Lessie Jo Frazier

Lessie Jo Frazier

Professor, Gender Studies

Professor, American Studies

Director of Graduate Studies, Gender Studies

Adjunct Professor, Anthropology

Adjunct Professor, Cultural Studies

Adjunct Professor, History

Affiliate Faculty, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Affiliate Faculty, Center for the Study of Global Change

Affiliate Faculty, International Studies

Affiliate Faculty, Latino Studies

Education

  • Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1998

About Lessie Jo Frazier

Professor Frazier's teaching includes courses on transnational feminisms; gender, race and the erotics of imperialism; gender and sexuality in Latin America; theories of gender and sexuality; feminist perspectives on warfare and militarism; methodology; and gender and human rights.

Research

Professor Lessie Jo Frazier's work focuses on political culture in the Americas. She is particularly interested in the intersection of cultural studies theories of power, subjectivity, and ideology with questions of political economy. She has published on gender, nation-state formation, human rights, mental health policies, memory, poetics, activism, and feminist ethnography. She is currently writing a book on gender, sexuality, and political culture in Chile; a co-edited volume on gender and sexuality in a global 1968; as well as articles on Cold War POWs and masculinity (using film and oral history), and amnesia as a paradoxical form of agency (using queer theory). Professor Frazier's teaching includes courses on transnational feminisms; gender, race and the erotics of imperialism; gender and sexuality in Latin America; theories of gender and sexuality; feminist perspectives on warfare and militarism; methodology; and gender and human rights.

She is the author of Salt in the Sand: Memory, Violence and the Nation-State, in Chile, 1890-Present (Duke 2007) and co-editor of Gender's Place: Feminist Anthropologies of Latin America (Palgrave 2002) and Love-In, Love-Out: Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in 1968 (forthcoming 2010 with Palgrave).

Her research on political cultures of the Americas has focused on Chile and Mexico. On Chile, she is currently writing Desired States: Sex, Gender, and Political Culture. On Mexico, her collaborative research with Dr. Deborah Cohen has resulted in "Defining the space of the movement: "Defining the Space of Mexico 1968: Heroic masculinity in the prison, and women's participation on the campus and street" (Hispanic American Historical Review 2003) and a book project extending that work on 1968 and its legacies in Mexican political culture.

Selected publications

Frazier, Lessie Jo. Salt in the sand: memory, violence, and the nation-state in Chile, 1890 to the present. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Print.

Frazier, L., et al. Gender’s Place: Feminist Anthropologies of Latin America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Print.

Frazier, Lessie J., and Deborah Cohen. Gender and sexuality in 1968: transformative politics in the cultural imagination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print.

"Precarity and Asylum: Kinship and Gender/Sexual Non-Conformity in Central America's Northern Triangle (Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador) and Mexico". NWSA Social Justice Quarterly, 2016

"Chile Debates Legalizing Abortion: Interview with LJ Frazier" NWSA Social Justice Quarterly, 2015

"More than Mojo: Gender, Sex, and the Racialized Erotics of Global '68" with Deborah Cohen. Kalfou, A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, 2015

Courses taught

G101: Gender, Culture and Society

G205: Gender and Sexuality in Latin America

G300: Gender Studies: Core Concepts and Key Debates

G410: International Feminist Debates

G718: Transnational Feminisms and the Politics of Globalization