History of Gender Commons^™

The Disabling Nature Of The Hiv / Aids Discourse Among Hbcu Students: How Postcolonial Racial Identities And Gender Expectations Influence Hiv Prevention Attitudes And Sexual Risk-Taking, Bruce H. Wade

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This analysis reveals how some African American college students respond to the discourse on HIV / AIDS as a social disability. The methodology includes surveys (n = 217), focus groups and interviews with convenience samples of students attending a consortium of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the U.S. The findings show that the perceived risk of HIV is high in this community, that nearly half of students use condoms inconsistently even though they are well aware of the risks of unprotected sex and their levels of HIV / AIDS knowledge are high. Social stigma, gender role expectations, an …

The Technology Of Immortality, The Soul, And Human Identity, Richard A. Jones

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In this paper, I argue that human beings will soon achieve immortality, but that that immortality will be neither the theistic promise of resurrection of the body nor the soul. Rather, I suggest that technological immortality—the ability through pure techné to reproduce any human life ever lived—is not only possible, but inevitable. Moreover, more than a cursory survey of the biological sciences, computer technology, and fictive literature, this essay also examines the normative dimensions of this near-future reality; ought we or ought we not?

Editorial, Pushpa Parekh

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

No abstract provided.

Disability As Embodied Memory? A Question Of Identity For The Amputees Of Sierra Leone, Maria Berghs

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This paper examines the problematic construction of amputee identity in Sierra Leone society after the decade long civil war through discourses and imagery of amputees presented in the media. Empowerment by NGO’s and other charities lead to a reaffirmation of amputee identity in which notions of class, ethnicity, and age may not play a big role, but gender certainly remains a relevant cultural marker.

Isolation And Companionship: Disability In Australian (Post) Colonial Cinema, Kathleen Ellis

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Despite reflecting a postcolonial rethinking of identity throughout the 1990s, disability was positioned as ‘Other’ in Australian national cinema. The intersection between culture, gender, nationality, and disability is evident in films located in traditional colonial spaces (The Well, The Piano). This article concentrates on the fascination 1990s Australian filmmakers had with disabled women; otherwise strong characters who redundantly fulfill cultural expectations of femininity. A disability perspective illustrates the link between disability and sexism in Australian Cinema.

I Don’T Ask God To Move The Mountain, Just Give Me The Strength To Climb It”: Disability Stories Of Southern Rural African American Women, Aline Gubrium

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In this article, I focus on the life stories of African-American women living in a rural community in the South, particularly on their career trajectory stories. Life in this small community leaves little to offer in terms of work, with most women working either in a clothing factory in town, in the state prison located on the outskirts of town, or working in nearby University Town as nursing assistants or custodial workers—all jobs which rely on the participants’ strenuous labor and which often result in disabilities (often related to back or hip injuries) and the participants’ consequent inability to work …

Monsters In The Closet: Biopolitics And Intersexuality, Nadia Guidotto

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In this paper, I focus predominantly on the hermaphrodite (intersex, in modern discourse) and its relationship to other abject bodies in history to show how biopolitics creates and regulates populations of monsters in order to establish and sustain a particular structure in society. This particular structure is based on what Judith Butler has called the heterosexual matrix, which I will extend to include racial and liberal elements.

Review Of Kounandi (Film From Burkina Faso) By Apolline Traoré, Barbara Hoffman

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

No abstract provided.

Entremundos/ Among Worlds: New Perspectives On Gloria Anzaldúa Edited By Analouise Keating, Colleen Kattau

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

No abstract provided.

Cultural Rehabilitation: Hansen’S Disease, Gender And Disability In Korea, Eunjung Kim

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This essay explores how leprosy was used to enforce cultural inferiority, which resulted in the oppression of affected people in Korea. The literature shows that images of lepers as cannibals infiltrated family lives in the communities and made institutionalization inevitable. Contemporary cultural representations depict marriage between disabled men and nondisabled women as a symbolic bridge between the segregated space of "lepers" and the "healthy." Such efforts reinforce the normative power of heterosexual marriage.

Colonial Discourses Of Disability And Normalization In Contemporary Francophone Immigrant Narratives: Bessora’S 53 Cm And Fatou Diome’S Le Ventre De ’Atlantique, Julie Nack Ngue

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In this paper, I examine recent Francophone immigrant narratives in a disability studies framework to reveal the ways in which colonial discourses of illness and disability on the Black female body haunt contemporary discussions of immigration and integration. While these novels portray female immigrant bodies as subject to constant surveillance and examination within multiple institutions of ‘normalization,’ they also expose oppressive discourses of illness and disability in order to challenge the paradigms of normality and homogeneity which undergird French treatment of immigrants.

Vitalism: Subjectivity Exceeding Racism,Sexism And (Psychiatric) Ableism, James Overboe

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Liberal discourse has argued against the pathology of differences that stem from being gendered or racialized. Yet, liberal discourse continues to pathologize the differences that derive from disabilities whether physical, mental, and/or developmental. This paper considers the position of a woman who is the site of the coming together of being gendered, being aboriginal, and being psychiatrized, and argues that her vitalism that has been psychiatrized benefits her subjectivity.

Gender, Disability And The Postcolonial Nexus, Pushpa Parekh

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This study will focus on intersecting gender, disability and Postcoloniality nexus and will foreground the contributions to and interventions from gendered disability perspectives within selected postcolonial cultural works in India and the Indian diaspora, including literary works, films, performances and activism. The articulation of intersecting identity perspectives, inclusive of disability, is a significant though ignored area within Gender, Disability or Postcolonial studies. Bringing these areas together within the current modes of interdisciplinary inquiry involves crossing the boundaries of identity categories and cultural locations.

(Post)Colonising Disability, Mark Sherry

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Disability and postcolonialism are two important, and inter-related, discourses in the social construction of the nation and those bodies deemed worthy of citizenship rights. This paper acknowledges the material dimensions of disability, impairment -and postcolonialism and its associated inequalities – but it also highlights the rhetorical connections which are commonly made between elements of postcolonialism (exile, diaspora, apartheid, slavery, and so on) and experiences of disability (deafness, psychiatric illness, blindness, etc.) The paper suggests that researchers need to be far more careful in their language around experiences of both disability and postcolonialism. Neither disability nor postcolonialism should be understood as …

Making The “Unfit, Fit”: The Rhetoric Of Mainstreaming In The World Bank’S Commitment To Gender Equality And Disability Rights, Rebecca Dingo

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In the 1990s The World Bank president James Wolfensohn urged Bank policy- makers to consider gender in their development policies; in 2004 the Bank made a similar commitment to include people with disabilities in their programmatic plans. Examining materials from Bank archives and from “The World Bank: Disability and Development” conference in 2004, this essay demonstrates the contradictory arguments put forth by the World Bank’s gender, disability, and development programs.

"Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow: San Jose University 150 Years, 1857-2007, Danelle L. Moon

Faculty and Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow: San Jose University 150 Years, 1857-2007, Danelle L. Moon

Faculty and Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Naccs 34th Annual Conference, National Association For Chicana And Chicano Studies

NACCS Conference Programs

Sociological and Ideological Shifts: Chicana/o Migratory Movements and Immigration Passages
April 4-7, 2007
Fairmont Hotel

From The Cloister To The World: Mainstreaming Early Modern French Convent Writing: An État Présent, Thomas M. Carr

French Language and Literature Papers

The article is an overview on recent scholarship dealing Ancien Régime convent writing. Although nuns constitute a large percentage of the seventeenth-century women authors whose writings were published, except for a few figures like Marie de l’Incarnation Guyart or the Port-Royal nuns, their texts have been largely ignored, even by scholars engaged in the retrieval of women’s writing during the period. This is in contrast to Italian and Hispanic studies, where the contribution of convent writing is acknowledged as central. The état present discusses reasons for this neglect, the methodological challenges and perspectives for further research, along with a 120 …

Storming Politics: San José Women In The “Feminist Capital, 1975-2006,, Danelle L. Moon

Faculty and Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Young Activists And The New 'No Wave': Two Anthologies For A Feminist Future, Alycia Sellie

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Marriage And Marital Sexuality In Lurianic Kabbalah, Lawrence Fine

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The presentation situates the development of Lurianic Kabbalah in its context of sixteenth-century Safed. Focusing on two texts by Hayyim Vital, Lawrence Fine discusses sexuality and marital relations in Lurianic Kabbalah and among the Kabbalists themselves.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

• Ta'amei Mitsvot, Parshat Bereshit (Reasons for the Commandments concerning “Be Fruitful and Multiply”) by Hayim Vital (1570s)
• Sha'ar Kavvanot (The Gate of [Contemplative] Intentions, Concerning Sabbath Eve) by Hayim Vital (1570s)

Ordering Early Modern Marriage, Elisheva Baumgarten

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

In this presentation, Elisheva Baumgarten discusses marriage rituals as recorded by a seventeenth-century Jewish author of a book of customs (sefer minhagim), which became popular in the early modern period. Baumgarten compares Yuspa of Worms' work with materials from the medieval period. She also places Jewish marriage rituals within the context of non-Jewish cultures of the time.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

• The Custom book of R. Juspa of Worms (17th century)

Click here to view the video

Treading Water In A Sea Of Male Politicians—Women’S Organizations And Lobby Activities In Historical Perspective, Danelle L. Moon

Faculty and Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Naccs 33rd Annual Conference, National Association For Chicana And Chicano Studies

NACCS Conference Programs

Linking Local and Global Struggles for Social Justice: Transnational Chicana and Chicano Studise
June 28-July 2006
Hotel Fénix and Hotel Morales

Gender Mainstreaming And Integration Of Women In Decision- Making: The Case Of Water Management In Samari-Nkwanta, Ghana, Nana Ama Serwah Poku Sam

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Water, as a natural resource, is a basic necessity of life. In recent years, it has been recognized that community participation, especially by women, is essential to the success of water and sanitation projects in poor communities of developing countries. This research therefore focused on an assessment of how the conscious consideration of gender issues has affected the outcomes of the Samari-Nkwanta Water and Sanitation Project (SWSP) in the South-western part of Ghana.The study revealed that the involvement of women and men from the initial stages of project to the end helps to enhance more equitable participation and responsibility sharing.

Editorial, Zdenka Kalnicka

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

No abstract provided.

A Gender Perspective On Water Resources And Sanitation, Marcia Brewster

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Women are closely connected to and affected by use of, access to and control over water resources, including water supply and sanitation facilities. Drawing on case studies from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Asia, this article: analyses the central role women play in providing, managing and safeguarding water resources and sanitation services; examines the issues of concern to be addressed in order to implement a gender-sensitive approach to water management and sanitation; and makes recommendations for strategies to mainstream gender perspectives in the field of water resources and sanitation management.

“The Place Of Cool Waters”: Women And Water In The Slums Of Nairobi, Kenya, Chi-Chi Undie, Johannes John-Langba, Elizabeth Kimani

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

n this paper, we explore how women and young girls in two informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya, are affected by water in its various forms. We analyze sixteen focus group discussions with women, girls in school, and girls out of school, focusing on their unique water experiences and concerns. Drawing on the strengths of qualitative data, we thickly describe how women navigate the water challenges prevalent in the urban slum context.

Narcissuses, Medusas, Ophelias… Water Imagery And Femininity In The Texts By Two Decadent Women Writers, Viola Parente-Capkova

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

My concern is the way in which women writers whose work can be characterized as Decadent and/or Symbolist used the figures of Narcissus, Medusa and Ophelia, as well as the imagery of femininity and water. When analyzing this aspect of their work, I am looking at the ways in which these writers created and co-created the Decadent imagery, what strategies they adopted in their representations of woman and the construction of female subjectivity.