Profile picture of Judith Raiskin

Judith Raiskin

Professor
Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies
raiskin@uoregon.edu
Office Hours: Please email faculty using your UO email account or use Canvas if enrolled in a course with the professor.
Research Interests: Literary and Cultural Studies; Oral history; LGBTQ Studies, Disability Studies; Archival and Public-facing Projects. Professor Raiskin is the Producer and Writer of the award-winning documentary film Outliers and Outlaws (2024), a documentary about lesbian Eugene. The film is currently screening in film festivals and at Universities: https://blogs.uoregon.edu/outliersandoutlawsdocumentary/ Academic institutions may purchase a digital site license at: https://outliersandoutlaws.bigcartel.com/product/outliers-and-outlaws-2024-65-minutes-documentary-digital-site-license

Biography

Professor Raiskin received her B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley (1979), her M.A. from the University of Chicago (1982), and her Ph.D from Stanford University (1989).

Research

Judith Raiskin co-created The Eugene Lesbian Oral History Project with Linda Long, Curator of Manuscripts in UO Special Collections and University Archives. The project consists of filmed interviews with 83 lesbian-identified women who lived in Eugene between 1965 and 1995, most of whom are now in their 70s and 80s. Included in the archives is a large collection of photographs, journals, diaries, and other documents related to the collective businesses, communal living, and cultural productions of this community. These interviews are available through Oregon Digital and are fully transcribed and searchable. Based on the interviews, Professor Raiskin has created a website and an interactive digital exhibit of 11 thematic “rooms” that include 23 edited composite short films that share perspectives from all the narrators, provides historical and scholarly context on different topics, and offers links and ideas for teaching this material: https://outliersoutlaws.uoregon.edu/.

Professor Raiskin has also published on same-sex parenting: "Parenting Without Protection: How Legal Status Ambiguity Affects Gay and Lesbian Parenthood." Relying on interviews with gay, lesbian and transgender parents, this project examines how, in the context of legal instability, these parents make use of legal and extra-legal resources to secure their family relationships. As a literary critic, Professor Raiskin edits the Norton Critical Edition of Jean Rhys's novel Wide Sargasso Sea and is the author of Snow on the Cane Fields: Women Writers and Creole Subjectivity.

 

 

Publications

Books

  • Snow on the Cane Fields: Women’s Writing and Creole Subjectivity (University of Minnesota Press, 1996)
  • Norton Critical Edition of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (New York: WW Norton & Co., 1999). Second edition forthcoming 2026.

Selected Articles

  • Raiskin, Judith and Annelise Heinz, "It was Mythic: Starflower Natural Foods and Lesbian Collective Space,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, December 2025.
  • Raiskin, Judith, “Just Up The Road: Lesbian Eugene,” Sinister Wisdom (forthcoming 2026).
  • Raiskin, Judith and Alison Gash, ‘Parenting without Protection: How Legal Status Ambiguity Affects Gay and Lesbian Parenthood,’ Law & Social Inquiry, (Vol. 43, Issue 1, Winter 2018), pp. 82-118.
  • “’No One Belongs Here More Than You’: Travel Ads, Colonial Fantasies, and American Militarism,” Cross/Cultures: Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures in English (Rodopi, 2015), pp. 269-304.
  • “’Ask Your Travel Agent for the Nirvana You Have Coming’: Shangri-la for Sale,” Global Studies Journal (Volume 4, Issue 2, 2012), pp. 51-65.
  • “Telling Tales Out of School: Indigenous Knowledge and Pacific Island Literature,” Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific, Ed. Kathy Ferguson and Monique Mironesa (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008).
  • “Inverts and Hybrids: Lesbian Rewritings of Sexual and Racial Identities,” The Lesbian Postmodern. Ed. Laura Doan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

  • “The Art of History: An Interview with Michelle Cliff,” The Kenyon Review ns. Vol. XV, no. 1 (Winter 1993), pp. 57-71.

    “Jean Rhys: Creole Writing and Strategies of Reading,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 22:4, October 1991, pp. 51-67.