To learn more about the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGS) Department here at Gettysburg, I sat down with Associate Professor Nathalie Lebon to talk about WGS as both a research field and academic major.
(from left) French and WGS Professor Emerita Elizabeth Richardson Viti, Christina Natalello ’06, and WGS Professor Nathalie Lebon
[Image property of Gettysburg College, http://www.gettysburg.edu/academics/wgs/index.dot]
Could you explain to me what Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is?
As a field, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGS) is interdisciplinary by nature. We draw from all subjects, even those you would not expect like the hard sciences; I had a colleague at another university that taught a lab science class that focused on experiments and scientific breakthroughs achieved by women. As a result, WGS professors often come from a diverse array of academic backgrounds. While I was trained as an Anthropologist, my colleague within the Program have specialized in Asian-American Studies and queer politics and justice, to name just a few.
But in its essence, WGS attempts to understand the oppression that women and ethnic and sexual minorities have faced. The field has always strived to take an intersectional approach to gender, making sure to be inclusive in terms of race, class and sexuality. About 10 years ago, we broadened the study of gender amd sexuality more explicitly, including discussions about masculinity, non-binary expression, and transgender individuals. It’s a field that’s done a pretty good job modernizing with the times.
How have you personally seen the field of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies change in your time as a professor and researcher?
We did not use to have Ph.D. programs in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, those are only about fifteen to twenty years old. Back when I was in school, I chose to pursue Anthropology with a focus on women’s issues; in contrast, students today can choose WGS as their main field of study from the undergraduate to the Ph.D. level.
The field has also changed in its focus. Originally, it was all about women and their struggles, but as we understand gender more fully now, we have re-centered our teaching and scholarship towards discussions of masculinity, femininity, and non-binary expression, while also bringing Sexuality Studies to the forefront.
Do WGS majors here at Gettysburg usually specialize in either Women’s Studies or Sexuality Studies? Do you offer concentrations within the major?
We do our best to give students equal exposure to both the gender and sexuality aspects of our major. In the introductory course, we have really integrated the study of sexuality and try to make the major intersectional from the very beginning. The same goes for the methods course and core requirements of the major.
On the other hand, we want to make sure we have a wide range of courses. Many focus on women’s issues. We do try to give our professors who specialize in Sexuality Studies the opportunity to teach what they’re passionate about. This is also in order to respond to student demand. Others like me, who focus more on women, are beginning to integrate sexuality studies more into our specialized classes, but we want to make sure courses specifically on Sexuality Studies are available to our students.
What area of WGS do you specialize in?
My work is centered around the study of feminist social movements in Latin America. My early work looked at what happened once they become professionalized. Specifically, I look at non-governmental organizations and how they cope with the challenges of partnering with state organizations. For my dissertation, I looked at the women’s movement in Sao Paulo, Brazil, specifically at four different organizations that dealt with women’s health, and studied how they interacted with and addressed the issues of low-income women.
More recently, I’ve been looking at popular feminism, movements that involve the working class and working poor, and their ideals. The coalition I’ve been studying recently, the World March of Women, is a transnational socialist-feminist movement that started in Quebec but now exists in 60 countries around the world. What I focus on is how this organization achieves a common goal despite having so many people from different geographic, language, class, and cultural backgrounds.
How many professors are there in the WGS department at Gettysburg?
This is a good question because there are only two professors who teach WGS courses full time, myself and my colleague Gina Velasco. However, we have about twenty other people across the college, spanning many different academic departments, that are teaching WGS courses. We have professors in Sociology, Spanish, Africana Studies, Economics, English, and History, to name just a few, who specialize in gender or sexuality issues within their fields and teach for our department.
What is your favorite class to teach here at Gettysburg?
I would have to say Feminism in Global Perspective. It focuses on transnational women’s issues and includes some sexuality issues. When I was in grad school, I worked with the women’s movement in Brazil and have done a lot of research on international organizing of feminist groups, so this course allows me to teach what I specialize in. I also like that I get to show students in this course that feminism is alive and well, and sometimes actually more alive in places where they don’t expect it to be. Students can learn a lot about feminism from places like Latin America and Africa.
The other class I enjoy teaching is the Practicum course, which is unique to the WGS major. As part of the course requirements, students volunteer for a total of 60 hours over the semester for an organization in town that works in some way with women, minority, or poverty issues. We then meet twice a week and consider each student’s service through a gendered lens. Students in the past have volunteered with the Gleaning Project, the local homeless shelter, the migrant health office, and the local Hispanic heritage center, and of course Survivors Inc., our domestic violence center in town among others. By being out in the community, students can look at local issues and talk specifically about how they affect women, children, and sexual minorities. Students also read and discuss literature on institutional development and apply it to their volunteer experience. For example, we talk about institutional cooperation and keeping diversity in social leadership. The Practicum is such an important part of the WGS major because it is more than an internship; it allows students to actively engage with the issues of today and think both locally and globally about justice for women and minorities.
I really want to recommend to all the Gettysburg students reading this article that they take a Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies course sometime in their college career. It is very easy to find a course that lines up with your major and it will help you better understand so many aspects of society today.