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."

 

Meet More Students

  • Jessica Lowell Mason
    2/7/22
    Situated in disABILITY theory, feminist theory, and queer theory, Jessica strives to use the written contributions of maligned, misunderstood, and heretical women (those dubbed 'madwomen' and 'witches') on the subject of consciousness to "talk back" to norm-enforcing modern-day sanist institutional and social practices.
  • Gabriella Nassif
    6/30/21
    Gabriella Nassif focuses on issues of labor, gender and development in the Arab region with a specific focus on Lebanon. She has spent the last few years living between Buffalo, N.Y. and Beirut, Lebanon.
  • Maria Amir
    9/13/19
    Maria Amir’s work focuses on South Asian queer Sufi practices and postcolonial feminist identities, specifically with regards to contemporary Human Rights and Nationalism discourse in South Asia.
  • Deanna Buley
    3/9/21
    Deanna Buley's research focuses on abortion access and support systems in highly restrictive locations such as Northern Ireland and parts of the U.S.
  • Elizabeth DiPaola
    3/15/21
    Elizabeth DiPaola is an MA student with an interest in the relationships between gender, sexuality, power, race, and class.
  • Lee Kagiavas
    4/17/24
    Their dissertation work is a pessimist, History of Consciousness--abortion-style-- examination of aesthetic personhood through BIPOC queer/trans art and anti-abortion imagery. In her free time, she likes spending time outside with family, cooking, teaching classes, and of course, reading.
  • Sam King-Shaw
    9/29/23
    Sam King-Shaw is a PhD student and Schomburg Fellow at UB. Sam’s research explores questions of relationality, desire, (freedom) dreams, and genealogy in twentieth-century Black queer cultural production.
  • Senay Imre
    9/17/20
    Senay's research focuses on a comparative study of the social and political aspects of the "gender equality" versus the "gender justice" movements in her native Turkey.
  • Soe Win
    9/29/23
    Soe is currently a PhD candidate. Her research interest includes gender-based violence, violence against minorities, and the women's movement in Burma (Myanmar).
  • Xingyu Chen
    6/12/18
    Xingu Chen joined the Global Gender and Sexuality Studies department as an MA student, then decided to stay for her PhD, focusing on war and fertility patterns, conflict-induced exposomes and women’s reproductive health in Asian countries after WWII.
  • Lisa Martin
    8/19/21
    Lisa Marie Martin is currently an MA student at the University at Buffalo in Global Gender Studies.
  • Jenna Woodcock
    9/29/23
    Jenna Woodcock is pursuing her Master of Arts in Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo. Her research interests include: Memoir as a therapeutic and social justice praxis, Disability studies, Food writing, Memory studies, Queering the archive.
  • Kit Lam
    9/29/23
    Kit is a PhD student, and their research interests surround issues of interracial solidarity in social movements, with a particular interest in Asian-Black solidarity in the COVID era and its aftermath.
  • Kailey McDonald
    3/9/21
    Kailey is a PhD student interested in the interplay between the political imaginary and the transformative power of language. Her research focuses on imagining political alternatives to neoliberal, neocolonial capitalism.