(Re)purposing, not "Rightsizing": Responding to Recent Attacks on Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies in the U.S. Academy

Abstract

Abstract: No one wants to be "rightsized," particularly not feminists, and especially not feminists in gender, women's, and sexuality studies programs and departments (GWSS). Yet that's one of the multiple threats we are now facing, and it is both internal and external. These attacks on GWSS and our cousins are not new, but both the university administrators and the politicos are taking advantage of the current pandemonium to ramp up their ferocity. As a GWSS director of one of the many programs under threat, what I offer is not a right-eous-resistance-to-right-sizing manifesto but a tentative gesture at possible GWSS (re)purposings. I put these rightsizing threats in context of pandemic-inspired calls for radical transformation rather than returns to normalcy. This is not a nostalgic plea for saving something familiar (perhaps a proper object called GWSS, perhaps ourselves as "what a feminist looks like"), nor the staging of a rescue mission into enemy territory (as if we weren't also complicit and always already on stolen land in the imperial university). Instead, I stretch toward an irreverent killjoy stance while exploring queer and trans joy and futurity, kin-making/revealing, and (re)purposing/redistribution as frameworks that open possibilities for other futures.