Volume 5, Issue 1
fall 2014

Editor, Geetanjali Singh Chanda
Managing Editors, Linda Hase & Moe Gardner
Layout Design, Nick Appleby

Letters from the Chairs of WGSS & LGBTS

from Kathryn Lofton

This fall has been an exciting and full semester. We have been overjoyed to welcome Vanessa Agard-Jones to our faculty. You may remember from an earlier Letter from the Chair my predecessor, Inderpal Grewal, discussing the search that brought Vanessa to us. That highly competitive search in transnational migration brought several great young scholars to campus ...
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from Karen Nakamura

I was thrilled when I was asked by the Provost’s office to serve as the Chair of LGBT Studies for the 2014-2015 academic year. My own research on disability in contemporary Japan has been deeply inflected by queer theory, lesbian and gay studies, and feminist theory, so I feel a deep connection to the work that we do ...
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Thrilled to be here!

by Vanessa Agard-Jones

Vanessa Agard-Jones, Assistant Professor in WGSS

WGSS Community,

I’m thrilled to have joined this faculty, and to be learning so much about—and from—the wide-ranging networks of people who call this campus’ WGSS and LGBT Studies Programs home.

As a graduate of Yale College, I’m particularly gratified to return to a place that has long intrigued and challenged me ...
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Student Perspective

Globalizing Gender and Sexuality
WGSS 206

by Taylor Nicolas '15

I have been exceptionally lucky to have Professor Vanessa Agard-Jones for two courses this semester. In Globalizing Gender and Sexuality (WGSS 206), we interrogate the transnational, examining debates about gender and sexuality across borders, cultures, and languages, all the while unpacking “globalized” categories and definitions. As a lens through which to approach the potentially large scope of the course, we have relied upon two case studies ...
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Alum Spotlight: Ciara McCormack

I received one of the best pieces of advice during my freshman year at Yale. I was chatting with an alum who had graduated the year before, when we inevitably stumbled upon the topic of what I was planning to major in. I told her I had no idea. She shared some advice she had once been given: “Don’t worry about what you think you want to do after college and how your major will fit that. Instead, pick your major solely by what interests you the most.” ...
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James Robert Brudner '83 Memorial Prize and Lecture:
Richard Dyer

by Abigail Moore '16

For the past 14 years, one of the hallmarks of fall in the LGBTS program has been the James Robert Brudner ’83 Memorial Prize and Lecture. Given annually in memory of James Robert Brudner, prominent AIDS activist, urban planner, journalist, and photographer, the prize is awarded to academics who have made incredible contributions of scholarship and activism in the field of gay and lesbian history and contemporary experience ...
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WGSS Graduate Certificate Program

by WGSS DGS, Jafari Allen

Jafari Sinclair Allen is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, African American Studies, and American Studies, and WGSS DGS

Thanks to the work of former Directors of Graduate Studies, Margaret Homans, Laura Wexler, and Jill Campbell, and the graduate students who have made WGSS one of their intellectual homes, the Graduate Certificate Program—formerly known as the “Qualification Program” which began in 2002 continues to move from strength to strength ...
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WGSS Colloquium and Working Group

by Ashley James and Heather Vermeulen

Continuing its legacy of compelling interdisciplinary dialogue across Yale’s graduate and professional programs, the WGSS Graduate Colloquium kicked off an exciting sixth year with Assistant Professor of English Literature and African American Studies Anthony Reed, who led a dynamic discussion on the radical aesthetics of race and gender in a contemporary film, Girl 6 ...
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WGSS Speaker Series

The Spring 2015 WGSS Speaker Series will explore Gender in Public: Studies in Performance

January 29 - Shane Vogel, Indiana University
Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance & the Calypso Craze

March 3 - Amy Derogatis, Michigan State University
Saving Sex: Sexuality & Salvation in American Evangelicalism (Co- sponsored by Dept of Religious Studies)

March 24 - Lynne Gerber, University of California, Berkeley
Playing Church: Performing Gay Christianity at the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco, 1970-2000 (Co-sponsored by Yale Divinity School)

WGSS Students Win Haas Prize Three Years in a Row

Yale College senior Hilary Rose O'Connell '14 joined Yemurai Mangwendeza '13, and Joan English Gass '12 as winners of the James Andrew Haas Prize. The Prize is awarded annually "to that member of the Senior Class in Yale College whose breadth of intellectual achievement, strength of character, and fundamental humanity shall be adjudged by the faculty to have provided leadership for his or her fellow students, inspiring in them a love of learning and concern for others."
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New Faces on WLH, 3rd Floor

Vanessa Agard-Jones
Assistant Professor WGSS

Karen Nakamura
Associate Professor of Anthropology & East Asian Studies, Chair of LGBT Studies

Jafari Sinclair Allen
Associate Professor, Anthropology, African American Studies, American Studies, WGSS DGS

Maureen Gardner
Senior Administrative Assistant, WGSS/LGBTS

GENDER/QUEER: A FILM SERIES

by Greta LaFleur

This year, alongside Yale’s annual Trans*/Awareness week, Ron Gregg, Senior Lecturer and Programming Director of Film Studies, and I organized “Gender/Queer: A Film Series”. The series is a five-event showcase of new work in video and photography. It showcases the politics and practices of representing contemporary and changing vibrant landscape of diverse cultures of gender noncomformity ...
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Marginality, Sexual Identity, and the Law in Putin's Russia

Masha Gessen - known for her books "Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot" and "The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin" and regular contributions to The New York Times and The Washington Post, among other publications - spoke to an audience of undergraduates, graduate students and professors about the history and current status of LGBT individuals in Russia ...
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In Memorium - Adrianne Wadewitz

by Mela Toro Waters

pictured, from left: Trip Kirkpatrick, Mela Toro, Professor Laura Wexler, Professor Genevieve Carpio

On May 23rd 2014 a group of faculty, students and staff across disciplines got together in remembering the life and honoring the work of Adrianne Wadewitz, who died swiftly from a rock climbing accident this past spring ...
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Recent Publications

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

“RECOGNITION & REJECTION OF SIKH IDENTITY IN FILM”
SIKH FORMATIONS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS ONLINE
GEETANJALI SINGH CHANDA

THEORIZING NGOS: STATES, FEMINISMS, AND NEOLIBERALISM, (DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2014)
INDERPAL GREWAL

"FASHION, THRIFT STORES, AND THE SPACE OF PLEASURE IN 1960'S QUEER UNDERGROUND FILM"
BY RON GREGG published in BIRDS OF PARADISE: COSTUME AS A CINEMATIC SPECTACLE

"NO VOICE IN THE COURTROOM? DEAF LEGAL CASES IN JAPAN DURING THE 1960's"
BY KAREN NAKAMURA published in GOING TO COURT IN JAPAN

CRAZY IN JAPAN: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF BETHEL HOUSE
BY KAREN NAKAMURA recently published in Japanese

JOURNEY THROUGH THE WHITE TERROR: A DAUGHTER'S MEMOIR
BY KANG-I CHANG, 2ND EDITION