ABOUT

Barbara Sutton is a Professor in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She is also affiliated with the departments of Sociology and of Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Studies. Professor Sutton's scholarly interests include body politics, human rights, globalization, and women's and feminist movements, particularly in Latin American contexts. The topics she is drawn to are broad and diverse, but reflect an overarching concern with how systems of social inequality--based on gender, race, class, sexuality, and nation--structure social experience and affect marginalized groups. Another thread that connects much of her work is the transnational significance of the issues she addresses, from globalization to militarism. She has used her interest in women's bodies and embodiment as a springboard for exploring various lines of inquiry: cultural norms of femininity and beauty, the bodily scars of neoliberal economics, reproductive rights issues, interpersonal, structural, and state violence, women's activism, and cross-border social processes. Her book, Bodies in Crisis: Culture, Violence, and Women's Resistance in Neoliberal Argentina (Rutgers University Press, 2010), exemplifies this approach. 

Other projects, such as her book, Surviving State Terror: Women’s Testimonies of Repression and Resistance in Argentina (NYU Press, 2018), also emphasize the role of the body in relation to violence, in this case state violence. This project explores questions related to collective memory, body and voice, survival and resistance, and women's historical and political agency. More recently, her co-edited book Abortion and Democracy: Contentious Body Politics in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay (with Nayla Luz Vacarezza; Routledge, 2021) delves into the successes, challenges, and strategies of abortion rights activists in the Southern Cone of Latin America. Her latest book is Bulletproof Fashion: Security, Emotions, and the Fortress Body (Routledge, 2023), a study that focuses on the United States and engages debates around gun violence and practices and discourses of security.

Professor Sutton believes that a transnational awareness is essential to understand timely political matters, including the changes brought about by economic globalization, armed conflict, migration patterns, fundamentalisms, and women's local and cross-border activism. Professor Sutton is interested in global issues both from an academic and a personal standpoint. She maintains strong ties to her country of origin, Argentina, and her international curiosity has taken her to different parts of the world. She has participated in dialogues with women from diverse regions, in activist and academic arenas.