00:00:00M.L.: Hi, I’m Maureen Linker. I am professor of Philosophy, and I’ve been in the Women’s & Gender Studies program since I’ve been here essentially, when I came to U of M-Dearborn in 1996. I am currently serving as Associate Provost for Undergraduate Curriculum and Experiential Learning.
00:00:19A.B.: And I’m Amy Brainer, associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and coordinator of LGBTQ Studies, also at UM-Dearborn. I’m going to ask you questions that are geared toward the period when you were director, but you can absolutely feel welcome to talk about anything from your time with Women’s and Gender Studies. I’m thinking you served as director from 2002 to 2004? [Amy's note: I messed that up. The correct years are 2004-2006! See the index for one of Maureen's annual program reports and an event she co-organized during this period.]
00:00:44M.L.: That’s right.
00:00:45A.B.: Do you remember how you came to be director? Were you asked? Was it something you volunteered for?
00:00:52M.L.: I was a faculty member who taught courses in philosophy that had feminist components and feminist theory components. At that point, so it was two years because I was in between - there were folks who were going on sabbatical, so I was asked to serve. I had just gotten tenure. It was important both to me and to the people who were mentoring me that I take on that kind of responsibility after I had tenure. I can’t remember exactly who was going on sabbatical, what the circumstances were that it was a two-year term, but I was excited to do it. At that point, so much of the work for the major had been done, really being led by Suzanne [Bergeron] and Rashmi [Luthra] and Lora [Lempert], but it hadn’t yet gotten over the finish line. That was my objective, was could I serve this two-year term and could I just do the administrative finishes to get the major approved. [See the index for the approved major proposal.]
00:02:02A.B.: Did you feel prepared?
00:02:04M.L.: I didn’t feel prepared, but I felt very emboldened. [Laughter] My philosophy colleagues were wonderful. They hired me, but when I was actually on campus, it was people in Women’s and Gender Studies that really pulled me in. Suzanne Bergeron started I think a year before me. She came to my job talk, and there was a feminist component to my talk. We talked afterwards. Lora Lempert invited me to be part of a book club, a writing club. I just felt like I was making some really, not just connections but friendships. I was really excited about the major and the work in designing the major. So I didn’t feel like I was prepared, but I felt like I had a lot of support and a lot of passion for seeing the major get through.
00:02:57A.B.: I asked that question because I had a similar timeline. I got tenure and immediately became director, and it kind of felt like there was this idea that a light switch goes on when you get tenure and suddenly, you’re able to know all these things and do all these things. I was like, what? [Laughter] Like you, I relied so much on the other Women’s and Gender Studies faculty who had paved the way for me, so I think very similar.
00:03:25A.B.: Tell me about yourself at that time. What did you specifically bring to the role of director? It could be your academic background, your personal background, both.
00:03:38M.L.: At that point, I had just worked successfully to get tenure and that was a big lift, as you know. I had a baby. He was born in 2001. So I had a one-year-old at home.
00:03:50A.B.: Oh my gosh.
00:03:54M.L.: But I was really excited about the work that I was doing and being part of both Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies. My work was in gendered conceptions of reason from the Enlightenment through the 20th century. It was a big period, but looking at how reason has been conceptualized. I felt like that was, it was complementary to work that other people were doing in Women’s and Gender Studies, but it was its own space too. Suzanne had a global perspective but a strong, obviously, background in economics. The rational man theory was just something that she had done a lot of work on and we liked to dissect together. Lora Lempert’s work in sociology. Rashmi [Luthra]’s work. I felt like what I was able to bring was this philosophical lens on conceptions of reason. I really gained a lot from the praxis of other people’s work, and it helped me ground some of my work in better ways. So I was excited, it was a very exciting time for me.
00:05:04M.L.: I was having nascent ideas about the book that I went on to publish, but not for ten years after that. [See the index for Maureen's book on intellectual empathy.] I was starting to do articles around that. I felt like I had, in terms of the curriculum, I had a unique lens, but it was very complementary I felt like, and it was evolving. I think too that it wasn’t until I was actually serving as director that I realized administration was an opportunity to work with a team, because it can be very isolating doing academic work. Even though I felt like I had kinships and friendships with people, I still did so much of my work alone. And having to get the major together and then administratively get it through. We had a student worker at the time who was, who is a very bright light and was taking courses in Women’s Studies and was part of WILL, so getting to work with her every day. Showing up every day at the office. And actually, it felt like the work that I had done, like office work I did when I was in college or grad school, and that I was responsible to a team of people who were expecting certain kinds of outcomes. That was new. That was a new feeling here. To feel like I’m showing up at the office in the morning and planning out the day and the week with somebody else and with other people.
00:06:33A.B.: Did your expectations and goals for the role change at all as you did the work?
00:06:38M.L.: I think I went into it thinking I was ready to battle. I was ready to fight for - and I was excited about the idea of being an advocate at multiple levels. I think the reality was that there was a lot more administrivia [laughter] that had to get done. That was a real lesson for me. Also, I think I was surprised that there were some things that didn’t require a battle. It really required a process and just making the process clear. It was that combination of both. The process piece of it though was a learning curve for me.
00:07:26A.B.: Did you feel like there was alignment between what mattered to you and how you spent your time?
00:07:33M.L.: Definitely. I really felt like it was - I had been focused so much on tenure and curriculum development within my own discipline, and I was looking to widen it. I wanted to feel like I was doing more interdisciplinary work and that I was learning from colleagues. It gave me the opportunity to read other people’s work more carefully and not to feel like I was taking time away from what I was supposed to be doing in terms of philosophy. It felt like that was part of my job. I should know what people are publishing in Women’s and Gender Studies. I should be building a community outside of Dearborn to let people know about Dearborn. Going to interdisciplinary conferences felt like oh, it’s part of my job. I’m the director of Women’s and Gender Studies. Yes, I should be at FEMMSS [Association for Feminist Epistemologies, Methodologies, Metaphysics, and Science Studies], I should be at NWSA [National Women’s Studies Association]. So that was exciting. It did feel like my scholarship, my teaching interests, my politics, my values were widening in ways that felt so exciting to have it be part of my job.
00:08:40A.B.: Did the amount of time you spent on other things change while you were director? You’ve kind of already started to talk about that.
00:08:47M.L.: Yeah, I did feel like I was - I think my home discipline, while they were supportive, I think they were kind of like, "Where - "
00:08:55A.B.: "Where’d you go?"
00:08:56M.L.: Yeah, "Where’d you go?" Right. Exactly. [Laughter] You just got tenure. I had some guilt about that, that I was not contributing as much as I had been in the six years prior. But having the objective of getting the major approved felt it was such a singular goal.
00:09:17A.B.: It does help to have something like that.
00:09:19M.L.: Right. Right. Exactly.
00:09:21A.B.: It’s a measurable outcome or something you can see happen.
00:09:25M.L.: Right, and that was my talking point. I need to do this, I want to get the major through. And convincing my discipline. Again, they were very supportive and in fact had overlaps in feminist theory, but I had to make the case first there. That was the only - I think that was the place where I sometimes felt like, I want to make sure people understand in my discipline that I was really grateful for all the support they had given me, but that this was something that I thought was really important for the university.
00:10:02A.B.: I asked Rashmi this question because she also talked about the creation of the major. And right now as we’re recording this in 2025, I feel like the major is precarious. There’s a possibility of losing it. So it’s important to me to ask this question. Why a major? Why was that important to have?
00:10:21M.L.: That’s a good question, and I totally understand your feeling that it’s precarious. Although I will say, part of the administrivia that I have to do now, I was looking yesterday at DDC [Dearborn Discovery Core] enrollments. I was looking at the top 20 DDC enrolled courses and Intro to Women’s and Gender Studies is up there. I understand that that’s not saying that the major - but it was just a great reminder to see. Thousands of students in the past four years are taking [Women's and Gender Studies] courses, and I think going on to take other courses [in the program] as well.
00:10:55M.L.: I think at that point we felt like we needed the legitimacy of a major. We felt like the kind of scholarship that so many of us were doing was really interdisciplinary and really did have a focus in feminist theory and in gender studies. We wanted to coalesce around that expertise and map, put our flag down and say that this is a burgeoning field. This scholarship matters. This would be an excellent double major for students, or primary major. I think it was the sense that this work needs to be legitimized and named.
00:11:39A.B.: Did you feel like this was one of the things where it was less of a fight and more of a process?
00:11:46M.L.: I think I thought it was going be more of a fight, and it turned out to be more of a process, yeah. I mean, there were some of the usual suspects of people who were skeptical. Colleagues who were skeptical about what - not that the courses or even the scholarship wasn’t valid, but do we really need a major in this? Couldn’t this just be part of courses that are offered in the minor? There was some of that, but I think the process turned out to be the bigger issue. And the name. Moving into Women’s and Gender Studies.
00:12:28A.B.: Was that while you were director?
00:12:30M.L.: Yes. Because we had courses that were Women’s Studies courses, and we had to deactivate all of the -
00:12:37A.B.: Ahh. It was a lot of work, yeah.
00:12:39M.L.: - all of those courses by hand. We didn’t have a CIM, curriculum management workflow system like we have now. Even that’s not without challenges, but this was manually. We had to manually do forms, and we had to deactivate every Women’s Studies course and then put in new courses with the new name.
00:13:00A.B.: Wow. Tell me why that was important to you to do all of that work.
00:13:05M.L.: I think because I felt, and I felt like our faculty felt, that we had to do this right. Again, Rashmi [Luthra] and Suzanne [Bergeron] had done a lot of work in getting us to the point where we were ready to move forward. I think the leadership prior to me, Suzanne, Rashmi, Lora Lempert, were really committed to getting things done correctly so that if we had to argue the values part of it, or if we had to argue the scholarly worth of it, we were not going to get called out on messiness in terms of the administrative part of it. I just remember having mountains of course changes to have to get through in the office with Christina [LaRose], our office assistant.
00:13:58A.B.: Well, bless you for doing that. [Laughter]
00:14:01M.L.: Yeah, it was - but that was an example of where the process overtook the advocacy.
00:14:10A.B.: Did being director influence your life outside of work in any way?
00:14:16M.L.: I think it did. It was my first administrative experience, and I went on to serve as chair in my department for a period of time. It got me interested in administration, actually, because of this sense of working with other people. It really felt like - I think I recognized my own isolation in some of my own work, that I liked working with people. I liked working with staff, and I hadn’t had much experience in higher ed working with staff. Working with our student office assistants and mentoring them. Working with the administrative folks who helped us and the staff. That was exciting to me. I liked being part of a team of people. That was new to me. I learned that as director. I also liked representing Dearborn outside of Dearborn. At conferences, acknowledgements in papers and books. It was exciting and made me feel like my work was better for having that, for being part of the team.
00:15:18A.B.: I’m going to jump to a question that I think you’ve started to answer, which is what are some things you’ve learned about yourself as a result of this work?
00:15:29M.L.: I think, yes, that. I didn’t expect that I would like to do teamwork. I think I appreciated staff as a faculty member. But really partnering with staff and partnering with students, I discovered that I really love that. And I didn’t want to ever be totally isolated again in my own scholarship or not work with staff again. You know, most of our staff are women. That’s typical. I think it was important to me to learn about the lives of people who work here and what matters to them in the work that I do. I felt like I was learning a lot about working with other people and mentoring other people and managing. The complexity of managing but in a good way. Trying to manage so that people can be their best. That was interesting and exciting to me. It was my first taste of that. It would be nice to apply some of the things that I believe in, in practice in the work that I do.
00:16:33A.B.: What are some of things you learned about the college or university as a result of this work?
00:16:38M.L.: I learned that there was an old guard. I mean, I knew that, but. I knew the skepticism about - I could see in certain meetings that I was in, when I would talk about the major and the work that we were trying to do to get the major through, that there was some eye rolling of like, “Here we go again.” I knew that was there, but I saw it more. When we advocated for the value of the work, it was different than when people argued for the value of other new majors that were disciplinary specific. It felt like, “Here go these angry ladies again.” To me that was motivating. I think about how at that point I felt eager to fight. I don’t know where that came from exactly. But I was like, “Yeah, come on. Bring it.” I was excited about that. It wasn’t though that it was insurmountable and obvious, but that feeling of, I believe in this, and I can make a better argument than you for why this is important, and please give me the opportunity to do that. When I did it, I could see sometimes that my credibility was going down [from] when I was just arguing as a philosopher versus as an advocate and director of Women’s and Gender Studies. There was some credibility loss. But I felt like we have a better case. We really have a better case to make collectively.
00:18:08A.B.: Very related, how were you supported in this work and by whom?
00:18:12M.L.: Definitely by my colleagues. Suzanne [Bergeron] was checking in all the time, asking how things were going, giving me advice. Lora Lempert, again, Rashmi [Luthra], Jackie [Vansant], Pat Smith. They were all supportive of it. We had a real brain trust of commitment. I felt very, very, very supported by the folks in Women’s and Gender Studies.
00:18:35A.B.: Was there any support you felt like you needed but didn’t get? That could be material or emotional or something else.
00:18:42M.L.: I don’t think so. I do think because we were a College Wide Program and not in a department, it was a lot of work to figure out things like how to do program name changes. I just remember walking physically over to what’s now the RUC [Renick University Center] and there was the Curriculum Management Office, and it was like piles of papers. I didn’t know the person in there. I didn’t feel like I had anybody advocating on my behalf like a department chair. The dean’s office was - was Katie [Anderson-Levitt] dean then? I don’t think so. Yeah, I don’t think she was.
00:19:20A.B.: She mentioned the years in her interview, but I don’t remember them, yeah.
00:19:25M.L.: Because Katie was incredibly supportive. I think at that point she was just a senior faculty member. I remember Katie said to me - at one point I was talking to her about the experience of being director and that I learned that I liked aspects of administration, and was that okay to say? Would it make me sound like I wasn’t a legitimate scholar? She talked me out of that. She said no, that’s really important. But I remember she said, “Just don’t take anything else on until you become full professor. Promise me that.” I did keep that promise. She was so sincere and so direct about it that I thought, I really need to listen to this. She was absolutely right. I felt like I had that support, but I didn’t know how to navigate the university administrative processes. That was a lot of trial and error.
00:20:18A.B.: It’s possible someone will listen to this in the same position you were in, with some of the same questions. Does interest in administration make me less of a serious scholar or less of a critical feminist? What would you want to say back to them?
00:20:34M.L.: Well, it’s certainly going to feel like that, and there are going to be days where it’s going to be true. Where you’re not doing things that are necessarily intellectually engaging. And then there are - I think it winds up getting more isolating. I thought going into administration was going to give me more of a team opportunity, but the further up I've moved, given all the various things going on, sometimes the very best things you do are things that no one will ever know about and you can’t share. And that’s something that - I didn’t feel like that as director of Women’s and Gender Studies, but I do feel like that as associate provost. And I felt that, I was library director for a period of time. Again, I felt like my experience as director of Women’s and Gender Studies really helped me think about that, about how to do that kind of work. But I learned that in the library, and then it’s just become truer, that there are times when you can help a situation in ways that matter to me as a feminist, but I can’t share it. It makes sense not to share it, but it winds up making you more isolated in a way.
00:21:52M.L.: And also I think I’m very cognizant now of [how] being in an administrative role can also chill the climate sometimes. Being present for things. Because people, for good reason, perceive that you might have dual objectives. Then how to make that space, how to not take up space where people need space to be together to plan or to advocate.
00:22:20A.B.: Right. A lot of consideration. Is there anything you’ve reached to - do you have a mentor? How do you navigate these things? Where do you go for support for this?
00:22:35M.L.: Now I have [associate provost] Joan Remski. I wanted to give her space to learn about the role. She was chair of Mathematics for a long time. She welcomed Women’s and Gender Studies into the Math department.
00:22:49A.B.: She did. She was so welcoming. [See Amy's interview for why Women's and Gender Studies moved to the Math department for a period of time.]
00:22:51M.L.: She was so welcoming, and her research and scholarship are not related but I think her ethos is. I think having just somebody that feels like a partner, that’s helped tremendously. I think the further you continue in administration - For me, I didn’t really have an external mentor, but it is interesting and some days exciting and some days awful. But to work at least with two other women who are committed in some ways to the very same things - having Gabriella [Scarlatta], who is an affiliate member, has scholarly interests [in Women's and Gender Studies]. Knowing that there are certain arguments that I can make that are meaningful to her. I imagine what it would be like if I didn’t report to someone like that. [At the time of this interview, Gabriella was provost.] How different it might be.
00:23:44M.L.: There’s still challenges. There’s still differences of opinion. But I do feel like together, the three of us, makes it possible to continue on days where I feel like it’s just impossible. Some days where I can, it’s because it’s just consciously being aware of what all the faculty are going through and what the students are going through and what the staff are going through. It’s not like, oh - there are days where my own work feels like that, but it’s a lot of just heaviness of how difficult things are. It’s, as you well know, but it’s a really tough time and it’s been a tough time for a lot of different [reasons], internally and externally.
00:24:25A.B.: So I have a question, it’s kind of from earlier, we’ve been jumping around a little bit. What were some things going on socially, culturally, or politically that shaped the program? I asked during your directorship, but I’ve found, and I think I would be the same way, that people have trouble placing things in these specific years. So don’t feel confined to 2002 to 2004. But things that were going on, the external pressures, that you saw Women’s and Gender Studies respond to, or not.
00:25:03M.L.: So, 9/11 was obviously still very much present on campus. I feel like Women’s and Gender Studies did provide needed leadership at that time, in terms of making space for our Arab Muslim students. We had Arab Muslim women who identified as feminists in the program who were taking courses. I think the work that non-Arab Muslim students in the program, who had been taking courses with us - I think they felt equipped from some of the work that they had been doing, to be able to identify things like intersectional alliances and targeting particular groups. It felt exciting to see that some of the conceptual work that we had done was helping to offer both support and resistance among students and faculty. That was definitely shaping the program. How do we protect a community that’s being targeted? How do we understand the way in which the identity of certain people who’ve committed a particular action are getting spread, you know, treated like a monolithic? I felt like intersectionality was starting to really become [recognized as] something that was more than a concept, [it was] a lived experience.
00:26:28M.L.: I think the other thing was this question of, how far do we go in inclusion before we get to the point where we’re including people who are not safe for us to include? [See the index for a conference Maureen co-organized on a related theme, "Valuing us all: The meanings of diversity in higher education."]
00:26:43A.B.: Yeah, that’s a hard one.
00:26:45M.L.: I remember that being a real issue among our students. Students who came from, for instance, very conservative religious families, very conservative Christian religious families. And students who were starting to identify as queer were saying, do I need to include these views? Also how far do we go in being critical of past traditions to the point where we’re taking away traditional experiences from people that matter? I remember having a long conversation with three students in the office. Again, Christina [LaRose] who was our [student worker] and two of her friends. I think Suzanne came in, and we were all having this conversation. It was about how one of the students worked at a nursery school, and they sang “One Little, Two Little, Three Little Indians.” She was talking about how she spoke to the teacher about, is this song okay? What’s the history of this song? It led to this broader conversation about what are some traditions and rituals, like maybe that one makes sense for a group of non-native people to be critical of. What does ownership of culture - what’s cultural appropriation and disrespect versus - like dancing. Can you dance in a way that looks like you’re imitating another culture? Twerking. Twerking was - I think Miley [Cyrus], maybe that was a little bit later. But I just remember it led to this conversation about, are some things okay to appropriate? Then who gets to do that? It’s just interesting because that’s 25 years ago and I think that conversation is still incredibly relevant. Who do we include and what can be culturally shared in an okay way and what can’t?
00:28:45A.B.: It would be so interesting to have that conversation again intergenerationally. I’m definitely having similar conversations, and also the culture has shifted in big ways on those issues. I think that’s why it would be so interesting to hear people speak from different generational perspectives on it. So tell me a little bit about the students. What were they like? What were some of their interests, values? Anything you remember about them.
00:29:18M.L.: Amazing. Amazing. I particularly enjoyed having philosophy students starting to take more Women’s and Gender Studies courses, so that was really exciting. Just the discovery of how conceptual categories started to become meaningful. The meaning-making that students started doing, or were in the process of doing, was super exciting. I remember one class, a feminist theory class, that there was one student who was - she just had this great moment in the class, out loud and narrated it so well. It was about gay marriage. The conclusion was something like, it’s just two adults who are making a choice about love that’s otherwise sanctioned by the state. It’s not a slippery slope to something else. It’s the exact same thing. There was just this super supportive - because she was struggling with it.
00:30:22A.B.: She was talking her way through it.
00:30:23M.L.: Talking her way through it. She was taking a variety of different things we were looking at, both from a legal perspective and a moral perspective, and she was concerned about the slippery slope argument. Then it just, you could see that it became so clear that no, this is not anything different. It’s really just adults making decisions about love and life and whether or not they want to choose to have this sanctioned by the state. It’s not a road to like, marrying pets or something. For her, it was so clear. I just remember people rallying around her in the class. It felt so supportive. And that sense that people were going to take things home with them. They were going to take things back to their friends. Then also the students who were afraid of what they were learning and how they were changing, but feeling so supported by their faculty and by other students. It’s so unique. Students in philosophy classes that don’t have feminist components that I’ve taught will have moments, but it’s still to me one of the most unique and most precious aspects of my teaching life, that sense of like, a shared soul around things that are really life affirming.
00:31:44A.B.: What are some things you learned about Women’s and Gender Studies as a field through doing this work or just during this period?
00:31:52M.L.: I think for me I had long been interested in this question of truth and all of the postmodern critiques of it, but I really landed I think through teaching, research, and learning from my colleagues around a kind of feminist empiricism. Standpoint epistemology, that we could have multiple perspectives but there could be a collective, co-constructed objectivity that is not subjective. That in fact, sometimes the more subjective we get, the more specific we get on standpoint, the more objective we wind up getting. In a lot of ways, it felt like the universal themes in literature, right? It’s fiction, but it resonates so deeply with people across cultures when it’s done really, really well. I felt like that about theory. The more standpoints that we gained together, the clearer we were coming in terms of, for me, moral truths. That was really exciting because I think so much of my work had been going back and forth in the arguments for a kind of - against a moral absolutism, for a moral absolutism, from Plato onwards. To land at a point where there was this incredible, layered subjectivity and standpoint that nevertheless yielded some things that had clear universal rightness about it.
00:33:26A.B.: This isn’t a question on the script but just came to me as you were talking. Out of my own curiosity, did you have many men take the classes or get involved in Women’s and Gender Studies?
00:33:42M.L.: I did, and it was philosophy students.
00:33:45A.B.: Ah, you were a little bit of the bridge for them.
00:33:48M.L.: Right, and there are always - in philosophy, you often get a lot of young men who love to argue and were good in debate in high school. But there were some who were sincerely fascinated by crafting a good argument and looking for evidence. At that point in my career, I was so committed to the idea that there’s no better argument than feminism. Really. Everything in my work was pointing in that direction. I felt like I reasoned my way into feminism. And also conceptualized reason as something that’s not separate from emotion. That that divide is, you know. And so I felt like there were male students who got real interested in that. It was fun arguing with them together in class. Arguing in the best sense, not in the adversarial sense.
00:34:45M.L.: There were a number of men who went on to either get a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies or major. Who went on to law school. Who went on to graduate school. I’m still in touch with several of them. Their partners, who are - in some cases, when they have women partners who are - I just recently heard back. There was an anniversary for - I went to their wedding. They’re both queer identified, he was my student, and she is - they’re married now. She sent me something about how much it meant to her that he developed the views that he developed while he was in school. And this is ten years later.
00:35:33A.B.: That’s incredible.
00:35:34M.L.: Yeah, so there were some really good experiences along those lines. I felt like there were a lot of good groups, cohorts of students, that became friends together that were both men and women.
00:35:51A.B.: Mm-hmm. What advice would you give to a director of Women’s and Gender Studies today?
00:35:59M.L.: Today.
00:36:00A.B.: Today.
00:36:01M.L.: Today when “woman” is one of the 147 words that are banned. Woman. [Laughter]
00:36:06A.B.: Yeah, right.
00:36:11M.L.: These are bleak times. I will say though as somebody who’s been at U of M-Dearborn for a long time, including in the role that I’m in now, I feel good about the staying power of Women’s and Gender Studies.
00:36:27A.B.: Well, that’s encouraging to hear.
00:36:30M.L.: I feel like there’s a lot of people who would fight hard. I know we’ve had changes in the Center for Social Justice and Inclusion. I saw what you wrote yesterday [on the WGST listserv about the Center closing]. That could look real discouraging, but it’s a more complicated story, I think, too in terms of that office and how they saw their future. In terms of Women’s and Gender Studies, my advice to a director would be to make alliances, certainly with your colleagues, but find friends in unusual places.
00:36:59M.L.: There is this question of how far do you compromise, right, where you’re not compromising your values. I think that there is more room to compromise without compromising your values in terms of maintaining the importance and the priority of Women’s and Gender Studies and feminist theorizing. There’s a reason that I think the current administration is afraid of it, because it’s been effective. I mean, you know, I spend time on TikTok now. And the way my algorithm works, I just see that there’s just no going back in terms of conceptual stickiness. Younger people just not only understand intersectionality, understand exclusion, they live it. It’s their being. Like, you’re not gonna change the joy that celebrating aspects of queer identity are now. Like, “Pink Pony Club” is a real, you know -
00:38:02A.B.: Yeah, how are you going to undo that?
00:38:04M.L.: There’s a joy that you can’t undo because it’s lived. I feel like that - don’t underestimate joy because it’s very scary to people who want to kill it.
00:38:18A.B.: So I’m very mindful that we have three minutes left and I have this doozy of a question that I end with. But I feel it’s only fair to give it to you, and you can take it with you if you want and come back. [Laughter] How do you see the Women’s and Gender Studies program fitting into the larger picture of your career and life?
00:38:37M.L.: Well, I will say integral. I’ve learned the most, I’ve loved the most, I’ve grown tremendously through the experience of being part of it. It taught me so many lessons, but really also how to integrate work and life together. Painful lessons too. But I think it’s been the most meaningful part of my work life at U of M-Dearborn, for sure.
00:39:08A.B.: Thank you so much.
00:39:09M.L.: Thank you for doing this, Amy. Thank you for all of your work and all the amazing things you’ve done, really.
00:39:15A.B.: Thank you. I mean, you were my foundation for anything that I managed to do.
00:39:20M.L.: Yeah, but you took off, you -
00:39:22A.B.: [Laughter] I don’t know.
00:39:23M.L.: - have heeded so much good here, so thank you.
