Center for the Study of Genders and Sexualities

Spring 2024 Calendar

February 29th:

Cyprus Marques

Philosophy Dept.

Trans Studies Graduate Fellow

Montebello Room, USU  3:00pm - 4:15pm

March 14:

The Young Lords: Puerto Rican Radicals Fight for Gender Justice in the 1960s

Dr. Johanna Fernandez

CUNY Baruch

WGSS Co-Sponsored Event

Gender & Sexualities Resource Center, USU, 3rd Floor 10:50am-12:05pm

March 25th

Archiving Chicanx and Latinx Feminisms

Dr Bernadine Hernández - University of New Mexico

Dr. Anita Huízar-Hernández - University of Arizona

Dr. Viviana Beatriz MacManus - Occidental College

Room TBD     3:00pm-4:30pm

April 16th

Dr. Alisa Bierria - UCLA

The Ann Garry and Sharon Bishop endowed lecture in Feminist Philosophy

Room TBD     3:00pm-4:30

CSGS Annual Student Research Conference

April 25-26: 20th Annual Student Research Conference

Gender, Sexuality, and Power

Alhambra Room, USU

April 25: Keynote Lecture with Dr. C. Riley Snorton - University of Chicago

LA Rooms AB, USU

Fall 2023 Calendar

 Dr. Zhe 'Meredith' Zhang

Dr. Zhe 'Meredith' Zhang got her PhD in Sociology from Ohio State University, then spent a few years at Rice University for a post-doctorate fellowship. Right before she became a Golden Eagle, as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, she was in the Ozarks as an Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas. She's broadly interested in anything related to family, health, gender, sexuality, and aging/life course. Most of her current work explores how family characteristics and experiences shape the health and well-being of sexual and gender minorities.

Meredith's Research Abstract

Existing literature finds that caregiving can be stressful and have negative health effects. Further, the association between caregiving and mental health is found to be more negative among women than men. However, relatively little research has considered the joint role of gender and sexual identity in shaping individual caregiving experience and mental health outcomes. To address this research gap, this study uses data from BRFSS, a probability-based sample of adults living in 36 U.S. states between 2015 and 2021 and examines the association between mental well-being (poor mental health days in a month) and caregiving status (providing unpaid care or not) by considering the joint role of gender (i.e., man or woman) and sexual identity (i.e., heterosexual, gay/lesbian, or bisexual). Preliminary results suggest that the gendered association between caregiving and mental well-being may be more prominent among heterosexuals than sexual minorities.

Fun Facts about Meredith

She loves learning languages. She speaks Mandarin and Cantonese, and she has a 1900-day streak learning Spanish in Duolingo as of February 2024. She is also an avid podcast listener, who tries to include interesting podcasts in her class.

Dr. Julian Nykolak

Dr. Julian Nykolak is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History. He received his PhD in 2017 from the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester and his research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Whitney Independent Study Program, and a Chateaubriand Fellowship. His writing has appeared in Art Journal, Art History, and Selva, and he is currently completing his book manuscript entitled “The Ends of the Avant-Garde: Painting and Politics circa 1968.” At Cal State LA he is the chair of the Art History option and recently coordinated a lecture series that brought contemporary artists Beatriz Cortez, Kang Seung Lee, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Sayre Gomez, Gala Poras-Kim, and Rafa Esparza to campus.

While holding this fellowship, Nykolak will begin a chapter for his second book project, “Impossible Communities: The East Village Art Scene,” on the transgender artist Greer Lankton. Lankton gained renown for her meticulously fabricated yet motley dolls, which she subjected to perpetual change under the watchful eye of photography—challenging the idea of the static work of art while staging the body as transformable and gender as successive. This project considers Lankton’s doll-making alongside her work dressing windows at a cult East Village vintage boutique to explore notions of lifestyle, self-fashioning, and the body as property as part of a larger argument concerned with the model of the subject that took shape within the rubble of the neoliberal remaking of the self and unmaking of the social in the early 1980s.

• Present your research at the annual "Gender, Sexuality, and Power" student research conference

• Receive a research award for your conference presentation

• Attend CSGS and GSRC coffee hours to tell us who you want to bring to campus

• Apply to become a CSGS student administrative assistant

• Apply for the CSGS Faculty Research Fellowship for one semester of course release

• Attend the Faculty Fellow Research Lecture and CSGS events

• Join the CSGS faculty advisory board to develop collegial ties

• Chair a student panel (from your class or otherwise) at the CSGS student research conference

• Meet past and present community partners: Trans Latin@ Coalition, Reach LA, Allies in Arts, ONE Archives, Project Rebound, Words Uncaged

• Participate in collaborative grant writing with community agencies

• Join the Community Engagement Committee to help build relationships between the community and the academy