The Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Program has a new name and new faculty. Staff and faculty gather for their first meeting of the academic year.
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“You can’t just study women in isolation—race, class, and sexuality impact all our lives,” says Arlene Avakian ’75G, ’85EdD, professor and program director for Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies. The program at UMass Amherst recently changed its name from Women’s Studies to reflect that reality.
Celebrating its 35th anniversary, the program is one of the nation’s oldest and remains in the forefront of the field, which has grown vastly more interdisciplinary and now, says Avakian, “studies women and gender through a web of social formations, including gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. The breadth of scholarship has expanded tremendously,” she adds. “When we started, there were perhaps 20 books for professors to choose from; now there are thousands.”
As the field broadened and deepened, the UMass Amherst women’s studies curriculum was redesigned, a graduate certificate program added, more faculty hired, the Five Colleges Women’s Studies Research Center established, and, in a “brava” moment, the introductory women’s studies class became a General Education course, filled with 300 students each semester.
The program’s reputation is strong: An external academic review team called it “distinguished for its diverse faculty” with outstanding curriculum integration “that is sought in many programs throughout the country but rarely achieved at the level we saw here.”
This prominence attracts faculty whose work redefines their fields. Associate Professor Banu Subramaniam, for example, is trained as a biologist and concentrates on feminist science studies, such as the politics of cloning. Assistant Professor Dayo Gore focuses on little-known radical African American women of the 1940s and 50s; her work provides a new perspective on the civil rights movement. Assistant Professor Miliann Kang will soon publish a cutting-edge book on interactions among immigrant Korean nail salon workers and their racially diverse customers.
This semester, two new faculty, one focusing on feminist science studies, the other an anthropologist concentrating on gender and sexuality, joined the collegial group with much fanfare. “Women’s studies now operates at the intersection of gender and science,” says Professor Alexandrina Dechamps ’88G, ’96EdD. “This is where the future is.”