1. College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Department of Languages and Literatures
PO Box 870202 Tempe, AZ 85287-0202
(480) 965-6281 Fax: (480) 965-0135
www.asu.edu/languages
David William Foster
Regents' Professor of Spanish and Women and Gender Studies
Honors Disciplinary Faculty
Faculty Member, Jewish Studies Program
Editor, Chasqui; revista de literatura latinoamericana
480-965-3752 / 6281
FAX 480-965-0135
e-mail david.foster@asu.edu
September 15, 2015
I am pleased to provide a letter for the placement dossier of Joseph Desamais, who is seeking a
position in the field of Biomedical Engineering.
While I cannot address the scholarly substance of his training in Biomedical Engineering, nor his
MBA work in Management, I can speak to the level of intellectual work he pursued under my
supervision in the area of gender studies. This area of research was crucial to his Honors thesis on
medical ethics and biodiversity, which I directed.
Desamais is one of the brightest and most intellectually inquisitive undergraduates I have had the
opportunity to work with at ASU during my almost 50 years of teaching. Although his core work is
in engineering, during the course of his undergraduate studies, as part of informal conversations with
him, since he is in the employ of my family, it emerged that he wanted to do something outside of
engineering for his final honors project. Specifically, he was interested in something that related to
his native American identity, and he had come upon the phenomenon of the berdache in native
American cultures. Berdache phenomena (an assignment of sexual and gender roles that run contrary
to Western binary heteronormativity) and the issue of the two-spirited people (which represents a
native American intersection with the queer intelligibility of sexuality beyond binary
heteronormativity) was fascinating to him as an issue of substantial cultural difference with
hegemonic Anglo society. Desamais wondered whether this topic might be pursued and, whether,
since one of my fields of expertise is gender theory, I might be able to orient him.
I suggested to Desamais that he spend a semester reading gender theory with me, and had him
purchase a recent 800-page collection of key papers, with the idea that we would cover what we
could in weekly meetings, in which he would write reaction papers to the essays he was able to read
each week. He came to the first meeting with 60% of the collection already read. That set the tone
for the semester, during which we covered an enormous amount of material on gender theory in

2. College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Department of Languages and Literatures
PO Box 870202 Tempe, AZ 85287-0202
(480) 965-6281 Fax: (480) 965-0135
www.asu.edu/languages
general and issues of gender in native American cultures. His position papers were a bit rough the
start since, as an engineering student, he was not used to thinking in the theoretical terms demanded
of gender theory Yet he quickly found his own position with respect to the material and,
subsequently, his own voice. I looked forward eagerly to our meetings because it was abundantly
evident that Desamais had found an intellectual niche with which he could identify, that he was able
to formulate interesting and probing questions about the material, and that he was developing
excellent competence in preparing his reaction papers.
This was a very unique experience for me, because I was used to doing independent study work with
and directly theses for students in the humanities. Since Desamais was trained in the sciences and
was doing his work in biomedical engineering (all with a very high GPA), it was invigorating to see
a student willing to take the risk of venturing so far beyond his home discipline, not only to do a
demanding independent study course, but to move toward formulating a topic for his final honors
project so far removed from the parameters of engineering.
Desamais finally decided that he would like to attempt to investigate two related issues: the medical
ethics of human transgendering/transsexuality and biological theories of diverse sexuality in the
animal kingdom. This meant thinking through the legal, political, moral barriers to
transgendering/transexuality in contrast with the sexual fluidity in the animal world. By exploring
the research of Joan Roughgarden, particularly in the controversial Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity,
Gender, Sexuality in Nature and People (2004), Desamais developed an honors thesis on how
Roughgarden’s research intersected—really, contradicted—the medical understanding of
evolutionary biology that grounds much of the professional and political opposition, historically,
since the 1950s, to transgendering/transsexuality.
In the preparation of the thesis, we spent an additional semester exploring these issues by discussing
the pertinent bibliography and with the preparation of position papers that would eventually
constitute the basis of the thesis. Desamais defended his thesis with considerable sophistication and a
secure command of the subject matter in late Fall 2013. What made the defense particularly
interesting was that his major advisory in biomedical engineering, Vincent Pizziconi, agreed to be
his second reader, and this provided a substantially enriched intellectual environment for the
defense.
During his final semester, since Desamais needed to complete the second half of the biomedical
engineering capstone lab, he decided to continue his work with gender studies, and pursued a
reading and conference course with me on queer filmmaking and also took for credit my School of
International Letters and Cultures capstone course on Urban Brazilian fiction. This means that the
bulk of his reading for the semester (including the viewing of a large array of films) and the writing
assignments that went with it was in the humanities. I resisted the temptation to fantasize that
Desamais might decide, after all, to do graduate work in the humanities: as he went on to be
accepted into ASU’s MBA program in Management, where he pursued work on management issues
that prepared him for managing research teams in biomedical engineering.

3. College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Department of Languages and Literatures
PO Box 870202 Tempe, AZ 85287-0202
(480) 965-6281 Fax: (480) 965-0135
www.asu.edu/languages
Desamais’s interest in doing a capstone in the humanities, along with his capstone in biomedical
engineering—one a closely researched and tightly written interpretive document, the other a design
project—attested to a level of intellectual commitment that I found very impressive. It was a
professionally very gratifying experience to be part of this student’s intellectual journey and,
moreover, to have enabled him to engage in a major inquiry into his own native American culture in
the process. I have every expectation that he will perform outstandingly in a professional capacity
and make distinguished contributions to the agency or enterprise with which he finds employment.
Sincerely,