Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In 1960, Virginia Prince, a white, heterosexual, male-to-female transvestite from Los Angeles, published the first issue of an underground magazine named Transvestia, which sought to educate, entertain, and instruct heterosexually-oriented male cross-dressers. The magazine went from twenty-five initial subscribers to several hundred around the United States and the world over the twenty years of Prince’s editorship. Hundreds of men who enjoyed periodically dressing and behaving as women read Transvestia, and many also sent letters, fiction, life histories, and self-photographs to Prince for publication. In this respect, they assembled in an important cultural imaginary of their own making and became the authors of their own stories rather than the subjects of regulatory medical and stigmatizing cultural discourses. In this presentation, I examine Transvestia’s fascinating visual archive of photographic presentations of self. The hundreds of photographs that Prince published serve as visual evidence of the identity-work carried out by the readers, the raced and classed models of femininity they emulated, and the idealizations of postwar domesticity they valorized and some fetishized. In these photographs, most individuals position themselves in ultra-feminine poses inside domestic spaces. They dress in complete and respectable feminine wardrobes and enact such emblematic cultural roles as the well-bred lady, the dutiful suburban housewife, the girl-next-door, and the club woman type. As it was articulated and visualized in the pages of Transvestia, the identity-work of periodic cross-dressers speaks to complex questions at the intersection of (trans)gender politics, the politics of fantasy, feminism, and power. Many of Transvestia’s cross-dressers expressed a desire to look and act like “real women.” Their feminine personae, then, represented who they wanted to be, if only temporarily and periodically. Nevertheless, in their embodiments and performances of various postwar icons of white femininity, Transvestia’s cross-dressers undoubtedly emulated gender stereotypes during a decade of rapid social change in respect to many women’s economic and social advancement. In this paper, I intend to explore these tensions, conundrums, and complexities surrounding transvestite identity-construction as it was visualized in what may now be considered a "transgender" Cold War cultural imaginary. Finally, I consider how the visual construction of crossgender identities enriches the historiography on gender and sexuality in postwar America.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Throughout the period of the all-volunteer force, the US military has been ambivalent about the participation of women in the armed forces and the roles they should play. Militaries have a long-standing close association with masculinity and the making of men, but America's volunteer military needs women to fill its "manpower" needs. The US military has had to find ways to attract women recruits without alienating young men, who are still the main focus of recruiting efforts.This paper will examine the ways that the various branches of the US military have tried to appeal to women and motivate them to enlist, and the ideas about soldiering and gender that they reflect and produce in the process. Examining recruitment materials provides insight into the changing perception of women's roles in the various branches. Each service has its own history and institutional culture, and each one struggles with the relationship between gender and military service in its own way. While there is a large body of literature on women in the military (as well as women and the military), very little examines recruitment, which is one of the military's most public faces.Recruitment involves overt image-making and an attempt to sell particular pictures of military service, making it an especially fruitful site to study the construction of gender by the military.

Publication Type: Poster
Abstract: Amidst claims that female murders are rare, both in and outside of literature, such women surface repeatedly in the works of Modern Anglophone writers from Africa. Fictionalized depictions of women who kill play an important role in conveying the activist agendas of Modern Anglophone writers. Through the portrayals of such murderous women, we can gain insight into the current debate surrounding the woman question in Modern African women’s literature. Such texts clearly serve as a rallying force, a call for “all exploited peoples everywhere” to assert themselves against the dominating forces that threaten both silence and exploitation.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: War is a potent site for the production and reproduction of gender identities. As Elshtain argues, ?wars destroy and bring into being men and women as particular identities by canalizing energy and giving permission to narrate.?1 This paper is concerned with the dominant messages about female gender identity that have emerged from the US?s 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. Specifically, I am looking at the discourse surrounding Pfc. Jessica Lynch and Pfc. Lynndie England, the female poster girls of American involvement in Iraq, and the focus of much wrangling and hand wringing over what the war has said about women. Ultimately, I argue that the predominant female gender images that were reproduced during and after the Iraq War are of the Woman in Peril (Lynch) and the Ruined Woman (England), and that these images crowded out justice feminist-style arguments that Lynch and England demonstrated that women are every bit as good and as bad as men, and are thus no less or more fit for combat and/or military service. I suggest that this occurred because the justice feminist argument for gender equality faces an already entrenched set of counter-arguments in the American discourse, while the Woman in Peril and Ruined Woman tropes are themselves deeply entrenched in the American discourse, and operate at a less explicit?and thus harder to contest?level.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Among all the factors that triggered Chinese feminist movements during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the introduction of Western feminism played an important role. While the Western influence on early Chinese feminism has been widely acknowledged, the problems that arose due to historical and cultural differences have yet to be more thoroughly discussed. This paper examines early problematizations of Western feminism in a Chinese context through an American woman writer, Pearl Buck’s first novel East Wind, West Wind (1930). Its purposes are to bring more awareness of the challenges of being cultural bridges, and to propose more attention to cultural difference in feminist practice so that the bridging function of feminism can be more effective across cultures.
The paper will first give a brief introduction of the writer and the novel. Pearl Buck, the Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize winner who spent a large proportion of the period from 1892 to 1934 in China, is often seen as a cultural bridge between the East and the West. Moreover, as a women writer, she is sharply conscious of the impact of Western feminism on Chinese women’s life at her time. Her highly ignored first novel, East Wind, West Wind, is actually one of the most valuable feminist documents in the history of Western efforts to represent Asian women. On one hand, the novel shows how Chinese male intellectuals translate Western feminist ideas for Chinese women; on the other hand, it translates the impact of feminism on Chinese women for its Western readers. Through “double translation,” Pearl Buck speaks for her Chinese woman protagonist to the Western audience, as indicated by the title of the first part of the novel, “A Chinese Women Speaks.”
I will then focus on the feminist narrative of the novel, which juxtaposes various power relations between men and women, women and women. While I acknowledge Pearl Buck’s feminist concerns on Chinese women’s liberation from oppression, and her excellent composition of the feminist text, I also argue that without realizing one’s privileged position, one may give a few women voices, but at the cost of other women’s silence, and that feminism is a complicated process that can never be translated through a single voice.
In addition, I will integrate gender and racial issues of the novel by examining the interracial marriage between the Chinese woman protagonist’s brother and an American woman, and by analyzing Pearl Buck’s comparison between American women and Chinese men, and her contrast between American and Chinese women.
By drawing attention to the pitfalls of both Pearl Buck’s and her novel’s characters’ interpretations of the cross-cultural situations, this paper cautions against the danger of being bridges, but by no means does it indicates that bridging genders, cultures and people should be winced from. It only intends to emphasize that we can never be too self-conscious in the criticism of others because we are all in a world where sexism, racism and other conflicting ideologies have penetrated into our unconsciousness.