Coming out in Asian American Culture

The purpose of this project is not to speak on the experience of all lesbian Asian Americans, but only the experiences of three lesbian Asian Americans: Sam, Jesse, and Sophie. The experiences of three individuals cannot be applicable to all lesbian-identified Asian Americans as their stories do not provide full understanding of the influential culture sanctions. This essay is merely an attempt to bring the invisible stories of these three women to the forefront, thus allowing the stories to become accessible so others can recognize that identifying as lesbian is not a betrayal of Asian American culture and identity. “Coming out” can manifest in whatever way feels natural, and the bond of family can help assuage the internal struggle of desegregating sexual and racial identity

The geometry of mortality change: Convex hulls for demographic analysis

We introduce convex hulls as a data visualization and analytic tool for demography. Convex hulls are widely used in computer science, and have been applied in fields such as ecology, but are heretofore underutilized in population studies. We briefly discuss convex hulls, then we show how they may profitably be applied to demography. We do this through three examples, drawn from the relationship between child and adult mortality (5q0 and 45q15 in life table notation). The three examples are: (i) sex differences in mortality; (ii) period and cohort differences and (iii) outlier identification. Convex hulls can be useful in robust compilation of demographic databases. Moreover, the gap/lag framework for sex differences or period/cohort differences is more complex when mortality data are arrayed by two components as opposed to a unidimensional measure such as life expectancy. Our examples show how, in certain cases, convex hulls can identify patterns in demographic data more readily than other techniques. The potential applicability of convex hulls in population studies goes beyond mortality

Disrupting the Lean: Performing a 2016 Declaration of Sentiments

Inspired by the spirit of disruption, this article narrates the making of a “2016 Declaration of Sentiments,” invented in a roundtable, “Disrupting the Lean: Performing a 2016 Declaration of Sentiments,” at the fifth Biennial Seneca Falls Dialogues (SFD). We open the essay with a brief theoretical overview that informs manifestos written in a feminist theory or senior seminar course that take up questions of gender equity, labor, and acts of resistance. We follow with excerpts from these manifestos as read in the roundtable, closing the essay with a “2016 Declaration of Sentiments,” collaboratively authored and recited by roundtable participants. Looking back but thinking forward, we give you our words and our voice as we seek to bring activism and agency back to Seneca Falls