Letter from the Chair of WGSS

from Inderpal Grewal

We’ve had a year packed with wonderful courses, new and visiting faculty, and so many conferences and events. And many debates and discussions around #MeToo!

Despite the turmoil in the world and in politics, or perhaps because of the turmoil, our dedication to teaching and research seems to us to be what is important and essential. Understanding gender and sexuality as key political vectors seems obvious to us – these issues are in the newspaper every day, from widespread sexual harassment, to the presence of sex workers and porn stars in political circles, to sexual assault and sexual violence all over the world...
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A Fond Farewell to Geeta Chanda

This year WGSS is missing one wonderful member of our faculty who took retirement. Professor Geeta Chanda taught key courses such as Globalizing Gender and Sexuality, Constructing the Self: autobiography; Gender, Family and Autobiography; and Fictions of Indian Women. Geeta was a mainstay of WGSS since 2001, and an important voice in feminist literary and cultural studies, writing many essays on women’s writing from India, on masculinities, and on popular culture. Her commitment to feminist teaching and to WGSS was deep and visible in her writing, teaching, and in the support she offered all her students. She was also the editor of this newsletter, taking on the project of disseminating our work to the broader Yale WGSS community. We thank her for all her work for WGSS. We miss her, and send her good wishes for a fulfilling next phase in New Delhi, India.

Student tribute to Prof Geeta Chanda
by Angela Sim ’18

I had the pleasure of taking a class with Prof. Chanda in my freshman spring: “Modern Families and Cultures: Asian and the U. S.” The class cemented my choice to be a WGSS major, because it was a class that was both Asian American studies and WGSS at the same time. Prof. Chanda brought together analyses of race and sexuality, transnationalism and family, labor and gender, as well as different kinds of texts—films, scholarly writing, novels—and also made space for us, the students, to bring our intellectual insights into our personal lived experiences. Tucked into a tiny room in the basement of WLH, we were encouraged to speak and to reflect, to share and to listen. Most of us had very little experience with WGSS, and Prof. Chanda patiently and generously guided us through the course and gave each of us, if not the determination to pursue the WGSS major, the analytical toolset to bring questions of gender and sexuality into whatever other courses we took. She was an incredible professor who shaped my journey through Yale long after I took her course, as I’m sure she did for many other students. I’m sure she will continue to shape the lives of people around her outside the university as well.

Faculty Profile: WGSS Assistant Professor Eda Pepi

Thank you for an incredible year!
by Eda Pepi

WGSS Community,
My first year at Yale has been an incredible journey. I have been touched by the warm welcome that my colleagues and the various communities of WGSS have extended to me since I joined this faculty a year ago. Trained in my doctoral work at Stanford as a sociocultural anthropologist, it has been exciting to return to the interdisciplinary field of gender & sexuality studies that was my original scholarly home as an undergraduate at Harvard. I continued to pursue my firm commitment in interdisciplinary approaches also in my previous employment with the Social Science Research Council. So, it has been no surprise to hear my colleagues across Yale sing the praises of WGSS undergraduate and graduate certificate students as I have witnessed first-hand their passion, maturity, and outstanding investigations of identity and power that make interdisciplinary scholarship so fulfilling...
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Engendering the Modern Subject
by Deepti Chatti, Isabel Ortiz, Aaron Tobey

Engendering the Modern Subject (WGSS 737) is a new graduate seminar taught by Eda Pepi. The course theorizes and historicizes dominant ideas of modern selfhood so as to challenge the self-professed universality of principles such as progress, individualism, freedom, and reason that continue to structure liberal democracy today. We do so by re-inscribing the liberal modern subject with textual and temporal specificity as constituted through “classic” texts of post-Enlightenment Europe by Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau, and others. By reading these texts alongside their feminist, critical race, and postcolonial critiques, we examine how the white, male, rational European humanist subject that haunts both dominant political formations and efforts to resist them is, in fact, contingent on the construction and othering of alternative subjectivities which it is never fully able to come to terms with through force or intellect...
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Visiting Presidential Fellow, Associate Professor Angel Nieves

Reflecting on my time in WGSS

We got “the call” from WGSS’s Laura Wexler whom I had gotten to know back in June, 2016 at the University of Victoria where we were in a class together at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute there. Laura asked, just over a year ago now, if I might be interested in getting onboard at Yale with a Presidential Visiting Professorship. My husband, Richard Foote, Yale College ’78 quickly told me you just don’t say no to Yale. The move here has enabled huge changes in our personal and professional lives, downsizing from a house in upstate NY (in Seneca Falls, the home of women’s rights) that witnessed two decades of our lives as a couple together, to an apartment here in town after nine years at Hamilton College where I had been an associate professor of American Studies and Co-director of the Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi). We’re now much better prepared for yet another move this upcoming summer when we head to southern California where I will become a tenured faculty member at San Diego State University...
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WGSS/LGBTS Events – Fall and Spring 2017/2018

Religion, Gender and the Politics of State Security Conference
by Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn

The conference, sponsored by a grant from the Luce Foundation, convened participants whose lives are shaped by social formations at the intersections of gender, religion, and the politics of state security and surveillance. It brought together scholars and activists from around the world who are approaching these questions through legal studies, anthropology, history, and cultural studies. We gathered to challenge traditional security studies, which has presumed a cis-heterosexual white male liberal citizen, whose rights are held intact through the state’s Lockean social contract...
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Honoring Donna Haraway - Symposia and Key-note Speech
by Alyssa Battistoni

For three days this October, Yale welcomed the historian of science and feminist theorist Donna Haraway to campus as the recipient of this year’s Wilbur L. Cross Medal for Distinguished Alumni, awarded annually to an alumnus of Yale’s graduate school. Haraway received a PhD in Biology from Yale in 1972, and is now Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California-Santa Cruz.
Haraway’s keynote address, “Making Oddkin: Storytelling for Earthly Survival,” was delivered to a packed house at the Whitney Humanities Center. Drawing on art and biology, fiction and politics, following Navajo sheep, Inuit seals, and Taiwanese dogs, Haraway told stories of a series of “contact zones” where creatures enter into relationships with one another, offering us lessons for “living on a damaged planet.”...
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Pleasureless: A Queer Symposium
by Phoenix Alexander

Lauren Berlant, Juana María Rodríguez, Gabriel Rosenberg and Shaka McGlotten participated in Pleasureless: A Queer Symposium, on March 30th 2018. This day-long event brought together leading scholars of queer theory to discuss consent, sex, community and connection in the 21st-century. From animal/human pleasures to daily practices of radical self-care, our presenters led students and faculty in theorizing what sex, and pleasure, offer us in a political climate that often pathologizes difference. Berlant spoke on the interplay of jokes and sexual acts, and the theme of ambivalence: one developed by McGlotten in his discussion of the distinction between pleasures and attachments that are often transient, sometimes toxic. Rosenberg used case studies of bestiality laws to critique intellectual assumptions (and legal frameworks) of consent and agency, and Rodriguez presented on ‘enfleshed theorization of queer brownness’ centered on the now-closed, but still-vital, ‘Esta Noche’...
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New Histories of Sexology
by Greta LaFleur

On April 20th and 21st of this year, Yale’s Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies hosted “New Histories of Sexology: Genealogies of Race, Sex, Colonialism,” a conference dedicated to exploring the emergence and long wake of the sexological sciences. While scholars tend to think of sexology as an intellectual movement of the late nineteenth century, and one largely based on Europe (England, Germany), this conference brought together twelve researchers from fields from literature to history, American studies to law, to explore both pre-histories of sexological science and to consider what the effects of its proliferation might have been. Organized by Yale University’s Greta LaFleur and Louisiana State University’s Benjamin Kahan, this event urged a return to this often neglected but critically important site of study in the history of sexuality...
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James R. Brudner '83 Memorial Prize and Lecture

CAROLYN DINSHAW delivered her Brudner Prize lecture, “Doing Medieval Sex Work in the 21st Century: A 14th Century Document and its Aftermath” to a packed crowd in Sudler Hall on February 7th, and again at New York’s LGBT Center on West 13th Street the following evening. The events were sponsored by the Brudner endowment, as well as LGBT Studies Program at Yale, and the Yale Gay and Lesbian Alumni Association (GALA).

Dinshaw is Julius Silver, Roslyn S. Silver, and Enid Silver Winslow Professor at NYU, has long been fascinated by the relationship between past and present, particularly concerning gender and sexuality...
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LGBT Studies is pleased to announce that Bill T. Jones has been awarded the 2018-19 James Brudner Memorial Prize in LGBT Studies. Bill T. Jones, a multi-talented artist, choreographer, dancer, theater director and writer, has received major honors ranging from the Human Rights Campaign’s 2016 Visibility Award, 2013 National Medal of Arts to a 1994 MacArthur “Genius” Award and Kennedy Center Honors in 2010. Mr. Jones was honored with the 2014 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, recognized as Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2010, inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2009 and named “An Irreplaceable Dance Treasure” by the Dance Heritage Coalition in 2000. His ventures into Broadway theater resulted in a 2010 Tony Award for Best Choreography in the critically acclaimed FELA!, the musical co-conceived, co-written, directed and choreographed by Mr. Jones. He also earned a 2007 Tony Award for Best Choreography in Spring Awakening as well as an Obie Award for the show’s 2006 off-Broadway run. His choreography for the off-Broadway production of The Seven earned him a 2006 Lucille Lortel Award. Mr. Jones’s AY'18-'19 Lecture date at Yale TBA.

Alum Spotlight: Jenna Cook (Yale B.A. Women’s Studies, 2014)

Choosing WGSS was one of the best decisions I made as a student at Yale and was central to my experience at the university. My decision to become a WGSS major came late in my undergraduate career—my junior fall. Up to that point, my official major was psychology, but whenever classmates or family members asked me about “my favorite class at Yale” or “a class that changed my worldview,” I always found myself thinking back to the WGSS classes that I had taken for fun. While psychology classes focused on dividing people into categories in order to create experimental settings, WGSS classes encouraged us to unpack these categories, appreciate the complexities, and recognize our assumptions. I loved the small class size and discussion-based style of the WGSS courses. My professors and classmates were feminist, disabled, trans, queer, radical, immigrant, body-positive activists and writers...
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WGSS Colloquium and Working Group

by Yuhe Faye Wang and Sam Huber

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...
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LGBTS Research Fellow 2017/18 Ahmad Greene-Hayes

This year I was fortunate to spend time at Yale University in the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies as a LGBT Studies Research Fellow. While on campus, I spent time in the Manuscripts and Archives division off the Yale Library, looking at the homophobia and AIDS collections, along with the Susan M. Chambré Research Files on Volunteer Aids Organizations. I had the honor of workshopping a journal article with the WGSS Working Group, whose comments were generous and pushed my project on "the Rev. James Cleveland, Sexual Indiscretion, and Black Church Rumor" forward in ways that I could not have imagined or anticipated...
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Congratulations to WGSS Class of 2018!

		Emmanuel Cantor Mimi Chiquet Jake Colavolpe Alexa Derman Celeste Dushime Jordana Gardenswartz Jatiah Holt		Marisa London Isadora Milanez Angela Sim Christopher Vargas Rebecca Young Justine Xu
		Click here to view the full slideshow