About the Contributors

Kate Bedford was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Women's Studies at Barnard College from 2007 to 2008. She now teaches at Kent Law School, Canterbury, England. She has worked on international development projects in Asia, Europe, and Latin America, and she taught numeracy and literacy skills in England. Her research focuses on the interactions between sexuality studies, development studies, and international political economy. She has just completed a book entitled Developing Partnerships: Gender, Sexuality, and the Reformed World Bank (2009, University of Minnesota Press) that addresses heteronormativity and development policy. She is currently engaged in research on the Commission of the Status of Women and its promotion of equal sharing of responsibility between men and women; on sexuality and class in the UK's new equality regime; and on local development, gender, sexuality, and bingo.

Jon Binnie, Reader in Human Geography at Manchester Metropolitan University, is author of The Globalization of Sexuality (Sage, 2004), co-author of The Sexual Citizen: Queer Politics and Beyond (Polity, 2000) and Pleasure Zones: Bodies, Cities, Spaces (Syracuse University Press, 2001). He is also co-editor of Cosmopolitan Urbanism (Routledge, 2006).

Erika Bornová was born in 1964 in Czechoslovakia, and she studied from 1983 until 1988 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Her participation in the third Konfrontace exhibit helped lay one of the cornerstones for the integration of Czech female artists into exhibitions and other public activities. Sculpture has always been an integral part of Bornová's work. Her earliest works were often created from old furniture—chairs or stools—that she wrapped in textile, fixed with mastic, and then colored. Some of her later pieces, including monumental beings constructed of Styrofoam, are meant to serve as reflections on ideals of beauty. With a healthy dose of irony, Bornová flirts with kitsch to create figures of humans and animals which become symbols of beauty for our time.

Laura Briggs is an Associate Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Arizona. She also holds affiliate appointments in History, Anthropology, and Latin American Studies. She received her Ph.D. from Brown University's Department of American Civilization. She is the author of Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico and is currently working on a book on transnational and transracial adoption. Some of her other research interests include eugenics, reproductive technologies, and education and technology.

Ann Cammett is an Associate Professor at the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada Las Vegas. Her scholarship explores legal and policy issues at the nexus of race, class, gender, the family, and criminal law. She is currently on the Board of Directors at the Center for Constitutional Rights and was a founding board member of Queers for Economic Justice.

Lisa Duggan, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, is the author most recently of The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy (Beacon).

fierce pussy, active in New York City from 1991 to 1995, was composed of a fluid and often-shifting cadre of dykes. Core members included Pam Brandt, Nancy Brooks Brody, Joy Episalla, Alison Froling, Zoe Leonard, Suzanne Wright, and Carrie Yamaoka. Emerging during a decade steeped in the AIDS crisis, activism, and queer identity politics, fierce pussy brought lesbian identity directly out into the streets in a manner characterized by the urgency of those years.

Mary Margaret Fonow is Director of the School of Social Transformation and Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University. Her research interests include feminism and transnational labor activism, feminist methodology, and social movements. Her books include Union Women: Forging Feminism in the United Steelworkers of America, Beyond Methodology: Feminist Scholarship as Lived Research, and New Feminist Politics: Transnational Alliances between Women and Labor (Illinois University Press, under contract). She is co-editor of "Knowledge that Matters," a special issue of Frontiers: a Journal of Women's Studies (Spring 2009) and Making Globalization Work For Women: Women's Social Rights And Trade Union Leadership (SUNY Press, under contract).

Suzanne Franzway, Professor in Gender Studies and Sociology, is a key researcher in the Research Centre for Gender Studies at the University of South Australia. Her current research projects include epistemologies of workplace change: transforming gender relations in engineering, international labour movements and activism, and the impact of domestic violence on women's work. She is a founding member of the UNESCO Women's Studies and Gender Research Network and is deputy Chair of the Working Women's Centre, South Australia. Her books include Sexual Politics and Greedy Institutions: Union Women, Commitment and Conflict in Public and in Private (Pluto Australia, 2001), Staking a Claim: Feminism, Bureaucracy and the State (Allen & Unwin, 1989), and is co-author of New Feminist Politics: Transnational Alliances between Women and Labor (Illinois University Press, under contract). She is co-editor of Making Globalization Work For Women: Women's Social Rights And Trade Union Leadership (SUNY Press, under contract).

Chitra Ganesh is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work seeks to excavate and circulate buried narratives typically excluded from official canons of history, literature, and art. Her art has been widely exhibited at national and international venues including the Brooklyn Museum, the Queens Museum of Art, the Asia Society, the Gawngju Art Museum, Fondazione Sandretto, and ZKM/Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.

Deborah Grant draws from the artworks of well-known male artists—such as Picasso, Basquiat, and Bill Traylor—to address histories and narratives pertinent to her own experience and identity. Grant has had numerous solo exhibitions and has been included in such notable group shows as "After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy" (High Museum of Art, 2008) and "Greater New York" (PS1/MoMA, 2005).

Josephine Ho, Professor and Coordinator of the Center for the Study of Sexualities, National Central University, Chungli, Taiwan, is an activist for sexual rights and freedom of speech. In 2003 she successfully fought a lawsuit aiming to shut down her academic website, charging her with "obscenity."

Janet Jakobsen is the Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women and Dean for Faculty Diversity and Development at Barnard College. She is also a member of Barnard's multidisciplinary academic program in women's studies and an affiliate of the program in human rights. Her publications include Secularisms, edited with Ann Pellegrini (Duke University Press, 2008); Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence, edited with Elizabeth Castelli (Palgrave/Macmillan 2004); Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance, with Ann Pellegrini (New York University Press, 2003); and Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics (Indiana University Press, 1998).

Naomi Klein is author of The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, co-producer of "The Take," and an activist for economic justice.

Esperanza Mayobre is a New York-based artist. She has participated in numerous group shows in the U.S. and internationally. Recently her work was featured at the Rich Gallery in London. She is currently part of the LMCC Workspace Artist Residence. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Artnet, Arte al Dia and Artforum.

Mandisa Mbali is a postdoctoral fellow in the History of Medicine at Yale University. She recently obtained her doctorate at the University of Oxford, where she was a South African Rhodes Scholar. Her doctoral thesis is entitled "The New Struggle: A History of AIDS Activism in South Africa, 1982--2003." Mbali has also published several scholarly articles dealing with former President Mbeki's adoption of AIDS dissidence and the politics of gender and sexuality in South African AIDS activism.

Carrie Moyer is a Brooklyn-based painter and writer. In 1991 Moyer founded the lesbian public art project, Dyke Action Machine!, with photographer Sue Schaffner. Her paintings and agitprop interventions have been exhibited and reviewed nationally and internationally. Moyer has written for Modern Painters, Art in America and the Brooklyn Rail. She is Assistant Professor of Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

Martina Pachmanová is an art historian, independent curator, and writer. She is Assistant Professor at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, Czech Republic. Pachmanová occasionally lectures in the Prague-based program of New York University. During the last ten years, she has curated more than twenty exhibitions. She is an author of several books related to gender and visual culture. Her essays and articles on modern and contemporary art, many of them dealing with issues of gender, sexual politics, and feminism, have been published in periodicals and exhibition catalogues in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia, Germany, United Kingdom, and the United States.

Sheila Pepe is a Brooklyn-based artist best known for making large, labor intensive installations on-site throughout the U.S. Since 1994, her material-based commissions have been for the most part completely ephemeral, punctuated by a variety of more lasting objects and statements. Pepe has had numerous solo museum exhibitions—most recently, at the Smith College Museum of Art in the summer of 2008. She has also been included in group shows at venues such as PS1/MoMA, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and the Boston ICA.

Svati Shah, Ph.D., is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Women's Studies at Wellesley College. She completed her Ph.D. in Columbia University's joint anthropology and public health program in 2006. She has previously taught at Hunter College, Marymount Manhattan College, and New York University. Her dissertation research focused on migration and sex work among day wage workers in the city of Mumbai. She has published in a range of scholarly and progressive journals, including Gender and History, Cultural Dynamics, Rethinking Marxism, and SAMAR: South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection. She is currently working on a book on sex work and migration in Mumbai's informal sector. In addition to her academic work, she has been involved with progressive, LGBT and feminist grassroots organizations in the U.S. and in India, and works as a research consultant to foundations and non-governmental organizations.

Anna Marie Smith is Professor of Government at Cornell University. She was a Visiting Senior Scholar at the Center for Gender and Sexuality and the Law, Columbia Law School, in 2008-09, and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton University, in 2009-10. She is the author of Welfare Reform and Sexual Regulation (Cambridge, 2007), for which she won the Victoria Schuck Award from the APSA, as well as two other books and several articles and chapters in anthologies. Her research interests include jurisprudence and normative political theory; distributive justice; poverty assistance programs and public education policy; feminist theory and feminist legal studies; critical race theory; and the rhetoric of modern State power and citizenship.

Neferti Tadiar is Professor of Women's Studies at Barnard College and Director of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference. Her academic interests include transnational and third world feminisms; postcolonial theory; critical theories of race and subjectivity; literary and social theory; cultural studies of the Asia Pacific region; and Philippine studies. She is currently working on a book project entitled Discourse on Empire: Living Under the Rule of Permanent War and beginning a new research project entitled Schooling National Subjects: Experience and Education in US Colonial Philippines. Recent publications include Things Fall Away: Philippine Literatures, Historical Experience and Tangential Makings of Globality (Duke University, forthcoming); Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation, co-edited with Angela Y. Davis (Palgrave Press, 2005); and Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (Hong Kong University Press/Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2004), Winner of the Philippine National Book Award (2005).

Mickalene Thomas's work explores notions of black beauty and power through romanticized depictions of African American women in intimate domestic settings. Her work has been included in many group exhibitions including "Wild Girls" (Exit Art, 2006), "Frequency" (Studio Museum of Harlem, 2005) and "Greater New York" (PS1/MoMA, 2005). Thomas recently had a solo exhibition at Rhona Hoffmann Gallery, Chicago.

Fatimah Tuggar is a multidisciplinary artist who combines objects, images and sounds from diverse cultures, geographies and histories to comment on how media and technology diversely impact local and global realities. Tuggar uses technology as both a medium and a subject in her work to serve as metaphors for power dynamics. She has shown internationally in venues including the Bamako Biennale, Mali; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Oi Futuro, Rio de Janeiro; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Katerina Vincourova, born in 1968 in Prague, is one of the most important Czech artists of the young generation. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, as well as the Surikov Academy of Fine Arts in Moscow. She completed a prestigious DAAD fellowhip in Berlin and she also holds the Czech Jindrich Chalupecky prize for young artists from the year 1997. Some of her recent work takes a characteristically playful yet critical look at the proliferation of promotional objects in today's society. She manages to critique consumerism while simultaneously identifying deeper, more personal meanings in such objects. Vincourova has participated in several recent solo and group exhibits throughout Europe and the United States.

Ara Wilson is Director of the Program in the Study of Sexualities and Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, she is the author of The Intimate Economies of Bangkok (California, 2004) and has conducted research on sexual and feminist politics at UN meetings, NGOs, and the World Social Forum. She is currently working on a book, Sexual Latitudes: The Erotic Politics of Globalization.

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