Moduli of products of curves

Some technical results on the deformations of varieties of general type and on permanence of semi-log-canonical singularities are proved. These results are applied to show that the connected component of the moduli space of stable surfaces containing the moduli point of a product of stable curves is the product of the moduli spaces of the curves, assuming the curves have different genera. An application of this result shows that even after compactifying the moduli space and fixing numerical invariants, the moduli spaces are still very disconnected.Received: 20 February 2004