UNCG RESEARCH MAGAZINE

WHO TELLS THE STORY?

“My first book was ‘Rhetoric in American Anthropology: Gender, Genre, and Science.’ Anthropology developed in a colonialist vein, connected to a nineteenth-century desire to control and contain. But by looking at work developed by white women, women of color, Jewish women, and older women who joined the field of anthropology, we see that was not the entirety.

“Women anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict wrote out of different relations with the communities they studied. Some wrote as insiders, like Zora Neale Hurston or Lakota writer Ella Cara Deloria. They often wrote in experimental forms, resulting in less problematic, more reciprocal approaches.

“There’s a lot of discussion in creative nonfiction and many academic disciplines about the line between fact and truth and knowledge and reality. These women researchers were wrestling really early with questions of how representation affects reality and whether they way you write can shape both the perception and reality of the thing you’re writing about.”

BEING DIFFERENT

“My research considers how people use their bodies to disrupt public space and try to bring attention to different matters – from their clothing and appearance to demonstrations, sit-ins, and protests.

“Our understanding of an issue can be changed by bodies making us think differently. I am inspired by how many of my students came to UNCG because they want to be in diverse classrooms. When we talk about challenging issues – that they do not all have the same prior experiences with, that they do not all agree about – they bring so much openness, energy, and honest, earnest desire to engage and understand one another.”

ACT LIKE A PROFESSIONAL

“A feminist perspective on gender, language, and communication is central to everything I do. I’ve written about the ‘The Independent Woman,’ a feminist periodical in the 1920s that promoted economic opportunity for women. It focused attention on grooming, appearance, dress – ways to look unassailably professional in order to not have your competence questioned, to not disrupt the tastes and sensibilities of people around you in the workplace.

“Women bore the burden of being seen as having a gender, while men represented themselves as gender-free, merely objective in their tastes and preferences. A lot of advice readers received was about ways to minimize disturbance: ‘don’t wear heavy scents,’ ‘don’t draw attention to your body in any way.’ They had to scrupulously survey their own bodies to ensure no one was ever disturbed by the fact that they were female.

“My interest came in part from the lack of change in this area. I help graduate students who are on the job market, and a lot of the advice that circulates is still extremely gendered, heteronormative, racialized, and about having a body no one can object to. That puts all the burden on women, on people of color, and on sexual minorities to make sure everyone else is comfortable in the workplace.”