2013-2014 Coca-Cola Critical Difference for Women Research Grant Graduate Student Awardees | Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Cultural production is regarded as imperative for employment, economic growth, and attracting investment and highly-paid workers into regions. People are increasingly encouraged to become entrepreneurs, particularly women who try turning their artistic hobbies into livelihoods. However, few succeed in earning significant incomes. Aspiring artist-entrepreneurs create significant value for

communities while their own livelihoods remain precarious. My research examines entrepreneurial crafters to understand how their practices effect individual livelihoods and local economies. I consider the production and circulation of monetary and alternative types of value, hidden and new uses of space for craftwork, and multiple ways in which workers are governed.

“SKIPing Girls to an Active Future: The Influence of Project SKIP on the Actual and Perceived Motor Competence of Preschool Girls Who are Disadvantaged”

Young girls who are disadvantaged have significant motor delays placing them at greater risk of obesity and chronic disease in the later years. This study aims to evaluate the effects of a motor skill intervention for disadvantaged preschool girls on actual and perceived motor competence with the goal of remediating delays and helping them catch up to their male counterparts.

“Becoming Latino: Mexican and Puerto Rican Community Formation in Grand Rapids Michigan, 1945-1975”

This project looks at Mexican and Puerto Rican panethnic identity and community formation in Grand Rapids, Michigan from the 1940s to the 1970s. While male leadership was certainly present, women played an integral part in creating and maintaining the community. Through their interactions in labor, the Catholic Church, and community organizations, Mexican and Puerto Rican women helped facilitate the processes of Latino ethnic mobilization. They also defied cultural stereotypes of domesticity as they used Grand Rapids’ judicial system to force their male partners into taking financial responsibility for their children. The community’s survival and success rested with these women.

“Pathways to Shortened Gestation among Black Women”

One in six births to U.S. Black women is preterm, resulting in heightened risk for newborn death and illness and representing a significant racial health disparity. Mechanisms driving early labor and birth are unknown but may be related to a combination of stress- and genetically-induced impairments in regulation of the pro-inflammatory cytokine interkeukin-1β. Hypotheses related to this proposed pathway will be tested in order to better understand mechanisms leading to early birth, develop screening tools to predict who is at risk for early birth, and identify targets for new treatments to prevent early birth and improve maternal and newborn health.

“Forming Women: Children’s Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel”

This dissertation reconsiders the relationship between canonical realist novels and didactic fiction written for children and read by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British citizens. By subjecting didactic fiction to a structural analysis, it aims to more fully consider how we have been taught to read and how that reading has structured our gendered experiences with the world. By rethinking minor children’s genres’ contributions to the realist novel, however, it is also a kind of revisionist literary history that demands we take childhood reading seriously.

“Seeing What You Can Do: The Effect of Imaginary Perspective on Stereotype Threat”

Previous research has suggested women’s underperformance in science, technology, math, and engineering (STEM) fields may result from feeling threatened by the stereotype in society that women are worse than men at these skills. The current project aims to investigate how imagining past math-related success from different visual imagery perspectives (first- vs. third-person) can protect women against this stereotype threat and allow them to perform up to their ability.

“Shifting The Gaze: Displacing Androcentrism in Contemporary Italian Theater through the Translation of Emma Dante’s Plays”

The Berlusconi-Era (1994-2011) precipitated Italy into a time of acute chauvinism and sociopolitical-economic crisis. Women theatre practitioners responded to this yet-to-be concluded era of unrest with strength but they have consistently been ignored by Italian and Anglophone scholars alike. My dissertation “Seeing the Unseen, Staging the Unspoken:” The Gender Politics and Political Language of Emma Dante’s Theatre in the Berlusconi-Era (1994- 2011) will look at the works of Sicilian director and playwright Emma Dante, provide English translations of three of her most important plays, and analyze them as strong political statements against the severe androcentrism of contemporary Italy.

“(W)holistic Feminism: Porous Bodies in Gloria Anzaldua’s Thought and Chinese Medicine Philosophy”

This project will propose a (w)holistic feminism distilled from the convergence between Gloria Anzaldúa’s work and Chinese medicine philosophy to intervene in women of color feminism, feminist subjectivity studies, alliance theory and intersectionality methodology. This project suggests that although they are rarely thought together, Anzaldúa’s thought and Chinese medicine philosophy share in common a premise of holistic interconnectivity among beings that hinges on a permeable body interacting dynamically with all other existences. Through a decolonial translation between the two schools of thought, this project aims to amplify their counterhegemonic voices and legitimatizing their shared (w)holistic theoretical frameworks in feminist analysis.

“Making a Modern Citizen: Parenting in a Changing India”

My dissertation aims to understand how the social, political, and economic changes transforming Indian society influence parents’ strategies for raising their daughters. Though girls and women are disadvantaged in the public and private sphere, research suggests that patterns of gender inequality are changing and vary across class and caste groups. Studies from Western countries show that mothers reproduce social inequalities through their childrearing practices, yet we know little about parenting in India. By tracing mothers’ rationalities about their childrearing decisions and comparing these rationalities across social groups, this project will increase understanding of how gender is changing in India.

“Comparative Feminism(s): Transnational Women’s Activism and Organized Women’s Movements in Turkey and Egypt, 1880-1940”

My dissertation investigates the interaction between global women’s activism and the emergence of organized women’s movements in Turkey and Egypt from 1880 to 1940s. Previous scholars have argued for the significance of analyzing the politics of modernity, anti-colonialism, and nationalism for understanding women’s activism in these Middle Eastern countries. My dissertation shifts existing frames of analysis in two main ways. First, I examine the role of religious and secular discourses in shaping possibilities and limits of women’s activism. Second, I examine both transatlantic efforts to foster women’s internationalism between the “West” and the “East” as well as regional efforts to develop a Middle Eastern sisterhood between Turkey and Egypt. To carry out this project, I intend to analyze the religious dynamics in a set of vexed relationships among (I) Euro-American dominated secular and religiously-inspired international women’s organizations; (II) secular and Islamic Turkish and Egyptian women’s groups and organizations. Overall, this dissertation examines both western discourses about women’s movements in Turkey and Egypt as well as Turkish and Egyptian women’s understandings of their own movements and their regional interactions.