Research and Activities

Faculty Research and Activities

Lori Baralt

Lori Baralt received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Michigan State University, with expertise in feminist theory, social movements, and women’s health. She also completed a specialization in Gender, Justice and Environmental Change through the Women and International Development Program.

Her dissertation, “Health Social Movements in a Transnational Context: Racing around the World for a Cure” critically examined the global expansion of biomedical breast cancer advocacy. Expanding on research related to breast cancer and the environment, she co-authored an article on the collaboration between breast cancer advocates and scientists in the Breast Cancer and Environment Research Centers that have been funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Studies and the National Cancer Institute. She also co-authored a piece examining the politics behind Komen for the Cure’s defunding of Planned Parenthood in 2012.

Her work has been published in the journals Environmental Health Perspectives, Women’s Health Issues, and Journal of Religion and Health as well as in edited volumes, including 21st Century Handbook of Sociology and Health and Environment: Social Science Perspectives. She has presented papers to the National Women’s Studies Association, the American Public Health Association, Sociologists for Women in Society, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, the Pacific Sociological Association, the Michigan Women’s Studies Association, and the American Sociological Association.

Currently she is working on two pedagogical research papers about teaching reproductive justice and environmental justice as well as collaborating with colleagues in Sociology and Health Science on a quantitative research project examining the sexual and reproductive health knowledge and behaviors of CSULB students. One article regarding religiously and sexual and reproductive health has been published and another article on HPV vaccination status in currently in progress.

Azza Basarudin

Azza Basarudin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at California State University, Long Beach. She received her Ph.D. in Gender Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Trained in gender and sexuality studies, her research and teaching interests are transnational feminisms, Muslim cultures and societies, feminist movements, and human rights, emphasizing Southeast Asia.

She has held visiting positions and fellowships at Harvard Divinity School, Syracuse University, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Universiti Sains Malaysia, and the American University in Cairo. Her research has been supported by the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and the National Science Foundation (NSF), among others.

Basarudin is a longtime resident of Los Angeles and has collectively produced and hosted radio shows on women and gender issues in communities of Muslims on KPFK. She is a former columnist for the Malaysian Insider and a founding member of a feminist task force in Southern California to tackle Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism.

Courses:

WGSS 301 Feminist Research Methods
WGSS 495 Senior Capstone Seminar
WGSS 401 Bodies and Borders: Feminism and Globalization
WGSS 339 (I/ST 339) Transnational Feminisms: Contexts, Conflicts, and Solidarities

Publications

Book

Basarudin, Azza. Humanizing the Sacred: Sisters in Islam and the Struggle for Gender Justice in Malaysia. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016.

Peer-Reviewed Articles & Chapters

Basarudin, Azza and Tina Beyene. “Embodied Precarity: Feminist Politics, Laboring Bodies of Color, and the Neoliberal University.” In Decolonial Feminist Genealogies and Futures, eds, Annie Isabel Fukushima and K. Melchor Quick Hall. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press (forthcoming 2024).

Basarudin, Azza. “Reluctant Belonging: Tudung (Headscarf), Communalism, and Muslim Politics in Urban Malaysia” Feminist Formations (forthcoming, Vol. 35, Issue 2, Summer 2023).

Basarudin, Azza. “Mak Nyahs and the Subject of Rights: Perversity, Piety, and Citizenship in Malaysia.” In Feminist Studies: Foundations, Conversations, Applications, eds Hemangini Gupta, Kelly Sharron, Carly Thomsen, and Abraham Weil. New York, NY: Routledge (forthcoming, 2023).

Basarudin, Azza, Sherine Hafez, Catherine Sameh, and Khanum Shaikh. “­­­Countering Epistemologies of Islamophobia: Critical Feminist Pedagogies,” Scholar and Feminist Online, Issue 17.1, July 2021.

Basarudin, Azza, and Khanum Shaikh. “The Contours of Speaking Out: Gender, State Security, and Muslim Women’s Empowerment.” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 19, no. 1 (2020): 107-135. muse.jhu.edu/article/759154.

Basarudin, Azza. The Shape of a Life. Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 1 June 2019; 8 (2): 24–34. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2019.8.2.24

Basarudin, Azza. “The Other Within Muslim Rights Warrior In Malaysia”. Samyukta: A Journal of Gender and Culture, vol. 2, no. 1, Jan. 2017, doi:10.53007/SJGC.2017.V2.I1.135

Basarudin, Azza and Himika Bhattacharya, “Meditations on Friendship: Politics of Feminist Solidarity in Ethnography” in Chowdhury, Elora Halim, and Liz Philipose (eds), Dissident Friendships: Feminism, Imperialism, and Transnational Solidarity (Champaign, IL, 2016; online edn, Illinois Scholarship Online, 20 April 2017) https://doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252040412.001.0001

Stacy I. Macías

Stacy I. Macías earned a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies from UCLA and received the Carlos E. Castañeda postdoctoral fellowship at UT Austin in 2011. Her research and teaching are in women of color feminisms, ethnic and cultural studies, feminist transnationalism, and queer of color theories. Together these areas of thought informed the critical inquiries in her dissertation, “Forbidden Femininities: Reimagining the Cultural Politics of Queerly Racialized Femininity in Queer Theory and Chicana/o Studies.” She grew up in South El Monte, CA and is a co-founding member of Tongues, a queer, lesbian, and bisexual women of color project and zine.

Her recent publications include “Claiming Style, Consuming Culture: The Politics of Latina Self-Styling and Fashion Lines” in The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Popular Culture, and “The ‘Good,’ the ‘Bad,’ and the Queer Invisible: The Los Angeles May Day Queer Contingent” in Diálogo: An Interdisciplinary Studies Journal. Most recently, she presented her research at the Lesbian Lives Conference in Brighton, England and the LGBTQ Scholars of Color National Conference in New York City.

Currently, she continues her research on queer of color representational practices in film, literature, material culture, and new media with a focus on how visibility and racialization processes bear on representations of the self in the cultural work of queer femmes. Her next research project examines disappearing Latina/Chicana lesbian and queer of color subterranean community sites due to gentrification and other structural processes.

Jennifer Reed

Jennifer Reed received her PhD in Comparative Culture from UCI. Her dissertation research focused on one-woman shows and the ways they provided alternatives to dominant images of women through representations of race, class, and sexuality. Her research has since focused more on television and representations of gender and sexuality.

She has written on the various personae of Lily Tomlin, Roseanne, and Ellen DeGeneres, postfeminism on television, and is currently at work on representations of female masculinity on The L Word. Her work has appeared in Feminist Media Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture, and the anthology Third Wave Agenda. Her 2013 book, The Queer Cultural Work of Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner was published by Palgrave.

She has presented her work at the National Women’s Studies Association, The Popular Culture Association, and the International Studies Association.

Shira Tarrant

PhD, Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles

Dr. Tarrant invites her students to explore issues and controversies in gender justice by applying data, facts, and lived experience to the hot-button topics that we care about today. Dr. Tarrant’s courses are designed to be engaging and of-the-moment: Course topics include the philosophy of sex and love, the economy, pop culture, pornography, feminist theory, masculinity, and intersectional perspectives on the law. She encourages students to think deeply and ethically about the world we live in, and to analyze everyday life through new and exciting points of view.

Shira Tarrant is committed to bridging academic scholarship with public debate with several books on feminist intellectual history, men and feminism, feminism and fashion, gender/sexual politics, and pornography. Interviews and reviews of her books have appeared in places such as The AtlanticThe New Yorker, and Bitch magazine. She enjoys providing media commentary on sex and gender for global TV and radio, including NPR, USA Today, MarketWatch, and Rolling Stone — and has contributed to anthologies such as Stay Solid! A Radical Handbook for Youth, scholarly journals, and mainstream news sources including Playboy and Rolling Stone. Dr. Tarrant’s most recent book is The Pornography Industry: What Everyone Needs to Know, published by Oxford University Press. Shira is currently researching academic mental health issues and has a forthcoming book chapter titled “Tools for Improving Academic Mental Health and Holistic Wellbeing.”

Abraham Weil

Abraham Weil is an assistant professor in the department of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at California State University, Long Beach and is the co-editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (Duke University Press). Weil completed his PhD in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona and his MA at Rutgers University. His current book project Transmolecular Revolution: Trans*versality and the Mattering of Political Life focuses on radical political formations, anti-black racism, trans* theorizing, and continental philosophy in the US and France from the 1960s to the present. Drawn from the conceptual vocabulary of cultural theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as well as recent work in trans* theory and black studies, this manuscript develops transversality and molecular revolution as frameworks for remixing scales of revolutionary political movements. To do so, his research works through competing theoretical approaches—including trans* theory, Marxism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, phenomenology, critical race theory, and sexuality studies—to investigate the shifting contours of gender, race, and sexuality amidst contemporary political struggle.

His recent and forthcoming publications include “Trans*versal Assemblages: All Colors are Found in Black” in Deleuze and Guattari and the Schizoanalysis of Trans (Bloomsbury Press), “Cosmopolitics in Drag” in Making Middles Matter: Feminist Methodologies in-between New Materialisms and Intersectionality (Routledge Press); “Transversal Animacies” in Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, and “Burn it Down: Abolition, Insurgent Political Praxis, and the Destruction of Decency” in Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics and “Psychoanalysis and Transversality” in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (2017).

Areas of focus: Continental Philosophy; Gilles Deleuze an Félix Guattari; Foucauldian Biopolitics; Black Studies; Trans* Theory; Affect Studies; Sexuality Studies; and Feminist Theory.