Julie Shayne

In general my classes focus on politics, poverty, and resistance in the Third World, typically through the lens of gender.  I passionately believe that as citizens of the most powerful country in the world we are in part responsible for global policies implemented in our name.  It is therefore my goal to enable students to understand the historical record regarding transnational policies and empower them to envision and create alternatives at all levels.   

My classes always include a variety of different types of texts including: fiction, memoir, social science, film, and journalistic.  I try and center the voices of the under represented and provide students access to the various ways that peoples' lives are impacted by political economic policies that benefit elite sectors of society and restrict and repress others.  I also spend much of my courses exposing students to small and large scale examples of grassroots resistance to political, economic, and social injustice.  Ultimately I hope that students are inspired to remain engaged in politics and translate personal political frustration into mobilization for social justice.

Recent Courses Taught

BIS 339 Women, Culture, and Development
BIS 363 Conflict and Connection in the Americas
BIS 393 Women and Politics in Latin America
BIS 490/BCULST 589: Culture and Resistance in the Americas
BCUSP 104/107 Table Talk: Food, Culture, and Development
BCUSP 104/107 Imagining the Americas: Film, Literature, and Politics in Latin America

Research/Scholarship

My research focuses on gender, revolution/resistance, and feminism in Latin America and the diaspora.  I am interested in how, why, and when women participate in revolutionary struggles, how, why, and when they organize as feminists, and how these two types of movements are related to one another. My first book is entitled The Revolution Question: Feminisms in El Salvador, Chile, and Cuba (Rutgers University Press, 2004.)  In it I discuss the ways that women participated in revolutionary movements in all three countries. I argue that women used traditional gender norms and all of the attendant assumptions about passivity to maneuver in hostile territory in ways distinct from that of men. As a result women strengthened revolutionary movements in ways that men could not.  However, often their contributions were overlooked or even stifled which led to a frustration that in some cases was translated into feminism in the wake of the revolutionary movements.

My second book is called They Used to Call Us Witches: Chilean Exiles, Culture, and Feminism (Lexington Books, 2009). They Used to Call Us Witches is a socio-political history which focuses on how leftist Chilean women exiles organized and articulated resistance in the anti-Pinochet solidarity movement of the 1970s and ‘80s with specific attention to culture, emotions, and gender. It also addresses the development of exile feminism in the diaspora in the post-dictatorship period. The book focuses on the case of Chileans in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Selected Publications

They Used to Call Us Witches: Chilean Exiles, Culture, and Feminism. Lexington Books. December 2009.