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Gender and Sexuality Studies Institute
6 East 16th Street, Room 1019
New York, NY 10003

Co-Directors
McKenzie Wark
Panteá Farvid
Rose Réjouis

For general inquiries about GSSI contact:
genderstudies@newschool.edu

For inquiries about our undergraduate program contact:
genderstudiesminor@newschool.edu

For inquiries about our graduate program contact:
GSS@newschool.edu

Gender and its Discontents Blog

Gender and its Discontents is the blog of the GSSI. Here, we feature selections of the exciting research completed by students in our graduate core course “Gender and its Discontents”, faculty and students opinion pieces, and material on past and forthcoming events.

Feminisms as the Desire to Change Everything and the Ultra-Right Backlash

An interview with Verónica Gago by Chiara Bottici CB: Let’s start with a basic question: do you consider yourself a feminist? When and how did you become a feminist? VG: […]

Cisnormativity and the Trans Visibility Paradox

By Rose Pelham

A while ago, I found myself in a bizarre conversation with a cisgender man who insisted he had a grand theory derived from the supposed exceptionality of trans experience. No […]

The Borderlands of Ukraine: A Preliminary Approach

By Mariah Guevin

As war between Ukraine and their oppressive, autocratic, neighbor to the north escalates, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has declared that all male citizens 18-60 years of age are forbidden from […]

On “Good Life”

By McKenzie Wark

You all know this, but I’ll say it anyway: house music is Black music; techno is Black music. I’m just a guest in these sonic spaces. That’s complicated, as I’m […]

How to Radically Transform Society, with bell hooks

By Fania Noël and Nathalie Batraville

“Love is an action, never simply a feeling” [bell hooks] On December 15, 2021, bell hooks passed away at the age of 69. A university professor, intellectual, feminist, poetess, and […]

Guilty Mind, Guilty Body, Guilty Soul: (Im)Purity Culture in the American Catholic Church

By Emma Cieslik

At the age of 10, Jane peered down at a pristine white flower. “Look at the flower in your hand, Jane. Notice how perfect it is,” Alba said, “How pure. […]

For an Anticapitalist Sexual Politics

By Maíra Marcondes Moreira

There’s something the discussions around identities, whether they are driven by a critique of identitarianism or a defense of identity as a political category, reveal: the divisions within capitalism aren’t […]

Girlhood: An Apocalypse

By Zoey Greenwald

I haven’t had my period in three months. It’s okay. This story doesn’t end with me pregnant. I’m not pregnant anywhere in it. I’m just thinking. Thinking heavy like always, […]

A Plea for Good Manners: A Rapbuttal

By The Lady, Reverend Corporal Austin D. Burke (aka Lil Tit)

This week, the post “A Plea for Good Manners” by Robert Mass (possibly seen here) was brought to my attention. Its contents took me quite by surprise – and so, […]

100 Reasons to Prosecute the Dictator

By Elif Genc

Feminicide is defined as the massacre of women and the killing of women with direct state responsibility. This responsibility of the state includes, delayed legal punishment and impunity. Feminicide refers […]

Unrelenting: Haitian Feminism on the Front Lines

By Fania Noel

“Olmene listened to her attentively while trying to reconcile the mother with the market vendor, with the woman she was discovering. Ermancia realized this and, just before she closed her […]

Essential Strike Manifesto for the 8th of March

By E.A.S.T. (Essential Autonomous Struggles Transnational)

We are the women who are essential for the healing of the entire world from the pandemic. We are doing essential work and yet we find ourselves in miserable conditions: […]

Haunting and Hosting

By Romy Opperman

My original intentions for this post were complicated by three visitations.[1]In addition to the focus on Alexander, my plan was to engage with other Black and decolonial feminist thinkers that […]

Interview: Lydia Caldana, GSSI Student/GSSI Website Developer

By Aaron Neber (Interviewer)

Hi Lydia. To get started, why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself.I’m Lydia Caldana. I am from Brazil and left for Italy in 2009 when I was 17 […]

Liberation For Everybody: A Call For Abolitionist Feminism

By Cailin Potami

DUN-DUN. The theme music starts. Within the next hour, Benson will serve justice to some monster (after Stabler gets a few hits in). The criminal will leave the courtroom in […]

Sexistential Crisis // I. Camus. The Myth of Sissyphus; or, L’Être Étrange

By Rev. Cpl. Austin D. Burke

This post marks the beginning of a series on Sexistential Crisis – taking as ‘focal exemplars’ sequentially: Camus, Fanon, de Beauvoir and Sartre, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Hegel. These are not […]

Intellectual Foremothers

By Ellen Freeberg, Gina Walker, Lara-Zuzan Golesorkhi

Reflections from The New School From 2015 through 2017 we traced the intellectual journey of Frieda Wunderlich, the only female professor to join a cohort of European scholars rescued from […]

Dream of A Keen

By Lana Lin

Before I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I dreamed that I had gained a new internal organ. It was called a “keen,” which afterward I thought might be a hybrid of my kidney and spleen.

Living In The Uncanny

By Lana Lin

Sometimes it snows in April, as Prince sings, but you know it’s uncanny when it hails in May, like it did a few days ago. I live in the epicenter […]

No Longer in Exile: The Legacy and Future of Gender Studies at the New School

No Longer in Exile’ was a two-day conference held in March 26-27, 2010 in celebration of the re- establishment of a gender studies program at The New School university.

Anarchafeminism in Times of COVID with Chiara Bottici

By Chiara Bottici

In this talk, I argue that anarchafeminism is a particularly timely form of feminism, because it is able to articulate a feminist position without turning the latter into yet another […]

Pride Wore White

By McKenzie Wark

White Black trans women step out of the queer chorus The Brooklyn Museum has a sunken forecourt that makes it something of an amphitheater. I’d arrived there on this bright […]

The Dyer’s Hand

By Ann Snitow

Ann Snitow’s retirement from The New School — Ann Snitow gave the following talk on the occasion of her retirement from The New School on April 9, 2019. In their […]

The Privilege & The Imaginal Possibilities of Sexual Fluidity

By Sanjana Pegu

Heterosexuality has been under siege since second-wave feminism. And yet it continues to hold sway, not only among self-identified heterosexuals but also those who disavow and critique it. Like capitalism […]

Anarchafeminist Manifesto 1.0

By The Ongoing Collective

[Translations: Hungarian – Turkish] We live under a global menocracy. Women are oppressed all over the world and all over themselves. In a time when the world has become a […]

The New York State Fertility Mandate and Compulsory Heterosexuality

By Ellen Yom

But a law expanding the right to reproductive choice is far from universal On January 1, 2020, New York became the tenth state to increase access to fertility treatments by […]

Void Bitches

By McKenzie Wark

To be trans is to be already left out of the design of the world. If trans writers have an affinity for the disaster of the world, maybe it’s because […]

Gender Reveal Party Fail

By Emily Breitkopf

On Cisnormativity and its disruptions In late 2016, a YouTube video entitled “Gender Reveal Party Fail” went viral. The video shows a couple named Joe and Leela Krummel standing over […]

The Politics of Female Sexuality in ‘Lipstick Under My Burkha’

By Shiv D. Sharma

What a recent Bollywood film can tell us about risk, pleasure, desire and feminism. In an advisory issued by the Information and Broadcasting ministry in December 2017, the Indian government banned […]

The Weinstein Trial and the #MeToo Movement

By Britta Reuther and Chiara Bottici

This is the text of an interview with Chiara Bottici, conducted by Britta Reuther, for the German TV and radio channel ARD. The Interview which took place on 6 January […]

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