WGSS Colloquium and Working Group

by Salonee Bhaman

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We began the WGSS working group series with a presentation from visiting LGBTS Fellow Ahmad Greene-Hayes, who shared a paper exploring the life and ministry of Grammy award winning gospel artist and reverend, James Cleveland. Greene-Hayes’ presentation held space for lots of lively discussion among the group around questions of legal history, gender performance, and the politics of HIV transmission, consent, and identity within the gospel community. Our second session of the working group convened an intimate group of students alongside Professor Hazel Carby. We discussed Professor Carby’s exciting new book chapter in progress around historical memory, race, and identity in both Britain and the greater Atlantic world. Our final Working Group also featured a chapter length workshop from Professor Jill Richards, whose work explored connections between radical women’s movements and the international avant garde, taking the discussion from Europe, the new United Nations, and both uptown and downtown New York City. These meetings provided our group with the opportunity contemplate these longer projects as they were still in development, bringing together an interdisciplinary group of minds to think through methodology, style, and new key questions.

This semester, we also had two exciting colloquium sessions, beginning with presentations from Zaib un Nisa Aziz (from the History Department) and Joey Plaster (from the American Studies department.) Zaib’s presentation thought through feminist intellectual traditions emerged and intersected across the British empire, while Joey shared an ethnographic exploration of San Francisco’s central city street youth ministries, with an emphasis on the fruitfulness of the framework of narrative and ritual in forming queer public cultures. Rodion Kosovsky (from HSHM) and Ittai Orr (a member of the American Studies department) presented their work during our second session, discussing the causes and solutions to domestic violence within the lesbian community in the United States, and an exploration of William Earle Jr’s queer primitivism, respectively.

We look forward to convening again next year. Thank you to all the faculty and students who took the time and shared their work with our community, as well as the wonderful community of scholars who attended these sessions. We very much appreciated the opportunity to think alongside all of you.