Volume 4, Issue 2
spring 2014

Editor, Geetanjali Singh Chanda
Managing Editors, Linda Hase & Craig Canfield
Layout Design, Nick Appleby

Letters from the Chairs of WGSS & LGBTS

from Inderpal Grewal

This will be my last letter to you as Chair of WGSS before I step down from this position. It has been an honor and a pleasure to build the program on the shoulders of others ...

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from Kathryn Lofton

Our semester began with a very sad goodbye to our friend and colleague, Sam See. As spring finally arrives in New Haven, I see around me everywhere bits of colorful life ...

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Our Thanks to Inderpal Grewal

from Emily Bakemeier,
Deputy Provost for the Arts and Humanities

As we all express our thanks to Inderpal for her four years as chair of WGSS, I would like to express appreciation for and draw attention to the fact that Inderpal’s arrival on the Yale campus and her leadership role in WGSS began well before she joined the Yale faculty in July 2009 and with her steadfast dedication, it will continue long beyond her formal appointment as chair ...

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from Mary Miller,
Dean of Yale College

In the past five years, Inderpal Grewal has brought stature and leadership to the WGSS program, strengthening its traditional areas of research into Women's and Gender Studies while at the same time investing it with the fundamental complexities of transnational movements and situations ...

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Locations of Learning:
Transnational Feminist Practices

by Maya Binyam, '15

by Joanne Meyerowitz

When I give my lecture on the Great Depression, I tell my students about a group of women I interviewed years ago at a union retirement center in Chicago. In the 1930s, the women had worked at Kuppenheimer, a garment factory, which was, like many factories, in financial trouble. One week, they said, they opened their pay envelopes and found only a penny inside ...

Women in Modern America
WGSS 201 / HIST 171 / AMST 27

by Sabrina Rangi, ‘15

As the semester progresses, there is often a steady decrease in the attendance of many lecture courses. Unlike these other classes, however, Professor Meyerowitz’s ‘Women in Modern America’ is full every time it meets on Tuesday and Thursday mornings ...

Alum Spotlight: Stephanie L. Schmid

Inspired by then-First Lady (and fellow Yale alumna) Hillary Rodham Clinton’s declaration at the United Nations’ 4th World Conference on Women that “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights,” I quickly declared my double major in Women’s and Gender Studies and Political Science as a freshman in 1998. The courses I took across every department at Yale, including graduate work at the Law School, gave me a set of tools and analytic practices grounded in feminist theory that I employ every single day in my career as a Foreign Service Officer (a.k.a., diplomat) with the U.S. Department of State ...

by Nessette Falu, Sarah Pettit Fellow

Transitioning from fieldwork to dissertation writing was indeed the unanticipated. I even ran from my feelings about fieldwork as I watched myself avoid Facebook for months. Looking back, it was a process that awaits and must be dealt with, even engaged. I had returned from Salvador-Bahia excited to shift into my Sarah Pettit Doctoral Fellowship at Yale. Also, I would now be closer to my family and partner in New York City. Only as time moved and life happened would I evolve into truly embracing the fellowship ...

by David Minto, HIST ‘14

The three ‘B’s’ - Biopower, BDSM, and Beyoncé were recurring themes during a two-day symposium at Yale this February on ‘power/sex: consent, constraint, context’. The fourth “B,” of course, was the Broken Leg sported by the event’s organizer, WGSS Professor Joe Fischel–reportedly sustained during the practice of extreme yoga… Thank you, Joe, for nevertheless continuing to compere this stimulating event that brought together a stellar line-up of thinkers on the topic of where power and sex intersect ...

by David Joselit, Distinguished Professor, The Graduate Center, CUNY

“The Critical Life of Information,” an all day conference exploring how the phenomenon of Big Data affects the humanities took place on April 11, 2014. Organized by Inderpal Grewal, Laura Wexler, and myself, the free-wheeling workshop included four panels focusing respectively on Big Data from the perspective of the Law, Visual and Quantitative Analytics, the Arts, and Governance, each of which included invited speakers as well as three respondents, largely though not exclusively drawn from the Yale faculty ...

by Andrew E. Dowe and Heather Vermeulen

After the most recent WGSS Graduate Colloquium, Professor Jill Campbell remarked upon how regularly presentations by scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds and with different methodologies and topics unexpectedly jell in our sessions. Much like interdisciplinary scholarship, planning and executing sessions meant to bring scholars from across campus into conversation requires a heightened appreciation of variables ...

WGSS Speaker Series

The Spring 2014 WGSS Speaker Series highlighted the theme of genders and social movements. Scholars who are working to understand the fluidity and porosity of national boundaries and the global networks of the twenty-first century demonstrated how possible connections across genders and social movements could be made.

Queer Life After DOMA: The Triumph of Gay Marriage
in an Age of Family Values

It is now axiomatic to observe that the histories of conservative religion and those of gay liberation are intertwined. But what, exactly, does this mean? What are the religious, historical, ethical, and metaphysical consequences of marriage as the political subject for LGBT equality? What does this particular legal change suggest about the sociology and phenomenology of religion in contemporary America? ...

Recent Publications

WGSS and LGBTS congratulate our faculty and affiliates on the publication of their recent scholarship.

“More and Less then Equal: How Men Factor in the Reproductive Equation,” Gender & Society Dec. 2013, vol. 27 no. 6
Rene Almeling

“Public Opinion on Policy Issues in Genetics and Genomics” Genetics in Medicine, Official Journal of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics
Rene Almeling

“The Unbearable Heaviness of Being,” Sikh Formations, Taylor & Francis Online
Geetanjali Singh Chanda

“Intrahousehold Bargaining and Resource Allocation in Developing Countries,” The World Bank Research Observer 28: 52–78. 2013.
Cheryl Doss

“Property Rights and the Gender Distribution of Wealth in Ecuador, Ghana, and India,” The Journal of Economic Inequality 11:249–265. 2013.
Cheryl Doss, Carmen Diana Deere, Abena D. Oduro, and Hema Swaminathan

Polio Wars: Sister Kenny and the Golden Age of American Medicine, Oxford University Press, Nov. 2013
Naomi Rogers

Journey through the White Terror: A Daughter's Memoir, 2nd edition, (Taipei: National Taiwan University, 2013)
Kang-I Sun Chang

Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminisms, and Neoliberalism, (Duke University Press, 2014)
Inderpal Grewal