![]() “And then we thought, ‘Let’s map out Harvard Yard,’” she says. Instead of giving up, Wells pivoted to a new idea: to map nearby options. Skipwith enthusiastically embraced the suggestion, but they quickly realized that logistical hurdles, such as building architecture, would prevent their vision from becoming a reality immediately. Wells decided to approach Director of Residential Life Ashley Skipwith to discuss creating gender-neutral options within the halls. ![]() However, as Wells points out, “if you want to take advantage of that, you have to live in certain buildings.” Two of the residence halls contained gender-neutral options. “At the time, the hall had only one bathroom per floor, which switched from men’s to women’s halfway through the semester,” she remembers. As a graduate student living in the GSAS residence halls, she regularly heard other residents request access to a gender-neutral bathroom. We have to address both concepts, and I bring Indian philosophical materials to advance that argument.” On the Mapīut Wells’ interest in gender isn’t purely philosophical. “In my dissertation, I consider why discourse theory is so powerful for race and gender, knowing that we can’t discount the still-relevant theory of social construction. ![]() “Sometimes there are things outside of discourse that aren’t answerable to our linguistic practices, which isn’t a bad thing inherently,” she explains. Kristina Olson, PhD '08, overturns expectations about gender through the TransYouth Project.Īs she considers race and gender, however, Wells sees concepts or ideas that stand apart from “word” or discourse-for example, the unspoken conviction of a person who connects with gender in a way that exists separately from how that gender is communicated through discourse. “They believed that there is nothing outside of word, which is really a radical statement.” “Some of the Buddhist philosophers I study believed the world as we know it is manifest through language, what was essentially an early form of discourse theory,” she says. Wells addresses contemporary philosophical issues of race and gender through her scholarship in philosophy, specifically Indian philosophy. “It’s the values we place on them as a society and how we treat people differently based on them. “There’s nothing inherently nefarious about having categories,” Wells says. But Clarisse Wells, a PhD student in South Asian studies, believes that it isn’t the act of categorization that is the problem. For transgender individuals, gender categorization can have traumatizing and lasting effects.
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