Margaret Frohlich
Margaret Frohlich is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Dickinson College with a PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literature from Stony Brook University. Her book, Framing the Margin: Nationality and Sexuality across Borders, won the international competition for the Victoria Urbano Prize for Criticism awarded by the International Association of Feminine Hispanic Literature and Culture. Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 8.2 (2012) recently published her article “What of unnatural bodies? The discourse of nature in Lucía Puenzo’s XXY and El niño pez/The Fish Child.” Her research also appears in the anthology Lesbian Realities/Lesbian Fictions in Contemporary Spain and in the journals Letras Femeninas and Romance Review.
Current research:
My project at the CSGS focuses on the aesthetic dimensions and politics of cinema and literature in the mobilization and production of sexual subjects in post-soviet Cuba. Central questions of this project are how pacts that would bind culture to the state function in the rhetorical landscape of U.S.-Cuban relations and how we might rethink sexuality in light of recent theoretical challenges to the concept of hegemony.
You can email Margaret Frohlich at margaret.frohlich(at)nyu.edu.
Leena-Maija Rossi
Leena-Maija Rossi is a Principal Investigator in Gender Studies at Universty of Helsinki, and Adjunct Professor in Visual Culture at University of Turku, Finland. She is also member of the research project Abusive Sexuality and Sexual Violence in Contemporary Culture (2012-14, University of Jyväskylä). Currently she works as the Executive Director at the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York.
Current research:
My research background is in feminist theories, queer studies, and visual culture. Within the realm of queer studies I have been focused on critical research of heterosexuality, and recently my mind has been occupied by intersectionality of gender, sexuality, class and ethnicity, especially whiteness. During my time at CSGS, I will further my two latest projects:
Under the working title Imagined White People and Different Shades of Pale I will take a look at the parallel and intersecting norms of whiteness and heterosexuality through case studies of both Finnish and American media. My research questions include the following: How do media images and narratives produce the imagined nations of straight white people? What are the used signifiers of respectability? How are the outlines of sameness and difference drawn visually? How are differences within whiteness, different shades of pale, produced?
In my other project I will focus on contemporary North American television, and its audiovisual representations of gendered and sexualized violence in such popular series as True Blood (2008–), Cold Case (2003–), and Gilmore Girls (2000–2007). My aim is to discuss the ways in which representations of gendered and sexualized violence participate in the societal legitimation of violence as problem solution. I will analyze how violence is both treated critically and re-produced as an accepted mode of behaviour: how it is not only shown in its brutality, but also romanticized, and made an outright laudable mode of gendered and sexualized behavior.
Recent articles:
“Happy” and “unhappy” performatives of heterosexuality. Australian Feminist Studies. 1/2011. 9-23.
Bad Citations? Adapting the Theory of Gender Performativity. In Jillian St. Jacques (ed.), Adaptation Theories. Rotterdam: Jan van Eyck Press, 2011. 135-167.
Daughters of Privilege. Class, Gender, Sexuality, Affectivity and Gilmore Girls. In Marianne Liljeström & Susanna Paasonen (eds.) Disturbing Differences. Feminist Readings of Identity, Location and Power. London & New York: Routledge, 2010. 85-98.
How to Make (Visual) Trouble Inside a Hetero Factory? In Lena Martinsson & Eva Reimers (eds.) Norm Struggles. Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2010. 83-95.
Licorice Boys and Female Coffee Beans. Representations of Colonial Complicity in Finnish Visual Culture. In Diana Mulinari et al. (eds.) Complying with Colonialism. Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. 189-204.
You can email Leena-Maija Rossi at lmrossi(at)nyu.edu.
Gina Velasco
Gina Velasco is an Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire. After receiving her Ph.D. from the History of Consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Bryn Mawr College from 2008-2010.
Current Research:
My first book manuscript, Queering the Transnational Filipina Body: Gendered and Sexual Nationalisms in the Filipino Diaspora, queers the ubiquitous figure of the Filipina body through an analysis of tropes of Filipino transnationalism within Filipino American performance, video/film, and websites. Offering a serious consideration of the political potential of revolutionary, diasporic nationalisms as a form of resistance to U.S. imperialism and capitalist globalization, Queering the Transnational Filipina Body examines the gendered and sexual politics of representing the nation within Filipino diasporic cultural production. More specifically, Queering the Transnational Filipina Body explores the political possibilities and tensions between Filipino diasporic support for revolutionary nationalisms and feminist and queer critiques of the nation.
I am also working on a second project which explores the relationship between nationalisms, diasporas, and queer genders and sexualities, with a focus on the performance art of queer artists of color in the U.S. I am currently collaborating with YaliniDream, a queer Sri Lankan American dissident artist, on an essay that describes how nationalism, experiences of war, gender, and queer sexuality inform both the content and form of her performance art. This article uses a queer diasporic framework to examine the relationship between performance art, transnational political organizing, nationalist movements in the Filipino and Sri Lankan diasporas, and cultural work around issues of gender and queer sexuality. Given the contemporary context of an ongoing global War on Terror, both the violence and the potential of the nation as an organizing principle continue to dominate queer diasporic subjects’ relationship to notions of home and belonging. In addition to multi- and trans-national attachments, queer diasporic subjects must contend with the dominant U.S. racial formation, as well as the neoliberal cultural politics of a mainstream GLBT movement in the U.S. Working within both queer communities of color in the U.S. and transnational political movements across the diaspora(s), queer diasporic artists and activists have a multivalent relationship to gender, sexuality, race, and nation. It is this crucible of affective and material connections that I examine in my study of performance art by queer diasporic artists of color U.S.
You can email Gina Velasco at gv525(at)nyu.edu.
