Michael Anastario
Michael Anastario is a Sociologist who conducts population-based research on sexual risk behavior, sexual violence, and mental health. He received his PhD in Sociology from Boston College. He is currently principle investigator on several studies of sexual risk behavior in foreign military personnel.
Current research:
My current research at the CSGS is focused on the role of occupations in the production of sexuality. In particular, I am examining how occupational elements of the armed services operate as components of the social field in the class habitus of military personnel. In the applied setting, I aim to understand how these elements dynamically produce patterns of sexual risk behavior which are quantitatively observable in biological and behavioral surveillance surveys of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Further, I am exploring the dilemma of researcher reflexivity in mixed methods research on sexual risk behavior.
Elizabeth Boskey
Elizabeth Boskey, Ph.D. is a part-time assistant professor at the SUNY Downstate School of Public Health and a science writer specializing in sexual health. In addition to the several hundred articles on sexually transmitted diseases she has written in her role of Guide to STDs at About.com, she is the author of The Invision Guide to Sexual Health (Harper Collins, 2005) and America Debates: Genetic Testing (Rosen Publishing 2007).
She is also the editor of the second edition of The Truth About Rape (DWJ Books 2010). Trained in Biophysics and Public Health, her current focus is on how the biological sciences can be used to inform the social discourse on gender and sexuality.
Current research:
My project explores the ways in which women’s healthcare in the United States is often paternalistic and coercive in ways that men’s healthcare is not. It explores the medical, political, and societal issues surrounding the Papanicolau (Pap) smear with the goal of determining how the medical establishment may be able to alter their practices to best protect the public’s health while still maintaining respect for women’s autonomy. In addition, it investigates the ways in which social attitudes about sexuality, in particular female sexuality, can impede the processes of policy making and research in reproductive health.
You can email Elizabeth Boskey at eboskey(at)nyu.edu
T.L. Cowan
T.L. Cowan is an Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies program and the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan. T.L. holds a PhD from the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, and her first book, entitled Poetry’s Bastard: The Illegitimate Genealogies, Cultures and Politics of Spoken Word Performance in Canada and is forthcoming (2012) from Wilfrid Laurier UP.
Current research:
My current research is preoccupied with the social life of grass-roots feminist and queer cultures, especially in the contexts of media and performance, as well as literary and anti-literary cultures and popular cultures. I am interested in the ways that public and private cultures merge in the scenes created and inhabited by radical feminists and queers, and in the ways that desire intersects with and informs transformational politics and vice versa. As a researcher I am profoundly interested in the aesthetics and epistemologies of activist cultural production, and this work is importantly influenced by my participation in feminist and queer grass-roots scenes as a writer, performer, critic, curator and activist.
During my time at the CSGS, I will be pursuing research for two chapters of my second book. This book, provisionally entitled Sliding Scale, studies and theorizes transnational cultures of feminist and queer cabaret and considers the ways that cabaret is not just a structure of entertainment (i.e. the variety show format), but also a “structure of feeling”: a mode of being and way of knowing that is both produced by, and in turn (re)produces, feminist and queer sensibilities and politics. These chapters will focus on, respectively, mid-century cabaret in New York City and on the WOW cabaret of the 1980s and 1990s; my research will consider these “historical” cabarets in the context of their contemporaries and will seek to develop my theory of “cabaret consciousness” across venues, historical moments and, ultimately, regional locales. I intend for this research to culminate in a transnational engagement of cabaret scenes in other North American cities including Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and Mexico City. My broader research, entitled Viscera & Ephemera, is a large-scale, collaborative ethnography and historiography of feminist and queer grass-roots performance in Canada. Sliding Scale and Viscera & Ephemera merge in a third project, the Cabaret Commons. The Cabaret Commons, which I am developing as a speculative research-creation project in collaboration Jasmine Rault and Dayna McLeod, will be a user-generated archive and gossip rag for feminist and queer performance and media artists, audiences and researchers. This research is made possible by the generous support of a Standard Research Grant and an Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
Maria Malmström
Maria Malmström is a Swedish anthropologist and her areas of interest are the MENA region, gender, body, sexuality, politics, violence, and security. She received her PhD from the School of Global Studies, Social Anthropology, University of Gothenburg. Her dissertation examined how female gender identity is continually created and re-created in Egypt through a number of daily practices, of which female circumcision is central. The study explored how the subject is made through the interplay of global hegemonic structures of power and the most intimate sphere, which has been exposed in the international arena. She is today involved in the inter-disciplinary research project “Hamas between Sharia rule and Demo-Islam.” The study aims to investigate in what way Hamas will adopt to the new realities on the ground (together with Michael Schulz et al.). Additionally, she is a gender consultant (UNFPA and others), and member of several academic/policy networks, e.g. Think Tank for Arab Women, and she is Senior Lecturer at Högskolan West, Sweden.
Current research:
Bodies and Bombs: Productions of Violent Militarized Masculinities among Male Hamas Youths
Why and how young men choose to join violent terrorist/military organizations—often with the aim of dying in order to use their bodies as deadly weapons— is a question which continues to puzzle social scientists, the policy world, as well as societ(ies) at large. This enduring question, which is ultimately about humanity and the seduction of violence, has become particularly salient given the changing global security-development landscape. The character of contemporary danger, threat, uncertainty, and belonging; the prevalence of terrorism as a seemingly viable political response to injustice; and the (US led) global war on Terror which is being waged in the intimate lives of peoples in disparate sites all over the world, render re-asking this question in distinct and varied ways an imperative. However, despite a general consensus that understanding the call to violence is vital to mitigating its effects—there is surprisingly little research that explores the intimate and complex production of violent (male) subjects in militant organizations. This research project therefore explores this overarching question in relation to young male Hamas members and the appeal of becoming soldiers in the context of the Hamas in the Palestinian – Israel struggle. The research sets out to explore who these militant actors are and who they desire to become in the hopes of gaining a better understanding of the ways in which their subjectivities and agency are informed by, and animated through, their desire to inhabit a ‘violent’ subject position. Central to such a line of inquiry is an exploration into the ways in which these young men’s experiences of masculinities are shaped and challenged by political, religious, economic and social changes that impinge on their lives.
You can email Maria Malmström at maria.malmstrom(at)nyu.edu
Darnell L. Moore
Darnell L. Moore‘s research seeks to put the broad notion of religiosity (and the theologies and practices of African American denominational churches, in specific) in conversation with theoretical interventions like queer theory, cultural studies and ethnic studies. A central concern that figures in his writing is the notion of religiosity as an additional social force that aids in the construction, and constriction, of bodies and of human lives. His writing has appeared in Black Theology: An International Journal; Theology & Sexuality; Pneuma: The Journal of the Society of Pentecostal Studies (forthcoming); and Transscripts: A Journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences at UC Irvine. Darnell has served appointments as a Visiting Fellow at Yale Divinity School and Lecturer in the Women & Gender Studies Department at Rutgers-New Brunswick. He is also an active member of the queer activist community in Newark, NJ where he serves as the Chair of Mayor Cory Booker of Newark’s Advisory Commission on LGBTQ Concerns and Education Chair of the Newark Pride Alliance. During his “regular” life, he is the Associate Director of the Newark Schools Research Collaborative (NSRC) and an Affiliate of the Institute on Education Law and Policy (IELP) both at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey-Newark. He holds a BA in Social & Behavioral Sciences (Seton Hall University), MA in Counseling (Eastern University) and MA in Theological Studies (Princeton Theological Seminary).
Current research:
The preached word and the performance of preaching (and the theologies that shape the preaching moment and the “word” shared) are but additional apparatuses of power and modalities of knowledge production that act upon and shape desires, fashion culture and construct bodies in both constructive and destructive ways. My research, then, is an investigation of the ways that religiosity figures in the construction of the gendered (and sexed, raced, classed and (dis)abled) body and shows up in the production of epistemic bodies? And, it examines the means, or routes, through which such knowledges traverse? The scholarship that I have produced during the past few years has emerged in response to these and other critical questions. The papers that I will be working on during my appointment will continue along this investigatory trajectory broadly examining the notion of identity and the interlocational and intersectional matrices of sexuality and gender, in specific.
Recent panel discussion transcript:
Homophobia and HIV Risk: What’s Family Got to Do With It?
Recent articles:
The Pink Days: Living Happily Ever After the New York State Gay Marriage Bill? on The Feminist Wire
A Review: Dreams Deferred: The Sakia Gunn Film Project by Charles “Chas” Brack on The Feminist Wire
Cheryl Clarke: The Never-Ending Resource that is Black Queerness on Lambda Literary
An Interview: James Earl Hardy on His Confessions of a Homo Thug Porn Star on Son of Baldwin
Reflections of a Black Queer Suicide Survivor (part I) on Yolo Akili
Reflections of a Black Queer Suicide Survivor (part II) on Yolo Akili
An Interview with Cheryl Clarke and Amiri Baraka in Newark, NJ on YouTube
What If I Chose to Be Gay? Or, Why Herman Cain Might Be onto Something on Huffington Post
On Location: The “I” in the Intersection on The Feminist Wire
You can email Darnell L. Moore at dlm420(at)nyu.edu
