ISD13: Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Community Collective

Collaborative Goals

The goal of this interdisciplinary group is to combine the resources and expertise of its members to rethink the intersections between feminist theory, queer theory, transgender studies, and transnational feminisms in the Central New York area.

Feminist theory, queer theory and new intersectional, transnational and transgender studies are ever evolving. This group will collaborate on research, exchange important ideas as they relate to shifts in their fields, share campus programming, and create a more inclusive feminist space in a region fraught with historic legacies of exclusion.

This group will share resources through regular meetings as a reading group. But this collective is also able to work through feminist praxis in how we address scholarship. Feminist praxis asks us to interrogate privilege and hierarchies that include but are not limited to patriarchy, heteronormativity, and cisnormativity as they intersect with ableism, racism, colonialism, and capitalism. This collective will discuss strategies for addressing these structures of power in our political environment, at our academic institutions and in our own ideologies, practices, and politics.

Our group intends to explore the following questions:

• How might thinking across the CNY region strengthen an inclusive feminist community?
• How can we address hierarchies and privilege within the academy that are sometimes used to lessen the visibility, impact, and presence of gender and sexuality studies programs/departments? And how can feminist faculty collaborate to resist these inequities and support and grow our programs?
• How can we envision a feminist community in CNY, a region that has been fraught with historical and racial tensions? Can we begin a new chapter for Seneca Falls, CNY and this greater area through this new collective?