Critical Gender & Sexuality Studies Reading Group
The Critical Gender and Sexuality Studies Reading Group is an interdisciplinary and cross-generational space where faculty working on questions of gender and sexuality from across the college come together to discuss recently published scholarship and literature.
Created by Dr. Nadia Guessous, Associate Professor of Feminist & Gender Studies, in collaboration with Dr. Tip Ragan, Professor of History, the Critical Gender and Sexuality Studies Reading Group is one major way we have sought to contribute to the intellectual life of the department and to feminist and gender studies on campus.
The reading group is also meant as a way of reclaiming a more holistic conception of our academic selves as faculty working at a teaching-oriented institution where we are frequently called upon to center student needs—and thus our role as teachers—above all else, and where we often lack enough substantial and sustained opportunities to learn from each other as faculty or to delight in collaborative intellectual inquiry on our own terms.
Since its inaugural meeting in the summer of 2016, and thanks to generous funding from the Feminist & Gender Studies Department and the Dean of the Faculty, the group has met to discuss a book or a set of book chapters over lunch nearly every block. The group took a hiatus during the early COVID-19 pandemic years but is now back in full swing.
Over the years, the group has consisted of 8-12 regular members from diverse fields, including Psychology, Sociology, Southwest Studies, Philosophy, Film and New Media, Religion, Theater/Dance, Spanish and Portuguese, English, Philosophy, Japanese, Music, and History, allowing us to strengthen our intellectual ties with colleagues across the college and to contribute to our intellectual growth as faculty interested in the interdisciplinary study of gender and sexuality.
Please contact Professor Guessous at nguessous@coloradocollege.edu if you are interested in joining or learning more about the group.
Some of the books we have read so far include:
-
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps for the Times Ahead (Haymarket Books, 2025)
-
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
-
Emily Lim Rogers’ Sick Work: Exhaustion, Labor, and Invisible Illness (Duke University Press, 2026)
-
Jina B. Kim's Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing (Duke University Press, 2025)
- Kong Pheng Pha's Queering the Hmong Diaspora: Racial Subjectivity and the Myth of Hyperheterosexuality (University of Washington Press, 2025)
- Natalie Lauren Belisle's Caribbean Inhospitality: The Poetics of Strangers at Home (Rutgers University Press, 2025)
- Richard Quang-Anh Tran's Queer Vietnam: A History of Gender Transgression, 1920–1945 (Stanford University Press, 2025)
-
Jennifer Nash’s Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (Duke University Press, 2019)
- Lilia Soto’s Girlhood in the Borderlands: Mexican Teens Caught in the Crossroads of Migration (NYU Press, 2018)
- Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Duke University Press, 2006)
- Mimi Thi Nguyen’s The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Duke University Press, 2012)
- Amber Jamilla Musser’s Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018)
- C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017)
- Joan Scott’s Sex and Secularism (Princeton University Press, 2018)
- Jennifer Terry’s Attachments to War: Biomedical Logics and Violence in Twenty-First-Century America (Duke University Press, 2017)
- Emily Hobson’s Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left (University of California Press, 2016)
- Nicole Seymour’s Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination (University of Illinois Press, 2013)
- Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015)
- Eli Clare’s Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (Duke University Press, 2017)
- Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life (Duke University Press, 2017)
- Lal Zimman, Jenny Davis, and Joshua Raclaw’s Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender and Sexuality (Oxford University Press, 2014)
- Helen King’s The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence (Routledge, 2013)
- Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay’s Vulnerability in Resistance (Duke University Press, 2016)
- Alison Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip (Indiana University Press, 2013)
- Dean Spade’s Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law (Duke University Press, 2015)
-
Saleem Haddad’s Guapa (Other Press, 2016)
