WGSS Department

New Course Offering! Professor Rebecca Wanzo to lead Interdisciplinary ‘Politics of Reproduction’ course to explore history, implications post-Roe v. Wade https://source.wustl.edu/2022/08/interdisciplinary-politics-of-reproduction-course-to-explore-history-implications-post-roe-v-wade/

What kind of racial reckoning is this? Black LGBTQ Practices of Care amid Spatial Marginalization The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and magnified the deep social inequalities, health disparities, and spatial marginalization that disproportionately impact Black q***r communities. For example, Black LGBTQ people disproportionately experience homelessness and housing instability due to convergent a...

Celebrate PRIDE Through CommUNITY
Wednesday, June 30 at 4:30 p.m.
https://happenings.wustl.edu/event/celebrate_pride_through_community #.YNxvf-hKiUm

St Louis Pride Flags

St. Louis Inclusive Pride Flag | STL-Style Show your pride for STL and the LGBTQ+ community with our new inclusive STL pride flags! We’ve updated our design to include the trans pride flag colors along with the black STL Pride flag, because Trans Lives Matter to us, in Saint Louis and beyond. Acid-dye construction on Solar Max 200 denier n...

Congratulations to the Class of 2021!

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P**n work as just work Heather BergIn her new book P**n Work: S*x, Labor, and Late Capitalism, Heather Berg argues that dramatic recent changes in labor conditions in the p**n industry reveal broader shifts in the labor market.

Interpretation shapes our lives.

Interpretation has interpersonal, ethical, political, and legal consequences. How we read events and each other plays a vital role in our ability to live with each other.

I have been sitting in sadness and solidarity, with friends and colleagues who have been processing the murder in Atlanta of eight people — predominately Asian women — and the discursive aftermath. Like many others, I was, to put it mildly, taken aback by Captain Jay Baker’s interpretative work when he claimed that the suspect was “fed up,” “at the end of his rope,” and “had a really bad day.” We can imagine many other ways to interpret these events.

Part of thinking through what we owe to each other in interpretative practice requires noting points of connection. That is central to what we commit to as a field and department in Women, Gender, and S*xuality studies. Last summer, I wrote a statement in solidarity with those protesting police brutality and anti-Blackness. It is important for us to recognize different histories of injuries against Asians and Black people while also recognizing points of solidarity, to understand histories of community work and activism that recognize connectivity in struggles for justice.

In drawing points of connection, there is also a substantial link between mass shootings and gender violence. Time and again we have seen that mass shooters have also assaulted women in their lives. In Atlanta, we saw a quite explicit link between mass shootings and gender violence—the killer reportedly claimed that he murdered six Asian women because of an alleged “sex addiction.” Invisible in some accounts is the fact that he could have chosen any number of targets for misogynist violence given the demographics of the city, but he specifically chose establishments with Asian women. Recognizing racialized gender violence as a specific issue must be central to any interpretation of these events.

Knowledge shapes interpretation. We can pledge to ourselves, as the critical race theorist Mari Matsuda reminds us, not to receive each other’s pain in ignorance.

To that end, we are co-sponsoring a panel Understanding Anti-Asian America with CRE2 and the Asian American Studies minor on Monday March 29, 2021, at 7 p.m. CST. I hope you’ll join us.

https://wustl-hipaa.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Th4xGRDkQr-6ZMCZThy5lw

Rebecca Wanzo

Chair, Women, Gender, and S*xuality Studies

For further reading:
Asian Americans Advancing Justice (Atlanta)

Cho, Sumi K. “Asian Pacific American Women and Racialized S*xual Harassment.”

Ho, Jennifer. “To Be an Asian Woman in America.” CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/17/opinions/to-be-an-asian-woman-in-america-ho/index.html

Liu, Roseann and Savanna Shange. “Toward Thick Solidarity: Theorizing Empathy in Social Justice Movements.” Radical History Review (2018).

Mari J. Matsuda, Where is Your Body?: And Other Essays on Race, Gender, and the Law (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).

Mitsuyi Yamada, “Invisibility is an Unnatural Disaster: Reflections of an Asian American Woman.”

Hampshire Feminist Collective, “The Legacies of Orientalism and the exoticizing of Women.” https://hampshirefeministcollective.wordpress.com/2013/08/03/the-legacies-of-orientalism-and-the-exoticizing-of-women/

Black and Asian-American Feminist Solidarities: A Reading List. https://www.blackwomenradicals.com/blog-feed/black-and-asian-feminist-solidarities-a-reading-list

Join WGSS for a discussion with organizers and practitioners in the fields of reproductive justice and prison abolition to learn about the connections between racial and sexual violence, transphobia, and the prison-industrial complex. Speakers will address how barriers to health services and economic resources are shaped by white supremacy, settler colonialism, transphobia, and sexism, and how collectives and individuals are organizing against mass incarceration. Topics include gender self-determination, the disproportionate impact of mass incarceration on Black, brown, and indigenous populations, alternatives to policing, sexual assault survivors and the law, and collective access to reproductive resources. Q&A to follow panelist presentations.

To register for the panel: https://wustl.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYvd-2hqjojH9PwDMceyK5ULzUQ6UEVKjmT