2019 Plenary Speaker
Engaged Being: Pauses of Self-Discovery
for Centering Ourselves in Research
Dr. Nessette Falu
Department of Anthropology, University of Central Florida
Research is a ritualized performance of skills, methods, theories, and production of evidence. We are also ritualized into undermining and blurring the ways in which we exist during the research process. Pauses, then, are imminent for renewal. Our research process is an under-recognized intimate pathway to discovery about who we are, what we are, and how we are becoming into ourselves. Alice Walker (2006) reminds us that if we do not take a pause, the pause will happen for us. What happens during intentional and unintentional pauses? How do we, as scholars and researchers, prioritize self-recovery from research traumas, conflicts, power relations, and different challenges? Is affirmation a healing tool or a product of systemic oppression? This talk responds to these questions by attending to the idea of self-discovery as ontological, epistemological, pedagogical, and ethical (Palmer and Zajonc 2010) possibilities. For non-conforming, cisgender, trans female bodies, queer, lesbians, and women preparing, conducting, and returning from research, I explore how our awareness and praxis are life changing, one pause at a time.
Dr. Nessette Falu is a cultural and medical anthropologist specializing in Black lesbian and racialized queer ontologies, medical and reproductive power relations, and ethics in Brazil and the United States. She holds a Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology from Rice University (2015) and a graduate certificate from its Center for Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Before joining the UCF faculty in 2017, she was a 2016-2017 postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She was a 2014-2016 Visiting Scholar at Lehigh University in the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies Programs. She was the 2013-2014 Sarah Pettit Dissertation Fellow in LGBT Studies at Yale University. She holds a Masters of Divinity from New York Theological Seminary (2008). She has been a practicing Physician Assistant since 2001 in Neurosurgery, Internal Medicine, HIV Care, and Hematology-Oncology, all mostly in New York City.
Her research investigates how self-identified Black lesbians in Salvador-Bahia, Brazil draw upon everyday lived experiences and their shaped ethical subjectivities to engage in anti-racist evaluative practices about the lack of regard toward their sexuality and Black female bodies by gynecologists. Centering gynecology is a social phenomenon, this study interconnects the various angles that pivot the reproduction of “preconceito” (prejudice) as the socio-political limitations of social realms such as Brazilian healthcare reform to combat lesbian discrimination, the entrenched prejudicial attitudes manifesting during gynecological exams, and the ethical thriving and transcending ideas of “bem-estar” (well-being). This anthropology of gynecology as social reproduction analyzes Black lesbian ontologies through an anthropology of ethics and becoming, linguistic biosocial interactions, disruptive visual images and body politics, and intersectional analytics on gender, sexuality, race, religion, and class. She is near to completion of her monograph, Social Clinic: Prejudice, Anti-Racist Knowledge, and Ethical Recognitions among Black Lesbians in Brazil and has two articles under review: “Ain’t I Too a Mulher?: Implications of Black Lesbian’s Health, Gynecology and Self-Care in Brazil” and “Virgin Affects: Black Lesbian Aversions and Anti-Racism in Brazilian Gynecology.”
She is native to New York City with pronouns “she/her/hers” and enjoys hot yoga and walks by a lake.