VHC welcomes its 2010-2012 postdoctoral fellow, Katie Oliviero, who will receive her PhD in Women's Studies from UCLA this summer. At UCLA, Katie was the recipient of the Jean Stone Dissertation Research Award, the LGBTS Teaching Fellowship and a Dissertation Year Fellowship. Her research intertwines sociolegal analysis with intersectional feminist and performance studies to examine how visual political cultures manipulate insecurity into a gendered and racial sense of vulnerability. Katie's dissertation considers how activist opposition to liberalized gay, reproductive and immigration rights effectively harnesses sensationalism and memory to compose core national ideals - citizenship, intimacy, personhood and family - as vulnerable and needing political protecti ion. Her article on on gendered vulnerability and immigration is forthcoming in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and her assessment of racial immorality in same-sex marriage opposition will be featured in an upcoming anthology.
As VHC's postdoctoral fellow, Katie will refocus this dissertation research to examine how international reactionary movements employ disability, children and animal rights narratives to generate cultural traction and call for state intervention. Her project will ask how progressive movements might engage with these idioms of vulnerability to advocate for state recognition, while simultaneously mediating their reactionary applications. Katie's office will be in the law school.