Geneva Williams: Can you talk a little about your academic work and kind of how you ended up where you are today?

Ariella Rotramel: I graduated high school in 1999, a Millenia ago. And I always remember identifying as a feminist. So for me, when there was the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas issue, and the hearings around Clarence Thomas’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, I was in grade school. But it was something I was really aware of. I remember arguing with other kids, and sort of just having concerns about how she was being treated and knowing that something like sexual harassment was not an okay thing. So, I was raised in a family where that was kind of normal, but in high school we didn’t have any kind of, like, gender studies stuff. In high school, I ended up with a best friend who identified as bisexual at the time, and we helped cofound a gay-straight alliance. Initially, I was an ally, and of course then I realized that I am also part of the community. So I had that kind of background, but coming out to my family, there were issues. And so I ended up at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for my first year of college, and I took a women in politics class my first semester that I really liked. But I had a lot of negative experiences on that campus, and so while I started taking classes that were interesting, it was a really bad fit. So I ended up transferring to UIC, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and I kept on taking these classes that were related to women’s and gender studies, but weren’t actually…there wasn’t a major. So I kept on taking the courses, and I got to know the faculty really well that were in the program, and I had a lot of friends. We started a Feminists United club around feminist issues, but that was definitely made up of a lot of students who were taking courses in that program.

And then eventually, with the support of Professor John D’Emilio and Professor Elena Gutierrez, I proposed my own major, right, so an independent plan of study. And I became sort of like the guinea pig for the gender studies major at UIC. So, a lot of that was just really about, these topics are interesting to me. Learning queer history was really important to me, as someone who was experiencing different kinds of homophobia, and I couldn’t quite understand, like, why, right? What was it about me that was eliciting these really negative attitudes, I guess, and assumptions about what kind of person I was? And it wasn’t until I was reading Lisa Duggan’s work about sort of the ideas of the sapphic slashers, like, oh, okay, that’s why I’m sort of being interacted with and talked to in this really problematic way. But also, as a white person…I had a girlfriend who was a Mexican, I had a lot of friends from different backgrounds, and I wasn’t as well educated on different cultures and contexts. That wasn’t really something that I got in my K-12 education. So, I had a lot of learning to gain. And so, gender studies was the place where I also got to think intersectionally about the fact that, like, I had a lot of queer friends, but a lot of my queer friends were Mexican, and some were born here, and some were undocumented, and some had migrated but did have status. And sort of the things we had in common, and sort of the things we enjoyed together, but also, there are real differences in terms of what it meant for us to be living in Chicago in the early 2000s. So, I ended up really thinking about those questions of race and gender and sexuality, because they’re just really important in terms of understanding our world. And that’s something I’ve always been curious about. Also, being from Chicago, it’s a place that has a lot of, particularly at the time, had a lot of segregation, had a lot of lines based on race. So that was something that I definitely was trying to understand and figure out how to navigate as a young person.

I had a really challenging experience in undergrad. At the end of the day, I was struggling with, like…you know, I identify as a nonbinary person, so I was experiencing a lot of issues around gender and sexual orientation, and mental health related to those kinds of things. Yeah, it was a really challenging time, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to get into grad school. But by the time I was a senior and ready to graduate, I realized this was something I was passionate about. I’d been participating in the first queer-Latino youth, LGBTQ radio program that was coming out of Pilsen. It was called Homofrecuencia, and so I was sometimes helping come up with little clips about queer history, or queer icons for that. And I realized I was really interested in thinking about history, but also thinking about the stories we tell about our community, and sort of, just, like, educating and sort of learning more. So, I realized that getting a Ph.D. in gender studies was interesting to me.

Because of my grades, I wasn’t sure that I was going to be successful, but I applied to some schools, I got into Rutgers University’s Ph.D. program in Women’s and Gender Studies. I think I started in 2004. Initially, I actually proposed a project about doing oral histories with Latina, and particularly Chicana, lesbian, bisexual women, because at the time there was not a lot of research on that. But what was exciting is other people have actually done that work since then, and that’s something that, I guess, is important for context. There just wasn’t a lot of scholarship, right? I took a sociology class as an undergrad, and I wanted to write a paper about lesbian identity formation, which seems like a pretty basic thing. And there was no real scholarship at the time, so I had a collection of essays that were very first-person but published by a sociologist. And my teacher was actually pretty annoyed with me. And I’m like, “Dude, I’m sorry that your field isn’t really covering this right now, so I’m gonna have to use these sources and methods that are not really typically in sociology.” So, that’s part of what I was thinking of. Those gaps and absences.

So, when I was at Rutgers, I proposed this project that was oral history, but I was in New Jersey, and I started getting engaged in some activism in New York, because it was an hour away on the train. Being from Chicago, I missed being in a city. So, I got first involved with a group called Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. Through them I got to know some other organizations, and between that, and I ended up with some roommates in Queens who were activists, I started really thinking about how I could use my Ph.D. in a way that was a little bit more meaningful in terms of what it was going to produce for other folks, and also made sense in terms of my own positionally and where things had been going. I ended up doing a project, a dissertation about women of color-led organizing in New York. I worked with two groups, CAAAV, organizing Asian communities, and Mothers on the Move, which is in the Bronx. It was a great experience in terms of getting to interact with people who are committed to the communities, who are going to do that work to support people across identities. There were times when Mothers on the Move activists, some of them showed up to support Chinatown tenants who had just been kicked out of their building. I got to see some of the kinds of engagement that I hadn’t really experienced in Chicago, and I think that’s a bit more normal now, hopefully.

But it was the kind of project that came out of both what I was interested in as an undergrad, and I think as a grad student, really starting to think conceptually about my positionality and what I could do. And so, for part of that project I tried to archive materials for both groups. It was pre-easy scanning, and a lot of the technology we have now. So it mostly was just sorting stuff, putting it in folders at both sites. It was something where I was trying to help a little bit with that memory piece. I did some interviews, and I did some participant work with both groups. That kind of is my story. And then I went on the job market. Job market was rough, of course. I ended up with a visiting position at Connecticut College. Through many complicated circumstances I went from visiting to tenure track. I worked on some different research topics, I worked on my book, did all the teaching, all the service. I received tenure in 2020. So here we are. I’m basically 25 years into my relationship with the field.

Williams: That was a wonderful answer, thank you so much. And congratulations for the tenure, that’s amazing. One thing I loved from what you just talked about was how you used your graduate school education and your Ph.D. in ways that were meaningful beyond the classroom. And so I, from my conversations with your student Kazi and the research I’ve done, I love how you have such a focus on mentorship. I was wondering if you could kind of talk about the role that you’re in now, and how you’re able to engage at all, but with mentorship at the university level with undergrads.

Rotramel: I think mentoring is super important. Mentoring, to me, is just one element of teaching. I’m just coming off of interim directing a center, and I had one of the staff members give me a very cute card today about mentoring and working with her. To me, that’s kind of the point. For better or worse, I really like people, and I’m very invested in people. So, mentoring, to me, is about…I think it is fundamental to the field. So I think, even in grad school, I had a feminist pedagogy class, and it was perhaps a little too theoretical for my taste, but the fact that we had that as part of our curriculum says something different about us as a field compared to the typical disciplines. So, I think there’s always been…you can’t really talk about women and gender studies or whatever variation of it without thinking about people. I think about their relationships, I think sometimes we use generation frameworks in a way that is really problematic, but at the end of the day, that also is about the sense of cross-generational engagement and commitment to feminism, and to feminist thought, and the valuing of the work that we do.

So for me, as an undergrad, this is the field that changed my life. I think there’s a lot of toxic messages we get about who we are as people, and I think a lot of that can be understood and thought about differently if we’re thinking about it through the lens of gender and women’s studies. So for me, knowing that I wasn’t this inherently bad person, or this inherently dangerous person, I think it did change things. I remember my mom thanking my teachers when I graduated because, yeah, it saved my life in a certain way. I take the best of what I learned from my mentors, and I leave behind the worst. The 90s and early 2000s were a different time, definitely boundaries are an important part of mentoring, and I think that’s an interesting thing to think about within feminist pedagogy conversations. Because sometimes there is that desire to ignore power dynamics, and just be comfortably peer-to-peer. And there’s part of me that, I get it. I would love to have that sort of parallel engagement. But at the end of the day, I’m a professor. I’ve taken on the role of being in the academy, in a hierarchy. I grade my students, there’s a lot of power dynamics. I have a lot of power in relationship to my students.

I think about that a lot when it comes to mentoring, because I want to be that person who they know is there for them, and is the person who is in their corner, but also, I think they should be treated as adults. And that’s maybe something that’s changed a little since I was an undergrad. As an undergrad, no one was chasing me down or trying to help me with anything. It was very much like, I generationally came out in a moment where it was like, “Yeah, you are over 18, you will face consequences. Period.” And so, working at a liberal arts college, and even when I was at Rutgers, the culture has shifted, and there’s a way in which undergrads can be really infantilized. And I just am not here for that. I chose to teach college-level students, and it’s because they are adults, and they can have adult conversations, they can consider adult topics. I teach classes like Sex/Work, I need my students to be adults who are really willing to engage with the full range of what it means to be human, and all the issues that we see globally. We have to be able to have those conversations as they are relevant. So with my students, I try to be someone who’s like, I have their back, I’m supporting them, but when it comes to their work, it needs to be driven by them, they need to be responsible for that. And I try to model like…I’m doing my best to be a good person in the workplace, and it be collegial and support folks, and I want to be someone who respects my students, who respects my colleagues, and sort of shows, that is the way to be a queer person at work. And that I am not going to sacrifice my self-respect, but I am also not going to be someone who is so invested in hierarchy that I talk down to people, or think I’m better than them because I have a Ph.D. The Ph.D. is so that I can do this work, it’s not so that I can think I’m better than anyone else, because I’m not.

Williams: That was beautifully put, and a very thoughtful answer. I am just curious about if you’d be willing to share any about your experience being vice president of the National Women’s Studies Association from 2021 to 2023.

Rotramel: I would say it was a really challenging experience. I met some really great colleagues. But you know, the NWSA is a complicated organization. I think that I am ambivalent. I think part of why I’m ambivalent is just that academic feminism, if that’s what we’re going to call this, it is always in conflict. We want a seat at the table, we want to be offering classes, we want to be doing the research that is our field. But when it comes to thinking about owning what we’re doing, power, I think there’s a real disconnect. And I will say, I’m the third year of my program that was offering Ph.D.s. I’m turning 44 this week. So generationally, my cohort of the bulk of what we see with Ph.D.s in the field really come out of the late 90s, early 2000s. So, we also have an issue that, as a field, we’ve been led by people who don’t have training, literally in the field, because the field was coming together.

So there’s this really interesting issue, too, about what does it mean that I’m trained in this field only? All my training is interdisciplinary, gender studies training in higher ed. What does it mean for folks like me to exist at the same time with people who are trained in something like history or sociology or psych, who care very much, and are leading departments and programs, but fundamentally, they have a discipline they belong to? So, I just think about that when I think about NWSA, because it’s a challenging issue in terms of…I think it’s recently starting to get leadership that comes out of, actually, the field. But that’s new. Also, COVID, there were a lot of interpersonal whatever, like, bureaucratic things that happened within the organization that changed. So I think it’s not unknown publicly that there was a staff that left the organization. So you had a long-term staff, they left, and I think there was a lot of disruption. I think there were leadership issues. And I think that my experience with NWSA was that interpersonally, I also dealt with some challenges in terms of my own identities as a gender nonbinary person, as a Jewish person, that I find deeply disappointing. But, I also got to work on connecting with colleagues and talking about threats to programs and departments. The issues we’re seeing with the Trump administration, we saw in Hungary over ten years ago, I think, at this point. Russia, there’s been anti-gender and -women’s studies action globally. And so, at the state level we were seeing that when I was vice president, where places like South Dakota, I think it was either North or South Dakota, pardon, and Wyoming, there was even an issue in Maine, where schools were thinking about one, what did we want to find. And we got resource issues. But also there were politics. Particularly for public universities, the issues we’re seeing today around censorship and whatnot, gender studies programs were getting threatened with defunding, there were issues around censorship around talking about things like abortion. So, that was really meaningful and important work to me, and I’m glad to see that, I think, NWSA is continuing some of that work at the level of, like, within the conference, and within sort of its own organizing.

But I guess, one thing I would say, is I struggled with that NWSA, in terms of what we were communicating under the president, was often about global issues, and I didn’t feel like we were spending enough time and energy actually talking about what is going on in our field, what are the real threats to programs and departments, and also what are the positives? Why aren’t we advocating and talking about why gender studies matters, and what are all the amazing things that our graduates do? When you’re coming from NWSA and then you’re looking at the AHA, the Historians Society, or the Sociological Society, or the Psychology Association. These are huge, and seemingly powerful, strong advocates for their field. And I feel that the NWSA, it’s had little bits of moments in terms of producing reports and whatnot, but it’s never been a very aggressive association. And to me right now, I’ve always wanted that. And now I think it’s sort of make-or-break in terms of how much is it going to be voiced? Because it’s hard to say you want to spend money on a membership, you want to go to the conference, if you’re not seeing the sort of bang for your buck in terms of advocacy. I both really appreciate NWSA as a space, Kazi had a great experience in San Juan. It was really meaningful for them. And I think I’m happy that they had this experience that makes them want to produce a Ph.D. But as someone who’s been in the field for a while, there’s elements of its work that I hope we see more of in the future.

Williams: That was an incredibly thoughtful answer. I appreciate you spending time and sharing that with me. Another thing I wanted to ask you about was from your 2020 book, Pushing Back: Women of Color–Led Grassroots Activism in New York City. I was wondering if there’s a story from that book that stood out particularly to you, about a feminist that you would see value in us including in our course.

Rotramel: That’s tricky. I would say, part of the thing with my book is a lot of folks weren’t like, card-carrying, “I’m a feminist” people. That’s not their priority. But I guess…I’m conflicted.

Williams: I could expand on that, if you’d like. Part of our course is documenting the experiences of women and how they engaged in American, U.S. history. It’s documenting, all-encompassing. So we have Valerie Solanas, or Phyllis Schlafly. So those two are very different sides of the aisle, but both define themselves as feminists equally. But they did contribute to the history of women in the U.S. So if there’s somebody like that…

Rotramel: They’re significant. I think part of it is, so my project was much more, kind of, people who sometimes would show up in news stories, or might be in photographs and they aren’t necessarily named, but are organizers and doing the day-to-day work. So, I would say I’m torn, but I would think about…the two people who were very generous with me with their time, and who I got to see doing a lot of really important, just like, door-knocking, and relationship building, and kind of grinding it out, I think that Nova Pierce I believe now she is married and Nova Pierce, at Mothers on the Move. She’s moved out of New York now, but she was this person who was my age, who was younger, doing housing activism. So I talk about her in terms of, you know, not only was she doing the straight-up public housing, what is wrong with your apartment, how do we get that addressed, how do we build power amongst folks, and all the other issues Mothers on the Move was working on. But she also performed on stage in this theater production about pins and needles. It was this remake of an old union play. She’s featured in a New York Times story. So I would highlight her, I guess.

Actually, I will pick Nova of everyone fabulous that I talked about and got to interact with. Because she is someone who really did not have a lot of support, who had gone through the welfare…I always forget what it is, but basically welfare-to-work program that they run in New York. And she was very smart, and she was aware that this was a completely bullshit kind of thing. She talked about, when I interviewed her, about picking up poop in the parks. That is not great workforce development. But it’s the kind of stuff that she had to do to continue receiving public assistance. She’s someone who went from that to being placed at Mothers on the Move and being so engaged that she became a housing organizer. And I just think she’s someone who’s a great example of someone who truly is from the community. Who is not someone who is bourgeois, and shares maybe one identity, she is someone who straight-up was living in public housing in the South Bronx, and was able to develop the relationships and do the work that was necessary. And I think that she made the most of all the political educational opportunities, and all the connections. And I just think that she’s a really…to me, she’s a great example because she’s someone who always had a lot of humility, and also had a sense of humor.

And I think that’s probably not something that will be important for this exam, but I think we need people who actually have a sense of humor, who can take ownership when they make mistakes, who can be held accountable and also be comfortable, or welcoming in ways I don’t think a lot of folks tend to be. I think she was a model of that. And I think that made it easier for people to feel welcomed into the work that she was talking about with them.

Williams: Yeah, I absolutely agree. I was wondering if there are certain modern feminists maybe, that are young people, whose works that you admire? Or if you have any recommendations of works that we should include in our course curricula?

Rotramel: It’s U.S. focused?

Williams: U.S. focused, yes.

Rotramel: That’s tricky. Because I was just actually thinking, I have a friend who is teaching a class, and she taught this book by this Moroccan feminist. It’s called Hshouma, and it’s all about shame, but it’s talking about gender and sexuality. If you’re allowed to think about those relationships, because part of the thing is, the issues around sexism and stigma were so compelling in this graphic novel that I’m thinking of teaching it in my info course. Because it does a good job of talking about gender identity and things like, even intersex folks. And I’m like, this person writing a book in I think 2019 really kills it in terms of really explaining those things. So I really liked that.

In terms of contemporary folks, I think it’s hard to put a finger on one thing. There are philosophers like Alexis Shotwell. I really like her work around trans issues. I’m thinking about things I taught this semester. Actually, I taught a literature class with my colleague in the spring, and it’s called Leather and Glitter, and it’s a lot of LGBT stuff. He’s in the English department. And we were teaching things like—I’ll look up his last name, because I always forget his name—Justinian Huang’s book The Emperor and the Endless Palace. This is a book that is taking an actual historical example of an emperor in China, and this sort of became the slang for queerness, was the cutting of the sleeve. It’s this story. And he takes it and makes this cross-time, cross-context, so it ends up taking place in the U.S., and he, Justinian, is a U.S. author. To me, some of these things are actually the most interesting work now, as I think about queer and gender narratives, rather than necessarily theory or scholarship.

I think that we’re in a moment where there’s so much more expansion of representation that yes, I want to look at stuff in the field, but I do want to look at The Hunting Wives and Heated Rivalry, right? I think there’s something to be said about trashy television, very mainstream, sensational kind of work that is introducing people to ideas and experiences that they have not thought about. Or that they have thought about, and they’re like, actually, that’s not just me. So I think that kind of stuff is exciting. And from a straight, traditional women’s studies approach, I think it’s also showing men having different kinds of intimacy, and different relationships in terms of the hockey bros. And I think The Hunting Wives is actually interesting because in the field, we don’t like dealing with right-wing women very much. And I will admit that I tend not to want to study them in terms of my own interest, and I think I’m okay with that. But when you look at us as a collective, you’re like, okay, they’re incredibly powerful, the ways that right-wing feminists or women articulate their politics. We have to talk about it and we have to account for it. And I’m glad that you brought up Phyllis Schlafly, because, yeah, if we’re talking about an AP exam and what is one person who really was powerful and had a clear message about where women should be, even though she was on the road, it was her. I think Gwen Stefani this week is peddling an anti-abortion app or something. We do have to talk about that, you know what I mean? So I think there’s a lot of possibilities there.

Williams: Yes. So I have one last question for you, and then we’ll be done. Again, thank you so much for your flexibility with the late start, I really appreciate that. So my last question that I have for you is, do you support the creation of an AP U.S. Women’s History course? If so, can you share why you think this course would be beneficial for high school students? 

Rotramel: Yes, I do. I took AP U.S. History, I took AP European History. I was at a school where those were some of the more easily accessible things. And I can’t imagine how different my life would be, to be honest, if I had an AP Women’s History class. I was not learning about women, and I wish I was exaggerating. But the U.S. History course tended to be very much wars, and presidents, and a very traditional kind of analysis. And I think there was a lot that was left out for me. I think European History, I mean, I don’t understand, actually now that I think about it, how do you teach without thinking about things like women? It’s a huge gap, and I think if we want people across genders to be educated, I think it’s an important option. I think it’s also an important option, when I’m thinking about teenagers, to have a better understanding, and to be able to talk about gender, and to think about not only why are women important, what have women done, what are the challenges around things like gender? But I think it will create more confidence and also respect, mutually. So I think about…I was taking these classes in Chicago, I wasn’t learning about Ida B. Wells. I don’t know that you can really understand the 20th century if you don’t talk about things like Ida B. Wells, or you don’t talk about Gloria Steinem, and the rise of feminism in the 60s and 70s. I actually do think you’re missing out a big part of the story of what was going on in this country. And so, it makes things really confusing. If you aren’t willing to talk about things like abortion, and the history of abortion and the fight over that, or suffrage, or women entering the military, right? There’s these huge things, women even entering higher ed. My college was started because Wesleyan shut the doors to women in the early 20th century. I think you have to talk about those things, and I think because of where we are, yeah, it requires its own course, and I think it has a lot of value.

Williams: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for your time. This was a wonderful interview.