Jessica Lowell Mason

Jessica Mason.

Jessica Lowell Mason is a teaching assistant and doctoral candidate in the Global Gender and Sexuality Studies program. Jessica's broader scholarly interests center on identity, language, consciousness, and embodiment, but focus more specifically on representations of madness in court documents, autobiography, memoir, and transhistorical fiction to uncover intersections between medical, legal, and literary discourses on madness, coloniality, sexuality, gender, and power, with the goals of contributing to community wisdom around the production of madness as a patriarchal and colonial project, challenging mental hygiene laws that use colonial and sanist heteropatriarchal state power to control disabled, non-normative, and neurodivergent bodies, and working toward mental healthcare justice. She strives to use the written contributions of maligned, misunderstood, and heretical women and gender-non-conforming people (often, those dubbed 'madwomen' and 'witches') on the subject of consciousness to 'talk back' to norm-enforcing modern-day sanist institutional and social practices - that is, to 'hex' the patriarchy. Jessica teaches both courses for the GGSS department and writing courses, and is the co-founder of Madwomen in the Attic, a grassroots feminist mental health and madness literacy organization. 

During the 2020-2021 year, Jessica was a graduate fellow with the College Consortium and the Coalition for Community Writing's Herstory Training Institute and Fellowship Program, Teaching Memoir for Justice and Peace. It is a year-long program in partnership with the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University (HISB). As a result of this fellowship, Jessica co-facilitates an ongoing free weekly workshop, titled "Memoirs to (Re)Imagine Mental Healthcare." In 2021 and 2022, Jessica will serve as the Convention Hospitality Fellow with the Northeast Modern Language Association, which is part of the NeMLA Graduate Fellows Program operated through the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Buffalo.

Email: jlmason1@buffalo.edu

Why did you choose UB?

"What drew me to the program is that social consciousness, social change, and community leadership development are part of the curriculum. It has much to offer the non-traditional, independent-minded, and trailblazing student."

 

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