This assignment asks students to continue thinking across-different contexts, including comparative-relational and cross-border thinking. Where you trace how certain operations, ideologies or structures (e.g., cheapening of third-world women’s labor) are animated across different ‘local sites’ (e.g., Ciudad Juarez and Dhaka) through linked conditions (Global markets, SAPs, free trade, middle-class consumers/consumption, etc.). Thinking, for instance, about the analytical work of Kempadoo, Oparah, Gross and Grewal, you will focus your analysis to specific ‘local’ sites, such as two cities, events, factories, hospitals or communities. You will need to do some research on your sites of analysis, but this is not a research paper as much as it is an analytical paper. The key here is to move from the general or broad (and by extension unspecific) to the local and its particularities.
In your paper you will answer/explain the following three questions:
• What are your sites of analysis (e.g., sex working raids and deportations in NYC and Rome).
• What are the connections and linkages between your sites of analysis? Including structural, historical, intersectional (racial, gendered, sexual, (dis)abled, etc.), legal and/or national logics/relations.
• What does a transnational framework make visible? What does thinking across borders/boundaries help to illuminate? What might we fail to see if we confined our analysis to the boundaries of a single nation-state?
Carefully engage with your texts and avoid ‘reaching’ in your argument (or overextending texts) to make absolute statements, especially in order to make generalizing or inaccurate claims. (For example, in Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas several contributors argue that police officers are often directly involved in femicides (especially within Ciudad Juarez), but this does not mean that the police are responsible for all murders (or all police officers partook in femicides), that this is necessarily true outside of Ciudad Juarez (e.g., Chihuahua), nor that this would be the case in a different context (e.g., Papua New Guinea).) Additionally, carefully consider what we have discussed in this class, and avoid universalizing/homogenizing narratives of violence, such as appeals to (cis)sisterhood) or erasing crucial or important differences.
Some possible sites of analysis (please feel free to move beyond this list):
• Police raids on sex-workers in the US (NYC) and Italy (or India or France);
• US militarized rape at the US/Mexico border and in US bases in South Korea (or Philippines or Okinawa;
• Globalized factory work in Ciudad Juarez and in Dhaka;
• Aurora Detention Center (GEO) and Manus Island Detention Center (G4S);
• Indigenous lands/bodies in the US/Canada (such as North Dakota) and Indigenous/Adivasi lands/bodies in India/Bangladesh (such as Kashipur);
• Caging of immigrant kids in the US and Norway detention facilities;
• US-Mexico (Arizona) militarized border and Israel/Palestine militarized border (Gaza);
• Coerced sterilization of poor women (of color) in the US and coerced sterilization of poor Roma women in Czech Republic (or Hungary);
• US family policing system’s targeting primarily Black mothers and Canadian targeting Indigenous mothers (or Somali mothers in Toronto) or Norway family policing system’s targeting immigrant mothers and families.
