WGSS Colloquium, Fall 2019

by Jacinda Tran and Patricia Ekpo

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This fall semester the WGSS Colloquium and Working Group hosted a lively array of interdisciplinary conversations with faculty and graduate students!

For our first Working Group meeting, visiting LGBTS Graduate Fellow Alika Bourgette, a PhD student at the University of Washington, presented exciting work on elder-youth intimacies and native Hawaiian resistance. In October, Professor Laura Barraclough joined us to discuss a paper in progress that analyzed gender and Mexican identity on a short-lived reality show called Los Cowboys. In November, History of Science and Medicine lecturer Miriam Rich visited the working group for a fascinating discussion on medical conceptions of monstrosity in nineteenth century births. 

The WGSS Colloquium also met thrice this semester. We began with a presentation about the resistance of Marshallese affected by US nuclear testing by Aanchal Saraf (American Studies) and an analysis of the role of photojournalism to inform public policy for Vietnamese Amerasians by Jacinda Tran (American Studies). Our second meeting featured presentations from Colton Valentine (English), who focused on the subjectivity and aspirations of a queer letter-writer addressing Émile Zola, and Xavier Lee (Comparative Literature), who compared the colonial formation of normative sexualities in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. Daniel Swain (English) and Brian D. Earp (Philosophy & Psychology) concluded the semester with respective presentations on queer memory and class positionality in Daniel’s readings of Frank O’Hara’s citational practice, and on the double standards of legality in Brian’s contextualization of the US law banning “female genital mutilation.”