CFP: Mapping Adoption

The 4th International Conference on Adoption and Culture

Mapping Adoption: Histories, Geographies, Literatures, Politics

March 22 – 25, 2012

The Claremont Colleges, Claremont, California

Call for Proposals

For our 2012 conference, we are expanding our concerns to include not only adoption in its many historical and cultural variations but also parallel institutions such as foster care, orphanages, and technologically-assisted reproduction, as well as various forms of forced relinquishment or family separation.. We seek proposals that explore the cultural meanings and/or political locations of any of these practices, and we encourage analyses of relationships among them. We will include academic work from a wide range of scholarly disciplines and areas—literature, film and popular culture and performance studies, cultural studies, history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, political science, law, women’s and gender studies, etc.— as well as artistic presentations of film, creative writing, graphic art, music, or productions in other media. We also encourage interdisciplinary panels, presentations, and productions.

Proposals may address adoption or related practices or their representation in any way, but we especially encourage work addressing race, class, gender, nationality, and/or sexuality and sexual orientation, and/or investigations of topics such as state and institutional power, (in)fertility, markets and market practices, and incarceration.

Confirmed keynote speaker: Catherine Ceniza Choy, Associate Professor of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, University of California, Berkeley, whose forthcoming book, Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America, examines how Asian international adoption has contributed to the transformation of the U.S. into an international adoption nation and how its history is also a history of race, labor, immigration and intimacy.

Please send 200-word proposals for papers or samples of creative work (of less than 10 pages) to asac2012 AT scrippscollege.edu.

Proposal deadline: July 1, 2011.

Tenure denial and transgender discrimination

Faculty at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, a public university in Durant, OK, think it has been, and in an act of solidarity are helping a trans colleague grieve her tenure case.

Rachel Tudor, who teaches American and Native American Literature, Modernity and Theory, Humanities, Composition, and Philosophy in the English, Humanities and Languages Department has, according to our informant, “been denied tenure at our university and informed that her employment will be terminated effective May 31, 2011.” Tudor is said to have had overwhelming support from faculty colleagues at every stage of the process because of her outstanding record as a scholar, teacher and colleague. The tenure case has been turned back by the dean and the Vice President for academic affairs.

Professor Tudor’s supporters say that they have compelling evidence that this denial and dismissal are due to discrimination against her for being transgender. In a mess that has gone on for nearly two years, the administration at our university has repeatedly and egregiously violated established policies and procedures. The Faculty Appeals Committee has found in favor of Rachel twice, and the Faculty Senate has passed a resolution in support of her. Meanwhile, the VP for Academic Affairs and the President arbitrarily re-wrote the Academic Policies and Procedures manual in the midst of the process, in order to allow the VP for Business Affairs (!) to overrule the decision of the Faculty Appeals Committee.

For more information, go here.

To sign a petition supporting Dr Turner’s appeal, go here.

(Thanks, gendermut!)

Hate crime, and petition

After an unidentified transgender woman tried to use the bathroom at a Baltimore McDonald’s, two patrons started attacking her in full view of other customers and employees. These employees can be heard on the video shouting words of encouragement to the attackers. It’s time we DEMAND that justice be served and that EVERY McDonald’s employee involved in this brutal hate crime be held accountable.

The April 18 assault took place at a McDonald’s location in the 6300 block of Kenwood Avenue in Rosedale, Maryland, a Baltimore suburb, according to the Baltimore County Police Department. A 14-year-old girl has been charged as a juvenile in connection with the assault, charges are still pending against an 18-year-old woman. “The incident remains under investigation and the State’s Attorney’s Office is reviewing the case,” added investigators.

Not surprisingly, McDonald’s lacks standard policies for protecting transgender individuals, despite a decent record of workplace discrimination protections for gays and lesbians. And while the company has pledged to “take appropriate action” against all employees involved in this heinous event, just one has been punished.

This is not enough! If McDonald’s employees stood by and encouraged this attack, they should be fired. Please sign this petition in hopes that justice can and will prevail for this transgender woman.

Also please contact the Maryland States Attorney’s Office — Violent Crimes Division at 410-887-6610 and express your concerns about this matter.

For more, and to sign the petition, go here.

Guantanamo revelations

We already knew this sort of thing went on, but the details are still shocking:

Another prisoner was shipped to the base “because of his general knowledge of activities in the areas of Khowst and Kabul based as a result of his frequent travels through the region as a taxi driver”.

The files also reveal that an al-Jazeera journalist was held at Guantánamo for six years, partly in order to be interrogated about the Arabic news network.

His dossier states that one of the reasons was “to provide information on … the al-Jazeera news network’s training programme, telecommunications equipment, and newsgathering operations in Chechnya, Kosovo and Afghanistan, including the network’s acquisition of a video of UBL [Osama bin Laden] and a subsequent interview with UBL”.

From here.

Ben Franklin’s sister

Excellent article by Jill LePore:

Franklin, who’s on the $100 bill, was the youngest of 10 sons. Nowhere on any legal tender is his sister Jane, the youngest of seven daughters; she never traveled the way to wealth. He was born in 1706, she in 1712. Their father was a Boston candle-maker, scraping by. Massachusetts’ Poor Law required teaching boys to write; the mandate for girls ended at reading. Benny went to school for just two years; Jenny never went at all.

Their lives tell an 18th-century tale of two Americas. Against poverty and ignorance, Franklin prevailed; his sister did not.

Really nice (and depressing) example of the way the circumstances one is born into, even within a single family, profoundly affect life chances. Something Jane herself wrote about, despite her total lack of formal education:

On July 4, 1786, when Jane Mecom was 74, she thought about the path to prosperity. It was the nation’s 10th birthday. She had been reading a book by the Englishman Richard Price. “Dr Price,” she wrote to her brother, “thinks Thousands of Boyles Clarks and Newtons have Probably been lost to the world, and lived and died in Ignorance and meanness, merely for want of being Placed in favourable Situations, and Injoying Proper Advantages.” And then she reminded her brother, gently, of something that he knew, and she knew, about the world in which they lived: “Very few is able to beat thro all Impedements and Arive to any Grat Degre of superiority in Understanding.”

On the importance of punishing pimps.

Nicholas Kristof on Rachel Lloyd’s Girls Like US

Our system has failed girls like [one of those Lloyd discusses]. The police and prosecutors should focus less on punishing 12-year-old girls and more on their pimps — and, yes, their johns. I hope that Lloyd’s important and compelling book will be a reminder that homegrown American girls are also trafficked, and they deserve sympathy and social services — not handcuffs and juvenile detention.