Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies
For urgent matters, please email the department chair, Dr. Lori Baralt (Lori.Baralt@csulb.edu).
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Women’s Feminist History Month
We are living in a moment of virulent backlash against feminism and the assault on women’s and marginalized communities’ rights and gender equality. White-supremacist nationalist, Christian-chauvinist, misogyny has resurged in this country over decades, but we are watching this extremist illiberal ideology spread its tentacles across sociocultural, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic domains to assume absolute power.
All over the world, authoritarian governments organize, in part, around controlling the bodies, lives, and identities of women and marginalized communities. The manifestations of this control are many and varied. Attacks on sexual and reproductive health, transgender identities, queerness, critical race theory, and academic freedom are gaining momentum nationwide and globally. These are hallmarks of increasing patriarchal authoritarianism (e.g., traditional family, hypermasculinity, forced motherhood), fascism, and thus declining democracy.
We have never needed feminist thinking, action, and organizing more than we do in this current moment. Feminisms offer ideas, frameworks, histories, ideologies, and strategies to combat the aggressive attack on women and femininity that we are witnessing gain momentum. These are serious issues, and we cannot afford to trivialize the actual power grab that an emboldened right wing is making at all levels of our communities and governments at the expense of women and marginalized groups right now.
We have answers in feminisms.
WGSS’s vision of Women’s Feminist History Month this year is marked less as a celebratory occasion and rather as an urgent and solemn time to remind us that we should not squander the laborious effort—the energy spent, the deep thinking, the brave acts, the risks taken, the lives lost—and the hard-won lessons learned from feminist knowledge and activism developed locally and transnationally for over more than a century. WGSS calls on our campus citizenry and communities to renew our commitment, amplify our voices, and use our skills to advocate, defend, and secure access, opportunities, and rights for women and marginalized populations. Our humanity is at risk if we do not take a stand and mobilize to be on the right side of history.