Center for Women’s & Gender Studies

The goal of the Healthy Sexuality Peer Educator program is to empower UT students to make healthy sexual choices that are right for them.

Healthy Sexuality Peer Educators carry out the program’s goal by conducting outreach and education activities such as presenting workshops to student groups, distributing information at tabling events, conducting individual consultations, and instructing the Methods of Contraception class. Healthy sexuality peer educators cover a variety of topics related to sexuality including sexual decision making, STIs, HIV/AIDS, condoms, methods of contraception, anatomy and physiology, safer sex, men’s health, women’s health, and safer sex communication.

Students receive 5 hours of upper division Kinesiology credit for their participation.
The application can be found here.

April 27 – 29
Four Seasons Hotel, Austin, TX
Fore more information, please visit this site.

Building on the historic 2009 Summit and its acclaimed Austin Manifesto, the Center for Women in Law will once again convene selected leading women in law to explore how women lawyers can attain and exercise power, and use that power for themselves and on behalf of other women. With an audience of judges, law school deans, general counsel, and law firm managing partners, the Women’s Power Summit is poised to transform the face of the legal profession. A detailed agenda for the event may be found at the link directly below.

Keynote speakers:
Gloria Feldt, Author, No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power
Linda Strite Murnane, Colonel, USAF, Ret. and Chief, Court Management and Support Services International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
Jeffrey Pfeffer, Ph.D., Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and Author, Power: Why Some People Have It—and Others Don’t
Patricia Sellers, Editor at Large, Fortune and Co-Chair, Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit

Tuesdays 2:00p-3:00p
April 5th– April 26th
The Body Project is a workshop designed to increase body satisfaction among female college students. The goal of the workshop is to en-gage women in a discussion about pressures to attain an unrealistic beauty ideal and how to respond to these pressures. During the 1 hour meetings, over the course of 4 weeks, participants complete a series of written and verbal exercises intended to increase body satisfaction.
Research has shown that this is one of the best classes for improving body image, and it has also been shown to lower likelihood of obesity and eating problems.
To sign-up contact Sara Weber at saraweber@mail.utexas.edu
The Mindful Eating Program at The Counseling and Mental Health Center

MEChA and La Collectiva Femenil presents: Lenguas Sueltas, open mic nite on April 27th from 6-8pm on the West Mall.
for more information, contact: lenguas-sueltas@hotmail.com.

Members of the “Peers for Pride” program are required to take one class in the fall semester and one in the spring semester. During the fall semester course, “Confronting LGBTQ Oppression: Exploring the Issues and Learning the Skills to Communicate Them,” students learn basic facilitation skills while taking an in-depth look at some issues facing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer individuals. They will write a monologue that they will perform on campus during the spring semester.
During the spring semester course, “Facilitating Dialogues on LGBTQ Oppression: Peers for Pride in Action,” peer facilitators have the opportunity to perform their monologue and fine-tune their facilitation skills and lead workshops across campus.
Participants are required to make a two-semester commitment to the program. Interested students must complete an application and an interview with the program’s director and course instructor, Shane Whalley, LMSW. For more information, contact Shane at swhalley@austin.utexas.edu.

Would you like to assist the GSC staff with this year’s Lavender Graduation ceremony on May 18th? We could really use some volunteers and would love to hear from you. Shifts generally last an hour but you’re more than welcome to volunteer for more time. Shifts will are available before (3:00 – 5:00), during (5:00), and after the ceremony (6:00 – 7:00).
If you’re interested, please e-mail us at matthewmckibben@austin.utexas.edu.

Are you graduating in May, August or December 2011 from a UT Austin undergraduate or graduate program?
If so, join us to celebrate your success at the annual UT Lavender Graduation on May 18th ! To register, follow this link.
Lavender Graduation is a special graduation ceremony that honors the achievements of graduating lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and ally students on campus.
Lavender Graduation is co-hosted by the Gender and Sexuality Center Advisory and Working Group and the Queer Students Alliance (QSA). Our goal is to provide a venue to demonstrate the success of our community members in a personal, entertaining and celebratory way. The Lavender Graduation Ceremony includes: exhilarating speeches from UT faculty, administrators, students, and alumni; the chance to cross the lavender stage to celebrate your success and to receive a Lavender Graduation certificate as well as a rainbow tassel; and music, cake and food to share with friends, family and well-wishers!

CWGS Embrey Women’s Human Rights Initiative invites you to learn about a new tutorial for faculty to support students in archival research on women’s human rights.

View a New Teaching Tool for Archival Research on Women’s Human Rights
Tuesday, April 26, 11:30am – 12:30pm, Gebauer 4th Floor Conference Room (GEB 4.200, left off of the elevators)

Finding aids, folders, reading rooms, and card catalogs – archival research can be confusing for students and difficult to teach effectively. Amelia Koford, a master’s student in the School of Information and the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, has created an online tutorial about conducting archival research on women’s human rights at UT-Austin. The tutorial guides students through five steps: finding an archival collection, preparing for research, viewing the collection, conducting research, and considering emotions and ethics. It focuses on archives on the UT campus, including the Benson Latin American Collection, Briscoe Center for American History, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, and Human Rights Documentation Initiative. The tutorial supports the Embrey Women’s Human Rights Initiative: http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/cwgs/womens-rights/Womens-Rights-Initiative.php

Please join us to learn how you might incorporate this tool for primary source research into your teaching. Bring a brown bag lunch and join our conversation. If you have any questions, feel free to contact Amelia Koford at akoford@ischool.utexas.edu. Hope to see you there!

The Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies 2011-12, Poets&Scholars, is having a two Preview/Promo events on Wed. April 27.

Introducing:

P.S. Poets&Scholars Lunchtime Reading Series

This is the first in a monthly series in which English department students and faculty share their own poetry and favorite poems by others.

Location: Atwood Library

Time: noon (light lunch provided)

Participants Roger Reeves, Liz Cullingford, Meta duEwa Jones, and Lisa Moore

Door Prize: An autographed manuscript (handwritten) copy of an original poem by Roger Reeves!

Evening poetry reading with

Eileen Myles and Hoa Nguyen

Location: Black Box Theater, new Student Activities Center (beside Gregory Gym)

Time: 5-7 p.m.

- Born in Saigon and raised in Washington, D.C., Hoa Nguyen is author of Red Juice, Hecate Lochia, six other books and chapbooks and co-editor of Skanky Possum. She has been teaching creative writing in Austin for 12 years.

- Eileen Myles was born in Boston and moved to New York in 1974. Her Inferno (a poet’s novel) is just out from OR books. For her collection of essays, The Importance of Being Iceland, she received a Warhol/Creative Capital grant. Sorry Tree is her most recent book of poems. In 2010 the Poetry Society of America awarded Eileen the Shelley Prize. She is a Prof. Emeritus of Writing at UC San Diego. She lives in New York.

We hope to see you there!

Fashion
UCLA’s 13th Annual Queer Studies Conference
October 14-15, 2011

Call for Papers
Deadline May 13, 2011

UCLA’s LGBTS Program is pleased to announce a Call for Papers for its upcoming Queer Studies Conference featuring presentations by graduate students as well as faculty and advanced undergraduates.

This year’s conference will explore and exploit issues of fashion, queerly construed. We wish to invite a wide range of questions and panels on subject topics as drag, female masculinities, male femininities, queer making and self-fashioning, cloning and styling, and, of course, the culture and politics of the fashion industry itself. Questions of class, economics, history, ethnicity, race, (im)migration, geography, exploitation, and sublimation are at the forefront of our query. We seek to know what might be a new analytic or interdisciplinary methodology through which to attend to multiple registers of fashion.

Keynote Speakers:
Jack Halberstam, Monica Miller, Mignon R. Moore,
Karen Leigh Tongson, and Deborah R. Vargas

Closing Performance:
“Queerture: A night of rocket science and fashion design”
with artistic director Tania Hammidi

Proposals for individual papers should take the form of abstracts; panel proposals should also include both a list of participants and paper abstracts. CVs must accompany all abstracts. Submissions from undergraduates should be accompanied by a brief letter from a faculty member highlighting the strengths of both the student and the student’s proposal.

Deadline for abstracts and CVs: May 13, 2011
Send abstracts and CVs to lgbts@humnet.ucla.edu
Contact: Catharine McGraw (310) 206-1145 & lgbts@humnet.ucla.edu

Latinitas – a non-profit organization working on the empowerment of young Hispanic girls through media and technology (www.latinitasmagazine.org) is
accepting applications for Summer Camp Leaders + Volunteers.

For more information contact: Hanne Vang Hansen, Latinitas Outreach Assistant
Visit the website for contact information: www.latinitasmagazine.com

For Earth Week this semester, the Students for a Sustainable Campus and the Campus Environmental Center are sponsoring Green Campus Tours of several buildings on UT Campus. We will be touring the sustainability initiatives employed in the UT Tower, the SAC, and the Power Plant on April 19th.

The tours are absolutely free but there is a limited amount of space, so sign up today! To learn more about this unique opportunity or to sign up, please click here .

NSPIRE UT Presents:

SPEAK: A Multilingual Show

We’re here to say what we mean. We’re here to speak. About ourselves. About our bodies. About our experiences. About love and relationships, sexuality, culture.

We’re here to say things that aren’t being said. Things we’ve been told we can’t say, because our real feelings don’t always translate or because what we have to say will make people uncomfortable. These words in your minds – from our lips.

SPEAK is a multilingual monologue show written by the performers. In conjunction with Sexual Assault Awareness Month, INSPIRE UT asked men and women to speak in their own languages about themselves – their experiences, their idea of love, their relationships, their bodies – because we believe that talking about these things – in the ways that people think about them, in all languages – has the power to tear down the mystery surrounding them and to help others find their voices and the power to SPEAK.

PERFORMANCES:

Friday, April 15th – 8:00pm
Saturday, April 16th – 8:00pm
Friday, April 22nd – 8:00pm
Saturday, April 23rd – 8:00pm

All performances are in CAL 100.

Tickets: Suggested $5.00

Tickets will be available before the show. Proceeds will support INSPIRE UT and SafePlace.

CAST:
Aurora Sanchez – Tagalog
Ariel Dang-Tran – English
Lynn Hou – American Sign Language
Chinyere Ugwuzor – English/Pidgin English
Ganiva Reyes – Spanish/English
Juan Portillo – Spanish
Tatiana Makhinova – Russian
Veronica Hernandez – Spanish/English
Bobbi Duncan – English
Erica Allseitz -Facilitator (English)

WHAT: ALG Screening of Howl (2010)
WHERE: Parlin 301
WHEN: Thursday, April 14 at 6:30 p.m.

—

Dear best minds of my generation (and other generations),

Please make plans to attend the year’s last screening of the ALG Cinemas Series. To usher in the end-of-the-semester madness, we’ll be watching Howl (2010), starring everyone’s favorite lit. student, James Franco, as poet Allen Ginsberg. Our esteemed post-doctoral fellow, Dr. Susannah Hollister, will introduce the film and lead discussion afterwards.

If you’re teaching “Banned Books” (or another complimentary class), please invite your students. This film deals largely with the obscenity trial that accompanied the poem’s publication.

If you are currently a student leader or are wanting to gain leadership experience and have at least a 3.0, this is the position for you! The College of Liberal Arts is looking for a few good men and women to fill the ranks of FIG Facilitator. As a FIG Facilitator you will help the FIG Mentor organize and conduct educational and social activities to help new UT students become better acquainted with each other, faculty, the university, and community as a whole.

No prior experience required. Just fill out the attached application and turn in to Shelley Bowers at sbowers@austin.utexas.edu by April 29.