Evelyn Autry
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Rutgers-New Brunswick
“Transit Memories as Haunting: Andean Indigenous Women’s Led Activism and Protest in the Peruvian Diaspora"
Through labors of memory, this research project uses multidisciplinary feminist frameworks, approaches, and methodologies to explore how memories hunt and transit in spaces, groups, generations, and time periods. The author examines how local and diasporic memories of state repression during Peru’s massive protests (2022-2023) travel amid social struggles, migration, racism, and massacre through different forms of expression that include social media, cultural production, video archives, and testimony. More specific, the author examines the ways in which diasporic memories are utilized and constructed during protests in the New York-Peruvian diaspora following the assassination of Indigenous protesters by police. The project draws upon collaborative interviews, performative assembly theory, and decolonial feminism to explore how Andean Indigenous women envision alternative worlds by narrating their collective struggles, embodying assembly practices and fostering transnational solidarity. Moreover, the project explores how they connect with those killed through public interventions and performances of indigeneity. In essence, this project highlights the role of diaspora communities in shaping and participating in global social and political movements.
Tyler Carson
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Rutgers-New Brunswick
“Skeletons in the Closet: Queer Debates on Intergenerational Sex in the United States, 1978-1994"
My project is about unearthing the buried and “shameful” histories of gay liberation; histories that have been discarded and repressed due to the modern gay rights movement’s nauseating emphasis on pride. What I uncover is that while a group of radical gay activists successfully initiated dialogue on the taboo and politically explosive topic of intergenerational sex beginning in the late 1970s, their legitimacy in gay and lesbian activist spaces was undermined by their perpetual refusal to critically interrogate how patriarchy, gender, and race structured their positions on issues of age, consent, coercion, and differences in power. I argue that these tensions are more broadly indicative of the growing intolerance and incommensurability of gay, mostly male and white, liberationist ideals with the more mainstream and liberal gay and lesbian rights movement. The demise of gay liberation as a viable politics in the late twentieth century US explains much of the hostility and resistance to radical and sex-positive approaches to the topic of gay intergenerational sex.
Zeynep Gürsel
Anthropology, Rutgers-New Brunswick
“Portraits of Unbelonging: Photography, the Ottoman State, and the Making of Armenian Emigrants”
In 1896 the sultan allowed Ottoman Armenians to emigrate on the condition that they expatriate and never return. All “legal” emigrants were photographed. Portraits of Unbelonging traces families in these photographs over a century – in the bureaucratic files that unmake them as Ottoman subjects, on the ship manifests that track their migration routes, in the censuses and naturalization records that document their complex lives as immigrants, and in the family albums and stories of their descendants living today. It is a history of displaced lives and the rise of the document-based global security regimes that govern citizenship and mobility today. It is also the story of one scholar’s haunting.
Sara Perryman
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Rutgers-New Brunswick
“‘Ghosts in the Machine’: AI Writing Technologies and the Spectral Student”
This project explores the interplay between artificial intelligence (AI) and writing practices in a contemporary university writing center. As a disruption of coherent authorship and knowledge production, the rise of AI technologies like ChatGPT operate as networked “ghosts in the machine,” challenging longstanding academic frameworks that reward the possessive individual knower. At the same time, automated content generation often replicates and perpetuates existing biases and power imbalances, turning the writing object into yet another tool to suppress marginalized voices. In the writing center context, students still reeling from the pandemic use ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) to cope with the aftereffects of Covid-19 on learning outcomes. The writing center, then, becomes “dead” space, or at least a space haunted by the residual trace of the spectral student who needs its support, yet, is conspicuous in her absence.
Victoria Ramenzoni
Human Ecology, Rutgers-New Brunswick
“The Witch as a Form of Resistance: Gender-based Sanctions, Rituals, and Institutions among Endenese Women, Eastern Indonesia”
This project seeks to explore the role of women in the spiritual cosmology of the Endenese, in Flores, Eastern Indonesia. It investigates the conflictive dynamics between kinship patrilineal systems, ritualized prescriptions affecting women such as female circumcision and food taboos, and non-normative witchcraft institutions embodied by women, in the context of Islamic/Indigenous syncretism. Exploring issues of gender, epistemological dualisms, and materiality, the study builds on long-term ethnographic fieldwork (since 2009) and archival research. Instances of haunting, curses, and taboo infringement are discussed within a new animistic framework within conservation and gender optics. Findings are of relevance for current gender policies being implemented to reduce violence against women, as well as numerous nutritional programs targeting children’s malnourishment, stunting, and gastrointestinal disease.
Latiana Ridgell
Childhood Studies, Rutgers-Camden
“The Politics of Black Girl Hair: Reimagining Black Girl Consumers in the 1990s Hair Relaxer Advertisements”
Prior research within children’s consumer culture has examined how advertisers have undermined motherhood in favor of capturing child consumers through toys and children’s media. However, very little research has critically examined how hair care corporations reimagined Black girl consumers via the mother child relationship. Thus, I examine the 1990s hair care advertisements as cultural artifacts and interview Black women participants about their memories of these ads. During a preliminary analysis of these artifacts, I found that tension between mothers and daughters surrounding hair care maintenance haunts the advertisements’ textual references. The images offer a Black girl-centered utopia capturing the attention of Black girl consumers. However, it is the text that carries spectral references to the past reminding mothers of their duty to maintain their daughter’s respectable appearance. These advertisements and products constitute an essential component of Black girls’ engagement with consumer culture and deserve inclusion in scholarly accounts of children’s consumer culture.
Meheli Sen
AMESALL, Rutgers-New Brunswick
“Gods and Monsters: Regional and Non-human Others in Contemporary South Asian Media”
Popular culture has undergone seismic shifts in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic in South Asia. Remarkably, the “all-India film,” a tag usually claimed by Bollywood, has come to be decisively wrested away by regional language films—especially in Telegu, Tamil, and Malayalam, which have achieved remarkable success nationally and globally. This project looks at this upstaging of Bollywood via several recent horror films, e.g., Tumbbad (2018), Kumari (2022), Kantara (2022) and Virupaksha (2023), to suggest that a new kind of regional imagination buttresses these films, in marked variance from the generic cosmopolitan homogeneity of Hindi-language cinema. Despite the apparent pervasiveness of Hindutva, popular media is increasingly excavating “other” narratives, images, religions, and rituals—a recalcitrant participant in the project of redefining India as a Hindu nation. I argue that the unruly and profligate energies of horror cannot be easily corralled into the imaginary of a singular, unified, Hindu India.
Julia Stephens
History, Rutgers-New Brunswick
“Haunted Visions: Sightings in the Archives of Colonial South Asia”
My current works considers how photographs, as visual traces and haunted objects, challenge frameworks that center texts and textuality in our understanding of historical time, research ethics, and possibilities for subaltern agency. Building on my work with photographs of colonial-era Indian migrants, including images preserved in state archives, within family collections, and repurposed as contemporary art, I ask how seeing, touching, reproducing, albuming, and adorning such images brings the absent past into the present. My work draws inspiration from how diasporic families have given images produced under conditions of colonial violence and commodification new life as family heirlooms and mediums of creative expression. By adapting elements of these methods in my own praxis, I grapple with the ethics of looking for subaltern pasts within the detritus of colonial documentation, interrogating the possibilities of practices such as albuming and conjuring as alternatives to scholarly knowing.
Asli Zengin
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Rutgers-New Brunswick
“Death in the Margins: Politics of Graveyards, Ghosts and Mourning”
My research project is on material, symbolic and affective ordering of death and afterlives in the margins of social and political life in Turkey. The margins I examine are ethnic, religious, sectarian, and economic, as well as gendered and sexual. More explicitly, I look at forms of death, burials, funerals, and practices of mourning for the social outcast, namely, homeless and underclass people, cis and trans victims of femicide, disowned members of blood families, and more recently, unaccompanied refugees. This mortal topography also contains the bodies of political detainees who have been “disappeared” under police interrogation and state violence, along with radical leftists and Kurdish guerrillas deemed “unidentified.” Most of the deceased in these margins turn into ghostly figures through practices of collective mourning and grief, animating the political world in Turkey. A close focus on this mortal topography of margins allows me to demonstrate the limits of social legibility and belonging in Turkey as an organization of disavowals, erasures, specters, and deaths that are caused by racial, classed, gendered, and sexualized forms of violence.
Shelley Zhang
Music, Rutgers-New Brunswick
“After the Cultural Revolution: Ethnographic Refusals, Intergenerational Trauma, and Transpacific Performance”
Since the 1990s, the world has seen an incredible surge of Chinese performers in Western classical music. Unknown to most outside of Chinese musical networks, these musicians often began their training as young children, learning from parents who lost musical ambitions during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and who hoped to realize them through their only child. In my work, I consider the careers of Chinese musicians in the context of intergenerational trauma, the one-child policy, and transpacific migration. I develop a new theory of “strategic citizenship” in my book and explore the potentials of an ethnographic novel to produce interdisciplinary research while protecting the identities of interlocutors. At the IWR, I would develop this project; a contribution to the Oxford Handbook of Music, Sound, and Trauma Studies, titled, “An Ethics of Refusal: Intergenerational Trauma, Ethnography, and Performance”; and an article on the revolutionary musicians, Li Delun and Li Jue.
Additional Seminar Participants
Smruthi Bala Kannan (IRW Visiting Fellow)
Susan Marchand (Douglass Alumna)
Anna Lynn Tom (Fulbright Nehru Doctoral Fellow)
Fernanda Villarroel Lamoza (Presidential Visiting Faculty Fellow)
Conveners
Chie Ikeya
Director, Institute for Research on Women
Sarah Tobias
Executive Director, Institute for Research on Women