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 Emily Hobson
My dissertation, Imagining Alliance: Queer Anti-Imperialism & Race in
California, 1966-1989, examines how lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender
activists adapted anti-imperialist politics throughout the late Cold War,
and how these activists used anti-imperialism to craft more liberated sexual
identities, build activist alliances, and establish queer community. I
historicize my study between the founding of the Black Panther Party (1966)
and the defeat of the Nicaraguan Revolution at the close of the Cold War
(1989). Through these unexpected markers, I reveal the importance of racial
militancy, internationalism, and national liberation for U.S. sexual
politics. I argue that through anti-imperialism, queer radicals embraced a
politics of alliance and a discourse of lesbian and gay space. However, I
also argue these two impulses stood in contradiction. Queer space carried
implicit ties to the privileges of the U.S. nation, whiteness, and capital.
Meanwhile, alliance rested on solidarity with national liberation projects
that often rejected queer identities. I examine activists¹ responses to
these contradictions, and locate the central role of lesbian feminists of
color in critiquing both gay and straight nationalisms and sustaining
anti-imperialist commitment. Finally, I argue for the importance of queer
politics in reshaping the left as a whole, in particular through queer
radicals participation in socialist-feminist and international solidarity
activism during the 1970s and 1980s.
I am earning my PhD from the Department of American Studies & Ethnicity at
the University of Southern California, and earned my BA at Harvard College.
Prior to graduate school, I worked in community-based campaigns for racial
justice in California public schools, as well as on campaigns for gender
equity, immigrant rights, and other social justice issues. I have been an
organizer and researcher for the Center for Third World Organizing (CTWO),
the Women & Organizing Documentation Project, and Californians for Justice
(CFJ), and I remained committed to activist work. I am honored to be a
Dissertation Scholar in UCSB's Department of Feminist Studies!
 Laurel Westbrook
My current research explores the mechanisms by which ideas and practices of gender and violence are produced and reproduced. In my dissertation, “Violence Matters: Constructions of Gender and Violence in Mainstream News Media and Social Movement Actors’ Accounts of Murder,” I focus on one such means of (re)production: social narratives about acts of violence. This work brings together the disparate subfields of Gender and Sexuality, Criminology, Social Movements, Media Studies, and Post-Structuralist Theory to trace the ways in which a particular set of ideas and practices of gender and violence were produced in the United States between 1990 and 2005. Using a unique dataset, I examine how these narratives shaped the dominant gender system as well as greatly influenced the criminal justice system’s attempts at violence prevention. To do this investigation, I collected and analyzed all the available texts produced by the mainstream news media and transgender activist groups about the murder of transgender people in the U.S. between 1990 and 2005—a total of more than 7,000 individual news articles, press releases, flyers, and activist websites about 232 homicides. I supplemented these texts with an examination of a number of other sources, including documents about the process of implementing anti-hate crime legislation. This work offers a variety of contributions to the literatures I engage with, including: how increased visibility of gender minorities can cause significant shifts in the gender system over time; the unintended consequences of what I term “identity-based anti-violence activism”; how beliefs about sexuality are central to acts of gender violence; and the ways in which narratives about violence shape attempts at violence prevention.
I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, completing my dissertation under the direction of Professors Barrie Thorne (co-chair), Dawne Moon (co-chair), and Wendy Brown (Political Science), with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality. I have several articles in press right now, including “Vulnerable Subjecthood: The Risks and Benefits of the Struggle for Hate Crime Legislation,” in press at The Berkeley Journal of Sociology, “Becoming Knowably Gendered: The Production of Transgender Possibilities and Constraints in the Mass and Alternative Press from 1990-2005 in the United States,” forthcoming in Transgender Identities: Towards a Social Analysis of Gender Diversity, edited by Dr. Sally Hines and Dr. Tam Sanger, "Where the Women Aren't: Gender Differences in the Use of LGBT Resources on College Campuses,” forthcoming in The Journal of LGBT Youth, and “On Writing Public Sociology: Accountability Through Accessibility, Dialogue, and Relevance,” co-authored with fellow Ph.D. Candidate Damon Mayrl and soon to be available in The Handbook of Public Sociology edited by Dr. Vincent Jefferies. I am honored to be a fellow in residence in the Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
 Lachelle Hannickel
I am proud to join the Women's Studies Program, under the mentorship of Jacqueline Bobo, as a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellowship
recipient for 2007 - 2009. I received my Ph.D. in French Literature from UCSB in 2007. This year I have enjoyed the opportunity to
continue research on my postdoctoral project about representations of resistance and the immigrant domestic worker. Early in Fall Quarter,
I participated in the Intimate Labors Conference, which provided me an exciting opportunity to network with other scholars working
on related issues. I am also currently working on an article on Guadeloupean author Gisèle Pineau's literary aesthetic, which stems
from my dissertation. In addition to my research, I have been able to help establish the UCSB chapter of the UC Society of Postdoctoral
Scholars. Women's Studies has been a wonderful home for me, and I look forward to continuing relationships with all involved!
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