2008-2009 Speakers

Upcoming Workshop:

Feminist Theory and Feminist History
A Workshop Discussion

Wednesday, May 13, 2009 
4:00 pm
Center for Black Studies Research
4th Floor, South Hall

With Eileen Boris
Hull Professor and Chair, Department of Feminist Studies, UCSB;

Ellen Carol Dubois
Professor of History, UCLA

Barbara Tomlinson
Associate Professor of Feminist Studies, UCSB

Berteke Waaldijk
Historian and Professor of Gender Studies at Utrecht and Visiting Professor in Film and Media Studies, UCSB

... and others

The workshop is a follow up of the project "Feminism and Equal Citizenship: Historical Perspectives", funded by a UC-UU COLLABORATIVE GRANT 2007-2008.

The workshop is sponsored by:

·         Department of Feminist Studies and Center for Research on Women and Social Justice, UCSB

·         Department of History, Comparative Gender Program, UCSB

·         Research Center History and Culture (OGC), Utrecht University

·         Graduate Gender Programme, Faculty of Humanities, UU

·         Department of History, UCLA

Suggested Workshop Readings:

·         Sue Morgan, "Introduction: Writing Feminist History: Theoretical Debates and Critical Practices," in THE FEMINIST HISTORY READER, ed. Sue Morgan (Routledge, 2006): 1-47

·         Clare Hemmings, "Telling Feminist Stories," FEMINIST THEORY 6, no. 2 (2005): 115-39

·         Rachel Torr, "What's wrong with aspiring to find out what has really happened in academic feminism's recent past? Response to Clare Hemmings," FEMINIST THEORY 8, no. 1 (2007): 59-67

·         Clare Hemmings, "What is a feminist theorist responsible for? Response to Rachel Torr," FEMINIST THEORY 8, no. 1 (2007): 69-76

For more information, email: [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask]

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Wednesday, March 4
12:15-2:15 pm
Feminist Studies Conference Room, 4631 South Hall

Takyiwaa Manuh
Director Institute of African Studies
University of Ghana

Interdisciplinary Semimar: "Transnational Feminisms in Africa"
co-sponsorred with the African Studies RFG

Participants are encouraged to read the following chapter: Takyiwaa Manuh,"Doing Gender Work in Ghana," in AFRICA AFTER GENDER? ed. Catherine Cole, Takyiwaa Manuh, and Stephan Miescher, pp. 125-49 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007)

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Thursday, Feb. 12
1:00 pm
South Hall, Room 4631A

Lila Abu-Lughod
Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science
Columbia University

"The Critical Analysis of Social Difference: A Research Agenda"

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Thursday, Dec. 4, 2008
4:00 to 5:30pm
South Hall, Room 4631A

Karen Brodkin
Anthropology, UCLA

"The Micropolitics of Activism"

A distinguished anthropologist and feminist studies scholar,

Professor Brodkin specializes in social movements, gender, 

work and kinship, political economy, theory, migration, 

race and contemporary North American cultures. Among her 

other books are How Jews Became White Folks And What That 

Says About Race In America and Caring By The Hour: Women, 

Work And Organizing At Duke Medical Center. In the early

1980s, she was Eileen Boris’s jogging partner. 

Come discuss chapter three of her recent book, 

Making Democracy Matter: Identity and Activism in Los Angeles

This book introduces us to a new generation of immigrant 

activists, especially women of color, and their struggles 

for social justice.

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Political Identity Starts at Home

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2007-2008 Speakers

Judy Rohrer

"The Marrying Kind?"  
Intersectional Ambivalence in the Borderlands of Gay Marriage

Friday, May 2, 2008, 10:00 a.m.

Women's Studies Conference Room

As coincidence would have it, I was living in Honolulu in 1996 when public debate over gay marriage flared up, in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004 when Mayor Newsom opened the floodgates of queer marriage, and in
 Europe in 2005 when Civil Partnership was legalized in the UK.  Unwittingly caught in media storms and political campaigns that demand a response from my queer-activist self, I am sucked from the borderland by the increasing strength of a twisting pink vortex.  This paper weaves together my experience with an analysis of intersectional ambivalences to gay marriage. What historical conditions, intersectional positionings, and political discourses produce these anxieties?  This paper asks not just how it is that marriage has come to monopolize gay politics, but also how that phenomenon is productive of certain ambivalences among particular queers.  What might we learn by centering those anxieties, by beginning to think through the questions they raise and taking them seriously rather than discounting or denigrating them?  In other words, what can we learn by leaving the limiting binary framework of the dominant discourse and investigating the borderlands of gay marriage?

Can Marriage Be Saved? A Forum from The Nation, July 5, 2004: 16-26

Claudia Koonz

Department of History, Duke University

"The Right to Cover: The Muslim Headscarf debates in Britain, France, and Germany"

Monday, February 25, 2008, 1-2:30 p.m.

Women's Studies Conference Room
South Hall 4631A

Come continue the conversation we began last quarter on France but expand the discussion to consider Britain and Germany through noted Women's and German historian Koonz's analysis of transnational reactions to the hijab as a kind of thermometer for national culture.

Reading: "Hijab/Headscarf: A Political Journey"

Dana L. Barron
Associate Director, Institute for Public Affairs at Temple University
"Double Days or Opting Out: The Work and Family Dilemma"
Friday, February 15, 2008, 9:30 - 11:00 a.m.
Women's Studies Conference Room
South Hall 4631A

Join Temple University's Dana Barron for a wide ranging discussion of current research on work and family, including policy recommendations being promoted during this election year and concrete actions proposed under the legal rubric of family responsibilities discrimination.

Click here for the readings: "Opting Out"? The Effect of Children on Women's Employment in the United States and Psychology at the Intersection of Work and Family: Recommendations for Employers, Working Families, and Policymakers.

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Judith Ezekiel
University of Toulouse-le-Mirail
and Professor-in-Residence, Wright State University
"Unraveling the Hijab: Race and Gender in the French Republic"
November 15, 2007, 12:00 - 1:30 p.m. 
South Hall 4631A

Brown Bag discussion. Drinks and dessert will be provided.

Judith Ezekiel is author of: Feminism in the Heartland, and the editor of a special issue of the European Journal of Women's Studies on “The Traffic in Feminism: Contemporary Women’s Movements in Europe,”and an editor of the web-based "The ‘Second Wave’ and Beyond."

Click to read Ezekiel's articles: French Dressing: Race, Gender, and the Hijab Story and Le Women's Lib: Made in France.

Join us to discuss feminist responses to the use of the veil in contemporary politics.

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