The GWSS Newsletter from The University of Iowa 2021/22

Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies

2021-2022 newsLetter

A Note from the Chair

Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies is perhaps the most diverse department in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Our faculty are jointly appointed in disciplines across the college in the arts, humanities and social and natural sciences and have a wide range of intersectional identities. We also have affiliate faculty in the Center for Teaching, The Women’s Resource and Action Center and the LGBTQ clinic at The University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics. The past few years have presented several challenges related to transitions at our university and the world-wide pandemic. Our faculty, staff and students have risen to these challenges balancing personal and collective concerns and burdens with their ongoing contributions to the field of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies.

Our faculty and staff have demonstrated not only a commitment to intersectional feminist principles of community and care, but also to social justice and thoughtful pedagogy, praxis, and research. Their resilience and imagination are reflected in their scholarship and their dedication to teaching and learning. From 2019 to 2022 faculty published 9 books and 31 chapters and articles. In the fall of 2021 we taught 1650 credit hours to graduates and undergraduates in the College of Liberal Arts an Sciences. Our graduate students and faculty pursue meaningful interdisciplinary research grounded in theories, methods and praxis that centers anti-oppression, anti-racism, intersectionality, feminist and queer goals related to social justice and transformation. We welcomed Allison Wanger as our new academic advisor and Anna Bostwick Flaming as an affiliate faculty member. As the chair it is an honor to support and serve such an amazing department.

In the coming year we will continue to demonstrate compassion, creativity, and community through our teaching, research and service. We need all of these skills to continue to address the complicated problems we face in the current social, cultural, and political moment. I hope you enjoy this newsletter and find inspiration in the work of our faculty, staff, and students.

-Rachel Marie-Crane Williams, Ph.D. DEO of GWSS

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Professor Hyaeweol Choi Stanley Family and Korea Foundation Chair Professor of Korean Studies Director, Korean Studies Research Network (KoRN)

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Hyaeweol Choi is a specialist in Korean/East Asian gender history. Her research interests range from gender and modernity, colonialism and nationalism, to food and body. Her latest book, Gender Politics at Home and Abroad: Protestant Modernity in Colonial-Era Korea (Cambridge University Press, 2020), explores the transnational dynamics that shaped the lives of Korean women under colonial rule. A reviewer described it as “a truly path-breaking work.” She has been playing a leadership role in Korean/Asian studies and gender studies. She is the Chair of the Program Committee for the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. She served as the President of the Korean Studies Association of Australasia.

Since joining the faculty at UI in 2018, she has launched the “Korean Studies Research Network (KoRN),” an exciting and innovative intellectual platform.

Funded by the Korea Foundation and UI International Programs, KoRN aims to present new, cutting-edge research studies on Korea-related topics and provide mentoring to the younger generation of scholars. As the founding director of KoRN, Hyaeweol hopes to facilitate collaborative and interdisciplinary research among scholars and students at the University of Iowa and other colleges and universities throughout the Midwest by offering regular seminars, a speaker series, and workshops.

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Professor Kristy Nabhan-Warren Professor and V.O. And Elizabeth Kahl Figge Chair, Catholic Studies Interim Departmental Executive Officer: Division of Interdisciplinary Programs.

Acting Departmental Executive Officer: Department of Rhetoric

As an ethnographer of religion, Professor Nabhan-Warren has always looked for compelling stories. In over six years of fieldwork in rural Iowa she discovered that refugees from all over the world come to work and live and where particular industries like meatpacking attract women and men from Central America’s Northern Triangle, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burma, Somalia, Vietnam, and many other places. It is a place where many hold deeply held religious beliefs and values that they bring to work with them in embodied and existential ways.

In Meatpacking in America, her latest book published by University of North Carolina Press she seeks to understand and convey people’s practices and beliefs and to see how they live them out in the everyday in what scholars of religion call a “lived religion” approach. Professor Nabhan-Warren turned her attention specifically to places of work where she could see the unfolding of religious expression and the “work” of religion. She focused on how religion works in people’s everyday lives and how their faith makes it possible for them to survive and even thrive in difficult situations. For many white Iowans and refugees alike---it is a deep and abiding faith that keeps everything together, and that makes it possible to keep going. Meatpacking America takes the reader into the homes, cafes, meatpacking plants, and farms of contemporary Iowa, and showcases people and their experiences and stories in a way that is far more complex and interesting than we see on the nighttime news and on social media. She will share her book and research in several venues in 2022 including The University of New Mexico, The University of Wisconsin, and the Valene L. Smith Museum of Anthropology at California State University.

Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies

David Gooblar is in the early stages of working on his next book, on the ways that changing university teaching practices can lead to more equitable student outcomes. His research so far, on classroom interventions that have led to smaller achievement gaps, suggests that investment in college teaching—in educating and supporting professors—would go a long way toward helping American higher education become a better, fairer system for all students. In the spring he will teach Higher Education and Social Justice as well as classes in English.

Assistant Professor David Gooblar

Assistant Professor Christopher-Rasheem McMillan is a performance-related artist and scholar. He has a joint appointment between Dance and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. McMillan received his BA from Hampshire College, his MFA in Experimental Choreography from the Laban Conservatoire, London, and his PhD in Theology and Religious Studies from King’s College, London. He was a Five College Fellow and the recipient of the McGregor-Girand Dissertation Fellowship. In 2021-2022 McMillan is a Fellow of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. He is also a resident fellow at NYC Center for Ballet in the Arts where he has been working on his book, Performance Criticism: Scripture, Sex and the Sacred, which questions how beliefs function through the performative. He is also choreographing a new dance work titled “Sacred.” McMillan seeks to understand both the meaning of the religious body in performance and the arrangements of the religious bodies in space as central parts of both lived experience and enactments of spiritual practices. In the Spring he will teach Theories of Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies as well as classes in Dance.

Assistant Professor Christopher-Rasheem McMillan

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Assistant Professor E. Cram

E Cram is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa.

Their expertise includes queer ecologies, queer theory, settler colonialisms, environmental cultural studies, rhetorical criticism and publicly engaged collaborative scholarship. They are an Associate Editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Queer Studies & Communication.

In their first book, Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, Energy and the Making of the North American West (University of California Press, 2022), Cram examines sexuality as a discernible force in environmental transformation. Re-reading archives of and public encounters with sites of settler colonialism and state violence throughout the North American West, Cram traces networks of capacity building that enabled both the production of bodily vitality and the exhaustion of racialized populations. Written for scholars in queer studies and the environmental/energy humanities, this book offers a grounded account of the importance of racialized sexualities in understanding the legacies of violence in making environments and energy cultures.

In 2022, Assistant Professor Cram will work on a variety of new projects engaging disability and environment, deepening their attention to sexuality, land, and energy. These include a project on the past and present restoration of the Johnson County Historic Poor Farm, and co-authored projects on disability in environmental communication.

Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies

Associate Professor Meena Khandelwal In 2022 Associate Professor Khandelwal will braid the disparate threads of her work on biomass-fueled cook stoves, commonly used throughout rural India and other Global South countries, together into a coherent set of chapters for her forthcoming book,

Cookstove Chronicles: Feminist Fieldnotes on a Subaltern Technology in India. The hand-crafted mud

stove (called chulha in Hindi) is a feminine technology, not a branded appliance. It is demonized by health and environmental experts for its role in creating indoor air pollution and associated sickness, harming forests and contributing to global warming, and reducing opportunities for women who spend much of their time collecting fuelwood. She argues that technology fixes such as improved stoves, with their claims to be ‘clean’ or ‘efficient’, fail because they arise from a narrow approach to complex social problems that are as much political and social as they are technological.

Women are not categorically opposed to new technologies that improve their lives, for they enthusiastically embrace mobile phones and solar flashlights.

She argues that non-literate women are technological innovators, though their knowledge and expertise goes unrecognized by engineers. They value their autonomy in being able to build and repair their own stoves from materials found in the immediate environment and to produce the fuel needed for daily cooking without need for money or help from their male kin or the government. The traditional, hand-crafted mud chulha is thus both the villain and the hero of her research on technological change in rural Rajasthan, India.

Over the past year, Assistant Professor Brady G’sell has completed a draft of her first book that details South African’s women’s efforts to garner resources to support their children in a context of high unemployment and infrequent marriage. The issues covered in the book captured global attention during the widespread riots and political unrest in South Africa in July 2021, propelling G’Sell to urgently publish her work so as to contribute to policy decisions that affect the well-being of mothers. G’sell has workshopped the manuscript through The Obermann Center for Advanced Studies competitive Book Ends Program. In addition, she will be contributing to a conference panel and a teaching volume on “Toxic Relations” or the dark side of kinship.

Assistant Professor Brady G’Sell

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Associate Professor Naomi Greyser, Director of Graduate Studies

Naomi Greyser is associate professor of English, American studies and gender, women’s & sexuality studies as well as executive director of POROI, Iowa’s Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry.

Greyser also works as head writing coach at NCFDD, where she supports especially underrepresented faculty with their writing and research and work-life balance. Greyser is at work on two books, both of which take a social justice approach to creativity and the emotional life of inquiry. Blocked: Writing, Race and Gender at the University maps writer’s block as an obstruction of marginalized knowledge intimately built into the U.S. university. Greyser charts unjust distributions of block and flow in university design, higher education policy and the felt experience of writing. Blocked joins recent scholarship on academia’s intimate, constitutive relationships with U.S. colonialism, racism, capitalism, ableism, homophobia and misogyny (Chatterjee and Maira 2014, Dolmage 2017, Doyle 2015, Ferguson 2017, Myerhoff 2019, Wilder 2013). Bringing affect studies together with disability studies and intersectional, decolonial American studies, Greyser treats academic inquiry as embodied and disciplined, and selectively debilitating and enlivening. The author takes grounds seriously as land, bounded property and rhetorical conditions for knowledge, ultimately resituating academic writing not as block (or flow), but rather as an overdetermined, lived encounter with the university’s structure and history.

Like a creative lab, idea-kitchen or workshop in book form, Un/Blocked: How Academics Write lays out tools, intellectual ingredients, practices and springboards for writers to work and play with. Drawing on over a decade of working closely with academic writers across disciplines, the author’s evidence-based approaches are designed to complement researchers’ expertise in their own fields.

Un/blocked acknowledges that blocks are not only common, but also built into inquiry itself.

Greyser couples her focus on practice with context on the powerful (and often overlooked) place of race, gender, class and colonization in the history of the university and its dominant forms of inquiry. Fascinating, useful and generative in spirit, Un/Blocked delves into the whys and wherefore of inquiry’s unwritten yet powerful rules – and lays out how researchers can bend and artfully break them.

In 2021 Assistant Professor Murillo co-authored a piece published with her colleague and collaborator Associate Professor Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz and had an essay entitled “Espanta Cigüeñas: Abortion in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands before Roe v. Wade” accepted for publication in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. On the heels of completing this research and having work published, she was also awarded the prestigious American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) fellowship for academic year 2021-2022.

During this fellowship, she will complete a full draft of her first manuscript, Fighting for Con-

trol: Reproductive Care, Race and Power in the Borderlands. This book examines the history of Assistant Professor Lina-Maria Murillo Editor of Tell Magazine

the birth control movement, especially the role of Planned Parenthood, along the U.S.-Mexico border in the twentieth century

Professor Leslie Schwalm Professor Leslie Schwalm is deeply involved in the Iowa Colored Conventions project.

This project, the first regional satellite of the national Colored Conventions Project, researches the history of Iowa’s Black convention movement, from 1857 to 1896.

Schwalm and fellow collaborators and have discovered sixteen state-wide conventions organized by Black Iowans. They are researching and writing about these Black activists and their strategies and goals for social and racial justice. Ultimately their goal is to work with Iowa history teachers and provide resources to bring this history into their classrooms. In 2020 Professor Schwalm received the prestigious Iowa Graduate College Award for Outstanding mentor. She also recently finished her book, Making Race in Civil War America to be published by University of North Carolina Press in 2023.

Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies

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Associate Professor Corey Creekmur

Associate Professor Corey Creekmur is the General Editor, of the “Comics Culture” series for Rutgers University Press, launched in 2014. According to the press, “Volumes in the Comics Culture series explore the artistic, historical, social, and cultural significance of newspaper comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels, with individual titles devoted to focused studies of key titles, characters, writers, and artists throughout the history of comics; additional books in the series address major themes or topics in comics studies, including prominent genres, national traditions, and significant historical and theoretical issues.” Seven books have been published in this series so far and three have been nominated for an Eisner award and one has received the award. Creekmur along with Professor Ana Merino and Associate Professor Rachel Williams also received a major grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a Sawyer Seminar in 2022-2023 which will be administered through the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies.

Associate Professor Nataile Fixmer-Oraiz published

Homeland Maternity: US Security Culture and the New Reproductive Regime which was published

by the University of Illinois Press. According to the press, the book, “explores homeland maternity by calling our attention to the ways that authorities see both nonreproductive and “overly” reproductive women’s bodies as threats to social norms—and thus to security. Homeland maternity culture intensifies motherhood’s requirements and works to discipline those who refuse to adhere.” Fixmer-Oraiz and Assistant Professor Lina-Maria Murillo are also the organizers of the working group for Reproductive Justice through the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies.

Associate Professor Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz

Professor Maurine Neiman is an internationally recognized biologist who focuses on biological diversity and the evolution of sexual reproduction. In 2021, she was a contributor to eight high-level scientific publica­tions and received the annual Iowa Center for Research by Undergraduates Distinguished Mentor award. She also led the development of a virtual influenza vaccination game in collaboration with the influenza advocacy group Families Fighting Flu and was named one of the first-ever Provost Faculty Fellows for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. In honor of her son J.J., she and her partner Bennett Brown created the J.J. Neiman-Brown Academic Caretaking Fund. This endowed memorial fund supports child or other caretaking costs for faculty and postdoctoral researchers as they engage in professional and aca­demic development opportunities. Over 20 undergraduate and graduate students are part of Professor Neiman’s laboratory group in the Biology department, and play a critical role in the lab’s research and science engagement activities.

Professor Maurine Neiman Provost Faculty Fellow for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Professor Meenakshi Gigi Durham Faculty Ombuds

Professor Meenakshi Gigi Durham was named the university ombudsperson in June of 2021. She also published MeToo: The Impact of Rape Culture in the Media. The publisher, Polity press states, “In the wake of the MeToo movement, revelations of sexual assault and harassment continue to disrupt sexual politics across the globe. Meenakshi Gigi Durham situates media culture as a place in which these broader social struggles are produced and reproduced. Arguing that the media are a linchpin in these events, Durham provides a feminist account of the interrelated contexts of media production, representation, and reception.” Professor Durham and award winning teacher and scholar teaches courses related to communication studies, journalism and gender.

In the classroom...

Associate Professor Marie Kruger, received a Professional Development Award for spring 2020. During the award period, Marie worked on two projects: she embarked on a new research project about film and television representations of Constitution Hill in South Africa, and she completed the remaining sections of her monograph. In the spring of 2022 she will teach an exciting class, Love, War, and Women: Stories about Activism. Students will learn, about literary and cinematic representations of gender in works by authors and directors from the Global South. They will also learn about historical and cultural lines of inquiry that examine artistic representations of love, sexuality, friendship, and parenting; shifts in gender identities and relations that result from social and political crises. Students are so eager to take this class it is waitlisted!

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Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies

Jews, Judaism, & Social Justice New Course taught by Professor Elizabeth Heineman What does a Jewish approach to social justice look like? Let’s ask the late Jewish Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. On the wall of her office hung a painting with a passage from the Hebrew Bible: “Justice, justice you shall pursue!”

But don’t get too confident (the passage tells us): You’ll have to pursue justice. You’ll have to work at it, because justice isn’t easily attained.

I’ve long been inspired by Jewish activism for social justice. And for just as long I’ve been troubled by the “isms” and hierarchies that haunt so many religious traditions, including Judaism: patriarchy, slavery, and divisions between “us” and “others,” to name just a few.

As a faculty member in GWSS, I know that one of the best ways to work through knotty problems is to get students involved. And so I developed a new course.

“Jews, Judaism, and Social Justice” will look at Jewish frameworks for pursuing social justice. How did the Rabbis debate the ways we should translate Biblical precepts into action 2000 years ago? How did the opportunities and challenges of the modern era - emancipation from the ghetto, but also harsh industrial labor conditions, scientific racism, and more - prompt Jewish responses as well as new alliances?

Along the way, we’ll ask questions that apply to any struggle for social justice. What is our responsibility to ourselves and to others? How do we pursue justice when we’re the victims of injustice - when we feel powerless? How do we make sure we’re working just as hard when others are suffering, perhaps in systems that benefit us?

To grapple with these questions, we’ll need to get creative. And so, in addition to our readings and films and class discussions, we’ll work together to plan a Social Justice Seder.

Traditionally, the Passover Seder celebrates the Israelites’ liberation from slavery in Egypt thousands of years ago. For the last fifty-plus years, Jews have broadened the Seder to address ongoing projects of liberation: racial justice, feminism, climate action, queer lives, freedom from antisemitism, anti-colonial struggles, and more. Covid willing, we’ll welcome guests to our Seder. We hope to see you there!

-Professor Elizabeth Heineman

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Dr. Anastasia Williams, Assistant Director of Center for Teaching in the Office of Teaching, Learning and Technology

Dr. Anna L. Bostwick Flaming Director of Center for Teaching in the Office of Teaching, Learning and Technology, GWSS Faculty

Dr. Flaming was named director of the Center for Teaching in the Office of Teaching, Learning and Technology in August of 2021. In the same semester she also officially joined the faculty of the Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies Department. This connection offered exciting opportunities for students in our department seeking experiences that bridged their knowledge with practice. Three phenomenal students, Kaylee Koss, Maddie Mann, and Maddie Wischmann spent time at the Center for Teaching and gained practicum credit developing materials for faculty related to diversity, equity, and inclusion as well as student centered pedagogy. Assistant Director Anastasia Williams played a major role in the success of the practicum project as well.

out reate a hand c to rd a h y ll rea s documents r o s s “We worked fe ro p d efully help lusive to buil c in that will hop d n a g in welcom re the become more tudents befo s ir e th h a it w to work with t a connections re g s a w ff egins! It unce ideas o o class even b b to e u n ti n lpful and co to make a he small group te ra o b a ll o c ideas r and dence in my of each othe fi n o c d e in a ally g in expresse c n e d handout. I re fi n o c as well as cial in and thoughts ure be benefi s r fo l il w h hic s ing them!! W ”-Kaylee Kos r! e re a c g in my nurs

“I feel very fortu nate to have had this opportu nity to meet and work with Anna , Anastasia, and all other faculty that helped to revise our hand out, to help us voice our opinio ns that instructors will hopefu lly remember when creating th eir nex t syllabus.”

-Maddie Wischm ann

Working for Social Justice with Professor Teresa Mangum

Pictured above: Alexis Belme,Jessica Bolten, Esti Brady, Samantha Cruz, Kenall Hicks, Courtney Jones. Biranna Jorge, Jacqueline Medyk, Elizabeth Morrissey, Michelle O’Brien, Zach Palmer, Abigail Postman, Hannah Rickert, Cassie Rizer, Riley Seufert, Kaille Simmons, Paulina Solis, Sophie Sheeder, Elizabeth Wagner, Tiana Warner In this year ’s W group of stu orking for Social Justi ce class, tau dents not o ght by Profe nly learned fying seven about caree ssor Teresa fields wher r Mangum, a s e but shared careers and began their n inspiring in th v semester-lo a e lu d a e b s le ir e to engage career advic ng research local and n is e s . ues of socia After identi . They met ational org l justice me experts, co anizations, created a w e n t, d h u th o c n e te ebsite rich e s d d tu in th d fo e e ir Linked In nts rmational in with resour country. Fu pages and a terviews w ces and adv ture classes it p h p li ic c e for their fe ation mater will add ad justice field ials, and llow social ditional car ? Want to h ju e s e tice worker r e lp? We’d lov areas. Are y to participa s across the ou a GWSS e to add yo te in brief in u to our lis alum work formationa to Laura-ka t in o f contacts w g in a socia l interviews stens@uiow l hen studen in fall 2022 a.edu. ts seek exp ! If you are e r interested p ts lease reach out

Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies

News and Noteworthy!

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Associate Professor, Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz (GWSS and Communication Studies) and Assistant Professor, Lina-Maria Murillo (GWSS, History, and Latina/o/x Studies) partnered to write about reproductive justice in the Midwest. During 2021, they collaborated on “Reproductive Justice in the Heartland: Mothering, Maternal Care, and Race in Twenty-First Century Iowa,” a book chapter in Maternal Theory: Essential Readings edited by Andrea O’Reilly, which has now become the foundation for their own edited collection focused on reproductive justice advocates’ activism and health care provision in Iowa.

This idea emerged from their joint directorship of the “Maternal Politics and Reproductive Justice” Obermann working group launched in 2019. Currently, they have approximately 25 participants from across the university, including members from the College of Public Health, Medicine, and Law, as well as members from local health care organizations. Through this group, and with support of the Obermann Center, they offered various university-wide lectures—hosting eminent scholars in the fields of reproduction and abortion—and workshops about reproductive justice and maternal health. This past year, they received the Obermann Center’s Humanities for the Public Good “Humanities Lab Development Award” to produce a humanities reproductive justice course bringing together students, faculty, staff, and community partners in 2024.

Laura Kastens, Administrator for GWSS and American Studies

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The GWSS faculty & staff (pictured above) send congratulations to our graduates of Fall 2021: Leah Rhodes, AnneMarie Derouin, Ellen Huggins, Jack Niemeyer, Ellen Junk, Sophie Sheeder, Jessica Bolten, Mishma Nixon, Claire Phelps, and Liza Whaylen! Happy New Year!

Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies