2013 Summer Graduate Research Fellowships

Joseph Cabowsky

2013 Graduate Research Fellowship in Sexuality Studies

Joseph and adviserJoseph (pictured with his adviser, Professor Rhonda Gibson) is a Ph.D. Fellow in Mass Communication, whose fellowship will fund an examination of the mass communication efforts of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), particularly focusing on their public relation materials, efforts, and campaigns. Since the 1980s, GLAAD has served as a media watchdog, advocating for a fair and accurate portrayal of LGBT individuals in the media, and has become one of the most influential LGBT organizations in other areas of LGBT rights advocacy, education, and overall awareness. As arguably one of the most important organizations of the modern LGBT rights movement, it is quite surprising how little academic literature has been written that specifically focuses on the organization. No academic study been published on the organization’s actual communication efforts, so Joseph will travel to the Cornell Archives where he can examine GLAAD’s papers from its inception in 1985 to 2001. He recently finished an academic paper that examines the organization’s press releases from 2011–2012, and will begin a dissertation project tracing the organization’s communication story from its start to the present day. Further analysis will gauge the effectiveness of the organization’s efforts while also examining those efforts critically and historically. This important research project will fill many gaps in the academic literature. It will tell us about how sexual minority social movements have used—and can use—mass communication efforts in their aim for visibility, justice, and equality.

Cassandra Hartblay

2013 Graduate Research Fellowship in Sexuality Studies

As a medical anthropologist, Cassandra situates her research at what she calls “a scantly populated crossroads of Disability Studies, Post-Soviet Studies, and Queer Studies.” Her Masters thesis addressed parent movements for inclusive education for children with disabilities in Petrozavodsk, a city of roughly 300,000 people in Northwest Russia near Finland). Last summer she returned to begin dissertation research, began gathering interviews with young people (18-35) who themselves identify as having disabilities. With the structural changes that followed the end of the Soviet Union in Russia, parents, teachers, and social service professionals worked to remake disability services and education. As one collaborator with cerebral palsy put it, this means that young adults with disabilities are “a generation of guinea pigs,” shuttled from one charter program to another. Cassandra’s approach to disability studies is grounded in queer theory, and the understanding that even the most seemingly biological bodily differences have meaning because they are socially interpreted. As she has gained rapport with young adults with disabilities, most of whom live with their parents, the issue of independence and establishing a family of choice—founded on sexual relationships—has emerged as a point of particular tension. For Russians with disabilities, sexual personhood—the ability to be perceived by others as a reproductive agent and as an agent worthy of pleasure—holds important implications for integration and citizenship.

Rachel Hynson

2013 Graduate Research Fellowship in Sexuality Studies

Rachel’s dissertation project in History builds on scholarship on intimacy under Communism, examining sexual behavior and patterns of intimacy as components of nation-making in early revolutionary Cuba. She explores attempts by revolutionary leadership to convert sexuality into a measure of revolutionary fidelity and Cubans’ skillful negotiation of a place for their sexual practices within the revolution. Much existing research examines homophobia as an essential element of nation-building in early revolutionary Cuba. Her work fills a historical gap by investigating the techniques employed to reform heterosexual forms of intimacy in the 1960s. By doing so, she challenges the assumption that only sexual minorities faced regulation during the early decades of the Cuban revolution. Rachel also demonstrates that by relying on persuasion to generate revolutionary support, the new regime achieved legitimacy through hegemonic rule, rather than by dominance alone, as scholars currently assert. This fellowship will support summer research at the University of Miami for a chapter on the campaign to rehabilitate chulos. Revolutionary leaders redefined the meaning of that term throughout the 1960s, but English-language scholars have mistranslated chulo as “pimp,” rather than “kept man.” In the cultural context of mid-twentieth-century Cuba, the inaccurate translation minimizes the scope and meaning of the movement. By understanding the term to mean “kept man,” this chapter contends that the state campaign against chulos aimed to restructure the economic gender roles of families in which women were the primary wage earners.