One could think of gender and sexuality in very contemporary terms—or that the terms relate only to a small fraction of the population. But for Prof. Daisy Delogu, the faculty director of UChicago’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality—it’s a misconception that she and the Center’s interdisciplinary approach aim to correct.
“In my opinion, there’s no realm of experience, or endeavor, or inquiry that remains untouched by questions of gender and sexuality,” said Delogu, a scholar of medieval French literature who took over as faculty director last July.
The Center was founded in 1996 after a decade of faculty and student self-organization. Over the course of its nearly 30 years of consolidating work and creating curriculum on gender and sexuality and in feminist, gay and lesbian, and queer studies, the Center also has engaged the campus and local communities with guest lectures, conferences, and other programming. This past year, the CSGS saw its largest undergraduate class with 19 fourth-year majors, and awarded 15 graduate certificates.
We talked with Delogu, who has been a member of UChicago’s faculty since 2003, about her experiences with the Center and its ongoing mission to bridge research and coursework with student development, leadership, and coalition building.
Note: This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
The Center’s core mission is to use an interdisciplinary approach to critically study the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality at UChicago. Why is this so important?
These questions pertain to every discipline you could think of—I can see someone trying to come up with one like: ‘What about minerals, what do those have to do with gender and sexuality?’ But even in the hard sciences, those are disciplines that exist in institutional structures, and one could observe that a lot of the people in those disciplines are men—so what's that about? Maybe minerals have less to do in an obvious way with gender and sexuality, but the way that we carry out our research, the questions we ask, who's involved, who's not involved, what that research produces in terms of results, and how those are or could be deployed, all those questions are social questions. As soon as you're involved in any kind of social question, you're embedded in relationships that of necessity involve questions of sex, gender, or sexuality.
The connection between medieval French literature and gender and sexuality isn’t necessarily obvious. How do those two subjects relate in your own research?
I think many people think of gender and sexuality in very contemporary terms. This is something that as a medievalist, I really am constantly pushing back against, because the fact is we all inhabit bodies, and we all move with those bodies through the world. Just like they do today, people 1,000 years ago thought about what it meant to be an embodied person in the world with other people and non-people. We might have terminology or concepts or specificity to our own time, which is real, but that doesn’t mean that other people in other places and times weren’t also struggling with similar sets of questions, or issues, or constraints. For me, it’s not that the details are somehow trans historical, but the basic fact of being a person with a body in society—that, to me, can and should be studied across time and place.
Can you talk about some of the recent work that has been facilitated or supported by the Center?
With the help of the College, we’re funding eight summer internships for undergraduate students who are working at organizations in and outside of Chicago, including the Chicago Abortion Fund, Digital4Good, Domestic Violence Intervention Program of Iowa City, and Ci3. We also provide research and travel funding for undergraduates, which last year supported expenses for several students, including several BA theses.
In addition, we have a research fund that was created in honor of the late Prof. Lauren Berlant called the Unfundable Fund for Gender & Sexuality Research. It is really meant to fund forms of inquiry that fall between disciplinary boundaries and that might not otherwise receive funding. This year’s recipient is a Ph.D. student both in English and in TAPS who is working on a hybrid scholarly artistic project in which she will produce musical scores.
For the first time this year, we also offered course development prizes for grad students. We picked two winning courses, entitled The Politics of Homophobia and Indigenous Feminisms of Latin America.
—Prof. Jacqueline Stewart
