Clusters are affinity caucuses and special topic clusters supported by WGSJ. These groups will run independently from the WGSJ board, but we will logistically support your meetings, events, and initiatives and we welcome your feedback on how the association can better serve the membership.
Check out some of the clusters run by our WGSJ members below.
If you would like to Chair or Co-Chair a caucus or cluster, please get in touch with us.
Fat Studies
Contact: Mackenzie Edwards at mackiee@yorku.ca
Learn more about Fat Studies
We’re looking for anyone with a keen interest in fat studies who is involved in women, gender, and social justice related fields to join the WGSJ Fat Studies Cluster! There is a long and generative history of scholarship and praxis that deconstructs and challenges embodied norms across axes of both gender and size, as well as in conjunction with other dynamics of privilege and oppression.
Intersectional feminism can be an insightful lens to understand the enmeshed histories and presents that animate contemporary moral panics around fatness, with patriarchal standards reproducing limited possibilities for societally acceptable embodiment (including for fat people). Feminist perspectives resist the dominant cultural and capitalist economic interplay that reifies hegemonic body ideals to the exclusion of many diverse bodies (Farrell).
More than just interrogating what we know about bodies, May Friedman writes that “If intersectionality allows me to contend with the tensions between my convoluted and ambiguous identities, the best of Fat Studies opens up the notion of identity as unstable and contingent” (248). By framing fatness through identity, we can better situate the messy, complex, layered realities of our lived experiences. An analysis that integrates intersectional feminism and fat studies is instrumental in fighting back against the normalized policing, shaming, (hyper)invisbility, and objectification of identities and embodiments that are often labelled as excessive or deviant.
Many intersectional feminists actively engage in researching the ways that body politics and fat oppression are informed not only by constructs of gender but also by ableism, anti-Blackness, classism, colonialism, heterosexism, racism, transphobia, and other violent structures (Gillon, Herndon, Harrison, Mollow, Robinson, Stoll, Strings, White). Beyond an academic kinship, a great deal of fat liberation practices emerge from and are in persistent dialogue with other forms of activism, especially feminist and queer movements (Cooper, Ellison, Farrell, Pausé, Taylor).
The WGSJ Fat Studies Cluster aims to be an intentional and inclusive space focused on fat studies. We welcome everyone in the areas of women’s studies, gender studies, and social justice who is invested in thickening the discourse on size, by taking a “distinctly cultural, material, and intersectional approach to fatness ” (Rinaldi, Rice, and Friedman, 4).
While we strongly encourage WGSJ membership, we don’t require it for you to participate! This initiative is aimed at fostering a thriving community of fat studies scholars, so that we can converse, connect, collaborate, co-create, and make change together.
Critical Femininities
Contact: critfemininities@gmail.com or Andi Schwartz aschwar@yorku.ca
Learn more about Critical Feminities
Critical femininities is an emerging field of study that aims to examine and theorize femininity in complex and nuanced ways. Critical femininities scholarship responds to certain feminist framings of femininity as patriarchal, heteronormative, and harmful to women. Critical femininities scholarship also responds to lingering gaps in queer theory where the subversive potential of feminine genders and sexualities has, historically, been overlooked. Critical femininities scholarship retains the feminist critiques that challenge the imposition of feminine gender styles and roles on women while celebrating femininity embodied and enacted by cis and trans women, cis and trans men, nonbinary folks, and others who live outside or beyond the binary. While critical femininities is about broadening how we understand the subversive and radical aspects of femininity, it also theorizes femininity as an axis of oppression and a foundation of discrimination and violence towards femmes and other feminine/feminized people. Critical femininities scholars take feminist, queer, decolonial, crip, and critical race approaches to reclaim feminine aesthetics, emotional and sexual styles, roles, work and more, as political, radical, valuable, and—above all—worthy of examination. Critical femininities scholars understand femininity as a theoretical framework and a site of knowledge production. As scholars, we work across many forms, including academic, literary, artistic, and activist. The language of “critical femininity studies” is drawn from femme scholar Ulrika Dahl’s foundational 2012 article “Turning like a Femme: Figuring Critical Femininity Studies.” We recognize and work with/in the multiple lineages that critical femininities stems from, including femme life writing, Black feminist thought, sex work activism, and Indigenous feminisms, that predate this language.
Grad Students
Contact: Hannah Maitland wgsjsecretary@gmail.com
Learn More about the Grad Student Cluster
Are you a graduate student studying gender, women or social justice? We want to hear from you! This form is part of our interview blog series, Fieldnotes, to highlight graduate students and build connections between gender studies, women’s studies, and social justice scholars. Tell us about your writing, activism, current projects, what brought you to your current research area, and your hopes for the future of gender studies.
After editing, these interviews will be shared to the WGSJ website.
We are interested in hearing from graduate students at the MA and PhD level who study gender and social justice in any faculty, department, or discipline. We hope you consider joining the WGSJ as a member, but membership is not required to contribute to this blog series.
Interviews should be a maximum of 1500 words total. If you are interested, please fill in the form here.
Submissions will be accepted on a rolling basis until April 30, 2026.
AI Working Group
Contact: Kathleen Cummins kathleen.cummins@sheridancollege.ca
Learn more about the AI Working Group
Call for participants in a new AI Working Group for WGSJ membership. The aim is to discuss the impact of AI on teaching, learning, scholarly writing, and research, as well as content creation in post-secondary education through an intersectional feminist lens. This is an informal drop-in format to provide WGS educators, scholars, and content creators the space to share, rant, ideate, collaborate, etc.
When: Recurring monthly Friday meetings @ 1-2pm (EST)
Inaugural Meeting: February 13 (this is flexible)
Where: Online
Interested? Kindly complete this Google Form