The faculty of UCI’s Gender & Sexuality Studies Department expresses our solidarity with the Palestine Solidarity Encampment launched by the UCI Divest Coalition and calls upon Chancellor Gillman and the UCI administration to ensure the safety and defend the rights of our students to free speech and protest. We also express our outrage over the series of events that occurred at UCLA last week, which included violent attacks on its encampment by a mob on April 30, 2024, and which culminated in law enforcement’s violent clearing of the encampment on May 2, 2024. Following our colleagues in the History Department, we endorse this letter signed by UC faculty in their condemnation of Chancellor Gene Block’s handling of the situation at UCLA, and urge Chancellor Howard Gillman and the UCI administration to take a different, more productive, and collaborative course of action.
We join the students’ call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire and end to the occupation and genocide in Palestine; for UCI to provide full transparency to all UC-wide and UCI Foundation assets, including investments, donations, and grants in order that it may divest from companies and institutions that are complicit in the Israeli occupation, apartheid, and genocide of the Palestinian people; for no punitive actions to be made by either law enforcement agencies or the University against student protestors; and for any current disciplinary actions against student protestors to be revoked. We urge UCI to stand on the right side of history and follow the examples of Evergreen State College, Brown University, and other institutions of higher education in pursuing morally sound investing policies. Instead of inviting the police to assault, arrest, and penalize their students, these institutions heeded their calls for justice.
We also align with statements of solidarity from the National Association of Women’s Studies, as well as from Gender & Sexuality Studies departments and programs at UCLA, UCSB, and across the country. Gender & Sexuality Studies emerged out of feminist social movements against violence and domination in all its manifestations. Our field is marked by analyses that connect violence at different scales and locations, make links between differently located but connected struggles for self-determination, and critically examine the violence of war, occupation, colonialism, imperialism, misogyny, and patriarchal authoritarianism in its many different but interlinked forms. Our rich traditions of thought refuse the division of oppressions one from the other, including antisemitism and Islamophobia, which are distinct, but overlapping forms of racialized logics. As we have long taught our students, calls for safety are unequally distributed and take us away from the productive discomfort that emerges in classrooms, on campuses, and in society when activists and scholars challenge systems of oppression and violence.
Gender & Sexuality Studies articulates visions of social justice and transformation rooted in the everyday material realities of oppressed people’s lives, and foregrounds life-sustaining movements and practices. The Palestine Solidarity Encampment reflects this life-affirming politics and connects to a longer history of student activism at UCI and throughout the UCs. We affirm the courageous student activism against war, occupation, genocide, and violence and urge Chancellor Howard Gillman and the UCI administration to heed our students’ calls for justice for Palestine.