People

2016

2016

Soderling, Stina

  • Job Placement: Lecturer, WGSS, UMass Amherst
  • Committee: Ethel Brooks, Jasbir Puar, Nancy Hewitt, Temma Kaplan, Karen Tongson
  • Dissertation: "In the crevices of global capitalism"

Bio

Stina’s research and teaching interests include queer theory, environmental justice and ecofeminism, and critical perspectives on the prison system. More specifically, she has researched access to land among queer communities in the rural US South, and is currently asking how histories of land tenure, sexuality, and religion have been intertwined in the expansion of the US nation-state. As a teacher, Stina is particularly interested in feminist pedagogy and student involvement both in and outside of the classroom. She has taught Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers and Mount Holyoke, and at Rikers Island through the Prison Education Initiative.

Abstract

“In the Crevices of Global Capitalism: Rural Queer Community Formation” is an interdisciplinary study of a cluster of intentional communities in Tennessee, referred to by residents as the “Gayborhood.” It asks what factors influence rural community-building, and how queer rurality is linked to larger historical, economic, and political patterns. As an interdisciplinary project, the dissertation draws on multiple methods, primarily ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, oral history, and media analysis. The project studies the Gayborhood not just from an LGBT history view, but more crucially from the perspective of the history of the land on which it is located. It argues that the creation of a queer community in rural Tennessee is predicated on several waves of displacement of other groups from the land, through an ongoing process of settler colonialism and capitalist exploitation. The dissertation makes four main interventions in the field of Queer Studies: First, it provides a reading of the concept of “labor of belonging.” The Gayborhood is created through constant labor, which is for the most part unremunerated, and not always acknowledged. This labor creates a multifaceted belonging: people belonging to a community, land belonging to people, and people belonging to the land. Second, the dissertation presents a theory of materiality and excess. The Gayborhood is in several ways built on waste: the utilizing of literal trash in building, discarded food in cooking, and also being located in a metaphorical post-industrial wasteland. Third, the project places rural queer intentional communities within the landscape of settler colonialism. The dissertation shows how the claiming of land by queer groups is predicated on the naturalization of white US citizenship, and the erasure of histories and presents of Native presence on the land. Fourth, the dissertation uses the concept of fermentation as metaphor and method. It poses that the process of fermentation, whereby microorganisms interact with feedstock materials in a process that combines decomposition and creation, can be used to explain how locations such as the Gayborhood become possible, and how they change.

Roach-Baptiste, Jeanne

  • Job Placement: Instructor III and Graduate Studies Coordinator at at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus, Trinidad
  • Webpage: https://sta.uwi.edu/crgs/july2011/JeanneRoach-Baptiste.asp
  • Committee: Abena Busia, Ethel Brooks, Aisha Khan
  • Dissertation: "Gender practices and relations at the Jamaat Al Muslimeen in Trinidad"

Bio

Jeanne has taught at Rutgers; Devry Collge of Technology; Essex County College, Newark, NJ, and Bloomfield College, Bloomfield, NJ. Her research interests include Caribbean feminisms, Black feminist criticism; borders and boundaries; Islam; African women’s spirituality; resistance and revolution in the African diaspora; African Caribbean History and philosophy; and feminist pedagogy.

Abstract

In an effort to bring into view critically—as actors rather than as spectacle—Muslim men and especially Muslim women in non-Islamic countries and to examine their constitutive individual as well as collective religious and social identities—that is their contextual realities as opposed to just the ideal of Islam—this project seeks via ethnographic research to investigate gender practices and relations among Muslims at the Masjid al Muslimeen and Madressa located in Trinidad and Tobago. This small community’s mundane yet resilient existence amid national, global, historical, geographical, physical, and sociopolitical ambivalences and contradictions begs revisiting how we read, interpret, represent, and deploy extant categories, theories, and methodologies articulating gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, and nation.

Davis, Meredith

Bio

Meredith Davis developed her leadership skills as an undergraduate at St. Mary’s College, where she served on search committees for Dean of Students and Director of Minority Affairs, student representative to the Faculty Senate, and Vice President on the Student Government Association Executive Board. After earning her M.A., Meredith went on to a career in education administration, beginning with the Office of Humanities in the Baltimore Board of Education, directing several programs in multicultural education and enhancing opportunities in institutions of higher education, to her current position as Associate Director, Office of Social Justice Education and LGBT Communities at Rutgers University. She has served as instructor or teaching assistant for courses on African American literature, Black political thought, and the Caribbean. Meredith is also a feminist poet who has performed her work in numerous venues.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the complex lives of African American men in Memphis, Tennessee (1925 – 2006), whose vocations and acts of courage afford alternative perspectives on Black masculinity. Comparing the Jim Crow, post-apartheid, and “postracial” eras. The project documents institutional and socially-sanctioned racism over the course of a century in the U.S. south. Crafting an interdisciplinary methodology that encompasses archival investigations, critical race and gender theories, and analysis of visual culture, I conduct case studies of the heroism of dockhand Tom Lee, the Sanitation Workers Strike of 1968, and the depiction of twenty-first century urban life in Hustle and Flow to disrupt pernicious and pervasive stereotypes of Black men. I demonstrate how a culture of emasculation generated practices of subjugation and systemic oppression, which operated over time and through changing modes of employment and economic dispossession to produce Black men as racialized and gendered subjects. I also illuminate Black men’s creative resistance to these modes of subjugation, identifying diverse means devised by Black men who struggled against great odds to build lives of dignity and win public respect.

Tola, Miriam

  • Research Interests: Autonomist theories of the common and current debates about matter, nature and life developed in the fields of feminist theory, science and technology studies and decolonial thought.

Bio

Miriam Tola's dissertation project, titled "Ecologies of the Commons", places Autonomist theories of the common in conversation with current debates about matter, nature and life developed in the fields of feminist theory, science and technology studies and decolonial thought. While many thinkers emphasize either "natural" or "artificial" commons, Miriam focuses instead on "ecologies of the commons" by considering how a multiplicity of being and forces, human and more-than-human, are both products and producers of actions and thoughts that shape modes of being-in-common. Her hope is that this project will contribute to unsettle Western notions of the political as an exclusively human affair.

Before coming to Rutgers, Miriam worked as a journalist, documentary producer and film festival curator in Italy and the United States. She has been a contributor for the Italian newspaper "Il manifesto" and the magazine "D. La Repubblica delle Donne". She graduated in Communication Sciences and Film Studies from La Sapienza University in Rome with a research project on the monstrous figurations of sexual difference in post-modern science-fiction cinema. At Rutgers she has been teaching foundational courses in women's and gender studies and upper level classes in critical sexuality studies, and feminist practices. She is a graduate fellow at the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis for the academic year 2013-2014.