Enke awarded Feminist Scholars Fellowship

Professor Anne Enke.

Anne Enke, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, History and LGBT Studies, was awarded a Feminist Scholars Fellowship from the Center for Research on Gender and Women. 

This fellowship is designed to provide UW-Madison faculty working on feminist scholarship a one semester full-time research appointment. 

In fall 2010, Enke will work on: "Gender Changes: Transfeminist Activism from the 1960s to the New Millennium". 

She describes this project as "a history of transfeminist activism that establishes the integral relationship between feminist and transgender movements beginning in the 1960s".

Enke will trace how a movement calling for freedom of gender expression and transsexual rights took form within and alongside feminism. Like feminism, transgender liberation was deeply invested in the workings of gender, sexuality, and bodies, but its relationship with feminism was regularly contested.

Focusing on grassroots movement-building, one of Enke's driving questions is why, when transgender people were so often key leaders and participants in feminist efforts, the larger feminist trajectory is one of gender dis-integration as well as integration.

Rather than ceding the definition of feminism to trans-exclusive frameworks, Enke is compelled by feminism’s challenges to gender hierarchy, and by the feminist history of transgender movement-building, to offer a new historical framework that sees their interdependence.

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Gender and Womens' Studies students complete spring community internships

Gender and Womens' Studies interns in spring 2010.

In the spring semester, 11 Gender and Women's Studies students completed nearly 2,000 service hours in their internship work with community agencies throughout the Madison.

Each fall GWS interns are selected through an application and interview process to participate in a 6-credit internship course during the spring semester.

The internship program is designed for GWS students to connect feminist theory to practice, learn ways to participate as feminists in activism, as well as to participate in a variety of community-based agencies.

This spring GWS interns are working as educators, researchers, facilitators, writers and event planners working in the fields of sexuality education, sexual violence and abuse, domestic violence, women’s health, and youth leadership and development.

Community agencies partnering with Gender and Women’s Studies this spring include: Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin, the Rape Crisis Center, Wisconsin Alliance for Women’s Health, GSA for Safe Schools, the Madison Birth Center, the Goodman Community Center, the Wisconsin Women’s Council, Lilada’s Livingroom, EVOC, Briarpatch and the Wisconsin Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

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New perspectives on gender and human security workshop sparks ideas,engagement

New Perspectives on Gender and Human Security Workshop in March on campus.

On March 19-20th the International Gender Policy Research Circle — a research circle on the UW-Madison campus supported by Global Studies and the International Institute — together with the Center for Research on Gender and Women and several UW area studies programs organized a workshop featuring cutting edge work engaging with the study of human security from a gendered perspective. 

Human security moves beyond traditional notions of security to consider the effects on human well-being of conflicts of all kinds – not just violent conflict but also environmental degradation, economic decline and other phenomenon that put people and communities at risk.  The workshop hosted over 80 US and international-based participants, from more than 13 institutions including other UW system campuses.

At the workshop, undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty debated the relationship between gender and human security and the relevance of the human security framework for advancing our understanding of the relationship between violence and women’s and men’s well-being. 

Speakers included Narda Henríquez (Catholic University, Peru), Valerie Sperling (Clark University), V. Spike Peterson (University of Arizona) and Fionnuala D. Ní Aoláin (University of Minnesota Law School).

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Lepowsky awarded Feminist Scholar, Institute for Research on the Humanities Fellowships

Professor Maria Lepowsky.

Maria Lepowsky, Professor of Anthropology and Gender and Women’s Studies was awarded a Feminist Scholars Fellowship from the Center for Research on Gender and Women and a Resident Faculty Fellowship at the UW Institute for Research in the Humanities. 

In 2010-11, Lepowsky will complete a book entitled Toypurina and the Hidden Histories of California.  The manuscript focuses on a young female shaman, Toypurina, who in 1785 led her Tongva people and their allies in a revolt against the Spanish at Mission San Gabriel, east of the new pueblo of Los Angeles. 

Drawing on century-old anthropological fieldnotes, wax cylinder recordings of sacred songs, family stories, oral histories and participant observation in present-day ceremonies, Lepowsky narrates the history of Toypurina and the legacies of her revolt. 

She re-envisions California history by placing indigenous Californians at its center. In addition, Lepowsky shows how today Toypurina is becoming a regional symbol of indigenous, Chicana/Chicano and feminist resistance to injustice. 

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1000th major in Gender and Women’s Studies awarded in May

Gender and Women's Studies' 1000th major will graduate this spring.

Between graduates of the Gender and Women’s Studies major and certificate, Gender and Women's Studies has nearly 2,500 alumni — a great milestone!

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Health by Motorbike: UW faculty, students head to Kenya this summer

Alonso meeting a friend's baby for the first time last summer at a health camp and mobile clinic in Godo. The baby wasn't too sure about meeting a new person, no less one wearing 'artifacts' over her eyes!

Gender and Women’s Studies Lecturer and Faculty Associate, Araceli Alonso (RN, MA, MS, PhD) will be spending her summer working on her "Health by Motorbike" initiative in rural Kenya.

Alonso will be conducting a summer health camp for women and adolescent girls in Lungalunga, Godo and Perani.

The health camp, funded by the Davis Foundation for Projects for Peace, will provide culturally sensitive health training and education about reproductive health, maternal health, child health, preventable diseases, and treatable infections.

As a part of this community health initiative, Gender and Women’s Studies undergraduate students, Megan Kleber and Sarah Maria Donohue, have been awarded a Wisconsin Idea Grant and will travel with Alonso to distribute mosquito nets to pregnant women and children under five to help prevent the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in that particular part of Kenya, malaria.

After the camp, the Mama-Toto (mother-child in Swahili) Mobile Clinic will be launched to serve women in the same communities throughout the year.

Alonso was also recently named a UW-Madison's Outstanding Women of Color honoree for 2009-10 for her work building community to create an inclusive and respectful environment on and off campus.

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