Innovative New Directions: Intersectionality

In the mid-1990s, two important new courses were added to the Women’s Studies curriculum that provided students additional angles from which to engage with the intersections of race, class, and gender. Alex Deschamps first taught her Women of Color and Activism course during the 1994-1995 school year.⁴⁹ In 1996, Arlene Avakian started teaching her course, The Social Construction of Whiteness and Women. That fall, she and her students attended and presented at a conference on whiteness in New Jersey. The following spring they presented their work to the UMass community and at another conference at Wheelock College.⁵⁰ This course continued to be well-enrolled every time it was taught for the next ten years.

In the late 1990s and moving into the 21st century, Women’s Studies continued to respond to changes in the field, all the while keeping its roots firmly planted in feminist activism and maintaining its focus on women of color. The program made a commitment not only to hiring scholars of color, but hiring faculty of color whose scholarship was on women of color and race, an important distinction that has had an enormous impact on the direction of the UMass Women’s Studies curriculum and on students’ experiences. The hiring of biologist Banu Subramaniam made real Women’s Studies’ desire to bring feminist science studies, with particular emphasis on the interactions of race and gender, to the center of the program. When they were hired in the fall of 2003, sociologist Miliann Kang and historian Dayo Gore further bolstered the department’s commitment to issues of race and ethnicity and brought new interdisciplinary perspectives to the program.

⁴⁹ WOST newsletter, Fall 1994.

⁵⁰ WOST newsletter, Fall 1997, p. 6.