About

Sueann Caulfield is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Michigan, with an affiliation also in the Residential College, Donia Human Rights Center, and the Global Feminisms Project. She earned her Ph.D. from New York University in 1995. Her research focuses on Latin America and Brazil, with particular interests in gender studies, sexuality, law and society, and global and world history. Caulfield's scholarly work explores feminist struggles, emotional regimes, and social inequalities within historical contexts, notably during the Vargas era in Brazil. She has contributed to understanding the intersections of activism, family, and rights, especially concerning women and marginalized groups in Latin America. Her recent publications examine feminist perspectives, vulnerability and empowerment, and historical analyses of inheritance disputes and social rights in 19th-century Brazil.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Gender studies
• Computer Science
• History
• Geography

Selected publications

• Navigating the Emotional Regime of the Vargas Era: Feminist Struggles, Catholic Reaction and Stories of Relational Rupture in Letters to President Getúlio Vargas (1930–1945)

  Gender & History · 2025-07-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT This article discusses the intense struggles over family laws and policies in the early‐twentieth century, culminating with the establishment of the Estado Novo dictatorship of 1937–1945. It then analyses letters from ordinary citizens who ask President Getúlio for help in the aftermath of separation from a spouse or consensual partner. These stories are framed by the ‘emotional regime’ and family values that were propagated by the state. Yet the letters also reveal how political tensions and oppositional positions influence their emotional responses and intimate lives.

  PublisherDOI

• Vulnerability and empowerment on the ground: Activist perspectives from the global feminisms project

  Feminism & Psychology · 2023 · 8 citations

  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Vulnerability is a standard criterion used by state and non-governmental organizations to identify groups of people in need of protection or support. Over the past two decades, however, this notoriously ill-defined and potentially stigmatizing term has been subjected to scrutiny by researchers, service providers, and theorists across multiple disciplines. This study examines the relevance of vulnerability to the ways international feminist activists who were interviewed between 2003 and 2019 for the Global Feminisms Project (GFP) described their struggles for women's rights in various settings over the past 50 years. Citing examples from nine countries, we show that these activists rarely used the term vulnerable, and never to classify groups of people. Instead, they frequently explained how particular groups were subjected to precarious conditions, and how they resisted subjugation, within multiple layers of gendered social relations and political structures. Many activists connected their locally-grounded work to global historical processes, emphasizing particularly the impact of neo-liberalism. Although using different vocabularies, these analyses resonate with work by bioethicists and feminist/queer theorists who reject the use of vulnerability as a classificatory term but embrace it as a tool for analyzing subjugation, building solidarity, and challenging neo-liberal conceptions of individual autonomy.

  PublisherDOI

• From <i>Crias da Casa</i> to <i>Filhos de Criação</i>

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-03-10

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Historians often scour the judicial archives in search of micro-historical evidence of everyday life and the dynamics of individual relationships, attuned to the possibility that such evidence might challenge normative narratives constructed by previous generations of social scientists. I expected, for example, that a close reading of lawsuits regarding paternity in Brazil would challenge the paradigmatic "traditional Brazilian family" famously constructed by Gilberto Freyre in his 1933 account of hierarchically structured relationships contained within colonial plantation households. 1 According to Freyre, Brazil's national character had been forged through myriad intimate relationships among members of the "Big House," where the master's family resided with various retainers and enslaved domestic servants, and the slave quarters, home to the families of field laborers. In Freyre's account, sexual relationships between Portuguesedescended male patriarchs and Indigenous or African-descended women they held as slaves, together with bonds between white children and their black nannies, or black children and their white mistresses or masters, played crucial roles in the nation's biological and cultural formation. These relationships, Freyre argued, not only produced a variegated population that occupied various rungs of the social ladder but also symbolized the sensual intimacy and affection that underlay the merger of Portuguese,

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 3 "What Virginity Is This!": Judging the Honor of the Modern Woman

  2020-11-27

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Frontmatter

  2020-11-27

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Introduction: Transformations in Honor, Status, and Law over the Long Nineteenth Century

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2020 · 5 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Law
  • History
  PublisherDOI

• The changing politics of freedom and virginity in Rio de Janeiro, 1920–1940

  2020-11-26

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 6. The birth of Mangue: race, nation, and the politics of prostitution in Rio de Janeiro, 1850-1942

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Gender studies
  PublisherDOI

• 1 Sexual Honor and Republican Law

  2020-11-27

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 5 Honorable Partnerships: The Importance of Color in Sex and Marriage

  2020-11-27

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Lara Putnam

  4 shared

• Sarah C. Chambers

  4 shared

• Alexandra Minna Stern

  University of California, Los Angeles

  3 shared

• Madeline House

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  1 shared

• Jorge Castellanos

  Hospital Universitari i Politècnic La Fe

  1 shared

• Manuel See

  Universidad del Norte

  1 shared

• Suphan Andie

  Universidad del Norte

  1 shared

• Özge Savaş

  Bennington College

  1 shared