FaultLines, Spring 2010

AULTLINES F

University of California, Berkeley

News & Notes from the Center for Race and Gender

DECODING RACE

GENDER

TRANSGRESSION & DESIRE

Spring Edition 2010 Vol. VIII, Issue 2

Words from the Director: Racialized Nationalism in Arizona Center for Race and Gender The CRG is an interdisciplinary research center dedicated to advancing explorations of race, gender and their intersections by promoting innovative projects and fostering collegial exchange.

University of California, Berkeley 638 Barrows Hall Berkeley, CA 94720-1074 Phone: 510-643-8488 Fax: 510-642-9810 http://crg.berkeley.edu EDITOR & LAYOUT Timothy Charoenying CONTRIBUTORS Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Alisa Bierria, Catherine Conroy Sarah Jane Pinkerton Anna Sterling Jose Arias To sign up for our mailing list e-mail: centerrg-list-join@lists.berkeley.edu to unsubscribe, email: centerrg-list-leave@lists.berkeley.edu To subscribe to Faultlines send us an e-mail request: centerrg@berkeley.edu Be sure to include your name and mailing address.

CRG STAFF Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Director Alisa Bierria, Associate Director Donna Hiraga-Stephens, Program Manager Joyce Li, Admin Assistant Timothy Charoenying, GSR Sarah Jane Pinkerton, Intern Anna Sterling, Intern ADVISORY COMMITTEE Alice Agogino-Thomas Biolsi Steve Crum- Angela Harris Charles Henry - Percy Hintzen Elaine Kim -Colleen Lye Beatriz Manz Martin Sanchez-Jankowski Tyler Stovall -Charis Thompson Barrie Thorne Nelson Maldonado-Torres Khatharya Um

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ccording to the U.S. Census Bureau there are 2.1 million U.S. citizens of Hispanic heritage in the State of Arizona. Under a new law passed by the Arizona legislature and signed by Governor Brewer, each and every single one of these persons—child, adult, elderly, male, female—is now subject to arrest by local police, should an individual officer have reason to believe that said individual is in any way "suspicious" (e.g. a dark complexion or black hair, or even what the policeman perceives to be an “accent”). If the arrested person is not carrying papers that can prove his or her U.S. citizenship, they are subject to immediate arrest, imprisonment, and deportation. (There are also an estimated 460,000 undocumented—i.e., "illegal"—persons in the state, some of whom have been there for 30 or more years, and have been working, paying taxes, and in some cases serving in the military).

This anti-immigrant law was introduced by a white supremacist and Holocaust-denying member of the Arizona legislature, Russell Pearce. Rachel Maddow reported on her MSNBC show that the legislation was written

by Kris Kobach, who for many years was an attorney for the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an organization dedicated to maintaining a Euro-American majority in the U.S. FAIR was funded for many years by the Pioneer Fund. According to Maddow, the Pioneer Fund was founded 70 years ago to promote eugenics and has long supported research aimed at proving the genetic superiority of white people and efforts to promote the gene pool of pre-revolutionary white settlers.

Notwithstanding the legislation’s neo-Nazi and white supremacists roots, Governor Jan Brewer claimed that the law would be implemented "in a fair way" without racial profiling. After signing the bill the Governor was asked if she knew what an illegal alien looked like (which is the basis for an arrest), and she stuttered, "I do not know," but "I think there people in Arizona who assume they know what an illegal immigrant looks like!!" In other words, she was unwilling to say the words, but she stated that others would "know one if they saw one." Scary.

But, as we gaze across the Colorado River border between California and Arizona and

Professor Glenn (left) & Professor Cathy Cohn (right)

snicker at those benighted and obviously racist people on the other side, should we really be so complacent and sure of ourselves? Are we so sure that the same racist sentiments don’t reside in our own state, indeed in our own legislature?

Should we not recall the limp response of the University of California statewide office to the outrageously racist acts at UC Davis and UC San Diego just a few weeks ago? And where is the support from Californians for meaningful and effective immigration reform that could offer pathways to citizenship, or at least legal standing, for a large proportion of the estimated 12 million undocumented persons who reside in California and elsewhere in the U.S.?

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t may be hard to imagine how Arizona could out-do itself in terms of oppressive racist legislation, but, just as this issue of Faultlines was going to press, that is exactly what happened.

On May 11, Arizona Gov. Brewer signed a bill making it illegal to teach ethnic studies in any public schools in the state. The rationale for this gross intrusion by the legislature into school curricula is that ethnic studies courses promote "ethnic chauvisim," and racial resentment of whites. The primary sponsor of the legislation is Arizona State Superintendent of Schools Tom Horne, who is running for Attorney General on a platform targeting Mexican Americans and other minorities. Mr. Horne told reporters on May 12 that his next target would be courses on Asian American as well as African American Studies.

The new Arizona law prohibits any educational activity that is "designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group." The substantial Hopi and Navaho student population —continued on page 14

CRG Fall 2009 For um Ser ies

The Persisting Plantation: Laborers in the Field & Literature Dr. Sang Lee, College of Natural Resources & Dr. Alia Pan, Center for Race and Gender

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he Fall 2009 forum series concluded with Dr. Sang Lee's (College of Natural Resources), examination of an aspect of life that many of us living in the global north take for granted: the ubiquity and seemingly year-round availability of tropical and off-season produce in our local grocery stores.

It may seem self-evident that tropical fruits must be imported from tropical climes and are made available in stores for a price. However, hidden from the consumer is a supply chain which includes farmers, local and international corporations, government agencies, and third party certification groups which confers such ethically appealing statuses as "organic" and "fairtrade." Dr. Lee is interested in better understanding the influence and costs that certification groups exert upon the local producers whose interests they purport to protect.

GlobalGAP for example, is one of the most far reaching certification groups in the market. It sets standards on food safety, environmental

Dr. Sang Lee, College of Natural Resources (left) & Dr. Alia Pan, CRG(right)

protection, worker welfare, and animal welfare. Few would dispute the ethics of such certifications, but the effects it exerts are little understood.

Dr. Lee presents the case of Costa Rica's attempt to shift production from traditional foods to more lucrative crops like the pineapple.

Because their government agricultural agencies could not provide the technological support needed to meet GlobalGAP requirements, farmers were forced to contract private firms instead, and therefor assumed much of the costs themselves. Thus, while certification can help ensure ethical agricultural practices, it can

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

3 - 10

CRG Thursday Forum Series

8-9

Featured Working Group

11

CRG Spring Symposium

12

CRG Student Grant Recipients

13

Featured Grant Recipient

14

News & Announcements

15

New Faculty Publications

also have unintended consequences for small producers and farm workers.

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r. Alia Pan concluded the forum with her analysis of Gayl Norman's novel, Corregidora. Dr. Pan focused on the furtive acts of rebellion taken by the character, GreatGram, a slave in 19th-century Brazil who is raped and prostituted by Corregidora, the slave owner from whom the titular protagonist will take her name In order to survive, Pan argues, slaves must take part in the creation and maintenance of their own value as commodities. For example, Great-Gram (and later, her daughter, Gram) secretly pockets some of her earnings as a sexual laborer.

In other words, while still a slave, she is able to maneuver her situation to resist Corregidora by accumulating her own wealth. Pan cites this in order to rehabilitate traditional scholarly narratives of "complicity."

While the slave-plantation complex renders the slave's body a commodity for extracting manual and sexual labor, Great-Gram's actions suggest that submission is also an exercise of personal agency and survival. — Catherine Conroy 3

CRG Spr ing 2010 For um Series

RELOADED: Representing Asian Women Beyond Hollywood Professor Elaine Kim, Ethnic Studies

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n her 1988 documentary, Slaying the Dragon: Asian Women in U.S. Television and Film, Professor Elaine Kim, Asian American and Ethnic Studies, critically examined how stereotypical characterizations of Asian American women in film have evolved over time and in response to shifting cultural, historical, or political climates.

What are our expectations and perceptions of Asian American women in film? How do they influence the roles available to them in major Hollywood films? How do these roles in turn continue to shape and define our expectations and perceptions of Asian American women, and by circuitous extension—the roles available to them in major Hollywood films?

The sinister "Dragon Lady" archetype made famous by Anna May Wong (the first Asian American Hollywood film actor) for example, could be interpreted as Hollywood's cinematic response to rising public and political concern over Chinese immigration in the early part of the 20th century. Similarly, the ongoing depictions of Asian women as objects of desire and outright sexual fantasy could arguably be traced back to wartime encounters with American military personnel, and an increasing acceptance for once taboo (and illegal!) inter-racial marriages and relationships. Art, as the proverb goes, imitates life, and the medium of the popular zeitgeist was film. Not surprisingly then, the limited roles that were even available to aspiring Asian American film actors, were further limited by the prevailing stereotypes of the day.

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Professor Elaine Kim, Asian American & Ethnic Studies

wo decades later, Professor Kim has revisited this subject with a new 30 minute documentary tentatively titled, Reloaded: Representing Asian Women Beyond Hollywood. Although she is still in the process of editing and production, Professor Kim screened an early preview of this new work before an enthusiastic CRG Thursday Forum Series audience.

Part of the inspiration for this new project, Professor Kim explained, were her classroom discussions with a new generation of high school and university students whose observations and perspectives have been colored and shaped by global capitalism and the Internet.

Today—more than at any other point in recorded history—capital, people, technologies, and ideas can be easily transmitted and transported across national borders, virtually anywhere around the globe. Asians from divers backgrounds now live all across the U.S. and all over the world. This in turn has lead to the formation of new communities of color, and more nuanced definitions of what constitutes race and ethnicity. America has become more

racially mixed than ever, and old notions of race, gender, and identity have been called into question.

In light of the changing cultural and social landscape, Professor Kim wonders: How have popular conceptions for being Asian American evolved, and subsequently, how does today's Hollywood reflect these changes? What is new in film depictions, and what continues to be recycled? What interventions are being made in Asian American independent films and new media? In order to help answer these questions, she juxtaposes film characterization of Asian Americans between 1984 and 2004 with interviews with students and scholars; established and aspiring actor, directors and producers; and other experts in the field.

Unlike the original 1988 production which had required the generous support of a grant to fund, Professor Kim and her team of university students have been able to film and edit Reloaded for little more than the cost of a digital camcorder and production software. No longer the exotic objects of discussion, they have become the auteurs of their own racialized identities.

CRG Spring 2010 For um Ser ies

Decoding Desire: Race, Sexuality, Violence & Trangression Margaret Rhee, Ethnic Studies & Laura Horak, Performance Studies

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n April 14, 2006, Seung Hui Cho, a Virginia Tech undergraduate student conducted the largest mass shooting on a university campus. Thirty-two students would lose their lives, and many others be wounded before Cho eventually turned his weapon on himself to commit suicide.

To make sense of the violence, scholars, psychologists, journalists, and other experts turned to evidence from Cho's personal life. His self-authored images and creative writings in particular would capture mass media attention and in turn provoke nationwide public discourse(s) on race, gender, and sexuality.

Implied in the popular discourse was a less than subtle link between sexual and social deviance. Explanations of Cho’s "masculinity" as "gay" evoked stereotypes of lesbians and gay men as perpetrators of violence. Not surprisingly, the widespread magnitude of the mass media commentary of Cho's suggested homosexuality and its connection to the Virginia Tech tragedy justifiably provoked responses from marginalized communities, including LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) press.

Margaret Rhee, Ethnic Studies, analyzes LGBTQ publications such as The Advocate and the San Francisco Bay Area regional The Bay Area Reporter, which published headlines such as "Before Virginia Tech, Seven Killed on California Campus Due to Homophobia," "The National Day of Silence: April 18, 2007," and "Virginia Tech’s Gay Angles." While the articles are few and

Laura Horak (left) & Margaret Rhee (right)

for the publication of her lesbianthemed novel, The Well of Loneliness in 1928. Likewise, Doane has found that cross-dressing did not provoke suspicions of lesbianism in US film and film criticism until the late 1920s and early 1930s.

In her work, Horak traces the esbian film scholars of recent gradual shifts in coded sexual idendecades have been eager to tity as reflected through the changes claim the cross-dressed women in gender inversion comedies and of the American silent screen era descriptions of masculine women as early representatives of lesbian- in the film press, and exhibited in ism. According to Laura Horak, new anxieties around cross-dressing Performance Studies however, films in censorship documents. She this connection between cross- attributes the new connection bedressing and same-sex desire in tween cross-dressing and lesbianism silent films may be apocryphal. in US films not only to the Well of After all, dressing women like men Loneliness trials in London and New was a popular trope in US silent York in the late 1920s, but, more imfilm, with a wide variety of mean- mediately, to the influx and importaings, ranging from vigorous frontier tion of sexually knowing films, filmfemininity, to pre-sexual adoles- makers and actors from Europe to cence or fashionable androgynous the United States in the early 1930s. modernity. As noted by scholars Once cross-dressing became pubsuch as Laura Doane, the "severely licly legible as a lesbian signifier, it masculine look" in women’s fash- soon became readable as little else, ions of the 1920s only became a and thus retrospectively, the asexual publicly recognized code for lesbi- "cross-dressed" woman of the silent anism in England after the highly- screen era was retrospectively—and publicized trial of Radclyff Hall perhaps inappropriately—appropriated. sporadic, collectively they shed light on racialized gender and sexuality and its entanglements with narratives of citizenship and nationalism.

Rhee's analysis of the Virginia Tech tragedy reveals the complicated contours of sub-nationalist discourse.

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CRG Spr ing 2010 For um Series

Knowing Palestine: Islamophobia, Imagination, & Critical Solidarities: Dr. Hatem Bazian, Near Eastern Studies &Asian American Studies & Asst Prof. Keith Feldman, Ethnic Studie "I need to talk about living room because I need to talk about home I was born a Black woman and now I am become a Palestinian against the relentless laughter of evil there is less and less living room and where are my loved ones?

It is time to make our way home."

June Jordan, 1982 from Moving Towards Home

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n response to the 1982 IsraeliLebanese War, and the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, scholar, poet, and activist June Jordan responded by organizing a series of readings with other poets entitled "Moving Towards Home" in the fall of 1982. The forum was intended to challenge the silence on the Left about the war on Lebanon, and to define a political vision and stance against Western imperialism.

Confronted and threatened by a group of Israeli men at one of the receptions, and subsequently being protected and led away by a group of women, Jordan would later write, "What I find more memorable are the women of that summer, and of that November evening, 1982, the new women of the new womanliness who persisted against the male white rhetoric about borders, and national security, and terrorism, and democracy, and vital interests."

According to Professor Keith Feldman, Ethnic Studies, an analysis of the Israel war on Lebanon, alongside South Africa apartheid, and US military operations in Latin America, reveals a key ideological linkage between multiple global projects of domination. He uses the

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Professor Keith Feldman (left) & Dr. Hatem Bazian (right)

term "destinarian exceptionalism" to suggest that these imperial projects didn’t just occur at the same time, but also shared a common settlercolonial narrative in order to justify and normalize their projects.

By juxtaposing Jordan's expressed solidarity as a feminist of color with the victims of war and massacres, Feldman illustrates how Jordan used affinity and relation as a pathway to imagine alternative futures.

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r. Hatem Bazian, Near Eastern and Asian American Studies, continued the conversation with a discussion of how Islamophobia— which he defines as a contrived fear or prejudice fomented by an existing Eurocentric and Orientalist global power structure—is intentionally used and deployed as an instrument of power to maintain or expand existing resource disparities between what he calls the "epistemic global north and the epistemic global south."

To illustrate this point, Bazian presented the case of the documentary, Obsession. The documentary was funded by the Clarion Fund and pro-Israeli settler groups in order to weaken Obama’s support in key

swing states. 28 million copies of the documentary were distributed in Sunday newspapers as part of a deliberate strategy to leverage public fear for political gain by disseminating the message that if Obama were elected, the US would be more vulnerable to Islamic violence.

The fact that national polls suggest that close to 22% of the American public believes that Obama is in fact a "closet Muslim" is testament to the effectiveness of such tactics.

Islamophobic propaganda, asserts Dr. Bazian, creates the logic and justification for war and colonialism in US and Israeli policy. In an Islamophobic framework, Israel is considered the "last outpost of civilization" among the "barbaric" Muslim world, which legitimates the process of reintroducing and reaffirming social and political hierarchies. Obsession is but one example of how Islamophobia is leveraged by individuals, groups, and organizations in order to promote their collective self-interest, and perpetuate the "white man’s burden" of dominating, reforming, or eliminating Muslim people.

— Alisa Bierra

Speaking Through Silence & Erasure:

CRG Spring 2010 For um Ser ies

Race, Sexuality, & Expression in Marginalized Language Communities

Anastasia Kayiatos, Slavic Literature & Languages & Nathaniel W. Dumas, Anthropology nastasia Kayiatos, a PhD candidate in the Slavic Languages and Literature Department, opened the CRG Thursdy Forum with an examination of silent pantomime performances staged by the artistic avant-garde and "deafmute" subcultures in the Soviet Union. Kayiatos is specifically interested in performances that dramatize "blackness" or "Africanness" in order to better understand Nathaniel Dumas (left) & Anastasia Kayiatos (right) how Soviet productions of race turned on the question of silence, of the sub-altern; and moreover as dynamics that may exist between an and how this "silence of speech- a depiction of the struggle of black American Fluent English speaker lessness" was in turn inflected by Africa against Western colonial marrying into the American Stuttering English community. He uses figurations of race and gender. powers.

Banned under Stalin, pantoThe irony Kayiatos notes, is that the idea of kinship and marriage as mime underwent a popular renais- the Soviet Union purported itself to a point of examination in order to sance in Soviet Russia during the be a non-racist society. Racism was better understand how spouses nineteen sixties and seventies. This something that "happens over there, actively suppress, or erase, the resurgence had been greatly influ- in Capitalist countries." By tracing race/gender nexus in their soenced by visits from world renown the visual representations of race cial projects of constructing their French actor and mime, Marcel in Soviet pantomime, she hopes particular family ideal.

To conduct his research, Dumas Marceau. The Soviet version of to demonstrate that underpinning pantomime that arose in this era re- these and other performances is examined data sets provided by The flects a uniquely populist, Marxist an implicit notion of race and Caring Group of Stutters, which ideology. Pantomime was seen as a hierarchal order predicated on was created to promote the idea of stuttering as "variational duplicaan art form true to the goals of So- speaking ability. tion." He analyzed the language in cialism, and performed as a means to express in universal language the athaniel Dumas, a graduate an article written by a husband, an struggles of the "simple people." student in sociolinguistic American Fluent speaker describKayiatos described a panto- Anthropology, continued the talk ing his experience being married to mime performance entitled "Africa" by considering how the race/ a Stuttering English speaker. The staged in 1962 by the Soviet Ex- gender nexus is down played husband seemingly understood his perimental Theater of Pantomime. within representations of marriage relationship to his spouse by conThis one act piece was performed between speakers of American structing his identity around the by an all white corps de ballet clad Stuttering English and American notion of being the "moral spouse" in black leotards and white loin Fluent English in the United States. whom exhibits endless patience. cloths, and bound together by vis- Dumas describes these marriages as Dumas contends that these couples de-racialized their relationships by ible chains. According to Kayiatos, a type of a "linguistic exogamy." the performance can be interpreted Exogamy, in anthropological down playing the gender/race nexus on many levels: as a critique of terms means marrying outside of as inconsequential to their subject Western capitalism; as a showing of one’s group. Dumas uses linguistic positions in comparison to language support and sympathy for members exogamy to characterize the social component. — Sara Jane Pinkerton, GWS

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CRG Spr ing 2010 Featured Wor king Group

You Got Schooled!

Discipline and Restorative Justice in Schools Working Group A guest feature by Jose Arias, Graduate School of Education

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he U.S. system of compulsory public schooling has from its very inception consistently been touted as the panacea for all of societies ailments. Its origins can be traced back to mid-nineteenth century, Progressive Era concerns over issues such as the increasing presence of non-English immigrants; rapid urbanization; the proletarianization of families; and the extension of suffrage to formerly disenfranchised populations. School had been envisioned by predominantly White, middle-class, adult activists and reformers as the primary means by which youth from disparate communities could learn to participate in political and economic life as well-formed "Americans." A more critical interpretation however, is that compulsory public schools were historically utilized as instruments to discipline a heterogeneous and potentially destabilizing and problematic population toward the "healthy" and "objective" norms, values and rationalities of the bourgeoisie.

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oncerned with the current state of public education; troubled by its history; and informed and empowered by a decolonial sensibility, we organized the Discipline and Restorative Justice in Schools Working Group (You Got Schooled!). A common objective of our working group—composed of non-profit representatives, graduate and undergraduate student researchers, high school students and faculty, and independent documentary film makers—is to dismantle and rebuild the "metaphorical school house" with theoretical tools produced through a methodological flip of the proverbial script.

Given that school reform narratives have traditionally privileged adult voices and objectives, we have made the conscious decision to have youth be the guiding voice for reform.

The high school age students participating in our project self-select and identify the questions concerning their experiences in public schools. This in turn helps provide authentic contexts and orientations around which to build new theoretical frameworks and/or

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You Got Schooled! Seniors (from left to right): Matthew McGill, Shimera Perry, Nyema Coleman, Malikah Wilson, Mahoganie Bradley, Destiny Haskell

You Got Schooled! Juniors (from left to right): Diana Ritchie (undergraduate researcher), Ken Kubo, Callie Lapides, Grace Mungovan, Aaron Stein, Wawaks Perkins.

CRG Spr ing 2010 design pedagogical tools that will push against current problematic practices such as the sorting, ranking and rewarding/punishing of students. In short, we believe that this form of student driven research will best help us uncover answers to Du Bois' illuminating and possibly liberating question: "How does it feel to be a problem?"

One program we are documenting is a campus based restorativejustice youth court. We believe this is a promising, and potentially curative model for transforming hyper-competitive and punitive campus cultures. We are tremendously excited about the promise of this work

and the potential of these and other praxis oriented projects.

Presently, our high school age team members are interviewing members of different communities on campus, tracking how resources and power circulate, and documenting what/how disciplinary practices operate across schools. Over the summer and into the fall we will analyze our data. Our goal will be to produce two papers and a documentary film. ur working group would like to thank the Center for Race and Gender for its generous contribution of intellectual guidance and resources for our work. Alisa Bierria

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provided some necessary coffee and advice surrounding the project during a particularly trying period. We look forward to continued collaboration into the new academic year and beyond, and would like to formally extend an invitation to any scholars interested in joining our group.

If you are interested in participating in our working group, please contact Jose Arias at:

ocelatl@berkeley.edu

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Education Justice & The Politics Of Beauty: Undergraduate Research Mary Candace Full, Sociology/Education & Connie Chung, Public Policy/Peace & Conflict Studies

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rior to receiving her B.A. in Sociology and Education, Mary Candace Full explored the structural inequities that at-risk students at continuation public schools may confront. A major obstacle faced by continuation school students is the stigmatization of attending these "less than" schools.

Based on her experience teaching classes, conducting after school programs as well as student and teacher interviews, she devised a categorization scheme to character how schools foster student development.

In Full's taxonomy, "safety-net" schools actively try to cultivate student confidence and academic success; "safety-valve" schools provide support but to a lesser degree; and students who find themselves at what she terms "cooling out" schools are seemingly there to pass the time until they are no longer legally required to attend school.

Full, now employed as a teacher, remains a firm believer in youth em-

powerment work. She cautions however, that for this type of work to truly serve as a stepping-stone for social change, entire school cultures—not just individual classrooms—need to be committed and sensitive to the concerns and needs confronting teachers, staff, and students alike.

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n South Korea, one out of ten people will undergo blepharoplasty, a surgical procedure to induce a "double eye-lid" effect. This procedure is also popular in the United States as well. Overall, there is a clear and rising trend amongst Asian and Asian American women in particular to undergo this procedure.

Connie continued the talk by analyzing this issue in a thoughtful, rich, and personal way by presenting her research documentary entitled "Beautiful Sisters." In her short-film, Connie provides viewers a look into her personal journey and eventual refusal to undergo eye-lid surgery.

Connie Chung (left) & Mary Candance Full (right)

The film includes interviews with a plastic surgeon and Asian women who have either undergone the procedure or are interested in it. A striking moment arises when a group of Asian women admit to undergoing the procedure before their high school senior dance—and enduring weeks bruising and swelling. The film was inspired by a personal motive: to help her own sister recognize her beauty in worth.

In the end, Connie decides that eye-lid surgery is not a decision she supports, and that everything unique about herself should be celebrated and not changed. It is a message she hopes her viewers take to heart.

—Anna Sterling, CRG Intern

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CRG Spr ing 2010 For um Series

Black Subjectivity, Terror, and Comic Interventions Professor Scott Saul, English & Jakeya Caruthers, Stanford University, Anthropology & Education

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akeya Caruthers, a PhD candidate in Anthropology of Education at Stanford, continued the discussion about the political force of black comedy, exploring how the social location of a joke is critical to what the joke communicates and the political impact it has. According to Caruthers, observational comedy has long been used by black people as a strategy for coping with the Jakeya Caruthers, Stanford (left) & Professor Scott Saul, English (right) relentless, racial violence of early If Pryor led a double life in LA, American slavery. She describes “I was beginning to feel like a in Berkeley, Saul argues, his life how this kind of humor lays bare wind up robot comic, repeating was stroboscopic. The nine month the conditions of oppression and the same lines, getting the same laughs, from the same jokes. Being period was characterized by "dark claims knowledge over oppressors, periods of inertia and bright flashes creating a powerful recognition that a character man, that makes me of experiment," during which he threatens white supremacy. In part, come alive. You got to separate who you are and who the character developed inventive and risky the humor's subversiveness lies in material such as an autobiographical its hidden location—the joke isn't is. There’s such excitement in that real moment when you achieve that screenplay, an antiwar drama, meant for everyone to know or hear, stream of consciousness poetry, making it unnerving to those the character. It’s like being in your and deconstructed news of the day, joke challenges. conscious and your subconscious expanding the boundaries of what at the same time.”

Caruthers also discusses the Richard Pryor could be considered comedy. power of black observational In Berkeley, Pryor discovered humor that confronts the agent of ccording to Professor Scott other artists and a cultural oppression rather than remain coded.

Saul, English, Richard Pryor’s environment that supported his She analyzes a routine performed by evolution as a comedic actor was experimentation. Saul cites radical comedian Dave Chappelle, in which profoundly influenced by his time black writers Cecil Brown, Claude Chappelle compares the different spent in Berkeley, CA in 1971. Saul Brown, and Ishmael Reed—and reactions that he and a white friend believes that prior to this stay in their self-anointed "Black Pack"— might have were they to travel Berkeley, Pryor had lead somewhat among the influences that would through time and meet George of a double life in Los Angeles. For guide Prior's comedy towards an Washington. In short, the white example, even as Pryor would make intersection of race, class, and friend would choose to reverently cameos in mainstream television sexuality, and encourage him approach and greet Washington, programs such as the Partridge to take the artistic risk of using whereas the black Chappelle would Family or opposite John Wayne in the improvisation as form of political run in terror of being captured by Green Berets, he would write, direct, provocation. Berkeley institutions the slave-owning Washington. produce, and star in the racially and such as the radio station KPFA and Caruthers contends that this sexually provocative underground Mandrake’s (a folks-blues club) example expertly reveals the way in film Bon Appetit, Uncle Tom’s gave Pryor an important platform to which black humor has the capacity Fairytales. FBI files also reveal that develop comic material that pushed to stand tall in the face of terror by Pryor was working closely with the the boundaries of performance and taking it seriously enough to laugh Black Panther Party in Los Angeles. critical self-reflection. not only at it, but with it.

— Alisa Bierra

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Good Medicine?

CRG Spring Symposium, Febr uar y 17th, 2010

Race, Gender & Justice in Health Care

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he topic of health care reform has dominated media headlines and served as the focal point of heated debate nationwide. Even now, in the wake of the successful passage of a reform bill through both houses of Congress, considerable differences in opinion remain with regards to the potential costs and benefits that the enacted policies may entail for individuals and our society at large.

The Center for Race and Gender and the Berkeley Center on Health, Economics, and Family Security convened a symposium to consider the scholarly implications that the proposed reforms have when issues such as racial and gender equity, immigration, colonial legacies, or what we even mean when we speak about "healing" are taken into consideration.

Featuring Presentations by: Melissa Rodgers, Berkeley Center on Health, Economics, & Family Security (Berkeley CHEFS) Professor Cybelle Fox, Sociology Dr. J. Diane Pearson, Native American Studies Professor Clarissa Rojas, California State University Long Beach.

CO-SPONSORED BY:

The Berkeley Center on Health, Economics & Family Security

http://law.berkeley.edu/chefs.htm

CRG Forum Series Course Credits

Undergraduate juniors & seniors can now attend the CRG Thursday Forum Series to earn 1 - 2 units of course credit. Help imagine and organize innovative research events. Connect with scholars and community groups around Berkeley and across the US. Learn what it takes to sustain meaningful academic dialogue in a challenging political environment. The Forum series is organized by the Center for Race & Gender and features a forum every other Thursday, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm, addressing issues related to race and gender. For more details please visit: http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/forum-series-course

CRG Race & Gender Writing Group

The CRG sponsors an interdisciplinary dissertation writing group. We welcome graduate students from the Humanities, Social Sciences, and other fields who share a common scholarly interest in the study of Gender and Race. The purpose of the group is to support and encourage members to start, continue, or finish their dissertations. Each member is asked to submit a chapter draft that the group discusses and critiques. Please contact centerrg@berkeley.edu for any inquiries.

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CRG Student Research Grant Program

Fall 2009 Graduate Student Grant Awards Recipients Joshua Jelly-Shapiro Geography

Daniel Laurison Political Science

The Most Beautiful Man on the Planet: Belafonte's Calypso & How It Changed America

Exclusion in Political Field

Kerima M. Lewis History

Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern Geography

Arson as a Weapon of Slave Resistance in the BritishAmerican Colonies

Mexican Women's Contributions to California Agriculture: Agricultural Knowledge and Social Networks Across Borders

Melinda Woodley Linguistics

Jacqui Shine History

The Phonetics of Race and Gender Identification

A Most Extraordinary Noise: Race, Gender, & Public Space in 19th Century New Orleans

Spring 2010 Undergraduate Student Grant Awards Recipients Clarissa Arafiles Anthropology, GWS

Dawn Robinson Interdisciplinary Studies

Gendered Reflections & Unmarked Identities in Gender and Women's Studies

Intergenerational Conflicts in Queer Communities of Color.

Hector Gutierrez Ethnic Studies

Beyond Machismo: Perceptions of Manhood & Masculinity in the Bay Area Day Labor Market

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CRG Student Research Grant Program

Fall 2009 Graduate Grant Spotlight: Nazinin Shahrokni, Sociology

Gender Segregated Spaces: Traversing the 'Public' in Iran Since its establishment in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has made efforts to segregate urban public space along gender lines.

One example is public transportation. In accordance with the precepts of Islamic law, the state segregated buses in order to provide women with a "safe" and "appropriate" space: women were relegated to the smaller, back of the buses, while men rode in the more spacious front (the rationale was that more men rode buses). Over time however, more women now use buses in Tehran. Nazinin Shahrokni argues that this is partly because the segregated public transportation did in fact provide women with a feeling of security, which in turn lead to a direct increase in their presence in public spaces. Consequentially, in 2006 the Public Transportation Organization of Tehran launched women-only buses to cater to the needs of female passengers. Counter-intuitively, this further segregation of public space (women-only buses) was the result of women's increased presence in the public space.

Shahrokni is currently in Iran conducting research for her dissertation. She is particularly interested in how

gender segregated spaces are produced and used in diverse ways. Her research is focused on four public spaces: women-only parks, soccer stadiums, and segregated buses and universities. Her CRG grant has helped her cover those unexpected expenses that pop up such as an urgent trip to a research site, an access fee to a data bank, or the printing of documents.

By highlighting different patterns of gender segregation and its specific mechanisms, Shahrokni hopes her dissertation will demonstrate that far from being unitary and homogeneous, gender-segregated spaces are produced and consumed differently. She posits that the phenomenon of gender based segregation of public space is no longer purely an "Islamic process" of gender segregation, but rather a subject-making process. In this way, she hopes to move the discussion away from Islam and traditional binaries such as "oppression vs. emancipation" in order to open up new ways to conceptualize gender dynamics. In her own words, "My research is a bit unsettling because it challenges our habitual ways of thinking about gender segregation and the comfortably-accepted relation between gender segregation and gender oppression. But unsettlement and discomfort are the first steps towards better understanding—understanding and knowledge in turn help overcome phobia." — Sara Jane Pinkerton, Gender & Women Studies

CRG Fall 2010 Grants Program

The Center for Race and Gender (CRG) at the University of California Berkeley, announces the availability of grants of $100 to $1,000 to fund undergraduates; and $100 to $2,000 to support graduate students for research or creative projects that address issues of race and gender.

ELIGIBILITY: Applications can be submitted by any Berkeley undergraduate not matriculating at the end of the semester or any student enrolled in a graduate program at UC Berkeley. Applications are particularly sought from students working in areas where race and gender issues have not previously been of major concern as well as areas where they have been more central. Proposals that support dissertation or thesis research are strongly encouraged.

GRANT PERIOD AND USE OF FUNDS: Grants will be awarded for a period of one year for graduate students and six-months for undergraduates from the start date. Funds may be used for direct costs related to the proposed project, such as travel to archival or ethnographic research sites; supplies and services, and equipment rental. Funds may not be used for equipment purchase, stipend, living expenses, conference attendance, or educational travel. Grant payments will be in the form of reimbursements for expenses.

APPLICATION PROCESS: Find downloadable forms and application requrements at: http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/graduate-grants http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/undergraduate-grants-program

APPLICATION DEADLINES: The Fall 2010 Undergraduate Grant application deadline will be October 6th, 2010 at 3 p.m.

The Fall 2010 Graduate Grant application deadline will be November 1st, 2010 at 3 p.m.

Awards will be announced within two weeks of each deadline.

Please direct inquiries to centerrg@berkeley.edu.

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Arizona—continued from page 2

will be spared because the teaching of Native American history and culture is mandated by federal law. However, the teaching of Latino studies in heavily Hispanic parts of the state will be banned. Indeed, Mr. Horne has stated that if elected Attorney General his highest priority will be to "go after Mexican American studies."

It is unclear how the legislation will effect the state’s major universities, but both the University of Arizona and Arizona State University are statesupported schools, and could become targets after all secondary schools in the state are cle ansed of their ethnic studies classes and programs. his terrible situation is not just Arizona’s. We have amongst us, right here on the UC Berkeley campus, undocumented students, who are trying to get a decent education while also in constant fear of arrest and deportation.

Most are struggling to pay tuition because they are ineligible for financial aid and can’t get jobs in the formal labor market. I have some of these students in my own classes and have met others at conferences and workshops. I know them to be smart, hardworking students who bring rich experiences and insights to the classroom and to the university community. But as long as racism is so prevalent, and as long as anti-Latino hatred is so widespread, it is virtually impossible for these dedicated students to succeed and start on the road to legal recognition. In this climate of anti-immigrant fever, it is unlikely that the California Legislature will pass legislation to make state and university funded financial aid available to undocumented students or that the U.S. Congress will pass immigration reform legislation that would provide them with pathways to citizenship. Hopefully there will be sufficient revulsion against Arizona’s law to energize citizen action aimed at immigration reform.

— Professor Evelyn Nakano Glenn

T

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News & Announcements

CRG DISTINGUISHED LECTURE: This semester's special guest lecture was delivered by Professor Cathy J. Cohen, the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science and Deputy Provost for Graduate Education at the University of Chicago.

Her talk, "Black Love, Black Deviance and the Politics of Morality in the Age of Obama" will be available online at our homepage crg.berkeley.edu

SPRING 2010 CONFERENCE: Families living on the fault lines of economic insecurity, geographic displacement, and ideological battles over who counts as a "family" present not only ON THE profound challenges for the survival of kinship structures, but also opportunities Re-imagining Race, Kinship & Care for uncovering new or hidden landscape for notions and practices of family, kin, and care. Video of panel sessions will be available online at crg.berkeley.edu

Families Fault Lines

illustration by Rosesharon Oates

U Un n ii v v ee rr ss ii tt y y o o ff C C aa ll ii ff o o rr n n ii aa ,, B B ee rr k k ee ll ee y y

CENTER FOR FOR RACE & GENDER crg.berkeley.edu

A FOND FAREWELL...

This semester the CRG bids a fond and heartfelt farewell to our longtime administrative assistant and friend, Joyce Li. Joyce has worked at the CRG since 2006. She is leaving to spend more time caring for her family. We wish her the very best as she moves forward with life.

Good luck, Joyce, you will be missed!

New Faculty Publications Professor Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Ethnic Studies/Gender & Women's Studies Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America (Harvard University Press, forthcoming, June 2010)

The United States faces a growing crisis in care. The number of people needing care is growing while the ranks of traditional caregivers have shrunk. The status of care workers is a critical concern. Evelyn Nakano Glenn offers an innovative interpretation of care labor in the United States by tracing the roots of inequity along two interconnected strands: unpaid caring within the family; and slavery, indenture, and other forms of coerced labor. By bringing both into the same analytic framework, she provides a convincing explanation of the devaluation of care work and the exclusion of both unpaid and paid care workers from critical rights such as minimum wage, retirement benefits, and workers' compensation. Glenn reveals how assumptions about gender, family, home, civilization, and citizenship have shaped the development of care labor and been incorporated into law and social policies. She exposes the underlying systems of control that have resulted in women— especially immigrants and women of color—performing a disproportionate share of caring labor. Finally, she examines strategies for improving the situation of unpaid family caregivers and paid home health care workers.

This important and timely book illuminates the source of contradictions between American beliefs about the value and importance of caring in a good society and the exploitation and devalued status of those who actually do the caring.

Associate Professor David Montejano, Chicano/Latino Studies Quixote's Soldiers: A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 1966-1981 (University of Texas Press, forthcoming, July 2010)

In the mid-sixties, San Antonio was a segregated city governed by an entrenched Anglo social and business elite. The Mexican American barrios of the West and South sides were characterized by substandard housing and experienced seasonal flooding. Gang warfare broke out regularly. Then the striking farm workers of South Texas marched through the City and set off a social movement that transformed the barrios and ultimately brought down the old Anglo oligarchy. In Quixote's Soldiers, David Montejano uses a unique blend of history and sociology to present a thick description of this social movement.

Professor Elizabeth Abel, English Signs of the Time: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (University of California Press, 2010)

Signs of the Times traces the career of Jim Crow signs—simplified in cultural memory to the "colored/white" labels that demarcated the public spaces of the American South— from their intellectual and political origins in the second half of the nineteenth century through their dismantling by civil rights activists in the 1960s and '70s. In this beautifully written, meticulously researched book, Elizabeth Abel assembles a variegated archive of segregation signs and photographs that translated a set of regional practices into a national conversation about race. Abel also brilliantly investigates the semiotic system through which segregation worked to reveal how the signs functioned in particular spaces and contexts that shifted the grounds of race from the somatic to the social sphere.

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Nonprofit Org. U.S. Postage PAID University of California

Center for Race and Gender University of California Berkeley 638 Barrows Hall Berkeley, CA 94720-1074

Please visit us at our new website: crg.berkeley.edu or contact us at centerrg@berkeley.edu or 510.643.8488

YOUR DONATION WILL SUPPORT CRITICAL STUDENT RESEARCH!

CRG provides much-needed grants to students for research projects for racial & gender justice. Recent budget cuts have made it imperative to protect this important resource. Your generous contribution will sustain promising undergraduate and graduate students to pursue groundbreaking research, strategic community connections, and the development of social justice projects of local and international scope.

Donations by Berkeley alumni, students, faculty, and staff will be DOUBLED or QUADRUPLED by a special matching program. Contributions of every size truly make a difference!

To donate online, please visit http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/donate-crg

Thank you for contributing to the Center for Race and Gender, UC Berkeley Your donation will go directly to a fund supporting innovative and vital student research.

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