WGSS
at Mills
Fall 2011 Issue 36
The Meg Quigley Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department IN THIS ISSUE: • WMST Graduate Tiffany Renée Runs for Congress • Young Women Speaking the Economy , Kirby Hoberg and Jessica Glennon-Zukoff • Inaugural Queer Studies Lecture Series invites Dr. Erica Meiners to talk about Queer Investments in AntiPrison Organizing • Announcing Queer Studies Writing Contest • Summer Quigley Grant Recipients and Their Projects • Prize Winners for Women’s Studies Writing Contest and the Zimmer Prize
Women’s Studies Graduate Tiffany Renée Runs For Congress Mills Women’s Studies graduate and Petaluma City Council Member, Tiffany Renée, will run for the United States Congress in 2012. Her ambitious goal is to fill the seat vacated by Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey, a 10 term liberal democrat who will be retiring after two decades in office. Renée grew up in Fair Oaks and Sacramento. She put herself through college and graduated from Mills in 1997 with a BA in Women’s Studies. Her education and her own personal experience has motivated her to spend the last 20 years in public service vigorously supporting women’s rights. Recently, Renée took time out of her busy schedule to respond to questions about her campaign, about her time at Mills and how it informed her life in politics. JH: How has your degree in Women’s Studies from Mills informed your political career? TR: My Mills education and Women’s Studies provided me with a framework for understanding how economic, social and political systems impact women’s lives. After reading existential philosophers like de Beauvoir, Sarte and Foucault and sociologists like C. Wright Mills, I continued my exploration of systems by pursuing a graduate degree at California Institute of Integral Studies where I studied systems theory, Buddhism and cosmology. This further informed my thoughts on how political systems are shaped through world views and what public policies impact women, the poor and the planet. JH: According to your website the struggles you faced in your life have driven you to try to create better opportunities for others. Continued on next page
Tiffany Renėe continued from previous page Can you tell me about the struggles that have motivated you in your political career?
always knew it was something I would do. JH: What do you think the biggest hurdle you have faced as woman in politics?
TR: One of the foundational moments for me at Mills was a Women’s StudTR: Being a younger, petite woman, ies class I took from Professor Christine people tend to underestimate me and my LaFia (1958-1996). LaFia experience. They underes“Part of the problem with lectured on the concept timate my ability to negotoday’s politics is that of “personal is political” tiate complex problems. people think the political and it put my life experiQuiet strength is confused ences into a wider context. arena should be shouting with being weak. Part of match when what is really Growing up, I had very the problem with today’s personal experiences that needed is a civil dialogue politics is that people on common goals.” challenged and shaped think the political arena me. My father was a should be shouting match when what is driven person. He was a Vietnam veteran really needed is a civil dialogue on comthat managed his inner torments daily. mon goals. Mentoring is also very imporAnd sometimes they erupted towards the tant for women in politics. I gladly offer people closest to him. At the time I didn’t internships, mentorship and advice to understand the context of the post-traupro-choice women interested in holding or matic stress he experienced; I only knew working for others in public office. the pain. Other personal experiences — JH: Is there wisdom that you could like the tragic murder of my father and pass on to students of Women’s the ensuing economic devastation for Studies? my mom and step-mom after the major TR: Just like medical students may learn bread-winner was gone — shaped my understanding on how policy has a profound about diseases and start self-diagnosing, women’s studies and gender studies impact on people and their quality of life. students are also seeing their personal JH: There have been many articles lately about how many fewer women experiences embedded within the systems of sexism and sociopolitical and economic are running for office. Why do you oppression. I fondly remember Mills being think that is? that container where students can act out TR: Young women more than young men, or work through those issues. The sooner tend to be overlooked as political canstudents can connect their own personal didates. Young women are focused on experiences to what is happening at the careers and are having families later in larger local, national, and world levels life, so by the time they focus on political — through what C. Wright Mills called careers they tend to be much older. Also, sociological imagination — the sooner they women don’t always see themselves as can begin addressing how to change those candidates. They need to be asked to run systems because they will know they are for office multiple times before really con- not alone in their experiences. sidering it. We think we need permission For information on internships and I guess. I never felt I needed permission. volunteer opportunities contact Tiffany I was raised that public engagement is a through her website: www.tiffanyrenéecivic duty. So I didn’t need to be asked. I forcongress.com.
WGSS at Mills
Women’s Studies Faculty 2011-2012 Deborah Berman-Santana Ethnic Studies Judith Bishop WGSS Diane Cady English Carlota Caulfield Spanish Language & Lit Mario Cavallari Spanish Language & Lit Carol Chetkovich Public Policy Vivian Chin Ethnic Studies Rebekah Edwards English Bert Gordon History Nalini Ghuman Music Margaret Hunter Sociology Priya Kandaswamy WGSS Edith Kinney Social Sciences Ajuan Mance English Brinda Mehta French & Francophone Ann Metcalf Anthropology Melinda Micco Ethnic Studies Zohreh Niknia Economics Elizabeth Potter WGSS Siobhan Reilly Economics Moira Roth Art History Kirsten Saxton English Ruth Saxton English Cynthia Scheinberg English Julia Oparah Ethnic Studies Nancy Thornborrow Economics Kathy Walkup Book Arts
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Young Women Speaking the Economy Two Mills students spent the summer of 2011 participating in the project Young Women Speaking the Economy sponsored by The International Museum of Women. The project brought 44 young women from Denmark, the Philippines, Sudan and the United States together to answer the question: “What’s on your mind at this time of global economic crisis?” The following excerpt of articles were featured in the International Museum of Women’s, Her Blueprint blog. To view the online exhibition, including Kirby and Jessica’s complete creative projects, visit: www.imow.org/economica/youngwomenspeaking.
By Jessica Glennon-Zukoff After a ten-hour flight from San Francisco to Amsterdam in which I watched two ill-advised movies and three episodes of 30 Rock, consumed absolutely everything the flight attendants offered, journaled sporadically, and slept not at all,
Jessica, first from the left, with friends
I boarded a flight from Amsterdam to Billund, Denmark. Nina Koefoed (professor of History at Aarhus University), Bayan El-Bashier (from the Sudanese chapter of YWSE), Leonora Lottrup (a student from Aarhus University), and my host for the week, Anne-Mette Bak (another student from Aarhus University), met me at the Billund airport. Nina drove us two hours northeast to the city of Aarhus, the second-largest city in Denmark. The five of us talked college, politics, and the politics of college before host-visitor sets were dropped off at apartments when we reached the city. Anne-Mette and I met Leonora and Bayan later for drinks, at a café-bar called Café Smagløs (kitsch-themed, to my delight, whose name translates to “Café Tasteless”). We discussed the custom of European teenagers traveling internationally for months during their gap year (I spoke to why that’s difficult for many in the lower-class in the
WGSS at Mills
Continued on page 6
By Kirby Hoberg The International Museum of Women’s online exhibition Young Women Speaking the Economy brought together 44 young women from four countries to discuss their thoughts about entering the work force in a time of economic uncertainty. As part of the exhibition, an event was held in each of the four participating countries – the U.S., Denmark, Sudan, and the Philippines – with some of the exhibition creators traveling to meet and discuss their ideas in person. I have heard that the United States is a wealthy country, but the significance of that statement was not real for me until my visit to the Philippines last May as a participant in Young Women Speaking the Economy through the International Museum of Women. Despite communicating with the other participants (from Denmark, Sudan, the
Kirby, second from the left, with friends
Philippines, and the U.S.) online through Facebook since November, I don’t feel like the real work of the project was complete until I met face-to-face with some of the amazing women of Young Women Speaking the Economy. Facebook just can’t replace the depth of understanding and conversational spontaneity that is possible in person, or the feeling of working together and showing the world what
Continued on page 7
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Inaugural Lecture WGSS Queer Studies Lecture Series
Dr. Erica Meiners Discusses Queer Anti-Prison Organizing Professor Erica Meiners delivered the inaugural
Queer Studies lecture “Worst of the Worst?: Queer Investments in Anti-Prison Organizing,” to a crowded room of Mills students, faculty and visiting community members. Meiners examined the relationship between the proliferation of sex offender registries and the growth of a prison industrial complex in the U.S.
Professor Meiners began with a brief history of mass incarceration and discussed the specific ways that this history should matter to queer people. Turning to sex offender registries, she argued that while these registries are often represented as protecting innocent children from the “worst of the worst” criminals, they do not in fact reduce childhood sexual abuse. Rather, these registries work to incite fear and justify the continued expansion of carceral institutions. Meiners pointed out that queer people ought to be concerned about this for a number of reasons. History shows that queers have often been treated as sex offenders by the state, and sex offender registries work to shore up the prison system as a whole, a set of institutions that particularly targets queer and transgender people. By focusing on the threat of violence from strangers, sex offender
registries obscure the fact that most of childhood sexual abuse is perpetrated by a family member or close acquaintance thereby foreclosing more meaningful interventions to prevent these forms of violence Lively discussion followed Meiner’s talk as the audience debated ways to make struggles against the prison industrial complex more central in the larger landscape of queer politics. This lecture is the first in a new series of Queer Studies events at Mills. Professor Erica Meiners is the author of Right to Be Hostile: Schools Prisons and the Making of Public Enemies and Flaunt It: Queer Organizing for Public Education and Justice. She is a Visiting Research Professor at the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Professor of Education, Women’s Studies and Latino and Latin American Studies at Northeastern Illinois University.
Announcing The New Queer Studies Writing Contest The WGSS Department introduces a new Queer Studies Writing Contest to recognize, support and honor the exciting student work being done in the field of queer studies at Mills. Created in conjunction with the development of a new queer studies minor, the writing contest is part of a larger effort to increase the visibility of queer studies at Mills. Look for information on length and deadlines in the spring.
WGSS at Mills
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2011 Quigley Summer Grant Recipients The Quigley Grant Program was established in 1993 to support faculty research and course development on issues of women and gender.
Deborah Berman-Santana used her Quigley Summer
Grant to travel to Puerto Rico where she researched the “4Ds”: demilitarization, decontamination, devolution, and development in order to deepen her inquiry into the struggles of marginalized peoples – particularly women in colonized communities of color – and to gain control of local resources for sustainable and democratic development.
Mia Bird completed her data analysis and pursued publication of a study on the effects of welfare reform on women’s marital bargaining power. Judith Bishop spent her summer writing two papers,
the first for Blackwell Compass on the limited role that gender studies has played in theorizing religious change/synthesis and second, for the International Congress on Celtic Studies titled: “The Legal Definition of a Saint: Gender, Sanctity, and Legal Categories in the Bretha Crólige.”
incarcerated in Chowchilla State Prison; this project includes teaching (as a volunteer) a class, Write Your Life, once a week.
Brinda Mehta worked on the final chapter of her latest
book-in-progress, Gendered Resistance and Social Commitment: The Creative Voices of Arab Women.
Melinda Micco: to write a monograph collecting the songs, stories, and traditions of Seminole people with emphasis on interviews with women tribal leaders and culminating in the latest election of a Seminole woman to the tribal office. Julia Oparah worked on a new participatory action
research project: Black Women, Pregnancy, and the Racial Politics of Childbirth, that aims to document and contextualize African American/black immigrant women’s experiences of childbirth in the U. S.
Filomena Borges translated Dulce Braga’s Sabor de
Ruth Saxton worked on her project entitled, Old
Mario Cavallari worked on his book about Spanish
Priya Shimpi/Julie Nicholson: (joint proposal and
Maboque, a non-fiction account of a young woman’s last summer before being forced to leave her home in Angola with her family and become part of the Portuguese Diaspora after the Carnations Revolution of 1974. poet Ana Maria Fagudo’s lyrical oeuvre. Her poetry creates a gendered, discursive space within which philosophical representations of existence and aesthetic meditations on writing meet.
Rebekah Edwards, Ajuan Mance, Kirsten Saxton re-
ceived three individual grants to support one collaborative book project, Trans Studies in Literature: A Critical Anthology, the first published anthology of literary-critical readings deploying a transgender, trans-theory lens. The summer was spent in research, establishing contacts and developing a panel for the UCLA Queer Fashion conference that allowed them to present early version of their essays.
Diane Ketelle worked on a narrative study focused on collecting stories from the lives of Native American women
WGSS at Mills
Ladies: Plots of Female Possibility in Contemporary Fiction by Women, that will explore the roles and plots available to aging women in contemporary British and American fiction by women writerstrans-theory lens.
joint award) worked on an ongoing research project examining adult women’s perspectives on play. They are currently expanding their research focus to include the importance of play in the lives of a more diverse sample of participants finding participants in San Antonio Texas and in Chicago and are launching the Oakland Play Memories project.
Mills WMST Graduates Elana Metz and Lacy Asbill Winners of the Yoshiyama Young Entrepreneur Award Moving Forward Education - Using the Power of Business to Improve the Lives of OaklandStudents!
Check out this Video: http://youtu.be/q57TUOrVOf0
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Jessica Glennon-Zukoff continued from page 3 United States), the differing political spectrums of Denmark and the United States (we agreed that the United States really has more of a political binary), and differing manifestations of racism in Denmark and the US, running parallel, however, when it comes to immigration politics. Bayan and I discussed what we understand to be the industry of humanitarianism, and what we see as a dependency of white upper-class Westerners on the idea that those in African nations are themselves dependent on their charity. This first day of café discussions set the tone for the week I spent in Aarhus: incredible food and ever-available wine, nourishing conversations of social politics and economic realities, all layered over the history of our surroundings. Over lunch in the middle of a day of sightseeing, I was able to hear Bayan speak to the reality of what is happening, and of what has happened, in Darfur, home to a conflict that has been packaged and marketed as a trendy and convenientlyhomogenous “Third World” cause in the United States. To hear a Sudanese woman share the implications of this conflict in her homeland and express how painful and frustrating it is to have the world patronizingly pity her nation, her continent, and her as a Sudanese woman (while of course ignoring colonization as a root cause of the status quo), changed me in a way I honestly still don’t have the words to convey. There she was, across the table from me, telling me what I didn’t realize I needed to hear most as a white American anti racist feminist: “You don’t know.” At a dinner hosted by Professor Koefoed, I spoke to Danish students about how exhausting the individualist capitalist culture in the US really is, how we’re stressed all the time because practically everything is based upon competition for resources – jobs, funding, a place in a program. Though
WGSS at Mills
many of us understand capitalism as a verticallyfunctioning system that operates based on a reserve of have-nots, we still must exist (often as those have-nots) and survive within it. It was difficult, I felt, to adequately convey how it feels when your family is thrown under the proverbial socioeconomic bus, to have no real societal safety net while being told by political leaders that you live in the greatest nation on earth, to find any and every way you can to fund your education, to cross your fingers for healthcare even when you do have insurance coverage, all under incredible pressure to make yourself a desirable candidate for opportunities you can only hope will ensure some future security. All of this was shocking to Danish students, who not only have national healthcare but government-funded higher education. Our public program, during which I participated in a panel discussion and all participants presented our multimedia projects, was hosted by the Women’s Museum in Aarhus, housed in the former city hall, built in the 19th century. Museum curator Bodil Olesen informed us that the museum staff relishes the fact that women were expressly banned from the premises when the building served as the city hall, and now the space is a sanctuary for women’s experiences across centuries to be conveyed. It is indeed a beautiful coincidence, and I felt the echoing weight of the still-gendered division of public and private spheres as I rose to speak during the program, in the former meeting hall on the museum’s second floor where, years ago, no women’s voices rang out. Jessica Glennon-Zukoff a junior double-majoring in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and English Literature traveled to Aarhus, Denmark for the Young Women Speaking the Economy.
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Kirby Hoberg continued from page 3 you made through a concrete event like the Young Filipinos seem to be walking the same tight rope as Women Speaking the Economy Philippines debut at the United States for some middle ground between the Ayala Museum. national identity, belief, and the pressures of reality. Through making our projects for Young Women In many ways the problems of the United States Speaking the Economy I had learned some of and those of the Philippines can sound very much the economic realities of the like the same laundry list: poverty, Philippines before I arrived in unemployment, over-population, and Without even leaving the the country, but some projects, overall economic decline. But the words highway, I could see huge such as Valeene Salanga’s on stretch into the reality of our different houses (McMansions in the rampant unemployment the US) a block away from circumstances. Poverty in the US can experienced by recent mean being on the Medicaid rolls. In shanty towns. graduates, have a much more the Philippines it is four million people contextualized meaning now. (in Metro-Manila alone) living in The extremes as we know them in the United sprawling slums built on top of garbage heaps. States pale in comparison to the normalized We got to enjoy some of the sights and history of economic extremes that I observed in the Manila during the trip, but there are still slums in Philippines. Without even leaving the highway I the background of our privileged tourist pictures. could see huge houses (McMansions in the US) a block away from shanty towns. Kirby Hoberg, a senior majoring in Anthropology Roman Catholicism is observably prevalent in & Sociology and minoring in Women’s Studies the country. It was not uncommon to see large St. traveled to the Philippines for the Young Women Francis crosses, and huge pro-life and Knights of Speaking the Economy. Columbus billboards. Our hosts at Miriam College were very friendly and patient with me, explaining all of the history and background for the things I was seeing and hearing. Economic extremes and a strong Catholic culture are resulting in a national debate over the Student Essay Prize Winner: Veronica passage of the RH bill that would nullify the ban on contraceptives in the Philippines. The population Beaty of the country is overwhelmingly young (annual For her essay titled: Against The Odds: Barriers population growth is around 2.3% versus around To Reentry And Collateral Consequences For 0.98% in the US) and this has led to a shortage of Women Of Color jobs. I had to fight the urge to clean off the table at a fast food restaurant or assume I would make my Zimmer Prize Winner : Alisa D. Plath own cup of coffee. With so few jobs available there is an employee hired for everything. For her demonstration of outstanding scholarCatholicism is deeply rooted as a part of Filipino ship & community service. Alisa volunteered as a Rape Crisis Hotline Counselor at United culture, and Filipinos are aware of the problems Against Sexual Assault. within the country. Reconciling the RH bill with this aspect of their heritage was a serious ongoing endeavor in the country during my visit, and
Prize Winners Spring 2011
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