Dissertation Title: "The Science of Family Planning: Mexico’s “Demographic Explosion,” Contraceptive Technologies,
and the Power of Expert Knowledge"
Abstract:
This dissertation delves into the history of contraception in twentieth-century Mexico by
analyzing the technoscientific activities of local professionals who sought to promote fertility control at a time in which the state maintained a pronatalist policy. By examining the roles of doctors, eugenicists, economists, chemists, and demographers between the 1930s and 1970s, this dissertation argues that these experts contributed to the government’s shift in population policy in the 1970s. Drawing on various archival sources, including clinical reports, institutional records, correspondence, and published materials authored by doctors and social scientists, this study demonstrates how local professionals forged alliances with international donors and fostered interdisciplinary collaborations. All these initiatives allowed these experts to smuggle contraceptives, establish family planning clinics, and even conduct human trials with the birth control pill in Mexico. “The Science of Family Planning,” thus, underscores the complex interplay between state policies, expert interventions, and individual agency, contributing to broader discussions on reproductive justice, public health, and governance in
Latin America.
Dissertation Title: "Contests over Contraception in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico"
Abstract:
Contests over Contraception in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico follows how the birth control pill became immoral and centers Mexican Catholics in this history. From the early 1960s to the 1970s, Mexican Catholic bishops, priests, and married couples debated the morality of the pill. Because the pill was primarily a hormonal invention, as opposed to a barrier method, it inspired debates about the purpose of sex. In the 1960s, the Church was reevaluating its doctrine—including its approach to sex and marriage—amidst modernization, social change, and cultural upheaval. Instead of assuming a monolithic Mexican Church, Contests over Contraception centers on the diversity of Catholic actors and their ideas. I argue that at the heart of these pluralistic debates about the morality of the pill was the contested place of nonprocreative sex in marriage, otherwise known as conjugality, marital intimacy, and pleasure. Centering the question of marital intimacy unsettles narratives about the Mexican Church, as either a critic of economic oppression or a defender of family values. Indeed, economic circumstances led Mexicans to consider family size. Still, this concern was not mutually exclusive with marital intimacy, as often inadvertently assumed. The fear of couples resorting to abortion was powerful enough to reconcile varying concerns and push Mexican Catholics to consider approving the pill.
This dissertation demonstrates that this history is much more than one of Catholic dissent or obedience in response to the Pope's prohibition of the pill in 1968. When we turn to Mexico, we see that these debates were about how couples, not individuals, decided their reproductive and sexual lives. And so, marital intimacy—when and why couples should have sex and whether the pill could facilitate this process—was an important one. Concerns over economic circumstances only raised the stakes.
Dissertation Title: "Expanding Worlds: Italian Women Artists and Cross-Cultural Encounters in Early Modernity"
Abstract:
Bridging the disciplines of art history and cross-cultural studies using a feminist interpretive lens, this dissertation challenges historical narratives of exceptionalism and Eurocentrism through analysis of patterns in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women’s engagement with expanding worlds through their networks and visual representations. A data-driven methodology is used to analyze European women’s access to cross-cultural encounters with world-traveling people and imported objects from Asia, Africa, and the Americas through a database of 249 artists. Then, visual analysis is conducted to understand the relationship between women’s worldly encounters and their subsequent creative choices in depicting artistic subjects that came to be considered exotic, thus positioning the artist as cultural mediator. This research challenges persistent narratives that frame women artists’ access to the world as unavoidably limited by gendered social norms, and offers a new narrative centered on cross-cultural exchange that moves beyond the limits imposed by traditional accounts that focus exclusively on male artists or treat women artists as anomalies. Women artists actively participated in the history of cross-cultural circulation, rather than existing outside it; by restoring their rightful places in this history, we gain the opportunity to assess whether women artists challenged pre-existing imagery and attitudes of cultural imperialism. Although the artists’ choices conform to some biased conventions, they also open the possibility of collaboration with foreign individuals; pay homage to the production of artists from different continents; and create expansive roles for imaginary characters represented as Black. This analysis contributes to our understanding of women’s complex intersectional positions and to the debate on their roles as producers of knowledge and culture.
Dissertation Title: "Imaging ‘Comfort Women’: Girl Statue of Peace (2011) in the Expanded Field"
Abstract:
The Statue of Peace (2011), known as the Girl Statue in Korean, memorializes the “comfort women,” victims of military sexual violence in the colonial and occupied territories under the Japanese Empire (c.1931-1945). Created by artists Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung, the Girl Statue is a life-size, bronze, freestanding sculpture of an empty chair next to a seated girl, confronting the site of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. Since its installation in 2011, the Girl Statue image has proliferated across media, scale, form, and function by artists and the public. The Girl Statue has been reproduced as replicas, watercolor paintings, logo images, gigantic balloons, plastic miniatures, coinage, soft dolls, bracelets, 3D toys, wooden DIY models, LEGO, performances, AR Challenge on social media, and even tattoos.
This dissertation explores the expansion of the Girl Statue over the ten years (2011-2021). Despite its aim to raise awareness of the “comfort women” issue and foster solidarity, the Girl Statue has served the desires and motivations of its makers, consumers, and participants. The multiplication of the Girl Statues symbolically compensated for the dwindling numbers of “comfort women” victims. The narrative of vanishing victims is exemplified by novels and films that underscore the decreasing numbers of the last “comfort women” as an endangered group in need of rescue. The immediacy and intimacy of collectible souvenirs grants a sense of satisfaction that one is contributing to an important cause for justice. Through a close analysis of site visits, conversations, newspapers, television, social media, archives, and symposia, this research explores how our engagement with the Girl Statue shapes and reflects our values regarding humanity. The uncomfortable burden persists for the “comfort women,” who, in becoming images, continue to comfort the present.
Dissertation Title: "The Politics of Care: Feminist Infrastructures of Love and Labor"
Abstract:
In recent years, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges posed by climate change, political theorists and organizers have directed their attention towards the “crisis of care.” The crisis of care refers to a generalized yet unevenly distributed breakdown in the ability to maintain social, ecological, and political systems. The consequences of this crises are multifarious, harming underrepresented minorities and workers, health and education services, the natural environment, and the institutions of liberal democracy. Feminist care theorists have analyzed these interlocking crises of care from a variety of perspectives, criticizing the way care is distributed in a capitalist society, and even postulating the need to care for human and non-human entities that are interconnected through relations of interdependence. Nevertheless, the question of how to enact a politics of care remains open from theoretical and practical perspectives.
“The Politics of Care: Feminist Infrastructures of Love and Labor” addresses this question by examining how a politics of care is produced as an effect of the interdependence between Global South and Global North, nature and culture, human and non-human. To do so, this dissertation critically reexamines the archives of two prominent strands of feminist thought: posthumanism (including decolonial critiques from Central and South America) and Marxist feminism (including critical race theories). It uses the methods of feminist political theory, film, and literary studies in Italian, Spanish and English. The results of the research are threefold. First, I argue for the inseparability of the strategies of love and labor, of regenerative politics and conflictual politics in organizing struggles over care. Second, I track the feminist function (how visions of gender and race emerge) within those struggles and theoretical archives. Third, I argue for the need for feminist infrastructures, and for a transnational understanding of care that is open to influences and practices from the Global North and Global South. Working across the divide between regions of the world, human and non-human, natural and technical, love and labor, “The Politics of Care” offers a complex view of interdependence conceived as infrastructure as a tool for organizing the politics of care.
Gender, Sexuality Feminist Studies