Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

01/18/2022

We've undergraduate and graduate student awards, including the Thompson, Smalley, and Ferber! Get financial support for your projects and research! Apply, apply!

01/18/2022

We extended the application deadline to February 11! See the ad here and please circulate! https://go.illinois.edu/GWSTransStudiesPostdoc

11/24/2021

The Department of Gender and Women’s Studies (GWS) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign invites applications for a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate appointment in transgender studies for the 2022-2023 academic year (August 2022–May 2023). This is a one-year appointment with a start date of August 16, 2022, eligible for renewal for a second year. The research associate’s appointment provides a salary, a close working relationship with faculty in GWS and related departments, and assistance in furthering the associate’s development as a productive scholar. The research associate will give a public presentation on their research project and each year will teach one of the department’s regularly offered undergraduate courses. Research subfields could include, but are not limited to, the following: Black feminisms and q***r critique; global migration and refugee studies; health, technology, and/or environmental studies; settler colonial studies; or indigenous studies, including occupation and resistance in the Global South.

The Department of Gender and Women’s Studies (GWS) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign invites applications for a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate appointment in transgender studies for the 2022-2023 academic year (August 2022–May 2023). This is a one-year appointment w...

09/12/2021

Dress codes for whom?

08/21/2021

Check out our Spring/Fall 2021 newsletter!

https://gws.illinois.edu/system/files/2021-08/GWS%20NEWS%20SP%3AFA%202021.pdf

05/03/2021

Come join us for our End of Year Gathering! Register at: https://go.illinois.edu/GWS_Party_May6 We hope to see you there!

04/21/2021

Prof. Yomaira Figueroa-Vasquez is giving a talk next week as part of our Black Feminist Theory Lecture Series!

APRIL 28, WEDNESDAY, 2:30-4 PM
Register on Zoom: https://go.illinois.edu/GWSYomairaFigueroaVasquez

(We know it's spelled wrong on the flyer, both will work!)

Decolonial Feminisms, Destierro, and Afro-Atlantic Diasporas

Mapping literature from Spanish-speaking sub-Saharan African and Afro-Latinx Caribbean diasporas, Decolonizing Diasporas argues that the works of diasporic writers and artists from Equatorial Guinea, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba offer new worldviews that unsettle and dismantle the logics of colonial modernity. With Black and women of color feminisms, feminist philosophy, and decolonial theory as frameworks, this talk will examine how Afro-Latinx and Afro- Hispanic diasporic artists reveal thematic, conceptual, and liberatory tools these artists offer when read in relation to one another.

Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez is an Afro-Puerto Rican writer, teacher, and organizer from Hoboken, NJ. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and her B.A. in English, Puerto Rican and Hispanic Caribbean Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is Associate Professor of Afro-Diaspora Studies at Michigan State University and the author of Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern, 2020). Her published work can be found in Hypatia, Decolonization, CENTRO, Small Axe, Frontiers, Hispanofilia, Post 45 Contemporaries, and SX Salon. She is a founder of the MSU Womxn of Color Initiative, , and Electric Marronage.

04/21/2021

Come check out the great classes we are offering this summer!!!

04/08/2021

Current GWS senior, Taylor Mazique, and GWS Academic Program Coordinator, Tasha Robles, will answer all your questions about our major in GWS and minors in GWS and Q***r Studies. There will also be a private Q&A session with Taylor too, to get the inside scoop on being a GWS student. April 13 @ 5 PM via Zooooom: https://bit.ly/31RGJFK

03/26/2021

If you want to show solidarity with Asian and Asian American people in our community and nation, here are three ways to do that in the next week: A local vigil for the people lost in Atlanta and for the…...

03/18/2021

Here is the joint statement of Gender and Women's Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign:

With heavy hearts, the Departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies send strength and love to the eight victims, including six Asian women, murdered at three massage parlors and spas outside Atlanta, Georgia, and to their loved ones near and far. We also send the same to all Asians and Asian Americans who have experienced gendered racial violence and racialized s*xual violence, and who might be feeling targeted, scared, sad, and angry, for their elders, friends, families, communities, and themselves.

The recent rise in anti-Asian violence against all ages and genders in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic has a deep-seated history in U.S. culture, white supremacy, and harmful stereotypes of Asian migrants as carriers of disease and contagion. The former president fueled this hatred by repeatedly calling the coronavirus the “China virus,” and “kung flu,” and his words are echoed by millions of Americans even as reported anti-Asian violence rose 150% in 2020. But this latest incident of violence demands that we account for the specific vulnerabilities of Asian migrants who are targeted while working at massage parlors and spas, Asian migrants who are often poor and sometimes undocumented, Asian migrants who are subject to s*xualized violence whether or not they trade s*x because of an enduring animus toward s*x workers, Asian women, and immigrants. After all, it is the fantasized figure of the migrant Asian s*x worker who is the foundation of U.S. anti-immigration law. The first immigration restriction legislation, the Page Act of 1875, prohibited the migration of all Chinese women, described as “lewd” and “immoral,” on the assumption that all Chinese women engaged in s*x work. A century of U.S. military operations in Asia and the Pacific oversaw the expansion of s*x trades around bases, and reinforced the non-accountability for U.S. soldiers’ racialized s*xual violence toward all Asian women, from Okinawa to Saigon to Manila. Asian and Asian immigrant women have been particularly vulnerable to multiple forms of violence within these longer histories of U.S. militarism and law.

For this reason, we caution that the answer to anti-Asian violence is not more policing. (Indeed, a Georgia sheriff official sympathetically said at a press briefing that the man accused of killing six Asian women and two others at spas had a “bad day.”) As the Page Act of 1875 illustrates so well, the criminalization of s*x work is central to the criminalization of migrant movements. Anti-s*x trafficking measures already make migrants, whether or not they trade s*x, vulnerable to all sorts of violence –from the murders in Atlanta to the everyday stigma and harassment massage workers face daily— while also facilitating the militarization of the police and the authorization of other legal and extralegal agencies (such as ICE and also non-profit anti-trafficking organizations) with police powers. Anti-s*x trafficking measures, which are also anti-immigration measures, do nothing to address structural impoverishment or labor abuses, and instead criminalize the movements of those who perform labor deemed illicit or unlawful. Increased policing would therefore only result in more racial profiling and surveillance, arrests, deportations, and other forms of racialized and gendered violence against Asian women, migrants, s*x workers, massage workers, and trafficking survivors.

We mourn the lives of those so senselessly and brutally taken by anti-Asian violence. We also call for the decriminalization of migration, and for labor rights for all workers, in order to protect Asian women and femmes and bring about migrant and racial justice. You can learn more about some of these movements from Butterfly (Asian and Migrant S*x Workers Support Network) and Red Canary Song, among other organizations working to decriminalize, decarcerate, and destigmatize migrants and anyone criminalized for their labor and survival.

03/18/2021

GWS/AAS Solidarity Hours tonight: https://go.illinois.edu/SolidarityHours