October 27, 2011
by Alexander Brey
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How to do History with Judith Butler

First, of all, I just want to say that it’s a little strange to be on the other side of the glass here at the Flexner reading group blog.

For my first post I want to talk a little bit about why I, as a historian-in-training, find Butler’s work useful. Her analysis of the performativity of gender was formulated in response to a set of modern philosophical texts (Nietszche, Hegel, Freud, Foucault) and cultural trends (feminism, drag, and the gay rights movement), so it’s not immediately obvious that it should be useful to someone studying earlier moments in history. It turns out, though, that the discursive and embodied practices through which gender is constructed have changed remarkably little since the beginnings of written history. While the performances of gender may have changed (today Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man comes of as slightly sassy when compared to, oh, say, the normative Leading Man du jour Sam Worthington), the use, or pointed neglect, of haircuts, clothes, words, cosmetics, gestures, etc., to perform gender has not. The means by which legitimate subjectivities are determined have remained less static, although even these often extend to the hazy dawn of the nation-state if not much earlier.

Take Early-Modern witches as an example. I’d say that Halloween got me thinking about them, but I’ve just been listening to a lot of Demdike Stare. In 1612, nine women and two men from the area around Pendle Hill, north of Manchester, were found guilty of witchcraft and executed by hanging. Thomas Potts, the clerk to the court, published the official proceedings as a book titled THE WONDERFVLL DISCOVERIE OF WITCHES IN THE COVNTIE OF LANCASTER.

As I was reading the first chapter of Excitable Speech, I was struck by the parallels between the hate speech trials that form the subject of Butler’s study and the Pendle witch trials. Both are characterized by anxieties about the tenuous connection between speech, intent, and injury, and both elide the way in which judicial speech itself enacts violence.

The Pendle trials, however, are framed not only in terms of the individual and the state, but also in terms of religion. The entire discursive framework of the trials was structured by the religious turmoil of 16th-century England and the air of paranoia that it created. And while witches may not have been new, they were certainly receiving large quantities of bad press: King James I personally attended the trial of the North Berwick witches, accused of attempting to sink his ship as he returned from his marriage to the Danish princess Anne, and he wrote a strange little book called Daemonologie. The privileged speech of the King, centered on an appeal to Christian scripture, certainly influenced the proceedings.

The separation of church and state that’s unproblematically assumed in Butler’s case-study doesn’t apply to this earlier moment, so we can’t simply read the Pendle trials through Butler. But her framework allows us to perceive the overlapping systems that are actively erasing their own agency in constructing the very subjects that they prosecute and kill.

October 27, 2011
by Johanna Gosse
3 Comments

The only position for women in the movement is ‘prone’

The title of this post refers to an infamous 1964 statement by Stokely Carmichael on the role of women in the civil rights movement. Since Carmichael was known to be supportive of women activists, it could be regarded as tongue-in-cheek, a bad joke taken out of context. But intentions aside, his statement is still considered emblematic of the entrenched misogyny of 1960s activist movements, which prompted the feminist critiques of the New Left that would later develop into the Women’s Liberation movement of the 1970s.

Carmichael’s oft-cited quote came to mind when I came across a blog entitled Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street, which claims to capture “The Sexy Side of Protesting Corruption.” Defenders of the site claim that it publicizes the Occupy movement and attracts would-be activists with the prospect of encountering “hot” women, and in any case, that the photographs are respectful and admiring. Besides the flawed, casuistic logic of its defense, the lingering issue of consent, and the potential that it could actually alienate women from the movement, this blog and the ensuing debate around it raise some important questions about public visibility, politics, gender, and the body—all major themes in the work of Judith Butler, particularly in her upcoming Flexner lecture series.

In fact, in Butler’s stirring address to protestors gathered in Washington Square this past Sunday (transcribed below), she explicitly attends to the question of the body—as a political, desiring, interdependent, even vulnerable entity: “It matters that as bodies we arrive together in public. As bodies we suffer, we require food and shelter, and as bodies we require one another in dependency and desire. So this is a politics of the public body, the requirements of the body, its movement and its force.”

If the Occupy movement is largely concerned with establishing political visibility by populating public spaces together with our bodies, then what does it mean to explicitly frame the protests, as does “Hot Chicks of OWS,” in terms of a heterosexual scopic economy? I’d argue that the women pictured on the site are understood primarily as sexual objects instead of as political subjects—and that this “eye candy” angle risks designating them as cheerleaders for a movement of which they are not true constituents. At the same time, I’m wondering how we might funnel this desire to see and to physically encounter others, this erotic dimension of political action, into alternative forms of social relationality that could potentially counterbalance the atomization and fictional sense of connectivity enabled by social media. As Butler reminds us, “we require one another in dependency and desire,” we are bound by mutual obligation, and in this sense we are all vulnerable and all experience varying degrees of “precarity,” to use one of her preferred terms.

I think that the dynamics of the Occupy movement bring this essential interdependence that Butler describes into stark relief. To have solidarity is to insist on standing together, to demand that no one be allowed or required to remain “prone.” The necessity of solidarity is one of the major ethical and strategic lessons of past political movements, and, I suspect that it also underpins Butler’s understanding of the connections between gender, precarity, and political power. Therefore, I’m especially thrilled that the opportunity to critically engage with Butler’s work, as afforded by the Flexner lectures, happens to coincide with such an historic political moment, one brimming with possibility, hope, and togetherness. In future posts I’ll attempt to bring Butler’s current work to bear on the emerging movement, in hopes that examining theory and practice together will prove mutually illuminating.

My transcription of Judith Butler’s speech at Washington Square, 10/23/11

“Hello everybody. I’m Judith Butler. I’ve come here to lend my support and offer my solidarity for this unprecedented display of popular and democratic will. People have asked: so what are the demands that all these people are making. Either they say, “there are no demands,” and that leaves your critics confused. Or they say that demands for social equality, that demands for economic justice, are impossible demands. And impossible demands are just not practical. But we disagree. If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible. If the right to shelter, food, and employment are impossible demands, then we demand the impossible. If it is impossible to demand that those who profit from the depression redistribute their wealth and cease their greed then yes, we demand the impossible. Of course the list of our demands is long. These are demands for which there can be no arbitration. We object to he monopolization of wealth, we object to making working populations disposable, we object to the privatization of education, we believe that education must be a public good and a public value. We oppose the expanding numbers of the poor, we rage against the banks that push people from their homes, and the lack of health care for unfathomable numbers. We object to economic racism, and call for its end. It matters that as bodies we arrive together in public. As bodies we suffer, we require food and shelter, and as bodies we require one another in dependency and desire. So this is a politics of the public body, the requirements of the body, its movement and its force. We would not be here if electoral politics were representing the will of the people. We sit and stand and move as the popular will, the one that electoral politics has forgotten and abandoned. But we are here time and again, persisting, enacting the phrase ‘we the people.’”

October 27, 2011
by Elly Truitt
2 Comments

Every Marriage Is A Ménage à Trois

Over the past decade, since Judith Butler’s essay, “Competing Universalities,” civil rights for those who identify as gay and lesbian have expanded dramatically. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell has been repealed, allowing tens of thousands of gay servicemen and servicewomen to serve openly in the military alongside their straight colleagues (though they are still prohibited from passing along their veterans’ benefits to their partners, due to federal prohibitions against recognizing gay partnerships). Marriage or civil union between two men or two women is now legal in Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont, as well as Washington, DC. (Though those partnerships are not recognized outside of those states, nor are those couples permitted to share federal benefits, nor is their union recognized when they pay federal taxes.) National polls show an overwhelming generational divide on the issue of gay marriage; the majority of people under the age of 40 believe that gay marriage should be legal at the state and federal levels, making it seem more and more likely that, in a few decades, this will be achieved.

Yet in the national conversation and debates about gay marriage the role of the state in recognizing, promoting, and rewarding a formalized union between two adults has been largely ignored. Every marriage is a ménage à trois, with two adults and the state bound together in matrimony. As I teach students in my medieval history classes, marriage in western culture has overwhelmingly been an institution to promote the orderly transfer of property from one family to another, and as a vehicle for legitimizing the offspring of a union between a man and a woman–for the purposes of inheritance. The US tax code and estate laws still largely enshrine this ideal, despite the fact that it is out of date. More children are born to single parents or out of wedlock, fewer couples are having children, fewer families find that there is any property to inherit, only debt (often due to the crushing expense of elder care alongside plummeting home values and stagnant wages), and more and more families are post-nuclear (divorces, remarriages, step-families, half-siblings, etc.). Furthermore, the industrial-bride complex is a multi-billion dollar industry (to say nothing of how much income “family law”–that is, divorce, pre-nuptial, and custodial law–generates) predicated on selling consumers on a romantic ideal of their “special day,” from which all mention of property and wealth is banished (save for the wealth generated by dressmakers, caterers, florists, and wedding planners).

Why? While I understand the historical reality that generated a controlling state-interest in marriage, it is clear that that historical moment is now over. People with assets can leave them to whomever they wish. Married couples without children–for whatever reason–and two incomes find themselves penalized in the tax code. The state operates on a definition of family, marriage, and sexuality that is out-of-date and impractical, yet in so doing, refuses to recognize millions of citizens *as* citizens, or even as humans.

I understand Butler’s position that to participate in those institutions, or to fight to be able to do so (marriage, the military) only strengthens them. Yet it seems to me that the two institutions are not parallel. Allowing gay warriors to serve openly in the military will strengthen the military in the best way: It will liberalize and diversify the military, strengthening our country as a whole. As for marriage, though, it seems like the state should get out of the wedding business altogether, allowing consenting adults to organize their private lives and households how they wish, and providing equal protection and opportunity to all.

October 27, 2011
by Sara Alcid
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Rachel Maddow and Judith Butler’s Critique of “the Shiny New Gay Citizen”

Earlier this month, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow expressed skepticism regarding the value of the inclusion of gays and lesbians in the institution of marriage. “I feel that gay people not being able to get married for generations, forever, meant that we came up with alternative ways of recognizing relationships,” she explains. “And I worry that if everybody has access to the same institutions that we lose the creativity of subcultures having to make it on their own. And I like gay culture.”

Many gay rights activists were shocked by this critique of the legalization of gay marriage. The liberal political agenda seems to have normalized the “correctness” of the assimilation of gays and lesbians into the institutions of marriage and the military. There has been little discussion of what is lost in this assimilation, or rather, what is gained by hegemonic systems of power. In the legalization of gay marriage and the repeal of DADT, equality for sexual minorities is gained, but this is an equality defined within the terms of a system that is informed by patriarchal heteronormativity. Is that really equality? Maddow’s skepticism of state-recognized gay marriage is rooted in an appreciation for the alternative cultures that arise as a natural resistance to discrimination. On a similar note, in “Competing Universalities,” Butler asks the lesbian and gay rights movement to consider the idea that striving to gain access to and assimilate with historically oppressive institutions undermines the “claim to be working in the direction of substantive social justice” (273).

Instead of striving to gain equality within an inherently unequal dominant order, Butler calls on the lesbian and gay rights movement to “refuse its terms, to let the term itself wither, to starve it of its strength” (274). While I agree with Butler’s (and Maddow’s) reasoning about the value in rejecting the hegemonic system of order and creating alternative orders of sexual legitimacy, there is a social cost to doing this. Refusing the terms of state institutions has consequences; perhaps the strongest being financial–a reflection of the interconnected nature of capitalism and the control of sexuality. Much of the reason that the lesbian and gay rights movement has fought for inclusion in the institutions of marriage and the military is related to economic benefits. Thus, in making assertions of the danger of the assimilation that Butler and Maddow speak of, I think it is also vital to consider the lived realities, namely economic strife, behind the desire for assimilation. While reading “Competing Universalities” I was struck with the tension between theory and reality that is often present in academia and something that I often grapple with as a gender studies student and feminist activist.

Something I look forward to asking Judith Butler about during her upcoming lectureship at Bryn Mawr is how she negotiates this aforementioned tension. She participates in grassroots activism—most recently, Occupy Wall Street—yet also engages in deeply theoretical considerations of social conditions. Perhaps her upcoming lectures, specifically her second one, entitled “Bodies in Alliance & the Politics of the Street” will provide me some answers, as I noticed that she drew from her “bodies in alliance” rhetoric while participating in the politics of the street at Occupy Wall Street.

October 27, 2011
by Vanessa Christman
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Inclusive Progress Includes Doubts

A new day has arrived (272). That’s what we were proclaiming this week when I moderated a student panel comprised of leaders in interfaith and intercultural dialogue. Speaking to a robust gathering of alumnae and other guests, the students described a campus where people of different races and cultures are members of each other’s affinity groups, diversity conversations happen in dorms on a regular basis, and interfaith and intercultural dialogue coalesces in new and surprising places such as LGBTQ Bible study. The event was spectacular, and it felt wonderful to have had a role in presenting it.

So why, ever since this successful event, have I been haunted by the image and sound from a video of Judith Butler addressing the crowd at Occupy Wall Street? Do I feel guilty being here in such a safe, comfortable space? (We just said at the alumnae event that we create safe and comfortable spaces at Bryn Mawr—it was seen as a good thing.) Is it because I am on a tree-bejeweled campus by day and home in my bed by night—and not out in the elements without the comforts of running water? Is it because I see her, my contemporary, getting out, standing up and addressing the occupiers, when I am working on inequalities in cozy lounges and living rooms?

Sure. Of course that’s all a part of it. But as I reflect on Chapter 10, “Competing Universalities,” I think I’m also troubled by the notion that Bryn Mawr, for all its unique wonderfulness, represents the norm. It’s not far from that realization to the troublesome thought that, while we have made great strides in diversifying our student body and having honest dialogue about our diverse community, those matriculating at Bryn Mawr could be seen as assimilationist. From there, it’s not hard to conjure up the shudder-inducing notion that, rather than seeking and supporting a diverse student body as acts of inclusion—a true embrace of people from minority cultures, sexual and otherwise—the College is hegemonic in its intent. And I am crestfallen if the result is that prospective students “question the value of being included [here]” (271).

October 27, 2011
by Jessica Lee
2 Comments

On Schematic Racism and White Paranoia

Judith Butler alludes to Althusserian ideology through her reference to Frantz Fanon in this essay. In so doing, Butler shows a literal propagation of Althusser’s well-known illustration of interpellation.[1]

Louis Althusser (famous for contribution to Marxist theory and infamous for uxoricide) employed the term interpellation to denote the mechanism by which subjects recognize their place in dominant ideology. He employs this scenario: a police officer hails, “Hey, you there!” in the street; the hailed individual responds and becomes the subject of the hail. [2] In the Fanon excerpt in Butler’s essay, he describes a “third-person consciousness” of himself as he responds to the hail, “Look, a Negro!” Fanon tries to laugh, but cannot. He acknowledges the schema in which he as a black male is bound (p. 207).

Althusser explains the reason for this phenomenon as follows:

Ideology has always-already interpellated individuals as subjects. Individuals are always-already interpellated by ideology as subjects. Individuals are always-already subjects.[3]

LAPD officers “hailed” Rodney King the moment they spotted his car on the freeway. His response (or lack of response) to the hail is circumscribed in the racist ideology. His very presence during the police brutality transforms him into a danger to the law. As Judith Butler writes, “a circuit is phantasmatically produced whereby King is the origin, the intention, and the object of the selfsame brutality” (p. 210). White paranoia always-already interpellated the black man as a criminal.

Butler’s discussion of racial interpellation makes me think of a question often raised in my Diversity class. Can people of color be racist? Many would argue no—people of color are always bound by the hegemonic racial schema, thus any “racism” they exhibit is a shadow of the dominant discourse. So how should we read the videos of Reginald Denny and Fidel Lopez being beaten during the LA riots? How should we read the videos of the Korean shopkeepers shooting at black crowds during the LA riots? Are these circumstances projections of white paranoia? I don’t know. Perhaps this is what is most impenetrable about schematic racism—it prevents us from ever truly “reading.”

[1] Louis Althusser. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation (1970).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

October 27, 2011
by Mary Zaborskis
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Gay Marriage: Thanks But No Thanks?

I’m from New York City, and I was celebrating my birthday the night that the Marriage Equality Act passed, signaling that gay marriage would be legalized in the state of New York. The bar overflowed with cheers (the joyful shouting kind and the glass-clinking kind) as texts and calls flooded the phones of me, my friends, and our fellow patrons (while drinking laws are, of course, a social construction that serve hegemonic powers, for the record, I turned 22 that day!). The timing couldn’t have been more perfect: with NYC Pride that same weekend, the city was poised to celebrate a significant achievement for gay and lesbian equality not only for our state, but for our country.

the Empire State Building on June 24, 2011

But what did we actually achieve? Is achievement even the appropriate term?

In “Competing Universalities,” Judith Butler argues that the fight for gay marriage (and gay couples’ adopting, laws concerning gay and lesbian participation in the military, and other politicized issues regarding granting non-heterosexual bodies the rights that straight bodies’ have) is a fight that ultimately aims to serve the dominant order. While gender is a construction that can be deprived of its power through subversion, Butler views the aforementioned instances as ones for which “occupying the dominant norm in order to produce internal subversion” (274) is not productive. Rather, she insists, “sometimes it’s important to refuse [the dominant’s] terms, to let the term itself wither, to starve it of its strength” (274).

To be quite honest, I’m pretty taken by Butler’s argument (when supplemented with the work of other queer theorists, activists, and organizations). I did cheer along with everyone else at the bar on my birthday, and this reaction was genuine; despite my personal and academic convictions, the passing of this act indicates the elimination of certain modes of discrimination, which is always cause for celebration. And yet, it was difficult to celebrate a moment that would simultaneously help to further discriminate against and alienate those gays, lesbians, and other bodies whose relations and practices don’t participate in, or fit into, these institutionally sanctioned modes of being that are ultimately in the service of those same institutions. Now that marriage is an option in New York, some companies that previously granted the same rights to domestic partnerships as they did to marriages are denying those rights; their logic is that these couples can now get married and so should, foreclosing and delegitimizing an alternate to the dominant norm. Steps for gay and lesbian rights in the name of equality often come at the cost of further marginalizing any gays and lesbians who refuse those same “rights.” How might focusing on rights that grant access to institutional domains distract us from a) directing our energies towards other gay rights efforts and b) the fact that the institution may be implementing the desire for this access to begin with? Who and what gets sacrificed on the way to equality?

That being said, I’m having some trouble wrapping my mind around when Butler urges us to subvert and when we should opt for refusal; just this week, Butler made known her support for Occupy Wall Street, a movement whose title literally calls for the “occupying [of] the dominant norm[‘s]” space to protest economic and social inequality. While this is an exciting moment where protesters are coming together as “bodies in alliance”—something we’ll be hearing more about from Butler soon in Lecture 2!—this is an instance where refusal doesn’t seem to be the route that Butler endorses. So my question is, which types of (fights for) participation strengthen the dominant order, and which hold the potential to subvert and fragment hegemony?

I also wonder if there is ever potential to subvert marriage. In her compelling and convincing plea for the Marriage Equality Bill in 2009, Senator Diane Savino argues that the sanctity of marriage is an illusion—in a very powerful moment (about 6 minutes in, but it’s definitely worth watching the whole thing), she asks us to turn on the television to see how in America, we’re “giving away husbands [to heterosexual women] on a game show . . . if there’s any threat to the sanctity of marriage in America, it comes from those of us who have the privilege and the right [to marry], and we have abused it for decades.” Is it possible that this “abuse” to marriage might be subversion? Marriage has arguably become warped in recent times. Does this warping have a limit—that limit being that marriage can be as illusory, random, or farcical as it wants as long as it continues to happen between a man and a woman—or is it possible that marriage is heading in such a direction that its bounds can (and perhaps will) ultimately expand to include other bodies and relationships, effectively changing—and subverting—our definition of marriage and the very institution itself?

October 27, 2011
by Medb McGearty
Comments Off on Permeating Boundaries of Gender in Feminism

Permeating Boundaries of Gender in Feminism

As we move through life, we are forced to identify ourselves by our gender on various administrative forms, applications, etc. For some, this task entails a simple check mark placed in a box without a second thought and for some a painful reminder of our “otherness.” With this check mark comes an affiliation with one side of a binary that for some feels like throwing a loaded die—no matter how many times you roll, you keep landing on the same number and, inevitably, you lose.

Butler’s exploration of the absence of a natural gender and its relationship to how we either fit or don’t fit into society led me to think of my own relationship to feminism. I grew up steeped in the feminist tradition: my mother refused to allow me to play with Barbies because, for her, they perpetuated an unrealistic and oppressive vision of femininity and were not anatomically correct. During adolescence, I continued to explore my own idea of feminism and became involved in the riot grrrl movement of the 90s. However, these manifestations of feminism that I grew up with rely on the assumption of a gender binary, which fueled the movement at it’s inception. Butler notes, “categories of true sex, discrete gender, and specific sexuality have constituted the stable point of reference for a great deal of feminist theory and politics” (103). She, then, points to the locus of this discourse as the female body, onto which meaning is ascribed signifying gender, sex, identity, power, and politics.

If the body acts as a signifier for gender, in what ways does a fight for a gender’s rights presume and collude with the existing hegemony of natural gender? Should the fight, as Butler argues, include all margins that threaten to contain the “inner” from the “outer”, and work instead to expose the fallacy of gender as it has been understood? For Butler, natural gender exists due to, “…the construction of the gendered body through a series of exclusions and denials, signifying absences” (110). It is interesting to consider how social movements fight to declare their identity, to give voice to their otherness, and in doing so comply with the principals of “inner” and “outer” that have been socio-culturally constructed.

This topic has been addressed in academic and social forums that look to expand notions of gender and belonging. In challenging forms of oppression, it is valuable to look at the categories to which one assigns value and with which one identifies and to recognize who is being excluded or eliminated and what violence to others is being perpetuated. My mind readily goes to the word inclusion when considering the implications of Butler’s work for social movements such as feminism; however, that would be a misstep. Rather, it is more valuable to seek permeation of presupposed boundaries in order to address the falsity of the construct of gender.

October 27, 2011
by Steph Herold
Comments Off on Is marriage equality true social justice?

Is marriage equality true social justice?

Butler makes several provocative claims in this essay, which is very timely considering that just this year, New York became the largest state to pass marriage equality legislation and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed effective mere weeks ago. Butler’s central question is one that has resonated in my mind for a long time: “the most pressing question is whether this ought to be the primary goal of the lesbian and gay movement at the present time, and whether it constitutes a radical step towards … an assimilationist politics” (273).

There is no doubt that by assimilating to the values of mainstream American (family, marriage, and military), the gay rights movement has been able to make unprecedented strides both legally and culturally. But whose rights come at the expense of these newly gained freedoms? Butler lays it out plain and simple: “people who are on their own without sexual relationships, single mothers or single fathers, people who have undergone divorce, people who are in relationships that are not marital in kind or in status, other lesbian, gay and transgender people whose sexual relations are multiple … whose lives are not monogamous, whose sexuality and desire do not have the conjugal home as their (primary) venue, whose lives are considered less real or less legitimate” (p.274). Butler goes on to say that by seeking marriage equality, the gay rights movement in fact is giving the state permission to define and police their relationships. This acceptance of the state’s power, a force that has violently discriminated against LGBT individuals in the past, reveals the LGBT movement’s priority as fighting for the rights of the few privileged individuals whose lives align with the kind of lives the state values (those who want to marry, serve in the military, raise a family, etc).

Assimilationist politics, as Butler calls them, seem to work. Marriage equality is a popular position to take, gaining support across generational lines. By prioritizing rights for the few instead of rights for everyone, the “well-endowed” LGBT rights groups (Butler mentions the Human Rights Campaign specifically) discriminate against the very people who should be their allies, whose specific human rights the organization claims to be fighting for.

Butler does an excellent job problematizing the prioritization of marriage equality and military service, but she doesn’t offer any solutions or suggestions. How can the LGBT rights movement better fight for the rights of all its constituencies? Would big donors and foundations fund a group dedicated to helping homeless trans youth of color with the same big bucks that they spend helping middle class, white gay folks fight for the right to marry?

October 26, 2011
by Tracy Kellmer
Comments Off on Flexner Book Club Blog Welcomes Graduate Student Bloggers!

Flexner Book Club Blog Welcomes Graduate Student Bloggers!

Hello again! We’re at the halfway point in our scheduled reading and discussions, and excitement is building as we approach Nov. 7, the date of Judith Butler’s first Flexner lecture.

I am pleased to announce that the Flexner Book Club Blog, Judith Butler Edition, is about to get an influx of new talent! Two graduate students each from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research are joining the blog, increasing the number of bloggers from 5 to 9.

They are Alex Brey, Johanna Gosse, Jessica Lee, and Medb McGearty. Their bios can be found under the Blogger Bios tab. Beth and I couldn’t be more thrilled that they will be sharing their perspectives on the readings and lectures with us, and we hope you will check out their posts and welcome them to the blog.

We would love to hear from you in the comments!