WGSS Graduate Colloquium & Working Group
The Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Graduate Colloquium is a venue in which Yale graduate students from a wide range of disciplines present work that engages women's studies, feminism, gender and sexuality studies, lesbian and gay studies, and queer studies. At the Colloquium, graduate students give academic talks, present syllabi, discuss pedagogy, and engage in roundtable discussions on pressing issues and questions central to the field of Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, with much lively discussion to follow.
The Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Working Group is a subsidiary of the Colloquium. The purpose of the Working Group is to foster interdisciplinary discussion about current issues in the field of women's, gender, and sexuality studies by bringing together graduate students and and faculty at Yale who are working on topics at the intersection of their discipline and WGSS. This venue aims to introduce recent work in a variety of disciplines and to strengthen our understanding of how our own work might engage with emerging debates in this field. Working Group dates are:
Fall | Spring |
| September 24 | February 4 |
| November 5 | March 4 |
| November 26 | April 15 |
All events take place at 5:30PM in William L. Harkness Hall (WLH), Room 309, 100 Wall Street, unless otherwise noted. All events are free and open to the public.
 |
Women at Home in the World: The Sexual Politics of Foreign Relations and Sentimental Diplomacy Talya Zemach-Bersin Mon, 09/10/2012 Gender, sexuality, and romance have figured prominently in the history of U.S. cultural diplomacy. Student travel schemes of the interwar period illustrate how the policing and performance of heterosexual femininity is an important vector of U.S. global power, transforming foreign relations into sentimental narratives of seduction and... |
 |
Queer Spatial Practice Susan Surface Mon, 09/10/2012 Recent theory relating to queer space has privileged formal, material, phenomenological, political and economic concerns. This presentation expands and redirects the terms of queer spatial practice to emphasize the performance of spatial production. |
 |
Uses of Masculinity in Constructing Late Medieval Holiness Marita von Weissenberg Mon, 10/08/2012 The vast majority of Christian saints reject marriage and the family in order to pursue celibacy, asceticism, and prayer. However, between 1100 and 1500, dozens of saints in Western Europe were married. Biographers of these holy men and women engaged with medieval concepts of masculinity in order to highlight sanctity. |
 |
Cold War Gay Rights: Employment Discrimination and the Depathologization of Homosexuality Aaron Potenza Mon, 10/08/2012 In the early 1960s, homophile activists came to see the “sickness theory” as foundational to federal policy. Discussing court cases, position papers, and a Pentagon meeting between top-level Defense Department officials and homophile activists, this paper explores how the fight to depathologize homosexuality was a product of the Cold War. |
 |
The Many Bodies of Anne Boleyn: Coincidence, Women’s Time, and the Photographic Image Anne Berke Mon, 11/12/2012 By reading archival photographs taken on the set of Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) alongside Julia Kristeva’s notion of “women’s time,” I seek not only to elaborate on Kristeva’s critical term, but also to argue for the evidentiary power of coincidence within a performance studies methodology. |
 |
‘An Influential Squaw’: Marriage, Community, and Power at New Helvetia Ashley Riley Sousa Mon, 11/12/2012 This excerpt from a chapter of my dissertation examines interracial marriages and relationships at the Sacramento Valley Rancho New Helvetia from 1839 to 1851. Indian wives shaped and sustained the colony their European, Native Hawaiian, and American immigrant husbands sought to build in Central California. |
 |
To Learn or to Fight: The Gender Politics of Educated Resistance in Occupied Warsaw Jadwiga Biskupska Mon, 01/28/2013 Women students in occupied Warsaw pursued their educations as a political and patriotic act after advanced study was forbidden by the Nazis. As the war progressed, many young men turned to “active” paramilitary resistance from study, “feminizing” the underground university. These gendered aspects of wartime education had diverse consequences. |
 |
Working the Body, Working the Spirit: Intersections of Work, Faith, Activism, and Sexuality Jennifer Leath Mon, 01/28/2013 This paper focuses on the intersection of sexuality with my dissertation project, that broadly addresses the co-constitutive relationship between work, faith, and activist ethics amongst Afro-Diasporic women childcare providers in Brooklyn and those who organized in solidarity with these providers during a campaign between 2005 and 2009. |
 |
‘Sup. Terr.’: Race, Sex, and the Nature of Surveillance in the Papers of Thomas Thistlewood, Jamaica, 1750-1786 Heather Vermeulen Mon, 02/18/2013 Thomas Thistlewood’s eighteenth-century Jamaica diaries reveal that he surveyed his domains through mapped sexual attacks against female slaves, “Sup. Terr.” (code for “upon the ground”), including the exact location and each slave’s “ethnicity”—executing a libidinal Linnaean project, a micro-calculus of empire in which race, sex, and (un)natural... |
 |
The Calculus of Clean: Domestic Spaces and Technological Advancement Tisha Hooks Mon, 02/18/2013 Drawing on the designs of homes, schools, and supermarkets in the post-World War II period, I consider the importance of the visible and invisible in conceptions of the modern, and the role the domestic space plays in proselytizing and advancing the “hyperbolic power” of cleanliness and control. |
 |
Up Against The Clock: The Emergence of the ‘Biological Clock’ Metaphor in America, 1975-1985 Jenna Healey Mon, 04/08/2013 The notion of a woman’s “biological clock” emerged in the late 1970s alongside growing alarm about the trend of delaying childbirth, especially among professional women. This paper will analyze the adoption of the biological clock metaphor by considering the cultural and medical context in which it first appeared. |
 |
Representational agendas of the National Organization for Women: Content, Production, Reception Christine Slaughter Mon, 04/08/2013 This talk uses the activities of N.O.W.’s Image of Women and Media Reform Committees as a case study of how marginalized identity groups attempt to change cultural representation of their group. Strategies used for changing representation include targeting images, reforming institutions of production, and re-training audience reception. |
Copyright © 2013 Yale University. All rights reserved.