I am writing to express my interest in the tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor in Gender, Sexuality and Popular Culture. I was this past June awarded a Ph.D. in Women's Studies from UCLA. As an interdisciplinary scholar whose teaching and research bridges feminist cultural studies and cultural studies of science and medicine, I am a strong candidate for this position.
I seek an academic position that will allow me to continue studying contemporary formations of gender, race and sexuality in relation to popular understandings of disease. My first research project in this area concerned the intersecting discourses of science and Orientalism represented by the U.S. mass media in its coverage of SARS and China. I demonstrated the ways in which U.S.-based perceptions of SARS contagion in China were shaped by Eurocentric views of hygiene, gender norms, public-private dichotomy, and human non-human animal hierarchy. This work resulted in a publication titled “Chinese chickens, ducks, pigs and humans, and the Technoscientific Discourses of Global U.S. Empire”.
In my dissertation, titled “The Bio Scare: anthrax, smallpox, SARS, flu and post-9/11 U.S. Empire”, I examined intersecting tropes of gender, race and sexuality in the media-driven disease scares that followed the September 11 attacks in the U.S.—the anthrax scare immediately after, the smallpox scare in 2002, SARS in 2003 and “bird flu” in 2004. These disease scares were part of a post-9/11 era characterized by heightened attention to “national security”. Shaped by the spectre of “bioterrorism”, they centered on "biological threats"—infectious diseases and potential biological warfare agents such as anthrax, smallpox, SARS and flu—and invoked racist representations of disease threats and sexist tropes of disease control. My project examined these cultural constructions of disease—and the disease control measures they helped engender—through a multi-sited cultural ethnography of textual sources spanning popular and specialized realms including mass media, law, medical journals, and internet blogs.
My research illustrated that, in the backdrop of U.S. imperialist politics, women were deployed as alternately health guardians of the U.S. nation and signifiers of a feminized white society vulnerable to "biological threats" presumed to emanate from queer embodiments of transnational danger—the "Middle Eastern" male (bio)terrorist intentionally spreading disease and "Asian" Other unhygienically harboring disease. I demonstrated the role that these disease representations played in both the stigmatization of racialized groups and the enlistment of women as healthcare workers into an emerging biodefense apparatus. Furthermore, I showed that these tropes helped justify the instantiation of neoconservative measures of disease control under the rubric of “biosecurity” (e.g., the diversion of scarce public health resources to biodefense). Drawing heavily on feminist, postcolonial and queer theory, and cultural studies of science and medicine, this multi-sited cultural history contributes to an understanding of racialized and sexualized geographies of disease and gendered economies of healthcare during the post-9/11 period in the U.S. This research was funded by the UCLA Institute of American Cultures. Thus far, two book chapters and an op-ed have resulted, and I am currently writing an article on the anthrax scare and masculinity to be submitted for academic journal publication as well as an issue brief on the securitization of healthcare aimed at health policy and racial and gender justice community organizations.
For my next research project, I am interested in continuing my study of contemporary constructions of disease discourse in the context of crisis preparation. I will focus on pandemic flu preparedness under the new Obama Administration, which has for the most part been an extension of disaster preparedness planning under the post-9/11 Bush Administration. I will examine how popular representations of communities of color as the imagined panicking and noncompliant masses threatening public safety during a pandemic crisis are informed by a history of eugenics control of these same populations. I will focus specifically on how women of color, seen as primary caretakers for their respective communities, are depicted as failing in their maternal roles and deemed responsible for breeding an overpopulated, belligerent and diseased ethnic community who threaten the health of mainstream populations.
I am particularly excited about the prospect of teaching gender and women's studies courses to a diverse ethnic and working-class student body in Chicago. I am passionate about teaching and am dedicated to empowering creative, socially-aware, and independent thinkers. I have teaching interests as well as experience in both introductory and upper-level Women's Studies courses that emphasize feminist activism, intersectionality, and global contexts. I have taught “Introduction to Women’s Studies” three times at a two-year college and four times as a teaching assistant at UCLA. In spring 2007, I designed and taught a course to rave reviews titled “Feminist Studies of Science and Technology” which focused on gender, race and sexuality in relation to science and technology. In addition to a desire to continue teaching introductory women’s studies and feminist science studies courses, I am interested in teaching feminist cultural theories and methods; gender and popular culture; global perspectives on women and gender; transnational feminisms; women of color history; queer women of color in the U.S.; race, gender and sexuality; race and disease geographies; and gender, sexuality and medicine.
My pedagogical strategies consist of a participatory instruction style, dialoguing across difference, and situating knowledge practices. I view teaching as a tool of social transformation. In a nurturing classroom environment, I encourage students to undertake the learning process through the lens of their own experiences and as critically engaged participants. I strive to honor the experience of as many students as possible by offering multiple modes of participation (and grade contribution)—in-class discussion, film and internet presentations, small group work, short paper assignments and extra credits, out-of-class communication, in-class time-constrained exams, take-home written papers, art and multimedia projects, as well as service-learning internships. I also attempt to demystify knowledge production and authority figures by encouraging students to view themselves as capable of contributing and asserting knowledge rather than as passive learners.
My skills and experience in curriculum development, administrative departmental committee service, and community work are also attributes I would contribute to your department. As a member of the UCLA Women’s Studies graduate curriculum committee, I spearheaded a revamping of the required two-course graduate series on feminist theory in order to move away from Eurocentric paradigms towards a more intersectional and globally-contextualized framework. I also served as graduate representative on the UCLA Women’s Studies faculty advisory committee, as a student member of the UC Migrating Epistemologies Working Group, and co-founded the student group “Women in the World” which put on plays and other cultural programs challenging stereotypes about Arab and Muslim women. Moreover, since 2000 I have been involved in community activism to promote social justice for women who have survived sexual assault, immigrant Chinese women exploited in the garment industry, and formerly incarcerated women. I also have experience working with diverse youth in anti-oppression trainings and teaching self-defense to diverse women and trans folk.
I am excited to be potentially joining your department. I believe that the Gender and Women's Studies Department at UIC and its mission of engaged scholarship would be an ideal environment to nurture my research interests—motivated by contemporary phenomenon shaping the lives of women and communities of color, my written work—aimed at both academic and less specialized audiences, and my pedagogical development—centered on student-generated knowledge production.
Thank you very much for your time and consideration.
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