CSWS Annual Review

This is the winning essay of the first-ever CSWS Diversity Initiative research interest group’s undergraduate essay contest on the topic of gender. The question: “How has gender in combination with issues related to diversity and/or mental health featured in your own pathway toward academic or other personal achievement?”

Rebecca Sprinson
Q: What is the topic of your thesis?
My thesis is titled “This Land Is Our Land: The Ideological Construction of a Lesbian Feminist Utopia in Southern Oregon, 1970–1990.” I’m examining the magazines and newsletters produced by women who lived on women-only farms, collectives, and communes in southern Oregon, which was a nexus of the lesbian-feminist back-to-the-land movement.

Women’s and Gender Studies is happy to announce that it has finally become a department. Benefiting from the political work of ethnic studies and its struggle to become a department as well as the unconditional support of our new dean, Scott Coltrane, in winter 2009 Women’s and Gender Studies was finally recognized as a fully legitimate, autonomous, interdisciplinary intellectual space.

Graduate student Gennie Thi Nguyen’s old neighborhood was flooded by as much as nine feet of water after Hurricane Katrina pounded the Gulf Coast in August 2005. For Nguyen, like other Vietnamese Americans of her generation who grew up in New Orleans, the destruction of vast areas of her city became a trauma shared with parents and their generation, and opened up new areas of communication, she said.

by Jennifer Erickson, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Anthropology
Scholars show that welfare policies affect women and men differently due to gender-based relationships with the state, which involve, for example, expectations about child rearing and shifting expectations regarding paid labor. Welfare policies negatively affect many refugee and immigrant groups in the United States by pushing them into the lowest paid sector of the economy. As a cultural project, neoliberal agendas have broadly succeeded in shaping public opinion toward an increased reliance on individual merit, consumerism, volunteerism, and distrust of government.

by Christopher Minson, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Department Head, Human Physiology
Millions of women use hormone therapy for treatment of menopausal symptoms and gynecological syndromes, contraception, assisted reproductive techniques, and combating osteoporosis. Early reports on the use of estrogen replacement therapy were very promising in terms of improving cardiovascular and bone health, but the results of two major clinical trials were disappointing and alarming, resulting in millions of women stopping hormone therapy.

Lamia Karim, recently tenured associate professor of anthropology, received CSWS support for her work on feminist legal reform in Bangladesh. The National Science Foundation also funds her research.

When members of the CSWS Americas research interest group (RIG) traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2006, they knew they would be witnessing social protest. But they did not know it would erupt into violence—or flower into a media takeover by women. As scholars of various academic disciplines—including anthropology, history and journalism—they experienced the social uprising through different professional filters. But for each of them, the Oaxaca social movement of 2006 inspired their research and motivated a response.

Q: How would you characterize your research?
I studied with feminists in an era in the ’80s when feminist scholarship was coming of age and being accepted in the academy. I was lucky to be a man interested in gender issues when it was a relatively new thing to do. The theoretical and methodological tools were there. So it was not a hard transition, to be able to apply that lens and these informed theories and methods to the examination of men’s lives. That was a fruitful coincidence of timing.

Q: You grew up in Indiana—where?
Indianapolis. I went to Shortridge High School, then to DePauw University in Greencastle for one year and couldn’t stand it so I dropped out. The war started and it was much more interesting to work. I worked in a radio station; I was the person who chose the music for the disc jockeys. I had several hundred dollars to spend. What I did was go to the record stores and buy records. That was the end of my career in that regard. Then I moved to New York. I really did not like Indiana; I found it racist, although I did not know much about racism yet.