Abstract: This essay provides an important entry point for understanding the current state of the field of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies (WGSS). We share insights from oral histories we collected from over 30 WGSS practitioners after the 2024 US election and through spring 2025, contextualized with information from an earlier national survey of the field we conducted in 2022-23. Our research suggests that the biggest threat to our field may not be budget reductions or program elimination, but rather the decline of the emotional health of WGSS practitioners. While our earlier work called for more politicized feminist engagement within our institutions, our oral history project demonstrates the generative potential of the current crisis for imagining WGSS in a different relationship to the academy. We argue that the joy, pride, and gratefulness that defined our subjects’ alignment with WGSS as a field has enabled a politicized resistance we term a refusal to regret, and that this refusal can be mobilized to incite new directions for the field in potentially radical new forms.
Abstract: The Feminist Trolley Problem is a short reflection on the ethical dimensions of feminist institutionality during a moment of crisis, destruction, and dissolution of WGSS centers, programs, and departments.
Abstract: Review of new books by Clare Croft, Ramzi Fawaz, Margaret Galvan, Cait McKinney, Jed Samer, and June Thomas exploring contemporary thinking about lesbian-feminism from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The books under consideration meaningfully link lesbian-feminist communities and lesbian lives with lesbian studies. The best of these books offers models for scholarship that takes seriously intellectual questions in lesbian studies while simultaneously treating lesbians who are (and were) creators of culture and ideas with care and compassion as well as curiosity and generosity. In lesbian studies of these books, passion and joviality shine alongside astute analysis and intellectual rigor.
Abstract: This mediation on the state of gender studies in academia is an attempt to rethink the relationships between faculty and staff and the university and the community. Drawing on the work of José Esteban Muñoz and Sara Marcus, I consider the value of holding on to both hope and disappointment during a time when the first has been commodified by the neoliberal university and the latter abounds.
