Editorial Collective
The Feminist Wire celebrates a multiplicity of feminist expressions from a variety of writers that span genders, sexualities, professions, races, ethnicities, and geographies.
Tamura A. Lomax
Tamura A. Lomax holds a Ph.D. in Religion from Vanderbilt University. Her dissertation, entitled Changing the Letter: Theorizing Race and Gender in Pop Cultural Media Through a Less Pornotropic Lens, explores the many ways that race, gender, sex, and sexuality get re-presented in religion and film. She is the author of several essays and is at work on three projects: An edited volume entitled Womanist/Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Cultural Productions, co-authored with Rhon S. Manigault-Bryant and Carol B. Duncan. This project combines womanist and black feminist thought to engage themes that emerge in the popular works of African American playwright, television producer, and filmmaker Tyler Perry. She is also at work on her first single authored monograph, which explores the poetics, politics and pornotropia of the African American sermon, as well as an essay that examines mythology, race, gender and gynecology. She teaches and lectures in American Religion, African American Religion, African American Diaspora Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Cultural Studies. She is co-founder, along with Hortense Spillers, of The Feminist Wire.
Monica J. Casper
- Monica J. Casper is Professor of Women and Gender Studies and American Studies at Arizona State University. She writes about gender, health, bodies, sexuality, motherhood, and reproductive politics. She is author of the award-winning book The Making of the Unborn Patient: A Social Anatomy of Fetal Surgery, co-author of Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility, and co-editor of Corpus: An Interdisciplinary Reader on Bodies and Knowledge. She is currently researching the biopolitics of infant mortality and maternal-child health and is also editing a volume on critical trauma studies. With Lisa Jean Moore, she co-edits the NYU Press book series Biopolitics: Medicine, Technoscience, and Health in the 21st Century. Monica’s essays and stories have appeared in Trivia: Voices of Feminism, Slow Trains Literary Journal, Florida Review, Canyon Voices, American Sexuality Magazine, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Spilling Ink Review, and Conscience. Follow Monica at www.monicajcasper.com, @Monicat66, or http://hegemonica.tumblr.com/.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Alexis Pauline Gumbs has a PhD in English, Africana Studies and Women’s Studies from Duke University. Alexis is the founder of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind and the co-creator of the Queer Black MobileHomecoming Project.
Heather Laine Talley
Heather Laine Talley is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Western Carolina University. Her teaching and research interests center on gender and sexuality, medicine, and the body. Her writings on topics as diverse as philanthropy, disability, and romance have been published in a range of edited volumes and academic journals. She is currently completing a book titled Sociology of the Face: Aesthetic Surgery as Life Saving Work (New York University Press). As an engaged scholar, she has employed the sociological imagination in the service of feminist activism through Act like a Grrrl, a Nashville based organization which invites girls to share and transform their personal experiences through writing and the arts and through her service to Asheville, NC-based Women at Risk. Her hope is to continue integrating teaching, scholarly research, and community activism. She is an editorial collective member of Feminist Teacher.
- Adam Thomas
Adam Thomas is a Ph.D. student in the History Department at University of California, Irvine, with a primary focus on constructions of race and masculinity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular American and Caribbean culture. His research is currently focused on racially ambiguous depictions of the Carpetbagger in late nineteenth-century print culture. He is a founder and first Editor-in-Chief of Trans-Scripts: An Online Interdisciplinary Journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences, based at UCI.
- Ulli K. Ryder
Ulli K. Ryder, Ph.D. is an award-winning educator, consultant, writer, editor and thinker. She facilitates discussions of gender, race, ethnicity, identity formation and media to foster diversity and create open dialogue. She has been a Visiting Scholar at Brown University since 2009. Dr. Ryder earned her Ph.D. in American Studies & Ethnicity from the University of Southern California. She also holds a Master of Professional Writing (USC), a Master of Afro-American Studies (UCLA), and BA from Simmons College in English and African American Studies.
Siviku Hutchinson
Sikivu Hutchinson is a senior intergroup specialist for the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission. She received a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University and has taught women’s studies, cultural studies, urban studies, and education at UCLA, the California Institute of the Arts, and Western Washington University. She is the author of Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, and Transportation Politics in Los Angeles, Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars, and the forthcoming Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels (Infidel Books, 2012). She is also the editor of blackfemlens.org, founder of the Black Skeptics and a senior fellow for the Institute for Humanist Studies.
- Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is from Harlem, New York. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming internationally in publications including Callaloo, American Fiction, Best New Writing, Crab Orchard Review, Bloom, Lumina, Amistad, The Minnesota Review, 2010 Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize Stories, Baobab: South African Journal of New Writing, American Visions and GLQ. She is the winner of the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, the William Gunn Fiction Award, the James Baldwin Memorial Playwriting Award, as well as honors from Glimmer Train, Gulf Coast, American Short Fiction, Best New Writing,Philadelphia Stories, the Boston Fiction Festival, Sol Books, Temple University, Del Sol Press, the NAACP, and others. She is the recipient of scholarships, fellowships, and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Yaddo Colony, the Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, the New York State Summer Writers’ Institute, the Center for Fiction, and Williams College. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. She recently completed her dissertation on voice and difference in contemporary women’s literature of the African Diaspora.
Darnell L. Moore
Darnell L. Moore is a writer/poet and activist who lives in Bedstuy, Broooklyn, NY and hails from Camden, NJ. He is a 2011-2012 Visiting Scholar in the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU and a Fellow of the Global Justice Institute. His writings, which have been published in peer-reviewed and popular publications, focus on issues of race and sexuality.
C. Riley Snorton
C. Riley Snorton is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He earned a Ph.D. in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University in Pennsylvania. Snorton has received several fellowships including an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral fellowship at Pomona College and the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation fellowship at Harvard University. He writes in the areas of transgender and queer theory, Africana studies, cultural studies, performance studies, and popular culture. Snorton has published book chapters in Homophiles, Critical Essays on Dave Chappelle, and Transgender Migrations:The Bodies, Borders, and Politics of Transition. His articles can be found in the International Journal of Communication, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. He is currently completing his monograph, The Glass Closet: Black Sexuality and Panoptical Imagination (University of Minnesota Press).
Aimee Meredith Cox
Aimee Meredith Cox, PhD, is a cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Performance and African and African American Studies at Fordham University. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan where she also held a postdoctoral fellowship with the Center for the Education of Women. Dr. Cox’s research and teaching interests include expressive culture and performance; urban youth culture; public anthropology; Black girlhood; and Black feminist theory. She is currently completing a book entitled, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship.Shapeshifters is an ethnographic exploration of the performative strategies young black women in low-income urban communities use to access various forms of self-defined economic and social mobility. Dr. Cox is the current co-editor of Transforming Anthropology, the peer-reviewed journal of the national Association of Black Anthropologists.
Dr. Cox is also a choreographer and dancer. She trained on scholarship with the Dance Theatre of Harlem, toured extensively as a professional dancer with the Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble/Ailey II, and is the founder and creative director of The BlackLight Project, a youth-led arts activist organization currently working in partnership with the Sadie Nash Leadership Project.
David J. Leonard
David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan, layupline, and Urban Cusp. He is a past contributor to Slam, Loop21, The Nation and The Starting Five. He blogs @No Tsuris . Follow him on Twitter @DR_DJL.
Catherine Morrisey-Ribeiro
Catherine Morrisey-Ribeiro is a graduate student at Arizona State University studying Social Justice & Human Rights. Her interests include mental health rights, global health movements, immigration and the construction of nationality, and food politics. She is currently working on a project documenting the lives of children institutionalized for mental illness. She lives in Arizona with her husband and four children, all of whom are actually pets (except her husband). Website: www.catherinemorriseyribeiro.com
Omar Ricks Photo courtesy of Jun Kamata
Aishah Shahidah Simmons
- Aishah Shahidah Simmons is an an award-winning African-American feminist lesbian independent documentary filmmaker, television and radio producer, published writer, international lecturer, and activist based in Philadelphia, PA. An incest and rape survivor, she is the producer, writer, and director of the internationally acclaimed, award-winning, groundbreaking feature film NO! The Rape Documentary, which unveils the reality of rape, other forms of sexual violence and healing in African-American communities. NO! also explores how rape is used as a weapon of homophobia. She is presently in post-production on Liberation from Within about the first 10-day Vipassana Meditation course, as taught by S.N. Goenka, held in India, for people of African heritage worldwide. Her previously completed videos Silence…Broken and In My Father’s House are her personal exploration of the impact of the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and rape on her Black feminist lesbian journey. Her writings on cinematic activism, gender-based violence, queer identity, and spirituality from an AfroLez®femcentric perspective are featured in several anthologies, journals, and blogs. Aishah facilitates workshops, teaches classes, and lectures extensively throughout North America and internationally. NOtheRapeDocumentary.org.
Mariko Nagai
- Mariko Nagai is a graduate of New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program, where she was the Remarque Fellow in Poetry. Her stories, poems, and translations have appeared in Pushcart Prize, New Letters, Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, 13th Moon, and other journals. She has received multiple Pushcart Prizes both in poetry and fiction (and was nominated two other times, with one poem chosen for inclusion in the Best of Pushcart Prize) as well as residency fellowships from Rockefeller Foundation – Bellagio Center, Yaddo, UNESCO-Ashberg Bursaries for the Arts, and Akademie Schloss Solitude. Histories of Bodies: Poems was the recipient of the 2005 James Saltman Poetry Award and published by Red Hen Press in 2007, and Georgic: Stories was awarded the 2009 G.S. Sharat Chandra Award. Georgic made the longlist for the Frank O’Connor International Story Award, the world’s largest short story prize. Mariko was nominated for 2011 Pushcart Prize for her story “Confession”, which first appeared in New Letters and won the silver medal in Short Fiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. Her work has been translated into Bulgarian, Dutch, French, German, and Vietnamese. Currently, she is an Associate Professor at Temple University in Tokyo, Japan.
Shubhra Sharma
Shubhra Sharma joined the Connecticut College faculty in 2010 as the Vandana Shiva Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies. At Connecticut College, Shubhra teaches courses on transnational women’s movements and feminist ethnography such as “Chutney-Popcorn: Bollywood, Globalization, and Social Reform,” and “Traveling as Feminist.” Before coming to Connecticut College, Shubhra served as Associate Director and Senior Lecturer in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a research fellowship with the Global Feminisms Collaborative at Vanderbilt University. Shubhra’s first book, “Neoliberalization” as Betrayal: State, Feminism, and a Women’s Education Program in India, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2011. Here, she analyzes how feminism as expertise played an important role in translating the “woman condition” into the “woman question” for the purposes of governance (by national and transnational authorities); how feminism as expertise displayed a form of “disciplining politics” vis-à-vis women “who will not articulate their needs in political terms”; and how subjectivities constituted through a form of “disciplining politics” challenge such politics in discourse and practices of everyday life. Shubhra uses betrayal as an allegory of/ for such challenges and tells many stories of such betrayal in context (Chitrakoot and Delhi, India). Currently Shubhra is examining the shifting (or not) nature of imaginations about self, family, and nation amongst the Indian diaspora community in Canada, especially those who have migrated there from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to understand what constitutes the linchpin of cultural identity building within this community in its transnational movement. Shubhra has also worked as a research anthropologist for a cutting-edge design firm based in Dallas, TX. She currently resides in New York City with her partner.
Kevin Allred
- Kevin Allred has a Bachelor’s degree from Utah State University and a Master’s degree from UMass Boston, both in American Studies. He has taught extensively in Women’s and Gender Studies and American Studies at Rutgers University, including his own signature course: Feminist Perspectives: Politicizing Beyoncé. He is currently writing his dissertation, in which he interrogates U.S. black feminism through the sonic register, attempting to politicize the very sounds black women’s voices make, both live and recorded. He is particularly interested in the ways black female musicians – like Nina Simone, Odetta, Beyoncé Knowles, Nicki Minaj, and Janelle Monáe – manipulate their voices in such a way that histories get sonically recapitulated and transformed into a form of sonic warfare against the state. He has been politically active with national and local LGBTQ organizations over the past thirteen years working on issues of queer youth empowerment through music, as well as nationally touring as a singer/songwriter and releasing two albums on his own independent record label, Gutter Folk Records. At present, he is at work on a third album of original songs and teaching in the American Studies department at UMass Boston.
Bushra Rehman
Bushra Rehman is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer who was born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens. She co-edited the anthology Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism, a seminal work on US based women of color and feminism. Her writing has been featured on BBC Radio 4, WNYC and KPFA and in the New York Times, India Currents, Crab Orchard Review, Sepia Mutiny, Color Lines, and Mizna: Prose, Poetry and Art Exploring Arab America. Bushra’s work has also been included in the anthologies Indivisible: Contemporary South Asian American Poetry, Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion and Spirituality, Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender, And the World Changed: Contemporary Pakistani Women Writers, Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies, and Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality. Her collection Bhangra Blowout and Other Stories is forthcoming from Upset Press. See www.bushrarehman.com.
Hakima Abbas
Hakima Abbas has been active in struggles for social justice around issues of self-determination, race, class, gender and sexuality for over fifteen years in Africa and her diaspora. Her professional work as a human rights defender, policy analyst and researcher has focused on Africa and the Middle East. Hakima is currently the Executive Director of Fahamu, a pan-African organization supporting the movement for social justice in Africa by generating knowledge to serve activism; creating learning for, by and across movements; amplifying Africa-centered voices, perspectives and solutions in policy and decision-making; and, creating platforms for analysis and debate. She is the editor and author of various publications on a range of issues–from aid and reparations to African LGBTI equality and aid to peacekeeping in North Africa–to the Diaspora in the African Union. Hakima holds a Bachelor of Sciences in Mathematics from Leeds University and a Masters in International Affairs from Columbia University.
Rosa-Linda Fregoso
Rosa-Linda Fregoso is an interdisciplinary scholar and writer. She is the author of six books and edited collections, and has over 50 essays published in print and online journals, and edited collections. Fregoso is currently a Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz and lives in Oakland California.
Fregoso’s research and teaching reflect her interest in human rights, culture and feminism in the Américas. Her publications cover issues of human rights, feminicide, and gender violence, media and visual arts, race, cultural politics and aesthetics, in the Américas.
Fregoso received an interdisciplinary PhD (1982-87) from the University of California, San Diego. A former Chair of the LALS department, she is also faculty affiliate of Film and Digital Media, Social Documentation, Feminist Studies, and History of Consciousness. She is a member of the Scientific Commission of the Observatorio Nacional de Violência e Género (Universidade Nova de Lisboa); an International Research Collaborator with the Red de Investigadoras por la Vida y Libertad de las Mujeres in Mexico and Central America. She is a co-principal investigator of the Interdisciplinary Initiative for Human Rights in the Américas.
A native of Corpus Christi Texas, Fregoso earned a bachelor in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to working in academia, she was a radio and television journalist. From 1977-79, she produced and hosted “Telecorpus,” a daily television-news program, broadcast in South Texas. From 1979-1982, she produced and hosted the weekly radio program, “The Mexican American Experience” for the Longhorn Radio Network and KUT-FM (an NPR affiliate). The Mexican American Experience was the first nationally syndicated radio program on Chicano/a issues to air on public and commercial radio stations.
Fregoso’s expertise in human rights, gender violence, and media informs her public service. She provides expert opinion in gender asylum cases and consultation on gender violence in Latin America, and serves as advisor for documentary and multi-media projects.
Nicole Guidotti-Hernández
Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández is Associate Professor of American Studies and the Associate Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her doctorate degree from Cornell University in 2004 and her M.A. from Cornell University in 2000. She received her Bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1997.
Professor Guidotti-Hernández research interests intersect with a number of fields and areas: Transnational Feminisms, Critical Race Studies, Chicana/o Studies, Latina/o Studies, Borderlands History, American Studies, Violence and Citizenship, and Indigeneity and Nationalisms.
Her book titled Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries with Duke University Press is a feminist intervention into discourses of nationalism, mestizaje and victimization that characterize the historicization of violence along the border between 1851 and 1910. Her articles such as “Reading Violence, Making Chicana Subjectivities” appear in anthologies such as Techno/futuros: Genealogies, Power, Desire (2007), edited by Nancy Raquel Mirabal and Agustin Lao-Montes. She has also published in journals such as Women’s Studies International Forum, Social Text, The Latin Americanist, and Latino Studies, where her article “Dora the Explorer, Constructing “Latinidades” and the Politics of Global Citizenship” is one of the most downloaded articles in the history of the journal.
She is also at work on two new projects. First, ¡Santa Lucia! Contemporary Chicana and Latina Cultural Reinterpretations of Saint Iconographies, examines kitschy and queered representations of Catholic saints in literary, self-help, visual and performative forms. These alternative saint iconographies provide a site for theorizing subjectivity as they reinterpret the deeply disturbing and often violent hagiographies of Catholic saints as queered or kitsch cultural allegories. Second, Red Devils and Railroads: Race, Gender and Capitalism in the Transnational Nineteenth Century Mexico Borderlands, tracks the development of the railroad and gendered relations at both the southern Mexico borderlands between Guatemala, Belize and Chiapas and the U.S./Mexico border to the north. The project examines how racialized masculinity, femininity, representations and performances of gender were some of the most contentious sites where power was enacted, negotiated, and redistributed.
As a public intellectual, Dr. Guidotti-Hernández has written numerous articles for the feminist magazine Ms. covering such topics as immigration, reproductive rights, the Dream act and Dora the Explorer. She also sits on the national advisory council for the Ms. and is currently on the national advisory council for Freedom University in Athens, Georgia. Website : nicoleguidottihernandez.com.
Linda Martín Alcoff
- Linda Martín Alcoff teaches philosophy and women’s and gender studies at the City University of New York, both at Hunter College and the Graduate Center. She has written and edited several books, including Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self (Oxford University Press, 2006). For more info go to www.alcoff.com.
