GWS Profile: Shasha He

Shasha He MA in English 15’

Coming from China with a background in English and international economics, I have a lifelong passion for studying literature, especially the force of literature in revealing women’s long-repressed desires and imaginatively constructing scenarios of gender equality. Studying Anglophone literary traditions at a Chinese university allowed me to compare, contrast, and begin changing ways women came to be disempowered. After a year of non-degree study in English at Princeton University, I began MA studies at Villanova in 2013. In the first semester, I took Dr. Shohet’s theory class and discovered a passion for gender and queer studies. I wrote a course essay about using chaos theory to explore sexualities in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and presented my paper at the 25th Annual Elizabeth Cady Stanton Research Conference at Villanova in 2014.

Almost every single course project that I did during my MA studies was about gender and sexuality. For instance, I did a feminist disability reading of the procreative body in Light in August in Dr. Lutes’s Faulkner class; I also employed Donna Haraway’s notion of cyborg to examine female characters in Red Mars in Dr. Hicks’s Science Fiction class. My MA thesis, to be completed in April 2015, focuses on law and sexuality in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, exploring in particular how the dialectic of stable and unstable elements in both law and sexuality produces the play’s problems, foregrounding the titular question of “measuring” in terms of the law’s capacity to calibrate sexuality.

As I worked on gender difference and sexuality in early modern literature, I found the conceptual frameworks of Christianity defining not only gendered norms but also permeating legal systems and social justice in the West. Given the centrality of Western feminism to global justice, and of Western models of law and social justice in the modern world, I decided to continue my studies in Harvard’s two-year Master of Theological Studies program in women’s, gender, and sexuality. In Harvard, I would like to braid my research at the intersection of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and queer theology. I once did a course project on the intersection of Christianity, Confucianism, and queerness in relation to Asian-American lesbian identities in Dr. Lutes’ feminism theory class. I wish to expand upon this project by interviewing Harvard’s and the Boston Theological Institute’s LGBT Asian American group. My future plan is to have my first start-up company. I hope to engage with the Harvard Graduate School Leadership Institute to provide first-generation Asian immigrants in Boston opportunities for inter-religious exchange, psychological consulting, ESL teaching, and vocational networking.