Visiting Scholars
September 1, 2011
Smitha Radhakrishnan
Smitha Radhakrishnan, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College. Her previous work on the culture of Indian information technology (IT) professionals examined how the global IT industry helps to foster new, gendered subjectivities that internalize the logic of global capitalism and reinvent a middle-class notion of what it means to be “Indian” (Appropriately Indian, Duke University Press, 2011). Her new project examines entrepreneurial training programs developed in large, global microfinance institutions. She argues that these programs play a key role in teaching predominantly female clients around the world how to ‘manage’ their own economic vulnerability, while maintaining sustainable businesses. Through a year of interviews, 
ethnography, and discourse analysis at the Boston and Bangalore offices of a global microfinance institution (Accion International), she will study the production, content, and dissemination of these trainings. Her study is premised upon the idea that the worldwide expansion of microfinance has not only extended credit to marginalized people, but has also spread new forms of knowledge that have transformed the ways in which both practitioners and beneficiaries of microfinance understand themselves as economic and social actors.
Watch for information on Dr. Radhakrishnan’s upcoming lecture at B.U.
2011, Spring and Summer Semesters
Richard Wassersug
Richard Wassersug, Professor in the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at Dalhousie University and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, joined WGS as a Visiting Scholar for spring and summer semesters, 2011. Professor Wassersug has diverse interests and is an internationally renowned expert on (among other things) amphibian development, space biology, and androgen deprivation in humans. He has divided his time between commitments at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society in Melbourne, Australia, his home university in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and his work with us at Boston University.
On, Friday, October 29, Dr. Wassersug discussed his studies of the psychology of androgen-deprivation in various populations ranging from advanced prostate cancer patients to ma-leto-female transsexuals at BU. In his talk, he concentrated on modern day voluntary eunuchs; i.e., genetic males who desire to be emasculated, yet do not wish to be female. Some have a nonspecific Gender Identity Disorder, others a Body Integrity Identity Disorder, and some have extreme sadomasochistic paraphilias (fetishes). He discussed what motivates these men to seek genital ablations; i.e., why, how, and where they get castrated, and the consequences of castration on personality and social relations. He also explored how information about these individuals might be used to help other androgen-deprived populations.
