geta LeSeur, Interim Head, Africana Studies

Sista Power: Black Migrant Women and the Formation of their Communities--A Look at Eloy and Randolph Arizona

Geta LeSeur's current research examines motherhood, coming of age, the impact of place on female formation, and Black migrant women. Her publications include several journal articles as well as Ten is the Age of Darkness: The Black Bildungsroman and Not all Okies are White: The Lives of Black Cotton Pickers in Arizona. In the latter, she uses oral histories as well as documentary evidence to portray the experiences of Black Okies, cotton pickers in the town of Randolph, Arizona, a group that has been excluded from prior accounts of western migrants.

Precirculated readings from Prof LeSeur's Not All Okies Are White will be available.

 

October 10, 2003 / 3:30-4:30 pm / Harvill 404 (Reception will follow the lecture.)

Assistant Professor Melissa Wright, Geography and Women's Studies, Penn State

Co-sponsored with Dept of Geography and Regional Development

Paradoxes of Protest: The Mujeres de Negro of Mexico

Melissa Wright is the author of "The Dialectics of Still Life: Murder, Women, and Maquiladoras" in _Millenial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism_, Duke UP, 2001). In this presentation she continues her exploration of the political and economic conditions surrounding the deaths and disappearances of hundreds of women and girls in Ciudad Juárez by examining the "Ni Una Más" (not one more) protest movement and march of November 25th, 2002. The marchers, many working with human rights and feminist organizations in Mexico, are protesting against the political disregard and lack of accountability, at all levels of government, in relation to this surging violence against women. And the symbolic leaders of their movement are the Mujeres de Negro, women wearing black, who are based in Chihuahua City. In this paper, she examines how the feminist politics of Mujeres de Negro play upon the negotiation of spatial paradoxes in order to open new arenas for womens political agency. For while the Mujeres de Negro of northern Mexico are galvanizing an international human rights movement that is challenging political elites, they are also reinforcing many of the traditional prohibitions against women's access to politics and the public sphere. She argues that the productive effects of this paradox blur the boundaries between power and resistance.

 

December 4, 2002 / 3:30pm

Prof. Samantha King (Physical Education)

Pink Ribbons Inc: Breast Cancer Activism and the Politics of Philanthropy

 

November 7, 2002 / 3:30pm

Prof. Julia Sudbury (Mills College, SRG fellow)
Outcomes from the International Conference on Penal Abolition (ICOPA) and Women in Prison in Nigeria.

 

October 18, 2002 / 3:30pm / Social Sciences 128

Prof. Bert Barickman (History)
"Morality" and Civilization" in the water, on the sand, under the sun, and the streets: seabathing and beach-going in 19th and early 20th century Rio de Janeiro.

 

November 30, 2001 / 1-3 pm / Modern Languages 451

Julia Sudbury (Ethnic Studies Dept, Mills College)
Transatlantic Visions: Resisting the Globalization of Mass Incarceration

Julia Sudbury received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Warwick in 1997. She is the author of Other Kinds of Dreams : Black Women's Organizations and the Politics of Transformation. Her current work is focussed on race, gender and the Prison Industrial Complex. She is a member of the board of directors of Critical Resistance, a national prison-abolition organization.

 

October 26, 2001 / 1-3pm / Transitional Bldg, Humanities Seminar Rm / 1731 E 2nd St (No readings for this session -- it will be a lecture.)

Radhika Mongia (Rockefeller Fellow)
Gendered Nationalism, the Racialized State and the Making of Migration Law: The Indian 'Marriage Question' in South Africa

Radhika Mongia is a Rockefeller Humanities Residency Fellow in the Sex, Race and Globalization Project and an Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her current project, Genealogies of Globalization, is 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.

 

September 21, 2001 / 1-3pm / Modern Laguages 451

Laura Tabili (History Dept, UA)

Empire is the Enemy of Love: The Progress of Edith Noor and Other Stories

Laura Tabili's research has been devoted to finding historical explanations for racial conflict in British and European societies. Her book in progress, Workers Without Borders: Outsiders and Insiders in an Industrial Society 1850-1939, will reconstruct local and global migration patterns, challenging assumptions about cultural purity and pollution invoked by contemporary opponents of immigration. "Empire is the Enemy of Love" explores and attempts to explain the fluidity and instability of colonizers' understandings of the relationships among race, class, gender and empire as they dealt with (and bullied) a series of migrants between metropole and colony in the 1920s and 30s.

 

April 20, 2001 / 10am-12pm / Modern Languages 451

Theresa Delgadillo
Miscegenation, Mestizaje, and Racial Memory: The Case of "Angelitos Negros"

Theresa Delgadillo is an assistant professor of Women’s Studies, UA. She received her PhD in English from UCLA. Her work focusses on religion and spirituality in Chicana literature. NB: Readings will be circulated in advance.

 

April 2, 2001 / 12 - 2 pm / Modern Languages 451

Cynthia Enloe
Soup (from her new book Maneuvers)

Cynthia Enloe is Professor of Government at Clark University, works on international politics from a feminist perspective. Her books include: Does Khaki Become You (1988); The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (1993); Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (1990), and most recently, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives (2000). She has appeared as the invited speaker at a wide variety of venues around the globe, from the South Seas to the Pentagon. NB: Readings will be circulated in advance.

 

March 23 - 24, 2001

Labor in the Americas Conference
Globalization, Inequality and the Challenges for Activism

The link below provides the latest information on the conference:

www.gened.arizona.edu/jstillerman/labconf.htm

 

February 23, 2001 / 12-2 pm / Modern Languages 451

Vernon Rosario

"QuÈ joto bonita!": Transgender Negotiations of Sex and Ethnicity

Vernon Rosario is a Child Psychiatry Fellow at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute where, in addition to clinical work, he pursues research and teaching on trangenderism and intersexuality. He is the author of The Erotic Imagination: French Histories of Perversity (Oxford University Press, 1997) and a forthcoming volume on the history of the biomedical treatment of homosexuality (ABC Clio). NB: Readings will be circulated in advance.

 

December 8, 2000 / 12-2 pm / Student Union, Room 256

Dereka Rushbrook, Doctoral Candidate, Geography and Regional Development

Cities and Queer Space: Staking a Claim to Global Cosmopolitanis

 

November 17, 2000 / 10am -12 pm / Student Union, Tucson Room

Steve Cornell

Culture, Inequality, and Indigenous Peoples in the United States (and Elsewhere)

 

October 27, 2000 / 12-2 pm / Transitional Building (1731 E. 2nd St) Conf Room 106a

Adele Barker, Associate Professor, Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies

Who Owns Russion Culture? Models of Globalization Post-Soviet Style

 

September 29, 2000 / 12-2pm / Student Union, Room 256

Laura Briggs, Associate Professor, Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies

Sex, Race, and Empire: Thinking American Imperialism through Sexuality