2009

• Job Placement: Chairperson, Essex County College
• Committee: D. Sifuentes, C. Decena, Y. Martinez, L. Stokes
• Dissertation: Admission as Submission: Richard Rodriquez's Autobiographies as an Epistemology of Penetration

Bio

Christopher Rivera completed his interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University in August 2009. A recipient of the Southern Regional Education Board Dissertation Fellowship, in 2009 he secured a position for one year as Visiting Assistant Professor in race/ethnicity studies in the Comparative American Studies Program at Oberlin College, Ohio. In 2010 he was offered a position as Assistant Professor of American Culture and Literature, Department of American Culture and Literature, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey.

Abstract

My dissertation is a study and contextualization of the three ethnic autobiographies of Chicano public intellectual Richard Rodriguez, The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982), Days of Obligation: An Argument with my Mexican Father (1992), and Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2003). Since the publication of Hunger of Memory, Rodriguez is identified as being against political programs like affirmative action or a “poster boy” for right-wing politics. I argue for a more critical approach to Rodriguez’s controversial role in Chicana/o and Latina/o literary and cultural studies. I explore the evolution of the author-protagonist, Richard, and highlight how his struggles are exemplary of postcolonial subjects negotiating their way through Americanization. Assimilation produces psychosexual discourses that I analyze as particular to a colonized subject’s identity that is ambivalently positioned as at once typically American yet always outside the definition of what it means to be “authentically American.” Building upon Octavio Paz’s “penetration paradigm” and expanding the implicit queer reading of la chingada and el rajado metaphors defined in Laberinto de la soledad (1950), my project articulates how the concepts of penetration, rejection, and ambivalence become strategies of resistance postcolonial subjects manipulate in pursuit of (in)authentic Americanism. Spanning the U.S.-Mexican border, Rodriguez narrates the location the deviant, brown subject assumes in historical and present narratives of nation formation. Rodriguez presents a colonized American subject who openly defends and explores various ambivalent processes of acculturation and assimilation. Instead of adhering to Paz’s notion of impervious national masculinity, Rodriguez narrates his experiences as prototypical of the life of a deviant and dark subject who acknowledges the benefits and losses of openly admitting to inhabiting ambivalent locations in culture. Recognizing the relationship nations and individuals have with their ambivalence regarding penetration and rejection becomes crucial because admission is read as submission in the epistemology of penetration that my project delineates. Through close reading the autobiographies of Rodriguez, I identity a subtext of desire; it is a desire for memory, for the creation of alternative narratives and alternative spaces for postcolonial American life and subjectivity.

• Job Placement: Researcher at the Academy of Philosophy and Social Science, Warsaw, Poland
• Committee: J. Regulska, T. Kaplan, M. Hawkesworth, A. Snitow
• Dissertation: Polish Feminism Between East and West: The Formation of the Polish Women's Movement Identity

Bio

Magda Grabowska completed her Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers in April 2009. Utilizing interdisciplinary methods of feminist story telling, discourse analysis, and participant observation, Magda’s work contributed to ongoing debates on transnational feminism, cultural politics, sexual strangeness and the politics of location, and addressed the question of how Eastern European feminism fits into ongoing formulation and reformulation of global gender theory. Madga Grabowska joined the Women's and Gender Studies faculty at The College of New Jersey before accepting a 2 year Marie Curie Postdoc at the University of Warsaw, Poland, funded by the EU. Magda is now Research Professor at the Polish Academy of Philosophy and Social Science.

Abstract

By focusing on the unique forces that shape women’s movements in the post-communist context, this dissertation asks if the established geopolitical and theoretical frameworks, based on dichotomies between East and West, South and North can be utilized outside these locations. Or is a new framework necessary to fully understand the specific processes that are at work in the ambiguous “Second” World location? Chapter One, traces the individual and collective trajectories of Polish women’s movement to the 19th century anti-partition mobilizations, the Second World War, the 1968 students’ liberation movement, the “Solidarity” labor union, and the 1990s Polish debate on abortion. Chapter Two identifies two elements as crucial for the unique development of transnational activism in the context of CEE: 1) its trajectory (“late” arrival into the international feminist space) and 2) the domination and critique of the EU “gender mainstreaming” paradigm within gender social justice discourses. Chapter Three recognizes the 1990s “abortion debate” became in impulse for the feminisms to move beyond the borders of the conservative nation state and bring the question of women’s sexual rights into the supranational political spaces and became a momentum for the emergence of versatile, vibrant mobilizations for gender and sexual justice in Poland and (e.g. European Court of Justice decision in the case of Alicja Tysiac against the Polish state). Chapter Four argues that secularism that had become, a necessary feminist response to violent and oppressive discourses that act to restrict women’s sexualities and rights, has also hindered feminist connectivity with religious women. In Poland a purification of the sexuality, emergence of the “political Catholicism” and “secular feminism” produced the subaltern, traveling identities of Catholic feminists. Chapter Five examines re-appropriation of the Anti-Semitic language of civic strangeness, historically represented by Polish Jews to the experience of sexual minorities. In conclusion this dissertation delineates two factors as decisive for current positionality of the “Second” world in the transnational feminist theory and practice: the rejection of Marxism as representing the colonial practices from the East (Russia, Soviet Union), the priotization of the supranational engagements with the European Union and Western Europe rather then Third World.

• Job Placement: Educator, National Nurses United/Institute for Health and Socio-Economic Policy (2011-Present) Visiting Assistant Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies Program, Eastern Washington University (2011) Lecturer, Women’s and Gender Studies Program, Eastern Washington University (2009-2011)
• Committee: M. Hawkesworth, E. Grosz, F. Bartkowski, J. Gerson, D. Liebowitz
• Dissertation: Feminist Scholarship: Excavating the Archive

Bio

Kelly Coogan-Gehr received a B.A. in Women’s Studies from Duke University in 2002, and she participated in the post-graduate course “Feminist Critical Analysis: Be/longing and Citizenship” offered through the Inter-University Centre, Dubrovnik, Croatia, in 2005. She defended her dissertation, "Feminist Scholarship: Excavating the Archive" in September 2009.

Abstract

My dissertation addresses the question of how feminist scholars define their field of inquiry. Most feminist scholars rely on a stock narrative of the history of feminist scholarship, which purportedly defines its processes and outcomes by decades—the white liberal feminist 1970s; the women-of-color, postmodern 1980s; and the poststructuralist, difference-focused 1990s, which they assume is adequate. My contention is that this stock narrative fails to adequately grapple with the complicated mix of forces that came together, and continuously collaborate, to create the event of feminist scholarship’s emergence. This emergence is the object of investigation for this dissertation. The study of emergence includes not only that which is visible and tangible about feminist scholarship in terms of its central ideas, concepts, theories, epistemologies, and methodologies, but also that which is not immediately or readily visible, such as the field’s animating intellectual and philosophical presuppositions and their relationships to time, space, temporality, and geography.

Identifying and demonstrating the deficiencies of the stock narrative of feminist scholarship, my dissertation develops several alternative accounts of feminist scholarship in its formation, contrasting the explanatory possibilities of approaches drawn from the history of ideas, the sociology of knowledge, and the Foucauldian archaeology. These three alternate accounts illuminate intricate and unexpected connections between academic feminism and geopolitical forces such as the Cold War, increased federal funding for higher education, changing priorities within philanthropic foundations, the emergence of development studies, area studies, and subfields such as Women in Development and Gender and Development. By complicating the narrative history of interdisciplinary feminist studies, the dissertation is able to offer a fresh interpretation of the centrality to academic feminism, particularly in postcolonial and transnational feminist scholarship, of key concepts advanced by U.S. scholars of color.