Hanging in there
A Note From the Chair: by Ellen Lewin
These are times that require patience and forbearance.
Almost every day we sustain announcements of cutbacks and retrenchment
throughout the University, responses to shrinking resources and collapsing
budget predictions. But these setbacks recede into relative insignificance
compared to the fresh catastrophes that we read of each day in our newspapers:
the bloodshed in the Middle East, the continuing violence in Afghanistan
and elsewhere where the military response to September 11th is being pursued.
Before starting to write this piece this morning, I watched the ceremony
held in New York City to mark the six-month anniversary of the terrorist
attack on the World Trade Centers, and I found myself mourning again the
loss of the world we knew before that terrible day. While it would be
excessive to claim that the collapse of those always controversial towers
signaled the collapse of everything else, I think it's not going too far
to say that we are operating in a very different climate from that which
existed just six months ago.
How have these events affected the world of
the Women's Studies Department at the University of Iowa? Most obviously,
we are faced with economic challenges that were not on our horizon before
September 11th. Although we live surrounded by cornfields a thousand miles
from New York City, the attacks have had reverberations on the economy
that are staggering, and which will not soon be resolved; the fiscal crisis
in Iowa cannot be understood apart from national and international events.
But beyond this, our links to the rest of the world are highlighted as
never before. We all "knew" that we lived in a global system,
that our lives were woven together with those of people we never met and
never would meet, but these relationships and networks have become much
more tangible, more immediate and believable in the months since the attacks.
So have our links across our nation and the world; whatever isolation,
separateness, and difference we may have experienced or claimed before,
we have had drastically to revise our notions of how we are situated in
the world, as human beings and as persons of conscience, as well as women
and feminists and scholars.
This brings me back to the various setbacks
and difficulties we face now. We clearly will have fewer financial and
human resources to deploy in 2002-2003 than we did even a year earlier,
but I think we are also wiser and more focused. Our graduate program is
beginning to mature as we accept our fifth cohort of new students, a group
that promises to broaden and diversify our academic community. Three students
have passed their comprehensive exams and one has had her dissertation
proposal approved. Our undergraduate major is up and running, with more
than 30 students declared and others moving toward doing so.
While we have not been able to replace any
of the faculty members we have lost in the past two years, and must manage
with two of our full professors also chairing other departments, we will
have two visiting faculty next year (jointly with Anthropology) who will
enrich our curriculum and enliven our community. We continue to reach
out to feminist scholars in other departments and hope to draw many of
them into the Women's Studies orbit in the next year, even if such ties
are not institutional or formalized. We continue our efforts to solidify
our programs-to work the kinks out of our earliest efforts-as doctoral
study in Women's Studies becomes less of an experiment and grows to be
a more familiar part of the academic landscape. We will turn our attention
to solidifying the new undergraduate curriculum and to adding opportunities
for experiential learning that will allow our majors and minors to do
things with Women's Studies scholarship we might never have imagined.
We are holding steady in an unsteady world.
NEW! Women's Studies BA Degree
by Jael Silliman
We now have an undergraduate major with thirty
students declaring Women's Studies as their major. Twelve of those thirty
are honors students. Our students are interested in pursuing many of the
areas of specialization we offer which includes a specialization in Literature,
Culture and Media, US Women's Issues, Gender and Sexuality, International
and Development Issues as well as women's history. Though we are only
in our first year we have several seniors who have been accumulating courses
in Women's Studies as they knew the major was in the making.
Meanwhile, we faculty members are very busy
learning the ropes of running a major and advising students. Last semester
and this semester, as the Undergraduate Advisor, I had the opportunity
to meet with many of the students and I look forward to working with them
again this Spring as they decide their courses for the next year. Several
of our faculty members are working with our students on independent studies
or senior projects. We are grateful to Florence Boos of the English Department
for working with Teresa Thomas, a graduating senior, on her final project.
Several new undergraduate courses are being developed. I offered a new
course Girl Speak: Voices From Around the World to introduce students
across the campus to Women's Studies as well as give them an international
perspective on this set of issues. The class is running well and is at
maximum capacity. We are also in the process of developing Gender, Race
and Class, a core course, as a GER course. Next year we will offer a senior
research seminar that will be run by Florence Babb. This summer we will
be offering three women's studies courses, in addition to several cross-listed
courses (see list on page 8).
This semester we offered our students a seminar
on internship possibilities which was run by Kelly Cleary from the Career
Services office. She will be available to advise our undergraduates on
internships available for Women's Studies students. This summer she will
reach out to a number of women's organizations to see whether they offer
internships that would meet the needs of our students.
We are off to a good start.
Congratulations!
Congratulations to our scholarship winners!
Jillian Duquaine is the winner of the Jane A. Weiss Memorial Dissertation
Scholarship, which is given to a Ph.D. candidate whose dissertation focuses
on issues pertaining to women and who has demonstrated commitment to women's
issues through activism in the University or larger community. She was
also awarded the Margaret P. Benson Memorial Scholarship, awarded by the
Women's Resource and Action Center, which recognizes a woman who is committed
to women's issues, diversity, and social activism.
Natalia Tcherniaeva is this year's Adele
Kimm Scholarship recipient. The Kimm Scholarship is made possible by a
bequest of Adele Kimm in honor of her brother, S. Conrad Kimm and her
sister-in-law Hilda Kimm. Tcherniaeva's research focuses on the construction
of gender in the contemporary post-Soviet, post-perestroika Russian culture,
and analyzes specifically the changes in the discourse on motherhood that
have been taking place during the last 10 to 15 years.
Lisa Jo Outlaw is the recipient of the
Johnson/Fernandez Women's Studies Scholarship. The Johnson/Fernandez scholarship
is given in honor of Ada Johnson, one of the first black women students
to graduate from The University of Iowa (1912) and Otilia Maria Fernandez,
one of the first Hispanic woman graduates (1924). Women's Studies has
established an annual scholarship for a woman student of color who has
taken courses in the Women's Studies Department or whose academic interests
include some aspect of women's culture or experience. Lisa is a senior
honors student in the Women's Studies Department, with an area of specialization
of US Women's History. She has been working for the last two years as
an Administrative Assistant at the Iowa Women's Foundation and is currently
a volunteer at the Women's Resource Action Center. She has worked at the
University and in the community at numerous efforts to empower women and
to create greater awareness of women's rights and achievements. We are
delighted that she has been awarded the Johnson/Fernandez Fellowship.
Since this is the first year we offer an undergraduate
major Lisa is our first undergraduate student to receive the award. On
receiving the award Lisa said " I am honored to receive this recognition
from the Women's Studies Department that has done so much for me. It has
helped me to find a direction for my life and work."
Rosemarie Scullion Receives
2001-2002 Collegiate Teaching Award
Rosemarie Scullion was one of sixteen faculty
members named recipients of the 2001-2002 Collegiate Teaching Awards for
demonstrating unusually significant and meritorious achievement in teaching.
The honor carries a $2,000 award.
The winners are named each year by the Council on Teaching. Nominations
are made by students, other faculty members, and department heads. Award
winners are chosen based on how their teaching and informal contacts enhance
student learning, an analysis of teaching materials and class activities,
scholarly works or creative achievements, and student evaluations of the
nominee's teaching ability.
One student wrote, "Prof. Scullion always was eager to listen to
each voice in the classroom, and soon we all became eager to listen to
one another. Her excitement for the course inspired me.... The focus in
her course upon students as peers in the understanding of the subject
differed from any other course I'd taken. We learned together, I felt,
and never was a question or opinion treated with anything other than honest
respect and curiosity."
Who Applies to WS at Iowa?
For Fall 2002 session we had 52 applicants,
of which five were accepted. They came from 25 states and the District
of Columbia, and seven foreign countries. Three were male, and 49 Female.
Global Feminisms Conference at
UI
by Jill Duquaine
The Women's Resource and Action Center at The
University of Iowa was pleased to put together a series of exciting events
which took place recently in observance of Women's History Month and International
Women's Day. Global Feminisms: Activism, Art, and Alternatives, a week-long
celebration dedicated to women, was held on the University of Iowa campus
from March 3-9, 2002. The keynote speaker for this event was internationally
renowned activist and labor organizer Dolores Huerta. The week's activities
culminated with the 4th Annual Sister Connection Conference, a day-long
symposium dedicated to serving women students of color.
Global Feminisms centered on women and the concepts of feminism worldwide
in honor of International Women's Month and Women's History Month. The
celebration featured presentations by students and faculty, as well as
music and art by local women artists. In addition, the Global Feminisms
series served as a supplement to two courses that Dr. Jael Silliman is
currently teaching through the Women's Studies Department.
Conference themes included Feminisms in Europe, Feminisms in India, Feminisms
in the Americas, Feminisms in Africa, and Feminisms in Oceania. In addition
to more traditionally "academic" lectures, university and community
members also participated in a variety of workshops as well as the Global
Feminisms film festival which included titles such as The Sealed Soil,
Under One Sky, 5 Girls, and others.
Dolores Huerta gave the keynote address on Wednesday, March 6 on issues
of labor, women, and society. Ms. Huerta has been actively involved with
the labor movement, civil rights, and women's rights in the United States
for the past several decades. In addition to co-founding the United Farm
Workers of America (UFW) with Cesar Chavez, she also negotiated the first
UFW contract with a vintner in 1966, marking the first time in US history
that a farm workers' committee negotiated a contract with agribusiness.
Since that time, she has been instrumental in the farm workers' struggle
and has been a successful lobbyist for union causes in Washington, D.C.
In addition, she has founded a variety of workers' pension funds as well
as women's rights organizations and medical clinics.
The final day of the series was devoted to Sister Connection, WRAC's annual
conference designed especially to address the needs and interests of women
students of color, including international women students of color. The
featured speaker was Dr. Jean Jew, Professor of Anatomy in the UI College
of Medicine. As in previous years, the conference provided an opportunity
for participants to:
· Develop and enhance collaborative relationships
· Inspire and nurture one another in academic fields and leadership
roles
· Acquire knowledge of potential resources needed to succeed in
light of the various forms of discrimination faced as women and as women
of color
· Provide a network of support and a forum for addressing social
and educational issues at the university and in the community at large
The Women's Studies Department was proud to co-sponsor these events, and
Women's Studies students and faculty were important to the success of
Global Feminisms. Women's Studies Ph.D. Candidate Jillian M. Duquaine
was co-organizer of the conference with Sam Lopez, Ph.D. candidate in
the UI Department of English. In addition, graduate students Elise Lobue
and Sandi Solis presented their research at the conference, as did faculty
member Jael Silliman.
Student News
Jill Duquaine's dissertation proposal,
"Teaching and Learning about Motherhood Community Organizations,
Pedagogy, and Ideologies of Motherhood in a Midwestern Community"
was recently approved by her dissertation committee and she is now dissertating!!
Jill recently won two scholarships - The Jane A. Weiss Memorial Dissertation
Scholarship, and The Margaret P. Benson Memorial Scholarship for a graduate
students, and was co-organizer of the Global Feminisms conference.
Michelle (Shell) Feijo has been accepted
to present at the 25th anniversary NWSA conference in Las Vegas. Her paper
is titled, "Prostitution; Personal Empowerment? Or, Sex Work as a
Means to Climb the Class Ladder."
Shell has also been accepted to present at the Association for Research
on Mothering Conference for their "Mothering in the Academe"
conference in Toronto this May. Her presentation is entitled, "Mother/Student/Money
Memoirs Class
and Motherhood in the Academy."
Elise LoBue presented her research on
women's activism in Kazakhstan at the Global Feminisms Conference (see
above article).
Faculty News
Florence Babb announces publication
of her co-edited special issue of the journal Latin American Perspectives
on "Gender and Same-Sex Desire." Historian James Green and Florence
are the co-editors and they co-authored the introduction. This came out
in the March-April issue.
Melissa Deem is teaching Feminist Foundations
II this spring and is developing a new undergraduate course titled, "Gender
Controversies in U.S. Public Culture." Melissa serves as chair of
the Critical Cultural Studies Division of the National Communication Association.
She is editing a forum on Michael Warner's Publics and Counter Publics
which will appear in the Quarterly Journal of Speech this fall. She will
present "Corporealizing Publics Minor Rhetorics and the Possibilities
of Live Politics" at the International Society for the Study of Argument
in Amsterdam this June.
Rosemarie Scullion organized a panel
on "Transatlantic Solidarity and Problems of
Globalization" for the MLA Annual meeting in New Orleans, December
2001. She also put together a Panel for the upcoming Twentieth-Century
French and Francophone Studies Conference in Hartford, Connecticut entitled
"History in French Cinema."
She will also deliver a paper on "The Spanish Civil War in French
Cinema" at that same conference.
Rosemarie is also serving on the organizing committee of a national conference,
jointly sponsored by the Modern Language Association and New York University
entitled "Conference on Relations between English and the Foreign
Languages Constructing Dialogue, Imagining Change" to be held April
12-13, 2002.
Jael Silliman "This has been a
good research year for me. My book, Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames Women's
Narratives From a Diaspora of Hope (University Press of New England and
Seagull Press, Calcutta) is now out and I have been invited to do several
presentations and readings at Mount Holyoke, Columbia, Brandeis and Concordia
University in Montreal. Policing The National Body Gender, Race and Criminalization
that I co-edited has just being released by South End Press (March). My
paper "Gender Silences in the Narmada Valley" has appeared in
Eye to Eye Women Practicing Development Across Cultures, edited by Susan
Perry and Celeste Schenck, Zed Press.
Last semester I took a group of undergraduates from my class Gender and
the Environment to the Women Assessing the State of the Environment Summit
at Chatham College in Pittsburgh. The students met leaders of the feminist
community and were introduced first hand to their work on a range of environmental
issues. This was a very inspiring experience for most of the students
and I hope I will have the opportunity to take students to such events
on a more frequent basis."
Visiting Faculty
Women's Studies is pleased to welcome two visiting
faculty to campus. Meena Khandelwal and Cindi Sturtz are
both visiting assistant professors in the Anthropology department and
jointly appointed with Women's Studies. Both are available for student
advising throughout the year.
Meena Khandelwal completed her PhD in
cultural anthropology at the University of Virginia in 1995. She has since
taught at Kenyon College and Denison University in Ohio. She is, in general,
enjoying her year at UI, and, in particular, her first Women's Studies
appointment.
Meena's book, which will be published by SUNY Press next year, is based
on ethnographic research in Haridwar, North India (1989-91; briefly 1997).
It looks at women initiated into sannyasa, a particularly extreme (and
male) variety of Hindu asceticism. Sannyasa is radical in that it requires
the renunciation of marriage, family, wealth, and social status for a
celibate lifestyle in pursuit of spiritual liberation. It is also radical
in its finality; it is not a form of religiosity that a person "tries
out" while retaining the possibility of return to worldly life. Although,
historically, women have been excluded from sannyasa, they comprise a
substantial minority of contemporary initiates.
Sannyasa is gendered in contradictory ways. On the one hand, women are
defined primarily as a threat to male celibacy and as symbols of all that
is to be renounced. On the other hand, sannyasa promises the possibility
of transcending all social and ontological dualities, including male and
female. Although concerned with rendering the phenomenon of female renunciation
visible, Meena is aware of the problems involved in taking "Hindu
women renouncers" as an appropriate category of analysis simply because
they are women. In order to counter any simplistic notion of a "typical"
female renouncer, she has focused her book on two very different figures.
Anand Mata left a husband, a job as head of a girls' school, and an activist
orientation to live a quite life of solitude and contemplation. She took
a vow of silence that lasted over a decade and has refused to become a
guru in her own right. In contrast, Baiji is a guru with two ashrams and
her own disciples. She is busily engaged in both ritual activity and social
service projects. Through the lives of these women, the book highlights
the eclecticism of renunciant beliefs and practices and the emotional,
agonistic dimensions that a micro-level analysis can provide. It also
stresses their shifting identification as women (opposed to men) and as
renouncers (opposed to lay persons). While renouncers do in fact transcend
gender in some ways, the society of ascetics in which they live is highly
gendered. Indeed, even among celibates, the requirements of female modesty
remain largely intact and are enforced by the fear of male sexual aggression.
Meena's work is not only offers a gender analysis, but it is also feminist
in orientation. She is interested in countering colonialist constructions
of Indian women as well as anthropological models that continue to privilege
elite male perspectives. The issue of female agency is central here: agency
that can be supportive or critical of patriarchy, agency that can sometimes
be found more in what women "do" than in what they "say."
Meena is also writing a paper on essentialism and another on arranged
marriage as a practice particularly identified with India. Having just
participated in two conference panels in female renunciation in South
Asian religions, which highlighted recent ethnographic work by young scholars,
she is considering an edited volume on the topic. She is currently teaching
Introduction to Women's Studies, and Gender and the Indian Diaspora.
Cindi Sturtz "My research interests
lie in the areas of language and gender, language and culture, masculinity,
discourse analysis, language ideology, and Japan. My dissertation research
focused on two closely related areas of research perceived versus real
language use and gender ideology with an emphasis on the male speaking
subject. My field site is the general Kansai (Western) area of Japan but
specifically includes men from the cities of Osaka, Yao, Kobe, and Nishinomiya.
Two papers from my dissertation are currently being readied for publication.
The first, "Regions of Masculinity Japanese Men's Conversational
Stereotypes and Realities" has been submitted to the book project
Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology Cultural Models and Real People,
edited by Janet (Shibamoto) Smith and Shigeko Okamoto. This paper shows
that regionality, a topic often ignored in Japanese (language) studies,
is a critical issue for any true understanding of "the Japanese language"
and its speakers. I have found that Japanese men encode their particular
values and perceptions of masculinity in their informal conversational
interactions.
The second paper, "Uwaki tte iu no wa attemo ii n ja nai ka? Japanese
men's conversations up-close and personal (It's OK to have an affair,
isn't it?)," has been accepted to the journal Japanese Studies. This
article challenges the stereotype that men do not engage in talk about
personal topics; it further shows, via a close discourse analysis, the
strategies that men use to sustain and maintain informal, friendly, conversations.
Future plans include collecting a matching account of female Kansai dialect
speakers so as to allow for comparison across male/female linguistic practices."
Women's Studies Receives Gift
from Professor Emerita
College of Nursing Professor Emerita Eva Erickson has presented the Women's
Studies Department with a marvelous reference work on the role of women
in the history of Chicago. Women Building Chicago, 1790-1990: A Biographical
Dictionary, edited by Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast, was published
by Indiana University Press in 2001. It is the result of more than ten
years of research, presenting short biographies of more than 400 women
whose lives helped shape the growth of Chicago. The subjects represent
women whose accomplishments were in the fields of labor, social reform,
medicine, art, music, science, education, politics, philanthropy, and
many other areas. Professor Erickson is the author of one of the biographies,
that of Rosa Lemberg, an actress, singer, musician, and teacher who was
born in what is now Namibia, grew up in Finland, and later emigrated to
the US. Professor Erickson, who is also Finnish-American, knew Lemberg,
and is the author of a book-length biography of this fascinating historical
figure. Professor Erickson taught in the College of Nursing from 1962
to 1977, specializing in nursing administration. Since her retirement
she has lived in Iowa City.
Summer 2002 Course Offerings
131:010:SC8 Introduction to Women's Studies
Vidya Kalaramadam 6/11/2002- 08/02/2002
6:00P - 9:00P TTh 61 SH
131:018:001 Women and Society
Ashley Finley 06/25/2002 - 08/02/2002
10:00 - 11:20 MTWThF 156 VAN
131:049:SC8 Topics in Women's Studies:Gender
& Popular Culture
Jill Duquaine 06/11/2002 - 08/02/2002
6:00P - 8:30P MW 105 EPB
131:111:001 Religion and Women
Kenneth Kuntz 05/20/2002 - 06/07/2002
1:00P - 3:40P MTWThF C107 PBB
131:125:SC3 Gender Controversies
Melissa Deem 05/20/2002 - 06/07/2002
1:00P - 4:00P MTWTh 14 SH
131:153:SCA Women, Sport and Culture
Laura Chase 06/11/2002 - 07/03/2002 4:00P - 6:30P MTWTh 354 FH
131:161:001 Women in Literature
Alvin Snider 06/25/2002 - 08/02/2002 11:30A - 12:50P MTWThF 202 EPB
131:161:002 Women in Literature
Heidi Johnson 06/11/2002 - 08/02/2002 12:00P - 12:50P MTWThF 204 EPB
131:162:001 Latin American Women Writers 3
Adriana Mendez 05/20/2002 - 06/07/2002 9:00A - 12:00P MTWThF 205 PH
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