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Speakers: Moji Anderson, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Psychology and Social Work, University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, Jamaica.
Moderated by: Jocelyn Viterna, Professor of Sociology and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Harvard University.
Jamaica is famous for being uniquely homophobic. While homophobia is real, epithets like Time magazine’s “the most homophobic place on earth” not only misrepresent reality but also posit LGBTQ+ Jamaicans exclusively as victims. Research with queer Jamaicans does reveal stories of pain and suffering. However, it also reveals agency, as they play with, around and through homophobia, creating potentially emancipatory ways of understanding the self, masculinity and sexuality that have implications for Jamaican culture writ large. Beyond Homophobia, which began as a symposium and has spawned two conferences and an edited volume, continues the centring of queer Jamaican and Caribbean peoples. In her presentation therefore, Professor Anderson will talk about what she has learned from both from her research and from co-founding Beyond Homophobia.
Moji Anderson is an anthropologist, qualitative health researcher and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Psychology and Social Work at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, Jamaica. She conducts research and publishes in the areas of health, sexualities, and identities in Jamaica and the Caribbean diaspora. She is co-founder of Beyond Homophobia, the biennial UWI conference, and co-editor with Dr Erin MacLeod of Beyond Homophobia: Centring LGBTQ Experiences in the Anglophone Caribbean(2020, UWI Press).
Jocelyn Viterna is Chair of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. Her research examines how social mobilization affects gender norms and practices in politics, in government institutions, in warfare, and in communities. Currently, Viterna is developing four research projects.
The first project documents how activism surrounding women's sexual and reproductive rights in El Salvador has fundamentally transformed the Salvadoran judicial system, and more specifically, its processes for litigating gender. Building from this research, Viterna is developing and deploying training programs aimed at mitigating implicit bias and gender discrimination in Latin American courts.
The second project examines how Salvadoran ob-gyns care for pregnant women and fetuses while negotiating the nation’s absolute abortion ban, and how the ban affects pregnancy health.
The third project compares the discourse and tactics of 8 conservative and 8 progressive social movements in the U.S., investigating whether and how each camp strategically mobilizes notions of “gender.”
Finally, Viterna is developing a book manuscript that situates the Salvadoran case in a broader regional and transnational context to better understand how transnational activism shapes global trends in reproductive health and justice.
Viterna’s work has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, Politics and Gender, and the Latin American Research Review, among other journals. Her book, Women in War: The Micro-processes of Mobilization in El Salvador (2013, Oxford University Press) won four distinguished book awards (the ESS Mirra Komarovsky award, the ASA Section on Sex and Gender award, the ASA Section on Political Sociology award, and the SSSP Global Division award) and one honorable mention (the ASA section on the Sociology of Development). It is currently being translated for publication in Spanish.