Gender Division SSSP Newsletter June 2023 Letter from the Chair Hello SSSP Gender Division Members, I hope you all are doing well and enjoying the summer so far! I look forward to connecting with everyone at our upcoming division business meeting and at the SSSP Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. To maximize participation and accessibility, we will hold the division meeting in a virtual format again this year. Details about the time and date are provided below. The division meeting is open to all division members, so please join us to contribute to the future of the division! SSSP is collaborating with the Association of Black Sociologists and Sociologists for Women in Society to offer a Virtual Social Hour this summer. Consider joining this event to connect with colleagues in other organizations and foster future collaborations. Details are provided below. The Gender Division is sponsoring and co-sponsoring many sessions at the upcoming Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. Please remember to register for the conference and make your hotel reservations if you can attend. We are co-sponsoring a joint division reception on Saturday, August 19 at 7:15pm. This is a great space to network with members of the division as well as other SSSP members. The Gender Division collaborated with other divisions to propose a Resolution to Support Gender-Affirming Healthcare and a Resolution to Oppose State Interference with Academic Freedom. If approved, we will need volunteers to help carry out the work involved. We are grateful that SSSP provides a mechanism for members to propose resolutions to address social injustices, and we hope you will join us to support these efforts. I am excited to announce that the Gender Division will have a new Division Chair and Vice-Chair beginning in August! Please help me welcome Pallavi Banerjee as our new Division Chair and Meghna Bhat as our new Division Vice-Chair. Pallavi and Meghna were elected by our division members. I am certain they will do an excellent job leading the division! While I will be rotating out of the role of Division Chair, I have been elected to serve as the Chairperson of the Council of Division Chairs. I look forward to continuing to support the Gender Division in this role and working with other division chairs to advance the mission of SSSP. We also have many members to congratulate on their achievements! Our division award winners are announced below, as well as our member accomplishments. Congratulations to all! Warm Regards, Shannon K. Carter (she/her) University of Central Florida Welcome Incoming Gender Division Leadership Congratulations to our new Division Leaders! Incoming Division Chair: Pallavi Banerjee Pallavi Banerjee is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary. She is the co-founder of the Canada chapter of the Sociologist for Women in Society (SWS) and the current Co-Chair of the Sister to Sister Committee at SWS and an outgoing council member of Sex and Gender Council at ASA. Her research is situated at the intersections of immigration, gender, families, unpaid and paid labour, intersectionality, and transnationalism. She is the author of the awarding-winning book The Opportunity Trap: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families and the Failures of Dependent-Visa Policy published in March 2022 by New York University Press. Her other award-winning research has been published in many peer-reviewed journals including the American Behavioral Scientist, Contexts, Sociological Forum, Gender and Society, Gender, Work and Organization, Women, Gender and Families of Color among others. She directs the Critical Gender, Intersectionality and Migration Research Group at the University of Calgary, and her research is supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Canada and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). Message from Incoming Chair: “I am honored to have been elected as the Chair of the Gender Division of SSSP and excited to be working alongside Meghna Bhat as the Vice-Chair elect. I am looking forward to building on the work of past Chairs to continue forging critical feminist, transnational, inclusive safe-er spaces and coalitions for intersectionality marginalized women and non-binary members within SSSP. I also commit to spotlight ideas and accomplishments of women and non-binary and queer scholars, activists, and practitioners of social justice oriented work so that we are centering these voices in our academic discourses and decentering hegemonic discourses.” Incoming Division Vice-Chair: Meghna Bhat Dr. Meghna Bhat (she/her/hers) is a nationally recognized independent gender and social justice consultant, interdisciplinary feminist scholar, educator, and storyteller based in Sacramento, CA. Her research interests include global perspectives on gendered representations of violence in pop culture and cinema, exploring the use of storytelling and film as feminist pedagogical tools for culture and narrative change, and survivor healing using transformative and restorative justice. Dr. Bhat currently serves as an elected member of the SSSP Anti-Harassment Committee and as an active member of the SSSP Gender Division. As a 2022 Seeding Creativity Individual Artist grant recipient offered by the Sacramento Office of Arts and Culture, Dr. Bhat created Gulabi Stories: A South Asian Healing Initiative to center the stories of the larger South Asian immigrant and refugee diaspora. Message from Incoming Vice-Chair: “I am thrilled and honored to be nominated as the Vice-Chair of the SSSP Gender Division and to work with Pallavi in this role. I am excited to continue (a) elevating, unpacking, and amplifying multidisciplinary research and social problems using a feminist lens, and further (b) building and bringing together an inclusive, intersectional, and diverse community of researchers, independent scholars, social justice practitioners, and community organizers that advance the values and mission of our SSSP Gender Division.” Gender Division Business Meeting The Gender Division Business Meeting will be held on Monday, July 17 at 1:00pm EST via zoom. The Business Meeting is open to all members. This is a great opportunity to network with other division members, and have input into division business including division priorities, budget, and conference sessions for the 2024 Annual Meeting. Please join us! Zoom link: https://ucf.zoom.us/j/98120826353 Virtual Social Hour 2023 Annual Meeting Same Problem, Different Day: Recognizing and Responding to Recurring Social Problems Led by Dr. Shirley A. Jackson, SSSP President 2022-2023, Portland State University Gender Sessions in the 2023 Meeting * Gender Surveillance and Drug Use * Are Bathrooms Enough: Addressing LGBTQIA Issues in Higher Education * Gender and the Environment * CRITICAL DIALOGUE: From Roe to Dobbs: The Far-Reaching Impacts of Gaining and Losing the Right to Sexual Privacy * Gendered Violence * PAPERS IN THE ROUND: Gender and Representations in Mass Media, Social Media, and Digital Media * PAPERS IN THE ROUND: Research on Gender, Sexuality, Sports, Leisure and/or the Body * Gender and Work * Gender, Sexuality, and the Law * Black Feminist Theory, Practice, and Activism: Connecting Past and Present- THEMATIC SSSP Resolution Proposals The Gender Division participated in the submission of 2 Resolution Proposals to the SSSP Board of Directors. One is a Resolution to Support Gender-Affirming Healthcare, submitted with the Division of Health, Health Policy, and Health Services, and one is a Resolution to Oppose State Interference with Academic Freedom, submitted with the Educational Problems Division, Conflict, Social Action and Change Division, and Sexual Behavior, Politics and Communities Division. If the resolutions are approved, we will need volunteers to help create statements, collect email addresses, and be available for media interviews on these topics. Please email Shannon Carter at skcarter@ucf.edu if you are interested in volunteering. Gender Division Award Winners Congratulations to our Gender Division Award winners! These scholars demonstrated excellence in advancing the field of gender research, and we are privileged to honor their accomplishments. Student Paper Award: "Gendered Money and Relational Work: Women’s Money and Labor in Matrimonial Disputes in India" Upasana Garnaik (ugarnaik@utexas.edu), University of Texas at Austin. Upasana Garnaik is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Upasana is a lawyer by training. After receiving her LLM from Duke Law School in 2012, she has been working as an academic and practitioner in the field of gender and family law. Outstanding Article Award: Shuster, Stef M. (sshuster@msu.edu), and Laurel Westbrook (westbrol@gvsu.edu). 2022. “Reducing the Joy Deficit in Sociology: A Study of Transgender Joy.” Social Problems. stef m. shuster is an associate professor at Lyman Briggs College and the Department of Sociology. They earned their Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Iowa, with a certificate in Gender Studies, and their B.A. in Sociology from Indiana University, Bloomington. Dr. Westbrook received their Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in 2009 and is currently a Full Professor of Sociology at Grand Valley State University. Their research and teaching interests include gender, sexuality, violence, transgender studies, social movements, the media, methods, and poststructuralist theory. Their current projects focus on the inner workings of the sex/gender/sexuality system. (Bio provided by Dr. Westbrook’s personal website https://sites.google.com/site/laurelwestbrook/) Member Accomplishments & Publications Heeya Datta successfully defended their dissertation prospectus, “From Decriminalization to Cultural Legitimization: Narratives of Lived Experiences of LGBTQ Communities in India,” at Louisiana State University. Dr. Penny Harvey has been promoted to associate professor and recently had a baby! New Publications Carson, Saphronia and Shannon K. Carter. 2023. “Abortion as a Public Health Risk: A Critical Discourse Analysis of COVID-19 Anti-Abortion Legislation.” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, special issue “The Politics of Abortion 50 Years after Roe.” 48(4): 10449950. https://doi.org/10.1215/03616878-10449950. Chen, M. (2022). The Compounded2 Nature of the Covid Pandemic on Survivors of Sexual Violence. Social Movement Studies 0(0): 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2022.2134110 Westbrook, Laurel. 2023. “The Matrix of Violence: Intersectionality and Necropolitics in the Murder of Transgender People in the United States, 1990–2019.” Gender & Society 37(3):413–46. doi: 10.1177/08912432231171172. Headley, Vernon, Annie Jones and Shannon K. Carter. 2023. “Beyond the Positivism/Non-positivism Binary as a Step Toward Inclusive Sociology.” Sociology of Race & Ethnicity https://doi.org/10.1177/23326492231170533