Aamir Mufti,
Associate Professor, Comparative Literature

Homes and Homelands: Gender and the Iconography of India's Partition explores the iconography of Partition in the visual arts and the ways in which distinct understandings of the Partition and its legacies can be produced through the visual image. The project is interested in particular in the work of Zarina Hashmi, an artist who has been based in New York for more that thirty years.

Hannah  Landecker,
Associate Professor, UCLA Center for Society and Genetics

Epigenetics and the New Politics of Prenatal Nutrition and Maternal Care examines the intersection of science and the politics of reproduction, looking at how new discourses in the genetic sciences reconfigure ideas of the relationship of care between parents and their fetuses and babies, as well as the relationship of care between societies or governments and women of reproductive age.

Margot Quinlan,
Assistant Professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry

Regulation of the Actin Cytoskeleton During Oogenesis seeks to understand the role of the cytoskeleton in determining polarity during egg and embryo development. During early development, polarity is required for body axis establishment, the first step in developing the complex body plan of multi-cellular animals. We are currently focused on understanding the roles of two proteins, Spire and Cappuccino, which regulate the cytoskeleton and are essential for proper egg development in fruit flies as well as mammals.

Christine Dunkel-Schetter, Professor, Health Psychology Chair, Psychology

Robin Derby, Assistant Professor, History

Boca del chivo: Rumors of Power and the Power of Rumor in the Caribbean treats Haitian and Dominican rumors about the state. With examples ranging from the eighteenth century to the mid-1990s, the project traces circuits of popular narration as they change in meaning from one national or class constituency to another, and as they move from the state to popular sectors and back, with attention to plot, allegory, metaphor and formulaic elements such as condensed symbols. 

Eric Avila, Associate Professor, History, Chicano/a Studies and Urban Planning

Limited Access: The Gendered Politics of Highway Construction in Urban America
This project undertakes a comparative history of urban highway construction during the 1950s and 60s, after the impact of the National Interstate and Highway Defense Program, which brought the federal government into the business of building a national urban and interurban highway network. 

Keith L. Camacho, Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies

Between Okinawa and the Marianas: Gender Power and the Right to Speak in the Post-9/11 Pacific

This project conducts ethnographic research on the formation of social activist groups in the CNMI, Guam and Okinawa during the post-9/11 era. The study is interested in the ways in which the creation of US foreign and territorial policies since 9/11 have shaped the conditions for militarization and anti-militarization movements in Asia and the Pacific.

Saskia Subramanian, Assistant Resident, Psychiatry & Medicine

Co-investigator:Thuy Tran M.D.

Lucy Burns, Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies

Puro Arte: On the Filipino Performing Body
This project traces the Filipino performing body in various sites, which include early American plays about the Philippines, the Filipino patron in the U.S. taxi dance halls, theatrical performances about the Martial Law, and the phenomenon of Filipino actors in Miss Saigon.

Nina Sun Eidsheim, Assistant Professor, Musicology

Michelle A. Johnson, Assistant Professor, Social Welfare

Jo-Ann Eastwood, Assistant Professor, School of Nursing

Co-investigator:

Dr. Noel Bairey Merz

Katrina Daly Thompson, Assistant Professor, Applied Linguistics & TESL

Dawn M. Upchurch, Professor, School of Public Heath

Gil Hochberg
Assistant Professor,
Comparative Literature

Queer Politics and the Question of Palestine

This project aims at closely examining the intricate and most complex dynamics defining the relationship between what can be broadly called “Queer Politics” and “the Question of Palestine.” The first goal of this project, then, is to highlight the importance of revisiting and complicating some of the more common representations of the Israeli Palestinian conflict through critical lenses developed in queer and feminist studies. Its second goal is to extend the growing scholarship that critically examines the interface between sexuality and nationalism, queerness and new modes of population control, by focusing on one of today’s most heated global political debates, which has nevertheless garnered very little attention and visibility within US queer studies.

Project update: Hochberg completed research for a special GLQ issue (to appear as volume 16.4 in Winter 2010) entitled Queer Politics and the Question of Palestine and completed an essay, “Waked Sharif’s Chic Point: Fashion for an Israeli Checkpoint,” for inclusion in the issue. The volume currently includes essays by Amalia Ziv, Rebecca Stein, Samar Habib, Amal Mirah, and Richard Jason, as well as an introduction by Hochberg, which situates the project in a broader frame in relation to both recent postcolonial queer projects and recent studies of the Israeli Palestinian conflict

VIDEO of her presentation at Works In Progress II is now available upon request via cswpubs@women.ucla.edu.

Featured in the April 09 issue of CSW Update.

Susanne Lohmann
Professor,
Political Science

Men, Women, and Universal Higher Education

The purpose of this research is to argue that higher education not only creates human capital but it also shapes a people’s collective mindset. Worldwide, men tend to study “useful” subjects like engineering, computer science, and business, which have the potential to create human capital and economic growth. Women tend to self-select into the humanities and social sciences, which human-capital theorists like to write off as “useless” but which actually serve to modernize people’s mindsets.

VIDEO of her presentation at Works In Progress II is now available upon request via cswpubs@women.ucla.edu.

Project update: An article will be submitted to Foreign Policy shortly and a longer article is in progress.

Saloni Mathur
Assistant Professor,
Art History

Ray Eames and India

When one thinks of Charles and Ray Eames, perhaps the most famous design partnership in twentieth-century America, one usually thinks of their distinctive furniture styles, now classics of mid-century modernism. Less well known, however, is that the couple traveled extensively in the Indian subcontinent participating in a range of projects in film, architecture, and exhibition design in the 1950s and 60s. This "Indian chapter" of the Eameses' story has, for the most part, been entirely ignored by design historians in the west. Professor Mathur seeks to investigate this unlikely encounter between Ray Eames and the recently independent Indian nation-state, the former captivated by the traditions of the subcontinent, and the latter searching for a "modem" identity that could integrate its ancient history as well as its more recent colonial past.

Project update: Her research was presented at a public lecture at the Clark Art Institute and is being prepared for submission to a peer-reviewed journal by the end of summer 2009.

Mona Simpson
Professor,
English

The American Cousins (a novel)

The American Cousins will examine the nature of marriage, tracing the lives of diaspora Arabs in the United States (whose marriages were arranged by their families) and of their more Americanized cousins (who were the products of a mixed  (Syrian-American) marriage and who have married the way most other Americans of their generation marry.)

Featured in the October 09 issue of CSW Update.

Lois Takahashi
Associate Professor,
Urban Planning

Patriarchy/Matriarchy Versus Blood Quantum: Cultural Significance as Evidenced in Hawaii Land Commission Grants

To explore the gendered dimensions and consequences of this land governance transformation, this proposed project has three main goals. The first is to determine the gendered dimensions of land claims in the records of awarded Mahele land grants. The second is to explore the race/ethnicity dimensions of these gendered land claims by analyzing claims made by Hawaiians and non-Hawaiians. The last goal is to determine to what extent Hawaiian culture may have influenced the Western migrants in the Islands, at least in terms of gender mobility via access to land ownership. The study will consist mainly of archival records research, focusing on identifying gendered land ownership across the Hawaiian and the non-Hawaiian community.

VIDEO of her presentation at Works In Progress I is now available upon request via cswpubs@women.ucla.edu.

Featured in the May 2009 issue of the CSW newsletter.

Victoria Vesna
Professor,
Design|Media Arts

Science Games for Girls: NANO BIO_BODS

The goal of the proposed project is to develop a prototype of a video game introducing young women to the new sciences of nano and biotechnology by using creative strategies of media arts projects. See http://ucdarnet.org. The working title of the project is NANO_BIO BODS. With the help of creative programmers, the project will develop a flash game that will allow girls to create their fantasy bodies (bods) that are not based on mechanistic ideas inherited by the industrial age, but instead use natural systems frequently utilized by biotechnologists. The game will be responsive and interactive, with biological systems applied that will be developed in collaboration with our colleagues in the molecular biology department. NANO_BIO BODS will be web-based with a prototypical existence online to a small group of beta-test participants and ultimately become a multi-user collaborative environment where young women join a community of like minded peers across geographies.

VIDEO of her presentation at Works In Progress II is now available upon request via cswpubs@women.ucla.edu.

Andrea Goldman
Assistant Professor,
History

The Staging of Urban Culture in Beijing, 1770-1900

Before the modern age, opera in China was the mass communication medium of the times, as powerful in shaping and reflecting popular imagination as TV and cinema are in our own times. Andrea Goldman's manuscript, entitled “The Staging of Urban Culture in Beijing, 1770-1900,” uses opera as a lens through which to observe culture in the city of Beijing. The study shows that opera performance in the capital of Qing era Beijing was poised at the intersection of state power, commercial interests, literati discontent, ethnic identity, public and private life, and gender and class negotiation.  As such, the urban theater reveals itself as vitally important to understanding state-society relations and the mechanisms by which ideas and values were shared, shaped, disseminated, and contested.  Through an examination of the context and content of opera in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Beijing, Andrea Goldman's work illuminates relationships between culture and power in the Qing metropolis, offering insight into how the state and various urban constituencies (officials, scholars, merchants, and petty urbanites) partook of theater and the stories played out on stage and manipulated them to their own ends.

Project update: An excerpt from the chapter “Social Melodrama and the Sexing of Political Complaint in Nineteenth-Century Commercial Kun Opera” was published in the May 2009 issue of the CSW newsletter. Goldman also presented some of her CSW-supported research at the annual Association of Asian Studies conference in Chicago in March 2009. Will submit manuscript, entitled “Opera in the City: The Staging of Class and Gender in Beijing, 1770–1900,” for review in 2010.

VIDEO of her presentation at Works In Progress I is now available upon request via cswpubs@women.ucla.edu.

Featured in the May 2009 issue of the CSW newsletter.

Kerri Johnson
Assistant Professor,
Communication Studies

Studies on the social and contextual circumstances that prompt changes in the expression of gendered cues

Doris Troy famously sang, “Just one look, that’s all it took.” Indeed research confirms that meaningful social information is reliably discerned from just one look. Such information ranges from observers’ appreciation of social category membership (for example, race and sex) to their evaluation of more enduring traits and dispositions. Although the face has been shown to carry considerable weight in such judgments – conveying social category membership such as age, sex, and race – person construal
frequently occurs from a distance or vantage point that precludes face perception. Nevertheless, observers construe the identities of others with relative ease, relying on body cues such as shape and motion as a foundation for their judgments. The goal of Kerri Johnson's research project is to understand how (and why) meaningful social information can be communicated by the human body.

Project update: She is working on at least two empirical manuscripts to be submitted to peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Nonverbal Behavior or Psychological Science. The ongoing research has also been featured in a documentary entitled The Science of Sex Appeal that aired on the Discovery Channel and The Learning Channel.

VIDEO of her presentation at Works In Progress II is now available upon request via cswpubs@women.ucla.edu.

Featured in the March 2009 issue of the CSW newsletter.

Miriam Laugesen
Assistant Professor,
Health Services

The Politics of State Policies on the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) Vaccine

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a prophylactic human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine for use among girls and women aged 9 to 26 years in 2006. The vaccine costs around $400 and is administered in a three-shot sequence. Some say that the vaccine is a scientific and public health breakthrough in the prevention of cervical cancer. Others suggest that the vaccine is supported by limited efficacy and safety data. Overall, there are many unanswered questions about overall vaccine effectiveness, duration of protection, and adverse effects that may emerge over time.

Surprisingly, although there is great interest in this topic among policymakers, scholarly analysis of state policy responses, especially the extent to which laws have been passed (as opposed to being introduced), has been limited. This research project will compile a database of proposed and enacted legislation, and answer three questions: (1) how many states have adopted, proposed, and passed legislation requiring vaccination, and/or public and private insurance coverage of the new HPV vaccine, (2) what factors are driving the variation in adoption of laws in different states, and (3) how important has religious or moral opposition to the laws been in the failure of states to enact the policies?

Project update: Laugesen is working on policy mapping manuscript, a longer article, presentations, and an additional grant application. She made three presentations on her research: two internal on campus (CSW Works in Progress I symposium in April 2009, Jonsson Cancer Center), and one external presentation to a national meeting of faculty in the Cancer Coordinating Prevention and Research Network (sponsored by Centers for Disease Control and NIH).

VIDEO of her presentation at Works In Progress I is now available upon request via cswpubs@women.ucla.edu.

Kendra Willson
Assistant Professor,
Scandinavian Section

Name Law and Gender in Iceland

Language is central to the construction of gender, and power structures are reproduced in language.  Some attempts to combat perceived gender inequity in language have been criticized as superficial, addressing issues which have little to do with real gender equity.  Note the controversy surrounding the generic use of the pronoun 'he'.  In Iceland, a recent Bible translation attempted to implement gender-inclusive language throughout, with results which many deemed a travesty of both the Bible and the Icelandic language. An historical and linguistic perspective can shed light on some of these issues.  For instance, the English word 'man' and the Icelandic equivalent have evolved from a gender-neutral meaning of 'human being' toward a gendered meaning of 'adult male' over the recorded history of the respective languages. This development reflects general patterns of semantic change much more clearly than it indicates changes in the status of women. It is worthwhile to investigate whether people really feel empowered or marginalized by certain linguistic structures.

VIDEO of her presentation at Works In Progress II is now available upon request via cswpubs@women.ucla.edu.

Patricia Greenfield
Professor,
Psychology

Social Change and Shifting Women's Roles in a Maya Community

This project continues research in the Zinacantec Maya community in Chiapas, Mexico. Earlier research has shown that sociodemographic factors such as involvement in commerce affect these everyday practices, shifting socialization environments and developmental trajectories.

Project update: Ethnographic observation study examining the effects of urbanization on women’s roles completed and accepted for a special issue of Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. Ethnographic interview study examining perceptions of social change among the first Maya university students and among the first Maya women to participate as theatre actors completed and submitted for publication to the Journal of Adolescent Research.

VIDEO of her presentation at Works In Progress II is now available upon request via cswpubs@women.ucla.edu.

Martie Haselton
Associate Professor,
Communication Studies & Psychology

Changes in Women’s Sexuality over the Menstrual Cycle: Examinations in Diverse Samples Spanning Geographic Regions and Variations in Sexual Orientation

The fertile window within the human ovulatory cycle is brief: just a few short days.  This is the only time in which the event with the largest social and biological consequence for a woman—conception—can occur.  It would be astonishing if the psychological mechanisms regulating women’s social behaviors were insensitive to information about cycling fertility.  For many decades, however, human ovulation was thought to be concealed from everyone, including women themselves.  This wisdom is now being overturned.  On high fertility days of the cycle, heterosexual women feel more attractive, prefer greater masculinity in partners, and shift their preferences toward qualities thought to indicate good genes in mates.  General sexual desire does not appear to change markedly over the cycle; rather, heterosexual women’s desires shift toward attraction for particular types of men. Under certain circumstances, when near ovulation, women may be more open to casual sexual encounters.

Project update: Haselton will discuss the findings in her plenary lecture at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Conference on Evolution and Behavior (part of Darwin Week, a commemoration of 150 years since the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species). She and her colleagues plan to submit a report of findings for review in the next 12 to 24 months.

Rachel Lee
Associate Professor,
English & Women's Studies

The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America

The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America examines how Asian Americans reflect back upon a history of imperialist body politics that idealize the Western subject, not only by both abjecting colored bodies and fetishizing them as edifying entertainments, but also by erasing these bodies from the landscapes of imperialist expansion now adumbrated in the way so-called "terrorist bodies" are evacuated, worried over, and expunged, in the not so new politics of neoimperial security.

VIDEO of her presentation at Works In Progress II is now available upon request via cswpubs@women.ucla.edu.

Denise Mann
Assistant Professor,
Film, TV & Digital Media

Gender and Marketing in the Post-network Era—An Ethnographic Analysis of the TV Workplace in the Age of Wikinomics

This ethnographic study will analyze whether or not the traditional network television workplace is adapting to collective intelligence models when it makes and sells primetime shows to women. Previous scholarship has focused on online content/viral marketing strategies designed for the predominantly young, male audience of multi-platform franchises like Lost and Heroes. This study will examine a set of primetime network programs—Pushing Daisies, Ugly Betty, Desperate Housewives, Ghost Whisperer—designed with a 18 to 49 female demographic in mind, focusing particular attention on the network’s investment (or lack thereof) in interactivity. The primary methodology employed will be situated fieldwork (that is, interviews and observation of TV production personnel; TV studio executives; and  network marketing executives).

VIDEO of her presentation at Works In Progress I is now available upon request via cswpubs@women.ucla.edu.

Project update: Mann contributed an essay for a special issue of the Journal of Popular Film and Television on “Transformation of Media in the 21st Century,” under review. CSW funded research will be included in upcoming book, WIRED TV: Cultural Studies of Post-Network TV’s Virtual Systems. Will serve as co-chair with Henry Jenkins of a panel discussion of transmedia TV for Society for Cinema and Media Studies in 2010.

Patricia Greenfield
Professor,
Psychology

The Impact of Urbanization on Zinacantec Maya Women and Girls: A Controlled Case Study in Historical Perspective

Global sociodemographic trends include the expansion of commerce and urbanization. Since 1969, I have been tracking changes in socialization and human development across the generations, as a Zinacantec Maya community in Chiapas, Mexico made the economic transition from agriculture to commerce. Past intergenerational comparison has shown that engagement in commercial activities makes learners more independent of their teachers in informal settings, while making cognitive processes more abstract and adapted to solving novel problems. In Summer 2007, a unique opportunity arose for a controlled, systematic case study concerning the impact of urbanization on the roles of Zinacantec Maya girls and women. My presentation will focus on the first report of this new study.

Juliet Williams
Associate Professor,
Women’s Studies Program

Making a Difference: Narratives of Sex Difference in Single-Sex Education Debates

Over the past two decades, the number of public primary and secondary schools in the United States offering single-sex educational opportunities has risen dramatically. This talk explores the significance of shifting narratives of sex difference animating the movement for single-sex public education. While earlier single-sex initiatives were introduced in the context of pedagogical reforms emphasizing social justice, today the accent in single-sex education debates increasingly is placed on assertions of "natural," "hard-wired," "genetic," and "biological" sex differenes. Adopting an intersectional approach, this project considers both the political and pedagogical stakes of changing conceptions of the basis and rationale for sex-segregation in public schools.

Elisabeth Le Guin
Associate Professor,
Musicology

Jácaras and Tonadillas: Female Musical Ruffians in Early Modern Spain

Andrea Kasko
Assistant Professor,
Bioengineering/Biomedical Engineering

Synthetic Immunotherapeutic Agents to Target Cancer

We are interested in developing cancer treatments which elicit an immune response from the body.  We are specifically targeting breast cancer cells using a receptor that is know to bind to a specific protein fragment.  By conjugating this protein fragment to molecules known to incite an immune response, we hope to stimulate the immune system to kill the cancerous cells.  By enlisting a patient's own immune system to fight cancer, we hope for a more effective, less invasive treatment for cancer, whether alone or in combination with other therapies such as surgery and radiation.

Mignon R. Moore
Assistant Professor,
Sociology

Two Sides of the Same Coin: Shifting the (Racial) Lens in the Study of Lesbian Practice

Collectivist feminist ideologies drawn from the 1970s Women’s Movement have framed much of the contemporary social science research on various aspects of lesbian social identity. This presentation draws from a three year qualitative study of black lesbian communities in New York at the beginning of the 21st Century to reassess many common assumptions about lesbian social life. It emphasizes four points of departure black women make from what the existing literature has assumed about lesbian practice, and suggests how a greater understanding of these experiences improves upon existing knowledge about the enactment of gay female sexuality.

Theodore Robles
Assistant Professor,
Psychology

Close Relationships and Physical Health: The Role of Gender in Biological Processes

High quality close relationships are an essential part of human life because they can promote psychological well-being and physical health. The flip side is also true; unsatisfactory and distressed close relationships promote low psychological well-being and harm physical health. The links between the quality close relationships and health tend to be more important for women compared to men. That is, women's health is more adversely affected by being in a distressed relationship compared to men's health. This talk will discuss findings from Dr. Robles' laboratory that shed light on the biological processes that play a role in explaining gender differences in the effects of relationship quality on health.

Featured in the June 08 issue of CSW Update.

Yu Huang
Assistant Professor,
Material Science and Engineering

Discover the Principles of Pathological Biomineralization

Prof Huang is in the news: Professor receives government's highest honor for young engineers, scientists

Carol Pavlish
Assistant Professor,
School of Nursing

Community Perspectives on Human and People’s Rights, Justice, and their Relationship to Gender-based Violence and Health in Post-Conflict Settings

This community-based, collaborative, and interdisciplinary four-phase research project aims to address gender-based violence (GBV) among displaced women in the post-conflict settings of Rwanda and South Sudan. Violence against women is most often associated with gender inequality and lack of respect for women's human rights; GBV most often results in physical, sexual, and psychological harm and is closely related to HIV infection in women in many regions of East Africa. A philosopher and bioethicist, Dr. Anita Ho from the University of British Columbia, and a nurse, Dr. Carol Pavlish from UCLA have collaborated with local community development practitioners with the American Refugee Committee, an international non-governmental organization in Rwanda and South Sudan. The overall goal is to collaboratively develop an innovative GBV program that is community-based, respectful of local realities, and observant of universal norms on human and people's rights as advanced by the African Union. Since GBV is an experience deeply embedded in socio-cultural values and mores, potential success of any effort to eliminate GBV depends on gaining deeper understandings of local priorities regarding gender relationships, practices, and rights.

Ellen Dubois
Professor,
History

Oriental Feminism on the Transnational Stage: Attempts at Self Definition in the Interwar Years

INVITATION ONLY WORKSHOP

Grace Hong
Assistant Professor,
Asian American Studies

Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization

“Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization,” an academic collection co-edited by Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick Ferguson assembles work that addresses African American, Asian American, Arab American, Native American/indigenous and Chicana/o racializations in relation to each other, is organized around new avenues of inquiry in contemporary studies of race.  The essays of this collection take advantage of the opportunities that the different role of the nation-state and nationalisms under globalization affords us to truly re-imagine what kinds of connections and collectivities are possible, beyond those suggested by nationalist modes of organization.

Featured in the April 07 issue of CSW Update.

Abigail C. Saguy
Assistant Professor,
Sociology

Body Weight: From Feminism to Public Health

Abigail C. Saguy investigates how aesthetic and moral attitudes about body weight shape medical understandings of weight. Working from studies (Bordo 1993; Sterns 1997; Popenoe 2005) that imply that Americans moralize weight differently than the French, even while they aestheticize thinness similarly, Saguy’s project examines and compares US. and French news reporting on two medical issues relating to body weight: 1) eating disorders (i.e. anorexia and bulimia), and 2) overweight and obesity. Using “overweight/obesity/ obese” and “anorexia/bulimic/bulimia” as search terms in headings and lead paragraphs, Saguy studied a random sample of 600 articles published since 1985 from select U.S. and French newspapers and newsmagazines.

Featured in the April 07 issue of CSW Update.

Christia Spears Brown
Assistant Professor,
Psychology

The Experience of Being a Girl in a Man’s World: How Discouraging Comments and Sexual Harassment Shape Adolescent Girl’s Achievement, Aspirations, and Self-Concept

Given existing research indicating that girls’ attitudes about themselves become more negative and they begin to limit themselves academically as they progress through adolescence, Christia Spears Brown studies what messages middle and high school girls are encountering and how those messages affect their self-concepts, future aspirations, and views about sexuality and relationships. Her study focuses on 200 adolescent girls’ experiences, inquiring about these girls’ current achievement and future goals, their gender role attitudes, their attitudes about their self-worth and body image, whether they think their gender affects their treatment by others, and how they cope with any differential treatment they may encounter.  Brown believes this research will likely have important implications for parents, teachers, clinicians, and others who have influence in the lives of adolescent girls.

Featured in the May 07 issue of CSW Update.

Martie Haselton
Associate Professor,
Communication Studies & Psychology

The Hidden Side of Female Desire: What Ovulatory Cycle Research Reveals

This talk presents data from a series of studies examining shifts in women’s motivations, desires, and behaviors across the ovulatory cycle. Compared with other cycle days, on days within the narrow fertile window, we find that heterosexual women report increased attraction to men other than their long-term partners. Studies using full-body photographs and vocal samples provide objective evidence of ovulatory shifts in women’s behaviors. Sixty percent of the time, independent judges selected a woman’s high-fertility photograph, rather than her low-fertility photograph, as the one in which she was trying to appear more attractive (through choices of more fashionable and revealing clothing). Vocal samples collected at high fertility, as compared with those at low fertility, are higher in pitch. These findings overturn the assumption that human ovulation is concealed. They also reveal a hidden side of female desire that is most evident if researchers take ovulatory cycle phase into account.

Featured in the February 07 issue of CSW Update.

Maylei Blackwell
Assistant Professor,
Chicana and Chicano Studies

Transnational Organizing: the Emergence and Work of Líderes Campesinas

Utilizing oral histories and archival documents to chronicle the emergence of Líderes Campesinas in the 1980s, Blackwell’s work speaks to the conditions in which farm worker women and girls live and organize including pesticide exposure, a lack of childcare or healthcare, domestic violence, long hours, low pay, sexual harassment on the job, and poverty.  This study analyzes modes of leadership, organizing and pedagogy that acknowledge those multiple layers of oppression to create multi-layered forms of leadership and community empowerment.

Featured in the June 06 issue of CSW Update.