CSWS Annual Review

by Rhiannon Lindgren, PhD Candidate, Department of Philosophy
When one defines an activity as a “labor of love,” we are often referring to an experience that combines feelings of joy, difficulty, fatigue, and gratitude. While the labor of love is a sacrifice, the prepositional qualifier of “love” indicates the motivation for such a sacrifice. One labors out of a sense of love that is both inspiration and reward for a tiresome endeavor.

by Miriam Chorley-Schulz, Assistant Professor, German and Scandinavian Studies
In their zine TimTum—A Trans Jew Zine (1999), Micah Bazant introduced an affirmative layer to the history of who is referred to in Yiddish as timtum (or tumtem). According to Bazant, a timtum is “a sexy, smart, creative, productive Jewish genderqueer.” This was not always the case.

by Jori Celona, Associate Professor, Creative Writing Program
My third novel, The Year of X, begins with Edie X., a mid-career artist, leaving her husband to attend a yearlong artist residency in upstate New York, bringing her young daughter, Lou, along for the ride. Her proposed project is a reimagining of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, in which she plans to document her own top surgery in a series of photographs. But shortly after arriving at the residency, she begins to have bizarre seizures, which hijack her life and art, and alter her sense of personhood in the world.

CSWS is honored to have the paintings of sociologist and CSWS co-founder Miriam M. Johnson (1928–2007), who was known as Mimi by her friends and colleagues, on view throughout our offices in Hendricks Hall. The paintings were donated to the Center after the passing of Mimi’s husband, Ben Johnson, in 2024.

On Feb. 28, 2025, CSWS hosted “Gender as Target: US 2024 Elections and Aftermath,” a teach-in featuring University of Oregon faculty and Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation (GTFF) representatives discussing how gender and race discourses informed the 2024 election cycle and ways we can collectively respond to the barrage of policies impacting immigrant and LGBTQ+ communities today.

by Jenée Wilde, Associate Teaching Professor, Department of English

The Center for the Study of Women in Society has launched a new student-centered research initiative—the CSWS Undergraduate STEAM Summer Fellowship. Over the summer, undergraduate fellows collaborated with University of Oregon faculty mentors to develop interdisciplinary research and creative projects that engage with STEAM fields—science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics. Our STEAM fellows approach their inquiry with gender and intersectionality as an analytical framework.

by Jenée Wilde, Associate Teaching Professor, Department of English

In the Jane Grant Room at CSWS, a dozen students gather around the conference table as their instructor gets the workshop started. This week, classmates in group A are the editors, providing detailed critical and generative feedback to the op-ed writers in group B. Next week, their roles will be reversed. “I really liked that one week we were an editor and the next week we were writing,” said Tanya Gunarathne, a general social science education major and nontraditional student at UO. “Being able to comment on our classmates’ work was intimidating at first, but after a while I was excited to see what everybody wrote, and they were excited to see what I wrote. It was an awesome thing to see.”

The 50th Anniversary celebrations of the Center for the Study of Women and Society committed to supporting research and creative practice that envisioned Feminist Futures. This charge has become ever more urgent this past year as we seem to be living now in a fight or flight mode, where each day a new crisis hijacks our attention and energies. In 2023, for instance, the wage gap for women widened after two decades. The fight to reverse this loss shrinks our capacity to work towards closing that gap, or to address how women of color make substantially less than 84 cents to the dollar...