Christoph Hanssmann (Department of Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies)

Over the past two decades, medical and therapeutic approaches to transgender patients have changed radically, from treating a supposed pathology to offering gender-affirming care. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in New York City and Buenos Aires, Care without Pathology: How Trans-Health Activists are Changing Medicine (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) by Christoph Hanssmann moves across the Americas to show how trans- health activists have taken on the project of depathologization.

Susy J. Zepeda (Department of Chicana/o/x Studies)

In Queering Mesoamerican Diasporas: Remembering Xicana Indígena Ancestries (University of Illinois Press, 2022), Susy Zepeda highlights the often overlooked yet intertwined legacies of Chicana feminisms and queer decolonial theory through the work of select queer Indígena cultural producers and thinkers.

By tracing the ancestries and silences of gender-nonconforming people of color, she addresses colonial forms of epistemic violence and methods of transformation, in particular spirit research. Zepeda also uses archival materials, raised ceremonial altars, and analysis of decolonial artwork in conjunction with oral histories to explore the matriarchal roots of Chicana/x and Latina/x feminisms. As she shows, these feminisms are forms of knowledge that people can remember through Indigenous-centered visual narratives, cultural wisdom, and spirit practices.

Ryan Lee Cartwright (Department of American Studies) 

The queer recluse, the shambling farmer, the clannish hill folk — white rural populations have long disturbed the American imagination, alternately revered as moral, healthy, and hardworking, and feared as antisocial or socially uncouth. In Peculiar Places: A Queer Crip History of White Rural Nonconformity (University of Chicago Press, September 2021), Ryan Lee Cartwright examines the deep archive of these contrary formations, mapping racialized queer and disability histories of white social nonconformity across the rural U.S. from the 1910s to the 1990s. 

Eric Louis Russell (Department of French and Italian) 

In Alpha Masculinity: Hegemony in Language and Discourse (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Eric Louis Russell, unravels the language mechanisms behind the myth and the reality of the American alpha male. 

Through a detailed, multi-level analysis, Russell shows how the Alpha figure combines elements of dominance, normativity, and androcentrism and how these forces intersect with neoliberal and pseudoscientific discourses to establish a uniquely hybridized male hegemony, one that is familiar to most, but whose internal mechanisms remain largely unquestioned and unexamined.

Bob Ostertag (formerly of Department of Cinema and Digital Media)

In Sex Science Self: A Social History of Estrogen, Testosterone, and Identity (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), Bob Ostertag, examines the development of estrogen and testosterone as pharmaceuticals. He situates this history alongside the story of an increasingly visible and political lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender population. He argues that scholarship on the development of sex hormone chemicals does not take into account LGBT history and activism, nor has work in LGBT history fully considered the scientific research that has long attempted to declare a chemical essence of gender.

Howard Chiang (formerly of the Department of History)

For much of Chinese history, the eunuch stood out as an exceptional figure at the margins of gender categories. Amid the disintegration of the Qing Empire, men and women in China began to understand their differences in the language of modern science. In After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia University Press, August 2018), Howard Chiang, traces the genealogy of sexual knowledge from the demise of eunuchism to the emergence of transsexuality, showing the centrality of new epistemic structures to the formation of Chinese modernity.

Elizabeth Freeman (Department of English)

In Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Duke University Press, 2010), the late Professor Elizabeth Freeman challenges queer theory’s recent emphasis on loss and trauma. Freeman foregrounds bodily pleasure in the experience and representation of time as she interprets an eclectic archive of queer literature, film, video, and art. She examines work by visual artists who emerged in a commodified, “postfeminist” and “postgay” world.

Elizabeth Freeman (Department of English)

In The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture (Duke University Press, 2002), Freeman explores the significance of the wedding ceremony by asking what the wedding becomes when you separate it from the idea of marriage. Freeman finds that weddings — as performances, fantasies, and rituals of transformation — are sites for imagining and enacting forms of social intimacy other than monogamous heterosexuality. 

Edited by Professor Emeritus Gregory M. Herek (Department of Psychology) and Jared B. Jobe and Ralph M. Carney 

Out in Force: Sexual Orientation and the Military (University of Chicago Press, 1996) refutes the notions that homosexuality is incompatible with military service and that gay personnel would undermine order and discipline. Leading social science scholars of sexual orientation and the military offer reasoned and comprehensive discussions about military organizations, human sexuality, and attitudes toward individuals and groups. They demonstrate forcefully that the debate is really about the military as an institution, and how that institution will adapt to larger social changes.  

Researchers at UC Davis are expanding into positive psychology to understand how social connection and the experience of joy can help people across LGBTQ+ communities to thrive.

In 2012, the California legislature mandated a more complete representation of everyone who contributed to the state’s and nation’s histories. The UC Davis California History-Social Science Project (CHSSP) brought together leading teachers and scholars to create a LGBTQ+ curriculum that connect all students to a richer history we all share.