Genderscapes

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The Newsletter of the University of Michigan

Institute for Research on Women and Gender

Dear Friends of IRWG: Welcome to the second issue of Genderscapes, and the University of Michigan’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender. When we published our first edition last fall, we had high hopes for renewing connections and conversations with a larger University, Ann Arbor, and national audience. We were very pleased with the response and hope to enhance what was started last year. If you have any comments about the newsletter, or IRWG, or how gender research should figure in the life of the University of Michigan, please don’t hesitate to contact me. I welcome your thoughts.

A Q u ick To u r o f 2 0 1 5 – 1 6

After such a spectacular 20th anniversary year of events, one might assume that this year would suffer the status of an anticlimax. Not at all. Over the course of the 2015-16 academic year, we’ll offer a variety of lectures, conferences, and panel discussions that reflect and enhance the gender scholarship taking place on our campus and around the country. Our active faculty-led programs will be at the forefront of event-planning this year. From LGBTQ and sexuality studies, to race and colonialism, feminism and technology, finance, and feminist science studies, our 2015-16

events will be diverse, multidisciplinary, and driven by the priorities of faculty and students who call IRWG “home.” I encourage you to learn more about our dynamic faculty programs and their upcoming events throughout the year on our website.

In addition to our faculty-led programs, IRWG will feature an ongoing series of book talks by feminist scholars, and present a major public lecture in the fall.

Our book series began September 17, with a presentation by Michael A. Messner on his recent book, Some Men: Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence

Current IRWG director Sarah Fenstermaker with her predecessors Carol Boyd and Abby Stewart

Against Women (Oxford University Press, 2015). Messner, a professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California, has spent his career studying gender and masculinity. On October 9, Susan Greenhalgh, a Harvard anthropologist, will discuss her new book, Fat-Talk Nation: The Human Costs of America’s War on Fat (Cornell Press, 2015). Greenhalgh’s book unpacks the complexity of contemporary “fat politics” and the unspoken human trauma inflicted on individuals and society.

On October 13, Piper Kerman will speak about her memoir Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison, and her subsequent work on prison reform.

Based on the 13 months she spent in the a federal prison on money laundering charges, Kerman’s memoir explores the experience of incarceration and the intersection of her life with the lives of the women she met while in prison: their friendships and families, mental illnesses and substance abuse issues, cliques and codes

Fall 2015

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GENDERSCAPES Fall 2015

As part of the November 2014 “Gender: New Works, New Questions” event, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes (American Culture, Women’s Studies) performs in response to the collection of animal-themed performance scripts and commentaries.

See page 10.

of behavior. The book also raises provocative questions about the state of criminal justice in America and how incarceration affects individuals and communities throughout the nation.

Since her release, Piper Kerman has worked to promote the cause of prison and criminal justice reform. She serves on the board of the Women’s Prison Association, which provides preventive services for at-risk women, works to create alternatives to incarceration, advocates against practices like shackling during childbirth and offers programs to aid reentry into society.

Kerman’s talk will take place on Tuesday, October 13 at 5:00 PM in Rackham Auditorium, and will serve as the 2015 Vivian R. Shaw Lecture. Established in 1997 by Ellen S. Agress (U-M, 1968), the biennial Shaw lecture is jointly presented by IRWG and the Department of Women’s Studies to address real world issues affecting women.

An expert faculty panel of U-M scholars will discuss the current state of female incarceration on Monday, October 12 at 3:30 PM in the School of Social Work Building, Room 1840. We are very pleased to be able

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to consider seriously the lives of incarcerated women with these two events. I hope you will join us.

Our ever-popular Gender: New Works, New Questions series will feature Dancers as Diplomats: American Choreography in Cultural Exchange by Clare Croft (Dance) and Nancy Rose Hunt’s (History) A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo. Each event will feature a panel of interdisciplinary scholars to offer comment on the works from the perspective of their individual disciplines.

More information about all our events can be found on our website.

Since last year, two important new additions have been made to the IRWG team.

Women’s Studies professor Anna Kirkland has become IRWG’s Associate Director, and Dr. Jocelyn Stitt has taken on the job of Program Director, Faculty Research Development. I am thrilled that they have joined us at IRWG, and they have already made a difference to IRWG’s ability to respond to the research needs of our faculty.

I hope you will get to know them as the year progresses.

facebook.com/UMichIRWG and

Finally, inspired by the Black Feminist Think Tank Symposium sponsored by the African American Workshop within the Department of Afro-American and African Studies, IRWG will this year engage in some institutional self-assessment for our place within the ongoing project of anti-racism. All of us who depend upon privilege – of whatever variety – are compelled to be self-critical in this way. I will let you know how it goes.

I hope that you will visit us in Lane Hall and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

My best wishes to you for a productive and satisfying academic year.

Sarah Fenstermaker

Director Professor, Women’s Studies and Sociology umsarah@umich.edu

@UMichIRWG.

Institute for Research on Women and Gender

IRWG Associate Director, Anna Kirkland

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nna Kirkland, Arthur F. Thurnau professor and associate professor of Women’s Studies with a courtesy appointment in Political Science, joined IRWG as Associate Director in September 2014. Her relationship with IRWG goes back many years, including receiving a Faculty Seed Grant as an assistant professor for her research on fat rights activists and civil rights and serving on the organizing committee for the 2006 Against Health conference. “Being part of the team at IRWG is exciting because it provides me opportunities to learn about and support all the fascinating interdisciplinary gender research happening at Michigan,” says Professor Kirkland.

Kirkland has spent her first year at IRWG helping to develop the faculty program areas, working with potential visiting scholars from around the U.S. and the world, restructuring by-laws to reflect institutional changes over the last decade, supervising our 20th Anniversary programming, and getting to know the staff. The Associate Director also helps to review all applications for funding, co-sponsorships, and new programming opportunities. “It has been great to receive mentoring from [Director] Sarah Fenstermaker and to see her initiatives like the Feminist Research Seminars, the Collaborative Planning Grants, and the Junior Faculty Scholars Program working out so well,” she added.

As Associate Director, Kirkland’s main priorities are to support IRWG’s faculty program areas, to work with the new Program Director for Faculty Research, Jocelyn Stitt, and IRWG Director Sarah Fenstermaker on new grant opportunities for faculty, and to improve IRWG’s social media outreach and web presence. She and Fenstermaker will also be working on connecting IRWG more closely to discussions about racial and gender justice. Reflecting on her first year at

“I love to spend part of my days writing in solitude, and I can combine that with the energy and collaboration that we have at IRWG.” IRWG, Kirkland says: “I have really enjoyed the chance to think big—what are we working on as research scholars and how can we use it to do good in the world?—as well as on details like what is our budget, how can we best allocate it, and how can we make this great event happen?” “My college job was as a manager at the campus catering service, and so it was fun to remember how important it is to put on a good event,” she recalls. “I love to spend part of my days writing in solitude, and I can combine that with the energy and collaboration that we have at IRWG. It’s nice to get out of my own head and think about other people’s research, too.”

Kirkland teaches courses on gender, law, and health policy, and received an Arthur F. Thurnau professorship in 2015 for her accomplishments in undergraduate teaching.

She has published two books, Fat Rights:

Anna Kirkland with former Associate Director Deborah Keller-Cohen

Dilemmas of Difference and Personhood with New York University Press in 2008, and Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality, also from NYU Press in 2010 and co-edited with Jonathan Metzl. She is completing her second monograph on the social, legal, and political dimensions of vaccine injury claims, under contract with NYU Press for publication in the fall of 2016 and currently titled Vaccine Trials: The Law and Politics of Vaccine Injuries.

Kirkland provided written expert testimony in the Michigan same-sex marriage case, DeBoer v. Snyder, and has been featured in the New York Times and on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered. She is exploring new projects on sex-based claims of health discrimination under the Affordable Care Act as well as continuing her work on vaccines and obesity politics. ■

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GENDERSCAPES Fall 2015

Q&A with Jocelyn Fenton Stitt, Program Director for Faculty Research Development

One of the main services IRWG provides to the university is the fostering of innovative and interdisciplinary scholarship. Director Sarah Fenstermaker recognized that IRWG’s already strong presence as an incubator for feminist research would be strengthened with the addition of a Faculty Research Development position. Jocelyn Fenton Stitt serves as an advocate for advancing research on gender or sexuality by finding funding sources and developing grant proposals. In conjunction with Lisa Parker, IRWG’s Grant Administrator, Michigan faculty studying gender and sexuality now have a centralized place on campus to receive such research support.

That’s a really long job title. What is Faculty Research Development?

My job title is a mouthful! A pithier way to think of what I do is that I’m a feminist research concierge. This job is perfect for me because I get to spend my week talking with faculty about research that really matters—from how to increase digital literacy among young women, to the relationship between teens’ participation in contact sports and their subsequent drug and alcohol use, to fieldwork in Ghana tracking women’s use of over-the-counter abortifacients.

More formally, Research Development professionals use their writing, teaching, and mentoring experience to give faculty members an edge in identifying funding opportunities and winning grants. By providing this support for faculty, IRWG is showing forward-thinking leadership on the collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of contemporary gender research. Data collected by the National Organization of Research Professionals shows that faculty who use Research Development services have success rates for obtaining funding far above national averages. Many RD professionals, like me, are former faculty members. We aren’t grant writers, although we do help with strategizing about effective organization and presentation of ideas.

What is your academic background?

After earning degrees from Pomona College (English and Women’s Studies), the University of Edinburgh (Caribbean Studies), and the University of Michigan (English and Women’s Studies), I was a faculty member at Minnesota State University for almost 10 years. My department, Gender and Women’s Studies, was housed in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

Integrating perspectives from both social sciences and the humanities, I also taught courses on Feminist Research Methods, Global Feminism, Mothering Studies, and Feminist Theory.

What is your research experience?

One of my most formative experiences as a graduate student was participating in the first cohort of IRWG’s Community of Scholars. With the encouragement of IRWG I developed an interdisciplinary research agenda. I’ve asked questions about the legacies of nineteenth-century discourses of nationalism, lineage, the family, and history and its impact on the formation of postcolonial nations. As part of their Series in Feminist Theory, SUNY Press published

my co-edited collection Mothers Who Deliver: Feminist Interventions in Public and Interpersonal Discourse. I also edited Before Windrush: Recovering an Asian and Black Literary Heritage within Britain. My ability to evaluate and mentor faculty with their interdisciplinary scholarship has been recognized by the National Women’s Studies Association, which asked me in 2014 to serve a three-year term on their First Book Prize Committee.

When faculty come to you for assistance, what can they expect?

Faculty members can expect that their interactions with me, a feminist scholar and teacher, will go beyond reviewing their grant applications. I know the pressure of being on the tenure track and will work with faculty on developing their research agenda with an eye on timelines related to tenure and promotion.

When I work with faculty members I start by reading their publications. I am an academic steeped in interdisciplinary feminist studies, which allows me to engage with scholars’ work as a whole. Then we meet to talk about their current research projects and funding needs. Working for IRWG puts me in a unique position with faculty. Unlike faculty mentors or department peers, my role is neither to evaluate nor to be in competition with faculty. What happens in our Research Development meetings stays with me. I see my role as an advocate for the success of faculty research related to women, gender, and sexuality. From there I help faculty chart their future research agendas and determine how extramural funding will play a role.

How can faculty get in contact with you?

Faculty can either email me (jocstitt@ umich.edu) or stop by my office in IRWG (1136B Lane Hall). I always have great snacks to share. ■

Institute for Research on Women and Gender

Junior Faculty Scholar

IRWG introduced the Junior Faculty Scholars Program for untenured Michigan faculty working in the fields of women, gender and/or sexuality during the 2013–14 academic year. Shazia Iftkahr and Victor Mendoza were our inaugural scholars. The JFS Program is designed to help Michigan’s newest faculty members to achieve tenure and promotion through course relief and office space at IRWG. Sara McClelland (Women’s Studies and Psychology) spent 2014–15 as the third Junior Faculty Scholar.

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ara McClelland’s research focuses on what women feel they deserve in their intimate relationships and how this shapes the kinds of support they receive (or don’t receive) throughout their lifetimes. She has two lines of research where she has examined this important topic. Her Intimacy and Sexual Quality of Life research is an interdisciplinary collaboration with Jennifer Griggs, M.D. (U-M, Oncology). With Griggs, McClelland has examined how women with metastatic breast cancer describe what kinds of support they need to maintain their quality of life. These data aim to guide health care professionals providing support for ill and aging patients.

In her Queer Youth Study, McClelland collaborated with José Bauermeister, Ph.D. (U-M, Public Health). McClelland analyzed interviews with young lesbian and bisexual women to better understand how young people describe their early experiences of same-sex sexual attraction. Previously, there had been little research on how young women’s own attractions and personal experiences are shaped by social forces such

as homophobia and prejudice. McClelland’s study asked questions such as, “What is the role of sexual attraction in shaping subsequent sexual identities? How are early experiences of same-sex attraction shaped by peer, family, school, and community responses?”

McClelland described the support she received as a Junior Faculty Scholar as being crucial to her progression as a scholar.

She noted, “the IRWG fellowship offered support for writing at a very useful time in my career. I had collected data for these two projects and needed time to write up articles for publication. The fellowship offered time to concentrate on writing and time to develop ideas.” McClelland was able to submit seven journal manuscripts and present at four national conferences during her IRWG fellowship.

When asked if she would recommend this opportunity to others, McClelland replied “It’s an amazing fellowship that would be incredibly helpful to junior faculty across the campus.” ■

Sara McClelland Fast Facts: • Received PhD in Social/Personality Psychology in 2009 from the Graduate Center, City University of New York • Started at U-M as three-year post-doctoral fellowship in the Michigan Society of Fellows in 2009 • Began a tenure track position as Assistant Professor in Women’s Studies and Psychology in 2012

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GENDERSCAPES Fall 2015

IRWG-Rackham Community of Scholars

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t was nearly twenty years ago when IRWG and the Rackham Graduate School joined forces to support student research on women, gender, and sexuality. Since then over 220 graduate students have participated in the IRWG/Rackham Community of Scholars summer fellowship.

IRWG’s hallmark initiative for graduate students, the program provides full summer funding for research activities, coupled with a weekly seminar in May and June. Led by Professor Elizabeth Wingrove (Political Science, Women’s Studies), the weekly seminar offers students from disparate disciplines the opportunity to workshop their projects in a supportive and collaborative setting. In the fall, the students reconvene to present their work at an annual symposium.

Recently, IRWG conducted a survey of Community of Scholars (COS) participants from the past decade. The respondents represented an array of scholars at different stages of their careers, the majority of whom are now in tenure-track positions at universities around the world. Of the respondents, 94% cited COS as useful in the completion of their U-M degrees, and 82% reported using what they learned from the COS fellowship in their present work. In a ringing endorsement of the fellowship’s primary objective, 79% of respondents felt that COS fostered interdisciplinarity in their work. Many of the survey respondents provided specific examples of what they gained from the Community of Scholars program. Their feedback will prove invaluable in the continued development of graduate student support at IRWG and Rackham. ■

Community Of Scholars Fellows Report Back “My experiences as a Community of Scholars fellow helped me learn how to communicate across disciplines in productive ways.

It was an empowering experience, and my students today are beneficiaries . . . It was an outstanding opportunity, and fundamental in my development as a critic, scholar, and teacher. Learning how to explain my work to non-experts was especially useful for grant applications, and I remain committed to fostering interdisciplinary exchange at my current institution.”

Chad Thomas, Assistant Professor, English Department, University of Alabama in Huntsville (COS 2007)

“In the space of COS, I built connections with colleagues and mentors in other fields that sustain to this day and have had a really deep influence on my work.”

is between disciplines, and how careful one has to be in how they communicate their work across disciplinary boundaries and to broader audiences more generally.”

Amanda Healy, PhD Candidate in English and Women’s Studies (COS 2013)

Laura R. Ramsey, Assistant Professor of Psychology Bridgewater State University (COS 2008)

“I think the most important thing that I got out of the Community of Scholars program was a better understanding and appreciation for interdisciplinary differences, which has since helped me to communicate and collaborate across disciplinary boundaries.

Talking about my dissertation project with fellow graduate students outside of psychology helped me understand what a gulf there

“I felt like I won the lottery. It was a godsend.

It helped me to a produce a much better thesis paper and thesis gallery show, because I was able to spend more time writing and researching my topic.”

John Gutoskey, MFA, Art & Design (COS 2013)

2014 COS Fellow Dahlia Petru

2013 COS Fellows Amanda Healy and Nicole Greer Golda

Institute for Research on Women and Gender

2015 Community of Scholars Cassius Adair (English Language & Literature) “States of Identification: Gender Variance, Racial Rhetoric, and the Politics of the Photo ID” Meghanne Barker (Anthropology) “Ethics of Cuteness: Doll Play and Children’s Performance of Motherhood” Monique Bourdage (Communication Studies) “The Playboy Pad: Negotiating Gender and Domestic Space in Postwar Magazines” The 2015 Community of Scholars represented two U-M Schools and nine disciplines.

Jamie Budnick (Sociology) “The New Gay Science: The (Re) Emergence of Biological and Genetic Theories of Sexuality” Cristian Capotescu (History) “Mitigating the Effects and Legacies of Abortion Bans and Economic Austerity: Humanitarian Aid for Romania in the 1980s and 1990s”

Tameka Tounsel and Johnny Berona at the 2014 Community of Scholars Symposium.

Katherine Jean Lennard (American Culture) “Made in America: Violence, Industry, and the Bodies of the Ku Klux Klan, 1902-40” Jessica Lowen (Anthropology) Rebecca Mandell (Health Behavior and Health Education) “Exploring Intersectional Approaches between the Environmental Justice and Reproductive Justice Movements” Nevila Pahumi (History) “Of Women, Faith, and Nation: American Protestantism and the Kyrias School for Girls, Albania, 1891-1933” Rita C. Seabrook (Psychology, Women’s Studies) “Greek Life and Gender Strife: The Relation between Fraternity Culture and Traditional Sexual Scripts, Sexual Violence, and Objectification of Women” Duygu Ula (Comparative Literature)“’Ayse Loves Fatma:’ Representations of Lesbian (In) Visibility from Turkey” Emily Jean Youatt (Health Behavior and Health Education) “Coming Out to Your Doctor: Interrogating Sexual Orientation Disclosure in Clinical Encounters” Tiffany Ball presents her work at the 2014 COS Symposium.

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GENDERSCAPES Fall 2015

Collaborative Planning Grants The Celia Project

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aculty often wish to bring multiple sources of expertise and disciplinary perspectives to planning a research project. Until recently there have been few sources of support specifically designated for feminist research carried out by interdisciplinary teams housed at multiple institutions. With the introduction of IRWG’s Collaborative Planning Grant in 2012, faculty and librarians can apply for grants up to $10,000 to spark connections across universities and disciplines for projects in the earliest stages of research.

The grant assists in helping new research projects get underway with the hope that future applications for extramural funding will be strengthened.

Martha Jones (History, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Law), and Hannah

Rosen, (formerly IRWG, currently History and American Studies, College of William and Mary) used their 2012 Collaborative Planning Grant to bring fresh insights from feminist historiography, critical race theory, and African American Studies to the case of The State of Missouri v. Celia, A Slave (1855). The Celia Project began when a graduate student gave Jones photocopies of court documents related to Celia’s trial.

A previous publication, Melton McLaurin’s Celia, A Slave (1991) brought the trial to the attention of scholars and students.

However, Jones and Rosen wanted to work

collaboratively to analyze this pivotal legal case and the numerous newspaper stories, archival sources, and state documents surrounding the trial.

Celia, an enslaved seventeen-year-old, was convicted and hanged for the murder of Robert Newsom, the man who purchased her. Celia gave birth to two children and was pregnant with a third while living in Newsom’s household. The children Celia bore were likely Newsom’s. Celia, who did not have a last name, gave testimony corroborated by Newsom’s family that she

“We know a lot more about slavery and sexual violence than we did in 1991. We have new…theoretical apparatuses for thinking about these questions and at the same time we have an opportunity to use new archival material to which McLauren did not have access.”

Institute for Research on Women and Gender

Planning Grant made possible a number of workshops on Celia and the legal status of enslaved women in Michigan and in Missouri. While in Missouri the project group traveled to the site of the farm where Celia was enslaved. They also worked with the local Historical Society and examined the Newsom family’s estate records.

Jones

Rosen

was subject to sexual violence by Newsom and thus killed him in self-defense. Celia’s story has been of interest to historians and legal scholars because it shines a stark light on the legal status of enslaved women. The state of Missouri found Celia guilty of murder, concluding that enslaved women did not have a legal right to resist an owner’s sexual assault. Thus the court concluded, in Missouri, enslaved women could not be raped. The Celia Project uncovers how Celia’s claim to have acted in self-defense to prevent rape was at once revolutionary and legally invalid.

Rosen’s work on sexual violence during slavery and Jones’s work on legal scholarship and African American women in the nineteenth-century brought different fields of expertise to their examination of the archives and local histories surrounding Celia’s trial and conviction. As Jones notes, “We know a lot more about slavery and sexual violence than we did in 1991.

We have new…theoretical apparatuses for thinking about these questions and at the same time we have an opportunity to use new archival material to which McLauren did not have access.”

Previous recipients of the Collaborative Planning Grant have used the funds for travel, to work closely with other scholars on publishing research, and for preliminary data collection. Jones and Rosen did all three in their effort to rethink the meaning of this 1855 trial. The Collaborative

One of the most exciting aspects of the Celia Project goes beyond Jones’s and Rosen’s collaboration with each other.

Travel to Missouri allowed historical work done by local historians to be brought into conversation with the university-based Celia Project. For example, Jones and Rosen met with local artist Solomon Thurman who had been commissioned by civil rights activist Margaret Bush-Wilson to create a portrait of Celia. Although no photographs or paintings of her exist, using archival records and family photographs he imagined what Celia might have looked like as a way of reclaiming her as a historical subject and creating a visual record of her for the community.

Jones and Rosen noted that humanists are not necessarily trained in how to work collaboratively. The IRWG Collaborative Planning Grant gave the team time and space to explore how to accomplish joint research.

The Celia Project’s next steps included submitting a National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Grant.

They were assisted by IRWG staff, including Contract and Grant Administrator Lisa Parker. “Working with Lisa opened our eyes to how even as humanists we could plug into a whole range of grant possibilities that would make this collaboration really sing.” ■ For more information about IRWG Collaborative Planning Grants, contact Jocelyn Stitt (jocstitt@ umich.edu) or visit our website.

Thurman, with his painting of Celia

Recent Collaborative Planning Grants Conscience-In-Action Renee R. Anspach (Sociology, Women’s Studies) Raymond G. De Vries (Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine, Medical Education/Obstetrics & Gynecology) Lisa H. Harris (Obstetrics & Gynecology, Women’s Studies) The Embodiment of Insult: Gender and Biobehavioral Response to Incivility in Organizations Lilia M. Cortina (Psychology and Women’s Studies) Sari M. van Anders (Psychology and Women’s Studies) M. Sandy Hershcovis (Business Administration, I.H. Asper School of Business, University of Manitoba) Global Feminisms in Russia Abigail Stewart (Psychology and Women’s Studies) Rebecca Friedman (History, Florida International University) Valerie Kivelson (History) Kristin McGuire (Global Feminisms Project, University of Michigan) Natalia Pushkareva (History, Russian Academy of Sciences) Setting the Standard: The Struggle over Title IX Compliance Elizabeth A. Armstrong (Sociology) Sandra R. Levitsky (Sociology)

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GENDERSCAPES Fall 2015

Gender: New Works, New Questions

Gender: New Works, New Questions, is an ongoing series of conversations spotlighting important new works by U-M faculty members. Scholarly books, creative writing, and other works of art that engage gender and sexuality are all considered for presentation. In 2014-15, IRWG featured works by two accomplished faculty members: Holly Hughes (Art & Design, Theatre & Drama, and Women’s Studies) and Nadine Hubbs (Women’s Studies and Music).

Professors Rubin, Garrett, Lacy, and Hubbs

AN IMAL ACTS : P E R F O R M I NG SP ECIES TO DAY

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n November 2014, a panel of U-M humanities scholars convened to discuss Animal Acts: Performing Species Today (University of Michigan Press, 2014), an edited volume by Holly Hughes and Una Chaudhuri. In response to the collection of animal-themed performance scripts and commentaries, the panelists — Clare Croft (Dance), Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes (American Culture, Women’s Studies), and Irina Aristarkhova (Art & Design, Women’s Studies) — brought their personal experience and academic insight to the conversation about human-animal interactions and the use of performance to explore these relationships. The result was one of the most energetic and dramatic Gender: New Works, New Questions events to date. From nuanced analysis to private reflections and even a tribute performance inspired by one of the scripts, the connection to the work was personal and heartfelt, and will not soon be forgotten by those in attendance.

“After my dogs died, and another was attacked by an off leash dog, all in the space of three months, I sought treatment at the Depression Center and was given a list of things I had to do each day if I wasn’t going to completely lose my shit. The therapist said ‘this is a prescription for a healthy emotional life.’ Of course, it was impossible to fulfill, unless you had inherited wealth. Not only eight hours of sleep, but additional rest, an hour of exercise and another 30 minutes of meditation, healthy

eating, socializing, you know the list. . . . my favorite thing on the list, the one that I kept, was the prescription for pleasure. The unsmiling therapist looked us in the eyes and said – ‘you must have pleasure every day or you are just going to be in a constant state of panic.’ This is what dogs offer us, the pleasures of the body, a pleasure that is hard to find in academia or even in the neoliberal economy.”— excerpt from Holly Hughes’s comments R E D NE C KS , Q UE E RS, AN D CO U NTRY M USIC

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lass, race, politics, sexuality, and music all play into Nadine Hubbs’s Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (University of California Press, 2014). Examining how class and gender identity play out in country music, the book weaves historical inquiry with an analysis of classed cultural repertoires and close listening to country songs. Appealing to and beyond an acadmic audience, the cross-disciplinary book was featured in the February 2015 Gender: New Works, New Questions series.

A panel of U-M faculty from Anthropology, Women’s Studies, Sociology, and Musicology provoked deep discussion into the many layers of Hubbs’s work. For fans of country music and self-professed

skeptics in the audience, the panel fostered an animated and memorable afternoon of thoughtful conversation.

“My book Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music brings together three fields. It was incredible to sit on a panel and hear my dream team of scholars from each field—Professors Karyn Lacy from Sociology, Gayle Rubin from Women’s Studies and Anthropology, and Charles Hiroshi Garrett from Musicology—engage the book from their differing disciplinary perspectives. My colleagues’ commentary flowed into an audience discussion that would have gone on late into the evening had we not called time. What a brilliant format and series for discussing new work in gender and sexuality studies.” — Nadine Hubbs

2015-16 Gender: New Works, New Questions Dancers as Diplomats: American Choreography in Cultural Exchange (Oxford University Press, 2015) by Clare Croft (Dance). Comments by Anita Gonzalez (Theatre & Drama) and Peggy McCracken (Romance Languages and Literatures, Women’s Studies). Nov. 2, 2015 A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo (Duke University Press, 2016) By Nancy Rose Hunt (History). Feb. 22, 2016

Institute for Research on Women and Gender

IRWG Faculty Seed Grants

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RWG’s Faculty Seed Grant program, established in 1996, enhances scholarship on women and gender at U-M by supporting disciplinary and interdisciplinary faculty projects.

Grants are awarded for initial research efforts, pilot studies, collaborative conference planning and for individual research activities. Two recent Faculty Seed Grants illustrate the variety of projects that IRWG supports.

DYNAM IC PAT T ERNS O F R E LAT I O NS H I P VI OLE N CE AMO N G YO U NG W OM E N

Yasamin Kusunoki (Institute for Social Research) One of the most important topics in feminist research and activism is understanding the causes of gender-based violence.

Yasamin Kusunoki’s research gives insight into patterns of intimate partner violence (IPV) experienced by young women. She is an Assistant Professor at the School of Nursing, Department of Systems, Population and Leadership and a Faculty Associate at the Population Studies Center and Survey Research Center within the Institute for Social Research.

Kusunoki’s research focuses on understanding the sources of gender, racial/ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in reproductive health during adolescence and the transition to adulthood.

She studies adolescence and early adulthood because these are dynamic life stages that include critical age-related social changes and experiences central to development and behavior, with implications for later adulthood. For example, romantic and sexual experiences during this part of the life course are influential for health outcomes including unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections, and set the stage for future family formation behaviors. According to Kusunoki, “little attention has been paid to young people’s intimate relationships, particularly relative

Kusunoki

to individual and familial characteristics, mostly due to data limitations. Even less is known about the dynamics of intimate relationships (including violence) and the mechanisms by which they contribute to disparities in reproductive health and family formation behaviors.”

IRWG’s Faculty Seed Grant allowed Kusunoki to begin to explore the dynamic patterns of IPV and identify the relationship processes that are most relevant for the risk of IPV using the Relationship Dynamics and Social Life (RDSL) Study – a unique longitudinal (weekly), mixed-method study that she and her ISR colleagues collected from 2008-2012. She finds that young women experience more violence in serious relationships, relative to casual relationships. Serious relationships include more insults, threats, and actual physical violence than casual relationships. This is largely a function of time – once a relationship has made it beyond the early, casual, infrequently together stage, violence of all types escalates. Cohabiting relationships have particularly high rates of physical violence. And, relationships that resume after a break-up have higher rates of violence than continuous relationships.

While Kusunoki describes herself as “only just beginning to scratch the surface of describing the dynamic patterns of IPV,” she finds a great deal of heterogeneity in the violent experiences of these young women. For example, 13% of women reported physical violence by a partner during the study. These relationships represented 6% of reported relationships. Of those relationships with any physical violence, 3.6% were physically violent every week, 5.4% switched on (became violent) and remained violent, 4.8% switched off (started violent and became non-violent), and the vast majority had either one discrete violent period or on-again, off-again physical violence throughout the relationship.

Kusunoki has submitted several grant applications that build on the research she was able to carry out through her Faculty Seed Grant, including an R03 to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), which she was awarded this year. She also recently submitted an R03 to NICHD with several IRWG colleagues (Quyen Epstein-Ngo (PI), Carol Boyd, and Phil Veliz), “Understanding Adolescent Sexual Violence: A Longitudinal Examination of Gender and Associated Risk Factors.”

This proposed secondary data analysis of Carol Boyd and Sean McCabe’s Secondary Student Life Survey (SSLS), will inform adolescent sexual violence prevention and intervention development by using this rich, community-based sample of adolescents to identify longitudinal trajectories of peer sexual violence perpetration and victimization among male and female adolescents.

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P RICES AN D PE R S O NH O O D : G E N D E R , RAC E , AN D T H E S O CIAL H I STO R Y O F R I S K - B AS E D P RICI N G

Krippner

Greta R. Krippner (Sociology) In exploring the surprising persistence of gender-based pricing in insurance markets, Greta R. Krippner (Associate Professor of Sociology) and Daniel Hirschman (Ph.D. candidate Sociology) relied on support of a Seed Grant from IRWG to conduct extensive archival work at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University.

Insurance is one of the few domains in American life where, as Mary Heen, a long-time observer of the industry, noted in the New York Times, “discrimination on the basis of sex is not only permitted but virtually required.” Across most lines of insurance, similarly situated men and women can expect to pay different prices for access to coverage – a practice that insurers see as integral to requiring each individual to pay for her “unique” risk.

Insurance, it appears, has been left behind by the civil rights revolution that has transformed how Americans exchange goods and services in the marketplace over the last half century.

The notion that each individual should “bear the cost” of the risk she represents is so pervasive in ways of thinking about how we manage misfortune that it forms a kind of common sense in

modern market societies. If you are a smoker, you can expect your health and life insurance premiums to reflect your greater likelihood of disease and early mortality. If you have defaulted on a loan, you can expect a higher mortgage payment. These examples are relatively uncontroversial as they describe situations where the risk that an individual will incur some misfortune is shaped by behaviors perceived to be directly controlled or chosen by that individual. But the principle of bearing one’s own risk also extends – at least potentially – to situations where the risk in question is not “chosen” but shaped by an individual’s gender, race, class, and

2014-15 IRWG Faculty Seed Grant Recipients Sue Anne Bell (School of Nursing) Gender Mainstreaming in U.S. Disaster Preparedness and Response: A Policy Monitoring Analysis

Aileen Huang-Saad (Biomedical Engineering) Examining the Effect of Entrepreneurial Education Pedagogy on the Development of Women in STEM

Amy Chavasse (School of Music Theatre & Dance) Sola, Dances by and for Women

Holly Hughes (Art & Design, Women’s Studies, Theatre & Drama) Preaching to the Perverted: A Hybrid Memoir

Clare Croft (Dance) Emerging Voices in Queer Dance Vanessa K. Dalton (Obstetrics and Gynecology) The Impact of Method Choice on Contraception Continuation in Ghana

Aliyah Khan (Afroamerican and African Studies, English Language & Literature) and Sherie Randolph (Afroamerican and African Studies, History)

Black Feminist Think Tank: A Symposium of the DAAS African American Studies Workshop Julie R. Posselt (School of Education) Competitiveness & Support in STEM Graduate Education: Examining Consequences of Organizational Culture for Mental Health by Gender, Race, & Sexuality Gayle Rubin (Anthropology, Women’s Studies) Valley of the Kings: Leathermen in San Francisco, 1960 – 1990

Robert Wyrod (Women’s Studies) The Gender Question on China’s Second Continent: African Women in the New Era of Chinese Development Damon R. Young (Screen Arts & Cultures) Making Sex Public: Cinema, Sex and the Social Ruth Zielinski (School of Nursing) Implementation and Evaluation of Home Based Life Saving Skills

Institute for Research on Women and Gender

Krippner and Hirschman draw on the papers of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and its affiliates to investigate the sustained legal campaign that NOW launched against insurance industry giants such as Mutual of Omaha (referred to as “Mutual of Macho” by feminists), Metropolitan Life, and State Farm.

In taking on this fight, feminists initially had the wind at their backs, having recently secured federal legislation banning gender discrimination in credit markets. But feminists’ efforts were defeated by intransigent insurers through protracted legislative and judicial battles.

Hirschman

sexual identity.

The idea that each individual should “bear the cost” of her own riskiness has a history of contestation that demonstrates that alternative ways of thinking about how risk is distributed were – and are – possible. Krippner and Hirschman explore one such moment of contestation in depth: the feminist campaign beginning in the mid-1970s and extending through the mid-1990s to end the use of gender classifications in the pricing of insurance.

Krippner and Hirschman stress, “our purpose is not to explain feminist failure per se, as much as to understand what this experience tells us about the broader history of risk-bearing in the twentieth-century United States.” Most notably, they argue that it is the origins of the insurance contract in mutual traditions that attempt to share risk broadly across a collectivity that explains insurers’ reliance on facially discriminatory classifications long considered inappropriate (and in fact illegal) in other markets.

As they put it, “the most socially progressive aspect of insurance – its collectivization of risk – begets the least socially progressive aspect of insurance – its rigid adherence to gender classifications.”

■

Source: National Organization for Women Legal Defense and Education Fund Records, “Editorials and Opinions on HR100/ S372”, MC 623, Box 126.7, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

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Re-Imaging Gender: A Juried Exhibition

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he visual arts play an important role in exploring and defining contemporary conceptions of gender and sexuality. As part of its 20th anniversary year, IRWG sponsored the first-ever juried art exhibition in Lane Hall, titled “Re-Imaging Gender.” The exhibit featured the work of 15 student artists from around the country using a variety of media to reflect and celebrate new understandings of gender – including photography, paint, lithograph, mixed media and video.

The participating artists, chosen through a competition that was open to MFA students throughout the state of Michigan as well as CIC institutions (Big 10, plus the University of Chicago), represented schools as far east as Rutgers University and as far west as the University of Nebraska.

Mishka Colombo (Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan) won First Prize for his painting, “Hide and Seek” and Julie Rae Powers (Ohio State University) won Second Prize for her digital photograph, “Homage.” Honorable Mentions were awarded to Evin Dubois (University of Illinois, Urbana -Champaign) for a hand-embroidered found object, “Amorous,” and Erin Hayden (Northwestern University) for her painting, “Ever After.”

“Re-imaging Gender” was on display at the Lane Hall Gallery, a space shared by IRWG and the Department of Women’s Studies, from January 15 through June 26, 2015. The first and second prize-winning pieces, Colombo’s “Hide and Seek” and Powers’s “Homage,” remain on permanent display in Lane Hall. ■

Top, right: Mishka Colombo, Cranbrook Academy of Art, “Hide and Seek,” Oil on Canvas Middle row, left to right: Julie Rae Powers, Ohio State University, “Homage,” Digital Photography; Erin Hayden, Northwestern University, “Ever After,” Oil, Acrylic, Papers, and Fabric on Canvas; Evin Dubois, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Amorous,” Hand Embroidery, Found Object Bottom row, left to right: Fidencio Martinez Perez, University of Iowa, “Clandestino,” Mixed Media; Alisa Yang, University of Michigan, “Oriental Woman with Gun,” Multicolor Screenprint; Rachael Griffin, University of Wisconsin,-Madison, “Untitled,” Lithograph and Watercolor

Institute for Research on Women and Gender

2015 Motorola Lecturer Ta-Nehisi Coates

B

y 5:15 p.m. on Wednesday, January 21, every seat in Rackham Auditorium was filled. More than one hundred additional members of the U-M community had logged on to the live webcast, and dozens more sat quietly outside the doors of the auditorium, straining to hear through the lobby’s speaker system. Ta-Nehisi Coates had arrived in Ann Arbor to speak on race in America.

Ta-Nehisi Coates delivers the 2015 Motorola Lecture

Called “the young James Joyce of the hip hop generation” by Walter Mosley, Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of the country’s foremost writers on politics, culture, and race. A national correspondent for The Atlantic, Coates is best known for his 2014 cover story “The Case for Reparations.” In a year where issues of race, class and gender have burst to the forefront of American consciousness, Coates spoke directly and passionately about the history of institutionalized racism in America and its impact on and relation to current events.

Prior to his public lecture, Coates spent an hour with students recalling his path to becoming a journalist and the confluence between writing and activism. Graduate studentsHakeem Jefferson (Political Science), Courtney McCluney (Psychology) and Austin McCoy (History) moderated the discussion. Jefferson found reassurance in Coates’s message, saying, “I appreciated Coates’s lecture because, like all of his work, it reminded us that structure matters, that public policy matters. For those of us involved in the hard and exhausting work of making this country live up to its ideals, these are lessons we cannot forget. And it was great to have Ta-Nehisi here to make sure we don’t.”

Established in 2001 with support from the Motorola Foundation, the biennial Motorola Lecture is presented

by IRWG and the Department of Women’s Studies.

This lecture aims to expose students, faculty, and the broader community to the work of exceptional journalists and to inform students about ways the media can reframe public understanding of complex issues. The 2015 lecture was presented in conjunction with the university-wide MLK Symposium, with cosponsorship from the Office of the Vice Provost for Equity, Inclusion, and Academic Affairs; the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies; the Center for the Education of Women; and the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

“Writing about black people in this country, writing about the force of white supremacy, writing about the force of racism in this country is one of the most meaningful things any writer can do. . .Those of us who are on what some might call “the race beat” are in fact interrogating these ideas, these narratives of American freedom at the very core. If you want to read some of the most proactive, some of the most beautiful, some of the most important writing holding this country accountable you should read black writers who are doing it today.” — Ta-Nehisi Coates Hakeem Jefferson, Courtney McCluney, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Austin McCoy

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Global Outreach The Great East Japan Ear thquakes through Women’s Lenses: Past , Present , and Future

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n 2011, Mieko Yoshihama, Professor of Social Work, began a participatory action research project using a method called PhotoVoice to analyze the effects of the Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent tsunami and nuclear crisis on women in northern Japan.

The gender-based project, the first of its kind in Japan, used funding from an IRWG Faculty Seed Grant, among other sources, to provide digital cameras to women in disaster-affected areas. Over the past four and a half years, the women have photographed details of their experiences, and participated in facilitated discussions about the disasters’ impact on their lives, communities, and the overall societal response.

The goal of the project, which Yoshihama envisions will continue for another decade or more, is to give voice to those who are often overlooked in disaster response policies and to provide opportunities for advocacy and policy change.

The following interview was drawn from a longer conversation.

When you say participatory action research [PAR], what do you mean?

Unlike typical research where the researchers and the technicians go in as an “expert” -- they collect data, they interview people, they do assessments of the communities -- PAR means that people who are affected by whatever you are studying, in my case it’s the disasters, they’re the ones who do the assessment. They are the experts. They tell us what’s happening through their eyes and analysis is done collaboratively. They work with the researchers to develop recommendations, plans for action, and oftentimes, they participate in the dissemination and action.

So, PhotoVoice is a kind of PAR? courtesy of PhotoVoice Japan

Yes. Former U-M professor Caroline Wang invented the PhotoVoice method back in the 1990s in China. At that time she and her research team were trying to provide assistance but they faced language and culture and educational barriers. The use of photography and discussions helped to capture the lives of the women in the high mountain areas. Then they were able to make significant social change.

Can you describe how the method works in your project?

We hold discussion group meetings repeatedly. The women bring their pictures -- some might bring hundreds of pictures and some might just take one -- and given the time constraint, we may ask the women to select three or five pictures to discuss. This selection process gives participants time and opportunity to examine what’s going on in their lives, and what they want to talk about. Instead of having the photographer talk about the picture first, we ask her to sit silently while the rest of the group responds to the pictures.

That’s a new method that I have developed for this project. The group will respond with, “wow, this picture tells me something,” or “when I see this picture I feel powerful,” “I feel sad,” or “I think this photographer wanted to share with us how angry she is.” Then we ask the photographer to respond. There is something about this reverse process that gives the photographer an opportunity to reflect on the pictures she has taken, and often she gets additional meanings, additional messages, additional issues that she hadn’t thought about when she took the picture.

The photographs give us an opportunity to identify societal issues: how they are felt differently, managed differently depending on your social location, whether you’re a woman or a man, whether you’re older, you’re employed or not. I think that this method is conducive to that kind of deep discussion.

Most PhotoVoice projects aren’t run the way we run ours. We really take time. A lot of PhotoVoice projects are for one month, one semester, one year, and they have a goal in mind: “we’re going to create a book, a collage, a video, and that’s the end product.” For

The Town Has Been Turned Into a Landfill The whole town was lost, replaced entirely by mountains of debris.

People used to live here, but now it has become a landfill.

It must be heart-wrenching to see such a horrible mess every day.

August 2011, Onagawa-cho, Oshika-gun, Miyagi

by Tamami

Institute for Research on Women and Gender

“The photographs give us an opportunity to identify societal issues: how they are felt differently, managed differently depending on your social location, whether you’re a woman or a man, whether you’re older, you’re employed or not.” us, we don’t know the end product. We’re running this for a long, long time in closed groups with the facilitators.

What kind of impacts have you seen as a result of PhotoVoice in Japan?

Voice forces us, both researcher and participant, to really stop. We have to stop to take pictures and to take notice of each other. If we asked the participants “what does it mean for you to be involved in PhotoVoice project?” They’d answer, “I’m forced to stop.” ■

For more information, visit photovoice.jp.

Japan’s National Women’s Education Center archives: www.nwec.jp/en/archive or http://w-archive.nwec.jp/il/meta_pub/ sresult Japan’s National Diet Library: kn.ndl.go.jp

These photos and written messages are now part of Japan’s national archives: the National Women’s Education Center and the National Diet Library, which is like the U.S. Library of Congress. That these private lives and private photos are now part of the national archive, can you imagine how much it means to the participants?

They thought their lives, their experiences of the disaster were private, and we say “no, these have deep social meaning and you’re the only ones who can tell us what these meanings are.”

In March 2015 we presented a workshop as part of the Public Forum of the Third United Nations World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Sendai City, Japan. Many of the women from our PhotoVoice project participated in the workshop and they talked about their experiences with the nuclear accident, radiation, the tsunami, and earthquakes.

Any other important findings or surprises?

As a university based researcher I have to go through an institutional review board (IRB), which takes a long time and requires consent papers be signed. I was very afraid that the process would be alienating to the participants. For those people who went through the massive disasters, to have researchers say, “I want you to read this long document and sign this paper,” is a foreign concept in Japan. But many of them appreciated that process. They felt they were respected. After a disaster, a lot of volunteers and researchers arrive and take photographs of the affected people, and then they would display them on their project websites without consent, at least explicitly. The feedback we got was that taking the time to explain the project procedures and the participants’ rights is even more important during the chaotic period after a disaster.

The other thing was this slowness of the process, taking the time to stop, how important that is. Every day we’re busy. We don’t take the time to stop and think. We move on to do other things. Photo-

courtesy of PhotoVoice Japan

Time Stands Still Soon it’ll be three years since the disaster, but this clock is still stopped at 2:46 pm.

The world spins on, but our feelings stand still.

Don’t leave us behind. Don’t forget us...

August 2013, in front of Tomioka Station*, Tomioka-machi, Fukushima

by Yoshida

*1.5km from the coastline; battered by the tsunami

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A Faculty of Our Own

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RWG supports faculty research on women and gender across the University of Michigan and beyond. We are proud to have an active cadre of scholars with appointments in the institute. Many of our research faculty focus on health-related topics, including Michelle Segar and Julia Seng. Interestingly, while their fields of Kinesiology and Obstetrics and Gynecology may seem unrelated at first glance, both study the connection between psychology and physical well-being, with special emphasis on research that leads to tangible health interventions for ordinary people.

MI CH EL L E S E G AR

M

ichelle Segar fits the description of a “Faculty of Our Own” in more ways than one. Dr. Segar is an Assistant Research Scientist at IRWG and Director of the Sport, Health, and Activity Research and Policy Center (SHARP).

She earned her PhD in Psychology and Master’s Degrees in Health Behavior/ Health Education (MPH) and Kinesiology (MS) from the University of Michigan.

Her research examines what messages and practices help people sustain behavioral changes, like exercise, to optimize motivation and create well-being and health.

Segar describes two pivotal moments as a graduate student that led to her research agenda. As a Graduate Student Instructor

Segar

Segar taught a Women’s Health course in the Women’s Studies department, along with IRWG faculty Dr. Carol Boyd. The feminist pedagogy she learned there, in particular from feminist scholar bell hooks’s work, has been “foundational for how I approached empowering and educating people in my professional career in behavior change.”

During her kinesiology master’s degree research, she discovered that her study group of cancer survivors had benefited in many ways from exercising during the study. Three months after the study was over, however, Segar was surprised to learn that “pretty much everyone had stopped exercising—and I was shocked, because I had heard them talking about how great exercise was for them.” After asking why they had stopped, the cancer survivors were not making time to exercise because of their work and personal commitments.

Segar had an “a-ha” moment and knew that she wanted to research the causes of this disconnect between people’s perceived benefits from exercising and their motivation (or lack of it) to exercise.

Her interdisciplinary training in psychology, public health, and kinesiology is reflected in her research interests. Segar focuses not just on health but on issues of time management, life-work balance, and understanding people’s socialization-based beliefs about exercise, sleep, and self-care.

Segar’s years of academic research are collected in her recently published, top-selling

book, No Sweat: How the Simple Science of Motivation Can Bring You a Lifetime of Fitness. Segar states, “No Sweat comes out of my comprehensive study of why people don’t stick with physical activity and why they don’t prioritize their own needs and self-care going back to the 1994 cancer survivors finding from my master’s thesis.”

Intriguingly, Segar finds that women resist messages of healthy eating and exercise when it is presented as a way to conform to beauty and thinness standards. One of the most revolutionary aspects of No Sweat is its focus on reframing exercise away from a common conception that it needs to be unpleasant to “count” and that is should be done to improve health or prevent disease.

Women, Segar notes, have a particular difficulty privileging their own self-care in their daily priorities. Instead, both male and female readers are encouraged to find exercise that they enjoy and to put their own self-care, well-being and health at the top of their daily “to do” list as a way to feel better and fuel what they most care about.

Finally, directing SHARP allows Segar to draw from the work of other interdisciplinary scholars to think through best practices for health care practices and public policy.

This wide ranging perspective on exercise and motivation has led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to seek Segar’s

Institute for Research on Women and Gender

input on strategies for communicating the upcoming Surgeon General’s Walking Callto-Action. Segar also directs the National Physical Activities Plan’s communications committee, charged with advising the Plan on more persuasive messaging for American people and policy makers. Her current research involves looking at how community-based participatory action research can help low-income urban women of color (who are also mothers) become physically active in ways that are personally meaningful and work within their complex lives.

She is also conducting research about how to improve practices within health care to improve behavioral sustainability among patients.

Seng

J ULIA S E N G

J

ulia Seng took a rather indirect route to becoming Professor of Nursing, Obstetrics & Gynecology, and Women’s Studies and Research Professor at IRWG. After earning a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Romance Languages at the University of Michigan, and spending a few years teaching high school French, Seng decided to change professions and work on women’s health. Volunteering in various capacities helped her discover a passion for the “complexity of dealing with the mind and body in tandem.” Opting to become a nurse-midwife, Seng earned degrees in nursing, midwifery, and eventually a Nursing PhD in Women’s Health from U-M. Her research focuses on the effects of posttraumatic stress disorder on women’s health and childbearing outcomes.

Seng’s research grew out of her clinical practice as a labor and delivery nurse and midwife in the 1990s. She describes seeing women “struggle with reactions that seemed related to sexual trauma.” At that time, there was little understanding of how PTSD could affect women. Her colleagues in nursing, midwifery and obstetrics were similarly unfamiliar with this concept,

so she reached out to psychotherapists who treated trauma survivors. “Once they ‘named’ what I was seeing as ‘PTSD,’” she explains, “I was off and running to learn more.”

With appointments in the School of Nursing, IRWG and Women’s Studies, Seng keeps one foot in the world of health sciences, and one foot in the social sciences.

She enjoys this cross-disciplinary landscape, stating, “It’s helpful because I often need to use language and frame my work in ways that are acceptable and influential within the biomedical mainstream. Staying grounded in a feminist scholarly community keeps me mindful to hold the tension on that and keep challenging the status quo and pointing to violence against women and children as the root of many intransigent social problems—adverse health consequences across the lifespan not least among them.” Seng describes her work as having emancipatory goals, calling it “feminist science with an activist edge.”

Her writing also spans this disciplinary divide, with publications in medical and social science journals, as well as for a

more general audience. Medical journals have published her findings on associations between PTSD and adverse perinatal outcomes, such as lower birth weight and shorter gestation. One of her most fulfilling projects is an educational intervention program called The Survivor Moms’ Companion. Designed for pregnant women with a history of childhood maltreatment, this program aims to help them manage PTSD as they head toward giving birth and mothering. While funding has been challenging to obtain for testing the intervention in the U.S., Seng is working with international collaborators to conduct testing in England.

She feels strongly that this program helps create knowledge that can be used by laywomen, an important part of her work as a feminist scientist.

Seng expects to keep advancing research on front-line interventions for women with PTSD that aim to improve their physical and mental health. She explains, “There is a strong goal in my work to help women who become mothers to break the cycles of maltreatment and physical, mental, and economic vulnerability. At this point, interpersonal violence and its consequences are very well understood. The critical task now is to reach the populations that need help to recover and regain health with interventions that work and are feasible to deliver.

Ten years from now I hope to have a lot of data from testing interventions. I hope to be able to make the case that addressing intergenerational cycles during the childbearing year is a great idea—and something we absolutely can do.” ■

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IRWG Faculty Programs

F

rom the early days of the institute, facultyinitiated programming was part of IRWG’s mission to stimulate and disseminate important research on women and gender. Interdisciplinary Faculty Programs examine scholarly subjects in novel ways, often incorporating combinations of lectures, symposia, small-group discussions, classroom activities, travel, and creative arts to complement more traditional research methods. Programs can be created by faculty members throughout the U-M system, including Dearborn and Flint.

Two programs in 2014-15, the Feminist Political Economy Initiative and FemTechNet, transcended physical boundaries, connecting feminist scholars from around the world who work on issues as diverse as socio-economic policy and digital studies.

“Understanding the Neoliberal State” Symposium, 2014

F E M I N IST POL ITICAL E CONOM Y I N ITIATIVE

A

s the director of the Feminist Political Economy Initiative, Leela Fernandes (Glenda Dickerson Collegiate Professor of Women’s Studies) received funding and administrative support from IRWG to organize a one-day symposium in October 2014, titled “Understanding the Neoliberal State: Feminism, Inequality and Social Change.” The symposium convened nine interdisciplinary scholars to discuss their research on the nature of the post-liberalization period. She explains, “The term ‘neoliberalism’ is too often used in erroneous or facile ways that presume that the state has retreated or been restructured in a singular way.

The symposium was geared towards a deeper analysis of how the state is changing, when it is retreating and when state power is expanding.”

This project was born out of Fernandes’s current research on the post-liberalization state in India. Fernandes is conducting research on how the state is managing access to water resources in urban India. Rapid and often unplanned urbanization has been producing new forms of political conflicts – between social groups, local governments and rural and urban areas. Her research examines how state bureaucracies and institutions manage such conflicts in the post-liberalization period. A key component of this research addresses the class and gender based inequalities that are reproduced through the state’s management of water resources.

The symposium participants represented a wide range of fields, from Sociology, Anthropology, Geography, Women’s Studies, American Studies and Social Work, who work in contexts as diverse as Bangladesh, Ecuador, India, Europe, and the United

Presenters at the 2014 symposium

Institute for Research on Women and Gender

States. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, delivered the keynote address. Fernandes tailored the symposium to meet her goal of deep intellectual engagement and collaboration, including providing time to read pre-circulated papers and have group discussions in addition to the public event and audience-based interactions. She is confident that the work begun at the symposium will continue, having built lasting connections among the scholars, most of whom had not previously met, and laying groundwork for follow-up collaborations. The papers presented at the symposium will also be published in an edited volume, currently under review with a university press.

Fernandes

Fernandes’s symposium embodied the interdisciplinarity and feminist inquiry that IRWG seeks to foster. It was the flexibility of the IRWG Faculty Program that enabled her to design an event that suited her precise vision. “My project was specifically focused on both feminist scholarly approaches and on the importance of interdisciplinary intellectual engagement. This made IRWG an ideal context for what I wanted to do,” said Fernandes. “In my experience, IRWG has also been very open to rethinking what counts as feminist intellectual inquiry so that questions of race and nation allow for an understanding of the existence of different genealogies of feminist thought.”

While Fernandes doesn’t plan to continue the Feminist Political Economy Initiative, she has joined forces with Victor Mendoza (English and Women’s Studies) to codirect a new program, the Race, Colonialism, and Sexualities Initiative. This initiative will sponsor ongoing events with speakers, activists, and cultural performers, designed to build an intellectual community of faculty and students. Mendoza is taking the lead in planning events for Fall 2015, focusing on queer of color scholarship. Fernandes credits the flexibility of IRWG in supporting creative and diverse events, and the ability to collaborate with colleagues across disciplines as a key factor in her decision to co-lead the new program.

“IRWG has been a terrific intellectual resource. I have especially appreciated the institute’s receptiveness to ideas for events and programming. There is an openness to ideas that makes working with IRWG feel very welcoming.”

F E M TE C HNE T

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n the face of rising hostility towards women online, FemTechNet provides a collaborative feminist space for creating and disseminating knowledge about technology and gender.

Professor Lisa Nakamura (Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor of American Culture, Co-Coordinator of the Digital Studies Program) along with Sharon Irish (Project Coordinator, Graduate School of Library and Information Science/Center for Digital Inclusion, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) and Elizabeth Losh, (Director of the Culture Art and Technology Program, University of California, San Diego) are facilitators of this online project, as well as of the IRWG Faculty Program of the same name. Nakamura notes that “a gender bias in organizations becomes a gender bias in the Internet” which explains why women now make up 50% of Internet users but account for 20% or less of programmers.

At first, the developers of FemTechNet wanted to provide open access courses on feminist issues related to technology and digital scholarship as a way to address the absence of feminist technology and digital studies courses on college campuses as well as for the general public. In 2015 FemTechNet’s Distributed Open Collaborative Courses (DOCCs) were held at thirteen universities and colleges, as well as three in community locations in Oakland, CA, Seattle, WA, and New York City. The FemTechNet courses use a

Nakamura notes that “a gender bias in organizations becomes a gender bias in the Internet” which explains why women now make up 50% of Internet users but account for 20% or less of programmers.

Nakamura

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common syllabus that is adapted by each instructor to meet the needs of their students. “You can take it on your own, without being in college, without getting credit,” Nakamura relates, or through regular university courses for Losh credit. Nakamura taught a course with Associate Professor Irina Aristarkhova, School of Art and Design, University of Michigan titled “Dialogues in Feminism, Technology and Culture,” offered by the Screen Arts and Cultures Department, the AmeriIrish can Cultures Department, the School of Art and Design, and Women’s Studies Department.

The FemTechNet Faculty Study group invited well-known digital humanities scholar Adeline Koh (Associate Professor and Director of Digital Humanities Center, Stockton University) to provide a workshop on editing Wikipedia. The workshop focused on teaching faculty, students, and the general public about the rules governing entries on Wikipedia. The goal was to create or enlarge entries on women artists around the world.

The project has evolved since its founding in 2012 by Anne Balsamo (The New School) and Alexandra Juhasz (Pitzer College) to become a think tank for the emerging field of feminist digital scholarship. FemTechNet is very much a collective project making use of the insights of feminist pedagogy. Their manifesto, which is available in three languages, declares that the tools of feminist pedagogy such as critical literacies about power and representation online are open source technologies that belong to everyone.

This feminist praxis, they argue, has the power to transform learning and higher education. “FemTechNet is committed to making the accessible, open, accountable, transformative and transforming educational institutions of our dreams. We are feminist academic hacktivism. FemTechNet is an international movement of feminist thinkers, researchers, writers, teachers, artists, professors, librarians, mentors, organizers and activists sharing resources and engaging in activities that demonstrate connected feminist thinking about technology and innovation.”

Recognition in the form of becoming an IRWG Faculty Program gave FemTechNet a space to meet, funding for workshops and conferences, and grant application assistance. In January of 2015 the faculty program hosted a conference in Digital Feminist Pedagogy. Nakamura credits IRWG for its forward thinking in taking a “risk” on funding this new form of scholarship and knowledge creation during a year that was “such a bad year for feminism and the Internet.” Affiliation with IRWG brought much-needed staff support for FemTechNet in the form of Heidi Bennett to publicize their events, Tammy Culler to provide technology support, and Lezlie Stephens to handle logistics. As a large group that works collectively, FemTechNet received help with identifying federal funding opportunities and submitting grants. Assistance with grants will allow FemTechNet, according to Nakamura, to become “a really big, really comprehensive resource for the public as well as for academics about sexism on the Internet and harassment and women in computing…Our model is kind of like a professional association where it moves around—the difference is that we charge no fees.” ■

Current IRWG Faculty Programs Does Equality Mean Business?

Gender Equity at the Crossroads of Feminism and Finance Director: Suzanne Bergeron (Women’s Studies and Social Sciences, U-M Dearborn) Feminist Science Studies Director: Sari M. van Anders (Psychology, Women’s Studies; Programs in Neuroscience, Reproductive Sciences and Science, Technology and Society) FemTech Net Director: Lisa Nakamura (American Culture, Screen Arts & Cultures, Women’s Studies) Lesbian-Gay Queer Research Initiative (LGQRI) Director: Nadine Hubbs (Women’s Studies, Music)

Lesbian Studies in Queer Times Director: Valerie Traub (English, Women’s Studies) Race, Colonialism, and Sexualities Initiative Directors: Leela Fernandes (Women’s Studies, Political Science) and Victor Mendoza (English, Women’s Studies) Reproductive Justice Directors: Ed Goldman (Obstetrics & Gynecology, Law) and Alexandra Minna Stern (American Culture, History, Women’s Studies, Obstetrics & Gynecology)

Institute for Research on Women and Gender

Feminist Research Seminar

I

ntroduced in 2014, the Feminist Research Seminars were a resounding success. Last Fall, Indiana University’s Laura Foster and University of Texas scholar Kim TallBear organized an assemblage of scholars for “Feminist Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies: Instigations, Interrogations, and New Developments”. In May, U-M faculty member Carol Jacobsen organized a seminar entitled “Feminist Video Documentary Strategies in Social Dissent and Change.” Happily sequestered for four days, seminar participants are given the chance to think deeply and collectively about the issues facing their gender-related research. Here is just a sample of comments we received after the 2014-15 seminars: “The number of people between 10-12 was ideal. This allowed enough people to provide a range of insights but also keep it small. I was also surprised that we were able in the end to come up with some shared conclusions and ways forward, there is usually never time for this!”

“It was a uniquely stimulating environment for me to gain valuable feedback on my work from esteemed colleagues, as well as a generative space for us to think together about developing the field of feminist postcolonial science studies….I cannot imagine a more productive and collegial space in which to have held this important meeting.”

“This was an amazing experience that combined discussions of challenging topics with presentations of artists’ work. The best part of the seminar was meeting and getting to know these fabulous women. But also being introduced to new resources (scholarly and artistic).”

We are eagerly anticipating the 2015-16 seminars. Fall will see “The Problem of Intersex Frogs: A Seminar on Feminism, Disability, and Environmental Justice,” organized by Elizabeth Reis (Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Oregon) and Rosemarie Garland Thomson (Professor of English, Emory University). In the spring of 2016, the Feminist Research Seminar will be “Talmud Interrupted: Queering the Study of an Ancient Jewish ‘Classic’” organized by Julia Watts Belser (Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies, Georgetown University), Rachel Neis (Associate Professor, History and Judaic Studies, Jean and Samuel Frankel Chair in Rabbinic Literature, University of Michigan) and Max Strassfeld (Assistant Professor, Religious Studies and Transgender Studies Program, University of Arizona). IRWG director Sarah Fenstermaker is proud of this initiative, saying, “It has been very satisfying to be able to provide this sort of intellectual space and opportunity to scholars from all over the world. It communicates the passion IRWG has to facilitate gender research in uniquely exciting ways at UM and beyond.”

IRWG’s Feminist Research Seminar offers feminist scholars from around the country a unique opportunity to work together, uninterrupted in an intimate and supportive setting at U-M for several days. For more information: irwg.research.umich.edu

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1136 Lane Hall 204 S. State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1290

20 15-16 FU N D I N G O P PO RTU N IT E S Faculty Funding

Graduate Student Funding

The IRWG Team

Faculty Seed Grants November 2, 2015

Boyd/Williams Dissertation Grant for Research on Women and Work November 15, 2015

Sarah Fenstermaker, Professor of Women’s Studies and Sociology, Director

Feminist Research Seminar January 15, 2016 Junior Faculty Scholars Program February 1, 2016 Collaborative Planning Grants Rolling Deadline Visiting Scholars Programs Rolling Deadline

Anna Kirkland, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Political Science, Associate Director

IRWG/Rackham Community of Scholars November 15, 2015

Terrence Crimes, Business Administrator

IRWG/Rackham Graduate Student Research Awards November 15, 2015

Jocelyn Fenton Stitt, Program Director, Faculty Research Development Heidi Bennett, Special Events Planner Tammy Culler, Desktop Support Specialist Lisa D. Parker, Contract and Grant Administrator Nicole Perry, Executive Assistant to the Director Lezlie Stephens, Administrative Assistant

Genderscapes Contributors Heidi Bennett Sarah Fenstermaker Daniel Hirschman Anna Kirkland Greta Krippner Mike Savitski, graphic design Debra Schwartz Find us on Facebook Badge

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Lotus Seeley Jocelyn Fenton Stitt

Contact IRWG 734-764-9537 | irwg@umich.edu | irwg.research.umich.edu

@UmichIRWG