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Welcome to the redesigned and interactive website of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. Our many new features include a blog, “School for Scandal,” which we hope will serve as a conversation starter around issues concerning gender and sexuality. There will be regular posts from yours truly as well as from an exciting array of guest bloggers. Look here, too, for follow-up reports on the Center’s events throughout the year.
Our website makeover is deliberately—and playfully—tabloid in style, with the bubble gum colors reminiscent of US Weekly. Now, playful is not the opposite of serious. Indeed, if we are openly courting scandal, we do so to mark the ongoing caricature of gender and sexuality studies as at once too trivial to count as serious scholarship and too dangerous for impressionable students.
These two accusations may seem like throwbacks to the culture wars of the late 80s and 90s. But, when it comes to the combustible combination of queers, classrooms, and budgetary bad times, certain accusations, to quote the well-known ad from Master Card, are priceless. So, rather than refuse the charge, we thought we’d go straight at it (well, not exactly “straight,” but you know what I mean…). After all, critics of gender and sexuality studies are hardly pulling their punches.
For example, in February 2009, Republican legislators in the state of Georgia took aim at classes in queer theory and the sociology of sex at both Georgia State University and the University of Georgia, promising to team up with the Christian Coalition to rid public universities of faculty teaching these scandalously inappropriate topics. The Athens Banner Herald headlined the controversy, “Steamy sex courses fire GOP’s ire.” Luckily, “ire” was the only thing fired, and no faculty lost their jobs—this time round.
However, as historian and self-avowed “tenured radical” Claire Potter has pointed out in her blog, we should not be surprised by the return of these old-school attacks on queer and feminist faculty and queer and feminist studies. Let me quote her at some length: “In the face of declining state revenues, right wingers are once again ‘Mapplethorping’ the public. They are shilling their ideologically rigid view that even more school privatization, and deep cuts in higher education, are an appropriate fix for a plunging economy that has been jointly devastated by pirate capitalists, corporate lobbyists, and decades of neoliberal fiscal policies. How can the dismantling of higher education be turned into a happy thing, you might ask? Because you can get rid of fields of knowledge that students don’t need to know, and that might even harm them, like queer and feminist studies, while preserving the teaching of ‘universal values.’ And by doing this, you can divert attention from the real consequences to real people of policies that are turning our public universities into a simulacrum of the wretched, privatized Postal Service.”
Potter wrote these comments well before “death panels” and “abortion on demand” became rallying cries for right-wing talk show hosts, who urged on a “grassroots” social movement to oppose Obama’s “socialist” take-over of national health care. (We should be so lucky.)
No matter the actual facts of the matter, these particular attacks on health care reform have succeeded in sowing confusion, mistrust, and outright anger in no small part because of the way they link into morally loaded issues concerning bodily life, and sexual life remains a hot button issue no less under the Obama administration than during the Bush years, progressive hopes notwithstanding. There is already plenty of evidence that Obama’s much-trumpeted talent for finding the center falters when it comes to sexual equality, never mind sexual freedom. Attacks on gender and sexuality studies, and ongoing attempts to defund them, are thus part of larger battles over the meaning and limits of sexual justice and gender equality.
This is no laughing matter, to be sure, but it is all the more reason to make room for serious play as we dig in for the long haul. Social change is not built in one election cycle. Obviously, we need to do more than “just” laugh in the face of outlandish attacks on queers and feminists and anti-racist organizers, but laughter is one way to start girding our loins. (Thank you, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.) Otherwise it’s gonna be one unhappy march to the revolution.
– Ann Pellegrini
Director, CSGS
 UCLA CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF WOMEN announces
Thinking Gender 2011
21st Annual Graduate Student Research Conference
Thinking Gender is a public conference highlighting graduate student research on women, gender and sexuality across all disciplines and historical periods. We invite submissions for individual papers or pre-constituted panels. This year, we especially welcome papers addressing women, gender and sexuality in relation to:
· Food (sustainability, food justice, marketing, disordered eating, food preparation)
· Money (the economy, microfinance, entrepreneurship, consumerism, the global marketplace, business practices)
· The Academy (innovative research methodologies, human subjects, power relations, epistemologies, the Archive)
· Invented Pathologies (menopause, PMS, female sexual dysfunction, the medicalization of sex).
For individual papers, please submit an abstract (250 words), a CV (2 pages maximum), and a brief bibliography (3-5 sources). For panels, please submit a 250-word description of the panel topic in addition to the materials required for the individual paper submissions. Please see the submission guidelines at http://www.csw.ucla.edu/thinkinggender.html.
Send submissions to: thinkinggender@csw.ucla.edu
Deadline for Submissions: October 22, 2010, by midnight
Conference is Friday, February 11, 2011, at the UCLA Faculty Center.
Event is free and open to the public, but there will be a $25 registration fee for presenters, to cover the cost of conference materials and lunch at the Faculty Center.
Parking is reserved at UCLA, Lot #2 for $10
UCLA Center for the Study of Women
Box 957222 / Public Policy 1400H
Los Angeles, CA 90095-7222
http://www.csw.ucla.edu
Affective Tendencies: Bodies, Pleasures, Sexualities
Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University
October 7-9, 2010
Deadline for Registration: September 15, 2010
This conference addresses the question of how sexuality, pleasure and bodies constitute, at least in part, affective life. Affective tendencies, orientations, trajectories have regulated how we understand and experience bodies, pleasures, sexualities. How are we to understand affective life? How are our conceptions of the body altered and complicated through understanding affective forces? Joy and sadness, as much as passion and desire, expand or contract our worlds, while they link bodies in particular styles of living in the world. How are relations of power – those that constitute relations of oppression, whether in terms of gender, race, class, nationality, religion or sexuality – to be understood following the ‘affective turn’? How is sexuality to be understood affectively? How is affect to be understood sexually? Are pleasures sexual? Are they always forms of joy?
Keynote Speakers
Lauren Berlant, George M. Pullman Professor, Department of English, University of Chicago.
Leo Bersani (Professor Emeritus of French, University of California, Berkeley)
David Eng (Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania)
Jasbir Puar (Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University)
Panels:
Race, Nation, Affect and Sexuality
A New Kind of Queerness?
Desiring Geographies
Sex and Violence / The Joys of Sex
Body Technologies
Speakers include:
Vigdis Broche-Due (University of Bergen, Norway)
Ed Cohen (Rutgers University)
Claire Colebrook (Penn State University)
Ulrika Dahl (Södertörn University College, Sweden)
Carlos Decena (Rutgers University)
Richard Dienst (Rutgers University)
Nicole Fleetwood (Rutgers University)
Jean Franco (Columbia University)
Marisa Fuentes (Rutgers University)
Mary Gossy (Rutgers University)
Allan Isaac (Rutgers University)
Ellen Mortensen (University of Bergen, Norway)
Kristin Sampson (University of Bergen, Norway)
Kyla Schuller (Rutgers University)
Jami Weinstein (Linköping University, Sweden)
Conference to be held in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, Rutgers University, 162 Ryders Lane, New Brunswick NJ 08901.
Registration for the conference is on a first-come first-serve basis.
Please register online before September 15th at: http://womens-studies.rutgers.edu or email Suzy Kiefer at mkiefer@rci.rutgers.edu.
For further details contact Elizabeth Grosz egrosz@rci.rutgers.edu or Suzy Kiefer at mkiefer@rci.rutgers.edu
Sponsored by:
The Centre for Women and Gender, University of Bergen, Norway.
The Offices of the Vice-President and the Deans of the School of Arts and Sciences.
The Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University.
For updates on the program visit us at: http://womens-studies.rutgers.edu.
GEXcel, Gendering EXcellence – Centre of Gender Excellence welcomes you to the conference
Violences and Silences: Shaming, Blaming – and Intervening
October 12 – 14, 2010, Room Temcas, T-House, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden
Supported by a grant from the Swedish Research Council, Linköping University and Örebro University launched a 5 year project to establish a European Centre of Gender Excellence based in Sweden–Gendering Excellence (GEXcel): Towards a European Centre of Excellence in Transnational and Transdisciplinary Studies of Changing Gender Relations, Intersectionalities and Embodiment, directed by professor Nina Lykke. In 2010 the GEXcel program at Linköping university will run subtheme 7 Getting rid of violence.
Subtheme 7 is lead by professor Barbro Wijma, and it is organized as a part of Theme 7 & 8, Teaching Normcritical Sex – Getting Rid of Violence. TRANSdisciplinary, TRANSnational and TRANSformative Feminist Dialogues on Embodiment, Emotions and Ethics.
The conference Violences and Silences is a culminating event of subtheme 7. Here, the focus will be on violence as well as on intervention strategies. Through an exploration of the role of silences and silencing, shame and blaming for maintaining violence, the concept of “perpetrator” is expanded, and thus, extended possibilities for intervention can be identified and discussed. During the conference, key note addresses will be given by internationally reputed researchers and artists.
The conference is chaired by Professor Barbro Wijma, with keynote addresses from:
Susan Edwards, Professor of Law, University of Buckingham, UK
”The Aetiology of Women’s Silence in Violence – Lessons from the legal field”
Dubravka Zarkov, Associate Professor in Gender, Development and Conflict Studies, The International Institute of Social Studies, The Hauge
Ann Heberlein, Associate Professer in Etichs, University of Lund, Sweden
Ka Schmitz, Artist, illustrator and queer feminist activist, Berlin, Germany & Sandra Klauert, graduated social worker and queer feminist activist, Germany
“Getting in Touch – Comic and Activism”
Lotta Samelius, Dr, Psychology, the National Swedish Police Academy, Sweden, Christa Binswanger, Dr phil, Gender Studies, University of Basel, Switzerland & Suruchi Thapar-Björkert, Senior Lecturer, Dept. of Government, University of Uppsala, Sweden
“Turning points and the ‘Everyday’: Exploring Agency and Violence in Intimate Relationships”
Åsa Wettergren, Associate Professor in Sociology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
“The humiliation and shaming of helper interactions – how good intentions undermine agency”
Barbro Wijma, Professor of Gender and Medicine, University of Linköping, Sweden
Junior as well as senior scholars are invited to present papers in the conference workshop streams. Send an abstract of the proposed paper to coordinator@genderexcel.org of up to 250 words demonstrating how research connects to the theme of the conference. Please also include a brief biographical note of up to 150 words outlining your current research interests, most recent publications, academic affiliation and status. Deadline for submissions are 15 September. Those who are accepted to present a paper will be notified shortly thereafter.
The deadline for registration is 24 September. Register to participate by sending an e-mail to coordinator@genderexcel.org. The registration fee is 400 SEK (about 40 Euro), and includes the conference dinner, lunches and coffee. Those who are accepted to present papers will be exempted from the registration fee.
For updates about the conference, visit http://www.genderexcel.org/?q=node/277
CentreLGS PECANS welcomes applications from early career scholars (postgraduate research students and academics up to 5 years post-PhD) wishing to visit either the CentreLGS at the University of Kent or the GSL research group at Keele University for a limited period of time (between 1 and 3 weeks and preferably between November and March) during the UK academic year of 2010-2011.
Applicants should be early career researchers with a strong interest in critical, interdisciplinary, theoretically engaged and policy relevant research relating to law, gender and sexuality (broadly defined).
Applications must be submitted to d.alessandrini@kent.ac.uk by 31 August 2010. The committee will make a decision by the 30 September 2010 and visits can take place from November 2010. Limited amounts of financial support are available to facilitate visits from outside the UK, and will be allocated on the basis of need.
More information about the Scheme is available on the PECANS website at http://www.clgs-pecans.org.uk/fellowships.php
Prior to submitting an application, prospective applicants are welcome to contact either Donatella Alessandrini (d.alessandrini@kent.ac.uk) or Rosie Harding (r.harding@law.keele.ac.uk) for informal advice on their proposed application. Further information about the research interests of CentreLGS members at both Keele and Kent can be found on the relevant departmental websites.
Please distribute widely and also remember to let new research students and new early career scholars in your institution know about PECANS.
PECANS: an international network of postgraduate and early career academics in Law, Gender and Sexuality.
 Women & Power 2010: Our Time to Lead
September 24–26, 2010
Join hundreds of women for a weekend of celebration and conversation guaranteed to wake up your inner leader and leave you brimming with renewed purpose. Omega’s annual Women & Power conference is one of the most celebrated women’s gatherings in the world, unique in its rich diversity of speakers, performers, and participants.
Featuring Gail Collins, Ani DiFranco, Elizabeth Lesser, Sharon Salzberg, Jennifer Buffett, Mae Jemison, Zainab Salbi and more.
This year, the conference is a call-out to women of all ages and backgrounds to become the leaders we have been waiting for. Whether you are a professional, activist, volunteer, student, artist, mother, spiritual seeker, or social visionary, it is time to dig deep, retrieve your authentic voice and values, and lead with courage and heart—at home, work, and in the world.
Hope to see you there. Thank you for forwarding to your networks.
Omega is located at 150 Lake Drive, Rhinebeck, NY 12572-3252.
 THE NEW VIEW CAMPAIGN announces its THIRD Conference, to be held at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, on Sunday, September 26, 2010.
FRAMING THE VULVA: GENITAL COSMETIC SURGERY AND GENITAL DIVERSITY
While the vulva surgeons are holding a conference on the Las Vegas strip, the New View, in collaboration with the UNLV Women’s Studies Department and Petals, will hold a counter-symposium to examine the personal and political complexities of the new female genital cosmetic surgeries.
Our one-day conference will include a morning plenary session on the emerging issues in genital scholarship, activism, and art, and an afternoon of experiential and discussion workshops for participants to share strategies and build connections. The event will conclude with an evening reception, photography and craft exhibition, and film showing at the Erotic Heritage Museum.
Areas covered will include:
• Cosmetogynecology and the new genital perfectability industries
• The rhetoric vs. the realities of Western genital surgeries vs. “FGM”
• Collaborative models of activism
• The revival of “cunt art” in craft, film, photography and painting
• Sex education and the challenges of body anxiety
• The latest body modification trends, from Vajazzling to Vatooing
• Disease-mongering, marketing, and body surveillance
• Critical health studies perspectives on cosmetic genital surgery
Confirmed plenary speakers include:
• Virginia Braun, University of Auckland, New Zealand
• Leonore Tiefer, NYU Medical School, NYC
• Vanessa Schick, Indiana University, Bloomington
• Lynn Comella, UNLV, Las Vegas
————————————
Leonore Tiefer, PhD
ltiefer@mindspring.com
212-533-2774
 An Interdisciplinary Symposium at New York University
September 23 to 25, Thursday to Saturday
times to be announced
Keynote lecture by Thomas Keenan
Other participants include Eliot Borenstein, David Campbell, Ilana Feldman, Sara M. Green, Nina Ha, Zenia Kish, Jana Lipman, Louisa Schein, April Shemak, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Celina Su, and Miriam Ticktin
For more information, click HERE.
This symposium will explore the contributions that the humanities and cultural studies make to our understanding of refugee experience, by bring together scholars and practitioners who engage refugees as artists, activists, and combatants, rather than as “fearful people” without agency.
Department of Social and Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th & 5th Floors
Eliot Borenstein
Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, Borenstein is the author of Overkill: Sex, Violence, and Russian Popular Culture after 1991 and Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1929. He is also editor and co-translator of Russian Postmodernism: Dialogue with Chaos by Mark Lipovetsky and has published numerous articles on contemporary Russian culture.
David Campbell
Professor of Cultural and Political Geography and a member of the Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies at Durham University. His many publications include the books National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, and Politics Without Principle: Sovereignty, Ethics and the Narratives of the Gulf War. He is currently working on a book about the global image economy and its production of pictorial representations of atrocity, famine, and war.
Ilana Feldman
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at George Washington University. She has published articles in a number of journals including Cultural Anthropology, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and History and Memory. Her book, Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority and the Work of Rule (1917-67), is in press with Duke University Press. She is editing a volume in progress entitled Government and Humanity.
Sara M. Green
Sara is Executive Director of A.R.T. (Art for Refugees in Transition), which she founded in 1999 in response to the humanitarian crisis in the Balkans. She has worked with refugee populations in Kosovo, Colombia and Thailand, where A.R.T. develops self-sustaining programs that draw on each community’s indigenous art forms and enable community elders to educate and incorporate younger generations in their cultural traditions. Sara earned her MBA from Columbia University, and also has a BFA in dance and danced professionally for ten years in the U.S. and Europe.
Nina Ha
Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Director of the World Literature Program at Creighton University. Her book in progress is titled American ‘Gook’ Examining Diasporic Vietnamese Masculinity and Sexuality.
Thomas Keenan
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and the Director of the Human Rights Project at Bard College. His publications include the book Fables of Responsibility as well as articles in PMLA, The New York Times, Wired, Aperture, Bidoun, and Political Theory. He is the editor of The End(s) of the Museum and the co-editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, New Media, Old Media, and other titles.
Zenia Kish
Ph.D. student in the American Studies Program at New York University. Her Master’s thesis in Media Studies examined representations of survivors and the politics of refugeeness in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. She has published on post-Katrina hip-hop in American Quarterly. Her doctoral studies concentrate on human rights, the reproduction of third world underdevelopment, agricultural imperialism and right to food movements.
Jana Lipman
Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Tulane University. She is the author of Guantanamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution, as well as articles about the role of the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay in foreign relations. She is currently writing about the relation of U.S. military bases and their significance for refugees and human rights in the second half of the twentieth century.
Louisa Schein
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural Politics and the book-in-progress, Rewind to Home: Hmong Media and Gendered Diaspora. She is also the co-editor of Translocal China: Linkages, Identities and the Reimagining of Space and the forthcoming Media, Erotics and Transnational Asia.
April Shemak
Assistant Professor of English as Sam Houston State University. She has published articles in Modern Fiction Studies, Textual Practice, and Postcolonial Text and is the author of the forthcoming book, Asylum Speakers: Caribbean Refugees and Testimonial Discourse.
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi
Currently a doctoral student at New York University writing her dissertation on the protection and governance of refugees as expressed in the architecture of camps and the broader urban, geographical, and cultural impacts of emergency planning for refugees. She is the author of The Library Book: Design Collaborations in the Public Schools about an initiative to revolutionize the culture of education to combat poverty in low-income New York City neighborhoods. Her background includes nonprofit work, freelance journalism, and architectural practice.
Celina Su
Associate Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Her work looks at civil society and the cultural politics of education and health policy. She is the author of Streetwise for Book Smarts and co-authored Our Schools Suck (with Gaston Alonso, Noel Anderson, and Jeanne Theoharis). She is the co-founding Program Officer for the Burmese Refugee Project, a non-profit organization that develops participatory models for community development among Shan refugees living in Thailand.
Miriam Ticktin
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at the New School for Social Research. Her research interests include anthropology of the human and humanitarianism; migration, camps and borders; sexual violence/violence against women; PTSD/trauma, and psychiatric humanitarianism. Her articles appear in American Ethnologist, SIGNS, Interventions, Ethnicities, and The Political and Legal Anthropology Review. Her forthcoming book, The Moral Emergency Complex: Humanitarianism, Sexual Violence and the Politics of Immigration in France, looks at how politics are enacted in the name of care and protection, under threat of emergency. She has also co-edited with Ilana Feldman the forthcoming volume, In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care.
Organized by the NYU Department of Social and Cultural Analysis; co-sponsored by CSGS.
A Brown Bag Lunch Talk with Jian Chen
September 20, Monday 12:30 to 1:45 pm
Jian Chen, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU
Prior to the multimedia convergence initiated by mass digitalization, documentary and pornographic film/video offered the experiences of communicability and interactivity now attributed to “post-cinematic” multimedia. Pornography and documentary are arguably anti-cinematic [...]
The Ah Kua Show, a stage adapation of Leona Lo’s autobiography, From Leonard to Leona, A Singapore Transsexual’s Journey to Womanhood, was first staged in Singapore in August 2009. This year, the play will open at the New York International Fringe Festival at 4.30 pm on Saturday, 21 Aug [...]
Transgendered Canadian performance artist Nina Arsenault has been characterized as cyborg, intellectual, and artist. After sixty plastic surgeries to feminize and beautify her originally male body, Arsenault has become an icon for a new queer generation. Her stage plays, electronic presence through videos disseminated online, website, blog, social networking presentation sites, her print media [...]
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