Research on work and family issues has burgeoned over the last two decades as evidence of the negative outcomes of work-family conflict has become apparent. While empirical literature is replete with studies examining the effect of several work and family related factors on conflict, the effect of culture as a variable in the conflict model has not been sufficiently investigated.

India and Taiwan are two economically developing countries in the Asian continent. They share some cultural values, such as high collectivism and a traditional life style. However, the gender representation in the workforce of these two countries is different. In Taiwan, about half of women and two thirds of men are in the workforce. The distribution of gender across industries shows that women are mostly in the service industry and men in industries such as manufacturing, agriculture and farming.

This paper presents preliminary findings of a study that forms part of a larger cross-cultural investigation on work-family conflict across nine countries. The paper examines the effect of work and family antecedents such as control, involvement, overload, hours spent and support, on work-family conflict. It also explores the antecedent effect of contextual / socio-psychological and cultural variables such as vertical and horizontal individualism and collectivism, gender role ideology and monochronic or polychronic time orientation on work-family conflict.

This paper examines the relationship between social support and work-family conflict for working women and men in the Indian context. Based on qualitative data gathered from focus group discussions in India, the nature of social support from the family is described. Next, statistical analysis of survey results is conducted to examine whether the relationship between social support and work-family conflict gives support to the data as well as traditional theory-driven hypotheses between the two variables.

Based on a review of literature pertaining to governmental policies affecting the work-family context, and data gathered from focus group discussions, this paper highlights how the Indian context is marked by high non-institutional and low-institutional support for working women.

Cuba and Haiti, as signs and as sites, were crucial to the imaginative restructuring of race and national identity in the US at the turn of the twentieth century. Between 1898 and 1940, the US occupied the two countries for extended periods of time, creating a transnational, intercultural contact zone that facilitated a large body of cultural production on the part of both black and white US Americans, including plays, operas, dance, music, films, and national spectacle.

Lynette Hunter and Dr. Shannon Rose Riley are co-editing a collection on performance as research that provides the first major document of the histories, methodoligies, and current practices in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia. The collection theorizes the diverse contemporary approaches to performance as research, with sections that include key terms, histories, pedagogies, modes of assessment, methodologies, and current practices.

In 2006 I performed with Cuban drag queen Roxy Rojo at the fourteenth annual Festival Nacional de Pequeño Formato in Sta. Clara, Cuba. I played the role of Miss Translation USA, the only contestant in the Mis(s) Representations of the USA Beauty Pageant. In the performance, Miss Translation competes in the swimsuit competition, the interview with the pageant judge, performed by Roxy, and the talent category.

For the last couple of years I have conducted research in Cuba on a range of contemporary performance forms. This work has emerged from a related project that unpacks the meanings that Cuba and Haiti have acquired in the US national imaginary: from their strategic position as the first sites of US imperialism in the Caribbean, and their crucial role in the imaginative restructuring of race and national identity in the US at the turn of the twentieth century, to their marked vilification and erasure today through contemporary US political strategy and foreign policy.

(Work in process; accepted in a forthcoming collection on the work of Kathy Acker.) In 1939, just four years after the US withdrew from its nineteen-year-long military occupation of Haiti, Cole