Livia Mayfield ’28
When I first arrived at Pomona, the opportunity to take classes I had never been able to take before was one of the things I was most excited about. I enrolled in Intro to Gender and Women’s Studies and immediately fell in love with asking questions and reading about theory and history through a feminist and queer lens. The class, taught by Professor Lundy-Harris, introduced me to so many new authors and outlets for learning, including an assignment that asked us to listen to Beyoncé’s Lemonade album. Professor Lundy-Harris, who is now my advisor, has been one of the most influential professors during my time at Pomona. After that class, I never really considered majoring in anything else.
One of my favorite courses I have taken has been Healing Justice and Care Praxis with Professor Heidi Rhodes. In this course, we focused on the healing justice movement, critiquing ideas of care as a feminine virtue and as a regulated, finite resource. Throughout the semester, we participated in many workshops, including acupuncture, tarot cards, cacao beans, meditation and more. This has been my most memorable class at Pomona because of the care and dedication that went into it from the professor and the GWS Department as a whole. It showed me that GWS could be a space not only for learning and questioning, but also for thinking about how we care for ourselves and each other.
Another favorite class of mine was Queer Theory & the Bible with Professor Erin Runions. Because of my personal interests, I added a Religious Studies disciplinary track to my major, allowing me to expand my learning into the field of religion and the role religion has played in the creation of binaries surrounding gender, race, sexuality and more. In this class, we explored several biblical texts, reading them in a “queer” way and diving deeper into the cross-dressing, gender and sexual play taking place throughout the Bible. This class was a perfect combination of my interests in GWS and religion and it showed me how many different questions I could ask within the field.
Ultimately, I chose GWS because it gave me a way to explore the questions I was already curious about while introducing me to so many new ones. I love that the field allows me to look at gender and sexuality through so many different lenses, while also connecting them to race, religion, history, culture and everyday life. More than anything, my classes have made me excited to keep asking questions, which is what made me fall in love with GWS in the first place.
yuankai alex gao ’28
I came to Pomona as a pre-med who was incredibly sure on being a molecular biology major, minoring in gender and women’s studies and theatre. GWS was something that I had first encountered in the high school debate space as this beautifully abstract way of argumentation, where pursuing my interests led me to appreciate its structural complexity and its rootedness in praxis. Reading feminist and queer theory helped me articulate my own queer experience as well, and I knew I wanted to learn more about it in a formal setting. I firmly believe that being socially conscious in a medical setting is absolutely essential, where GWS provides an excellent understanding of the dynamics of power within society.
My first semester a Pomona was truly transformative for an array of reasons, but especially because of my ID1, Feminist Experiments in Living Otherwise, and Intro to GWS courses. I was nervous about the insufficient depth of my knowledge, whether I was articulating them the way I was “supposed to,” and whether I was prepared or not for a collegiate level humanities course. As we finished introductions in class, I could feel my anxiety begin to wane as I was greeted by the wonderful GWS faculty. I had never experienced a care-first classroom before, where my professors were able to draw out my excitement and curiosity by making me feel like I was supported not only as a student, but as a person. The warmth I felt from each of the faculty, the dedication they have for their work, and the genuine care they have for the community is what solidified my decision to major.
Currently, I am expanding my research skills by practicing historical analysis in GWS166: Witchcraft. The multidisciplinary aspect of GWS is something that really inspires me to develop my breadth of analytical and critical reasoning, where my interests in the field lie in trans and disability (crip) studies, particularly its intersections in race and the medical industrial complex. My final project for GWS180: Queer Feminist Affect Theories allowed me to create a creative writing piece centered around my experience as a queer, Chinese and neurodivergent person, weaving together a tapestry that examines both the affective aspect of being with ecological concepts of biology. My thesis will likely follow a similar path, intersplicing Asian American trans futurisms with critiques on the medicalization and commodification on queer/femme people.