Rockefeller Resident Fellows 1998-2001
Gender-Race-Ethnicity: Rearticulating the Local and the Global
The overall intellectual goal of the IRW's 1998-2001 Rockefeller project, "Gender-Race-Ethnicity: Rearticulating the Local and the Global" was to bring feminist articulations of intersectionality into conversation with postmodern understandings of the local and the global, broadening what had hitherto been very localized, mostly U.S.-based discussions of the intersectionality of gender, race, and ethnicity to include transnational and global contexts.
Rockefeller Resident Fellows, 1998-1999
Bishnupriya Ghosh
Assistant Professor of English, University of California-Davis
In Her Own Image: Hindu, Muslim, Mormon Women and the Religious Right, 1990-1999
Professor Ghosh's project examined global implications and links between religious right-wing organizing around issues of women's bodies, sexuality, and work. Using thee geopolitical contexts, she discussed gender, sexuality, and feminist negotiations as they respond to and are challenged by right-wing religious polities and politics.
Ara Wilson
Associate Professor of Women's Studies, The Ohio State University
Intimate Economies: Markets, Sex, and Gender in Bangkok
Using interdisciplinary methods, this project explored how national, ethnic, gender and sexual identities are defined in and through six market areas including Bangkok's Chinatown, a tourist prostitution sector, and the marketing of Avon and Amway projects. These market areas are complex social sites formed at the intersection of local, national, and global realms and therefore provide evidence of how the interplay of capitalist and traditional economies helps to defined "Thai" and gender identities.
Professor Wilson's book, Intimate Economies: A Feminist Ethnography of Capitalism in Bangkok, is under contract to the University of California Press.
Rockefeller Resident Fellows, 1999-2000
Ana Mariella Bacigalupo
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
Shamans of the Cinnamon Tree, Priestesses of the Moon: Gender and Healing Among the Chilean Mapuche
Professor Bacigalupo considers the role of gender in the ethnic identity, lives and ritual practices of Mapuche shamans, or machi, as they interact with local, Chilean national, and global processes. Machi are women or feminized, cross-dressing men who assume cross-gender and co-gender identities for the purpose of healing. She argues that, since machi have been known in their contemporary sense since the sixteenth century, state bureaucracies and institutionalized religions. while controlling how these shamans are perceived and represented in national discourse, do not always play a decisive role in the gendering of shamanism.
The book based on her Rockefeller project, Shamans of the Winter's Bark Tree: Gender, Power, and Healing Among the Chilean Mapuche, is under contract with the University of Texas Press.
Robin Adele Greeley
Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Connecticut, Storrs
The Gendering of Mexican Cultural Nationalism 1920-1946-1970
Taking on a crucial but largely unexplored issue in the history of Latin America--the gendered, racialized construction of subjectivity in post-Revolution Mexico--Professor Greeley's project tracks the ways in which visual representations of the Mexican nation became bound up in debates on gender and race. Arguing that issues of masculinity and femininity generated much of the framework through which more public debates on politics, nation, class and race were formulated, she discusses how the Mexican Muralists and Frida Kahlo variously represented Mexican nationalism, race and gender.
Rockefeller Resident Fellows, 2000-2001
Kiran Asher
Assistant Professor of International Development, Clark College
The Pacific Lowlands of Colombia: Ethnic Territory, Economic Frontier or Biodiversity Hotspot?
In a threefold project, Professor Asher maps how national and multinational discourses of biodiversity conservation and sustainable development intersect with discourses and struggles for Afro-Colombian biodiversity conservation and economic development. Secondly, she considers how national plans for the Pacific region are at odds with Afro-Colombian ethnic and territorial claims. Thirdly, she examines the gendered nature of these interrelated discourses as they invoke local well-being to procure local support, particularly that of black women, for their interventions.
Negar Mottahedeh
Assistant Professor of Literature, Duke University
Doubled Visions/Forked Tongues: The Reading of Dialects and Diversity in Cinematic Language
Professor Mottahedeh's project addresses the problematic nexus of contemporary Iranian national filmic representations of women and ethnic others and the imprint of Shi'ism on them. The resulting book will discuss the impact of religious laws on the technology and techniques of the Iranian feature film industry--a medium aggressively employed in shaping and disseminating the contemporary image of the Islamic Republic through a fabricated representation of Iranian women and ethnic minorities in a global context.
Institute for Research on Women