People

2013

2013

Tamura, Yurika

  • Job Placement: Clinical Assistant Professor at the School of Liberal Studies at New York University; (From 2023): Assistant Professor at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of North Carolina
  • Webpage: https://chaocenter.rice.edu/Content.aspx?id=481
  • Committee: E. Grosz, A. Isaac, N. Rao, J. Murphy
  • Dissertation: Community of Non-Belonging, Bodies for Non-Philosophy: Interncultural Performance and a Sense of Coexistence

Bio

Yurika Tamura completed her PhD in 2013. She has taught courses on feminist theory, Asian American studies, and Japanese literature and film. Yurika's research interests include critical race theory, body and sensations, music and performance, and affect. In her dissertation project she experiments on writings on music, corporeality, and sensation.

Abstract

This dissertation studies music and stage performances led by contemporary Japanese minority groups, primarily Ainu activists, from three theoretical perspectives: 1. Politics of representation, 2. The body and materiality, and 3. Philosophy of difference. Each perspective informs each chapter’s study of the soundscape and performance produced in lieu of verbal political negotiation. Posed as a project in performance studies and critical race theory, the dissertation analyzes cultural and political contexts of each performance as well as affect of the impact of performance. By addressing political situations and history minority populations in Japan, and especially since most of the chapters address the issues of contemporary Ainu indigenous struggles, this project necessarily takes postcolonial and feminist approaches that criticize Japanese imperialism, colonialism, and ideological products of other disciplinary forms of nation-building, such as the social hierarchies based on race and gender. The performances introduced in this dissertation themselves, however, take remarkably positive approaches to conceiving differences of the bodies. Rather than reverting to traditional identity politics, their performance activism seeks a new way for the various bodies and sensations to occupy shared spaces. Thus by examining their inclusive politics that is marked by avoidance of political discussions and focus on the sound elements and music sensations to activate a space of coexistence, this dissertation explores how music and bodily sensations allow us to conceive new modes of coexistence by different bodies of people. Another question this dissertation pursues is how to conceive materiality of the body while many gender and cultural studies have studied the body as signs and symbols of identity, and not a corporeal substance. By aligning with the recent theoretical movement that focuses on the material body, this dissertation engages in theorization of the body that leverages innovative conceptualizations of living with others. Finally, the dissertation proposes the concept of “Transnational Indigeneity,” an indigenous theorization that locates indigeneity outside and beyond national and racial borders and critiques such imperial exclusions and markings of bodies and the earth. The dissertation describes how transnational indigeneity is materialized in the new Ainu collaborative music scenes through the sound and sensations.

Hernandez, Jillian

  • Assistant Professor
  • Department: University of Florida
  • Job Placement: Associate Professor, Center for Gender, Sexualities and Women’s Studies Research, University of Florida
  • Webpage: https://people.clas.ufl.edu/jillianhernandez/
  • Committee: L. Schein, C. Decena, A. Stein, S. Sidlauskas, A. Cheng
  • Dissertation: The Politics of Sexual Aesthetics: Women and Girls Crafting Bodies

Bio

Jillian received her PhD in Women's and Gender Studies in May 2013. She was awarded a Dissertation Fellowship from the American Association of University Women for her research: “The Politics of Sexual Aesthetics: Women and Girls Crafting Bodies.” Jillian's research projects focus on contemporary art, sexualities, and girls’ studies. She was formerly Curatorial Associate at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami where she created the nationally acclaimed “Women on the Rise!” outreach program for teen girls. She has organized several exhibitions of contemporary art and published essays in her areas of interest.

Abstract

The Power of Sexual Aesthetics: Women and Girls Crafting Bodies examines how people of color respond creatively to being framed as sexually deviant through normative assessments of their corporeal styles in the U.S. This work comprises a comparative study of how aesthetics shape the racialization of African American, Latina, and black, non-Latina Caribbean immigrant women and girls. The dissertation constructs its argument by juxtaposing the body crafting practices of heterosexual and LBTQ young women of color I have worked with through community arts outreach, with contemporary women artists of color whose work portrays explicitly raced and sexualized bodies. Employing a multi-method approach, the study combines focus groups with young women, interviews with artists, reception study, and visual analysis of music videos, YouTube media, photographs, collages, and paintings, to fashion a transdisciplinary synthesis. Bridging Art History, Gender, Sexuality, African American, Latino/a, Critical Race, Ethnic, and Cultural Studies, the dissertation traces the circulation of raced female bodies in the visual fields of popular culture, fine art, and everyday social spaces, domains in which norms of body presentation and representation are both crystallized and challenged. Case studies of “chonga” girls, masculine body presenting young women, and contemporary cultural producers elaborate the modes through which racialized corporeal aesthetics are valued. This project highlights a double standard: vernacular images and embodiments of sexuality fashioned by disadvantaged girls more often draw negative critiques and cultural devaluation in social discourse when compared to more professional pictures and bodies lauded as “edgy” and “innovative” for their sexual content in the elite art world, popular culture, and media. The Power of Sexual Aesthetics analyzes how body crafting practices may work to both reveal and occult class disparity in a contemporary neoliberal context. The power of neoliberal discourse lies in its obfuscation of class exclusions and structures, and effective circulation of narratives concerning the putative potential of self-making and overcoming economic circumstances. This dissertation argues that the dissident aesthetics of poor and working class women and girls of color have the potential to unmask realities of class stratification, hence their disciplining as racially, sexually, and aesthetically excessive.

Gorman, Cynthia

  • Job Placement: Associate Professor of Geography and Women’s and Gender Studies, West Virginia University
  • Webpage: http://geography.wvu.edu/people/faculty/cynthia-gorman
  • Committee: J. Regulska, R. Rodriguez, C. Lee, C. Bunch
  • Dissertation: From Recognition to Regulation: Flood Fears, Gender Violence, and Asylum Law in the United States

Bio

Cynthia Gorman received a B.A. in Political Science from Bates College and an M.A. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University. While at Rutgers, Cynthia directed the Community Leadership Action and Service Project (CLASP) at the Institute for Women's Leadership, a program which she developed through her Master's practicum with the Institute.

After completing her PhD in 2013, Cynthia worked as an Instructor of Leadership Studies at West Virginia University. Her research focuses on the gender politics of nationalisms, the geopolitical context of human rights discourse, refugee-asylum law in the post-Cold War era, and the development of gender-based persecution jurisprudence in the United States. Other interests include community-based activism and feminist pedagogies.

Abstract

Over the past twenty years, women’s human rights advocates have made significant gains in securing protection for women with gender-related claims of persecution within the United States. However, efforts to expand the legal rubric of refugee-asylum law to include gender-related forms of persecution have aroused controversy about inviting a flood of women from around the world fleeing gender violence. In this dissertation, I explore how fears of a flood of women asylum seekers have shaped the development of gender-based asylum jurisprudence in the United States. While it is envisioned as carrying out a humanitarian mandate, refugee asylum law continues to be embedded in and responsive to state efforts to systematically control the movement of populations across its territorial borders and to screen out asylum seekers deemed to threaten the composition of the nation. Through particular technologies of exclusion justified by flood fears, state actors undermined cases that could open pathways to citizenship for large numbers of migrants. Employing a methodology of feminist legal archeology combined with interviews of impact litigators, I demonstrate how efforts by feminist legal advocates to expand asylum protection to include gender-based persecution became entangled in efforts by state immigration officials and adjudicators to exclude particular women from protection. Thus despite the humanitarian commitments of refugee-asylum law and feminist legal advocates’ success in winning recognition of gender-based persecution, fears of an impending flood of refugees have resulted in exclusionary definitions of who can gain asylum on the basis of gender-based persecution.

Dhar, Debotri

Bio

Debotri Dhar received a B.A. in Economics (Honors) from Delhi University, India, and a Masters with distinction in Women’s Studies from University of Oxford, UK, before earning her Ph.D in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers. She is currently a full-time lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Debotri has published book chapters, essays, and articles in journals such as Postcolonial Text, Feminist Formations, and Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy. She has edited and introduced numerous volumes including Education and Gender (Bloomsbury Academic: London, New York, New Delhi), Love is not a Word: The Culture and Politics of Desire (Speaking Tiger: New Delhi), and The Best Asian Short Stories (Kitaab, Singapore). Her monograph on sexual violence and the state is forthcoming from Routledge (London, New York, New Delhi), and she is working on her next. Dr. Dhar has served as an expert panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships and a reviewer for the National Women's Studies Association, among others. Debotri also writes books in the genres of fiction and creative non-fiction, as well as articles on gender issues for popular publications, and has served as a judge for the Barbara Deming Fund for women writers (New York). She has spoken on television and radio, to communicate on gender issues with a wider audience, and lent her interdisciplinary expertise to organizations across sectors.