2021 is a significant year for women. Kamala Harris is the first female U.S. vice president and the highest-ranking woman elected to public office in American history. The National Women’s History Alliance has declared this year’s theme to be “Valiant Women of the Vote: Refusing to be Silenced.” And the Department of Women’s Studies in the College of Social Sciences will be renamed the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies in Fall 2021.
“This change better reflects our current curriculum offering,” said L. Ayu Saraswati, associate professor and department chair. “It also invites students who are part of and interested in LGBTIQPA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, Queer/Questioning, Pansexual and Asexual) communities and Queer Studies to find a home department at UH Mānoa.”
The women’s studies department was established in 1975 with a mission to serve the public “by generating and transmitting knowledge pertaining to democracy, social justice and human diversity.” It has done that exceptionally well in 2020 and 2021, as evidenced by high-achieving faculty and students who include:
- Professor Monisha Das Gupta, who co-edited a special issue of Amerasia Journal with Lynn Fujiwara at the University of Oregon at the invitation of the journal’s editor, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu. “As Asian-American feminists, we wanted to feature research articles, artwork and essays that reflected on the everyday experiences of migrants and refugees with legal regimes that have evolved amid White Nationalism. We worked with established scholars and those who are new to our field. It was rewarding to help graduate students and post-doctoral fellows to publish their work,” said Das Gupta.
- Student Sarah Michal Hamid, who was featured by Teen Vogue on Women’s Equality Day 2020, for serving as co-coordinator of the AF3IRM Hawaii chapter, a national anti-imperialist transnational feminist organization. “That’s where I met with people who welcomed my experience because they understood it, too. They were also women of color, transnational women; their families were immigrants, and their homelands had undergone serious colonization. That was where I was able to connect to this wonderful network of sisterhood and solidarity,” Hamid told the magazine. (See separate Q&A feature.)
- Graduate Austin Ajimura, who completed bachelor’s degrees in women’s studies and biology in 2019. He is now lead patient advocate at the Hawaiʻi Homeless Outreach and Medical Education (HOME) project at the UH John A. Burns School of Medicine. HOME provides free medical care for sheltered and unsheltered houseless populations on O‘ahu. “I regularly work with individuals who struggle with mental illness, drug addiction, suicidal and homicidal ideations, as well as victims and perpetrators of domestic violence,” Ajimura said.
- Professor Mire Koikari, author of Gender, Culture and Disaster in Post-3.11 Japan, published by Bloomsbury Press in October 2020. It has been described as “essential reading for all those wishing to understand local and global politics of precarity and its proposed solutions amid the rising tide of pandemics, ecological hazards, industrial disasters and humanitarian crises.”
Department chair Saraswati has garnered quite a few accolades herself. She is the author of a forthcoming book, Pain Generation: Social Media, Feminist Activism and the Neoliberal Selfie (NYU Press), and one of her essays was recently highlighted as among the most impactful works in the field over the past 20 years.
Plus, she proudly shares that the department now has its own podcast, “Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies,” on KTUH, the radio stream from UH Mānoa. “Not only is this podcast a place to archive valuable work by both students and faculty, it will strengthen the department’s visibility and accessibility,” said Crystal Kwok, a women’s studies graduate certificate student who runs the program. “These exciting developments are a perfect way to commemorate a new name in a new, exciting time for a visionary department.”
