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Course Descriptions for Dr. Gremillion
This past summer, Helen C. Gremillion was appointed to the Peg Zeglin Brand Chair for gender studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She comes to IU from Stanford University, where she received a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology in 1996 for her dissertation entitled "In Fitness and in Health: Crafting Bodies, Selves and Families in the Treatment of Anorexia Nervosa." For the past two years, she held an appointment as lecturer for Stanford's program in "Cultures, Ideas and Values."
The Peg Zeglin Brand Chair was established in 1996 with a gift from Dale Ellen and Norman Mills Leff of New York City and was the first created in the nation for gender studies. Gender studies at IU was born of women's studies, established in the late 1960s and known as the nation's oldest such academic program. In November 1997, the Trustees of IU voted officially to change the name of the Women's Studies Program to Gender Studies Program after a new bachelor's degree in gender studies was approved for the Bloomington campus by the Indiana Commission of Higher Education.
"It's truly an honor to welcome Professor Gremillion to IU Bloomington," said Peg Brand, assistant professor of philosophy and gender studies at IU. "Her role in gender studies and her current research will attract students to exploring issues crucial for women today -- identity, self-esteem and health, both of mind and body."
Q:When and why did you first become interested in gender studies issues, Helen?
A: I first became interested in gender studies as an undergraduate at Boston University. An interdisciplinary major of my own design allowed me to explore questions that cut across my fields of interest at that time -- psychology, anthropology, and the history and philosophy of science. By the time I was a junior in college, I discovered that gender studies provided a critical lens for synthesizing knowledge in these various fields.
Q: What is your area of expertise?
A: My most recent research is a cultural account of anorexia nervosa and of psychiatric treatments for anorexia. My teaching and research interests include medical anthropology, the social construction of the body, gender and scientific epistemologies, feminist ethnographies, and gender and identity formation in contemporary consumer culture, particularly post industrial U.S. society. I am also interested in pursuing research on "narrative therapies" developed in the 1980s which attempt to deploy cultural studies and post-modern theories in clinical practice.
Q: How do you define "gender studies" and why is it important for us to teach it?
A: I define gender studies as the interdisciplinary analysis of femininities, masculinities and sexual difference. Gender studies asks how these ideas are socially created, represented, experienced, maintained and transformed in their cultural and historical contexts. I believe that gender studies is important to teach for several reasons. First, gender permeates all aspects of social life, from the making of communities to the shaping of sexualities to the reproduction of and the forging of resistances against economic, ethnic and racial inequalities. Second, an analysis of gender promotes critical thinking because it uncovers deeply embedded assumptions about the supposed "nature" of individual and group identities. Finally, many scholars in fields as diverse as the natural sciences, the arts and humanities, and policy studies, to name but a few, are arguing that an understanding of gender is crucial for recent theoretical and methodological developments in their disciplines, including developments that cut across disciplinary boundaries.
Q: What do you see as the "new frontier" or the next advancement in gender studies?
A: One important "new frontier" in gender studies will be bridging the methods and insights of the social sciences with those of the humanities. The field of gender studies in the United States is rich with scholarship deriving from the humanities disciplines, particularly English and history. As a social scientist, I believe that this scholarship can be fruitfully extended to the sociology and ethnography of people's lived experiences, while challenging such sociologies and ethnographies to account for cultural representations of gender as well as their transformations over time.
Q: What is the most difficult aspect of researching and teaching gender studies issues? What do you find most rewarding?
A: I find that one of the most difficult aspects of researching and teaching gender studies is also one of the most rewarding aspects -- namely, the requirement to question assumptions that operate powerfully in our everyday lives. For example, the idea that the nuclear family is a "natural" social unit obscures from view and works to justify the social relations, cultural forms and institutional structures that create and maintain this idea. Gender studies brings to light these processes that are often taken for granted. This kind of analysis can be unsettling, but can also open the way for more active participation in shaping and/or working to change many aspects of our social lives.
Q: How have gender studies changed over the past 30 years or so?
A: It is difficult to summarize changes in gender studies in the United States over the past several decades, but the IU program's recent name change from women's studies to gender studies provides a good point of focus for this question. Increasingly, scholars in the field are asking critical questions not only about women's perspectives and experiences, but also about the wider social fields, relations of power, and forms of knowledge that "produce" a range of gendered perspectives and experiences. Gender studies today interrogates masculinities as well as femininities, sexualities as well as sex -- to identify only two important shifts in recent year.
Q: Classes you are teaching this semester?
A: G402, Body Politics: Feminist Debates (senior seminar) G701, Feminist Theories of the Body (graduate seminar).
For a synopsis of Germillion's courses, go to this Web site:
http://www.iuinfo.indiana.edu/homepages/091898/text/courses.htm
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