Center for Women’s & Gender Studies

18th Annual Emerging Scholarship in Women’s & Gender Studies Conference, Call for Papers
The 18th Annual Emerging Scholarship in Women’s & Gender Studies Conference
Conference Date: April 8th, 2011

CALL FOR RESPONSES
Submission Deadline: February 11th, 2011

The CWGS graduate student-run conference provides an opportunity for undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty from all departments to engage in round-table panels which address a diverse array of women’s and gender studies topics posed by CWGS faculty affiliates. Graduate students, faculty, and community activists from outside the University are also welcomed to attend. The Center’s annual theme for 2010-2011 is “Gender and Justice” but research on any aspect of gender and/or sexuality is welcome.

Please visit the Conference Website for a listing of panels and submission instructions:

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/cwgs/events/conferences/Student.php

Get your Tickets for allgo’s Baile 2011: 25 Years and Still Dancing.

It is not too late to purchase an ad or to become a $100 individual sponsor. Our sponsorship packet is available here. You can also donate an item or a service for our silent auction

Food and drink catering provided by event sponsor: Alfred’s Catering

Prepare to dance to the amazing music that DJ Chorizo Funk spins.
He will be playing all the music that we love.
Join our soul train line and strut your stuff or dance the Bachata with a friend.

Come prepared to enjoy the company of queer people of color and allies.
Anticipate meeting new people. There is always someone to dance with.

Participate in the silent auction, purchase roses to give to a new friend or partner. Get your photograph taken to commemorate the occasion.

And don’t forget that when you purchase a ticket to this fund raising event it helps to support allgo’s social change work.
Come on and party with a purpose.

Lecture and Opening

Familias Mexicanas/Mexican Families
by Óscar Sánchez
A photographic series depicting the daily life and intimate spaces of gay, lesbian and transgender families in Mexico
Feb 17 – Mar 21

Opening Lecture on Same-Sex Marriage in Mexico City
by Dr. Leticia Bonifaz Alonzo (UNAM, Mexico City)
Thursday, Feb 17, 6-8pm

FAB UT, Fine Arts Building. 23rd and Trinity

Sponsored by the Queer Studies Cluster, Lonzano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, Center for Latin American Visual Studies, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and FONCA

Curated by Gabriela González Reyes

Hello, I’m the editor of Lavender Review, a biannual e-zine dedicated to poetry and art by, about, and for lesbians, including whatever might appeal to a lesbian readership.

Contributors to the first two issues include poets Marilyn Hacker, R.V. Bailey, U.A. Fanthorpe, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Eleanor Lerman, Suzanne Gardinier, Judy Grahn, Ali Liebegott, Eileen Myles, A.E. Stallings, and Rachel Hadas; and artists Louise Fishman, Irit Rabinowits, Carrie Moyer, Liz Ashburn, Sarah Lucas, Emily Roysdon, Leslie Satterfield, Betty Parsons, Marie Laurencin, Romaine Brooks, and Claude Cahun.

The theme of Issue 3 is Night, in honor of Marilyn Hacker’s “night-fancied” Lettera amorosa. The deadline for submissions is 6/1/11. For submission guidelines, click here.

Please spread the word about this exciting new journal!

Thanks,
Mary Meriam
Editor, Lavender Review
lavender.review@gmail.com

http://lavrev.net

Competitive Benefits Rally!
Monday, February 14, 2011
12-1:30pm
West Mall

What better way to show your love for equality than on Valentine’s Day? Join PEFSA and student allies for a rally on the West Mall, followed by a march to UT Human Resources to symbolically enroll our partners for insurance benefits. We hope you will join us in showing the campus that equal benefits for all UT families is the best policy. We will have speakers, t-shirts, and signs on the West Mall at noon. If you would like to submit insurance paperwork for your partner, please contact Lindsey Schell (schell@mail.utexas.edu) by Feb. 1. HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY TO ALL!

Please save the date for the Third Interdisciplinary Conference on Human Trafficking at the University of Nebraska! The conference will take place September 29, 30, and October 1 at the Cornhusker Hotel in Lincoln, Nebraska.

We are pleased to announce that our keynote speaker will be Siddarth Kara, author of the award-wining Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery, and Fellow with the Carr Center on Human Trafficking at the Harvard Kennedy Center of Government.

Information on the conference, submission of abstracts, registration, dates, venue, and speakers will soon be available at http://humantrafficking.unl.edu.

There will be a number of changes to the conference, including a student track where students can present paper for feedback.

Keep your eyes open for the call for papers!

Hope to see you there!

Please join the CWGS/Rapoport Center Research Cluster on Women, Gender, and Human Rights for its first meeting of the Spring semester. We are pleased to welcome Dr. Jennifer Suchland of Ohio State University to begin our semester series. Please share this announcement.

“Sex Trafficking and the Making of a Feminist Category of Analysis”
Dr. Jennifer Suchland, Ohio State University
Tuesday, February 8, 4:30 -6pm, GEB 4th Floor Conference Room

What is at stake in how we define and combat sex trafficking? Since the end of the Cold War, the issue of sex trafficking has been dominated by debates regarding agency and violence against women. My talk will discuss why this is the case looking specifically at how a “violence against women” approach to anti-trafficking can privilege particular understandings of trafficking that obscure the role of the state and transnational flows of capital in sustaining the informal and formal economies that make up sex trafficking. I ask how we can advance a human rights approach to anti-trafficking that links economic and sexual rights.

Dr. Jennifer Suchland is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Ohio State University. Her research is on comparative gender studies and issues of culture, law and political discourse. Her most recent essay, “Is Postsocialism Transnational?”, is forthcoming Summer 2011 in “Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society.” She will be discussing research from her current book project which includes work on the evolution of global anti-sex trafficking discourse and its impact on postsocialist Russia.

For more details on the event, please contact Lydia Crafts Putnam at crafts.lydia@gmail.com.

The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice of the University of Texas at Austin is proud to announce the launching of the Rapoport Center Human Rights Working Paper Series.

We encourage submissions from scholars of all disciplines as well as from activists and advocates that contribute to the Rapoport Center’s mission to build a multidisciplinary community engaged in the study and practice of human rights that promotes the economic and political enfranchisement of marginalized individuals and groups both locally and globally.

The Working Paper Series is being launched online in a blog-style format. This approach offers authors the ability to actively receive feedback and encourages readers to engage in debates surrounding human rights and social justice through posted comments.

Please visit the website to read our first working papers, which are the finalists of the Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights. You may also find submission and blogging guidelines on the website.

The Corcoran Department of History is seeking an additional participant and chair for a panel that
explores contributions to the second wave from outside traditional networks for the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in Chicago, January 5-8 2012.

We would like to explore the extent to which the ideals and goals of second-wave feminism have been advanced through unconventional or disparate avenues, or by those who might have considered themselves
outsiders to the mainstream movement (broadly construed). One paper will examine the influence of professional women’s career ambitions on the course of the office workers’ movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Another paper will examine the development of a feminist consciousness by American military women serving in-country during the Vietnam war.

If you are interested please contact Amy Rebecca Jacobs (arjacobs@virginia.edu). Final abstracts must be submitted by February 15th , so if you are interested please contact her no later than February 7th .

Please join writer and novelist Aminatta Forna for a discussion of her writing and work in the UK and Sierra Leone on Monday, January 31, at 3pm in WAG 101, and a reading/signing of her new novel The Memory of Love Monday, January 31, at 7pm at Book People.

Both events free and open to the public

Aminatta Forna was born in Glasgow and raised in Sierra Leone and the United Kingdom. She is the award-winning author of The Memory of Love, Ancestor Stones (2006) and The Devil that Danced on the Water (2002).

Her new novel The Memory of Love (Bloomsbury/Atlantic Grove), published in April 2010, is a story about friendship, war and obsessive love in post-conflict Sierra Leone. It has been selected as one of the Best Books of the Year by the Sunday Telegraph, Financial Times and the London Times.

The Devil that Danced on the Water, a memoir of her dissident father and of Sierra Leone, was runner up for the Samuel Johnson Prize 2003, chosen for the Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers series and serialised on BBC Radio and in The Sunday Times newspaper. Ancestor Stones was a New York Times Editor’s Choice book, selected by the Washington Post as one of the Best Novels of 2006.

In 2002 Aminatta helped to build a primary school in her family’s village of Rogbonko. The building of the school was the first step in what would become known as the Rogbonko Project: a community effort to create an escape route from poverty through multiple initiatives in the spheres of education, agriculture, infrastructure and health.

The Gender and Sexuality Center is proud to bring Dr. Lissa Rankin to campus on Thursday, February 24th for “What’s Up Down There? Questions You’d Only Ask Your Gynecologist If She Was Your Best Friend.”

Where: Glenn Maloney Room; Student Services Building at 7 pm.

For more information on Dr. Rankin, please visit this website.

The Living with Pride series begins again on Thursday, February 17th with “Living with Pride: Religion and Sexuality.” This will include a discussion about the intersections of religion and sexuality. Snacks will be provided. “Living with Pride: Religion and Sexuality” will take place from 6:00 – 7:30pm in the Gender and Sexuality Center, Student Activity Center 2.112. We look forward to seeing you there!

Siva Vaidhyanathan, Professor, University of Virginia, Department of Media Studies & School of Law

Friday, February 4th at noon in Burdine 116

A guest lecture sponsored by the American Studies Department and the Radio-Television-Film Department

As the academy endures financial and political pressure of unprecedented gravity, many scholars are struggling with the need to make intellectual work seem relevant with the fears of being labelled shallow and market-oriented. In addition, scholars who step into public debates risk harassment from critics on cable news and talk radio. This talk will explore the pros and cons of new, untenured scholars asserting themselves into public debates and attempting to generate a public voice. It will consider the potential risks and costs to the quality of one’s prospects for employment and tenure. And it will consider the rewards that can come from doing high-profile work.

Siva Vaidhyanathan received his BA in History and his Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas. He is a professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia. Vaidhyanathan is a frequent contributor on media and cultural issues in various periodicals including The Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Dissent, MSNBC.Com , andSalon.com , and he maintains a blog, www.googlizationofeverything.com . He is a frequent contributor to National Public Radio and has appeared in a segment of “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart. Vaidhyanathan is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Institute for the Future of the Book. In March 2002, Library Journal cited Vaidhyanathan among its “Movers & Shakers” in the library field. In the feature story, Vaidhyanathan lauded librarians for being “on the front lines of copyright battles” and for being “the custodians of our information and cultural commons.” In November 2004 the Chronicle of Higher Education called Vaidhyanathan “one of academe’s best-known scholars of intellectual property and its role in contemporary culture.” He has testified as an expert before the U.S. Copyright Office on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Vaidhyanathan is the author of three books: The Googlization of Everything — and Why We Should Worry (University of California Press, 2011); The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (Basic Books, 2004); and Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity (New York University Press, 2001). He also is the co-editor of Rewiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies (editor with Carolyn de la Peña) (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

by Sharon Bridgforth
featuring Sharon Bridgforth, Florinda Bryant and the 2010-2011 Austin Project Ensemble

WHEN: Sunday February 20 at 6pm
WHERE: Winship Drama Building, Room 2.180
WHO: Sharon Bridgforth is a resident playwright at New Dramatists since 2009 and a writer working in the Theatrical Jazz Aesthetic. Her piece, blood pudding, was produced in the 2010 New York SummerStage Festival. She is the 2010-2011 Visiting Multicultural Faculty Member at The Theatre School at DePaul University.
MORE INFO: www.sharonbridgforth.com

Was Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist classic lost in translation? Has it been rediscovered? The Second Sex (Le Deuxième Sexe, 1949) was one of the most important texts of the twentieth century: brilliant, bold (scandalous, to some) complex, and interdisciplinary, ranging across philosophy, literature, history, and anthropology. The first English translation, attempted in the 1950s by a male zoologist from Smith College, edited out whole sections and misrepresented Beauvoir’s philosophical stance. (That edition was published by Alfred A. Knopf, and correspondence about it is in the Harry Ransom Center at UT.) Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier have just completed a second English translation, this one unabridged. Their work has generated a new wave of discussion about translation and feminism. Borde and Malovany-Chevallier will discuss the unique challenges of Beauvoir’s text, the history of its translation, and their attempt to capture its philosophical complexity.

Sheila Malovany-Chevallier and Constance Borde attended Rutgers University in the 1960s and have been working together ever since. They have lived in France for over 40 years, where they have earned degrees in linguistics (one from Vincennes and one from Nanterre), taught at Sciences Po, and published extensively in a variety of fields. All along, they have been translating work in social science, social theory, feminism, and art from French to English.

Friday, February 18
2 pm
Protro Theatre, Harry Ransom Center

Sponsored by:
The Harry Ransom Center
The Humanities Institute
The Institute for Historical Studies
Department of French and Italian
Center for Women and Gender Studies
Center for European Studies
The Symposium on Gender, History, and Sexuality, Department of History