Deborah Cohen
How are social inequalities gendered? How are they racialized, sexualized, and classed? And how do these processes configure subjectivity and agency, citizenship and political culture in the United States and Mexico at different historical moments? I turn a historian's eye toward answering these questions, incorporating an array of kinds of evidence—archival, oral historical, ethnographic, literary and filmic—and deploying a variety of analytical approaches–feminist, post-colonial, and critical race theory. My use of interdisciplinary methodology comes out of my graduate training at a university largely unconcerned about disciplinary boundaries. The methods also reflect the overarching priorities of American studies, Latinx studies, and Race/Ethnic studies. What emerges from my approach and subjects, then, is not only a historical narrative but a set of theoretical arguments and approaches that makes my work of interest to a wide academic audience.
Each of my projects broadly maps out these questions: from how Mexican migration produces a particular kind of subject imperfectly aligned with the nation (Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in Postwar United States and Mexico); to the dialectical processes through which actors are constituted vis-à-vis their participation in movements and political projects, along with the legacies of those processes (Beyond '68: The Gendering of Political Culture in the 1968 Mexican Student Movement and Its Legacies); and the analysis of social movements as sites of profound transformations in practices of and thinking about gender and sexuality on a global scale (Gender and Sexuality in 1968: Transformative Politics in the Cultural Imagination). In addition, I have two book projects now in their early stages. The first shifts these questions to the ways that sexual practices and subjectivities become sites of struggle over and symbolic of national and transnational belonging and their affective components (Loyalty and Betrayal). The second explores how race and desire become constituent of broad political projects (The Racialized Erotics of Banditry ).
Each of my projects broadly maps out these questions: from how Mexican migration produces a particular kind of subject imperfectly aligned with the nation (Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in Postwar United States and Mexico); to the dialectical processes through which actors are constituted vis-à-vis their participation in movements and political projects, along with the legacies of those processes (Beyond '68: The Gendering of Political Culture in the 1968 Mexican Student Movement and Its Legacies); and the analysis of social movements as sites of profound transformations in practices of and thinking about gender and sexuality on a global scale (Gender and Sexuality in 1968: Transformative Politics in the Cultural Imagination). In addition, I have two book projects now in their early stages. The first shifts these questions to the ways that sexual practices and subjectivities become sites of struggle over and symbolic of national and transnational belonging and their affective components (Loyalty and Betrayal). The second explores how race and desire become constituent of broad political projects (The Racialized Erotics of Banditry ).
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Books by Deborah Cohen
Drawing on oral histories, ethnographic fieldwork, and documentary evidence, Cohen creatively links the often unconnected themes of exploitation, development, the rise of consumer cultures, and gendered class and race formation to show why those with connections beyond the nation have historically provoked suspicion, anxiety, and retaliatory political policies.
Papers by Deborah Cohen
Drawing on oral histories, ethnographic fieldwork, and documentary evidence, Cohen creatively links the often unconnected themes of exploitation, development, the rise of consumer cultures, and gendered class and race formation to show why those with connections beyond the nation have historically provoked suspicion, anxiety, and retaliatory political policies.
This essay has three aims: a) to sketch debates around scale and its scholarly importance; b) to offer a historical understanding of the problem and use of scale in global studies; and c) to posit that sexual intimacy and political desire in the 60s became global in ways that further challenge how we as scholars use scale. Even as sociologist Saskia Sassen finds the global in the local, we posit a multi-directional methododology of scale where dynamics usually associated with the local are locatable as the global. The global parameters of late-1960s social movements suggest the multi-scalar re-orderings of the Cold War as both novel and fundamental to the attendant political, economic, and cultural changes that brought these movements to fruition.
https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/american-historical-review
https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.3.739
"1968 is one of the most fiercely debated and misunderstood transformative years in global history. This extraordinarycollection takes us out of our comfort zones and brilliantly shifts the terms of discussion away from the cheerful celebration of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll to the more terrifying and painful stories of brutal repression, agonized shame, and conflicted aspirations. It decenters the typical western tales told about 1968 by bringing in the vantage points of Havana, Mexico City, Prague, and Dakar, while offering utterly fresh accounts of developments in Paris and San Francisco as well. The beaten, burning, and yearning bodies evoked here withsensitivity and rigor change how we think about the intricate interconnections between emotions and politics." - Dagmar Herzog, author of Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics
"1968, like 1789 and 1848, is a watershed year in the history of revolutionary movements, one whose events reshape everything that follows. Drawing on archival research, close readings of texts and images, and political analysis to reframe these events in a comparative global context, and foregrounding the hitherto neglected significance of gender and sexuality, Frazier and Cohen s new interdisciplinary collection proposes major revisions in how we think about 1968 and what has come since." - Andrew Hoberek, University of Missouri-Columbia
"Frazier and Cohen's collection considers the centrality of gender and sexuality in a year of global political ferment.Essays on events and social movements in Africa, Europe, and the Americas challenge conventional scholarship, raise new questions, and provoke new directions in our thinking about why 1968 mattered then, and why it still does today."-Lisa Duggan, author of Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism,
CONTENTS
Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy
“Out Now!”: Antimilitarism and the Politicization of Homosexuality in the Era of Vietnam Justin David Suran
Los Duenos de Mexico: Power and Masculinity in ’68 Elaine Carey
“Your Sexual Revolution Is Not Ours”: French Feminist “Moralism” and the Limits of Desire Julian Bourg
Plus ça Change… Gender and Revolutionary Ideology in Cuban Cinema of 1968
Emily A. Maguire
Africa and 1968: Derepression, Libidinal Politics, and the Problem of Global Interpretation Steven Pierce
Spirit, Awakenings, Imaginaries, Beyond ’68
Talking Back to’ 68: Gendered Narratives, Participatory Spaces, and Political Cultures Deborah Cohen, Lessie Jo Frazier
Acts of Affection: Cinema, Citizenship, and Race in the Work of Sara Gomez
Susan Lord
The “Burning Body” as an Icon of Resistance: Literary Representations of Jan Palach
Charles Sabatos Ph.D.
Ambiguous Subjects: The Autobiographical Situation and the Disembodiment of 68
Michelle Joffroy
The Spirit of May 68 and the Origins of the Gay Liberation Movement in France
Michael Sibalis
Afterword Michele Zancarini-Fournel (Translated by Deborah Cohen and Lessie Jo Frazier)
*Global and cross-cultural figures, movements, sources: French, Cuban, Czech, Mexican, US-ian.
*Bridges counter-cultural and broader socio-cultural phenomena.
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