Sexuality, Women’s & Gender Studies Fall 2019 Newsletter

Stephen Dillon

Stephen Dillon is Associate Professor and Critical Race and Queer Studies at Hampshire College. He is the author of Fugitive Life: The Queer Politics of the Prison State (Duke University Press, 2018). His other writings on race, sexuality, feminism, and incarceration have appeared in Radical History Review, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies and Critical Methodologies; Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, and the edited collections Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex and Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition. He received his Ph.D. in American Studies with a minor in Critical Feminist and Sexuality Studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

Jennifer Hamilton

Jennifer A. Hamilton will be Visiting Professor of SWAGS for two years. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist whose research and teaching focus on the anthropology of law, science, and medicine; postcolonial feminist science and technology studies; and the contemporary politics of indigeneity.  She is the author of Indigeneity in the Courtroom: Law, Culture, and the Production of Difference in North American Courts (Routledge 2009). She is currently writing her second book, The Indian in the Freezer: The Genomic Quest for Indigeneity, which critically engages how the genomic sciences organize inquiry around the figure of the “Indian” and how this this research is shaped by and implicated in historic and ongoing debates about health disparities in Native North America. She is in her third year of directing the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center (FCWSRC), an organization committed to fostering feminist research, dialogue, and community across disciplines and institutions. Now in its 28^th year, the Center recently hosted an event, “The Power of Toni Morrison: In Loving Memory,” featuring presentations by Amherst Professors Marisa Parham and Khary Polk.

In May, Professor Hamilton attended the NORA conference in Reykjavik, Iceland as part of a roundtable she co-organized with Danish colleagues, “The Landscapes of Artificial Ice: Theorizing the Borders of Cold Storage.” The roundtable focused on the technological capacities and limitations of freezing biological materials and brought these into conversation with key questions in feminist science studies. In September, she was invited to King’s College London in the UK to present her work, “The Return of the (Plastic) Indian: Indigenous Futurisms, Biomedical Research, and Health Futures,” at a two-day interdisciplinary conference, “Race and Biomedicine Beyond the Laboratory” (RaBBL).

Professor Hamilton’s article, “From Bits to Bodies: Perfect Humans, Bioinformatic Visualizations, and Critical Relationality,” was recently published in Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, and another chapter, “From Reindeer to Woolly Mammoths: The Imperial Transit of Meat” is forthcoming later this year in an edited volume, MEAT!, from Duke University Press.

Professor Hamilton is thoroughly enjoying teaching her two new courses, “Feminist Science Studies” and “Gender, Law, and Technology” this semester and looks forward to teaching “Feminist Theory” and “Feminist Ethnography” in Spring 2020!

Aneeka Henderson

During the last academic year, Professor Henderson has been working on her book project, Veil & Vow: Marriage Matters in Contemporary African American Culture, Gender and American Culture Series | University of North Carolina Press.

Veil & Vow's official publication date is February 10, 2020 but is available for pre-order now.   

Supported by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) and the Mellon Foundation's Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Program, Professor Henderson's monograph places familiar, politicized questions about the crisis of African American marriage in conversation with a rich cultural archive that includes fiction by Terry McMillan and Sister Souljah, music by Anita Baker, and films such as The Best Man. Seeking to move beyond simple assessments of marriage as "good" or "bad" for African Americans, Veil & Vow critically examines popular and influential late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century texts alongside legislation such as the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act and the Welfare Reform Act, which masked true sources of inequality with crisis-laden myths about African American family formation. Using an interdisciplinary approach to highlight the influence of law, politics, and culture on marriage representations and practices, her project reveals how their kinship veils and unveils the fiction in political policy as well as the complicated political stakes of fictional and cultural texts. Providing a new opportunity to grapple with old questions, including who can be a citizen, a "wife," and "marriageable," Veil & Vow makes clear just how deeply marriage still matters in African American culture.

She is excited about teaching SWAGS 100 The Cross-Cultural Constructions of Gender and SWAGS 105 Women, Gender, and Popular Culture in the fall.

Lisa Käll

Lisa Folkmarson Käll is an Associate Professor in Gender Studies at the Department of Ethnology, History of Religion and Gender Studies at Stockholm University, and a STINT-fellow with SWAGS during the fall of 2019. Her academic training is in Women’s and Gender Studies and Philosophy and she specializes in Feminist Continental Philosophy. Her research addresses questions concerning embodied subjectivity and intersubjectivity and has focused on for instance the meaning of the lived body in the constitution of konwledge, understandings of the notion of situation and situtated knowledge, pathological and normative bodily self-objectification, the bodily constitution of sexual difference and sexual identity, empathy and the sharability of pain, constitution of bodily boundaries and the relation between selfhood and otherness.

While being firmly grounded in philosophy, she is strongly committed to interdisciplinary perspectives. An interdisciplinary commitment plays a crucial part in contributing to a deeper understanding of texts, systems of thought and questions, and thereby actively resists philosophical and scientific dogmatism. An interdisciplinary approach is also a way to put focus on the impossibility of final answers and to stress the importance of continuously asking new questions and to engage new perspectives. She often uses for example cultural representations, mostly film to address philosophical questions and in a series of articles she approaches different aspects of subjectivity, such as bodily intentionality, vulnerability and exposure, objectification and alienation, and erotic and ethical perception through film.

Much of Lisa’s work deals with understandings of the body/embodiment and she seeks to understand embodiment in terms of a boundary phenomenon as a way of approaching fundamental questions about the role of embodiment in the constitution of subjectivity and identity. She puts focus on how lived embodiment constitutes the condition of experience and knowledge and thereby of any possible socio-cultural categorization or scientific classification of human bodies, whether in terms of sex, gender, sexuality, race, age, or something else. She raises questions of how to understand the relation between the lived body as conditioning how it is categorized and ascribed a specific identity and the body as an object marked by this identity in different ways; how the way bodies are categorized and classified in the way they condition this very categorization; how different strands of identity such as sex, gender, race, age, etc are lived out and intersect in singular embodied existence while also being identified as specific and separate on the basis of how they are embodied. Lisa further raises questions concerning the transformative force of biotechnologization and biomedicalization of embodied subjectivities and how embodied subjectivity materializes as the node in which habitual oppositions of subject and object, nature and culture, agent and victim, active and passive break down and reemerge in new form. These questions put focus on how the body is constituted as a boundary phenomenon in so far as it is the nexus of continuously fluctuating boundaries and productive points of connection.

Lisa is honoured to be a STINT-fellow and very excited to spend the fall at Amherst College, teaching the course Introduction to Feminist Philosophy: Subjectivity, Embodiment, Situatedness.

Manuela Picq

Manuela L. Picq is a French Brazilian scholar who shares her time between Amherst College and Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador. Her most recent publications include Sexuality and Translation in World Politics (with Caroline Cottet, E-IR 2019) and Vernacular Sovereignties: Indigenous Women Challenging World Politics (University of Arizona Press 2018). She studies Indigenous rights to self-determination and gender and sexuality across Latin American and in world politics. Her work at the intersection of scholarship, journalism, and grassroots activism has won her a 2018 nomination amongst a New Generation of Public Intellectuals. This semester she is teaching two courses: SWAGS/POSC 411 Indigenous Women in International Relations and POSC 307 States of Extraction: Nature and Politics in the Americas. She is coordinating three guest-lectures at the Center for Humanistic Inquiry this fall: Maya lawyer Juan Castro (Sept 23), Bolivian public intellectual Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (Sept 24), and the delegate of women weavers of Guatemala Angelina Aspuac (Oct 23).

Khary Polk

This summer, Professor Polk completed work on his book, Contagions of Empire: Scientific Racism, Sexuality, and Black Military Workers Abroad, 1898–1948.

Book Summary

From 1898 onward, the expansion of American militarism and empire abroad increasingly relied on black labor, even as policy remained inflected both by scientific racism and by fears of contagion. Black men and women were mobilized for service in the Spanish-Cuban-American War under the War Department's belief that Southern blacks carried an immunity against tropical diseases. Later, in World Wars I and II, black troops were stigmatized as members of a contagious "venereal race," and were subjected to experimental medical treatments meant to curtail their sexual desires. By turns feared as contagious, and at other times valued for their immunity, black men and women played an important part in the U.S. military's conscription of racial, gender, and sexual difference, even as they exercised their embattled agency at home and abroad.

By following the scientific, medical, and cultural history of African American enlistment through the archive of American militarism, this book traces the black subjects and agents of empire as they came into contact with a world globalized by warfare.

Book now available for pre-order.

Krupa Shandilya

Krupa Shandilya is currently teaching a new class “Reading the Romance,” which explores the genre of romance fiction and film from a feminist perspective. Students read and watch a range of texts from classical romances such as Pride and Prejudice to the new popular romance, American Dreamer and the Bollywood film Manmarziyan [The Heart’s Desires]. They put these films and novels in conversation with feminist theorists such as Simone de Beauvoir and Carol Vance, thinking deeply about questions of sexual pleasure, romance and love. In a recent class discussion, the class discussed an essay on hookup culture on campus and reflected on its findings in the context of their own lived experiences of romance and sex on campus. The class looks forward to engaging with films and books that talk about same sex love, polyamorous coupling and BDSM (Bondage, Domination and Sado-Masochism) practices.

Riley Caldwell-O'Keefe

Riley Caldwell-O’Keefe is the Director of the Amherst College Center for Teaching and Learning. She supports individual faculty and departments through course design, curricular initiatives, and programming.  In July 2019, Dr. Caldwell-O’Keefe was an invited faculty member at an institute where she taught about cultural competence and addressing bias in the classroom. Her current educational development research focuses on student voice and course feedback. She has two works in progress, an article on teaching support at small liberal arts colleges and a book chapter on the process and impact of integrating diversity and ethics requirements into the curriculum at Boise State University, where she was a faculty member and Associate Director of the general education curriculum. She served 10 years in the U.S. Air Force and drew on this experience for her master’s and doctoral work which she completed at UC Santa Barbara with a Feminist Studies doctoral emphasis. Riley is dedicated to project-based work as evidenced by her projects at the NY Historical Society and Waterwell Theatre’s production of the “Blueprint Specials” as well as her students’ creation of the Idaho LGBTQ Oral History Archive.

Benedite Dieujuste '20

Benedite Dieujuste (Beni) is a senior English and Women’s Studies double major who is interested in public health and reproductive justice. This summer she conducted background research for her thesis on the effects of population control ideology on family planning programs, particularly in those that target women in developing countries. She combed through academic journals, newspaper articles, and influential texts on the topic of population and development to narrow the scope of her initial proposition. Her research was made possible by the department’s newly established Olver Student Research Fund.

After reflecting on her experiences this summer, Beni expressed her gratitude to John Olver, the SWAGS department, and Professor Amrita Basu: “I would not have been able to have started the research for my thesis before the school without the support of the Olver Fund and Professor Basu. Although I would have maybe read a book or two, my work would have been aimless and very limited. Professor Basu was a wonderful guiding force this summer and she helped me learn how to conduct productive research. Also, her reassurance during my many periods of doubt helped me handle the fear I had about taking on such a challenging project.”

The Olver Student Research Fund provided Beni with the support that allowed her to focus solely on research; a privilege many students can’t afford during the summer. She hopes to use the knowledge gained through her thesis to inform her future professional work in the field of public health.

Sahara Ndiaye '20

A senior double-majoring in SWAGS and Art History, Sahara spent the past semester studying in Spain. There she immersed herself in writers like Lorca, Carmen Martin Gaite, and Rosalia de Castro. She was exposed to the unique struggles of women in Spain and the limits of the feminist movement there. She knew she wanted to major in SWAGS when the most interesting readings in her first year seminar (Representing Equality) and film and media studies class were the feminist theory readings. She knows that studying SWAG is useful because it changes the way she thinks about not only gender but how culture functions and how each individual complies.

Feriel Ouerghi '20

Feriel is a rising senior majoring in Computer Science and Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies. She hails from Tunisia, where she was born and raised before coming to Amherst College. She chose to take SWAGS courses because of the ability of academic writing to put into words the experiences she has encountered, as well as learn about other lived experiences. During her semester abroad at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, she focused on the history of women and politics and took a course that examined the presence of women and other marginalized communities in the Singaporean political scene. Her time in Singapore gave her the opportunity to study the intersections of gender, race and socio-economic class in a Southeast Asian context, something she never thought she would be able to do. Her favorite part of being a SWAGS major is being part of a tight-knit community that seeks to understand and empower each other.

Lisa Zheutlin '21

Lisa is a junior SWAGS major from Boca Raton, Florida. She is also pursuing the Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice Five College certificate and is very happy that Amherst College now allows students to receive it. She loves the interdisciplinary nature of the SWAGS department, as she has taken classes in the Anthropology, French, English, Political Science, and Art History departments that all relate to her SWAGS major. Her favorite SWAGS classes so far have been Race, Culture, and Reproductive Health with Professor Cole because of its expansive focus on reproductive justice, as well as Contemporary Debates: Women and Right Wing Politics with Professor Basu, in which she researched the role of identity politics in the electibility of women candidates. Currently, she is taking Reading the Romance with Professor Shandilya, which she is super enthusiastic about. Outside of the classroom, Lisa is the president of the Reproductive Justice Alliance Club and is excited to continue to pursue these pertinent issues in the future.