Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: organizations offering a comprehensive array of services to girls and young women who are CSE victims. With funding from NIJ, Development Services Group, Inc. (DSG) is conducting a formative evaluation of two SAGE programs: LFESKILLS, a 6-14 month program for girls under age 18 who have experienced CSE; and the Girls Reaching Adulthood Through Community Empowerment (GRACE) program, a 2-month program for 18-24 year old first-time prostitution arrestees. Because many of the potential variables on which to evaluate programs such as this are not well-understood, this formative evaluation includes qualitative components in two phases: Phase I includes interviews and focus groups with program staff in order to delineate the working program model, understand the process and assist in operationalizing variables for the current evaluation: Phase III involves in-depth interviews with current and/or former program participants to understand common circumstances and pathways to CSE, and thus identify process and outcome measures for future evaluations as well as develop program logic models that will help in clarifying the model. This paper presents the results of the completed Phase I and ongoing Phase III qualitative research.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: No abstract available at this time.

Publication Type: Prose
Abstract: Riding Grace: A Triumph of the Soul (Silver Light Publications, February 2007) is a poetic, powerful memoir documenting Alissa Lukara’s no-holds-barred 12-year quest to reclaim her life from the dark night of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and severe childhood sexual abuse. It inspires all women to dive deep into their shadows to find the love and compassion at their core. Rendering the unspeakable in a bold, lyrical voice, Alissa, a first generation American, breaks through denial, upends her Latvian ancestral patterns, and bravely faces and speaks the truth. By accepting the unacceptable, she opens to miracles, healing and grace.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: "Cross-racial espionage" is a phrase I have coined that circumvents
traditional concepts of cross-racial masquerades or racial passing that
currently exist in the fields of humanities and the social sciences to
describe methods by which a person who is legally classified as one race
poses as a member of another race. In this paper, I want to explore an
alternate employment of cross-racial masquerading as an act of resistance or
subversion that would reflect the passing figure's affinity to, rather than
disdain, of blackness. To this aim, I define "cross-racial espionage" as a
form of masquerading or passing that occurs when legally classified blacks
or whites pose as members of the other race for a higher egalitarian,
insurgent, or moral purpose. More specifically, on a larger level, I want
to explore how black, biracial, or white "spies" function as race men and
women.
In this paper, I analyze _Soul Sister_ (1969), Grace Halsell's
autobiographical account of her experiences living in Harlem and in the
South after darkening her skin to appear black. Recreating John Howard
Griffin's 1950s journey across the color line, as a white woman posing as
black, Halsell attempts to explain to a white audience what life is like for
African American women at the height of the Black Power Movement. I assert
that Soul Sister is a cross between travelogue - where Halsell acts as her
own "native informant" - and anthropological case study. Unlike earlier
travelogues, Halsell adopts the rhetoric of Black Power and Soul in order to
change the status quo. However, I further argue that eventually Halsell's
use of blackface ceases to become a performance and she instead internalizes
the mask and projects her experiences as "authentic" or "real." Halsell
never seems to consider that her life-long experience as a white woman, as
well as her preconceived notions of "authentic blackness," could possibly
distort her analysis of the racial experiment.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: “Feeling Like a Woman, Looking Like a Man, Sounding Like a No-No:” Grace Jones’s Eccentric Sexuality”

     The darling of Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, Grace Jones is often associated with white gay male subculture. Yet we can see the sign of Grace in the vocal stylings of Nona Hendrix and Nena Cherry in the late 1980’s; in the stagecraft of Tina Turner’s post-Ike renaissance; and in the sartorial and sexual outrageousness of RuPaul and perhaps even Lil’ Kim and Foxy Browne in the 1990s,  moving into the twenty-first century. And we can also see Grace Jones explicitly referenced in African American and Caribbean art that might be outside of the realm of “entertainment”: New York visual and performance artist Lyle Ashton Harris’s “Memoirs of Hadrian #19” and Postmodern cubist Caribbean poet Deborah Richards, in “The Halle Berry One-Two,” for example. In Grace Jones’ work and that of the other black artists influenced by her, we see the wedding of disco and punk; art and fashion; male and female, animal and human, and human and machine to create new notions of black sexuality.
      Grace Jones counters and surpasses traditional notions of gendered erotic performances- for black women in particular-  by occupying and performing the image of  the black female body as “Strange” or “eccentric.”  Here, I call on Carla Peterson’s definition of “eccentric,” “insisting on its double meaning: the first evokes a circle not concentric with another, an axis not centrally placed (according to the dominant system), whereas the second extends the notion of off-centeredness to suggest freedom of movement stemming from the lack of central control and hence new possibilities of difference conceived as empowering oddness.” (Peterson xii).  Jones’ use of drag puts her into the larger history of African Diaspora performers using gender in complex ways. Jones’ drag and other techniques of performing identity pose challenges of readability. She is, in many ways a trickster figure, sliding out of grasp of both her fans and critics. Like three other trickster performers of color who rose to prominence during the same period of the 1980’s and early 1990’s– visual artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose works and life constantly poke fun at fears of black sexual potency; performance artist Coco Fusco, whose 1992 collaborations with Guillermo Gómez-Pena, the “Two Undiscovered Amerindians” series, document the “irony of having to demonstrate one’s humanity “ through over the top staged performances of the “savage” on display; and rapper Flavor Flav, “sideman” for the group Public Enemy, whose manic comic persona fueled the critical fire of many of Public Enemy’s most potent political songs-- – Jones uses an outsized, “eccentric” public persona—one that often risks caricature – to lobby critique and to express anger and ultimately, agency. In this  talk, I will explore Jones’ eccentric sexuality in the cultural context of the 1980’s and 1990’s, and the implications of her performances on recent theoretical discourses of transgender identity, drag and desire.