2013 – 2014
GLOBAL CAPITALISM AND INTIMATE INDUSTRIES
Seminar Director: Rhacel Parrenas, Professor of Sociology & Gender Studies (Dornsife)
The 2013-2014 seminar will bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to advance the humanities and social science literature on gender, labor, and global capitalism. The seminar focuses on “intimate industries” in peripheral economies, meaning industries that commodify intimacies including affect, care, reproduction, and sex in the ‘Global South’. Examples of these industries include international marriage brokerages, migrant care work training centers, medical tourism facilities, sex tourism companies, internet pornography businesses, cultural tourism institutions, call centers, adoption centers, and surrogacy clinics.
Seminar participants will examine the distinctive elements of markets for intimate industries, and account for the construction of race, gender, sexuality and nation in intimate labor. Employing a multi-scalar approach, the seminar will interrogate the social relations constructed in intimate industries, such as relations between surrogates and mothers, care workers and wards, and migrant remitters and recipients. Seminar participants will also examine how the state regulates intimate industries, illustrating how state and transnational regulations and public anxieties that are gendered and racialized often emerge alongside the commodification of intimacy. Lastly, the seminar will explore how intimate industries reconfigure the political economy of globalization.
Seminar Members:
Rhacel Parrenas, Professor of Sociology & Gender Studies (Dornsife)
PROJECT: Global Capitalism and Intimate Industries
Katie Hasson, Assistant Professor of Sociology (Dornsife)
PROJECT: The Global Politics of Menstrual Suppression. Examines the international availability and marketing of menstrual suppression birth control as well as how narratives of menstruation and menstrual products circulate globally.
Chaitanya Lakkimsetti, Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow with the Gender Studies Program and the Center for Feminist Research (Dornsife)
PROJECT: ‘From Bars to Streets’: Understanding Intimate Industries Through Dance Bars in India. Explores media representations of dance bars and bar dancers in India, particularly how notions of “excess and extraction” are represented and how they are tied to moral panic and social exclusions.
Nathaniel Burke, Ph.D. student in Sociology (Dornsife)
PROJECT: Performing Masculinity in the Adult Film Industry. Through a survey that interrogates the working experiences of men in pornography, access to employment, pay rates, and job satisfaction will be correlated with workers’ demographics to understand how the industry (re)produces norms and ideals of sexuality and masculinity.
Feng-Mei Heberer, Ph.D. student in Critical Studies (Cinematic Arts)
PROJECT: Lesbian Factory – On the Production of Love and Care Among Migrant Women Workers in Asia. Draws from scholarship on global migration and neoliberalism, affect theory, queer studies, as well as critical race studies, to investigate documentary and performance videos on Asian transnational subjects and discuss the normalization of minority populations.
Erin Kamler, Ph.D. student in Communication (Annenberg)
PROJECT: Art, Social Justice and Women’s Empowerment: Dramatization as Research in the Trafficking In Persons Space in Thailand. Combines international feminist research with the writing, composing and production of an original musical based on the discourse on the trafficking of women in Thailand.
Demetrios Psihopaides, Ph.D. student in Sociology (Dornsife)
PROJECT: Producing Technologies of Trans Subjectivities and Defining US Citizenship. Provides a rigorous, empirically grounded analysis of how heterogendered, racialized, and economic anxieties converge in decentralized, state-sponsored arenas to not only construct the state and definitions of national belonging, but also produce the very technologies of subjectivities that produce a coherent sense of “self.”
2012-13
GENDER, RACE, SEXUALITY, AND THE POLITICS OF POPULAR MUSIC
Seminar Director: Karen Tongson, Associate Professor of English & Gender Studies (Dornsife)
The 2012-2013 seminar will bring together scholars, writers, and practitioners from a range of disciplines and schools at USC—from Dornsife, Annenberg, Thornton, and Lucas, among others—to explore critically the effects and affects of popular music in transnational and trans-regional contexts.
Popular music is catchy and crass, an infectious mass idiom that makes us dance, sing along, and purportedly abandon our cares. And yet for generations, across national and regional boundaries, popular music has also functioned as a barometer of dissent; as a call to rebellion, action and revolution for the disenfranchised. Historically, popular music has not only scored, but also incited transformative movements like national revolutions, as well as feminist, civil rights, and queer rebellions.
More recently, however, popular music has also been employed by oppressive regimes to subdue and subjugate so-called “enemy combatants,” and “agitators.” Listen, for example, to the heavy metal “blasts” used by the U.S. military during operations for the Gulf wars, or to the high-decibel sound devices used by local law enforcement to disperse protesters in the Occupy movement throughout the U.S., as well as in several recent uprisings throughout the globe. This seminar hopes to explore the full range of popular music’s political, aesthetic and affective incarnations, from its dissemination as a cultural imperialist medium, to its reclamation by communities for whom it may not be intended.
Seminar Members:
Karen Tongson, Associate Professor of English & Gender Studies (Dornsife)
PROJECT: Gender, Race, Sexuality and the Politics of Popular Music
Edwin Hill, Assistant Professor of French, Italian, Comparative Literature and American Studies and Ethnicity (Dornsife)
PROJECT: La Rage: Losing it in the French Peripheries. Explores anti-colonial discourses of rage in French hip-hop culture and literature, in order to offer a timely intervention into debates about the 2005 and 2007 riots in the French banlieus, or urban peripheries, and France’s “ultra-peripheries”–its colonial territories in the West Indies.
Kara Keeling, Associate Professor of Critical Studies, School of Cinematic Arts, and African American Studies in American Studies and Ethnicity (Dornsife)
PROJECT: ‘Electric Feel’: Transduction, Errantry and the Refrain. Ascertains what logics inherited from particular popular musics might offer ongoing efforts to renegotiate bonds, institutions and political possibilities shaped by the violences characteristic of capitalism, white supremacy, neoliberal multiculturalism and contemporary geopolitics.
Josh Kun, Associate Professor of Communication (Annenberg) and American Studies and Ethnicity (Dornsife)
PROJECT: The World Begins Here: Love and Death and Music in Tijuana. Tracks the transnational flows of culture from Tijuana’s founding as a family-owned cattle ranch in the aftermath of the 19th century creation of a US-Mexico border, to its current state as a chaotic urban sprawl of well over two million people. In these histories, Kun hears what he calls the ‘aural border’: a bi-national territory of sonic performance and listening; of melodic convergence and dissonant clashing.
Shana Redmond, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity (Dornsife)
PROJECT: Timing is Everything: The Feminine Antiphonies in ‘We are the World.’ Revisits this anthem of global “relief”–particularly its redeployment in the wake of the 2010 earthquake disaster in Haiti–in order to expose the feminized musical tropes that organize conditions of aid and aid occupation, which developed in post-disaster sites like Ethiopia in 1985, and Haiti in 2010.
Mina Yang, Assistant Professor of Music (Thornton)
PROJECT: Dancing into Visibility: Asian-American B-Boys and the Hip-Hop Trans-Nation. Situates her extensive research on b-boying in Asia and Asian America within the context of racial discourses in the United States and hip-hop history, and against the backdrop of emergent transpacific economies and cultural geographies.
Micha Cardenas, Ph.D. student in Interdivisional Media Arts and Practice (SCA)
PROJECT: Femme Disturbance. Combines scholarship, poetry and performance components to explore how musicality and figures like Janelle Monae and Ke$ha (among others) help foster antirationalist theories of genderqueer solidarity, politics and action.
2011-12
RACE, SEXUALITY, AND RESISTANT BODIES
Seminar Director: Macarena Gomez-Barris, Associate Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity
The 2011-2012 seminar will bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplines from across USC, to discuss the humanities and social science literature on sexuality, race, and embodiment. The following questions are of particular interest:
What are the ways that race and sexuality have been historically organized during colonialism and after the transition to statehood?
How does a lens on sexuality and embodiment open up analyses of twentieth and twenty-first century discourses regarding power, culture, self, rights, and security?
How is the body theorized in different disciplines, and what are potential new directions for interdisciplinary approaches to the body?
Broader areas of study include historical and contemporary approaches to racialized and sexualized bodies, including: visual studies, post-colonial studies, queer theory, reconstituted area studies, performance studies, critical security studies, and religious studies.
Seminar Members:
Macarena Gomez-Barris, Associate Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity; Seminar Director
PROJECT: Race, Sexuality, and Resistant Bodies.
María Elena Martínez, Associate Professor of History
PROJECT: Law and Religion in Colonial Latin America. Addresses the production of knowledge about the body through colonial racial and sexual classificatory systems.
David Lloyd, Professor of Comparative Literature and English
PROJECT: Four Poets: Violence and Sexuality in the Long Modernist Period. Reads decolonizing poetry to figure the conditions of the colony and the racialized self.
Jack Halberstam, Professor of English
PROJECT: The Traffic in Genders: Transgenderism in a Global Frame. An examination of the meaning of cross-gender identification within a global context.
Jih-Fei Cheng, Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies & Ethnicity
PROJECT: Parallel Dislocations: Bodies of Refuse. Focuses on the visual representations and kinship networks of various queer populations within the continental U.S. and Hawaii.
Gretel Vera Rosas, Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies and Ethnicity
PROJECT: Maternal Illegalities: Screenings of Latin/a American Transnational Motherhood. Analyzes undocumented migration, sex work, and/or trafficking through film.
2010-11
GENDER VIOLENCE AND ANTI-VIOLENCE
Seminar Director: Michael Messner, Professor of Sociology & Gender Studies
The 2010-11 seminar will bring together gender studies researchers from all fields, including scholars working in the social sciences, humanities, social work, communications, medicine, public health and policy, or other fields. Some ideas that may drive the work of next year’s New Directions Fellows might include:
What are the causes and consequences of gender violence?
In what ways do definitions of and awareness of gender violence vary historically and cross-culturally? By race/ethnicity, social class, or sexual orientations?
What is the social significance of symbolic forms of violence—in literature, film, music, video games, graffiti, or on the Internet?
What roles do states or NGOs play in perpetrating, tolerating, mitigating or stopping gender violence?
To what extent are campaigns to stop gender violence (be they local, national, international; be they face-to-face or through the mass media) grounded in the research on the causes of gender violence?
Seminar Members:
Mike Messner, Professor, Sociology & Gender Studies; Seminar Director
PROJECT: A comparative study of two generations of men doing feminist anti-violence work with boys and men.
Kim Shayo Buchanan, Associate Professor, Gould School of Law
PROJECT: The racial dynamics of rape in women’s and in men’s prisons.
Annalisa Enrile, Associate Clinical Professor, School of Social Work
PROJECT: Transnational campaigns against gender violence: a case study of the Philippines.
Max Greenberg, Ph.D. student, Sociology & Gender Studies
PROJECT: Feminist anti-violence movements meet the “health program” of NGOs.
Tal Peretz, Ph.D. student, Sociology & Gender Studies
PROJECT: Intersectional analysis of men’s campus-based anti-violence programs.
Alison Renteln, Professor of Political Science
PROJECT: National efforts that achieve some success in stopping violence against women: laws prohibiting dowry death.
Noelia Saenz, Ph.D. student, School of Cinema
PROJECT: Connecting contemporary Spanish and Latin American cinematic representations of gender violence with efforts to stop domestic violence.
2008-09
MEDIATED IDENTITIES
Seminar Director: Alice Gambrell, Professor, English
This seminar will bring together researchers in all areas of gender studies and/or media studies with scholars of gendered topics who publish their work in non-traditional forms. We will explore–in historical, cultural, activist, aesthetic, and other terms–how media and consumerism help to form such “identity” categories as gender, nation, sexuality, race, or class. We will also consider how the medium through which research is made public helps shape its messages: Why, for example, have feminist scholars played such active roles in interrogating and extending the appropriate vehicles for scholarly publication? Seminar discussions will also be shaped by the specific projects of seminar participants.
Because non-print publication is such an important part of this subject, suitable projects may include—along with familiar academic forms of publication and creative work–innovative mixtures of these forms. Media under consideration (or put into play) by fellowship recipients during the course of the seminar could include sound-based, visual, print, electronic, theatrical, or other forms.
Seminar Members:
Alice Gambrell, Professor, English
PROJECT: Mediated Identities
Velina Hasu Houston, Theatre
PROJECT: Writing a Woman’s Life: The Impact of Theatre on Identity Formation
Anikó Imre, Critical Studies
PROJECT: Transnational Feminism and the Mediated European Public Sphere
Tara McPherson, Critical Studies
PROJECT: Re-coding the Self: Transformation in the Era of Late Capitalism
D. Travers Scott, Annenberg
PROJECT: Electro-Sensitives: Health Discourse, Technological Subjectivity, and the Diseased Feminine