from Rod Ferguson

It might be safe to say that hope has always been a challenge. Indeed, human history is filled with a range of atrocities that leaves us in awful wonder. Our moment seems to be one in which the search for hope eludes even the most optimistic among us. And understandably so. The list of atrocities grows by the day—genocide, deportations, war, kidnappings, the suppression of student movements, and so on. As the group Sweet Honey in the Rock sang once, “This is a mean world to try to live, to try to stay in, until you die.”... Read More

from Joe Fischel

What a plentiful year for LGBTS! This year we were especially committed to championing trans scholarship and activism, scholarship and activism keyed to a more gender inclusive, gender expansive word.

Our headliner event for the fall 2024 semester was the James R. Brudner ’83 Memorial Prize and Lectures, awarded to the legendary, lifelong transgender rights activist and community organizer, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy. In conversation with Rod Ferguson on campus and with Katie Lofton at The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in New York City, Miss Major beautifully reflected upon her advocacy for sex workers, incarcerated people, people living with HIV/AIDS, and trans communities... Read More

WGSS Director of Undergraduate Studies Review

by Igor De Souza, Lecturer in WGSS

We had an active Academic Year ’24-’25. We had 30 students in our department who joined, finished, or continued a WGSS major, our largest cohort ever. Of those 30 students, we had our largest-ever graduating class of 14 students. Every semester, hundreds of Yale students take WGSS courses, both majors and non-majors.

The work of our graduating seniors reflects the interdisciplinary nature of our department. A few examples: Sophia Kanga’s research essay on female aerialists at the turn of the 20th century was awarded the Steere Prize in Women’s Studies. Anika Seth’s essay explored the intersection of rape law and activism in India. Gabby Montuori composed the music and wrote the lyrics for an original song cycle, which received a public performance at Yale. We held a public presentation of senior work at the end of May, where seniors shared the results of their work with faculty, peers, and guests... Read More

Combined Ph.D. Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

by Dara Strolovitch, Director of Graduate Studies for WGSS

After being approved by the Graduate School of Art and Sciences in 2019 as the first doctorate in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies in the Ivy League, Yale’s Combined Ph.D. Program is thriving!

Partnering with the departments of African American Studies, American Studies, Anthropology, English, and Sociology (and with graduate students from Political Science and Italian pursuing “ad hoc” Combined Degrees as well), the doctoral program currently includes twenty-two graduate students who, together this year, published eight articles, presented twenty-two papers, and received twenty-five grants, fellowship, and awards. They also organized working groups, reading groups, and speaker series, served as Teaching Fellows, and taught courses in the Yale Prison Education Initiative... Read More

Student Course Review: WGSS 200-Topics in Human Sexuality

by Max Kiekhofer ’27

Vulva. Vagina. Penis. Abortion. Masturbation. SEX! The topics that few professors have dared to discuss in a room of 100+ Yale College undergraduates. One of the brave professors who has is Professor Joe Fischel, in his spring course, “Topics in Human Sexuality.” Fischel revamped Professors Lorna and Philip Sarrel’s sex education class from the 1970s, which was introduced the year after Yale first admitted women... Read More

Course Review: WGSS 226 - Pop Sapphism

By K. Tongson - Visiting Professor and Visiting Presidential Fellow, appointed in WGSS and AMST

As I admitted to my students on the first day of our WGSS/AMST undergraduate seminar on Pop Sapphism, I designed the class as a kind of “fact-finding” mission. Is “sapphism,” a term with its roots in antiquity that achieved a broader cultural saliency from the 1960s onward a “new” identity and orientation claimed by contemporary LBGTQIA+ communities? Is this literally ancient concept... Read More

WGSS Colloquium Overview 2024/25

by Carlo Sariego and Zahra Abba Omar

As co-convenors of the WGSS Colloquium, Zahra and I were thrilled to host a rich and wide-ranging series of events over the 2024–2025 academic year. Our Fall 2024 lineup began with a working group session led by Joe Fischel, followed by a dynamic October 7th panel featuring Nora O’Neill on race and gender in medical education technology and Akshat Agarwal on family law and marriage equality in India.... Read More

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2024-25 Brudner Prize Awarded to Miss Major Griffin-Gracy

by Sena Amuzu

September 23, 2024

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The James Robert Brudner ‘83 Memorial Prize, established in 2000, is awarded annually to an accomplished scholar, artist, or activist whose work has made significant contributions for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and sexual minority communities. The Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies, and the Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies faculty are honored to present this prize to Miss Major Griffin-Gracy for 2024-25.

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy is a Black, transgender activist who has fought for over fifty years for her trans/gender nonconforming community. Major is a veteran of the infamous Stonewall Riots, a former sex worker, and a survivor of Dannemora Prison and Bellevue Hospital’s “queen tank.” Her global legacy of activism is rooted in her own experiences, and she continues her work to uplift transgender women of color, particularly those who have survived incarceration and police brutality. Miss Major’s fierce commitment and intersectional approach to justice brought her to care directly for people with HIV/AIDS in New York in the early 1980s, and later to drive San Francisco’s first mobile needle exchange. As director of the TGI Justice Project, she’d return to prisons as a mentor to her ‘gurls’ inside. She now runs House of GG-TILIFI, a retreat center for trans and gender nonconforming leaders from the Southern U.S., in Little Rock, Arkansas.

WGSS Grad Students with Miss Major Griffin-Gracy

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Review: Judith Butler’s lecture, Fascist Passions

by Karis Braxton ’27

World-renowned scholar Judith Butler’s March lecture, “Fascist Passions,” sparked lively anticipation on campus, with tickets selling out overnight. Not one seat went empty in the Humanities Quadrangle lecture hall, each attendee eager to hear Butler’s astute insights into the apparatus behind—and the antidotes to—what they term “Fascist Passions.” Amidst the echoes of note-taking and hushed reflections, Butler dissected how fascist passions function as ideological mechanisms to justify the subjugation and oppression of marginalized groups. According to Butler, fascist passions derive pleasure from witnessing people stripped of their rights, while simultaneously “articulating a restoration fantasy” designed to justify this harm. These passions prey on deep-seated insecurities and fears about social change, mobilizing anxiety as an accelerant for both covert and overt forms of oppression. To resist, Butler urged the audience to embrace radical “counter-imaginaries”—visionary alternatives rooted in liberation, empathy, and justice. Butler’s timely and incisive analysis provided the audience with an evocative and accessible vocabulary to address the turbulent and disconcerting socio-political landscape of both the United States and the world at large. At the end of their stirring lecture, Butler earned a wave of resounding, well-deserved applause—an unmistakable affirmation of the talk’s depth and resonance.

Students with Judith Butler