Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Is the tango “forever macho,” as has traditionally been suggested? This article unveils a notorious gender ambiguity in the tango culture, anxiously covered up by a practice that dramatizes the binarism of heterosexuality in an almost parodic way. The performative construction of gender roles during the formation of modern Argentina (1920-50) was promoted by an active interaction between the culture industry and its audiences/ consumers. This exchange reflected the need in the public sphere for the creation of a modern feminine identity remarkably documented in the performativity of "public" women, for the purposes of this paper, women tango singers.

These performers, who became a raging success in the stages of commercial theaters, the cabaret scene and the radio and film industries were able to achieve the impossible: while singing mostly male-authored lyrics which delivered a message of control over modern women’s independence, the public availability of their performing bodies which interacted mainly with female audiences, contradicted the representation of abjection, prostitution and destruction suffered by the women of the tangos they sang. In addition, the artistic personas of these female performers--the arrabalera:, the tough yet glamorous woman of the suburbs who had learnt to deal with modern life and men, and who many times cross dressed in order to be allowed into a male-dominated system-- provided a strong vernacular model that was not devoid of gender contradictions. Their defiance to standard canons of female beauty and sexuality was accepted naturally by their audiences, who were pleased to see mimicked on stage forlorn vernacular types: the slick compadrito and the more exotic gaucho style. This embracing of a national popular aesthetic diverted the attention from the mischievous gender play that Argentine audiences would at the time deny as being the reflection of a hidden gender ambiguity. They have become, nevertheless, living documents of a fissure in the heteronormativity of the apparently seamless construction of the modern Argentine nation.

Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: On September 26, 1937, Bessie Smith died as a result of injuries she sustained in a car accident outside Clarksdale, Mississippi. Although she eventually made it to the local black hospital, she did not survive surgery. Speculation that her death had been caused by southern racism began soon after her death and continued for decades. Reports circulated that she was first taken to a white hospital and turned away. Then, she died on the way to the black facility.

I contend that the more likely scenario involved Smith's being taken directly to the black hospital. She was not turned away from an emergency room at a white hospital because local people--both black and white--knew and accepted the fact that white hospitals did not treat blacks in Mississippi. That, however, did not preclude this from being a violent example of Jim Crow. Once involved in the accident, Smith was on a preset course that had already determined what level of medical care she was entitled to have. This paper argues that the events following Bessie Smith's accident were an illustration of structural violence, an indirect form of violence that does not cause direct physical pain but is the result of unjust social, political and economic systems.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Microorganisms live in an Aristotelian world dominated by viscosity where inertia plays absolutely no role. After a brief review of known mechanisms for bacterial self-propulsion, I will introduce a new model for the self-propulsion of certain strains of Synecococcus (blue-green algae) based on acoustic streaming (AS). These one-cell organisms swim at 10-20 diameters per second without flagella or visible changes in shape. Biologists have discovered that some cells are able to generate high frequency small amplitude surface acoustic waves (SAW's) on their outer membrane using coupled molecular motors. Could traveling SAW's generating AS be the mechanism for Synechococcus self-propulsion? Do Synechococcus "sing" themselves along? I will present theoretical and experimental evidence.

Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: One of the New Deal's most interesting programs was the Federal Theater Project, part of the job creation program, the Works Progress Administration (WPA). In Buffalo, the WPA funded a puppet theater project, called the Buffalo Historical Marionettes, under the direction of Esther Wilhelm, who thought of herself as Buffalo's own Eleanor Roosevelt. The Buffalo Historical Marionettes employed more than 200 women and men, from seamstresses-turned-costume-makers and carpenters-turned-set-builders to singers and performers. Among the latter were eight African Americans, five men and three women, who, in reference to the famous Fisk chorus, called themselves the "Jubilee Singers." They performed a repertoire of puppet plays, all with historical inflections and musical dimensions (which included an orchestra recruited from the popular "Colored Musicians Union"), for audiences of school children, nursing home residents, and hospital patients, from outdoor parks to the chapel in Attica Prison.
In my paper and slideshow presentation, I will trace the history of this performance unit and their work, and I will present a collective biography of its members. I will analyze their work in terms of how it represented the history of race in the United States and challenged the dominant racial tropes in the popular culture of the 1930s. I will also discuss how Eastern European immigrants met southern African American migrants in 1910s and 1920s Buffalo and how their relationships evolved within the fulcrum of the Great Depression, the new industrial labor movement, African American struggles for racial and economic justice, and New Deal politics.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: On September 21, 2008, singer-songwriter, John Stewart died. Stewart had recorded some fifty solo albums over the course of a career that spanned more than half a century, plus another sixteen albums as a member of the Kingston Trio in the 1960s. Stewart's untimely death led to an outpouring of grief and shared consolation on a website dedicated to his music. This study examines patterns in discourse on a fan-based website covering two months and approximately 200 messages, tracing the grieving process from shock to acceptance and eventual steps toward acceptance, resolution, and moving forward. The grieving process was both conventional in some ways, and yet profoundly unconventional in others. While the steps through the process followed the traditional curve, the depth of feelings expressed among people who, for the most part, will never meet face to face. The paper pays particular attention to frustration expressed by fans who were hit hard by Stewart's death, but who could find no solace or understanding among their closest loved ones. The paper weaves two lines of scholarship--Horton and Wohl's parasocial theory and Anderson's imagined community--to explain fans' expressions of loss, isolation, and interpersonal consolation via online rhetorical patterns.