This fall, Dr. Angela Jones joined WGSS@SBU as a Senior IDEA Scholar. They are an award-winning teacher and writer with expertise in African American political thought and protest, sex work, race, gender, sexuality, feminist theory, Black feminisms, and queer methodologies and theory. Dr. Jones is a long-time friend of WGSS@SBU, and we couldn’t be more excited for them to be officially a part of our community. 

Dr. Angela Jones is the author of Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Industry (NYU Press, 2020) and African American Civil Rights: Early Activism and the Niagara Movement (Praeger, 2011). They are a co-editor of Sex Work Today: Erotic Labor in the 21st Century (NYU Press, 2024). Jones is also a co-editor of the three-volume After Marriage Equality book series (Routledge, 2018). Jones has also edited two other anthologies: The Modern African American Political Thought Reader: From David Walker to Barack Obama (Routledge, 2012), and A Critical Inquiry into Queer Utopias (Palgrave, 2013). Jones is the author of African American Activism and Political Engagement: An Encyclopedia of Empowerment (Bloomsbury, 2023) and Black Lives Matter: A Reference Handbook (current available for pre-order from Bloomsbury).

In addition to publishing article in various peer-reviewed academic journals, they also write for public audiences and have published in venues like Contexts (digital), The Conversation, the Nevada Independent, Peepshow Magazine, PopMatters, and Salon. Dr. Jones is currently working on a mainstream trade monograph under contract with the legacy feminist press Seal Press, which is tentatively called “Sex Lives: Erotic Power and the Social Life of Sexuality.”

We asked Dr. Jones to answer a few questions about their research and teaching, their experiences in academia, and about what they do when they aren’t writing all these brilliant books and articles!

Tell us about the collection you co-edited Sex Work Today: Erotic Labor in the 21st Century.

Sex Work Today was a long time in the making. Bernadette Barton, Barb Brents, and I started the project not long before the lockdown phases of the pandemic, so finally, getting this book out into the world felt extra good. The anthology features thirty-one original essays by sex workers, advocates, researchers, and activists. The essays engage intersectional and transnational frames and are short, crisp, and accessible.

Can you also tell us about Black Lives Matter: A Reference Handbook (which will be released this May)?

Black Lives Matter: A Reference Handbook is a book I co-authored with Shaonta’ “Shay” Allen and Simone Durham. The book documents the creation and growth of BLM and profiles leading and influential activists and organizations associated with the movement. It includes a range of personal essays that explore the persistent problems of police violence and racial discrimination in the USA. There are also chapters, including governmental data and excerpts of primary documents, as well as an annotated bibliography of related books, news articles, reports, and podcasts.

When this book is published, it will also feel extra special. My co-authors, Simone and Shay, were navigating a lot: a dissertation defense and a transition to a tenure-track job, among other things. Working on this with them and the things we learned from each other was a gift.

What was the best class you took as a student?

The best class I took as an undergraduate was my senior seminar in sociology on gender, race, sexuality, and the body. It was the moment bell hooks broke my heart. We were reading from an anthology, and we got to her essay, “Selling Hot Pussy: Representations of Black Female Sexuality in the Cultural Marketplace” (from Black Looks). It was then that I realized that a number of my Black feminist mentors (hooks, Collins, Lorde) were brilliant on so much but also oh so wrong about sex and sexuality.

My favorite graduate school class was the political economy seminar I took with Agnes Heller. She had such a brilliant mind. Although she was small in stature, she filled the room. We dissected and discussed “Estranged Labor” in ways I never had. In particular, our conversations about the species being forever changed my relationship with labor. That course pushed me to think more concretely and differently about the type of world I want to live in and what role I might continue to play in the movements getting us there.

Is there a particular book that has had a huge influence on your research and/or teaching?

Hands-down W.E.B DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folks. It is not only one of my favorite books (alongside Alice Walker’s The Color Purple), but also profoundly affected my research and writing. DuBois’s conceptualizations of the veil and double consciousness have been influential academically but have also helped me personally to process living in a white supremacist world. I wrote about it here. Critically, his field-defining concepts were born out of autotheory. DuBois pioneered innovative research methods—advocating for mixed methods and fieldwork, using colorful data images, and recognizing that autoethnography and oral histories—that beautiful storytelling aren’t antithetical to scientific rigor—the personal breathes life into theory. DuBois knew and told us that theory and data are political—that research and the stories we tell can foster social justice and change.

What are you listening to right now?

I am currently listening to Lamya H’s book, Hijab Butch Blues. I still have about a third left, but it is so good! Music—I listen to a lot of R&B, Neo-Soul, and old school Hip-Hop, Trip-Hop, and dancehall reggae. Lately, CoCo Jones, Muni Long, and Snoh Aalegra have been in heavy rotation.

How do you like to relax?

How I relax depends on what my bodymind needs. If I’m feeling chill but still creative, I love to write or read in front of a fire. If the world and its people have been thunderously loud and evil, you can find me, candles lit, sage in the air, doing yin yoga and meditation on my mat. And sometimes, my spirit needs ratchet joy with rest, and I binge trashy love shows on Netflix and call it research.

Dogs or cats?

Cats—definitely, cats! I have two, Blaze and Simon, coming soon to a Zoom screen near you. I vibe with cats. Most dogs ain’t got no chill, lol—that and a huge dog bit me as a kid, and so, sure, I suppose I still have feelings about that.

Dr. Manisha Desai joined Stony Brook University in Fall 2023 as the Executive Director of the Center for Changing Systems of Power. She is jointly appointed in WGSS and Sociology, and we could not be happier to welcome her into our department. In her short time here, Dr. Desai been a steadfast and fierce advocate for climate justice, artistic freedom, transnational feminisms, and student protest movements. 

Dr. Manisha Desai’s research delves into transnational feminism, women’s human rights, gender and globalization, and contemporary Indian society to theorize with marginalized communities in their pursuit of social justice. Methodologically, her work investigates power dynamics in knowledge production and advocates for co-produced knowledge to transform unequal social relations. She employs a critical feminist lens that seeks to decolonize knowledge production and contribute to social justice even as it problematizes those efforts.

Currently, Dr. Desai is engaged in research on women’s rights, land rights, and climate justice in India and the Northeastern United States. Her work aims to understand how Dalit women farmers in India and women farmers of color in the United States bring together issues of land rights, and women’s economic, social, and political rights to address climate change. She is also involved in the Global Research and Action Network on the Eco-Social Contract at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. Here, she collaborates with academics, community members, and policymakers from various countries to promote climate justice.

Additionally, Dr. Desai is working on reframing diversity, equity, and inclusion as justice, equity, and transformation to ensure that issues of systemic racism and inequalities are addressed structurally. Committed to decolonizing knowledge production and academia, she serves on the Steering Committee of the Federation of Feminist Journal Editors. The Federation aims to establish a feminist knowledge commons outside commercial publishing to facilitate the free circulation of feminist knowledge across borders and language barriers.

We asked Dr. Desai to tell us more about her social justice work, how this connects to her research and teaching, and the role art and literature play in her life!

Tell us about the Center for Changing Systems of Power.

The Center for Changing Systems of Power is a collaborative space for furthering epistemic, aesthetic, and social justice locally and globally.

Epistemically, we are committed to co-producing knowledge with those within and outside the academy to develop solidarities of epistemologies that will not only illuminate interlocking relationships of socio-economic and political inequalities but also how communities locally and globally are challenging those systems of power. Currently, our affiliates are focused on ecological, health, and carceral systems that are in urgent need of transformation.

Aesthetically, through our artivist in residence program, we seek to showcase practices and visions of art that draw upon dynamic local and global traditions and practices that envision a better world for us all.

Socially, the Center is committed to promoting justice, both within and beyond the academy, in communities and causes on Long Island, greater New York, and globally.

We bring together academics, community groups, artists, advocates, and public policy makers by sponsoring dialogues and debate as well as teach-ins over issues of importance within and outside SBU.

How does your work with CCSP connect to your feminist research and teaching?

The Centers three lenses of epistemic, aesthetic and social justice emerge directly from my transnational feminist research and teaching. As a feminist scholar activist and teacher, I’ve always been attentive to knowledge produced outside the academy and incorporated activist and artistic reflections in my research and teaching.

Similarly, collaboration with colleagues across disciplines has informed my writing and teaching and that is also how the Center functions.

Ensuring that the Center’s programming is inclusive of students and staff and community members is another way that my feminist sensibilities inform the work of the Center.

What is the most important thing for researchers to keep in mind when collaborating with communities outside academia?

This question reminds me of the by now classic book Participation: The New Tyranny? by Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari that critiqued the ways in which participation was becoming mandated in the development field.

Something similar seems to be happening with community engagement as everyone from federal funding agencies to universities want researchers to collaborate with communities outside academia.

Given this, it’s crucial to be honest about our motivations, i.e., why do we seek collaboration, who benefits, before thinking about how we work together.

What was your favorite class as an undergrad?

I was a microbiology major and chemistry minor in a very structured curriculum with little freedom so can’t say that I had a favorite. But I went to a Jesuit college and us non-Catholics had to take a course called Moral Science. As a 16-yr old starting college it intrigued me that ethical issues were framed as a science for the heathens. So, were the Bible and science being seen as equivalent? I enjoyed such questions and conversations in that class though not sure what our Jesuit priest thought of that.

What is the best novel you’ve read recently?

Not sure about the best, but I recently read a book of short stories called What we Fed to the Manticore by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri that stayed with me for a long time. The narrator of each story is an animal, a donkey, vultures, the mythical Manticore of the title, and each is set in a different location from Gaza to India to the US northern plains. Each is a haunting tale of inter-species relationships and life on earth that is very of our time and yet also timeless.

Given my own work on eco-social justice and thinking of more than human rights and earth jurisprudence it spoke to me in ways that it might not have had I read it at another time.

What is your favorite museum?

Don’t have a favorite but among the ones I go to and enjoy on a regular basis is a little gem called the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, CT. New Britain is one of those small New England industrial towns that have lost their manufacturing base with few material remnants of a once vibrant community, this museum being one of them. As the oldest museum featuring American art, it showcases an amazing array of artists. That’s where I first saw Kara Walker’s cut-out paintings and recently saw the Brazilian American artist Vik Muniz who assembles large scale collages with everyday materials and then photographs them.

Early bird or night owl?

Definitely an early bird.

This June, the fantastic zine/collection 2 Trans 2 Furious: An Extremely Serious Journal of Transgender Street Racing Studies won the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ+ Anthology. WGSS PhD student AJ Castle’s essay “The Cipher Cut” is featured in this award-winning volume. We couldn’t be prouder of our department’s first Lambda winner!

2 Trans 2 Furious was edited by Tuck Woodstock and Niko Stratis with cover art by Mattie Lubchansky and zine design by Shay Mirk. You can get a PDF version of the collection directly from Girl Dad Press, or you can order a bound print copy from AK Press.

Here’s the official description:

More than forty trans writers and artists have joined forces to explore the deeper meanings of the Fast & Furious franchise (and also gender). There’s really no way to know why this exists, but it does, and you can own it! Suitable for F&F fans and newcomers alike.

Includes:

– A new short story by Manhunt author Gretchen Felker-Martin
– A demolition derby driver’s perspective on 2 Fast 2 Furious’s derby scene
– An essay contemplating the queer symbolism of Cipher’s bowl cut <— This is AJ’s piece!
– The scoop on the franchise’s only canonically nonbinary character
– Instructions for an F&F-themed tabletop role-playing game
– A contemplation of which Taylor Swift album represents each F&F character

Plus: Bingo cards! Comics! Haiku! And, of course, hot gay erotica…

Prof Lisa Diedrich‘s new book – Illness Politics & Hashtag Activism – is now available from the University of Minnesota Press. This small-but-mighty volume shows how illness on social media provides insight into the struggle against ableism and stigma and for care and access. Join us on Wed, Nov 20th at the Humanities Institute to hear more from Prof Diedrich and celebrate the book’s release!

Published as part of the “Forerunners: Ideas First” series, Illness Politics & Hashtag Activism embraces the spirit of the series – “where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead.” Like the other volumes on this exciting series, Prof Diedrich’s new book is an open access publication, so you can read it online if you’d like!

Here’s the official description from the publisher:

This past spring and summer, the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department graduated 5 new PhDs: Ashley Barry, Annu Daftuar, Andy Eicher, Tara Holmes, and Melis Umut. We were thrilled to celebrate the end of the academic year with 5 dissertation defenses – each one bringing together the WGSS community, allies from across campus, and friends and family from all over. Please join us in congratulating our newest doctors!

We kicked things off with Melis Umut‘s defense on April 12th. Her brilliant dissertation, “Erotic Visuality and Popular Culture in a Conservative Society: 1970s Turkish Erotic Melodramas and the Muslim Sexual Imagination,” explores the emergence and popularization of erotic films in the Turkish film industry during the 1970s. These films borrowed from the melodramatic mode while simultaneously instigating a pornographic gaze. Pushing back against dominant perceptions of these films as lacking in quality and cultural value, Dr. Umut illuminates the innovative and long-lasting impact these films have had on Turkish cinema and visual politics.

Then, on April 26, we settled in for a double-header. Tara Holmes defended her dissertation “ ‘Let’s Not Get Caught, Let’s Keep Going’: Mainstream Cinema and Queer Viewing Practices in the 1990s.” This highly original project turns a critical eye on popular films that, despite not having any explicitly queer characters, have become iconic in the queer community. Focusing on Thelma and Louise (1991), Death Becomes Her (1992), Now and Then (1995), and Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997), she explores the queer desires and attachments incited by these films. In doing so, Dr. Holmes expands our understanding of queer spectatorship and challenges our conceptions of what constitutes queer cinema.

Later that afternoon, Andy Eicher defended his dissertation “Profligate Homosexual: HIV/AIDS, Personal Responsibility, and Drugs into Bodies.” Bringing together critical disability studies and queer/feminist theory, this project challenges official narratives of the HIV/AIDS epidemic that reproduce racist, ableist, classist, and homophobic assumptions about health and sexuality. He assembled a fascinating archive of activist ephemera, artistic productions, governmental records, pharmaceutical marketing, and pop cultural events to uncover alternative narrative possibilities. Ultimately, Dr. Eicher highlights the presents and futures made possible thanks to the creativity of queer people inventing ways of life outside the logics of heterosexuality

On May Day, Ashley Barry filled the Poetry Center for the defense of her dissertation “In/Sane On Screen: Mad Films and the Psychiatric Gaze,” which examines representations of people with mental illness in contemporary narrative film. Earlier in the semester, she gained recognition for this fabulous project when she took second place at the annual Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) Challenge and, again, as the recipient of the Graduate School’s highly competitive President’s Award to Distinguished Doctoral Students. Dr. Barry is currently a 2024 ACLS Leading Edge Fellow and will be starting a position as Policy Researcher at the NYC nonprofit organization College Access: Research and Action.

A few months later, on Aug 2, Annu Daftuar defended her dissertation “Global Fertility Markets: Regulation and Reproductive Justice,” which examines the caste politics of domestic surrogacy practices in India. Annu will be sharing her research at GW’s Virtual Global Symposium on Surrogacy this October and publishing an article based on this project in a special issue on “Reproductive Justice across Disciplines and Demographics” in the Journal of International Women’s Studies. In January, Dr. Daftuar will join the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Appalachian State University as an Assistant Professor of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies.

This year, the WGSS Department welcomed May Navarra back to campus as the keynote speaker for our commencement ceremony.

May Navarra is a two-time alum of Stony Brook University. They completed their first degree here – a B.A. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, along with a minor in Biology – in 2018. That year, the WGSS Department selected May as the winner of the Terry Alexander Award to support their plans to pursue a career in health advocacy. May had just been accepted into the Master’s of Public Health program on our campus and had signed on to work at what, at the time, was the new LGBTQ* Center. Throughout their time at Stony Brook, May played a crucial role in fostering an inclusive and interdisciplinary gender and sexuality studies community while also fiercely advocating for social, economic, and health justice on campus and beyond.

As a student, May aspired toward a career in biomedical research that would resist simplistic categorizations and, instead, enact an intersectional queer feminist praxis. And that’s exactly what they’ve done! Since completing their MPH, May’s professional work has addressed the complex and overlapping health inequities in relation to reproductive justice, immigrant rights, and LGBTQ advocacy. Today, May works as a researcher of transgender health at Boston University’s GenderCare Center, which provides accessible, individualized, and comprehensive gender-affirming care while also advancing education, research, and advocacy efforts across New England and beyond. May’s current research focuses on improving the way identity-based data is collected from patients for electronic medical records. As a firm believer in the importance of making sure research teams look like the populations being studied, May is proud to be part of the growing body of trans researchers working in the field of trans healthcare.

In their keynote address, May reflected on their academic journey through Stony Brook and offered sound advice for moving into the world as a WGSS graduate. Please enjoy this video of their truly inspiring remarks!

The WGSS Department is delighted to introduce Jonell Ashby as the 2024 winner of the Terry Alexander Award.

This award is given in honor of Terry Alexander, the mother of Courtney Alexander, a Women’s Studies major who graduated from Stony Brook in 2006. Terry Alexander worked in the New York City public schools, she was an active member of the Brownsville Community Baptist Church, and she was a community activist with the Bed Stuy Park Lions Club in Brooklyn. Terry was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 1982 and, from that point forward, she and her family were regular participants in the annual MS walk to raise awareness about the disease and money to further the research. Terry attended the WGSS graduation in May 2016 to watch her daughter graduate. Sadly, shortly thereafter, she became very ill from MS-related complications and died on December 7, 2006.

The WGSS Department is grateful for the Alexander family’s continued support, and we are honored to give the Terry Alexander Award each year to students planning to pursue a career in health care or health advocacy. Our hope is that this award will generate interest among our students in examining the complexities of caring for people with chronic illnesses while also providing us with the chance to acknowledge the importance of a parent’s love, encouragement, and commitment to education and community work. Terry Alexander is a shining example of all these things.

Professor Jenean McGee presented Jonell Ashby with the award at our spring commencement ceremony. Here’s what Prof McGee had to say about Jonell:

“Hailing from Brooklyn, New York, Jonell Ashby is a doula, holds an associate degree in biology and is graduating with as a Women’s, Gender, Sexuality Studies major with post grad plans of becoming an OBGYN.

My first introduction to Jonell was this past fall at the WGSS open house. Immediately I was not only impressed but in awe of what Jonell had accomplished in so little time. I was then thrilled to see her seated in the front row (literally right in from of my podium!) for my WST 392 course on Black women and US modern medicine. Knowing about Jonell and being a new professor, I was a bit – dare I say – intimidated and nervous about teaching someone so steeped in the conversations about Black women and medicine. But it turned out being an amazing course, and Jonell provided her classmate’s and myself with unique perspectives from the vantage point of being a doula and having an interest in Black women’s health.

To list a few of Jonell’s accolades:  As a Collective Power for Reproductive Justice intern, she helped produce the first-ever “Trust Black Women Universe” project for Essence Festival in New Orleans, Louisiana. She also helped launch a youth-centered menstrual equity project, which involves a giveaway featuring people of color-owned and organic menstrual brands. This fall, she will begin working on her Masters in Public Health degree right here at Stony Brook University.

Getting to know Jonell and hearing my colleagues and students sing her praises, she is truly the perfect recipient for the Terry Alexander Award. With all of that it is my privilege to present Jonell Ashby with this award.”