Contributors to Intersections
Issue 23


Kalissa Alexeyeff has a BA (Hons) in Sociology and Anthropology, La Trobe University, a Masters in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies, Monash University and a PhD in Anthropology, The Australian National University. She has written a book Dancing from the Heart: Movement, Gender and Cook Islands Globalization (Univeristy of Hawai'i Press, 2009) which is based on two years fieldwork in the Cook Islands and New Zealand. It explores the significance of dance in the Cook Islands throughout colonial history and in its contemporary manifestations. Her research interests include expressive culture in particular dance and music in the Cook Islands and the Asia-Pacific region more generally, gender politics cross-culturally, development, migration and globalisation.
Rita Banerji is a freelance writer, photographer, and social activist currently based in Calcutta, India. Her book Sex and Power: Defining History, Shaping Societies was released by Penguin Books in November 2008 (and internationally by Penguin Global in May 2009). Some of the magazines and journals where Rita's works have been published include the London Magazine, New Orleans Review, Femina, Review-Asia (Hong Kong), and the Global Media Journal (in September). She is also a regular contributor to the Word Worth Magazine (US). Rita is the founder and chief coordinator of an international, online campaign against female genocide in India, called The 50 Million Missing campaign. The environment is her other focus, a field that was the subject of her academic training and work while she lived in the US for eleven years. During that time she worked with Chipko (a women's grassroots movement in India), and with the World Resources Institute and the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC.
Romit Dasgupta teaches courses in Japanese, Japanese Studies and Asian Studies in the Discipline of Asian Studies, School of Social and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia. His area of research is on masculinities in Japan and Asia. He is co-editor, with Mark McLelland, of the volume Genders, Transgenders and Sexualities in Modern Japan (Routledge, 2005). Other recent publications include 'The Film Bishōen and Queer(n)Asia Through Japanese Popular Culture,' in Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan, ed. Matthew Allen and Rumi Sakamoto, (Routledge 2006), and 'The 1990s "Lost Decade" and Shifting Masculinities in Japan,' Culture, Society & Masculinity, 1:1, 2009.

Peter Eckersall teaches in Theatre Studies in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Recent publications include Theorising the Angura Space: Avant-Garde Performance and Politics in Japan 1960–2000 (Brill Academic, 2006) and his edited volume of Kawamura Takeshi's Nippon Wars and Other Plays will be published by Seagull Press in 2009.

Allison Holland completed her doctorate on Mariko Mori at the University of Melbourne in 2008. Previously, Allison has curated exhibitions for the State Library of Victoria and lectured for the School of Art History, University of Melbourne. Allison is currently Curator of Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Victoria.
Elena Jeffreys is President of Scarlet Alliance, Australian Sex Workers Association, and was a delegate to the Regional Security and Global Prosperity stream of the 2020 Summit. Elena writes regularly on the topic of sex work and trafficking in Australia, and is currently a member of the Commonwealth Attorney Generals' Roundtable on People Trafficking. In the photograph, Elena wears a Del, traditional Mongolian Dress, made for her by the Khusvgul sex worker community in Mongolia, and is accompanied by Chan Kumjing, the alter ego of a Burmese sex worker. Chan Kumjing was born from an Empower Foundation art project in Northern Thailand. Burmese sex workers do not have the opportunity to travel themselves to do advocacy for their rights; because they are illegal migrants they do not have the necessary identity papers. A group of these sex workers made paper maché likenesses of themselves so that they could be taken to AIDS Conferences to highlight the issues of migrant sex workers. Chan Kumjing was adopted by the Scarlet Alliances' International Spokesperson Rachel Wotton at the Toronto AIDS Conference in 2006, and continues to travel to all important sex worker events in Australia. Link to more information about Chan Kumjing.
Yasuko Hassall Kobayashi is a visiting research fellow in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at The Australian National University. She obtained her PhD in Southeast Asian studies from The Australian National University, and worked in the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore as a post-doctoral fellow. She is co-editor of 'Special Issue: Southeast Asia's absence in postcolonial studies,' Post Colonial Studies, vol. 11, no. 3 2008. Her research interests are ethnic minority issues, migration in Southeast Asia, governmentality, and role of films in civil movements in Singapore.

Vera Mackie holds an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellowship in Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne and has held Visiting Professorships at Hitotsubashi University, Ochanomizu University and Victoria University. Major publications include Gurōbaruka to Jendā Hyōshō [Globalisation and Representations of Gender], Tokyo: Ochanomizu Shobō, 2003; Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; Relationships: Japan and Australia, 1870s–1950s, Melbourne: University of Melbourne History Monographs and RMIT Publishing, 2001, co-edited with Paul Jones; Human Rights and Gender Politics: Asia-Pacific Perspectives, London: Routledge, 2000, paperback edition 2006, co-edited with Anne Marie Hilsdon, Martha Macintyre and Maila Stivens; and Creating Socialist Women in Japan: Gender, Labour and Activism, 1900–1937, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, paperback edition 2002. Current research interests focus on the politics of visual culture in modern Japan and the cultural history of the body in modern Japan.
Mark McLelland Mark McLelland is Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and was the 2007/08 Toyota Visiting Professor of Japanese at the Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan. He is best known for his work in Japanese sexual minority history and is the author of Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan (RoutledgeCurzon, 2000) and Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005) and co-editor of Genders, Transgenders and Sexualities in Japan (Routledge, 2005), Queer Voices from Japan (Lexington, 2007) and AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities (University of Illinois Press, 2008). His latest project: Kissing Is a Symbol of Democracy, looks at the development of new styles of Japanese heterosexual romance and coupledom in the wake of the US Occupation. The first paper from this project: 'Kissing Is a Symbol of Democracy!: Dating, Democracy and Romance in Occupied Japan 1945–52,' will appear in The Journal of the History of Sexuality.

Petra Mahy is a PhD candidate in the Resource Management in the Asia-Pacific (RMAP) Program at the Australian National University. Petra has completed degrees in Arts/Law from Monash University and in Asian Studies from the Australian National University. Her PhD research is on development and gender issues at a large-scale coal mine in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, with a particular focus on evaluation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs from a gender perspective.
Mark Pendleton is a PhD candidate in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne and a visiting researcher at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. His doctoral research is on memory and grief in Japan in the aftermath of the 1995 Tokyo subway gassing. He has published in Overland, Melbourne Historical Journal and, most recently, Asian Studies Review (2009), with an article entitled 'Mourning as global politics: Embodied grief and activism in post-Aum Tokyo.'
Jyh Wee Sew performed 'That's Why' in Adopt the Block fund-raising project, Aug. 2002 in Telok Blangah, Singapore; choreographed Malay dance with 'Survivor' (the sound track by Destiny's Child) on Racial Harmony Day, July 2003. Additionally, colourful Malay, Mandarin and Tamil letters were sent to motivate inmates in the Yellow Ribbon Project 2006. Jyh published Reduplicating Nouns and Verbs in Malay (2007), Semiotik Persembahan Wacana (2009), and Persembahan@Media.com (forthcoming), all with University Malaya Press. Jyh is indexed in Who's Who in Humanities Academia (Academic Keys 2009) and Who's Who of the World (Marquis 2010).

Utako Shindo is a Melbourne-based artist whose artistic practice takes various forms such as performance, drawing, photography, sound, print and video, creating site-specific audio-visual installations. Her works express sensuous and visceral oscillations, which we experience, between memory, anticipation, body, image, sound and space. She has exhibited extensively in Australia since 2003 and has completed a Master of Fine Art by Research at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne University in 2008. She received project funding from Melbourne University and the Japan Foundation in 2008.
Maila Stivens is a Principal Research Fellow in the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne. She has carried out research on middle class kinship in Sydney; in Malaysia on ‘matrilineal’ Negeri Sembilan; on modernity, work and family among the new Malay middle classes; ‘public’ and ‘private’ in Southeast Asia; the ‘Asian Family’; Family Values East and West; and is currently working on an ARC project on New Asian Childhoods. Previously a lecturer in Anthropology at University College London, she has also been a visiting fellow at the Asia Research Institute, NUS, Singapore in 2004. Her main publications include: Why Gender Matters in Southeast Asian Politics (editor, Monash 1991); Malay Peasant Women and the Land (with Jomo Sundaram and Cecilia Ng, Zed 1994); Matriliny and Modernity: Sexual Politics and Social Change in Rural Malaysia (Asian Studies Association of Australia, Allen and Unwin 1996);and two co-edited volumes Gender and Power in Affluent Asia (jointly edited with Krishna Sen, Routledge 1998); and Human Rights and Gender Politics: Asia-Pacific Perspectives (edited with Anne-Marie Hilsdon, Martha Macintyre and Vera Mackie, Routledge 2000).

Katsuhiko Suganuma is an Assistant Professor at the Center for International Education and Research at Oita University in Japan. His research focuses on contemporary Japanese sexuality politics, queer globalisation and post-colonial feminism. He has published critical essays on gay and lesbian sexualities in contemporary Japan. He is a co-editor of Queer Voices from Japan (Lexington Books, 2007). He is currently a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Queer Studies Japan.
Mikala Tai is currently a PhD Candidate at the Centre of Contemporary Art at the University of New South Wales, where she is researching independence in contemporary Chinese art. In conjunction with her PhD she is a researcher at the Centre of Contemporary Art and Politics where she is working on a linkage project 'Construction, Connection, Community: Measuring Asian Art's Contribution to Contemporary Culture in Australia.' In addition to her research Mikala is a consultant and curator at Chinese Contemporary Art Consultants where in April 2009 she brought Shanghainese artist Yang Yongliang to Melbourne for his premier Australian exhibition. She has recently contributed to both unmagazine and Broadsheet and guest lectured at the Australian Catholic University and Latrobe University.

Elen Turner is a PhD candidate at the Research School of Humanities, Australian National University. She received her BA (Hons) from the University of Otago, New Zealand. For her PhD she is researching women’s publishing ventures in India, with particular focus on how writers, editors and activists perceive women’s rights and gender issues, and how these are reflected in women's writing.


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