Gender, Sexuality, & Fem Studies

Do you like board games? Are you interested in Queer Studies? Are you committed to social justice? Join us for a Queer Studies GAME NIGHT!


Students in Professor Carly Thomsen’s GSFS 289: Introduction to Queer Critique class created board games that translate the arguments of complicated academic texts into a format that can circulate beyond the classroom. Join us to play our fun games—and learn more about queer studies in the process!
Game night snacks provided!

Why are 130 million girls around the globe not being educated and what can we do about it? Inspired by the film of the same name, Tanya Lee Stone’s Girl Rising tackles these questions. Stone will explore how educating girls is the single most powerful tool we have to make our world a safer, healthier, more functional place. She will unpack the major obstacles to education, including where and why they happen and how we can easily be activists. Q&A invited.

Four exceptional women mount grassroots campaigns against powerful incumbents in Knock Down the House (Rachel Lears, USA, 2018, 90 mins.), an inspiring documentary that takes a look at the 2018 midterm elections that tipped the balance of power. When tragedy struck her family in the middle of the financial crisis, Bronx-born Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had to work double shifts as a bartender to save her home from foreclosure.

Join us for a screening of Prof. Thomsen’s documentary “In Plain Sight” about LGBTQ women in the rural upper Midwest who want to stay. Made with the collaboration of Middlebury students. Popcorn will be served.

Vessel (Diana Whitten, 2014, USA, 90 mins.)

The fat ‘n’ hairy collective will be hosting a student-led reading group of Roxane Gay’s “Hunger: A Memoir of My Body.” Roxane Gay writes with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care.

In this talk, Professor Louisa Stein (FMMC) looks at how we transform media by weaving it into our everyday lives. She examines the transformative work of fans creating gender-bending cosplay music videos (CMVs) for the anime series Yuri On Ice. In their ongoing release of videos, these fan authors intertwine the narrative seriality of Yuri on Ice with serial narratives of their own lives. In so doing, they embody, recreate, repeat, and transform key emotional moments and images that, in their repetition, affectively bind together larger networks of community and self-authorship.

GSFS students Rubin Edlin ’19.5, Elizabeth Sawyer ’19, and Rebecca Wishnie ’20 report on their year-long effort to create a digital infrastructure for archival materials relating to sexual violence at Middlebury and activism to eradicate it.

GSFS Senior majors! Please join us for a reception in your honor. We look forward to seeing you and greeting your family and friends.