The Martin Duberman Fellowship
Evelyn Blackwood
Gendered desires:
Tombois and femmes in
West Sumatra, Indonesia
an endowed fellowship named for
CLAGS founder and first executive director,
this award is given to a senior scholar
from any country doing research on the LGBTQ
experience. The 2007/08 Duberman
fellowship was awarded to Evelyn Blackwood,
Associate Professor of Anthropology
and Women’s Studies at Purdue University.
Her project Gendered Desires: Tombois and
Femmes in West Sumatra, Indonesia, addresses
global sexualities through an ethnographic
analysis of tombois (masculine-identified
females) and their normatively gendered
girlfriends in one particular metropolitan
location, the city of Padang, on the coast
of West Sumatra, Indonesia. It attends to
the ways nationally and globally circulating
discourses are received and reinterpreted
across class, ethnicity and gender, resulting
in a multiplicity of sexualities within the
nation-state of Indonesia. Focusing on the
everyday lives of tombois and their girlfriends
in Padang, this project is informed
by and addresses concepts of trans-identities,
female masculinity, and mestiza consciousness
at the same time that it challenges
Western-oriented LGBT identities, histories
and spaces. It offers a compelling view of
sexualities on the margins of queer space
that nevertheless speaks to the struggles and
experiences of all sexual and gender minorities.
Global lesbian and gay liberation
discourse contains within it progressive
narratives of the development of “modern”
same-sex identities. Activist discourse in
particular holds the expectation that modern
lesbian subjects will express a self-consciousness
or awareness of sexual identity as “lesbians.”
One of the key questions of the book
is to ask first, how is it possible to theorize
Fellowships are Darla Linville and Emily
Skidmore.
Darla Linville is a doctoral candidate in
the Urban Education Program at the Graduate
Center of the City University of New
York. Her dissertation, Resisting Regulation:
Teens and Discourses of Sexuality and Gender in
High Schools, focuses on how LGBTQ youth
are creating their sexuality and gender identities
in response to the current discursive
climate in schools.
The dissertation looks at the urban,
suburban, and rural schools struggling to
accept and educate LGBTQ youth, and to
encourage all students to view their diverse
classmates as possible friends and allies.
Many schools have addressed these needs
by implementing gay-straight alliances and
state-mandated professional development
and student awareness programs. Danville’s
research complements these efforts by
documenting students’ and teachers’ ethical
commitments to create a learning environment
in which all students find their lives
reflected in the curriculum and pedagogy.
Using PAR (Participatory Action Research)
methodology, Danville’s project seeks
active participation of those who happen to
be the focus of research. The research team,
comprised of seven LGBTQ public, private,
and Catholic school students between the
ages of 15 and 18, meets on a weekly basis
after school to design the interview protocol
and to analyze data. These team members
are in the process of interviewing LGBTQ
youth and teachers about the discourses of
sexuality and gender in their high schools,
and mapping the ways these discourses exist
in the spaces – locker rooms, classrooms,
hallways, stairwells, offices, clubs – of
schools.
Danville’s recent publications include
Race, Sexuality and Schools: A Quantitative Assessment
of Intersectionality, co-authored with
Juan Battle and published in Race, Gender
& Class and Queer Theory and Teen Sexuality:
Unclear Lines, forthcoming in a collection
she co-authored with Jean Anyon, Michael
Dumas, Kathleen Nolan, Madeline Perez,
Eve Tuck and Jen Weiss.
Emily Skidmore is a PhD candidate in
History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-
Champaign. Her dissertation, Exceptional
Queerness: Defining the Boundaries of Normative
U.S. Citizenship, 1875-1936 argues that
or rethink queer liberation discourse to
incorporate individuals who do not fit that
expectation? And second, how are dominant
discourses reflected, reproduced, and altered
in the narratives and practices of tombois
and their girlfriends?
Building on feminist/queers of color
theories Blackwood argues that lesbi subjectivities
produce and refract modern state,
Islamic and transnational gender and sexual
discourses in class specific ways. She looks
at tombois’ and girlfriends’ developing sense
of self in relation to those closest to them,
their families, extended kin, neighbors and
friends as well as to the discourses that circulate
in their environment. By analyzing
their self-descriptions as well as their social
interactions with each other, she shows how
tombois and girlfriends come to take up
and negotiate particular subject positions
and how these positions rely on and yet play
with normative categories of gender. This
study of lesbi in West Sumatra disturbs any
claims about proper or “modern” forms of
same-sex desire and extends the categories of
queer subjectivities to multiple and disparate
individuals and communities.
Joan Heller-Diane Bernard
Fellowships
Darla Linville
Resisting Regulation: Teens
and Discourses of Sexuality
and Gender in High Schools
Emily Skidmore
Exceptional Queerness:
Defining the Boundaries of
Normative U.S. Citizenship,
1875-1936
these fellowships support scholarly
research into the impact of lesbians
and/or gay men on U.S. society and culture.
The winners of the 2007/08 Heller-Bernard Fellowships are Darla Linville and Emily
Skidmore.
Darla Linville is a doctoral candidate in
the Urban Education Program at the Graduate
Center of the City University of New
York. Her dissertation, Resisting Regulation:
Teens and Discourses of Sexuality and Gender in
High Schools, focuses on how LGBTQ youth
are creating their sexuality and gender identities
in response to the current discursive
climate in schools.
The dissertation looks at the urban,
suburban, and rural schools struggling to
accept and educate LGBTQ youth, and to
encourage all students to view their diverse
classmates as possible friends and allies.
Many schools have addressed these needs
by implementing gay-straight alliances and
state-mandated professional development
and student awareness programs. Danville’s
research complements these efforts by
documenting students’ and teachers’ ethical
commitments to create a learning environment
in which all students find their lives
reflected in the curriculum and pedagogy.
Using PAR (Participatory Action Research)
methodology, Danville’s project seeks
active participation of those who happen to
be the focus of research. The research team,
comprised of seven LGBTQ public, private,
and Catholic school students between the
ages of 15 and 18, meets on a weekly basis
after school to design the interview protocol
and to analyze data. These team members
are in the process of interviewing LGBTQ
youth and teachers about the discourses of
sexuality and gender in their high schools,
and mapping the ways these discourses exist
in the spaces – locker rooms, classrooms,
hallways, stairwells, offices, clubs – of
schools.
Danville’s recent publications include
Race, Sexuality and Schools: A Quantitative Assessment
of Intersectionality, co-authored with
Juan Battle and published in Race, Gender
& Class and Queer Theory and Teen Sexuality:
Unclear Lines, forthcoming in a collection
she co-authored with Jean Anyon, Michael
Dumas, Kathleen Nolan, Madeline Perez,
Eve Tuck and Jen Weiss.
Emily Skidmore is a PhD candidate in
History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-
Champaign. Her dissertation, Exceptional
Queerness: Defining the Boundaries of Normative
U.S. Citizenship, 1875-1936 argues that queer corporealities were made not in opposition
to regimes of U.S. citizenship, but
in dialectic relationship with them. Located
temporally in the years between 1875 and
1936, the period of this study witnessed the
“invention” of homosexuality as a distinct
social identity, the increased emphasis on defining
normative American citizenship, and
the origins of the overseas U.S. Empire—
three processes which Skidmore argues were
deeply interrelated. In these years, individuals
whose gender embodiment was not
legible through the matrix of white heterosexuality
were under the constant threat of
arrest and violence, and were often discussed
in local and national newspapers. However,
these bodies were not always pathologized;
certain queer bodies were produced in
courtrooms, newspapers, and sexological
literature as laudatory examples of U.S.
exceptionalism. While the increasing use of
the rhetoric of U.S. exceptionalism justified
the new roles of the nation abroad, a parallel
discourse developed in the nation’s newspapers
and courtrooms to police aberrant
formations of sexuality and gender.
In order to understand why some queer
bodies were produced in the service of U.S.
exceptionalism, this dissertation reads medical,
cultural, and legal narratives of acceptable
(or what Skidmore refers to as “exceptional”)
queerness against stories which
pathologized queer embodiment in order to
unearth the cultural logics behind both narratives.
As becomes clear, acceptable queer
bodies were discursively produced through
the invocation of normative citizenship—
an identity implicitly understood to be
embodied as white, male, and heterosexual.
In contrast, stories of pathologized queerness
produced bodies which stood in opposition
to the positive values of normative citizenship,
bodies which posed a threat to nuclear
families (rather constituting members of),
were marked by their non-reproductive
sexuality, and, frequently, were non-white.
By interrogating the relationship between
the production of queer bodies and the
regulatory regimes of U.S. citizenship, this
dissertation illustrates the ways in which
Americanness was both allied with and
subject to emergent state power and the
cultural norms of citizenship entailed by it
as the imperial nation was consolidating.
GRADUATE PAPER AWARD
Larry Iannotti
SM Citizenship: Identity,
Behavior and the Law
individuals are facing prosecution and
discrimination as a result of their participation
and identification with Sadomasochism
(SM) while the law remains unclear in
its conception of SM as either a behavior or
an identity. Starting with a Queer Theory
analysis of power and performativity, and
utilizing Foucauldian definitions of governmentality
and citizenship – SM Sexual
Citizenship explores the aspects of power
and agency that run between the state and
the individual with regard to SM behavior,
sexual identity and the SM community. The
paper seeks to clarify the shifting and everevolving
boundaries between what the law
considers sexual behavior, personal identity,
reasonable state interests and the malleable
boundary between public and private. Iannotti
provides a background exploration of
the theoretical constructs of governmentality,
sexual citizenship and personal identity.
He then focuses on the development
and contestation of identities, names and
locations through which SM citizenship
becomes initialized, debated and formed.
Furthermore, he considers relevant case-law
and legal doctrine which has been applied
to some of the contestations and concludes
by returning to an exploration of the current
theorizing of sexual expression, sexual
identity, citizenship and governmentality;
revisiting the possibility of contemplating
an SM as a discreet sexual identity. Larry
Iannotti is currently a second level doctoral
student in the Social Welfare program at
CUNY. His studies have focused on the
intersection of sexual expression, the law and
mental health. He earned his Masters in
Social Work from Columbia University and
received post-graduate training in psychotherapy
at the Institute for Human Identity.
Professionally he has practiced clinical social
work in medical, educational and private
settings, concentrating on designing services
which meet the needs of sexual minorities
and transgender clients within such settings.
He is currently a member of the Doctoral
Students Council as well as fulfilling a role
of student representative on the Graduate
Center Curriculum Committee.
UNDERGRADUATE PAPER AWARD
(CUNY or SUNY Students)
Ahuva Cohen
Only Women Bleed
written twenty years after undergoing
male-to-female sex-reassignment
surgery, Only Women Bleed is Ahuva
Cohen’s reflection on her success or failure
in realizing wholeness as a trans-woman.
Using humor to mask hints of bitterness,
she confesses to certain regrets, such as no
longer being able to urinate while standing
up. In the course of analyzing her disappointments,
however, she recognizes that
her expectations of fulfillment as a woman
were originally formed from a male perspective
and were based on an ideology of sexual
performance. Having lived as a woman, or
more specifically by having experienced
the sting of job discrimination, the sorrow
of widowhood, and the fear of rape, Cohen
concludes that what she now shares with
biological women is not so much a vagina
as it is an acquired empathy for their common
suffering. Therefore, she may have
ultimately succeeded in achieving what she
initially wanted—that is, becoming a “real
woman”—but not in the way she originally
anticipated, which makes her life not much
different from that of any other fifty-three
year-old. Cohen grew up in Texas and came
to New York City in 1973. As an administrator
in Central Office and a creative writing
student at Hunter College, Cohen has
been a member of the CUNY community
for twenty-five years. Her current ambitions
are to complete a baccalaureate degree before
she retires and to write a memoir that will
be optioned as a made-for-television-movie
on Lifetime.
SYLVIA RIVERA AWARD
Megan Davidson
Seeking Refuge Under the
Umbrella: Inclusion, Exclusion,
and Organizing Within
the Category Transgender
given for the best book or article
to appear in transgender studies
this year (May 2007-June 2008) this
year’s award goes to Megan Davidson. Based on 15-months of ethnographic
fieldwork with transgender activists in
the US, Megan Davidson’s work details
activists’ definitions of transgender and
the identities covered by this umbrella
to inform an analysis of how different
understandings of transgender frame
activists’ efforts for social change. From
transsexual separatists, intersex activists,
and genderqueer youth to transgender
activists, gender rights advocates, and
others organizing within the category
transgender, the author ethnographically
evidences the political implications
of inclusion and exclusion in terms of
assimilation, social privilege, activist
strategies, rights claims and policy
changes, and the visions of social change
forwarded by trans activists. Davidson
has published parts of her dissertation
research conducted between the years
2004-5 in Sexuality Research & Social
Policy and Queer Youth Cultures (ed. Susan
Driver). She will also be presenting her
research at the American Anthropology
Association meetings in San Francisco
in November, 2008 as part of a 3-part
Presidential Panel on transgender
research and the connections between
academic analysis and social activism.
Megan Davidson holds a PhD in Cultural
Anthropology from SUNY Binghamton
and continues to be interested
in emerging social movements and the
politics of sex and gender in the US. She
runs BrooklynDoula, offering labor and
postpartum doula services in Brooklyn
and Manhattan (http://brooklyn-doula.
com), and lives in Brooklyn with her
partner and their two children.
n
Passing-the-Torch Award
Lisa Jean Moore
Sperm Counts:
Understanding Man’s Most
Precious Fluid
cLAGS is proud to announce Lisa Jean
Moore as the winner of the 2008
Passing-The-Torch Award. Moore, an Associate
Professor of Sociology and Women’s
Studies and Coordinator of Gender Studies
at SUNY Purchase, is the author of Sperm
Counts: Understanding Man’s Most Precious
Fluid (NYU Press, 2007), a timely contribution
to LGBTIQ studies. In her book
Moore traces the history of the cultural
representations of sperm as well as the
recent disembodiment of sperm in debates
about the use of DNA evidence in paternity
disputes, criminal cases (the Lewinsky scandal),
and the artificial insemination. Her
writing interweaves anecdotes and theory
to produce a compelling, engaging, and an
accessible account. Her study of the intersection
between sexuality and the body is not
only engaging, but also proposes a unique
interdisciplinary approach to cultural studies
from a sociological perspective. Moore
has co-authored two more books with Judith
Lorber: Gender and The Social Construction of
Illness (Alta Mira Press, 2002) and Gendered
Bodies: Feminist Perspectives (Roxbury, 2007).
She has also written about the embodiments
of teaching, lesbian and gay discrimination
in the market place, safer sex, and gendering
of social bodies. She is currently working on
two co-authored volumes, actively pursuing
research and community projects, and
attending conferences relevant to LGBTIQ
scholars.
n
Paul Monette-Roger Horwitz
Dissertation Prize
Tyler Schmidt
Dreams of an Impossible
Blackness: Racialized Desire
and America’s Integrationist
Impulse 1945-1955
this disssertation is a literary and
cultural study that explores the subtle
shifts in social understandings of race and
sexuality in American literature emerging
out of WWII. The dissertation considers
how these transformations complicate the
more public events of integration in the late
1940s and early 1950s. In focusing on the
more intimate spaces of region, neighborhood,
and home, and most intimately in the
libidinal urges found in poems, letters, and
novels of the period, this project does not
focus exclusively on the racial dimension of
integration, as many historical accounts have
done; rather, it considers the ways “queer”
desire—understood as same-sex and interracial
desire— in its more publicly articulated
forms fueled integrationist writing and
helped shape its aesthetics. Using archival
research, historicist approaches, and contemporary
theories of racialized sexuality to interrogate
the concept of integration, Schmidt’s
dissertation examines varied “integrationist
impulses” in eight writers from the period,
organized in pairs. The first chapter focuses
on Elizabeth Bishop’s and Zora Neale Hurston’s
regional representations of integration
in 1940s Florida. Next, the complex racial
and sexual subjectivities of the WWII urban
landscape, and the influence of integrated
artistic communities, are explored in the lives
and poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks and Edwin
Denby. Turning to psychoanalytic and existential
articulations of cross-race encounters,
the third chapter examines representations
of white perversity in the work of African
American novelists Ann Petry and William
Demby, locating their novels alongside the
era’s journalism on the homosexual as both
sexual and racial menace. In the final chapter,
the trauma of integration and re-imagined
identities of whiteness are considered in
novels by Jewish writer Jo Sinclair and African
American pulp novelist Carl Offord. In
creating these unconventional couplings this
project aims to spotlight the ways segregationist
criticism, whether by race or genre,
has obscured important and needed reevaluations
of post-WWII America, particularly the
convergences of race and sexuality in postwar
identities. Investigating integration as both a
racial and sexual phenomenon, Schmidt’s dissertation
documents the imprint of same-sex
desire, interracial sex, and queer configurations
of the family on the era’s desegregationist
politics and its literature. Tyler T. Schmidt
completed his Ph.D. in English at the Graduate
Center, CUNY, with a co-concentration in
Africana Studies and Lesbian and Gay/Queer
Studies, in May 2008. This fall he will join
the faculty of Lehman College, CUNY as an
assistant professor of English and co-coordinator
of the Writing Across the Curriculum
program. He has taught literature and writing
at Baruch College, the Cooper Union,
Bard College, and Eugene Lang College. His
essays have been published in Obsidian III,
African American Review, and Women’s Studies
Quarterly. Research interests include 20th
century American poetics, interracial cultural
studies, critical pedagogy, and African
American literature of the 1940s and 50s.