Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality Marks 30th Anniversary with Symposium

With an acknowledgement of the current climate, the Center will offer rigorous conversation around the present moment and the future of gender and sexuality studies.

By Sarah Steimer

After the pandemic dashed plans to celebrate its 25th anniversary, and with the uneasy state of U.S. politics, the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality will mark its 30th year with an event that explores the wide scope of the field while addressing the challenges at hand. The symposium, to be held April 9 and 10, will include a keynote address from writer, scholar, and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs, as well as panel sessions that feature scholars and practitioners. The goal of the event, organizers say, is to demonstrate the depth and richness of the field of Gender and Sexuality Studies.

“People oftentimes have a one-dimensional view of what gender and sexuality studies is,” says Tate Brazas, associate director of the Center. “This symposium will show there's a lot more to it, demonstrating why gender and sexuality studies really matter, why they are an important component of the intellectual life of any university, but particularly the University of Chicago.”

The event opens with the keynote address and 2026 Lauren Berlant Memorial Lecture delivered by Gumbs, the author of several books, most recently Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde and the award-winning Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. Their address is expected to use archival and published writing from key 20th-century Black feminist writers to provide lessons of Black feminist ecological practice that are relevant to gender and sexuality study and liberation — both within and beyond academic institutions.

Daisy Delogu, the Howard L. Willett Professor of French Literature and faculty director of the Center, notes that Gumbs’s work touches on many areas of study. Delogu says individuals from across the university have expressed their excitement about Gumbs’s address, including those in environmental studies, creative writing, and the Department of Race Diaspora and Indigeneity, to name a few.

The following day’s symposium will consist of four panels that feature scholars and practitioners, moderated by UChicago professors. The first panel, “Embodied Thought and Practice”, features Qudsiyyah Shariyf, deputy director of the Chicago Abortion Fund; Jack Schneider, assistant curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; and author Touhfat Mouhtare. Moderated by Kaneesha Parsard, assistant professor of English Language and Literature, the panelists will discuss how creative work, activism, or other embodied practices provide alternative avenues for thinking about gender and sexuality. 

The second panel, “States of the Fields”, will include Aren Z. Aizura, associate professor and chair of the Department of Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota; Durba Mitra, the Richard B. Wolf associate professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University; and Lynn M. Thomas, director of the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington. The panel, moderated by Rochona Majumdar, the George V. Bobrinskoy Professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and Cinema and Media Studies, will explore the new directions in which feminist, gender, and sexuality studies have moved since the 1990s. 

The “Urgencies and Predicaments” panel, moderated by Kristen Schilt, associate professor of sociology, will consider the material challenges facing women and LGBTQ populations, as well as attacks on education and freedom of expression, and will feature Lisa L. Moore, director of the LGBTQ Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin; Amy Reid, program director of Freedom to Learn at PEN America; and Michelle Lemelman, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and the Medical Director of TransCARE at the University of Chicago.

Lastly, “Institutionalization and Its Discontents” will include Margot Kotler, senior associate director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women; Heather K. Love, professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania; and Haylee Harrell, assistant professor of Black Studies at the University of Houston. Moderated by Cathy Cohen, the D. Gale Johnson Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and RDI, the panel will focus on the affordances and limitations of institutionalization. 

“The conversations that we were initially having about the symposium, which were before the 2024 U.S. election, were very different,” Brazas says. She explains that the events that followed, including laws, executive orders, and hostilities toward gender studies programs, refocused the symposium to address those realities.

“I don't think I've ever heard gender talked about so much in mainstream media, but often attached to the words ‘dangerous ideology’ or spoken of as either a threat or as something made up,” Delogu says. “But gender is both a dimension of the experience of every person, and an analytic.”

Delogu notes that — while the field has its outspoken critics — the symposium is not focused on doom and gloom.

“Despair is not useful,” she says. “The ‘Embodied Thought and Practice’ panel in particular allows us to imagine possible futures: What are some of the ways people are developing to carry on, to be okay, or help others be okay?”

All are welcome to attend the symposium. More information, and links to register for the keynote and panels, can be found here.