Gil Hochberg
Assistant Professor,
Comparative Literature

Queer Politics and the Question of Palestine

This project aims at closely examining the intricate and most complex dynamics defining the relationship between what can be broadly called “Queer Politics” and “the Question of Palestine.” The first goal of this project, then, is to highlight the importance of revisiting and complicating some of the more common representations of the Israeli Palestinian conflict through critical lenses developed in queer and feminist studies. Its second goal is to extend the growing scholarship that critically examines the interface between sexuality and nationalism, queerness and new modes of population control, by focusing on one of today’s most heated global political debates, which has nevertheless garnered very little attention and visibility within US queer studies.

Susanne Lohmann
Professor,
Political Science

Men, Women, and Universal Higher Education

The first purpose of my research is to argue that higher education not only creates human capital but it also shapes a people’s collective mindset. Worldwide, men tend to study “useful” subjects like engineering, computer science, and business, which have the potential to create human capital and economic growth. Women tend to self-select into the humanities and social sciences, which human-capital theorists like to write off as “useless” but which actually serve to modernize people’s mindsets.

Saloni Mathur
Assistant Professor,
Art History

Ray Eames and India

When one thinks of Charles and Ray Eames, perhaps the most famous design partnership in twentieth-century America, one usually thinks of their distinctive furniture styles, now classics of mid-century modernism. Less well known, however, is that the couple traveled extensively in the Indian subcontinent participating in a range of projects in film, architecture, and exhibition design in the 1950s and 60s. This "Indian chapter" of the Eameses' story has, for the most part, been entirely ignored by design historians in the west. I will investigate this unlikely encounter between Ray Eames and the recently independent Indian nation-state, the former captivated by the traditions of the subcontinent, and the latter searching for a "modem" identity that could integrate its ancient history as well as its more recent colonial past.

Mona Simpson
Professor,
English

The American Cousins (a novel)

The American Cousins will examine the nature of marriage, tracing the lives of diaspora Arabs in the United States (whose marriages were arranged by their families) and of their more Americanized cousins (who were the products of a mixed  (Syrian-American) marriage and who have married the way most other Americans of their generation marry.)

Lois Takahashi
Associate Professor,
Urban Planning

Patriarchy/Matriarchy Versus Blood Quantum: Cultural Significance as Evidenced in Hawaii Land Commission Grants

To explore the gendered dimensions and consequences of this land governance transformation, this proposed project has three main goals. The first is to determine the gendered dimensions of land claims in the records of awarded Mahele land grants. The second is to explore the race/ethnicity dimensions of these gendered land claims by analyzing claims made by Hawaiians and non-Hawaiians. The last goal is to determine to what extent Hawaiian culture may have influenced the Western migrants in the Islands, at least in terms of gender mobility via access to land ownership. The study will consist mainly of archival records research, focusing on identifying gendered land ownership across the Hawaiian and the non-Hawaiian community.

Victoria Vesna
Professor,
Design|Media Arts

Science Games for Girls: NANO BIO_BODS

The goal of the proposed project is to develop a prototype of a video game introducing young women to the new sciences of nano and biotechnology by using creative strategies of media arts projects. See http://ucdarnet.org

The working title of the project is NANO_BIO BODS. With the help of creative programmers from our department, we will develop a flash game that will allow girls to create their fantasy bodies (bods) that are not based on mechanistic ideas inherited by the industrial age, but instead use natural systems frequently utilized by biotechnologists. The game will be responsive and interactive, with biological systems applied that will be developed in collaboration with our colleagues in the molecular biology department. NANO_BIO BODS will be web-based with a prototypical existence online to a small group of beta-test participants and ultimately become a multi-user collaborative environment where young women join a community of like minded peers across geographies.

Andrea Goldman
Assistant Professor,
History

The Staging of Urban Culture in Beijing, 1770-1900

Before the modern age, opera in China was the mass communication medium of the times, as powerful in shaping and reflecting popular imagination as TV and cinema are in our own times. My book manuscript, entitled “The Staging of Urban Culture in Beijing, 1770-1900,” uses opera as a lens through which to observe culture in the city of Beijing.

My study shows that opera performance in the capital of Qing era Beijing was poised at the intersection of state power, commercial interests, literati discontent, ethnic identity, public and private life, and gender and class negotiation.  As such, the urban theater reveals itself as vitally important to understanding state-society relations and the mechanisms by which ideas and values were shared, shaped, disseminated, and contested.  Through an examination of the context and content of opera in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Beijing, my work illuminates relationships between culture and power in the Qing metropolis, offering insight into how the state and various urban constituencies (officials, scholars, merchants, and petty urbanites) partook of theater and the stories played out on stage and manipulated them to their own ends.

Kerri Johnson
Assistant Professor,
Communication Studies

Studies on the social and contextual circumstances that prompt changes in the expression of gendered cues

Doris Troy famously sang, “Just one look, that’s all it took.” Indeed research confirms that meaningful social information is reliably discerned from just one look. Such information ranges from observers’ appreciation of social category membership (for example, race and sex) to their evaluation of more enduring traits and dispositions. Although the face has been shown to carry considerable weight in such judgments – conveying social category membership such as age, sex, and race – person construal
frequently occurs from a distance or vantage point that precludes face perception. Nevertheless, observers construe the identities of others with relative ease, relying on body cues such as shape and motion as a foundation for their judgments. The goal of my research project is to understand how (and why) meaningful social information can be communicated by the human body.

Miriam Laugesen
Assistant Professor,
Health Services

The Politics of State Policies on the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) Vaccine

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a prophylactic human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine for use among girls and women aged 9 to 26 years in 2006. The vaccine costs around $400 and is administered in a three-shot sequence. Some say that the vaccine is a scientific and public health breakthrough in the prevention of cervical cancer. Others suggest that the vaccine is supported by limited efficacy and safety data. Overall, there are many unanswered questions about overall vaccine effectiveness, duration of protection, and adverse effects that may emerge over time.

Surprisingly, although there is great interest in this topic among policymakers, scholarly analysis of state policy responses, especially the extent to which laws have been passed (as opposed to being introduced), has been limited. This research project will compile a database of proposed and enacted legislation, and answer three questions: (1) how many states have adopted, proposed, and passed legislation requiring vaccination, and/or public and private insurance coverage of the new HPV vaccine, (2) what factors are driving the variation in adoption of laws in different states, and (3) how important has religious or moral opposition to the laws been in the failure of states to enact the policies?

Kendra Willson
Assistant Professor,
Scandinavian Section

Name Law and Gender in Iceland

Language is central to the construction of gender, and power structures are reproduced in language.  Some attempts to combat perceived gender inequity in language have been criticized as superficial, addressing issues which have little to do with real gender equity.  Note the controversy surrounding the generic use of the pronoun 'he'.  In Iceland, a recent Bible translation attempted to implement gender-inclusive language throughout, with results which many deemed a travesty of both the Bible and the Icelandic language. An historical and linguistic perspective can shed light on some of these issues.  For instance, the English word 'man' and the Icelandic equivalent have evolved from a gender-neutral meaning of 'human being' toward a gendered meaning of 'adult male' over the recorded history of the respective languages. This development reflects general patterns of semantic change much more clearly than it indicates changes in the status of women. It is worthwhile to investigate whether people really feel empowered or marginalized by certain linguistic structures.

Patricia Greenfield
Professor,
Psychology

Social Change and Shifting Women's Roles in a Maya Community

What does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be a man? Cultural beliefs and values embedded in everyday practices elaborate and give meaning to the affordances of biological sex. Research I have been conducting in a Zinacantec Maya community in Chiapas, Mexico since 1969 has shown that socio-demographic factors such as involvement in commerce affect these everyday practices, shifting socialization environments and developmental trajectories. Recently, my graduate students and I have been collecting data in this community regarding the ways in which sociodemographic factors and shifting gender roles affect female development. Last year, I received a Faculty Development grant to prepare in Chiapas, Mexico for the study of Generations 3 and 4 in an ongoing intergenerational study of social change and female development. In addition to computerizing our genealogical records, in order to find the next generations in 2012, we also carried out a study of the effect of urbanization on gender roles during the summer of 2007, collecting data in the indigenous community of Nabenchauk and in the colonial Mexican city of San Cristobal de las Casas.

Martie Haselton
Associate Professor,
Communication Studies & Psychology

Changes in Women’s Sexuality over the Menstrual Cycle: Examinations in Diverse Samples Spanning Geographic Regions and Variations in Sexual Orientation

The fertile window within the human ovulatory cycle is brief: just a few short days.  This is the only time in which the event with the largest social and biological consequence for a woman—conception—can occur.  It would be astonishing if the psychological mechanisms regulating women’s social behaviors were insensitive to information about cycling fertility.  For many decades, however, human ovulation was thought to be concealed from everyone, including women themselves.  This wisdom is now being overturned.  On high fertility days of the cycle, heterosexual women feel more attractive, prefer greater masculinity in partners, and shift their preferences toward qualities thought to indicate good genes in mates.  General sexual desire does not appear to change markedly over the cycle; rather, heterosexual women’s desires shift toward attraction for particular types of men. Under certain circumstances, when near ovulation, women may be more open to casual sexual encounters.

Rachel Lee
Associate Professor,
English & Women's Studies

The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America

The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America examines how Asian Americans reflect back upon a history of imperialist body politics that idealize the Western subject, not only by both abjecting colored bodies and fetishizing them as edifying entertainments, but also by erasing these bodies from the landscapes of imperialist expansion now adumbrated in the way so-called "terrorist bodies" are evacuated, worried over, and expunged, in the not so new politics of neoimperial security. If these are somewhat more obviously concerns of studies of racial formation and postcoloniality, my project argues that these are also concerns of feminism and queer studies. The chapters of this project, thus, assemble an "Asian American" body through various performers, dramatists, novelists, and new media artists' representations of a body part. Where the surrealist game of the cadavre exquis had several artists working in the same medium assembling a common object, I'm aiming for a multidimensional exquisite corpse, working across several kinds of cultural portraits in literature, performance, visual art, and websites. Using the metaphor of the corpse, I'm also playing with the idea of this body as monstrous, unstable, and vanishing, always on the verge of passing away (declared pure fiction, moved aside for "subjectless critique"), or becoming too reified. My intent is not to assemble this body as a confirmation that there is an Asian American organic materiality "out there," but to examine the different tactics of making the raced and sexed body intelligible across these various media.

Denise Mann
Assistant Professor,
Film, TV & Digital Media

Gender and Marketing in the Post-network Era—An Ethnographic Analysis of the TV Workplace in the Age of Wikinomics

This ethnographic study will analyze whether or not the traditional network television workplace is adapting to collective intelligence models when it makes and sells primetime shows to women. Previous scholarship has focused on online content/viral marketing strategies designed for the predominantly young, male audience of multi-platform franchises like Lost and Heroes. This study will examine a set of primetime network programs—Pushing Daisies, Ugly Betty, Desperate Housewives, Ghost Whisperer—designed with a 18 to 49 female demographic in mind, focusing particular attention on the network’s investment (or lack thereof) in interactivity. The primary methodology employed will be situated fieldwork (that is, interviews and observation of TV production personnel; TV studio executives; and  network marketing executives).

Patricia Greenfield
Professor,
Psychology

The Impact of Urbanization on Zinacantec Maya Women and Girls: A Controlled Case Study in Historical Perspective

Global sociodemographic trends include the expansion of commerce and urbanization. Since 1969, I have been tracking changes in socialization and human development across the generations, as a Zinacantec Maya community in Chiapas, Mexico made the economic transition from agriculture to commerce. Past intergenerational comparison has shown that engagement in commercial activities makes learners more independent of their teachers in informal settings, while making cognitive processes more abstract and adapted to solving novel problems. In Summer 2007, a unique opportunity arose for a controlled, systematic case study concerning the impact of urbanization on the roles of Zinacantec Maya girls and women. My presentation will focus on the first report of this new study.

Juliet Williams
Associate Professor,
Women’s Studies Program

Making a Difference: Narratives of Sex Difference in Single-Sex Education Debates

Over the past two decades, the number of public primary and secondary schools in the United States offering single-sex educational opportunities has risen dramatically. This talk explores the significance of shifting narratives of sex difference animating the movement for single-sex public education. While earlier single-sex initiatives were introduced in the context of pedagogical reforms emphasizing social justice, today the accent in single-sex education debates increasingly is placed on assertions of "natural," "hard-wired," "genetic," and "biological" sex differenes. Adopting an intersectional approach, this paper considers both the political and pedagogical stakes of changing conceptions of the basis and rationale for sex-segregation in public schools.

JULIET WILLIAMS is an Associate Professor of Women's Studies at UCLA. She is the author of "Liberalsm and the Limits of Power" (2005) and co-editor of "Public Affairs: Politics in the Age of Sex Scandals" (2004).

Elizabeth LeGuin
Associate Professor,
Musicology

Jácaras and Tonadillas: Female Musical Ruffians in Early Modern Spain

Andrea Kasko
Assistant Professor,
Bioengineering/Biomedical Engineering

Synthetic Immunotherapeutic Agents to Target Cancer

We are interested in developing cancer treatments which elicit an immune response from the body.  We are specifically targeting breast cancer cells using a receptor that is know to bind to a specific protein fragment.  By conjugating this protein fragment to molecules known to incite an immune response, we hope to stimulate the immune system to kill the cancerous cells.  By enlisting a patient's own immune system to fight cancer, we hope for a more effective, less invasive treatment for cancer, whether alone or in combination with other therapies such as surgery and radiation.

ANDREA KASKO earned her B.S. in Chemistry in 1997 at the University of Michigan, an M.S.E. in Macromolecular Science at Case Western Reserve University in 1999, and a Ph.D. in Polymer Science in 2004 at the University of Akron under the advisement of Professor Coleen Pugh. Kasko worked as a post-doctoral research associate with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute under the advisement of Professor Kristi Anseth at the University of Colorado, Boulder starting in September, 2004. In September, 2006, she joined the faculty at the Department of Bioengineering at UCLA.  As a faculty member, she is pursuing a research program focusing on the development of novel materials for tissue engineering and drug delivery.

Mignon R. Moore
Assistant Professor,
Sociology

Two Sides of the Same Coin: Shifting the (Racial) Lens in the Study of Lesbian Practice

Collectivist feminist ideologies drawn from the 1970s Women’s Movement have framed much of the contemporary social science research on various aspects of lesbian social identity. This presentation draws from a three year qualitative study of black lesbian communities in New York at the beginning of the 21st Century to reassess many common assumptions about lesbian social life. It emphasizes four points of departure black women make from what the existing literature has assumed about lesbian practice, and suggests how a greater understanding of these experiences improves upon existing knowledge about the enactment of gay female sexuality.

MIGNON R. MOORE (Ph.D. University of Chicago) is Assistant Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies at UCLA. Her research interests are in the areas of family, race, gender, sexuality, urban poverty and adolescence. She is the recipient of several honors including an award from the Human Rights Commission, fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon, Woodrow Wilson and Ford Foundations, and a Visiting Scholar award from the Russell Sage Foundation. Her presentation is drawn from a working book manuscript titled Invisible Families: Gay Relationships and Motherhood among Black and Latina Women.

Theodore Robles
Assistant Professor,
Psychology

Close Relationships and Physical Health: The Role of Gender in Biological Processes

High quality close relationships are an essential part of human life because they can promote psychological well-being and physical health. The flip side is also true; unsatisfactory and distressed close relationships promote low psychological well-being and harm physical health. The links between the quality close relationships and health tend to be more important for women compared to men. That is, women's health is more adversely affected by being in a distressed relationship compared to men's health. This talk will discuss findings from Dr. Robles' laboratory that shed light on the biological processes that play a role in explaining gender differences in the effects of relationship quality on health.

THEODORE ROBLES is an Assistant Professor in Health Psychology at the UCLA Department of Psychology. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology (Clinical-Health) from Ohio State University, and completed his clinical psychology internship at the University of Pittsburgh Department of Psychiatry. His research is focused on how social connections influence health, with a focus on biological pathways, including the cardiovascular, endocrine, and immune systems; and the effects of psychological stress on physical health outcomes including sleep and wound healing.

Yu Huang
Assistant Professor,
Material Science and Engineering

Discover the Principles of Pathological Biomineralization

Carol Pavlish
Assistant Professor,
School of Nursing

Community Perspectives on Human and People’s Rights, Justice, and their Relationship to Gender-based Violence and Health in Post-Conflict Settings

This community-based, collaborative, and interdisciplinary four-phase research project aims to address gender-based violence (GBV) among displaced women in the post-conflict settings of Rwanda and South Sudan. Violence against women is most often associated with gender inequality and lack of respect for women's human rights; GBV most often results in physical, sexual, and psychological harm and is closely related to HIV infection in women in many regions of East Africa. A philosopher and bioethicist, Dr. Anita Ho from the University of British Columbia, and a nurse, Dr. Carol Pavlish from UCLA have collaborated with local community development practitioners with the American Refugee Committee, an international non-governmental organization in Rwanda and South Sudan. The overall goal is to collaboratively develop an innovative GBV program that is community-based, respectful of local realities, and observant of universal norms on human and people's rights as advanced by the African Union. Since GBV is an experience deeply embedded in socio-cultural values and mores, potential success of any effort to eliminate GBV depends on gaining deeper understandings of local priorities regarding gender relationships, practices, and rights.

CAROL PAVLISH came to UCLA in 2006 after teaching at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minnesota for 30 years. She has conducted women’s health research with the American Refugee Committee for the past 10 years and worked in Rwanda, South Sudan and northern Uganda.

Ellen Dubois
Professor,
History

Oriental Feminism on the Transnational Stage: Attempts at Self Definition in the Interwar Years

INVITATION ONLY WORKSHOP

Grace Hong
Assistant Professor,
Asian American Studies

Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization

“Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization,” an academic collection co-edited by Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick Ferguson assembles work that addresses African American, Asian American, Arab American, Native American/indigenous and Chicana/o racializations in relation to each other, is organized around new avenues of inquiry in contemporary studies of race.  The essays of this collection take advantage of the opportunities that the different role of the nation-state and nationalisms under globalization affords us to truly re-imagine what kinds of connections and collectivities are possible, beyond those suggested by nationalist modes of organization.

Featured in the April 07 issue of CSW Update.

Abigail C. Saguy
Assistant Professor,
Sociology

Body Weight: From Feminism to Public Health

Abigail C. Saguy investigates how aesthetic and moral attitudes about body weight shape medical understandings of weight. Working from studies (Bordo 1993; Sterns 1997; Popenoe 2005) that imply that Americans moralize weight differently than the French, even while they aestheticize thinness similarly, Saguy’s project examines and compares US. and French news reporting on two medical issues relating to body weight: 1) eating disorders (i.e. anorexia and bulimia), and 2) overweight and obesity. Using “overweight/obesity/ obese” and “anorexia/bulimic/bulimia” as search terms in headings and lead paragraphs, Saguy studied a random sample of 600 articles published since 1985 from select U.S. and French newspapers and newsmagazines.

Featured in the April 07 issue of CSW Update.

Christia Spears Brown
Assistant Professor,
Psychology

The Experience of Being a Girl in a Man’s World: How Discouraging Comments and Sexual Harassment Shape Adolescent Girl’s Achievement, Aspirations, and Self-Concept

Given existing research indicating that girls’ attitudes about themselves become more negative and they begin to limit themselves academically as they progress through adolescence, Christia Spears Brown studies what messages middle and high school girls are encountering and how those messages affect their self-concepts, future aspirations, and views about sexuality and relationships. Her study focuses on 200 adolescent girls’ experiences, inquiring about these girls’ current achievement and future goals, their gender role attitudes, their attitudes about their self-worth and body image, whether they think their gender affects their treatment by others, and how they cope with any differential treatment they may encounter.  Brown believes this research will likely have important implications for parents, teachers, clinicians, and others who have influence in the lives of adolescent girls.

Featured in the May 07 issue of CSW Update.

Martie Haselton
Associate Professor,
Communication Studies & Psychology

The Hidden Side of Female Desire: What Ovulatory Cycle Research Reveals

This talk presents data from a series of studies examining shifts in women’s motivations, desires, and behaviors across the ovulatory cycle. Compared with other cycle days, on days within the narrow fertile window, we find that heterosexual women report increased attraction to men other than their long-term partners. Studies using full-body photographs and vocal samples provide objective evidence of ovulatory shifts in women’s behaviors. Sixty percent of the time, independent judges selected a woman’s high-fertility photograph, rather than her low-fertility photograph, as the one in which she was trying to appear more attractive (through choices of more fashionable and revealing clothing). Vocal samples collected at high fertility, as compared with those at low fertility, are higher in pitch. These findings overturn the assumption that human ovulation is concealed. They also reveal a hidden side of female desire that is most evident if researchers take ovulatory cycle phase into account.

Featured in the February 07 issue of CSW Update.

Maylei Blackwell
Assistant Professor,
Chicana and Chicano Studies

Transnational Organizing: the Emergence and Work of Líderes Campesinas

Utilizing oral histories and archival documents to chronicle the emergence of Líderes Campesinas in the 1980s, Blackwell’s work speaks to the conditions in which farm worker women and girls live and organize including pesticide exposure, a lack of childcare or healthcare, domestic violence, long hours, low pay, sexual harassment on the job, and poverty.  This study analyzes modes of leadership, organizing and pedagogy that acknowledge those multiple layers of oppression to create multi-layered forms of leadership and community empowerment.