States of The Field: Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies 50th Anniversary Symposium

States of the Field is a symposium commemorating the 50th Anniversary of UMass Amherst’s Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Department. First established in 1974 as a three-year pilot program in Women’s Studies, the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at UMass Amherst remains committed to interdisciplinary scholarship across the field’s intersections. While programs such as the one at UMass Amherst have been solidly, albeit unevenly, institutionalized within the U.S. university, it is difficult to not perceive the field as having returned to temporary status. Such a perception derives from the reality that we—collectively as scholars, as workers, as people—are facing intensifying racialized and gendered scrutinym leading to heightened surveillance, blatant backlash directed at marginalized communities, devaluing from fully corporatized universities, rising global authoritarianism, and attempts to obscure potential futures offered by the vast contributions emerging from Women’s Studies and related interdisciplines. In consideration of this context and our present historical moment, the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at UMass Amherst invites you to join us in a shared project of collaborative discourse on danger and possibility. To celebrate 50+ years of WGSS at this institution, we offer an organized space to discuss the overlapping nodes of feminist, queer, and trans thought. We invite you to join us for this two-day conference as we aspire to take stock of where we are; story and re-story how we got here; discuss our many tasks as we face the present.