from Margaret Homans

Spring semester in WGSS has been rich with extraordinary speakers, events, and classes.  We bid an affectionate farewell (or better, “see you again soon!”) to Inderpal Grewal, retiring from Yale after ten years as Professor of WGSS (and for many of those years as Chair), during which her vision and her strategic brilliance have transformed the program both with new faculty and courses and with new energy and purpose.  Please read in this newsletter about one of her last courses, the symposium in her honor, and many wonderful events that would not have taken place without her leadership.  She will be enormously missed and we are all grateful for her legacies of outstanding scholarship, institutional optimism, and progressive pedagogies and politics.

Feminists in the University: Thinking with Inderpal Grewal

by Sasha Sabherwal
PhD Candidate, American Studies & Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Professor Inderpal Grewal’s career has shaped the course of feminist thinking and epistemologies across the world. Her work has been at the forefront of theorizing gender, masculinities, political violence, securitization, and surveillance. At Yale, Professor Grewal has spent the last decade working interdisciplinarily across Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, the Ethnicity, Race and Migration Studies Program, American Studies, and South Asian Studies. These academic homes have been places of refuge for many students across the university, and places where Professor Grewal offered fierce mentorship, academic support, and intersectional teaching. Her approach has always been to build a strong community of feminist scholars by focusing on pedagogy and research...
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The James R. Brudner ‘83 Memorial Prize for 2018-19 was given to Bill T. Jones, dancer and choreographer, whose Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company changed how dance spoke about identity, community and the politics of race and sexuality. Jones came to Yale on February 19 to talk about his work and his practice and to give a thrilling talk at the Whitney Humanities Center in which his words, movements and gestures captured the complex history of black sexuality and social movements that enabled his work. Tracing his life through both the LGBTQ movement and the civil rights struggle, Jones showed how he forged a practice and a company that could speak to the particular intersectional embodiments that they engendered...
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Kinship in Times of Suspicious Citizenship

by Eda Pepi

It was an honor to host the 2018-2019 Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies speaker series! In light of recent public emergencies in the United States—ranging from family separations and child detentions to the Muslim ban and the proposed legal erasure of transgender identity among many others—I organized the series under the rubric “Kinship in Times of Suspicious Citizenship.”

The goal was to foreground gender and kinship as analytics for understanding a range of topical issues about migration, citizenship, and social reproduction. I wanted, in particular, to highlight transnational perspectives in gender and kinship studies that show how these emergencies are neither unprecedented nor exceptional. Indeed, what we are witnessing today is ultimately a global movement in regulating citizenship by intervening into family life...
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New Directions in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

by Greta LaFleur

This spring, the Program in WGSS hosted "New Directions in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies," a two-lecture series organized by Prof. Greta LaFleur that brought Professors Cal Biruk, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Oberlin College, and Sarah Ensor, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Michigan, to campus. Both talks index important new avenues for gender and sexuality studies; Biruk’s lecture pointed to critical intersections between data and information studies and queer theory and sexuality studies in their work on non-profit and anthropological industries of study in Malawi; and Ensor’s talk put recent work in Black studies into conversation with central texts of early queer theory on futurity, and critical environmental studies, in order to imagine a relationship between historical events and effects that she calls “fallout.” For Ensor, this approach allows us to understand environmental influence and harm over longer periods, and suggests connections between historical events and our contemporary moment that may not appear connected. Drawing on a range of approaches and methodologies that have become increasingly important to gender and sexuality studies, critical ethnic studies, and the histories and politics of knowledge more broadly, these lectures represent the kinds of exciting new directions that are drawing students and other scholars to women’s, gender and sexuality studies, at Yale and beyond.

WGSS Colloquium, Spring 2019

by Salonee Bhaman

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This semester, the WGSS Colloquium and Working group was able to host a series of exciting conversations between an interdisciplinary community of students and faculty. 

Visiting LGBTS Graduate Fellow Desirae Embree, a PhD candidate at Texas A&M University opened up the semester’s Working Group (where faculty members and visiting scholars share pre-circulated work) with a portion of her dissertation, an exciting interdisciplinary work exploring Dyke Porn, community formation, and early feminist media production.  In March, Professor Eda Pepi shared a chapter in process from her forthcoming book and led a fascinating discussion on the biopolitics of empire and the bounds of citizenship in Jordan and Morocco...
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