Critical Gender & Sexuality Studies Reading Group
The Critical Gender and Sexuality Studies Reading Group is an interdisciplinary and intergenerational space where faculty working on questions of gender and sexuality from across the college come together to discuss recently published scholarship and literature. Created by Dr. Nadia Guessous, Department Chair and Associate Professor of Feminist & Gender Studies, in collaboration with Dr. Tip Ragan, Professor of History, the Critical Gender and Sexuality Studies Reading Group is one major way we have sought to contribute to the intellectual life of the department and feminist and gender studies on campus.Since its inaugural meeting in the summer of 2016, and thanks to generous funding from Feminist & Gender Studies and the Dean of the Faculty, the group has met to discuss a book or a set of book chapters over lunch mostly every block.
Some of the books we have read so far include:
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Jennifer Nash’s Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (Duke University Press, 2019).
- Lilia Soto’s Girlhood in the Borderlands: Mexican Teens Caught in the Crossroads of Migration (NYU Press, 2018).
- Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Duke University Press, 2006).
- Mimi Thi Nguyen’s The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Duke University Press, 2012).
- Amber Jamilla Musser’s Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018).
- C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
- Joan Scott’s Sex and Secularism (Princeton University Press, 2018).
- Jennifer Terry’s Attachments to War: Biomedical Logics and Violence in Twenty-First-Century America (Duke University Press, 2017).
- Emily Hobson’s Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left (University of California Press, 2016).
- Nicole Seymour’s Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination (University of Illinois Press, 2013).
- Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015).
- Eli Clare’s Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (Duke University Press, 2017)
- Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life (Duke University Press, 2017).
- Lal Zimman, Jenny Davis, and Joshua Raclaw’s Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender and Sexuality (Oxford University Press, 2014).
- Helen King’s The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence (Routledge, 2013).
- Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay’s Vulnerability in Resistance (Duke University Press, 2016).
- Alison Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip (Indiana University Press, 2013).
- Dean Spade’s Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law (Duke University Press, 2015).
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Saleem Haddad’s Guapa (Other Press, 2016).
Convened by Dr. Guessous, the group has consisted of about 15 regular members from diverse fields, including Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, Religion, Southwest Studies, Film and New Media, Theater/Dance, Spanish and Portuguese, and English, allowing us to strengthen our intellectual ties with colleagues across the college and to contribute to our intellectual growth as faculty interested in the interdisciplinary study of gender and sexuality.
The reading group is currently on pause but will be resuming soon. Please contact Professor Guessous at nguessous@coloradocollege.edu if you are interested in joining the group.