Interview with Professor Jane Juffer: Discussing Work on Migration and Gender

I recently interviewed Professor Jane Juffer, a program director of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. She is also involved with the Department of English, and previously taught Latino Studies at Pennsylvania State University.

Her bio reads:

“Jane Juffer holds a joint appointment with the Department of English and the Program of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, where she is also program director. She was named a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow in 2021. She works in the areas of cultural studies, feminist theory, and Latinx studies and is the author of six books: Letters from Inside a U.S. Detention Center (Routledge 2023); Millennial Feminism at Work: Bridging Theory and Practice (Cornell University Press 2021); Don’t Use Your Words! Children’s Emotions in a Networked World (NYU 2019); Intimacy Across Borders: Race, Religion, and Migration in the U.S. Midwest (Temple 2013); Single Mother: The Emergence of the Domestic Intellectual (NYU 2006); and At Home with Pornography: Women, Sexuality, and Everyday Life (NYU 1998).” (bio and photo from Cornell University Directory)

Could you talk about how you personally got involved in the Department of English to study Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality studies (FGS), Latino studies, and more? What interests you about these topics and/or their intersectionalities?

Let’s see how far back I should go. The intersection of my interests can be traced to the fact that I was a journalist before graduate school, and I worked on the US Mexico border as a freelancer. This would have been late 80s, early 90s. I was writing a lot about issues that women who were crossing the border faced. So, I did a lot of investigative journalism into what it meant to be a female immigrant coming up from Central America and crossing the border. I studied all the different issues they faced as well as the incredible courage they demonstrated. I worked there for three years and then I decided to go to graduate school in Chicago. Throughout my graduate school training, I always had that interest in mind: how to pursue a more theoretical understanding of feminism, but always keeping it grounded in the everyday lives of different women.

My first job was at Penn State where I really did focus on Latino studies. That topic also always had a personal connection for me. I was a single mom at that time. So, I wrote a whole book about single mothering, integrating my experiences into the narrative. But I also went back to the border and interviewed women about what it was like to be undocumented and a single mom.

Then, when I came to Cornell, my main focus was both in English and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Since I’ve been here, I’ve been doing a lot of work with a student group on immigrants who are being detained at the Buffalo Federal Detention Center. I published a book about a year ago that was based on letters that a Salvadoran woman inside detention wrote me — she actually got out and then lived with us until just recently.

Those three interests cross a number of different spaces for me. One thing I love about feminist studies is that it promotes the concept of “the personal is a political kind of thing.”

What were your motivations for starting to write “Millennial Feminism at Work: Bridging Theory and Practice?”

That book, which is an edited collection (so it’s not just my work), grew out of love because I’m director of FGS. I have had all these lovely students over the years that I wanted to bring back. We had a panel in 2019 to show that you can get a degree and major in FGS and still get a really good job. A lot of students will ask me what to tell their parents, because they think that their children wouldn’t be able to secure a job if they major in FGS. I just wanted to emphasize that it’s possible to get an unconventional degree and still get a job that you want. So, I invited back seven of our alumni who had different jobs. There was a doctor, a journalist, you know, a couple students in sociology graduate school, etc. They put on an amazing panel and spoke about how they were able to use their feminist studies undergraduate degree in the workplace. It wasn’t that they said that the degree was completely compatible, but they talked about very moving ways that the feminist theory was empowering. They also discussed how, quite often, the workplace is not very friendly to feminism.

That is what gave me the idea of soliciting more essays and putting together a collection around these questions: how to be a feminist in the workplace and how to make the transition from a university environment, which is more feminism friendly, to the workplace.

I put out a call over social media and received essay entries — about 17 — from all over the country.I think, 17 essays when I put out a call over social media and got essays from all over the country.I think it turned out really well. It’s actually been selling quite a few copies, which doesn’t often happen with academic books.

Is there any specific student story that you are able to share that was particularly striking to you?

I wrote about this in the introduction, but one common theme between stories that did emerge was how so many of the writers felt like they had to kind of contain their emotions at work, particularly emotions such as anger and sadness. They discussed how it is hard to completely express yourself at work. I like to think about feminism as being a practice that encourages us to be able to say what we feel, express our anger, and stand up for what we believe in. That kind of transcended feminism obviously has to do with a lot of injustices that you see at the workplace. At university, we can often find an outlet for criticisms, passion for social justice, etc, but that becomes much more difficult at work. That was the main theme.

In the book, there was a section on nonprofits. Even in workplaces that you would hope would be more amenable to open expression of critique, it’s quite often that wasn’t the case. That was enlightening. I want to make our program more aware of the gap between theory and practice; the things we teach in a college classroom don’t always translate so easily into the workplace.

How do you see your book “Intimacy Across Borders: Race, Religion, and Migration in the U.S. Midwest ” working in conjunction with your other studies/research on gender studies and feminist theory?

For me, gender studies and feminism is not just about gender. A lot of the work I’ve been doing on immigration detention might not seem like immediately about gender, but I think feminism is about social justice for everybody. When I wrote that book it really went back to the small town in Iowa where I grew up, which was all Anglo when I was growing up there; it has become 30 to 35% Latino). In my childhood town, there’s a big meatpacking industry there and dairy farms so a lot of Latino folks have moved there. I was interested in how that migration had really reshaped the mainly white, very conservative community I grew up in. Religion was a big part of that. I grew up with the Reformed Church, which was very conservative. So, I was curious as to how Latino migration could possibly reshape the church to be less racist and less conservative. In some ways, it has and in other ways, it hasn’t. I was interviewing people there and it did also have a personal component, as well. I wanted to understand how my own upbringing in a very conservative religion shaped me.

The other weird personal connection was that I’m married to a man who grew up in South Africa, which was also shaped by the Reformed Church. In fact, the Dutch Reformed were the architects of apartheid. I grew up in Iowa and he grew up in Cape Town, and we’re actually born in the same year. We were both shaped by the Reformed Church, but in very different ways. Exploring that whole personal element within the larger social demographic notion was a motivation, especially given that many small towns in the US are being completely reshaped by Latino migration. I thought about what these ideas meant for the conservative politics of many of these small towns. Could they possibly become less racist and less homogeneous?

What are your goals for how you hope to see your intersectional research — on gender and migration specifically — develop within the next few months or during the summer?

I’m the advisor for the student group, CADA, which is the Cornell Anti-Detention Alliance. We are continuing to visit people who are being held in detention at Batavia outside of Buffalo. I’m still very involved in that group.

Research wise, I’m not writing about detention right now. I might go back to it, but for now, I’m mainly trying to facilitate student projects that have to do with detained folks. They’re having a big teach-in outside Batavia on April 23 21st. I’m trying to help them organize it in a way such that Ingrid, the Salvadoran woman who wrote letters to me and who lived with me, can speak at the teach-in. I’m really trying to amplify the voices of women and other people of all genders who’ve been held in detention. So, while migration is not my current research project focus, as an activist something I’ll I think I’ll always be involved in.

What is your current research project?

A year ago, I started teaching a class at the local retirement center on memoir writing. This is my fourth iteration of the class. I’m doing more research into memory and aging, and helping older folks write their memoirs, which has been really quite rewarding. We’ve got some amazing stories to tell. There are some really good writers there. I’ve been thinking about putting together a collection like the Millennial Feminist collection, but around memory and aging. My dad died two years ago. I started thinking a lot about what happens to the brain as people age, and how actually writing down their own personal narratives can be really good for the brain, as well as for the psyche. A lot of these older folks are sharing their writing with their kids or grandkids or siblings. It’s been really fun.

What advice do you have for those interested in fields similar to your areas of interest? Do you have blogs, podcasts, or summer opportunities that you recommend students explore?

I don’t know much about the blogosphere. I think getting involved in as many activities in high school as possible is important so that you do get some kind of hands-on experience.

In addition to that course, I know there’s a lot of pressure in high school. I have a 15 year old and we were talking to his 17 year old friend who is looking at colleges and he’s getting already totally stressed out. He wants to go into chemical engineering, and he just got back from Chicago where he went to the University of Chicago campus. I was just struck out listening to him, because he’s already so intensely focused on his academic future. I think in high school, it’s good to keep an open mind, write and read widely. Go to protests, and don’t immediately succumb to the pressure. I know there’s a lot of pressure to figure out already what you’re going to major in. But, I often tell even my first and second year college advisees that it’s totally okay and normal not to know what you want to major in. You don’t have to have everything figured out.

That’s actually something I love about FGS: it’s very interdisciplinary. I’ve had some wonderful students tell me that they have no idea what they wanted to major in, and then they found FGS and realized they can have an interdisciplinary experience. With FGS, you can take classes in history, english, biology, etc. We have three core classes and then your other six classes can be any cross listed class, which means your major coheres around the fact that you’re interested in gender and sexuality and race. But, you don’t have to decide that you are a history or a psych major or anything. You can bring those all together, which is how I think I’d characterize my work too. I wrote books about immigration, single mothering, pornography, media, etc. There’s no necessary cohesiveness to that, but the approach is the same. I want to bring together all these different tools to understand this issue through FGS.