Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Dr. Rosalie Purvis about the ENG/WGS 371 Borders Studies course

The following is an interview with Dr. Rosalie Purvis about the ENG/WGS 371 Borders Studies course she has been teaching this academic semester. We sought to understand how WGS influences may have altered and improved the methods of education in the subject.
Ryan: Thank you so much again for agreeing to this interview.
Rosalie: Thank you.
Ryan: I do have a list of questions here… So, this is a brand new course you’ve designed, your ENG/WGS 371 Border Studies course, to fit our second model for the new double-dipped course – which is what we like to call the courses that fit this role – whose purpose is drawing together two different groups of majors, in this case both English and WGS.
As you prepared your syllabus before the semester’s start, in what ways do you think you might have approached the course differently than if it was being offered strictly as an English course, or strictly as a WGS course?
Rosalie: You know, it’s interesting because I’ve taught a few iterations of Border Studies courses now. The first one I developed was a themed interdisciplinary course where the focus was writing which I developed at Cornell when I was a PhD student there. And I designed it with first-year students in mind at that time. But even though I didn’t officially call it a gender studies course, it was always such a big part of the course because I think that anything in Border Studies ends up relating so much to gender studies. And then I developed the course here as a graduate-level English course, and in some ways, the course I feel is a little more like, almost – you could head it under Comparative Literature instead of English, although we don’t have a Comparative Literature department. And so much of my research and my PhD was actually with Comparative Literature faculty and my first Border Studies course that I took was in Comparative Literature. But in some ways – and that course was cross-listed with – at Cornell, they call it “Gender and Sexuality Studies” but I think it’s the same basic idea. So I have taught versions of this course and when I first started talking with Dr. Neiman about developing it for us for WGS and English, I thought “Okay I’m gonna transform every material I’ve used and make it completely different,” that was my first instinct. And even the course description would be completely different. But Dr. Neiman and I sat down and looked at what I already did and she went, “This already is all, like, very Gender Studies.” She’s like, “You don’t have to make such an effort to change anything because, from the beginning, Gender Studies is here.” And Gloria Anzaldua is a very significant feminist theorist, queer theorist, in addition to being a Border Studies theorist, for example. And she’s kind of a core to me and my thinking and research. I was gonna make a million changes but I wound up looking at every text and realizing “Well, actually, every time I teach this class, almost every text leads to a long discussion about gender because it’s a huge topic in the field, so I always adapt the course to meet what I expect might be the needs, the desires, and the interests of the target group, so the first-year students at Cornell, when their focus was writing, I didn’t teach such complex texts like I would do a section of the Anzaldua, or I would – I kept the level a bit more manageable, because they were often in their first semester. So I would adapt it, but my students could kind of take in anything. But I adapted it so that we could sort of process it. And then, in the Graduate course, there was a lot more theory. And I still have kept most of it. But in terms of Gender Studies itself, not too much had to change. I might still, towards the end, bring in another specific Gender Studies theorist, but really, almost every theorist I already deal with is also a Gender Studies theorist on some level.
Ryan: You mentioned earlier there were some things that were already very much in a WGS environment, would you mind just giving a couple examples of what you had on the syllabus that was just immediately pointed at? Or how the subject already was fitting into WGS roles?
Rosalie: Yeah! Well, the Anzaldua’s the first one, and then I would say that, as we move through the semester, there’s a lot of material we’ll be looking at in the coming month that has a lot to do with the global adoption and surrogacy industry. Those texts are going to come up, and that’s a very WGS-oriented topic on many levels, we’ll see as we’re studying that. We’re also going to be reading one play that is about a trans man who goes from one country to the other and transitions in the second country. He comes as a migrant – I don’t know if he actually has refugee status, I can’t remember at the moment, but he views his gender transition in conjunction with his cultural transition and his migration journey. This is a play that I didn’t always teach in this class, actually. I started teaching it in the class with the graduate students here. And actually, it was one of my undergrads here who introduced me to the play.
Ryan: Oh really?

Rosalie: Yeah. And they were a Gender Studies minor. Or, no, I think a triple – Gender Studies, Theater, and Psychology major. But they were the one who introduced me to the play in the first place, and they directed a scene from it in my directing class. They taught me about the play, and I put it on the syllabus after that, after discussing it. That was a while back now. So that’s another example of another very overt – I would say – gender studies connect. But I think that even when you look at some of the texts like the movie La Jaula de Oro, there’s so many gendered topics, and even though the director is a man and he’s looking at it through male gaze on some level, even that is actually significant, that we’re looking at that perspective. The border is often a very gendered space. It’s interesting that in the U.S., if you go to an airport or something, it’s still fairly gendered, even in small things – they aren’t as obvious about it, but if you need to be patted down, they’ll match a man to a man, a woman to a woman if you go through security. And when you are cisgender and the gender as which you seem to present to those people coincides with your gender identity, it may be a shocking experience to have someone patting you down, but when I’ve traveled with people who are nonbinary or trans or who don’t clearly show up as a particular gender in such a moment where a quick decision has to be made by the security, it always causes a problem for someone. I’ve seen a man assume that someone is biologically male, and then during the pat down figure out they got it wrong in that sense, or maybe they got it right but then does it matter in terms of dysphoria that a man is patting you down? Those moments are very disturbing at times for my nonbinary and trans friends. That is one significant detail we don’t even think about that much – that comes up even here. But when I traveled in India, the men and the women – and it’s a binary system, which is kind of ironic considering that India does recognize a third gender, but not, apparently, with the pat down. But you go to a different line for all of security [depending on gender]. Because at the end of security putting your bags through, you go into a little private cubby where everybody gets patted down. And there’s a women’s side and a men’s side. So it’s even more delineated. And every single time when I make that trip, I have to usually go through security in three countries – In the U.S., in India, and wherever I’m stopping over, which is usually the Arab Emirates – each system of border check is gendered, and each is gendered with a different set of cultural norms. But it’s a very gendered experience. So much of the border is gendered in terms of who’s safe crossing, what are the reasons people are crossing. There’s also – we don’t get into it very much in this class, maybe I should bring it in at some point – but there’s also the subject of sex trafficking. And there’s also people crossing seeking refuge or refugee status because of queer identities coming from one country to another. And all of these topics in different ways come up throughout the course. So there’s the surrogacy and adoption industries, the fertility industries, all of these border topics – and I’m just naming even a few – are already so gendered. All of them. Even just something like a security checkpoint, the way you get treated at a border is completely different whether you’re cis, not cis, male, female, or a different gender identity. If you look at any performance of border, like the Attari-Wagah border ceremony “dance” as I call it – It’s always men. It’s always men who present a particular performance of masculinity for example. So why is this, while when we talk about countries, they’re referred to as “the motherland.”

Ryan: Oh, I never even considered that. That’s a really good point.
Rosalie: Yeah, and then the protectors of the country are the men. The men protecting the mother. Next month, we’re going to be talking about the theme of language. I put it in quotes, “the mother tongue,” because there’s many, many writings that we look at, and all of them somewhere in there have the word “mother tongue.” And interlingual works very often – and maybe it’s a bias in what I’ve chosen, but I find it comes up a lot – deal with language and its relationship to the mother, or motherhood, however that’s defined. I could go on about this forever, clearly. [Laughs]
Ryan: [Laughs] Clearly.
Rosalie: But almost every text relates. There’s even one theory that we’re reading by a cis, straight white-ish man, although he isn’t even strictly white in the cultural context where he wrote. Even that’s interesting, that in the end, he – but in my work there’s usually one, one of those. My work has always prioritized minoritarian views a lot of the time. So it’s often, already by nature, that’s been the focus. And even that’s interesting. And then I have to make sure, “Oh, but I should include this cis white guy from this other era.” And then whiteness is also a question, because who even is white? Whiteness is a construct based on assimilation when it comes to immigration.
Ryan: Then you have the question of, “is the whiteness that they’re referring to a Western whiteness, or whiteness in general?” So I absolutely see what you mean there.
Rosalie: And also, when Italians immigrated, Irish, Jews, they weren’t considered white for the longest time. Now, the more assimilated a culture, the more white they’re viewed as. The whole identity of whiteness also shifts through migration and is, you’re right, totally different in different cultures.
Ryan: That is an excellent bit of overlap there I would say.
Rosalie: I didn’t even know there was going to be that much. See? Dr. Neiman was right. More right than I even realized. [Laughs] She’s so good at seeing those connections even when we don’t see them ourselves.
Off the top of your head, can you say how many students enrolled in the course for WGS credits, just a general estimate?
Rosalie: I think half are enrolled under WGS, but honestly I can’t fully remember. I noticed it when I started, when I looked at the roster, it was about half-half.
Ryan: Okay, great. So, half WGS, half English, thereabouts?
Rosalie: I think so.
Ryan: Fantastic. Another question: in noticing that split, did it impact your view of how to teach the class? And if so, in what ways?

Rosalie: Well, I wouldn’t say it affected me when I looked at the roster, but in the first weeks, when I was really trying to listen and hear what peoples’ interests were and where they were coming from, what I do feel is that this class is a very important opportunity for people to really be exploring, practicing giving different perspectives and coming at the material from the perspectives of their other disciplines, not just Gender Studies, but, say, Philosophy. And so when we have course discussions in the class as an English course, often the mode of analysis remains literary analysis even when we’re talking about other things. There’s a kind of way of talking about the text that has a literary analysis methodology somewhere on the back-burner. [Laughs] But in this class, because everyone’s coming from a different discipline, I have been finding – more than in the other versions I’ve taught – that people are finding a common ground by sharing narratives from their lives and experiences, tying it into their disciplines, and explaining the disciplinary perspectives through those narratives to the others in the group who might not know their disciplinary perspective. So there’s a kind of common ground that I feel comes – and maybe it’s just the nature of this group, that people are making connections through these narratives to their experiences. Now, in the field of Border Studies, I find this to be really important. In a lot of English courses where you’re doing literary analysis – In the courses I teach, identity and experience come up. When I’m teaching this class, any Gender Studies class, LGBTQ literature, even Performance Studies. Even, to some degree, Global Theater History, even then, comes up in terms of professional experience with students. But in these courses, peoples’ experiences come up because I think these fields – Gender Studies in part, certainly Border Studies – a lot of what these fields are bringing into the discourse of academia is that there is a relevance to subjective perspective and personal experience and lived experience. Even the word “personal experience” sounds like it’s minimizing it for some reason. “Lived experience” sounds a bit more highfalutin so I’ll leave it at that. But I think that the narratives of people’s experiences are so significant in the creation of this field, the invention within the field and how we analyze, because so much of Border Studies and Gender Studies has hinged on bringing narratives to the foreground that previously were not brought to the foreground. And most of the people experiencing these narratives were not granted a space to tell them. Which diminishes any of our experiences dealing with the subject matter. And this is an interesting phenomenon in these fields. I’m a very big fan of what we call Autocritical Academic Analysis, where you take a personal narrative or personal experience and utilize that combined with a kind of critical analysis. It’s kind of a lived experience as one of the methods of qualitative research. You’re not going to use your lived experience, generally, to prove a quantitative point. You’re not gonna gather a statistic from just your experience. But what you can do is illustrate some aspects of a qualitative study. The work I’m attempting to make into a book, my dissertation is practice research, because I’m talking about the performances I’m making, and what that process might illustrate about how to make intercultural performance methodology. But the doing of something or the living of something as a way of showing you information that you otherwise wouldn’t have qualitatively, in terms of understanding it more deeply, not in terms of saying how many, numbers-wise. Autocritical isn’t going to tell you, “This is how many crossed the border with this and this and this,” but it might tell you the story of Chauk in the film La Jaula de Oro (a character in the movie who is a Tzotzil native). Maybe he wouldn’t even make it into the statistics. So for me, qualitative study within this field is very important because quantitative study doesn’t actually cover so much of the truth of what happens. There’s fact in fiction, fiction in fact as they say. It’s not beginning to address the actual issues of gender or of the experience of border migration spaces. Both topics are in the border in a way, even Gender Studies. I’m very interested in what Gender Studies can tell us about the nonbinary zone, and that’s also kind of a border space, in a sense.
Ryan: That is true. And there’s only so much hard data can do until you need an actual lived experience to really feel the issue.
Rosalie: Yeah. You can go into the hard data of it and maybe that’s very significant, but I know for me, the understanding of those areas are linked to lived experience. Not necessarily just my own but also those of people whose work I read or who I work with or talk with, including my students. My students teach me so much about, for example, I know I’ve said this, but the culture of this place that I’m still unfamiliar with. And this is a place worthy of analysis, obviously, also. A lot of my students come into Border Studies and a few of them have said, and there’s a humbleness to this that I appreciate, “Well, I’m from Maine and I don’t know anything about this.” And I’m like, “Well, we’ll see about that.” And then within a few weeks, it’s like, all of this is very relevant everywhere, including here.

Ryan: Fantastic, thank you for that.
Rosalie: I hope I answered the question.
Ryan: Yes, you did, actually, fantastically.
Rosalie: Okay. [Laughs]
Ryan: You actually answered the follow-up question too, without me even having to mention it, so, perfect! [Laughs]
Picking up off that last question, what kind of materials or approaches did you draw into the syllabus that you might not have otherwise considered, if not aiming to reach both WGS and English students? And what might you maybe have excluded, if anything?
Rosalie: This may sound weird, but actually, when I teach this as an English class, a lot of the materials are not that different, but I feel, I always have this secret voice in me going, “Is this okay for an English class?” And now that it’s also a WGS class, I feel like now it’s fully sanctioned in my own sense of what works in this context. In Comparative Literature as a field, it seems to be a lot more common that, say, films or cultural artifacts have become part of the source material that we look at and analyze and read as texts. In the field of English – and it’s always so funny, because my PhD wasn’t in English, it was in Performing and Media Arts, but I did a lot of focus on Comparative Literature, as an undergrad, my double major was Languages and Literature, which they didn’t call English though it was also English, but I did a lot of international literary analysis in that study even all the way back in my undergrad. So in a sense, I always feel like, “But I never actually did a degree in English.” It was always other forms of literature. So I never really know when I say this, but, I’m just unaware of, in the field of English right now, how much of that sort of intertextual study is commonly done, or whether we’re still mainly – and I don’t mean to say “still” as if to suggest that it’s old or archaic or passe, it’s valid as well – but whether it’s more about reading the books. But in Comparative Literature, which maybe I would say is the field I most often have my other foot in, it’s common that a film or even a commercial could be a valid source text. And in English – I’ve taught in a lot of English departments, that’s the funny thing, though I never studied English as my exclusive field anywhere, I’ve taught in more English departments than I can count when I was adjuncting, and I’ve taught a lot of courses under the heading of English. But I know that at times, what I was doing, not now as much maybe, but ten, fifteen years ago when I would teach certain materials in those classes, it was a bit transgressive to be teaching those materials as English source texts. So maybe there’s a legacy in my mind that, “Oh, I’m showing these commercials and we’re analyzing them, is that okay with everyone?” But now that it’s officially Gender Studies I guess there’s a part of me that feels liberated.

Ryan: Almost like you’re more free to actually look at the material.
Rosalie: Yeah! And it didn’t stop me anyway, but now it definitely makes me feel like maybe truly I am more of an interdisciplinary – I mean, I am in two departments even here, and I guess with WGS I’m kind of in three departments by now. And I’m also teaching students in the IPhD now. So in some ways, maybe I feel the most at home myself in the borders between disciplines. So in a way, I never hold back, but I always have a thought of, “Will everyone get why I’m doing this in an English class?” But here I don’t signpost it as much with our group, because I feel like, “well, they get it,” because we’re all different fields.
Ryan: Yeah, if it’s a purely English course, I could see how it could be like, “Well how does this apply to the major?”
Rosalie: I mean sometimes I feel – with the grad students not as much? Although, no, I do, with the grad students, I say, “The way I’m teaching comes from this perspective and from this discipline and that’s why I’m including these things.” I mean no one ever thinks it’s a problem as far as I know. But nonetheless I feel like – And I encourage them to signpost. I’m like, “If you’re doing something that’s kind of weird in your thesis, people will accept it if you explain in your thesis why you’re doing it.” And signposting is what I call that.
Ryan: That’s very valuable advice.
Rosalie: It is valuable advice. Someone gave me that advice and now I can’t stop giving it to everyone else. If you use the right lingo to explain what you’re doing – and this sounds a little trite, what I’m saying, but it’s true – if you explain it in the lingo that the people who are skeptical can relate to and respect, they will generally be like, “Okay, I see why you’re doing it.”
Ryan: Awesome. Even a little bit of advice there. [Laughs] All right, so. Four weeks in now, what has teaching the course to both English majors and WGS majors been like? In what ways do the two groups of students approach the material similarly or differently? And have there been any surprises that you’ve had in the process?
Rosalie: The relating to the personal narrative is something that I really value. There’s also an element, though, of it being kind of unbridled, because we’re not doing it from one disciplinary perspective. So sometimes even that I have a kind of, “Oh, we’re doing this and I see the relevance, but will everyone else see the relevance?” But when we’re doing it and we’re all using a sort of lingo of literary analysis, it kind of validates it, in a sense. But in this group – and maybe this is reminding me that I should signpost that we’re doing this a bit in class, like “why this is important, and why this is okay or relevant” – but it’s valuable to come in with perspectives that are multidisciplinary. People are coming at it from different fields and when people are giving a narrative of any kind or explaining something, they might explain, “okay, this is connected to my field.” But there is this common ground of understanding the field that, to me, gets more into the autocritical lived experience in the conversations than even usually it does. And I don’t know again if that’s this group or if that’s because we’re interdisciplinary. I think it’s probably both? For me personally, also being a learner in the class, I feel very enriched by the multiplicity of perspectives that people are bringing, and always I feel my students are bringing so much into the class that I would never have known. I mean, it’s cheesy to say “I learn more from my students than they learn from me most of the time” – but I learn so much from the perspectives that people bring to the material, and even if I’ve taught a text for twenty years, every time I teach it, a student will tell me some things I’ve never thought of. And this is happening in this class maybe more even than usual because of the interdisciplinary nature I think. So people are bringing a perspective that connects more to psychology, or public health, or philosophy, and they’re using their different modes of analysis to address the material and the topic at large. And I know for me personally, this has been – I don’t know if it’s as cool for everyone as it is for me, because everyone else isn’t used to going over these materials, but I’ve taught these materials and studied them a lot already. So I’m seeing a difference in how rich the perspectives are and how diverse. So I can’t say it’s WGS versus English, but I see it more as everybody’s coming from such different fields. I can remember at times who’s an English major because of what they seem to get excited about. A lot of them are very interested in the construction of a narrative or a metaphor. But everyone is, to some degree. It’s just that the English students are going to go down that rabbit hole very far very fast. You can see that’s the part that sparks their interest – though it sparks everyone’s interest I think – but it’s a way of analyzing through those lenses that comes very immediately to them. And I don’t even know if they’re trained to see it that way or they’re a self-selecting group because they like looking at things that way and therefore they went into English.
To pose a similar question as the last, but from a different angle, have you found that you’ve needed to take different approaches to the material than you might’ve expected?
Rosalie: I don’t expect to take a particular approach with most materials, but I think that’s because in my life, I’ve lived myself in so many culture spaces, I grew up between different culture spaces, my education was divided between many different cultural environments, and then when I went on to teach, I taught in such diverse institutions, demographics, communities, places. When I go in to address a material, I don’t think I go in expecting necessarily that I’m going to steer the conversation in a very particular way. I actually have learned that, maybe because I’ve been in such a multiplicity of spaces, that if I let the students ask questions about a text that interests them, anything I think is important is going to come up also. But I never – Because every group I’ve taught in every environment I’ve taught, people are coming from such different perspectives of experience or knowledge or even classroom culture, I think it’s come to a point where I don’t expect a single defining way of addressing something, and because of that and because these fields are so much – in my opinion – about invention of perspective, about invention of a new way of looking, I like to see what way of going into a text my students are choosing in conversation, and then eventually also in their writing. And I think I’m always surprised by every individual every single time, and every group brings something totally different. So maybe I would say “no,” I guess is the short answer. [Laughs] I don’t think I expect a particular way in. I will say I’m very impressed with the level of close reading, thoughtfulness, and sophistication that this group is bringing. And also, there’s a kind of compassion that everyone brings to the material that I find very moving. That’s not always the case, but I’ve actually found that here with my students at UMaine. There’s a kind of – I don’t know how to describe it – a humbleness in the positive sense, I don’t mean that in the self-deprecating sense. And this sense – especially in the English department – that the students have a lot of compassion. They’re very thoughtful about really trying to understand the perspective of others. And I feel that in this group very much, and it’s very helpful in this field.

Ryan: That’s very interesting, given that you’ve been in multiple universities, that it would stand out like that.
Rosalie: I felt the same when I was teaching a class recently in India in a history program. I asked a guest to speak in a class and the questions the students asked, I was like, “Wow, these questions are so thoughtful and compassionate for first year, second year students even.” Because I mean just developmentally, like they say, when we’re still teenagers, we don’t yet fully have the capacity to empathize with others, because we’re still developing ourselves so much. I feel like our students here are often – I find most of them – Generally, there’s a feeling of such thoughtfulness and really trying to understand other perspectives. And a lot of my students will apologize and say “I really only know the place I’m from.” But that’s true for most of us in some way. But then at the same time – I directed this play when I first got here that’s about migration, and I had them write on the audition form, “Is there anything you can say about how you relate to the subject matter of the play?” And I remember one student who was a first-year student at UMaine said, “Well, I’ve never migrated, I’ve lived in the same town my whole life. So I cannot say of course that I understand the experience of a refugee. But I do believe that a feeling of displacement and questioning who we are and where we belong is an innate part of the human experience, and so through that I try to understand as best I can.” And I was so moved by that.
Ryan: You should’ve gotten that student to write a paper or something on that subject, cause that’s amazing.
Rosalie: I should ask him. Funny enough, now two years later he’s going to be in my next production.
Ryan: Oh, fantastic!
Rosalie: But, that kind of thing I’m always so touched that my students bring such a thoughtful perspective to things like that.
What is working best in your course design, would you say?
Rosalie: I don’t know. I can only speak for what’s working for me, because I don’t know how it will work for everyone else. I feel like until it’s over there’s still so much you still might not know. But I can say, in some ways, there’s a surrender, where you just have to give over to the experience of the teaching and be open to what is happening rather than what you want to demand to happen. Because there is in some way – Like pedagogy or way of learning – It’s not a linear predictable path, and everybody will absorb material in different ways and at different times. And sometimes we’re not even aware of what we’ve learned until a year later or two years later, when something sinks in. And this can be very frustrating if you’re teaching and you want a certain instant result. It’s not frustrating for me because of my kind of material – It can be frustrating if, say, you’re teaching a dance class and everybody needs to learn a combination at the end and not everyone gets it. But then I think of how, when I would be in dance classes – because I was a double major in dance – I was very slow picking up dance combinations, and my teachers would get so frustrated. This one teacher I remember being like, “Just get it, oh my gosh, it’s so simple.” And then I wouldn’t get it, I wouldn’t get it. But I remember with this one combination that one day I was doing my laundry in my laundry room a year later in New York City and suddenly I was doing the combination in the laundry room and it suddenly was there. So I feel like that’s one of the mysterious things about learning, that we don’t always know what our learning journey is. And so what I hope for is that if nothing else, I can bring the passion that I have to the subject and share it with other people. That’s at baseline the only thing I can really think about when I’m teaching. And that I can try to learn as much from what the students are saying about the text as I possibly can. I’ve noticed if the students are teaching me things about the material, they’re also learning. And in the end, the learning goals of expanding our collective knowledge of borders and issues and interconnecting the disciplines, analyzing different kinds of texts from different perspectives, I feel like that, to me, is the most significant way to do that, by just asking lots of different kinds of questions about the texts and looking at them from different angles. And then even learning to analyze the texts of our lives through the same lens. A lot of people who take the Border Studies class have said to me a year later, “Now everything I see, I see in borders. I see borders everywhere now.” And that’s part of the class goal, that you can use this as a lens to explore so many aspects of life.

Ryan: Right. I’ve actually already found myself considering what is a border and the spaces between things a lot more frequently now, whether it be physical or metaphorical, so I would say that’s definitely working.
Rosalie: And I would say in Gender Studies maybe it’s the same, that if we are analyzing things and looking at it from – Because we don’t think about it. There are so many things that are gender specific or gendered in our culture that we don’t question, until we do.
Ryan: Yeah. Border studies can apply to a metaphorical border, between understanding, between genders or understanding between the cisgendered or non-cisgendered experience. Lived experiences, even. It’s such an important, fascinating subject.
Rosalie: It’s so significant. And it sounds like you know this from your own experience in your own life how much this affects people and how many assumptions we make without even knowing.
Ryan: Yeah. I’ve had to correct a lot of my own assumptions in the course just because I am a white cisgendered male in a major like this. It’s been fantastic, it’s been fascinating and I’ve learned a lot through it, but there are things that you need to connect and bridge the gap, so to speak.
Rosalie: Yeah. So I always say that I never blame any group for things, it’s more like the cultural identities that are set, like whiteness as a concept. Or maleness as a concept. Those things are the problem, not necessarily most individuals, you know? I mean some individuals are problematic.
Ryan: Yeah, it’s more just the environments and the mentalities that they know.
Rosalie: Or that gets imposed on all of us. And we all have responsibilities towards our identities. We all have a responsibility to recognize what our identities do for us in the world.
What most excites you about this particular course and the opportunity to bring students together from both WGS and English?

Rosalie: Well, Border Studies is probably my favorite topic ever. I’m obsessed with these topics. And I guess I’m obsessed with the topics of WGS as well, although I was in denial about that for a long time because I had this rebellious idea of “Well it shouldn’t matter.” And also when I started doing theater and dance, and I would do any of my projects, someone would go, “Wow, it’s so cool to see these feminist pieces!” And I’m like, “What’s feminist about them?” “Well you have a woman doing stuff!” And I’m like, “That’s just because it’s me doing stuff.” But then I realize that that is what makes it a feminist piece, for example, or stuff I would do that had queer narratives in it, and people would say, “Wow, it’s such an activist piece about LGBTQ-” and I’m like, “I’m just telling the truth.” And people would go, “But it’s a queer piece and we can analyze it through this lens and this lens and this lens.” And at first I resisted that, because I had this feeling that I’m living it, I don’t need to analyze it.
Ryan: That your life isn’t something to be analyzed.
Rosalie: Yeah! At first I felt resistant to it. But then at some point something shifted, and I was finding that actually Gender Studies and queer theory could support me. It could support me in that, even. And then I realized it’s actually not helping me to deny it and pretend it doesn’t matter. Because it matters. But there’s a part of us that doesn’t want to be essentialized to our identity, we feel that removes us from a certain universality that we maybe aspire to. But why, really? And then I started to realize that anything could be viewed – There’s a graduate student in the English department, oh my gosh I love his work so much. He’s from Pakistan, and he wrote this series of short stories for his thesis that were all about border stuff, a lot of them, and cultural border stuff, which is why I was on his committee, because he was in my Border Studies class for the grad students. But all of his stories, to me, spoke to masculinity and the deconstruction of masculinity, and every story – not to get graphic – but the word “dick” or its equivalent was on almost every page of the stories, and I kept reading them and thinking “this is an amazing commentary on masculinity.” And then when we were in his thesis review, it was all cis men on his committee, and I think there was one other woman in the room, maybe his girlfriend was there. And at one point I brought this up, I said, “I love how all the stories are a deconstruction of masculinity, and I was wondering how your approach was to that.” And he went, “I have never thought about that.” And then he paused, he almost sat down, and he said, “Now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t know whether I should be really excited about this perspective or immediately go into therapy.” But what was interesting was that it was about masculinity, but no one else noticed it. I noticed it. Because it’s not my gender identity. So that was almost the reverse of people telling me, “your work is feminist and queer,” where I’m like, “this work is masculinity.” I notice it because it’s not my experience. So that’s also Gender Studies. So if I were teaching a class on constructing masculinity, which I don’t think I’d be equipped to teach, I would totally teach his collection in that class.
What does the cross-fertilization between majors enable you in your own approach to the course?
Ryan: I think we actually covered that earlier, where you felt more free to discuss the subject.
Rosalie: That’s true. That’s pretty much what it does. Plus it’s healing for me to feel empowered to think about everything from all these perspectives. “Healing” is a cheesy word, but it is. A lot of the material and the things we talk about in this class are kind of painful. And there’s a power in addressing it as a community, a compassionate community, and to feel the permission to address it from all these perspectives to me feels very empowering. I’ll say empowering rather than healing.
How has the cross-fertilization between majors enabled students insofar as their engagement with the material? Anything you might’ve noticed?
Rosalie: Well, how has it?

Ryan: [Laughs] Well, I will say that as a WGS major myself, I found a lot of places wherein the subject is right at the forefront of my interest with Border Studies. I think we’ve already mentioned quite a few of them in the interview so far. One of the things that stuck out to me as a literary nerd – not an English major, so I can’t speak on that regard – but as a literary nerd who likes analyzing media, in the first couple weeks where you showed off those images that were artwork or depictions of borders, the fence with all the ditched bicycles. I immediately picked up on a narrative of that, where you have to leave something behind at the border to go beyond it.
Rosalie: Oh my gosh, that’s so moving.
Ryan: That’s what I picked up on, I’m sad I never mentioned it in class.
Rosalie: You could write a whole something on just that. It’s such a beautiful idea. You could write a creative piece on it, or an analysis.
Ryan: That’s just me as a literary nerd, I’m sure there’s a lot more that English majors could actually bring out as well.
Rosalie: This is very valuable that you just told me this, because now I’m thinking about everything in a different way too, yeah.
Ryan: In that case I’m happy I brought it up.
Rosalie: If you think about it, all of the texts we’ve looked at have that in them. Whether you’re leaving your home, your dignity, an object, your national identity, your language, there’s so many things. But the physical reality of it, the metaphor with the bicycle, yeah. And the discarding of those things that are left behind, that at one point were so significant. Love it!
What, if anything, would you do differently next time you teach the course?

Rosalie: I don’t know yet.
Ryan: Kind of hard to say in the first like four or five weeks.
Rosalie: There’s things that I want to do that I still haven’t done that I’m thinking from our conversation, I should be sure to do this or mention this. Every time I teach a class, one thing that I realize overall is that there are things that I assumed to be understood realities that I don’t mention explicitly, that I wish I had said explicitly. For example, now that we’ve talked about it, I’m thinking of the personal narrative sharing and how that comes up, I realize instead of saying explicitly how this comes up and why it at times matters, or the signposting thing, that there are times where I feel after the fact that there are things that I didn’t think to say because to me, they were my own version of obvious, but they would only be obvious to me, because I’m in my own brain. So any time I teach a class, at some point, I’m like, “Duh, I never told them this crucial thing that was in the back of my mind that I just didn’t think to say.” So that’s something that comes up every time. Every time. Every time I teach a version of this class, there are things I change. And also it has often to do with how much time we spend on a certain thing, or how I set us up to address a certain thing. But I think of this class in my own mind as divided into four units or four subjects, and we’ve only just finished the first one. The first one sets us up for the next one, so I guess we’ll see how the transition goes.

Ryan: Fair enough. It is kind of hard to tell in the first five weeks anyway. But it is kind of cool to see that you always pick up something you wish you’d incorporate.
Rosalie: Oh my gosh, always.
Ryan: Shows the evolving nature of the topic I suppose.
Rosalie: There’s also that, yeah. Actually, right now, something that I feel is not right there in my class, in my materials that I want to bring but I haven’t yet solved this, is I feel like I’m missing a text that deals with the Ellis Island reality of migration in that era. I don’t have a text like that currently in it. And also another thing that I’m working on and that I haven’t added in is that I felt like I didn’t have enough fiction in the class. But now there’s going to be three short stories that we look at at different times. One of them I normally would have already done. It’s about the India-Pakistan border and partition, but now because my colleague Debaroti is coming, I’m waiting to have her teach a unit on it because she knows way more about the topic than I do. And I thought it would be a missed opportunity if I don’t bring that story in when she’s there. A lot of cultural questions come up that I’m not fully equipped to answer that would be for her, just a piece of cake to answer. Those are two areas where I’m still building the course: A deeper historical piece, pre-1950s, and fiction. Those are two areas where I’m a little less schooled. I don’t study fiction as much as I do poetry and plays and nonfiction. And also I’m not really an archivist in this area. And those are the areas where I still want to expand in the materials.
One last question, you’ve already mentioned your work in theater, how has WGS impacted your experience with theater? Maybe created new avenues to approach it, new perspectives, new experiences?
Rosalie: All the work I do is probably WGS-ish, professionally and in the academic setting. And this semester, I’m directing this play by an Indian playwright that we translated. And in the play, there’s only one female character as it’s written. But I knew I wasn’t going to cast it like that. So I just waited to see who would come into casting. And in the play we have a few actors who are trans and nonbinary, and we also have two women playing men, although one is playing as a boy, one is playing as a woman, so the gender of the character will change. So even in this play that I’m like, “It’s not a Gender Studies piece at all, I’m not dealing with gender!” Last year, I made a point to direct this play that was specifically queer utopia, and this semester, I’m like, “Well I’m doing this intercultural thing, I’m bringing this classic from another continent,” and that’s all good, but it’s gonna be like “wah-wah” when it comes to gender. But then without trying, the way it just worked out, is that it’s turning out to also be pretty empowering when it comes to gender.

Ryan: I think that’s actually a really poignant point that, without realizing it or without the intention initially, that it’s already become a part of this play that you’re putting on.
Rosalie: And it’s already radical. Just like when I would do things where the stories were queer love stories or they were just women playing protagonists or something. People think of that as radical. And I recently was working with a trans dancer in India, and she gave a speech at one point after this conference. People asked, “Do you have anything to say to the dance community?” And she said, “Trust us. Allow us in. Just give us a space on stage. Ask us to do work.” To me, that’s a given. I’ve never not done that. I don’t even like to use the word “inclusive,” because it sounds like “I guess I’ll include you.” I’ve always come at it primarily from that point of view. But now I’m starting to realize that not everyone does that.
Ryan: You were less concerned with the politics of the situation and just getting the people that would want to be in.
Rosalie: And also I cared about those people, and they were already the people I was knowing and working with. Part of me doesn’t like to say, “I’m doing this radical thing.” Because then I feel it becomes about virtue signaling. Plus I don’t like to draw attention to someone’s gender identity in that sense because I think it’s not appropriate to out people. So maybe when mentioning it, I just say there’s gender diversity in the cast. I don’t want to out anyone who’s trans. But I wouldn’t want to say anywhere in writing, “I have trans actors in my cast” because I feel like I’m outing people. Moreover, we use gender-inclusive methods in casting. It’s always been on my mind, gender-conscious, gender-inclusive.
Ryan: And even doing something like that, it can be seen as radical by some people.
Rosalie: It is! Even when I started, I would cast people of all different identities in roles and I guess people found it unexpected. In my MFA, I cast a woman in the lead role in this German play. She was a Black woman and a larger woman, and none of those things struck me as in any way even mention-worthy. But when I wrote my thesis, and I mentioned this was the person we cast, the guy who gave the first edit – who was a bit conventional, I’ll say – wrote “You’re not even going to mention her race and her weight?” And I’m like, “are you kidding me?” So then I went through and I mentioned everybody’s build and everybody’s race. I had twenty actors, and I’d go through and be like, “And then I cast Dan, who is a white man of athletic build who comes from New Jersey.” I just mentioned it to everyone. Because I’m like, “why only her?” And he kept saying it only about the people who were not white guys of a certain build. He wanted me to mention everyone else the ways in which, in his perspective, they deviated from a norm. I was twenty-five when I was doing that, and I was already asking, “Why is he asking me that?” I was at that time really surprised, and that got me on a roll. Those kinds of issues. All those things about identity come up a lot in performance and who we expect to see in what roles.
Ryan: Especially with theater, there is a massive visual aspect that some people would see.
Rosalie: And some people are very rigidly attached to certain ideas. I mean, for me, gender identity, race, and ethnicity, but that intersecting with people’s body types, those issues are super significant in terms of, “Oh we only picture someone like this in this role, so we won’t cast someone like that.” I’ve always deviated in how I cast and who I put into different roles. I didn’t even notice that I was doing it, it’s just how I saw things. And other people would be like, “Wow, you cast this person? Wow. Oh, you have a trans woman in that role? What does that mean?” Because she’s a woman and this role is – To me, that kind of diversity was so innate. But people would often toot my horn for me or ring the bell for me. “You’re doing this thing, not everyone’s going to be into it.” I never thought about it, because to me it seems normal.
Ryan: I had a similar experience going into WGS, because I thought that this is how you should approach some of these things. It is not my place to get involved in, “Should gay people be allowed to marry?” Of course they should. That was always the mindset that I had. But people would tell me even in high school when I was growing up right around when the bill legalizing gay marriage in America was passed, which was right around when I was graduating, people were always surprised whenever I would put forward that stance. It’s not my place. They should just be allowed to be happy and be married, I don’t know why we’re included in this. But it was still seen as surprisingly radical.
Rosalie: It’s intense to be in an environment where you think very differently from the people around you. It can be so alienating. Do you feel like in a field like WGS, you have a kind of community?
Ryan: Yeah, kind of. I feel like with WGS a lot of it is an increase in awareness, like you’ve already mentioned. You didn’t think of it as you being actively conscious at the time, but then you started to realize that this is supporting yourself and these actors. It’s a lot like that, an increase in awareness.
Rosalie: It increases awareness and it’s a supportive mode of thinking. For me, it has been. Also, though, there’s this – I can’t remember who wrote it, because it was on a meme and on Instagram – I follow this Diversity in Academia instagram thing. Somebody recently posted something that said “When you’re doing your academic work in a field that connects so deeply to your identity, it’s different than the people who don’t do that. The kind of emotional labor you’re investing in is different to when you don’t have that kind of personal connection to what you’re doing.” And who’s to say when and where we do that? She was pointing out that because of that – she writes about the African diaspora, and that connects to her identity. She was like, “Every time I work on this, I’m writing about my own safety indirectly. So when it gets addressed or discussed or debated, it’s not the same as if somebody’s studying the work of a 19th century poet to look at the rhythm of the lines. It’s a different experience. And she was saying that that has to be acknowledged, that people are investing different things into these areas. And in a field like WGS, it’s always going to connect to our identities in some intense way.
We thank Dr. Rosalie Purvis once again for the incredibly interesting conversation, and a look into the academic process.