People

2014

2014

Mazzaschi, Andrew

  • Job Placement: Deputy Editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society at Northeastern University
  • Committee: E. Cohen, J. Puar, J. Livingston, A. Aizura
  • Dissertation: Bodies of Value: Transnational Discourses and Practices of Plastic Surgery

Bio

Andrew Mazzaschi received a B.A. in Women’s Studies and Literary and Cultural Studies from the College of William and Mary in 2003. After completing his PhD in 2014, he continued in his role of Deputy Editor at Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society as the journal makes the transition from Rutgers to Northeastern University in Boston.

Abstract

Proceeding through case studies of actors involved in transnational instantiations of plastic surgery practice or discourse, this dissertation demonstrates that a transnational lens illuminates new dimensions of plastic surgery’s history and its contemporary manifestations. Examining plastic surgeons’ development efforts after WWII, the transnational charity Operation Smile, and cosmetic surgery tourism to Johannesburg, South Africa, the dissertation examine how surgeons’ and patients’ involvement in transnational work affects their understandings race, gender, and health. I argue that, in all three cases, the demarcation between reconstructive and cosmetic surgery is racialized: On the one hand, cosmetic patients understood as paradigmatically white and from the “developed world,” enacting forms of self-investment through medical markets. On the other hand, recipients of reconstructive surgery, associated with particular geographical areas and racialized as nonwhite, are understood as objects of external investment. I show that the concept of race operative in transnational surgical contexts is not, first and foremost, an anatomical one; rather surgeons produce a nonbiological but still embodied conception of race that is linked to cultural and economic difference. Finally, I show that plastic surgery’s expansive conception of health—incorporating bodily, psychic, and social dimensions—is precisely what allows it to engage in the forms of racialization I describe and what enables the specialty to incorporate itself into a variety of economic rationalities.

Lovin, Laura

  • Job Placement: Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship, European Commission (2015-2017)
  • Committee: J. Regulska, H. Davidson, M. Hawkesworth, E. Grosz
  • Dissertation: Women’s Labor in the Global City: Representations of Transnational Subjects and Spaces in Contemporary Visual Geographies

Bio

Laura Lovin received a B.A. in Special Education in 1997 and a B.A. in Sociology in 2000 from the University of Bucharest, Romania. She also received an M.A. degree in Cultural Studies from University of Bucharest in 2000 and an M.A. in Gender Studies from Central European University in Budapest, Hungary in 2003.

After completing her PhD in 2014, she received a two-year Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship from the European Commission. Her research project is "The Race, Class and Gender of Transnational Urban Labour: Romanian Workers in the Cities of London and NYC,” and her collaborating institution is the Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research at London South Bank University.

Abstract

This dissertation explores depictions of working women in three transnational urban spaces, Sibiu (Romania), Berlin (Germany) and Newark (New Jersey, USA). In the aftermath of the cold war and in the midst of globalization, these cities represent marked sites in the geopolitical axes of "west"/"east." Each city has grappled with labor restructuring, the upward redistribution of wealth, urban dilapidation, and segregation. Each city has also deployed a commodified version of multiculturalism to foster tourism, corporate development, and diverse strategies for reinvestment and revitalization. Within these contexts, I looked for contemporary art projects that render topical phenomena such transnational work migration, changing labor practices, new modes of livelihood, and new gendered, racialized and classed identities. This dissertation relies on data and representational materials collected through extensive multi-location field research in Sibiu, Berlin and Newark. The case study on Sibiu foregrounds working women of three different ethnicities, Romanian, Romani and Saxon, and traces their articulation in relation to practices of transnational work migration. The case study on Berlin continues the engagement with transnational migrant workers. The theme of sexuality constitutes its core analytical dimension, as representations of voluntary and coerced sex work take the center stage of the visual arts projects encountered in Berlin. Finally, in the case of Newark, an U.S. city where work disappeared with the transnationalization of industrial production, the theme of racial neoliberal subject formation informs the analysis of the documentary representation of a young woman's work as a community activist. Interrogating concepts of urbanity, representation, and affect, this research also identifies limitations of recent accounts of affective theories, methodologies and politics, arguing that while taking the affective turn in humanities and social science, researchers should continue to supplement their readings, viewing, and theorizations with contextualized examinations of informed by political economy and inquiries into the meaning making practices of situated subjects.

Munem, Bahia

  • Job Placement: Lecturer, Center for Ethnicity and Race, Columbia University
  • Committee: N. Hewitt, E. Brooks, J. Puar, A. Ramos-Zayas
  • Dissertation: Expulsions and Exceptions: Palestinian Women Refugees and the Politics of Belonging in the Brazilian Nation State

Bio

Bahia Munem received an M.S. in Communication from New Jersey Institute of Technology and holds an M.A. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers. She was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies for her ethnographic project in 2010.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the resettlement of a group of Palestinian Iraq War refugees in Brazil. In 2007, Latin America's largest democracy and self-proclaimed racial democracy made what it claimed was a humanitarian overture by resettling 108 Palestinian refugees displaced from Baghdad as a result of the Iraq War. The majority of them had escaped from Baghdad in 2003 and had been living for nearly five years in a makeshift refugee camp on the border of Jordan and Iraq. Utilizing a multi-method approach, this work examines how Brazil, with its long history of Arab migration, incorporates this specific re-diasporized group into the folds of its much-touted racial democracy, an important arm of Brazilian exceptionalism. In order to address the particularity of Palestinian refugees, and while considering pluralism discourses and other important socio-political dynamics, I engage and extend Edward Said’s framework of Orientalism by analyzing its machinations in Brazil. To closely assess the particularity of the resettled Palestinian refugees (but also Arabs more generally), I consider how already stereotyped Brazilians construct Palestinians in Brazil through an Orientalist lens. This Orientalism, I argue, is a product of a Neo-Orientalist glaze. This formulation takes into consideration the racialized and exoticized constructions of Brazilians in order to examine how these essentialist ideas are reconfigured and reproduced to “Orientalize” other others. In examining the near and distant history of this group, interrogating labor histories and contemporary labor practices, dissecting their incorporation into Brazilian public policies, and interrogating discourses of cultural misrecognitions and problematic Palestinian cultural constructions, I have made significant theoretical interventions and highlighted distinct ways in which members of a minority community are de-subjectified and re-subjectified in the Brazilian context. Moreover, this analysis provides insight into the Brazilian nation-state and the scope and scale of its neoliberal form of statecraft. Considered together, my dissertation engages and traverses a wide range of literatures, crosses disciplinary boundaries, and contributes to multiple fields of study. At the same time, it illuminates in fine detail the daily lives of a group of refugees whose experiences can help us re-imagine the lives of multiply-displaced persons in other times and places.

Lee, Eunsung

  • Committee: M. Hawkesworth, L. Schein, H. Davidson, M. Gossy
  • Dissertation: Politics of Cultural Proximity: Transnational Marriage and Family Making Among Vietnamese Women and Women and South Korean Men in the 21st Century

Bio

Eunsung Lee received a B.A. in English Literature from Dongguk Univeristy, South Korea, and M.A. degrees in English Literature from University of Northern Iowa and Women’s Studies from San Diego State University.

Abstract

This dissertation examines how the idea of cultural proximity is constructed in commercialized marriage and transnational family making among Vietnamese women and South Korean men. Based on ethnographic work in Vietnam and South Korea, my dissertation theorizes cultural proximity in the context of regionalization among Asia-Pacific countries, ethnic identity formation, and social stratification in South Korea. The dissertation argues that the construction of cultural proximity involves disciplinary politics. I explore how the politics of cultural proximity is embedded in Korea’s multicultural policies that aim to socially and culturally assimilate migrant women and children of transnational families. In addition, I analyze the everyday politics of cultural proximity articulated by Koreans who are involved in brokered marriages, cultural assimilation programs, and transnational family making. This study highlights the new transnational formations of social, ideological, economic, and interpersonal relations in South Korea where Vietnamese wives negotiate patriarchal gender roles, ethnic identity, and social stratification. The study extends the theory of cultural proximity to assess the multifaceted regionalization processes in the Asia-Pacific region. It contributes to the study of race and ethnicity in the region by examining immigration, multicultural policies, and cultural assimilation programs in South Korea that are based on the hierarchy of Korean and non-Korean identities. In addition, the study sheds new light on masculinity studies by arguing for more nuanced understandings of Korean men who are involved in unconventional marriage and family making. My analysis of Vietnamese women’s rural-to-rural migration attests to the on-going gender scholarship that critiques women’s upward mobility via transnational marriage. My study confirms that Vietnamese women struggle to find ways to empower themselves in the host country. Lastly, my study of the role of international matchmaking agencies in Vietnamese women’s settlement processes suggests that both the South Korean and Vietnamese government ought to consider the promulgation and enforcement of laws related to matchmaking services that better protect the Vietnamese women.

Falzetti, Ashley

Bio

Ashley received an M.A. in Women's and Gender Studies from Rutgers University in 2009 and an M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee in 2006. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Women's and Gender Studies at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti. She is currently researching two new chapters for her book manuscript "Belonging in Myaamionki" on Miami Indian experiences of settler colonialism in the Lower Great Lakes. An article that draws from this research, "Archival Absence: the burdens of history," was recently published in Settler Colonial Studies (Winter 2015.) She teaches courses on interdisciplinary feminist methodologies, the co-constructions of race, gender, and nation, as well as the heteropatriarchy of colonialisms.

Abstract

Frances Slocum has become the most famous Miami Indian woman in history, which is surprising because she was born to a white Quaker family. This project traces the formation of her captivity narrative as she is transformed into a figure of local history in two distinct places: Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania where she was captured and Peru, Indiana where she lived and was buried. Settler Histories of Place examines the periods in which her narrative gains popularity and finds that her story circulates most widely at moments when there are broader movements to take control of Miami Indian lands in Indiana. How storytellers describe her racial identity shapes how she is imagined as a historical figure of settler and native history. What details are included or omitted shapes how the violence of settling the United States is imagined. Narratives about Frances Slocum are used in two particular regions as key historical stories of place. These stories use racial descriptions to naturalize a settler sense of belonging, normalizing settler claims to land inhabited by the Miami. Accounting for Miami perspectives of Frances Slocum disrupts settler narratives of Miami absence and reveals the cultural logics of public history in a settler-context.

Adda, Harnida

  • Job Placement: Lecturer, Universitas Tadulako, Palu, Central Sulawesi, Indonesia
  • Committee: Y. Rodgers, E. Brooks, R. Balakrishnan, D. Goldstein
  • Dissertation: Rural Home-based Self-Employment: Evidence from Central Sulawesi, Indonesia

Bio

Harnida Adda received a B.A. in Economics with a specialization in Human Resource Management from Tadulako University, Indonesia in 1999. She also received an MA in Women’s Studies from Flinders University, Australia in 2004. Her passion for women in managerial positions has inspired her to write an MA thesis entitled "A Question of Style: Gender and Management in Asian Countries," which enabled her to explore the issue of leadership styles of women executives in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines, and Indonesia.

She started her PhD in Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers in 2008 with a Fulbright Scholarship and completed the program in 2014. She is now back in her home country of Indonesia getting back to routine as a lecturer at her alma mater, Universitas Tadulako, Palu, Central Sulawesi. Apart from teaching, she also speaks locally on topics related to human resources management. She plans to undertake collaborative research with local governmental and non-governmental institutions centering on the topic of the development and sustainability of women's economic activities through home-based industries as a potential strategy for enhancing women's participation in both domestic and public spaces. She will also revise her dissertation into a book and some articles for publication in national and international journals. Last but not least, she is looking forward to undertaking post-doctorate opportunities.

Abstract

This study explores how women in Central Sulawesi of Indonesia experience power and value transformations through self-employment. Based on the subjective experience of female fried onion producers and sarong weavers, this study suggests that the integration of women into home-based industries generate benefits beyond economic survival. Self-employment has led women’s work to be recognized as “real work” and it has increased women’s personal capabilities. This change has led self-employed women to position themselves as partners of their husbands, as their voices have become more acknowledged at work and in the home. This study indicates the existence of a new dimension of rural women, as they have become agents of social change by participating in micro self-employment. These women have developed self-awareness of their personal resources and have attempted to create a new role for themselves by challenging and transforming the patriarchal structure of their households. Through their initiative and commitment to developing their income-earning capacities, these women have gained more respect and authority that enable them to participate more outspokenly in their families’ affairs due to the improved power relations between their husbands and themselves. Through conducting in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and participant observations, this study shows that the contributions of rural women through home-based self-employment goes beyond the individual and her family; owners provide job opportunities for other women, and the choice of producing fried onions and weaving sarongs helps to preserve the specialties of the local culture. Rural women’s contribution through self-employment is valued beyond the material entity that these women bring in to their households. They have made the commitment to endure the risks of small-scale home-based micro-businesses as a way to diversify their family’s source of income. They have thereby increased their visibility in their own homes and in society. By embracing their strengths through self-employment, rural women have been able to overcome the power barriers that used to impede their advancement in economic and social lives. By using the cultural influences as one of motivations to engage in ‘non-traditional’ work, these women are continuing to improve their capabilities in the face of persistent challenges.