Sarah Chant

Visiting Lecturer in Women's and Gender Studies

Contact
Email:
sc141@wellesley.edu
Department
Women’s and Gender Studies

My research explores the production of queer and trans futures and political imaginaries in the U.S. South, particularly through practices of affect and memory. An anthropologist by training, I’ve conducted research amongst drag performers, activists, archivists, and clergy in Alabama, looking at how trans and queer people use strategies of hope, humor, desire, and imagination to make space for themselves and their communities. I’m currently developing a project on the affective dimensions of contemporary and historical anti-trans and anti-queer legislation in the southeastern United States, and how these histories intersect and overlap with anti-Black and anti-immigrant legislative initiatives in the region. I teach courses in queer theory, feminist theory, and queer popular culture, and have previously taught courses at the intersection of affect theory and trans theory as well as queer and trans histories of the U.S. South. As a physics student turned anthropologist turned gender studies scholar, I am also always interested in thinking and learning about different conceptualizations of space and time across disciplinary boundaries.

Education

  • B.A., New York University
  • M.A., The New School
  • Ph.D., The New School

Current and upcoming courses

Queer Popular Culture

WGST209

This course explores queer popular culture from music, film, and television to visual art and performance, examining how different representations and understandings of sexuality, gender, sex, and queerness emerge through these cultural productions. We will engage with media from different time periods, cultures, and contexts in order to understand how popular culture and ideas around queerness feed into each other and become constitutive of how we understand our own identities. Topics discussed include race and representation, the “bury your gays” trope, camp, homonormativity, art and HIV/AIDS, queerbaiting, and performances of masculinity. We will explore both the possibilities and limitations of queer representation in media, and uncover what makes some popular culture “queer.” Is it about the subject, the narrative, the politics, or the creators? What is gained by identifying something as queer popular culture specifically?

  • Seminar: Intersectional Feminisms

    WGST327

    Emerging initially from legacies of Black feminist thought and articulating the multiple axes along which sexist oppression is experienced, “intersectionality” has exploded into a buzzword within and beyond feminist theory. Despite critiques of intersectionality’s limitations as an analytical concept, the phrase still contains value for feminist thinking and organizing; as Jennifer C. Nash writes, “in the midst of the uncertainties of the everyday, the promise of intersectionality has become even more significant to feminist practice.” This course will look at the many forms that feminism can take through an intersectional lens, tracing and critiquing genealogies of thought and action including trans feminisms, postcolonial and anticolonial feminisms, crip feminisms, indigenous feminisms, and more. Readings will include Nash on rethinking intersectionality, Jasbir Puar on feminism in the service of empire, Marquis Bey on Black trans feminism, and others whose work and activism ignites and engages multiple identities and histories.