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Blackwood Research Group

 As a socio-cultural anthropologist, I am interested broadly in questions of gender, sexuality, identity and power in the context of a globalized world. Among my research projects, I have explored gender and kinship among rice farmers of the matrilineal and Islamic Minangkabau of West Sumatra, Indonesia.  I have conducted long-term research on same-sex sexualities and female-bodied trans-identities, focusing on tomboi identity, female masculinities, and lesbian activist movements in Indonesia.  That work is published in Falling into the Lesbi World: Desire and Difference in Indonesia (University of Hawaii Press 2010).

Falling into the Lesbi WorldCurrently I am working on an oral history project focusing on lesbians in San Francisco in the 1970s.  This project seeks to understand cultural processes of social change by exploring how a cohort of lesbian-identified baby-boomer women created a women’s community and a lesbian identity in the 1970s and how this identity continues to inform and shape their lives as they age. 

Please see our blog at the BlaRG: http://blackwoodresearchgroup.wordpress.com/

Current graduate students:
Yuen Ki (Franco) Lai (PhD, Anth): Sexualities in Travel: Women's Same-sex Relationships among Indonesian Migrant Domestic Workers in Hong Kong

Ryan Plis (PhD, Anth) : Families in Transition: FTMs and their Kin Networks in the Contemporary U.S.; (MS ’10): Negotiating Lesbian and Queer Identities in Midwestern Young Adults

Adlina Maulod (MS, Anth): Masculine Ontologies: Female Sexuality and Political Economy in Singapore

Stephanie Allen (PhD, English): Second Class Citizens: Black Lesbians, Citizenship, and the Politics of Representation

Research conducted by former graduate students:
April Callis (PhD  ’11, Anth): Beyond the Binary: Identity, Subjectivity, and the Sexual Borderlands

Katja Pettinen (PhD ’10, Anth):  On the Social Life of Affect: A Narrative-based Ethnography of Relatedness and Coming Out in the United States

Jae Truesdell (MA ’09, American Studies): Photogen(d)ic(k): Articulating Transness Autobiographically and Photographically

Hubert Izienicki (MS ‘07, Sociology), Missing: The Case of Polish Men who Have Sex with Other Men

Heather Mitch (MS '07, Anth), Life in Transition: An Ethnographic Study
Jason Romero (MS '06): Global Queer Tensions: OCCUR's Gay English Class in Tokyo and the Politics of Visibility

Elizabeth Sternke (MS ‘03): Media representations of rape in the U.S.