February 2, 4:30 pm, Lewis Aud., GS
Judith Halberstam is Professor of English and Director of The Center for Feminist Research at the University of Southern California, where she teaches courses in queer studies, gender theory, art, literature and film. She is the author, most recently, of In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, published by NYU University Press in the Sexual Cultures series in 2005. She is also author of The Transgender Moment: Gender Flexibility and the Postmodern Condition, FemaleMasculinity (Duke University Press, 1998), The Drag King Book (Serpent’s Tail, 1999), Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke University Press, 1995). Halberstam says, "Female Masculinity" emerged for me as a term that was implicit in many different discussions of gender, gender performativity, constructivism and so on but was never named as such. In my book [Female Masculinity] I actually argue that despite an almost universal concurrence that femaleness does not automatically produce femininity and maleness does not produce masculinity, very few people seemed to be noticing or thinking through the material effects of disassociating sex and gender and this has been particularly true in the sphere of masculinity.”
February 14, 4:30 pm, Guerlac Room, A.D. White House
Afsaneh Najmabadi is Professor of History and Studies on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. She is author of Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity, published by the University of California Press in 2005. Using gender as an analytic category, Najmabadi asks, “What work did gender do in the making of Iranian modernity, and how did it perform this cultural labor? If central concepts of Iranian modernity were gendered, how were they gendered and what effects did their genderedness produce for constitution of Iranian men and women of modernity?” Her research interests include socio-cultural transformations of gender and sexuality in the modern Middle East and South Asia, with particular attention to how these transformations are inter-articulated with conceptualizations of modernity and secularism.
February 21, 4:30 pm, African Studies & Research Center
Dwight McBride is Leon Forrest Professor and Chair of African American Studies & Professor of English and Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He is author, most recently, of Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch, published by NYU Press in the Sexual Cultures series in 2005. Other recent publications include Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bi-Sexual Fiction (2002 Cleis Press); Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony (2001, NYU Press); James Baldwin Now (1999, NYU Press). He is also editor of a special issue of Callaloo, “Plum Nelly: New Essays in Black Queer Studies” (Winter 2000). McBride’s teaches and writes on the discourse of racial respectability and speaks directly to the relationship between African American Studies, “straight BlackStudies” and LBGTQ studies.
March 30, 4:30 pm, 258 Goldwin Smith
Denise Riley teaches at the School of English and American Studies at the University of East Anglia. Her non-fiction books include, most recently, Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (2004), as well as War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother (1983); 'Am I That Name?': Feminism and the Category of 'Women' in History (1988); The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (2000); and The Flesh of Words (2004: with Jean-Jacques Lecercle). She edited Poets on Writing: Britain 1970-1991 (1992). Her collections of poetry include Dry Air (1985); Mop Mop Georgette: New and Selected Poems 1986-1993 (1993); and Selected Poems (2000). In her poet’s prose, Riley confronts everyday complex emotional and philosophical problems of speaking and listening: the “rhetoric of life’s absurdities and urgencies, its comforts and embarrassments, to insist on the forcible affect of language itself.” “The Right to Be Lonely,” “’Lying’ When You Aren’t,” “Your Name Which Isn’t Yours,” all chapters in Impersonal Passion, present rare and breathlessly engaging accounts of how language locates and works on us.
April 4, 4:30 pm, 258 Goldwin Smith
Sally Kitch is Professor of Women's Studies at The Ohio State University. Her interdisciplinary research analyzes and develops feminist theory in the American context. It includes two books on the significance of celibacy to theories of gender equity in American utopian communities: Chaste Liberation: Celibacy and Female Cultural Status (1989; winner of the NWSA-University of Illinois Press Book Award, 1987); and This Strange Society of Women: Reading the Letters and Lives of the Women's Commonwealth (1993; winner of Helen Hooven Santmyer Book Award in Women's Studies, 1991). Her most recent book, Higher Ground: From Utopianism to Realism in American Feminist Thought and Theory (2000) explores the relationship between utopian thinking and theories of feminism. Her book project, The Sex Factor: Gendered Foundations of Race and Strategies of Resistance, investigates the gendered underpinnings of racial formation in American history and explores the sometimes disguised legacy of women’s resistance to the conventions of gendered racial formation. She is currently engaged in the Afghan Women’s Leadership Project at OSU which, among other topics, both examines and seeks to enhance the resistance and reconstructive strategies of Afghan women in the context of contemporary nation building.
April 12, 4:30 pm, African Studies & Research Center
Kara Keeling is assistant professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her essays on media and popular culture have appeared in The Black Scholar, Qui Parle and elsewhere, and she is co-editor (with Colin MacCabe and Cornel West) of a selection of writings by the late James A. Snead entitled Racist Traces and Other Writings: European Pedigrees/African Contagions. She is currently completing a book-length manuscript, "The Witch's Flight": The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense, in which she brings a Deleuzian reading to images ranging from Black Panther photographs to “Blaxploitation” stars such as Pam Grier and Tamara Dobson. Keeling's current research and teaching interests involve articulating, interrogating, and challenging the logics of racism, sexism, homophobia, and capitalist exploitation currently perceptible in images and circulating via various media.
April 19, 4:30 pm, African Studies & Research Center
Roderick A. Ferguson is assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches courses on social theory, culture, and modern social formations. His most recent book, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (University of Minnesota, 2003), tells the story of canonical sociology's regulation of sexual difference as part of its general regulation of African American culture. Ferguson places this story within other stories-the narrative of capital's emergence and development, the histories of Marxism and revolutionary nationalism, and the novels that depict the gendered and sexual idiosyncrasies of African American culture—works by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison. In Aberrations, Ferguson also includes the first-ever discussion of a new archival discovery—a never-published chapter of Ellison’s Invisible Man that deals with a gay character in a way that complicates and illuminates Ellison's project. Currently, he is working on a book project that analyzes the emergence of African American and Caribbean intellectual formations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how those formations negotiated with the gendered and sexualized legacies of Enlightenment thought.
April 24, 5:00 pm, 423 ILR Conference Center
Betty Friedan Remembered: Prospects for Feminism, Families, and Work
Remarks by: Biddy Martin, Provost; Muriel Fox, Co-founder and past board chair of the National Organization for Women (NOW); Francine Moccio, Institute for Women and Work; Sheila Tobias, author, Faces of Feminism: An Activist's Reflections on the Women's Movement; Amy Villarejo, Associate Professor, Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and Theatre, Film, & Dance; and Michele Wallace, Visiting Professor, Africana Studies & Research Center. Co-sponsored by the Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program, Institute for Women and Work, Office of the Provost, and School of Industrial and Labor Relations.