CSWS Annual Review

by tova stabin, University Communications

The history of Eugene’s lesbian community from the 1960s through the 1990s will be kept alive through video interviews and archival documents of more than 140 women taking part in the UO’s Lesbian Oral History project.

Judith Raiskin, associate professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Linda Long, curator of manuscripts in Special Collections and University Archives in UO Libraries, are conducting the project as part of the library’s effort to preserve Oregon history.

by Ernesto J. Martínez, Associate Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies

by Marjorie Celona, Assistant Professor, UO Creative Writing Program

A 2018 O. Henry Award winner, Marjorie Celona’s short story “Counterblast” first appeared in The Southern Review Permission to reprint this excerpt was given by the author. You can read the story in its entirety in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 (September 2018, Anchor).

Interviewed by Alice Evans, CSWS Managing Editor; Michelle McKinley, CSWS Director and Professor, School of Law; and Dena Zaldúa, CSWS Operations Manager

by Dena Zaldúa, Operations Manager, CSWS

Last fall, we were still reeling from the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on the University of Virginia campus when the school year began. Few of us in the CSWS family could believe this was really happening. If only that had been our nadir. During the 2017-18 academic year, we have seen children separated from their parents at the border and incarcerated in cages. 

by Andrew Robbins, PhD Candidate, Media Studies, School of Journalism and Communication

With funding from a CSWS Graduate Student Research Grant, I was able to travel to the GLBT Historical Society Archive in San Francisco in November 2018 to explore the unsorted collection of “Tranny Fest,” the original name of what is now known as the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival. The collection was donated by the festival’s original co-founders, media lawyer Alex Austin and late filmmaker Christopher Lee, who started the festival in 1997. 

by Peter P. Ehlinger, PhD Student, Counseling Psychology, College of Education

“They’re tired of waiting for things that aren’t going to come.” — Non-cisgender student

“I drank a lot as a young teenager…I think a lot of that came from a strong sense of lack of belonging and social anxiety.” — Non-cisgender student

by Layire Diop, PhD Candidate, Media Studies, School of Journalism and Communication

The figures released by the World Health Organization (WHO) are staggering. Even though fistula was eliminated in developed countries a century ago, it still affects two million women around the world (WHO, 2018). 

by Elinam Amevor, PhD Student, School of Journalism and Communication

The nineteenth century colonial legacy of the British in the Gold Coast—now Ghana—which ensured that men produce cash crops for export to keep the engines of the Industrial Revolution running, while women engage in food-crop production to feed the home, continues to determine the gendered nature of Ghana’s agricultural sector in the twenty-first century.