Center Makes LGBTQ+ Focus Explicit.
UF’s Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research recently affirmed its multifaceted approach to the study of LGBTQ+ issues by announcing a new name: The Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research. President Fuchs’ statement in support of the victims of the Pulse nightclub terrorist attack and the LGBTQ+ community was an administrative milestone after years of work by the Center and its partners such as LGBT Affairs and the LGBTQ+ Advisory Committee, whose collaborative efforts have been instrumental in protecting the rights of UF’s LGBTQ+ population. “It’s been integral to what we’ve been doing all along,” says Center director, Bonnie Moradi. “This name change cements the Center’s distinctive national profile of having the research, teaching, and leadership/outreach missions of a research center and an academic department with an intersectional focus on how gender, race, sexualities and other social systems combine to shape organizations, cultures, and people’s lives.”
“This name change cements the Center’s distinctive national profile.”
The Center began, as did many similar programs in the 1970s, as a Women’s Studies program. To challenge administrative bias against the LGBTQ+ community during the 1980s, feminist professors worked to expand the scope of Women’s Studies, while supporting the Committee on Sexism and Homophobia, the predecessor to the current LGBTQ+ Advisory Committee. As it has done for 40 years, the Center represents the core of LGBTQ+ research and teaching at UF in the face of a turbulent local history.
President Fuchs’ order to light Century Tower in rainbow colors represented institutional level support for a community that has experienced a complex journey of milestones and setbacks in the contemporary LGBTQ+ rights movement. Says Professor Wolfgang Sigmund of the LGBTQ+ Advisory Committee, “It was wonderful to see UF and President Fuchs send such a strong signal of equality and unity when we faced the atrocity from the Pulse Nightclub shooting.” The field of gender-related studies offers the scholarly foundation for community outreach efforts that empower and connect the LGBTQ community, such as the lighting of the tower.
As a shining example, The Samuel Proctor Oral History Program recently launched LGBTQ Florida, which will curate a multimedia living history. Project coordinators, Holland Hall ’16 and Chelsea Carnes ’15, say, “Oral history is an especially practical method for collecting historical information from communities that have been silenced by prejudice.”
To contribute stories for LGBTQ Florida, please contact Holland Hall or Chelsea Carnes.
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