CSWS Annual Review

by Jane Nam, PhD Candidate, Department of Philosophy
South Korea is often deemed the beauty capital of the world, as the cosmetic surgery hub and home to one of the largest beauty industries in the world. Beginning in early 2018, however, thousands of young South Korean women began to cut off their hair, smash their beauty products, and opt for androgynous wear. They are partaking in what they call the Escape-the-Corset Movement, or Tal-Corset, a radical feminist movement calling for all women to take off their figurative corsets. This project is an effort to describe the philosophical meanings behind the experiences of these women, using feminist phenomenology.

by Carmel Ohman, PhD Candidate, Department of English
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to engage creative texts by and about Black women in this historic moment of collective action. Toni Morrison famously wrote that the relationship between artist and reader is central to Black art and storytelling: “it is the affective and participatory relationship between the artist or the speaker and the audience that is of primary importance.” The audience, like the text, needs to work. For Morrison, the engaged, deep-feeling work of reading is part of the work of Black liberation.

by Marc J. Carpenter, Doctoral Candidate, Department of History
When listening to Native students and community members talk about the “Pioneer” statues at the University of Oregon, I have heard the phrase “two sides of the same story” often enough that I do not know whom to credit. Until June 13, 2020, the Pioneer and Pioneer Mother monuments looked down from their pedestals on anyone passing either side of the President’s office at Johnson Hall. Both crafted by the same sculptor, each statue celebrated a different element of the colonial conquest of Oregon.

by Emily Masucci, PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology
For many historically marginalized women, the state and its institutions are not perceived as reliable. State-sponsored violence against women—low-income, afro-descendant, and indigenous women in particular—is a weapon with which the Brazilian state was founded and has maintained power since. The fabric of Brazil is stained by histories of forced sterilization of indigenous and afro-descendant women, of brutal rapes of young women students by military officials during the dictatorship, and recently by the calculated political feminicide of Rio de Janeiro city councilwoman Marielle Franco. Given this legacy, survivors of gender-based violence (GBV) are justifiably apprehensive of appealing to state institutions as they pursue safety and redress.

by Diana Garvin, Assistant Professor, Department of Romance Languages
How did women negotiate national politics in their daily lives under Italy’s Fascist regime? In this year’s research with CSWS, I tackled this question, the genesis for my book Feeding Fascism by investigating a new body of evidence drawn from food and foodways. Rarely do scholars endeavor to involve all five senses in their reconstruction of women’s history, perhaps due to the difficulty in sourcing such materials.

by Kristin Yarris, Associate Professor, Department of Global Studies
With the support of a Center for the Study of Women in Society faculty grant, I was able to make a productive research trip to Alaska in the summer of 2019 to work on my project, “Mid-Century American Psychiatry and State Formation: A Post-Colonial Analysis of Morningside Hospital and the Alaska Mental Health Act.” The project uses an historical case study of the Morningside Hospital, an inpatient psychiatric facility that operated in Portland, Oregon during the first half of the 20th century, to examine the connections between the development of American Psychiatry and of the U.S. nation-state. The connection to Alaska comes because, for decades while Alaska was a Territory with insufficient public mental health resources, people were sent to Morningside from Alaska to receive psychiatric intervention.

In 2019-20, CSWS launched the theme of “Gender, Power, and Grief” for our Lorwin Lectures and other speaker events. On a daily basis, we bear witness to the state-sponsored violence that renders the loss of certain lives and communities unworthy of grief. Immigrant communities are terrorized and families torn apart or imprisoned for exercising their basic human rights. Our speakers and programming sought to both honor the process of grief and the cultural practices of bereavement.