Spring 2015 WGSS Newsletter Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies IN THIS ISSUE Signs Comes to Northeastern! Signs! Comes to NU 1 ! WGSS is thrilled to welcome the pioneering feminist Signs @ 40 2 journal Signs to Northeastern University. As of January Inaugural Editorial 3 1st, after ten years at Rutgers University under the amazing leadership of Prof. Mary Hawkeworth, WGSS Highlights from 2014 5 Program Director Suzanna Walters takes over as Editor- Events 7 in-Chief. Prof. Carla Kaplan of WGSS and English will New Faces 8 serve as Chair of the Board of Associate Editors. We Coming up in 2015 10 have assembled an impressive editorial board that includes feminist scholars from Northeastern but also Undergraduate Courses 11 draws on the rich resources of the Graduate Consortium Graduate Courses 12 in Women’s Studies (continued on page 2). GCWS Courses 13 Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies !1 Spring 2015 Signs @ 40: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2014 marked the 40th anniversary of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. The journal has contributed four decades of research, writing, and art to feminist scholarship. Topics have included film, gender theory, law, philosophy, and much more. Published articles and featured art are never restricted by geography. Instead, Signs makes a point of highlighting narratives from around the globe. From the beginning, the journal adopted the belief that “truth is never monolithic” and crafted an interdisciplinary approach to storytelling. Forty years later, Signs is the leading international journal in women’s and gender studies. Check out the retrospective website at http://signsat40.signsjournal.org. Feminist Scholarship Through the Decades Yampolsky - Mujeres Mazahua (1989) Martinez - The Traits of Both (1993) Ashevak - Women with Fish (2006) (Cont.) In welcoming Signs to Northeastern we also welcome our two Signs staff members – Miranda Outman-Kramer and Andy Mazzaschi – and our three graduate assistants, Firuzeh !Shokooh Valle (Sociology), Victoria Papa (English), and Laura Hartmann (English). Started in 1975 and published continuously since, Signs is recognized as the leading international journal in women’s and gender studies, at the forefront of new directions in feminist scholarship. Challenging the boundaries of knowledge concerning women’s and men’s lives in diverse regions of the globe, Signs publishes scholarship that raises new questions and develops innovative approaches to our understanding of the past and present. What makes feminist scholarship published in Signs distinctive is not necessarily the subject of investigation or particular methods of inquiry but the effort to cultivate alternative research practices that further feminist, queer, and antiracist goals of social !transformation. Signs publishes pathbreaking articles, review essays, comparative perspectives, and retrospectives of interdisciplinary interest addressing gender, race, culture, class, nation, and sexuality. Whether critical, theoretical, or empirical, articles published in Signs generate theories, concepts, analytical categories, and methodological innovations that enable new ways of thinking, new ways of seeing, and new ways of living. Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies !2 Spring 2015 Inaugural Editorial: Thinking and Doing Feminism It is with great pride and to actually increase print heritage of the journal. At the pleasure that I join the subscriptions but has also same time, new leadership distinguished ranks of editors deepened its feminist always provides an of Signs. Along with my commitments to intersectional opportunity for new vision and colleague Carla Kaplan, who theorizing, transnational for a reimagining of the project will serve as Chair of the breadth, and robust itself. Our cultural moment Board of Associate Editors, I interdisciplinarity. From the demands innovative strategies: am excited to begin this new Catharine Stimpson Prize for feminism is increasingly endeavor. Under Mary Outstanding Feminist stabilized in the (neoliberal) Hawkesworth’s inspired Scholarship to virtual issues academy as it also finds itself editorship and with the steady and the launch of Films for the fighting retrenchment around support of the University of Feminist Classroom, the last the world; attacks on women’s Chicago Press, Signs continues ten years at Rutgers have been bodily autonomy move to represent the best of enormously productive ones, ceaselessly ahead even as feminist scholarship and to pushing the journal in ways young feminist activists find offer a model of journal both structural and intellectual creative new strategies to resist them; gender becomes a more malleable and contested site, Any journal – and most especially a journal with but gendered power and profound commitments to social justice, sexual violence have hardly disappeared. And feminist freedom, and gender equity such as Signs – must currents now move in an ever reckon with what it means to “think and do feminism” more digital sea; how we read, how we know, how we teach, in an era of online everything, and in light of these and how we engage politically are other contradictions and challenges. being reformed by the Web, social media, and other forms of virtual communication. publishing to others. Mary’s and always substantively Any journal – and most staff and Editorial Board have engaged with the changing especially a journal with most assuredly brought the terrain of both feminist theory profound commitments to journal into the twenty-first and journal publishing. It social justice, sexual freedom, century, enhancing Signs’ remains, in our minds and and gender equity such as digital presence and reach undoubtedly in the minds of Signs – must reckon with what while at the same pushing the most feminist scholars, the it means to “think and do intellectual envelope with internationally respected feminism” in an era of online feminist scholarship of the journal in the field. everything, and in light of highest caliber from an ! these and other contradictions astoundingly diverse range of So, in sum, what’s not broke and challenges. geographical locations and doesn’t need fixing: we’ve disciplinary homes. Under the inherited a gem. Therefore, a That said, five core concerns ten years of Mary’s editorship, core component of our broadly animate our editorial Signs has not only become one editorial vision entails vision (continued on next of the few academic journals preserving the traditions and page). Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies !3 Spring 2015 First, we believe that the field of theory and queer theory, gender and sexuality, productively women’s studies must engage. substantively reckon with the ! provocations and contributions Second, we are committed to recentering attention to local and of gender and sexuality studies. transnational racial and ethnic difference, particularly as they The relationship between circulate in and through those questions of sexuality/gender theories of sexuality and theories discussed above. Feminist scholarship has always been marked of gender has a long and by encounters and emendations, the dual move of critical productive history, arguably reflexivity and analytic innovation. These debates and revisions initiated by Gayle Rubin’s have come from many locations: from women of color who classic 1984 challenged the assumptions of whiteness implicit in much article feminist theorizing, “Thinking from lesbians who Sex: Notes critiqued the for a Radical heterosexism not just Theory of the of mainstream Politics of feminist movements Sexuality.” but of feminist Since that analysis itself, from moment, the theorists and relationship activists who insisted between that “the West” not feminist be presumed the theory and automatic site of a what became privileged theoretical known as enterprise. These queer theory voices have been has been insistent and debated and analyzed in consistent, pushing feminist theory to interrogate its own lacunae journals, edited volumes, and to engage in self-reflexive rethinking of the very project of monographs, syllabi, and feminist scholarship. From this ferment were born black feminist conferences. Signs is unusually thought, radical feminism, transnational feminism, and— most well positioned to engage head pervasively perhaps— the very idea of intersectionality laid out on with the challenges of these first by legal theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. While these discourses and to model queer/ discussions have in no way disappeared, new ones have emerged, sexuality studies with a feminist and Signs must pioneer ever more multivocal strands of feminist lens. We intend to pursue this theorizing by creating increased opportunities for dialogue and exceedingly fruitful dialogue, debate. especially in thematic review Read! the full editorial at http://www.northeastern.edu/womensstudies/ essays and special issues news_events/recent_publications/signs_editorial/ devoted to the tough questions Suzanna! Walters that come up when feminist Northeastern University This editorial was previously published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 40, no. 3 (2015). Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies !4 Spring 2015 HIGHLIGHTS FROM 2014 Prof Moya Bailey’s Intro to WGSS work. She introduced this New Student Group @ NU class created a digital magazine. model of creating a product ! in a class to WMNS 1103. Queer Student Union (QSU) ! is! a group of Northeastern The Synthesis University undergraduate Students addressed topics LGBTQQIAP-identified