January 2011Relocating Queer HistoriesSoundscapes of Desire in The Barber of East L.A. Prof. Karen Tongson
GWS Spring Colloquia, 602 Barrows Hall Karen Tongson is Assistant Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Before joining the faculty at USC, Tongson held a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship in Literature at UC San Diego, and a UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) Residential Research Fellowship at UC Irvine. Tongson's work on popular culture, queer studies, performance, music and literature has appeared in such journals as Social Text, GLQ, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and The International Journal of Communication, as well as in the anthologies Queering the Popular Pitch (Routledge), and The Blackwell Companion to LGBTQ Studies (eds. Haggerty and McGarry). Her first book, titled Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries, is forthcoming in spring 2011 (NYU Press). Professor Tongsonis also co-editor-in-chief of "The Journal of Popular Music Studies"and co-series editor of the new NYU Press book series, "Postmillennial Pop." Singing, Writing, Legislating Kinship: Decolonizing Desire in the Caribbean, Britain and the U.S.<
Panel discussion, 370 Dwinelle Hall This panel examines instances of singing, writing and legislating toward reconfigured kinship models for particular non-normative ‘others’ in the Caribbean, Britain, and the U.S. Reading Mayra Santo Febres’ work, Roberts analyzes transgender racial identities in a critique of heteronormative family life in the Caribbean. Jha scrutinizes the role of old Indian film songs as a site of postcolonial diasporic nostalgia and resistance among some British Asians. And finally, Rohrer critiques homonormative and homonational desires to legislate gay marriage in the U.S. Critical Subjectivities & Sites of Resistance in Caribbean Studies
CRG Afternoon Forum Series, 691 Barrows CRITICAL SUBJECTIVITIES & SITES OF RESISTANCE IN CARIBBEAN STUDIES A Poetics of Delicacy: Queer Caribbean Oral History and the Politics of Inclusion Richie Riley, a Jamaican dancer who migrated to London in 1948, decided to be interviewed for a gay history project in London in the 1980's. Over the course of a fascinating two hour interview Riley never identifies as gay, resists the interviewer's attempts to have him discuss his movements in well-known gay locales of post-war London, and describes his late Scottish wife as his only love. Nevertheless, I argue, Riley's testimony functions as a queer text, signaling his keen understanding of the variety of exclusions to which he is subject and registering his non-normative affections in a variety of ways. One of these ways is what I call his "poetics of delicacy," an aesthetic and political structure to be found in Caribbean queer testimony more generally. To explore the implications of this mode of queer auto-narration, I turn from Riley to queer subjects in the Caribbean more than thirty years later--subjects I interviewed in Jamaica in June 2009. With reference to scholars of queer subjectivity from Eve Sedgwick to Philip Brian Harper I consider the challenges that Caribbean queer oral history poses to discourses of inclusion and visibility, as well as the pleasures of devising reading strategies to perceive the fullness of putative silences in these testimonies. 'There are no sharks in the sky': Caribbean Identity & Black Positionality in Cualquier miércoles soy tuya, by Mayra Santos Febres Undeniably, much critical attention has been paid to the debate surrounding identity in the Caribbean and indeed it must be noted that Caribbean Cultural Studies is today an area which seeks to legitimise the narration of experiences by those who have lived such. My interest in this paper lies specifically with the representation of identity in the Hispanic Caribbean and on the ways in which contemporary Hispanic Caribbean narrative is a site in which constructions of alterity highlight the re-imaginations of identity. In Consuming the Caribbean, Mimi Sheller argues that the Caribbean is constantly caught up in a “politics of the picturesque.” Arguably then, how the Caribbean frames itself is of paramount importance. In this paper, I make a close critical reading of the novel Cualquier miércoles soy tuya [Any Wednesday I’m yours] by the Afro-Hispanic Puerto Rican writer Mayra Santos Febres. Set in contemporary Puerto Rico, the novel is a sort of fiction noir which recounts the transient life of the urban underworld in San Juan and in which two murders take place. My analysis aims to construct possible critical positions for Blacks in popular Caribbean culture and to suggest ways in which these can be viewed as sites of resistance. Throughout the novel, Santos Febres chronicles the experiences of the Caribbean people but perhaps most importantly she also presents Caribbean identity through defiant and at times compromising acts. Co-sponsored by Beatrice Bain Research Group Center for Race and Gender, Beatrice M. Bain Research Group Terror and Loathing: Women of Color Feminism and Comparative Race Analysis
Lecture, 554 Barrows, (Barbara Christian Conference Room Terror and Loathing: Women of Color Feminism and Comparative Race Analysis The changing configurations of race and nation in the wake of movements for decolonization and new social movements of the mid-20th century have revealed the limitations inherent in nationalist and identity-based forms of collectivity, even or perhaps especially when they are expressed in minority or cultural nationalisms. This talk argues that the greatest potential for producing such alternative comparative methods lies within formations that reveal the shared comparative method of bourgeois and minority nationalisms: women of color feminism and queer of color critique. Through a reading of Audre Lorde's theorization of difference as mediated through the affective register of "terror and loathing," this presentation suggests a comparative method based on heterogeneity rather than correspondence. Bio: Grace Kyungwon Hong is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies and Women's Studies at UCLA. She is the author of The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and the co-editor (with Roderick Ferguson) of Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (forthcoming, Fall 2011, Duke University Press). She is also the co-editor (with Roderick Ferguson) of the book series Difference Incorporated at the University of Minnesota Press. Sponsored by Ethnic Studies, co-sponsored by the Center for Race & Gender Center for Race and Gender, Ethnic Studies Department February 2011Desiring Nation
Lecture, 691 Barrows “To the News and to Brazil I declare that I am a man of honor.” Raul Pompéia, Suicide Note, 25 December 1895 Desiring Nation: Raul Pompéia and the grammar of deviance in fin-de-siècle Brazil Taking the suicide of Raul Pompéia as a starting point, Miskolci seeks an understanding of how this Brazilian intellectual’s literary and political trajectory reveals unimagined relations between sexuality and the public sphere at the turn of the 19th century. A prominent figure of his time in Brazil, Pompéia was well known for his novel, O Ateneu (1888), in which the young proponent of Brazilian Republicanism developed his critique of Empire through a story about the moral deviance that marked the education of the nation’s elites. O Ateneu recounts the story of a young elite attending an all-male boarding school. After its publication, Pompéia saw his work and his political commitment within the Republican regime turn against him, due to suspicions about his sexuality that threatened him with public shame. This historical and sociological analysis reconstitutes the gender and sexual norms that made up the moral value system in which relations between individual and society in Brazil unfolded at the turn of the 19th century. Miskolci analyzes Pompéia’s drama by erasing the elusive borderlines between public and private lives, historical events and subjective experience. A key figure in the debate on queer theory in Brazil, Miskolci has authored several books, including Thomas Mann, the Mestizo Artist (2003) and Dissident Sexualities (2007), the first Brazilian Queer Studies anthology. Miskolci will also be presenting at UC Santa Cruz: Vagina MonologuesUntil the Violence Stops
Performance, Pauley Ballroom, MLK Student Union V-Day at UC Berkeley presents its Event Contact: vagmonsucb@gmail.com The 37th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society
Conference, 371 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley The Annual Meeting of BLS is a two-day linguistics conference featuring invited speakers and selected talks, and is considered the premier conference of its kind in the field. This year's conference includes a Special Session on "Languages of the Caucasus" and a Parasession on "Language, Gender, and Sexuality." The invited speakers include Mary Bucholtz and Robert Podesva, two of the foremost scholars in linguistic approaches to gender and sexuality. More details on the conference can be found at http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/bls/index.html Hosted by the Berkeley Linguistic Society Co-Sponsored by the Department of Gender & Women's Studies and The Li Ka Shing Foundation "I Was Totally Dazed"Gay Men's Discovery of a Homosexual Community in Israel, 1948-1975 Professor Yuval Yonay, University of Haifa
Lecture, 370 Dwinelle The categories of "homosexuals" and "Lesbians" were invented in the 19th century as part of the evolving medical and psychological scientific discourse. They gradually spread, socially, from elite professional knowledge to the wider publics and, geographically, from Western and Central Europe to the rest of the world. During this process people who felt sexually different came to identify themselves as "Lesbians" and "gays." How did "sexually different" people who lived in the middle of this decades-long process experience it, and how did they learn to identify themselves as "homosexuals"? In a previous work I discussed the early awareness of sexual difference and the emerging understanding of one's own homosexuality in a society in which sexual categories are not yet fixed. In this lecture I will describe how this early awareness developed to a full-blown homosexual identity when individuals discover the existence of a vibrant underground community of people "like them." Joining this community they gradually come to identify themselves as "homosexuals." The lecture is based on 30 in-depth interviews with Jewish-Israeli elderly gays who remember gay life in Israel before the establishment of the first gay and Lesbian organization in 1975. Yuval Yonay got his Ph.D. at Northwestern University (1991) and since 1993 has taught at the University of Haifa. He has published a book and articles on the history and epistemic culture of mainstream economics and on Israeli Palestinians' status in the Israeli labor market. During the '90s Yuval was active in the Haifa GLBT organization and he belongs to the first generation of Israeli scholars studying and writing on GLBTq issues. This year Yuval is a visiting scholar at UC-Berkeley, where he plans to write a book on the gay history of Israel. Center for the Study of Sexual Culture Elsewhere, Within Here by Trinh T. Minh-haBook Reading at Moe's Books Trinh T. Minh-ha
Reading, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue Born in Vietnam, *Trinh T. Minh-ha* is a filmmaker, writer, and composer. Her work includes: ten books, including /Elsewhere, Within Here/ (2010), /The Digital Film Event /(2005), /When The Moon Waxes Red/ (1991), /Woman, Native Other/ (1989); seven feature-length films, (including Night Passage 2004, The Fourth Dimension 2001 and A Tale of Love 1996), which have been honored in numerous retrospectives around the world; several collaborative multi-media installations (including, Old Land New Waters, 2007-2008, (3rd Guangzhou Triennale 2008) L�Autre marche (Musée du Quai Branly, 2006-2009), The Desert is Watching (Kyoto Biennial, 2003); and Nothing But Ways (Yerba Buena,1999); She is Professor of Rhetoric and of Gender & Women�s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. /Elsewhere, Within Here/ is an engaging look at travel across national borders--as a foreigner, a tourist, an immigrant, a refugee?in a pre- and post-9/11 world. Who is welcome where? What does it mean to feel out of place in the country you call home? When does the stranger appear in these times of dark metamorphoses? These are some of the issues addressed by the author as she examines the cultural meaning and complexities of travel, immigration, home and exile. The boundary, seen both as a material and immaterial event, is where endings pass into beginnings. Building upon themes present in her earlier work on hybridity and displacement in the median passage, and illuminating the ways in which "every voyage can be said to involve a re-siting of boundaries," Trinh T. Minh-ha leads her readers through an investigation of what it means to be an insider and an outsider in this "epoch of global fear." /Elsewhere, Within Here/ is essential reading for those interested in contemporary feminist thought and postcolonial studies. 26th Annual Empowering Women of Color Conference (EWOCC)
Conference, MLK Student Union Building, UC Berkeley The 26th Annual Empowering Women of Color Conference (EWOCC) entitled: Building Across Difference: Inciting a Movement of Our Own, returns on February 19, 2011 to the UC Berkeley Campus to honor the legacy of women of color in the U.S., celebrate the struggles of women of all ages, and provides a space for growth, empowerment, and practical tools for everyday life. This year, the nation's oldest and largest women of color conference will focus on mental health awareness and strengthening our internal and external bonds. The one-day conference will be dedicated to issues affecting women at every stage of their lives with workshops, speakers, panels, performances, networking, and vendors of interest to all age groups. The conference will host educators, activists, and authors Angela Davis, Ericka Huggins, and Dylcia Pagan as keynote speakers.
We will have a host of live performances including area DJs, spoken word artist, and musical ensembles.The conference will take place on Saturday, February 19, 2011 from 9:30 AM to 5:30 PM. Conference events will be held in the Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK) Student Union Building on the UC Berkeley campus. MLK is located on the northwest corner of the intersection of Telegraph Ave. and Bancroft Ave. Admission to the conference includes access to all workshops, speakers, breakfast, lunch and snacks, and live performances. For more information and registration, please visit the conference website. On-site registration will also be available at the conference. For disability accommodation requests and information please visit http://access.berkeley.edu.
Sponsored by the Graduate Assembly and the Graduate Women's Project, UC Berkeley. Co-Sponsored by The Department of Gender & Women's Studies and The Li Ka Shing Foundation Rebellious Daughters Play Baseball and “Woman Up” Democracy
Panel discussion, 370 Dwinelle This panel makes visible two very different groups of rebellious daughters, who refused to be limited by gendered structural barriers to individual fulfillment and social justice. Girls and women played baseball, not softball, even though they were boxed into a “separate but equal” version of the U.S. national pastime. As second-class citizens, U.S. Progressive-era feminists created woman-friendly activist spaces outside and inside the state, so they could discredit the ideological twins of masculinized limited government and private charity. By unraveling gender-biased narratives of American exceptionalism, these rebellious daughters help us understand how to engender democracy, as they extend the practice-theory of democracy beyond electoral politics into daily life, sports, work, and relations across a variety of borders. America’s Baseball Underground: Invisible Women in America’s National Pastime This talk explores the mystery of American girls’ and women’s invisibility in the “national pastime.” While Americans insist that “girls can’t play baseball” and have made it very difficult for them to have access to the game, girls and women have played since the early nineteenth century, continue to play wherever they can find a team and a game, and some have gotten good enough to play on the US Women’s national team in international competition. How can there be a “national team” with no access to the “national game”? How do we understand the paradox of women who challenge one of the most sacred boundaries in American culture, nonetheless embracing the nationalistic honor of being a part of “Team USA”? The answer may involve discarding some scholarly and political preconceptions, and abandoning some traditional categories of analysis. This talk is an effort to tell their stories. Destabilizing the Neoliberal Narrative of U.S. Democracy: Progressive-era Feminist Tools Wendy Sarvasy argues that because Progressive-era feminists interconnected engendering and socializing democracy, the completion of their engendering democracy project can aid us in re-socializing U.S. democracy. She explores how their insights help us move beyond three contemporary critiques of neoliberalism to re-imagine social democracy. Brown argues that neoliberalism represents a new political rationality that the state applies as it shapes citizens into individualistic, rational calculators. Fraser analyzes how neoliberals with their emphasis on the freedom of the market have co-opted the feminist goal of economic independence for women through paid work. Harvey and Brown point to the ways in which neoliberalism as ideology or rationality undermines democracy, both thin and thick.
Organized by BBRG: Beatrice Bain Research Group The First International Berkeley Conference on Silent CinemaCinema Across Media: The 1920s
Conference, Berkeley Art Museum Theatre and Pacific Film Archive Theatre, UC Berkeley An international, interdisciplinary conference that will include plenary speeches, roundtables, concurrent panels, and a series of silent film screenings with live musical accompaniment at the Pacific Film Archive. Plenary speakers: Presented by The Department of Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley Co-Sponsored by The Department of Gender & Women's Studies and The Li Ka Shing Foundation For a full list of sponsors and more details, please visit the conference website or contact theconference@berkeley.edu for more information. Civic Engagement & Social Exclusion: Race, Gender, and Political Action
CRG Afternoon Forum Series, 691 Barrows CIVIC ENGAGEMENT & SOCIAL EXCLUSION: RACE, GENDER, & POLITICAL ACTION Mobilizing Inclusion: Redefining Citizenship through Get-Out-the-Vote Campaigns A large body of experimental literature has shown that voter mobilization works, particularly within communities of color. Using data from over 300 field experiments conducted among low-propensity racial/ethnic voters in California, our analysis explores the mechanisms underlying the effectiveness of these campaigns. We argue that a GOTV conversation, because it involves a social interaction, results in the adoption of a cognitive schema as a "voter." An individual's receptivity to the mobilization message, in addition, is mediated through other schemas they possess, such as those related to racial, gender, and other identifications. Our model allows for a deeper understanding of why these campaigns work and, in particular, how their impact can vary by race, gender, nativity, and social context. Who Produces our Politics? Principles of Stratification in the World of Elite Political Operatives Professional political operatives create and direct nearly every aspect of contemporary campaigns. But though “politicos” are at the heart of our system of representative democracy, they are not at all representative of the electorate: women and people of color comprise a smaller proportion of national-level political consultants than of lawyers, CEOs or members of congress. While the broader universe of campaign staffers is somewhat more reflective of the American public (at least in terms of its racial and gender makeup), white men still hold the preponderance of key roles – in both parties. On the one hand, this is hardly surprising: most types of high-powered, well-paid work are dominated by white men in this country. On the other hand, however, this is a semi-profession with no formal barriers to entry: it is possible to succeed in this field without even a high school degree, in fact, and the extant professional association has little authority to certify campaign workers. If it is not specific training or credentials that determine entry or advancement within the field, what capitals or assets do matter? And how does that affect the racial and gender composition of this world? This talk will present initial results from analyses of five sets of data: three surveys conducted nationally of party elites and consultants (in 1999 and 2002), an original dataset containing nearly the entire staffs, consultants, and advisors involved with presidential campaigns in 2007-2008, and in-depth interviews with over 60 professional politicos. I will discuss the principles of hierarchy and division within the field, the positions of women and people of color within those hierarchies, and advance some early theories about the causes and consequences of racial and gender exclusion among political operatives. Queer Judaism in AmericaPoetry reading and discussion
Reading, Congregation Sha'ar Zahav The last few years have witnessed the publication of a number of Jewish queer texts that chose to engage traditional forms of Jewish ritual and literature. These include: Siddur Sha’ar Zahav: The All-Inclusive Siddur, the siddur of Congregation Sha’ar Zahav in San Francisco; B’chol l’vav’kha, the siddur of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in New York; the Torah commentary Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible; and Andrew Ramer’s Queering the Text: Biblical, Medieval and Modern Jewish Stories. These publications mark an important contribution to American Jewish life and culture, now engaged in a fascinating dialogue with the queer community. The proposed symposium seeks to acknowledge and examine this contribution by engaging the editors and authors of these works, and by facilitating a conversation about queer Judaism, its creative engagement with collective Jewish textual forms, and what happens to both in the process. [The Saturday evening poetry reading and discussion will be followed by a symposium at Stanford University on Sunday, Feb. 27]
Taube Center for Jewish Studies, A Wider Bridge, Hillel at Stanford, Keshet, QuAD, Stanford Humanities Center, Shoshana and Martin Gerstel Conference Fund Queer Judaism in America: Directions and TrendsSymposium on Queer Jewish Religiosity in America Rabbi Camille Shira Angel
Conference, Stanford Humanities Center, 424 Santa Teresa Street, Stanford The last few years have witnessed the publication of a number of Jewish queer texts that chose to engage traditional forms of Jewish ritual and literature. These include: Siddur Sha’ar Zahav: The All-Inclusive Siddur, the siddur of Congregation Sha’ar Zahav in San Francisco; B’chol l’vav’kha, the siddur of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in New York; the Torah commentary Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible; and Andrew Ramer’s Queering the Text: Biblical, Medieval and Modern Jewish Stories. These publications mark an important contribution to American Jewish life and culture, now engaged in a fascinating dialogue with the queer community. The proposed symposium seeks to acknowledge and examine this contribution by engaging the editors and authors of these works, and by facilitating a conversation about queer Judaism, its creative engagement with collective Jewish textual forms, and what happens to both in the process.Taube Center for Jewish Studies, A Wider Bridge, Hillel at Stanford, Keshet, QuAD, Stanford Humanities Center, Shoshana and Martin Gerstel Conference Fund March 2011CSSC Dissertation Workshop - Application Deadline
, http://cssc.berkeley.edu/diss.html Apply for the CSSC Dissertation Workshop by March 1, 2011! Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures The Racial Politics of Care & Intimacy: Domestic Workers Transforming the Political Landscape
Symposium, 370 Dwinelle The Racial Politics of Care & Intimacy: Tuesday, March 1, 2011 Domestic workers are mobilizing at the intersections of racialized immigration, gendered labor, and globalization. Their grassroots movement to build power and establish labor standards for intimate care work is transforming the landscape of citizenship, workers' rights, and coalition building. Organizers and scholars will discuss the critical politics at stake. Speakers: Prof. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, UC Berkeley, Lillian Galedo, Filipino Advocates for Justice Maria Distancia, Mujeres Unidas Activas Amy Cray, Hand in Hand Dr. Kathleen Coll, Stanford University, Refreshments served! CSSC Fellowship - Application Deadline
, http://cssc.berkeley.edu/fellowship.html Apply for the CSSC Dissertation-Year Fellowship by March 8, 2011! Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures National Imaginary and Darkness: Race and Gender in Italy
Panel discussion, 370 Dwinelle Hall (Level F), UC Berkeley This panel engages ideas of whiteness, otherness and gender in Italy. Two Italian scholars present their historical and cultural analyses, offering post-colonial critiques of hegemonic race and gender as formations evolving from the late 19th century, to the fascist era, to contemporary Italy. Beatrice M. Bain Research Group Deployment, Bases, and the US Military: Japan and the Self Through Race & Sex
CRG Afternoon Forum Series, 691 Barrows DEPLOYMENT, BASES, AND THE US MILITARY IN MOVEMENT: ? We Call It 'The Rock': Circulating the Imaginary of Okinawa in the Military Diaspora ? My paper will explore how U.S. military personnel and their families, currently or formerly based in Okinawa (re)create and circulate narratives of Okinawa within military communities both in and outside Okinawa. I will focus on how those narratives are shaped against their own identities as US soldiers, veterans, racialized/gendered citizens, spouses, and tourists within Okinawa. Michael Taussig described the cultural productions of fear and the processes of sustaining Otherness in his work on colonial Colombia as a mix of “Indian understandings of white understandings of Indians to white understandings of Indian understandings of whites.” Likewise, I argue that Okinawan militarized and transnational space is a mix of military understandings of Okinawan understandings of US/mainland Japanese understandings to Okinawan understandings of military understandings of Okinawans. Being a Black MP in Postwar Japan: Memory and Identity through Resistance and Accommodation as a Subaltern Occupier "'Yeah, he's my Daddy': Constructions of Fictive Kinships in a Street-level Sex Work Community"Sex Work at Berkeley lecture series Kate Weinkauf, Arizona State University
Lecture, 370 Dwinelle Hall Visiting scholar Kate Weinkauf will lecture on fictive kinship relations in the sex work community. This lecture is part of CSSC's 2010-11 series, "Sex Work at Berkeley." Center for the Study of Sexual Culture The Many Faces of Inter-Country Adoption
Panel discussion, 370 Dwinelle (Level F) Presenters:
This presentation features an earlier history of Chinese international adoption from Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s, which has been overshadowed by the more recent phenomenon of Chinese international adoption that began in the 1990s. It also links this earlier history of Asian international adoption to the discourses about and the policies related to the resettlement of refugees. While, at first glance, the pairing of adoptees and refugees may appear odd, the histories of Asian international adoption and Asian refugee resettlement in the United States share several similarities. These include the emergence of these phenomena primarily from the historical contexts of the chaotic aftermath of war, the migration of Asian adoptees to the United States under the auspices of refugee policies, and several discursive similarities such as the objectification of Asian adoptees and refugees by scholarly studies and the mainstream media as objects in need of rescue by the United States. As an increasing number of white Americans expressed interest in international and transracial adoption, their adoption of “full-blooded” Chinese children presented social workers with another problem of race: assessing racial tolerance among potential adoptive parents and their communities.
America's Baseball Underground: The Invisible Women Who Play the National Game
Lecture, Wildavsky Room at ISSI, 2538 Channing Way Center for the Study of Social Change Speaker Series: Jennifer Ring, Professor of Political Science and former director of Women's Studies, University of Nevada, Reno "Girls can't play baseball!" and America has the folklore to prove it. From the taunt "You throw like a girl" to the assumption that every girl with a bat in her hand is a softball player, American culture has excluded half the nation from the sport historically associated with American national identity. Racial exclusion in baseball has been acknowledged, if not entirely rectified, but no injustice is perceived in giving American girls and women a "separate but equal" version of the national pastime. Jennifer Ring explores the historical and sociological rationales for women's exclusion from baseball in her book, Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don't Play Baseball (University of Illinois Press, 2009) and discovers that contrary to her own assumptions, as well as those of American popular culture, American girls and women do play the game, and have done so since the mid-nineteenth century. Her lecture explores the misconceptions about women's baseball, and includes interviews with the U.S. Women's National Baseball Team upon their return from the Women's World Cup Baseball Tournament, (summer of 2010) in Venezuela. Professor Ring's book, Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don't Play Baseball, will be available for sale and signing at this event. Sponsored by The Center for the Study of Social Change Co-Sponsored by BBRG: Beatrice Bain Research Group, the Department of Gender & Women's Studies and the Li Ka Shing Foundation, and the Sociology Department Race, Punishment, & Crime Policy
CRG Afternoon Forum Series, 691 Barrows RACE, PUNISHMENT, & CRIME POLICY Punitive Crime Policy: Race, Ideology, & Social Hierarchy Public support for and implementation of punitive crime policy cannot be explained solely by objective crime rates. This study examines the social factors – particularly those related to race relations – that pertain to support for punitive crime policy and its implementation. The analysis exploits the critical distinction between ballot propositions that are: irrelevant to race, explicitly about race, or implicitly about race to explore the import of changes in demographic factors at the county level. Evidence is presented that propositions about criminal justice are implicitly also about race. Thus, comparing support for propositions such as those on bi-lingual education or immigration status with those regarding punitive criminal justice issues is revelatory. To this end, county-level characteristics between 1990 and 2000 and voting trends between 1994 and 2000 are used. This paper challenges the theories of political preference that proclaim the dominance of ideology and proposes that the issue of race – of the voters themselves, in their social contexts and as a political topic – complicates and informs a straightforward application of these theories and requires a more nuanced understanding of support for punitive crime policy. Trust, Manipulation, and the Maintenance of Social Boundaries at San Quentin Prison San Quentin is an infamous prison in US history, the subject of myths, cautionary tales, and cable network specials. And yet ask the men housed inside its walls, and they will tell you San Quentin is the best place to serve time in California. Beginning in the mid-1990s, San Quentin’s gates were opened to volunteers from the San Francisco Bay Area interested in providing educational and therapeutic programs. These programs proliferated to the point that today more than 4000 volunteers are issued institutional security clearances to offer services inside San Quentin each month. The advent of rehabilitative programs at San Quentin is particularly surprising given the larger trends impacting prisons in California and the nation since the 1970s. The US incarcerates more people per capita than any other country in the world, and the prison system, given its acute impact on disadvantaged populations—particularly young, black men—is now a central institution in the regulation of poverty and the reproduction of inequality along racial lines. Based on reflections on over a decade’s work as an educator inside San Quentin, this paper explores the tensions between distinct rationales for punishment as they are negotiated on a daily basis by those living and working behind the prison’s walls. While San Quentin shares certain important characteristics with the warehouse prisons of the contemporary punitive era, I argue discourses describing the primary function of the prison in these terms mask the consistent negotiation between control and care underpinning its daily operation. Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Social Change April 2011Enrique Dussel on "The Politics of Liberation in Latin America"
Lecture, TBA A public lecture by philosopher Enrique Dussel for the Chancellor's Colloquium and responses from invited discussants. Enrique Dussel He is the founder with others of the movement referred to as the Philosophy of Liberation, and his work is concentrated in the field of Ethics and Political Philosophy. Through his critical thinking he proposed a new way (a critical way) to read the universal history, criticizing the Eurocentric discourse. Author of more than 50 books, his thoughts cover many themes including: theology, politics, philosophy, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, and ontology. He has been a critic of postmodernity, preferring instead the term "transmodernity."
Visit the colloquium's website to find out more about the program and event. Co-Sponsored by The Department of Gender & Women's Studies and The Li Ka Shing Foundation Feminist Anti-Violence Organizing & the Prison Crisis
CRG Afternoon Forum Series, 691 Barrows CO-OPTATIONS & CROSS-MOVEMENT ALLIANCES: FEMINIST ANTI-VIOLENCE ORGANIZING & THE PRISON CRISIS ‘No More Cages’: Abolitionist Politics in the Feminist 1970s This paper will engage examples of U.S. grassroots feminist opposition to women’s imprisonment in the 1970s and early 1980s. As (select) feminist anti-violence interests were increasingly folded into crime control efforts over this period, radical women with ties to antiracist, anti-psychiatry, lesbian feminist, and prison abolition movements attempted to make “violence against women” speak to everyday conditions of confinement in women’s jails and prisons. Through analysis of the activist mobilizations and alternative media production of Brooklyn’s Women Free Women in Prison, and Seattle’s Through the Looking Glass, the paper will explore how these groups expanded the political definition of imprisonment to include a range of institutions, or “cages,” as well as how they challenged mainstream feminists to rethink criminalization as a frontline strategy for addressing gendered violence. Moving Beyond Critique: New Social Movement Responses to Gender-Based and State Violence It’s ladies’ night and our rhymes is tight: Lil’ Kim, Beyonce, and the “Girls in the BandWith Tracy McMullen
Lecture, Dwinelle 370 “Not Tonight”, Lil’ Kim, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, Da Brat, Missy Elliot, and Queen Latifah retrieve “hidden histories” in African American music and enact empowering black female identities from the tropes offered by a patriarchal and racist society. Drawing on a tradition of African American cultural and aesthetic practices described by Henry Louis Gates, Ingrid Monson, George Lipsitz and others, these artists interweave audio samples and visuals from previous eras and across racial codes to perform new critical histories, identities, and cultural memories. The video elucidates many common themes in African American women’s rap: that “Lady Rappers” have “skillz”; that they are committed to community and group support; and that black womanhood can encompass all identity codes, including those associated with normative white femininity or black masculinity. Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures Catalyzing Knowledge in Dangerous Times
Conference, 370 Dwinelle Catalyzing Knowledge Center for Race & Gender Ten Year Anniversary Conference Facebook event: *** Keynote Lecture: Prof. Andrea Smith, UC Riverside 5:30 pm: Reception Catalyzing Knowledge in Dangerous Times will explore the ways in which knowledge is politicized, embodied, and imagined within a volatile political climate that targets education as a racialized and gendered battleground for defining legitimacy, visibility, and access. Abstracts here: Schedule: 9:30 am Center for Race & Gender at Ten Years 10:00 am Media, Maps, & Motion * Micha Cardenas, UC San Diego * Prof. Ricardo Dominguez, UC San Diego * ~~~ 11:30 am Women of Color Feminist Knowledge * Prof. Laura Perez, UC Berkeley * Prof. Cindy Cruz, UC Santa Cruz * ~~~ 12:50 pm ~~~ 1:40 pm Educators Organizing Across Borders * Dr. Hatem Bazian, UC Berkeley * Prof. Julia Oparah, Mills College * ~~~ 3:00 pm Sparking, Defending, and Envisioning * Prof. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, UC Berkeley/Rutgers University * ~~~ 4:30 pm Conference Synthesis ~~~ 5:30 pm Reception ~~~ 6:00 pm Keynote Talk: Featuring poets & performers, Luna Maia, OLO, & Jezebel Delilah X PLUS an exhibit of Ethnic Studies political art by Made possible by the generous support of the Center for New Racial Studies, Department of Ethnic Studies, Multicultural Community Center, Native American Studies, Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures, Townsend Center for the Humanities, Gender & Women's Studies Department, Center for the Study of Social Change, Berkeley Center for New Media, and the Women of Color Initiative CRG Distinguished Guest Lecture: Prof. Andrea Smith, UC Riverside
Lecture, 370 Dwinelle Hall Center for Race & Gender Spring Distinguished Guest Lecture: From Academic Freedom to Academic Abolitionism Thursday, April 14, 2011 370 Dwinelle Hall Facebook event: Keynote talk for Catalyzing Knowledge in Dangerous Times Andrea Smith is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural and Media Studies at UC Riverside. Prof. Smith received her Ph.D. in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz in 2002. Her publications include: Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances and Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. She is also the editor of The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, and co-editor of The Color of Violence, The Incite! Anthology. She currently serves as the U.S. Coordinator for the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians, and she is a co-founder of Incite! Women of Color Against Violence. She recently completed a report for the United Nations on Indigenous Peoples and Boarding Schools. LGBTQ Youth Talk Back: Some Thoughts on Resistance and Ethnography
Lecture, Wildavsky Conference Room, 2538 Channing Way, Berkeley, CA Featuring Cindy Cruz, Assistant Professor of Education, University of California, Santa Cruz Also with Colette Auerswald, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, University of California, San Francisco and Director of Research Training, University of California, Berkeley-University of California, San Francisco Joint Medical Program
This ethnography begins in a large urban metropolis in the US, where I compiled the stories and testimonios of 43 LGBTQ homeless youth between the ages of 14-21. In this research I found that LGBTQ street youth stories, despite their broken and fragmented narratives, often connect their life experiences directly to the health and condition of their own bodies. It is this queer homeless body that is centered in a story of resistance, as these bodies are highly restricted and contained by teachers, doctors/paramedics, social workers and the police. Despite the containment of their bodies, these LGBTQ street youth consistently create spaces that move them away from the tropes of infection, contamination, and deviant sexualities that are inscripted onto the bodies of queer youth. Using the framework of resistance from the work of Maria Lugones (2003), this essay argues that researchers must develop new abilities to see and acknowledge resistance in these tight spaces. The trope of contamination and irresponsibility intersect many of the experiences of LGBTQ street youth--the discourse of infection, excessive sexualities, and the strategies of survival sex—in ways that implicate not only LGBTQ street youth, but also other marginalized bodies.
Sponsors: Societal Issues, Institute for the Study of, Center for Urban Ethnography, Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures, Race and Gender, Center for, Anthropology, Department of, Young Queers United for Empowerment, Sociology, Department of
Gender and 'the Violence of Everyday Life' in Palestine
Panel discussion, 370 Dwinelle Hall (Level F), UC Berkeley BBRG Panel Abstract: Due to the ongoing Israeli occupation, violence has become a normalized and integrated way of life for Palestinians. Palestinian women pay a high price in this enduring struggle for the liberation of Palestine. Structural and systematic violence created by the colonial regime permeate every aspect of Palestinian life. Women consistently compensate for the absence of men who are either imprisoned in Israeli jails, dead, or suffering from physical and psychological injuries: while women, on the one hand, experience the burden of maintaining “demographic weight,” they also end up becoming solely responsible for providing for their families. This panel examines the multitudinous ways in which occupation, and thereby violence, permeates Palestinian life with profound impact on traditional gender roles and ever-increasing demands on Palestinian women. Ayesha AlRifai demonstrates how the network of biopower technologies of Israeli governance over Palestinians in East Jerusalem causes systematic spaciocide, negatively impacting Palestinian women’s daily lives. Diane Tober explores the impact of occupation on women and gender roles by drawing connections between occupation, domination of space, and the hegemonic intrusion into the Palestinian domestic sphere in the West Bank. Samar Habib examines the remedial and radical power of queer politics, and Palestinian lesbian activism inside the green line.
Convenor: Paola Bacchetta
Discussant: Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, PhD
Speakers:
Palestinian Women of East Jerusalem: Carrying the Burden of State-sanctioned Spaciocide “The Land is My Blood”: Gender, Identity, and Meanings of Space in Palestine Queer politics, Palestine and Palestinian Lesbian Activism Inside the Green Line
Bios:
Ayesha AlRifai Ayesha AlRifai is an Affiliated Scholar at UC Berkeley, Dean of Education Sciences Faculty and Principal of Ramallah Women Training Center at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Ramallah-West Bank where she manages and plans for more than twenty four degree awarding programs and courses offered in a 1000 capacity college solely serving the young refugee women of Palestine. She earned her doctorate from City University of London- UK in 2005 and worked as an assistant professor at the Public Health Faculty at AlQuds University and guest lecturer at Birzait and Bethlehem Universities in Palestine. Alongside her academic works in the area of public health policy, planning and evaluation AlRifai served as a national consultant in the areas of Gender, Reproductive Health, Policy Research, and Programs Evaluation for UN agencies, national and international, governmental and nongovernmental organizations working in humanitarian, aid and development in Palestine. AlRifai is the author of several academic works, including Palestinian Refugee Women and their Access to Health Care: Gender Perspective. In: Nobody Can Imagine our Longing: Refugees and Immigrants in the Mediterranean, Mintoff Bland ed. (Austin: Plain View Press, 1997) and Palestine: Contexts in Health Policy Discourse (Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag, 2009). This is in addition to numerous smaller pieces in her area of expertise in peer reviewed journals and UN publications. AlRifai is an affiliated member in many professional and activism bodies such as the Association of Women of the Mediterranean Region, International Federation of University Women, and International Union for the Scientific Study of Population.
Diane Tober
Samar Habib Samar Habib is an Affiliated Scholar at UC Berkeley and a visiting Professor at San Francisco State , teaching Gender and Modernity in Arab and Muslim Communities, at the department of Women and Gender Studies. She received her doctorate from the University of Sydney in 2007 and worked as a tenured lecturer in Gender and Islamic Studies before coming to the United States to continue to teach and research in her area of expertise. Habib is the author of several academic works, including Female Homosexuality in the Middle East (New York: Routledge, 2007 & 2009) and Arabo-Islamic Texts on Female Homosexuality (New York: Teneo, 2009). She is the translator of I Am You (New York: Cambria, 2008) and the editor of Islam and Homosexuality, in two volumes, (Oxford: Praeger, 2010). Shorter academic works appear or are forthcoming in EnterText, ISIM Review, History of Feminist Thought and LGBT Transnational Identity. She is an editorial board member of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature (founded by fellow Australian, Germaine Greer, in 1982); the chief-editor of Nebula: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Scholarship; and the co-founder and publisher of African Nebula and nebu[lab] (edited by Michael Angelo Tata). Her creative works include the novel A Tree Like Rain and the chapbook Islands in Space. Her poetry and fiction have also appeared in Arabesques, Joussour, The Liquid Mirror and nebu[lab] Her latest novel, Living Close to Mecca, a ficto-historical work set in ninth century Baghdad, is currently under consideration for publication.
Sponsor: Beatrice Bain Research Group (BBRG) Co-sponsors: Townsend Center Working Group on Muslim Identities and Cultures, The Department of Women and Gender Studies and The Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative at San Francisco State University
Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right
Lecture, 370 Dwinelle Hall (Level F), UC Berkeley Jennifer Burns, Assistant Professor of History, Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia Professor Burns will speak about her recently published book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford University Press, 2009), an intellectual biography of the controversial novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand. Worshipped by her fans, denounced by her enemies, and forever shadowed by controversy and scandal, Rand was a powerful thinker whose views on government and markets shaped the conservative movement from its earliest days. Drawing on unprecedented access to Rand's private papers and the original, unedited versions of Rand's journals, Professor Burns offers a groundbreaking reassessment of this key cultural figure, examining her life, her ideas, and her impact on conservative political thought. Organized by: Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science, the Beatrice Bain Research Group, the Department of Gender and Women's Studies, Undergraduate Political Science Association and the History Department The Strange Career of the Filipino ‘National’: Race, Citizenship, and the Dilemmas of U.S. Empire c. 1900-1946
CRG Afternoon Forum Series, 691 Barrows Prof. Rick Baldoz, Oberlin College I will explore the complex relationship between Filipinos and the U.S. by looking at the politics of immigration and race and citizenship on both sides of the Philippine-American divide: internationally through an examination of American imperial ascendancy and domestically through an exploration of the social formation of Filipino communities in the United States. I'll discuss how American practices of racial exclusion repeatedly collided with the imperatives of U.S. overseas expansion. |
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