PCSW Women's Research Colloquium 2022

Additional Project Authors: Drs. Sabrina Alimahomed, Araceli Esparza, and Analena Hope Hassberg

The COVID-19 pandemic presented a variety of challenges for faculty in terms of teaching, research, and service. For academic parents and caregivers, particularly mothers, COVID-19 was a tipping point, creating conflicting expectations as we navigated working full-time from home while caregiving full-time for our children. This presentation will document the challenges faced by academic moms, with attention to how these challenges vary based on intersecting identities, that were exacerbated by the pandemic, our COVID-19 campus organizing work, and the need for continued institutional change going forward to support parenting and caregiving faculty.

Slides from Talk HERE. Resources & Refs HERE

Instagram @little.justice.readers

Additional Project Author: Tia Sherèe Gaynor

This research adds to emerging issues of intersectionality and public service provision through examining how transgender women of color (trans WOC) are interacting with U.S. social welfare offices. Using data from the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey we uncover evidence that trans WOC are more likely to avoid social welfare offices and face discrimination in social welfare offices, relative to other trans identifying individuals, such as white trans women. Scholars and administrators of social welfare programs, including Social Security related benefits, should be aware of the potential for public benefit avoidance and administrative discrimination directed toward historically marginalized groups, and prioritize social equity considerations among clients facing compounded intersectional barriers.

Slides from Talk HERE. References HERE.

Recent Relevant Publication: Intersectionality and Social Welfare: Avoidance and Unequal Treatment among Transgender Women of Color

While much information provided at this time of the pandemic points to the United States being in a state of economic recovery, the U.S. labor market numbers show that Black women remain among the least recovered. Makisha Glover-Hill will participate in discussion on how the COVID-19 Pandemic has highlighted the consistency of economic harm to Black women in the labor market across all industries.

Resource slide from Talk HERE.

This ethnographic podcast is the story of one person on their journey to realizing

their identity. Using first-person perspective, Emi provides a picture of what reality is for many gender expansive individuals in Western society, as well as illustrates how identity changes over time.

In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler seeks to complicate gender categories toward a broader set of political goals. I will argue that Butler identifies and takes steps toward rectifying a nihilism present in liberal feminism by advocating for a complication of gender categories. From this, I will claim that embracing a more expansive definition of the group ‘women’ is a step toward Nietzschean joyful experimentation in a collaborative sense.

Using a case study of Idaho’s “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act” and its subsequent legal challenge in Hecox v. Little (2020), I examine the legal construction of gender by the transmisogynistic state. Using

a trans feminist framework, I argue that state transmisogyny relies on the logic of cis sexism to legally construct gender in ways that reinforce oppositional and traditional sexism. I find that the state of Idaho constructed a gender order based on sexist biologics, excluding trans women and girls to “protect” cisgender women and girls in a demonstration of protectionist state transmisogyny.