Terry Alexander Award in WGSS: Lucy Gordon

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This award is 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 she 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.

Photo on left is of Terry Alexander and on the right is Lucy Gordon.

Professor Liz Montegary presents the 2021 Terry Alexander Award in WGSS to Lucy Gordon:

It is my pleasure to announce the winner of this year’s Terry Alexander Award: Lucy Gordon. The department unanimously selected Lucy for this award, as her research interests, professional goals, and community activism reflect her investment in imagining new ways of organizing the world that would undo heteropatriarchal modes of oppression and improve health outcomes for racially marginalized communities. Over the past few years, Lucy has worked closely with the Center for Civic Justice at Stony Brook University. In addition to helping coordinate this past fall’s student voter registration drive, she organized community workshops on pressing matters of health and social justice, including an event on environmental racism and another on trans health care practices.

But Lucy is not only a skilled community organizer; she is also a dedicated feminist researcher. This year, she worked on two major research projects. Lucy joined a team of psychologists on campus to assist in a pilot project designed to increase access to mental health care for children. On top of making time for this ongoing collaborative project, she also completed a truly excellent WGSS Honors Senior Thesis entitled “Parenting in a Pandemic: Re-Imagining Childcare after COVID-19.” Drawing on quantitative survey data from and four in-depth interviews with parents from Long Island and New York City, Lucy explores the major challenges parents have faced over the past year and illuminates how the process of navigating these challenges has changed the way her informants think about the work of parenting and caregiving more broadly. She concludes her thesis by calling for a care work economy – a new way of organizing society where care work is not devalued as unskilled, feminized labor and relegated to privatized family units. Instead, she outlines strategies for building a world where caregiving of all kinds is actually valued and materially supported in the name of public health and economic justice.

Lucy is graduating from Stony Brook this month with BAs in Psychology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. As a feminist thinker committed to racial, gender, and disability liberation, she is considering careers in psychology, counseling, or social work and plans to apply to graduate school in the very near future. I have been consistently impressed by Lucy Gordon since I met her as a first-year four years ago, and I am 100% confident that she will continue impressing us in the years to come. Congrats, Lucy!

Vivien Hartog Graduate Student Teaching Award 2021

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We are very pleased to announce the 2021 recipient of the Vivien Hartog Graduate Student Teaching Award: Carlos Vazquez

Congratulations Carlos!

 

First, we want to introduce this award and Vivien Hartog. Then Carlos’s advisor, Lisa Diedrich, will introduce Carlos.

This award is named in honor of Vivien Hartog, a Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies graduate certificate student who died before she could complete her Ph.D. in Sociology. It goes to the graduate student instructor we think most exemplifies Vivien’s lifelong commitments to activism, teaching, and learning. Here’s a description of Vivien written by her family that captures something of the kind of person we are honoring with this award:

“In Vivien Hartog’s 55 years, she went through more identities than most could imagine. An incomplete list would include: rebellious daughter; actress in training; young mother, wife (3 times); scientologist; scourge of scientology; business woman; domestic help in a hotel; undergraduate; radical feminist and lesbian; graduate student in sociology and women’s studies. At every point she both threw herself into her new identity and at the same time, remained herself. And one way that she always remained herself was in her commitment to social justice and to human rights. She remade herself regularly, but she always understood her remaking as struggles on a larger stage. Particularly in her last decade, she saw her life through the lens of an international women’s movement.”

Professor Lisa Diedrich on Carlos Vazquez:

I am delighted to tell you about Carlos Vazquez, a most-deserving recipient of the 2021 Vivien Hartog Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Instructor.

Carlos’s scholarship and pedagogy are deeply intertwined. The work he does in the classroom is linked to his recognition of the need for structural changes in higher education and society more broadly. In his research, he is interested in practices of what he calls “queer of color pedagogies of care,” which he describes as “an ethical mode of care that preoccupies itself centrally with a future-yet-to-come, mobilizing a praxis that enables the transmission of knowledge geared towards nurturing the future and diminishing the vulnerability of trans and queer of color communities to come.” In his classroom, he puts this ethical mode of care into action, centering both race and disability and the experiences of Black and Latinx communities. His impact on students at Stony Brook has been nothing short of profound.

Carlos has been an influential and popular instructor for our department, teaching a range of courses, including Introduction to Queer Studies and the timely and important topics class that he created, Race and Disability in Contemporary Culture. He also stepped up and volunteered to teach in the Writing Program in only his second year at Stony Brook. I mention this not only to show the breadth of Carlos’s teaching experiences at Stony Brook, but also to give a sense of his willingness to stretch and challenge himself pedagogically, as well as his recognition of the centrality of developing his students’ capacity for creative expression in multiple genres and modalities.

Carlos is a Turner Fellow and he takes seriously the Turner fellowship’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion through the teaching and mentorship that Turner Fellows provide to undergraduate students, especially underrepresented minority students. This commitment is apparent in both the form and content of his courses. He is especially good at getting students to analyze a wide range of media—music videos, TV programs, films, advertisements, memes and gifs—using a multiplicity of theoretical and methodological tools from the intersecting interdisciplinary fields of gender and sexuality studies, critical race studies, and critical disability studies. I can’t tell you the number of times he has dropped by my office to show and tell me about something that he and his students had just discussed in class. In one instance, the text he had his students discuss was one of the large Far Beyond brand murals adorning various buildings on Stony Brook’s campus. In another, he excitedly relayed to me how he and his students discussed the swimming lesson scene from Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight as an enactment of a queer of color pedagogy of care.

Comments on Carlos’s evaluations frequently mention his kindness and compassion. One student noted that, “such compassion from the professor motivates me to do better and…try instead of giving up. I want to thank him for being an inspiration on how to be a good professor.” In relation to the difficulty of going online in spring 2020, another student said Carlos “was incredibly understanding of the situation and tried to alleviate our stress as much as possible.” I know as well that he is particularly good at reaching out to students who are struggling, giving them specific ways to get back on course, showing care and concern for their well-being and lives beyond the classroom.

In his letter of application for the Vivien Hartog Award, Carlos wrote that he hopes “these cares, and commitments, and concerns…align [him] with the aims, objectives, and aspirations of the late Vivien Hartog, and the Award bestowed in her name.” I think Vivien and Carlos are indeed kindred spirits.

WGSS @ URECA 2021

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We are pleased to showcase work by WGSS majors at URECA’s Undergraduate Research Symposium, this year in a virtual format. This year two WGSS majors submitted posters for the event: Lucy Gordon (supervised by Prof. Liz Montegary) on “Parenting During a Pandemic: Re-Imagining Childcare after COVID-19” and Nicole Vion (supervised by Prof. Lisa Diedrich) on “The Politics of Female Rage in Queer Music.” Check out their amazing research projects below.

Pandemic Playlist: WGSS@SBU Mixtape #1

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We are now one year into the coronavirus pandemic. In March 2020, we closed the WGSS office at Stony Brook University and went into lockdown. All classes went online. We started this WGSS blog in order to create a virtual space of celebration for the graduating class of 2020. We will use this space again to celebrate #WGSSGraduation2021.

We decided it would be fun to create a #WGSSPandemicPlaylist that brings together music that has helped WGSS faculty, students, and alums during this difficult time. This will be on ongoing project, so please be in touch should you want to contribute to the playlist (Lisa[dot]Diedrich[at]stonybrook[dot]edu).

Happy listening!

McKenzi Thi Murphy (Journalism/Theater Arts/WGSS (Class of ’21))

I’m Still Here: Elaine Stritch

I’m Still Here by Stephen Sondheim, sung here by Elaine Stritch for Sondheim’s 80th Birthday Concert (the best version). Look, I’ve got a whole playlist with musical theatre songs about women going absolutely feral, but this one seems appropriate given *everything* that’s happened. “I got through all of last year, and I’m here,” indeed. Elaine Stritch is no longer with us, but there’s something inspiring about watching a then-85 year old woman belting out a song and jumping up and down just relishing in the fact that yes, she’s still here.

 

Mary Jo Bona (Professor of WGSS) and Stephanie Bonvissuto (PhD candidate)

The President Sang Amazing Grace: Kronos Quartet and Meklit

Mary Jo: We talked about Leonard Cohen’s passing and we both later played “Hallelujah” all that month. I was at JFK the day after the 2016 election, off to Montreal for NWSA. We connected by phone. I told you I could hear a pin drop at the gate; it reminded me of being at the airport after 9/11. And then the years after that day in between: poetry, lyrics, and song. And then: listening more, weeping, and healing.

Stephanie: I would not hear Cohen’s haunting anthem again until Saturday Night Live’s cold open a few days later. Kate McKinnon sits at the piano as a white pantsuit-clad Hillary Clinton to play to a hushed audience, giving us permission to weep in and for the moment. As the last note fades, Kate/Hillary faces the camera to say, “I’m not giving up, and neither should you.” Mekit and The Kronos Quartet elicits the same for me, wrapping the ethos of a powerful moment as an ephemeral gift for us to similarly hold and to hold us and our tears.

 

Nur-E Ferdous (Health Sciences Major, WGSS Minor (Class of ’22))

Fine Line and Treat People With Kindness: Harry Styles

In my opinion, the two songs are like two sides of the same coin. Fine Line is much slower and somber, and to me it kind of recalls the numbness of life in the pandemic but also towards the end the way he almost is begging and reassuring at the same time that “we’ll be alright” helps me think that we will be alright after this and that it’s okay to be scared and sad because of this. Treat People With Kindness is much more upbeat, and it is literally about being kind and generous to others and celebrating each other for being who we are. I linked the music video of TPWK because there’s a lot of analysis of the video and Harry’s gender identity in it. That also kept me patient during the pandemic and also positive because it was difficult many times to handle our own emotions as well as the emotions of others’.

 

Callias Zeng (WGSS Major, Environmental Studies Minor (Class of ’21))

The Beauty of Being Deaf: Chella Man

I’ve followed deaf, trans, queer activist Chella Man for a few years now. He’s very vocal about addressing ableism and celebrating the Deaf/Hard of Hearing community. He posted a video today called, “The Beauty of Being Deaf.” It is a wonderful video, so I wanted to share it!

 

Teri Tiso (Associate Professor Emerita of WGSS)

Let’s Talk about Sex: Salt-N-Pepa

We cannot talk about our bodies and health without talking about sex. Our basic understanding of physical characteristics is always skewed by our social and cultural beliefs. When we talk to each other (all of us) about blood, breasts, penis, vagina, sperm, eggs we are able to learn about menstruation, puberty changes, pregnancy, and how we are taught to interact as females, males, intersex, and queer humans.

 

Julie McGovern Carballo (Biology Major, WGSS Minor (Class of ’21))

Keep It Gold: Surfaces

This song is a reminder to always look at the brighter side of things!

 

Lisa Diedrich (Professor of WGSS)

Budapest Concert Part VIII: Keith Jarrett

Music has been so important to me during the pandemic. I have really loved that many musicians performed live on social media from their homes to entertain us—a gift that emerged out of isolation and fear. The person I have listened to the most is Keith Jarrett. I love the melancholic virtuosity of his live performances. We also learned this year that because of health issues caused by a stroke in 2018, he may not be able to perform live again. So, this recording of a concert in Budapest released in October 2020 is bittersweet.

 

Joy-Louise Gape (History/WGSS (Class of ’21))

I Won’t Give Up: Jason Mraz

This song has been in my playlist for years because of how powerful it is. This song is a very strong reminder about how important it is to never give up and always look up as well as look to those around you. It also reminds you how necessary it is to adapt to the surrounding circumstances and how much stronger that can make you. Most importantly, this song reminds the listener that you are worth it. Given the times that we all have been through recently, I think that this a powerful reminder about our inherent worth and strength as well as the power we can draw from those around us.

 

Victoria Hesford (Associate Professor of WGSS)

Honey: Robyn (on Later…with Jools Holland)

I chose this song because, first of all, it’s just a great pop song. But I also chose it because Robyn explained in an interview that she wanted to create a song that didn’t end. So, it seemed a fitting song for the pandemic. You really don’t want this song to end, unlike the pandemic, which has already gone on too long.

 

Nicole Vion (English/Studio Art/WGSS (Class of ’22))

Salt in the Wound: boygenius

Boygenius is a collaboration of the artists Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus (I love this album so much). This live performance is one of my personal favorite versions of the song:

 

It’s Okay to Cry: SOPHIE

The artist SOPHIE was a trans woman who recently tragically died and the loss of SOPHIE has impacted a lot of people, especially in the LGBTQ+ community. This is SOPHIE’s song titled “It’s Okay To Cry” and the visual that went along with the track:

 

A Pearl: Mitski

Mitski’s lyricism really solidifies her as one of my favorite artists, and this song definitely falls under that category.

 

Jackie Donnelly (WGSS ATC & GPC)

Coldplay: Everyday Life (Live in Jordan)

Jackie added to the playlist on Twitter with this comment: I’m late to this party, but I’m posting a live album here by Coldplay performed at a citadel in Jordan at sunrise & sunset that I stumbled upon. I gravitate back to it over and over to listen & watch. Beautiful guest vocals, instrumentals, & views. [Editors note: No one is late to this party!]

Breonna Taylor and Tony McDade: Why I Have Become Indebted to My WGSS Education

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This post is from Elizabeth Varghese, who graduated in May with BA in WGSS and a BS in Biology. Elizabeth received a Provost’s Award for Academic Excellence and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She will be an MD/MPH candidate at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook in the fall.

I started my Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) degree by accident. I got locked out of a course I needed for my then journalism minor, and stumbled upon Professor Tiso’s WST 102 class in the middle of a panicked and groggy 8:01 a.m. search for anything that would fulfill a general education requirement. Relieved to have simply found a class that seemed easy to balance on top of what would eventually prove to be a difficult semester for pre-meds, I didn’t think much of an introductory WGSS course.

At the time, I also never saw science as anything less than objective. Like most people, I took everything in textbooks and journals at face-value, because why wouldn’t I? We all know how difficult it is to get something published, and textbooks are usually the pedestal on which our professors build their classes – of course these authors are assumed to be accurate.

In one of my first WST 102 classes three years ago, I began to realize how wrong I was. Our most fundamental middle school biology classes include a unit on reproduction—the sperm and the egg. Upon further analysis of the language used in different textbooks, the contrast in how the male reproductive system was described vs. the female was stunning. The production of a million sperm cells a day is apparently astonishing, while ovulation is a slow, degenerative process. The seminiferous tubules span a remarkable one-third of a mile when uncoiled, and menstruation is just the wasting away of the endometrium.[1] Fast forward to senior year, and I found myself completing my senior thesis on forced sterilization in the minority Roma population of Czechoslovakia—an appalling practice that the government portrayed as for the good of public health.

The deceptively objective world of science is fully shaped by the perspectives of those who are privileged enough to communicate it. I turned to medicine as a career when I was too young and terrified and likely hated myself a little too much to want to do anything else. WST 102 was the first step in realizing the importance of my voice in the field, as well as the privilege of being able to lift up others.

I began writing this as a small way to thank the incredible professors of Stony Brook University’s WGSS department for their profound impact on my undergraduate career. In light of the horrific deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and particularly Breonna Taylor and Tony McDade, it has become something more.

Education is paramount in dismantling anti-blackness, understanding the histories and oppression of different minorities, and achieving racial justice. WGSS programs such as Stony Brook’s have been providing spaces to do just that for years. Throughout college, I have learned from professors who actively de-center whiteness from their curriculums, teach history and theory from the lens of different sexualities, and uplift the disabled. They have been doing the work that is now so incredibly essential for this country to move forward (and at a state university, no less).

Breonna Taylor and Tony McDade are largely missing from the national outrage and conversations around black lives, but I can assure you that they are not missing in the outrage and conversations of my professors and classmates. They are not missing because we discuss the race, gender, and sexuality hierarchy that exists and try to combat it. They are not missing because we study Audre Lorde and Patricia Hill Collins and learn how to use black feminist thought to think critically about the world. But it is far from enough.

WGSS programs, as well as other ethnic studies programs, have long had reputations of being “snowflake” and expendable in undergraduate education. If the recent onslaught of pleas to educate those around us to literally stop black lives from being murdered has proved anything, it is the exact opposite. Students of these programs are now and always have been in unique positions to propel necessary radical change in governance and thought, and perhaps more tangibly, to ensure that people such as Breonna Taylor and Tony McDade are never forgotten and see justice.

I shouldn’t have started my WGSS journey by accident. I should have known full well then as I do now the necessity and impact of a course such as WST 102. The histories, theories, and lessons learned in WGSS and ethnic studies programs will continue to pervade every sphere of our existence until true change is made. The immense anger and pain emerging now is a sign that that fact has not been understood. Universities across the country now have the responsibility of making sure that it is.

 

[1] Emily Martin. “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male- Female Roles.” Signs 16, no. 3 (1991): 485–501.

 

Congratulations, WGSS 2020 Graduates: We are so proud of you!

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Professor Nancy Hiemstra congratulates the WGSS 2020 graduates on their achievement and reads from Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.

Congrats WST Majors & Minor! Woohoo!

You are a truly amazing group of students, for how hard you have worked, challenges that you have faced, and all that you have accomplished. Thank you for diving into your courses in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and giving so much of yourselves to your studies. Thank you for the knowledge, ideas, and brilliant questions you have shared in class. While it is really disappointing that we are not able to celebrate your graduation together in person right now, don’t let that lessen your feelings of pride for all you have done, joy that you’re finally at the finish line, or excitement and curiosity about the future. One thing that I think the present moment has made blatantly clear is how incredibly important YOU are to our collective future. As the unequal impacts of this pandemic become more and more apparent, the critical theories, concepts, and tools you have developed through your Women’s and Gender Studies majors and minors are desperately needed now more than ever. As you carve out your path going forward, as you create your own adventures, know that you have within you the ability to really see how power works, and to speak truth to power. We are so proud of you. Please stay in touch, we will be thinking of you.

Good luck! 

Vivien Hartog Graduate Student Teaching Award: Annu Daftuar, Val Moyer, & Melis Umut

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We are very pleased to announce the 2020 recipients of the Vivien Hartog Graduate Student Teaching Award: Annu Daftuar, Val Moyer, and Melis Umut.

Congratulations to Annu, Val, and Melis! 

First, we want to tell you a bit about this award and Vivien Hartog. Then, the advisors of the three graduate students will present this year’s winners.

This award is named in honor of Vivien Hartog, a Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies graduate certificate student who died before she could complete her Ph.D. in Sociology. It goes to the graduate student instructor we think most exemplifies Vivien’s lifelong commitments to activism, teaching, and learning. Here’s a description of Vivien written by her family that captures something of the kind of person we are honoring with this award:

“In Vivien Hartog’s 55 years, she went through more identities than most could imagine. An incomplete list would include: rebellious daughter; actress in training; young mother, wife (3 times); scientologist; scourge of scientology; business woman; domestic help in a hotel; undergraduate; radical feminist and lesbian; graduate student in sociology and women’s studies. At every point she both threw herself into her new identity and at the same time, remained herself. And one way that she always remained herself was in her commitment to social justice and to human rights. She remade herself regularly, but she always understood her remaking as struggles on a larger stage. Particularly in her last decade, she saw her life through the lens of an international women’s movement.”

Professor Nancy Hiemstra on Annu Daftuar: 

I am thrilled to present the Vivien Hartog Graduate Student Teaching Award to Annu Daftuar, who truly exemplifies Vivien Hartog’s lifelong commitments to social justice, activism, teaching, and learning.

Since beginning her doctoral studies in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in 2016, Annu has excelled at teaching a range of courses, first as a Teaching Assistant and now as a solo instructor. As a woman of color originally from the Global South, she serves as an inspiring role model and mentor to all of her students. She consistently designs and teaches her courses with great care and thought, endeavoring to create a feminist classroom space, and aiming to make students’ learning experience different, accessible, and transformative. In addition to introductory courses, Annu has drawn on her own expertise and interests to provide outstanding learning experiences for her students. For example, in “The Global Politics of Reproduction,” Annu built on her dissertation research on the transnational surrogacy industry in India. Looking through student evaluation comments for this class, I was impressed by the rave reviews, including this one: “This has been one of my favorite courses at Stony Brook…Annu is such a badass professor and it was an honor to be her student.”

Now it is my pleasure to present the honor of this award to Annu. Congratulations!

Professor Lisa Diedrich on Val Moyer:

I am delighted to tell you about Valerie Moyer, one of the winners of the 2020 Vivien Hartog Graduate Student Teaching Award. Like Vivien Hartog, Val’s research, teaching, and on- and off-campus activism start from a commitment to social justice and inclusion. 

Val’s dissertation, “Muscularity, Hormones, and Other ‘Threats’ to Women’s Sports,” is timely and important. Using track and field as a case study, she investigates the question: What is a “woman athlete”? She discusses the many processes of becoming a woman athlete, in terms of building physical capacity at the micro-level of muscles and molecules through training and fitness, as well as at the macro-level through social and political advocacy and activism to challenge assumptions about femininity and to open up opportunities for women and girls to participate and compete in sports across the world. Her work shows a generalized anxiety about the possibility of “unfair advantage” that circulates around women athletes. This anxiety also operates across multiple scales—at the level of individual bodies, between bodies in competition, and between nations in international sporting organizations and competitions. In “Threatening the Gender Hierarchy in Women’s Sport,” a blog post for Nursing Clio, Val discusses recent requirements that Caster Semenya suppress her testosterone levels in order to allow her to continue to run competitively, and she argues that these are part of a longer history of experiments in sex testing in sports that have sought to exclude some women, especially black and brown women, from competing. She points out the important historical fact “that women with higher testosterone have been a part of women’s sports all along.”

Val has excelled at Stony Brook not only academically but also as a teacher and departmental and campus leader. She has received stellar reviews as a teaching assistant and instructor for a variety of classes, including Histories of Feminism, Intermediate Writing, and Unfair Advantage: The Politics of Track and Field. To use a sports metaphor (!), Val is a consummate team player. In her second year in the program, Val was chosen by her fellow graduate students to be the graduate representative in the department. By all accounts, she was a great success in this position, garnering the admiration of graduate students and faculty alike. She also served as one of the organizers of the WGSS graduate student conference “Spaces of Dissent” and as the department mobilizer for the Graduate Student Employee Union at a time when the GSEU has actively campaigned to eliminate graduate student fees. This work continues.

Congratulations, Val!

Professor Victoria Hesford on Melis Umut:

It gives me great pleasure to present the Vivien Hartog Outstanding Graduate Instructor Award to Melis Umut! Like Vivien Hartog, in whose memory this award is named, Melis has an adventurous spirit. She has travelled far—from Istanbul, Turkey, to Hungary, the UK, and the US—all in pursuit of her education in feminist media and film studies. Melis’s travels have also taken her across disciplinary borders—she has pursued graduate degrees in visual culture, cultural studies, and gender studies, and she has read widely in feminist film and media studies, psychoanalysis, disability studies, and porn studies. Melis is a true intellectual, someone who is excited by ideas and eager to learn. While working on her dissertation, “Erotic Visuality and Popular Culture in a Conservative Society: 1970s Turkish Erotic Melodramas and the Muslim Sexual Imagination,” Melis continued to sit in on graduate seminars (including most recently, Patricia Clough’s seminar on “The Political Unconscious” at NYU), and attend public lectures and talks. Before the lockdown put an end to travel and conferences, Melis was writing a paper, based on a dissertation chapter, for SCMS—the Society for Cinema and Media Studies—the premier conference in her field. Melis loves living in New York because of the cultural and intellectual experiences it offers—it is a city that appeals to her sense of adventure.

Melis’ wide-ranging intellectual curiosity also informs her teaching. She has taught classes at the introductory level for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, as well as topics classes in film and on transnational and non-normative sexualities. For her class on non-normative sexualities, Melis introduced students to intersectional analyses of sexuality and disability as well as performance art and sex work. It is through this kind of formal and conceptual experimentation that Melis presents her students with new ways to think about sex, visual culture, and gender. And I know from my observations of her teaching, that Melis loves to challenge her students by showing them difficult or provocative performance and visual art. Melis encourages her students to see things differently by introducing them to a way of looking not determined by the commodified forms of visual culture we are immersed in in our daily lives. In this sense, Melis is a classroom activist in the best tradition of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Congratulations Melis!

Well wishes from WGSS faculty to the WGSS class of 2020

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Several WGSS faculty have created celebratory messages to the WGSS class of 2020 for the #WGSSGraduation2020 blog. Here are contributions from Professors Victoria Hesford, Liz Montegary, and Francesca Spedalieri. Enjoy!

Professor Hesford reads Emily Dickinson’s poem “‘Hope’ is a thing with feathers.”

 

Professor Montegary shares some messages for the “graduated feminists!”

And Professor Spedalieri shares this contribution:

Greetings and celebrations, WGSS graduates!
 
In this particular space-time vortex we find ourselves in, I wanted to share the words of Gwendolyn Brooks — a Pulitzer Prize winner, iconic 20th-century poet, author, and teacher. [A dear friend and colleague, Dr. Elizabeth Wellman, introduced me to this quote.]
In an interview in 1973, Brooks was asked “if poems arrived to her complete.”
This is what Brooks said:
Image Description: A wide-shot photo of the Wang Center from the entrance to the Zuccaire Gallery at the Staller Center. It is a sunny day despite the cotton-candy clouds that punctuate the sky. Overlaid on the image in black type are Gwendolyn Brooks’ words. They read:
“A poem rarely comes whole and completely dressed. As a rule, it comes in bits and pieces. You get an impression of something—you feel something, you anticipate something, and you begin, feebly, to put these impressions and feelings and anticipation or rememberings into those things which seem so handleable—words.
And you flail and you falter and you shift and you shake, and finally, you come forth with the first draft. Then, if you’re myself and if you’re like many of the other poets that I know, you revise, and you revise. And often the finished product is nothing like your first draft. Sometimes it is.”
For me, Brooks’ words about poetry seem to reflect the journey of and beyond college. And, in the present moment, they also resonate loudly with hope.
So here is to you, your journeys, and those who have and will support you along the way.

Congratulations, Class of 2020!

Terry Alexander Award in WGSS: Nic Grima

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Every year an undergraduate receives the Terry Alexander Award, honoring the mother of Courtney Alexander, a Women’s Studies major who graduated in 2006. Terry was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1982, and she worked to raise awareness about the disease until her death in 2006. This award is given annually to a graduating major in Women’s and Gender Studies, who has completed the Gender, Sexuality, and Public Health track, and is interested in a career in health care and/or health advocacy.

Photo on left is of Terry Alexander and on right is Isha Joshi, winner of the Terry Alexander Award in 2019, with Courtney Alexander.

Professor Nancy Hiemstra presents the 2020 Terry Alexander Award:

This year, we are delighted to present the Terry Alexander Award to Nic Grima. Nic is graduating this spring with a BA in WST, having completed the Gender, Sexuality, and Public Health track as well as a Chemistry minor.

I had the great pleasure of having Nic as a student in two classes, and in both Nic really distinguished themself for insightful, thoughtful contributions to the class. All instructors in our department who had Nic in class had glowing remarks about them. As part of their GSPH track, Nic completed an internship with Stony Brook’s LGBTQ Services in 2017.

For the research seminar in WGSS, they wrote an excellent and really important paper entitled “Transitioning Care: Structurally Competent Trans* and Gender Nonconforming Healthcare in a University Setting.” Nic presented this work at URECA. Nic has been in communication with folks at SBU medicine about implementing some of this research into ways to improve care for transgender and gender nonconforming people at SBU. After graduation, Nic plans to pursue further education and work in the health professions, with special interest in health care for trans and gender nonconforming individuals.

Congratulations, Nic, we are proud of you!