2022 ISSG Prize Winners Announced!

1. What inspired you to focus on your topic for your submission to the Women's and Gender Studies Award?

I wrote the initial draft of “A College Issue” in the fall of 2018, as part of Janet Jakobsen’s seminar on Feminist Inquiry. At the time, I was a member of the survivor advocacy group No Red Tape Columbia, and I sought to articulate some of what I had learned about how universities so often fail to support student survivors of sexual violence. No Red Tape was frequently at odds with Columbia’s Title IX office, and when we would meet with administrators to propose even minor changes we would often be met with open hostility. Many of these proposals were the kinds of ideas we might take as a given in women’s and gender studies.

For instance, as of the fall of 2019, it was still Columbia policy to consider a participant in a sexual encounter displaying signs of physiological sexual arousal as part of the evidence in determining whether or not they gave consent. This goes against the extensive body of research on arousal non-concordance, which shows unambiguously that physiological arousal is involuntary and is not a reliable indicator of enjoyment of or desire for sex. Furthermore, questions about displaying arousal during an assault are deeply invasive and may be unnecessarily retraumatizing for survivors. After unsuccessfully trying to explain this to members of Columbia’s Title IX office, No Red Tape released an op-ed detailing the problem with this policy. In response, Columbia chose to double down. To my knowledge, this remains part of Columbia’s policy today.

This experience and an array of similar ones led me to become deeply skeptical of the university’s Title IX office and its approach to the epidemic of sexual violence on campuses across the nation. That’s why it was such a major revelation when Dr. Jakobsen’s class introduced me to critical university studies. Learning that the university’s orientation towards profit motives and prestige can incentivize it to undermine members of its own community helped me unravel a lot of the contradictions I saw in the Columbia Title IX office.

In “A College Issue”, I focus in particular on the contradictions present in consent education materials. As I argue there, the university’s motivations to sell itself to its students and distance itself from any connection to blame can be seen through a careful critical reading of the presentation materials. The result of acceding to these pressures, I argue, is that the presentations fail to acknowledge that universities are not only educational institutions, but are also communities, and that sexual violence is a pervasive harm which affects all members of those communities. And in seeking to motivate its student audience solely through legal obligation, the presentation—and the universities it was designed for—fail to address the emotional and interpersonal dimensions of effective sexual violence response.

2. What inspired you to focus on your submission to the Queer Studies Award?

Perhaps because of trans women’s comparatively large representation in the tech industry, indie video games have come to be a staple of the community’s artistic and literary production alongside zines, poetry chapbooks, and Medium essays. (For an example of a clearly literary video game, see Porpentine Charity Heartscape’s Howling Dogs.) However, queer game studies remains a rather small field, and articles which give careful attention to video games made by trans authors are relatively few and far between. It is into this space that I produced “Handmade Trajectories” as a work of archival care. My aim was to shore up some small fraction of the work of internet archaeology and literary interpretation needed to preserve these important digital works by trans authors and to attend to understanding their essential value.

I chose Anna Anthropy’s dys4ia as my subject of analysis because of contradictions I noticed in the controversies surrounding it. In some discussions, dys4ia had been criticized as not in fact qualifying to be a game, or having any aesthetic or ludic value at all. When authors in queer game studies would defend dys4ia, they would argue (rightfully) that these attacks were transphobic and misogynistic. But for all that dys4ia came up, I could only find one author (Noah Wardrip-Fruin) who treated dys4ia as valuable on its own artistic merits and not just for its trans author and autobiographical subject matter. Ironically, this dynamic mirrors how dys4ia was received when it became a breakout success: it was taken as an “empathy game”, important solely because it communicated something essential about being trans.

My goal, then, was to both acknowledge the discourse which had long treated dys4ia as a slice of trans experience, and then to move beyond it. Integral to this process was Jeanie Vaccaro’s notion of the handmade, which I took from Jack Halberstam’s seminar on Queer Theory and Visual Culture. In the first section of the essay, I seek to analyze some of the game’s inherent ludic and artistic value. I expand on Wardrip-Fruin’s account of “semantic overloading” in the game to show that it creates a spellbinding interrogation of standard subject/object distinctions. Then, in the second section, I reject the normative, teleological account of transition which has been used to characterize the game and examine how its incorporation of surveillance and uneven power dynamics complicate this narrative.

3. How have you been able to integrate your interest in Gender and Sexuality Studies in the work you have done here at Columbia/Barnard?

I am thankful to have had professors who were supportive when I wanted to take leaps of faith in connecting topics like cognitive linguistics and speech act theory with my interests in women’s studies. I also want to thank my mother, Elizabeth Simmons, for helping me revise the first drafts of those ambitious projects (and of the essays I submitted for these awards).

Outside of my coursework, I had the good fortune of meeting Isaac Jean-François in my sophomore year, who led me to join the que(e)ry collective for its inaugural year. I also joined No Red Tape Columbia and NYC for Abortion Rights, where I learned how to use the knowledge of feminist theory I was acquiring to actually push for positive change. Finally, I am endlessly grateful to have been able to learn in conversation with my peers at Columbia and Barnard, including the aforementioned Isaac, Claire Adler, and the inestimable Alex Volgyesi, who is a veritable well of knowledge on feminist theory and lesbian history.

         4. What are your plans for the future?

This fall, I will be starting as a doctoral student in philosophy at the University of Southern California. At present, my research interests lie in discourse analysis and pragmatics, and in their applications to critical social theory