Todd Reeser
Director, Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program, and Professor of French
As the academic year comes to a close and I have a chance to breathe, I find myself reflecting on all the exciting work around gender and sexuality that took place over the course of the past nine months at Pitt.
GSWS’s enrollments continue to grow at all levels, from the undergraduate introductory course to graduate seminars. We have had to hire more instructors to satisfy student demand. Given the current cultural situation, it should come as no surprise that students want to make intellectual sense of the gendered world around them. Think of what students are seeing: the possibility of a woman president, Bruce Jenner coming out as transgender, attempts to roll back reproductive rights, marriage equality in the U.S., violent masculinities, and more social media cultural artifacts where gender figures than those of my generation can imagine. Many of our students come to our courses to think through what gender and sexuality mean not only in U.S. and global culture, but in their own lives. Introduction to Feminist Theory continues to be our highest-enrolled course. We added an exciting, new course to our repertoire this year, Gender and Sustainability, a course we plan to offer regularly over the coming years as this topic continues to take center stage in the academy. This coming fall term, instructor Julie Beaulieu will teach a new course, Global LGBTQ Literature, a course which answers student demand for courses on sexuality and cultural production (in this case, literature). I myself will be teaching a new advanced-level undergraduate course in the fall term on masculinities.
We were very busy this year hosting events and welcoming visiting scholars to campus to enrich our intellectual life. We hosted a number of events under the umbrella topic of embodiment, including reading groups, work-in-progress discussions, lectures, and external visitors. In the fall term, we hosted three external scholars, and in the spring term we hosted five. These events are integral to the creation of an interdisciplinary intellectual community and help build buzz for GSWS. We are careful to integrate students at all levels into appropriate events and, where possible, have students read work by external scholars in courses before attending their events. These events included scholars who work on sustainability, fracking, black masculinity, Spanish film, childhood, and young women’s sexuality. The very well-known scholar, Anne Fausto-Sterling from Brown University, delivered a lecture on how babies learn gender to more than 130 people. She also met with faculty and grad students to discuss her published research, and met with undergrads for a Q&A session on her recent book Sex/Gender: Biology in a Social World. I was pleased to hear so much student enthusiasm for a “meet the author” event: students brought their books to her and excitedly asked her to sign them. We hosted a day-long conference on March 20 on reproductive rights (see story) and an undergraduate conference on sexuality studies in April (see story).
We continued the tradition of hosting the well-attended Iris Marion Young Event and Awards Ceremony on November 6 at the Twentieth Century Club in Oakland. The organizing committee decided to change the format for this event to host a roundtable on a current issue. This year the panel focused on “Race and Education in Pittsburgh,” and three specialists presented on this topic and responded to questions from the audience. We presented three awards for community engagement (one each in the category of faculty, graduate student, and undergraduate). See our website for more information on the winners. Professor Irene Frieze, former chair of Women’s Studies, was the faculty winner this year.
We hosted work-in-progress discussions for four Pitt faculty and two grad students so that they could get feedback and so that the rest of us could learn about the interesting work they are doing in gender studies. We welcomed five visiting scholars who participated in our events, including Santiago Fouz-Hernández, a well-known film studies scholar from the UK.
As if this was not enough, we have begun planning for a major, interdisciplinary conference in April 2016 entitled “Doing the Body in the 21st Century.” We have a venue and we have exciting keynotes lined up. The first version of the conference website is up, the call for papers has gone out to list-serves, and we hope to host 70-90 external scholars to campus for this major national conference in gender studies. This conference is part of our long-term goal of establishing a national research presence for the program.
As I sit here in Paris where I am conducting research for a project on transgender France, I am already looking forward to next academic year.
We invite you to help support our efforts to bring gender and sexuality diversity to Pitt students and to the larger Pitt community. Please consider making a donation on our website so that we can continue to offer all these exciting events and fund student research on gender and sexuality.
Todd Reeser
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