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.

Through my teaching this year I have been able to connect to diverse students and scholarship on genders and sexualities in the global South. In Engendering the Modern Subject, graduate students considered “classic” philosophical texts alongside feminist, critical race, and postcolonial commentaries that highlight the sexual and racial constitution of a seemingly universal subject of modernity as a locus of unmarked, universal reason and purposeful action. Bodies & Pleasures, Sex & Genders dealt with the cultural analysis of embodiment by taking seriously the potential our bodies have for “hanging on to ourselves” within the broad spectrum of pleasures, and by extension pains, in order to transnationally interrogate sex, sexuality, and gender as analytical categories. And students in Gender & Citizenship in the Middle East analyzed how the gendered and sexual dimensions of war, conflict, and partition, and the codification of modern citizenship in the Middle East—from Syria to Western Sahara—are imbricated in ethnosexual and orientalist colonial legacies. Our juniors in Theory & Method partook in a practicum that encouraged them to experiment for themselves with theoretical and methodological issues, which they have previously traced in existing scholarship—ultimately mobilizing these frameworks as part of effective and ethical research agendas for senior projects that I know are original and will contribute to WGSS as a field of scholarship.

On the research front, I’m writing a book about marriage, citizenship, and political sovereignty in Jordan where I’ve done research for the past eight years. The book explores how states manage political and economic problems, like statelessness and migration, through families. In Jordan, men can pass their citizenship to their children, but women can’t. Dependent nationality results in the daily reproduction of statelessness in Jordan and beyond. This problem is not dissipating. Of the 15 million stateless people around the world, a significant portion became stateless not by moving but by getting married or being born into mixed-nationality families. This project examines ethnographically how Jordan polices its borders by regulating in this way the marital and reproductive choices of Jordanian women, showing that our understandings of the state cannot stand separate from analyses of gender and kinship.