Erica Rand
Professor of Art and Visual Culture and Gender and Sexuality Studies
Associations
Art and Visual Culture
Pettengill Hall, Room 215
Gender and Sexuality Studies
Pettengill Hall, Room 215
About
Erica Rand is Professor of Art and Visual Culture and of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Bates College, with a focus in queer and trans studies, and was the inaugural Faculty Fellow at the Center for Inclusive Teaching and Learning (CITL). She is the author of Barbie’s Queer Accessories, The Ellis Island Snow Globe, Red Nails Black Skates: Gender, Cash, and Pleasure On and Off the Ice, and The Small Book of Hip Checks On Queer Gender, Race, and Writing. She has served on the editorial boards of Radical Teacher and Salacious and co-edits the series Writing Matters! for Duke University Press. In a piece for Global Sports Matters called “Skating Out of the Binary” and in “At the Ice Rink, My Feet End in Knives,” she describes training in a gender non-conforming adult figure skating pairs team, with pairs partner Anna Kellar of the Future of Figure Skating podcast, as they participate in growing efforts to expand inclusion in the sport—a sport mired in racialized heteronormativity that is also being transformed through critically engaged practice and institutional change.
That skating, writing, and activism feed into Skating Away From the Binary, a new book of short essays and exercises, available for preorder, in the Forerunners series at the University of Minnesota press. Grounded in lively descriptions of the pair’s training, the book invites readers to think about both big-picture forces and the devil in the details, about both the ingredients of gender traditionalism and the pleasures of moving otherwise. It makes a compelling case for transforming figure skating in particular, for fighting exclusionary, including trans-hostile, practices in sport, and for working toward a world where all people can move with joy in the skins, bodies, and identities we inhabit.
Expertise
Current Courses
Fall Semester 2025
Gender and Visual Culture
Situating an intersectional trans and queer studies at the center rather than the margins of gender studies, this course has two primary and interconnected areas of focus: the study of people as gendered makers and viewers of visual culture, with emphasis on the later 20th and the 21st centuries; an…
Methods in the Study of Art and Visual Culture
This course considers methods of pursuing research, thinking, and writing in the history and criticism of art and visual culture. Surveying a wide range of approaches, while attending to issues of power and privilege that have affected the histories of our field(s), the course works to prepare stude…
Senior Thesis: History and Criticism
Preparation of an essay in the history or criticism of art and visual culture, conducted under the guidance of a member of the department faculty. Students may conduct a thesis in either fall or winter semester. Students conducting a senior thesis in history and criticism do not meet as a class. Stu…
Skating Away from the Binaries
At a time when some people are doubling down on gender segregation in sport, others are working to challenge the interconnected binaries that affect how people understand and practice sports: binaries like female/male, artistic/athletic, human/nonhuman, mind/muscle, and serious/fluffy. In this cours…