Center for Women’s & Gender Studies

*Critiquing Culture*

The Cultural Studies Graduate Conference at George Mason University 2012

Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars. -Walter Benjamin

The Cultural Studies Student Organizing Committee (SOC) at George Mason
University invites paper proposals for our 6th annual Cultural Studies
Graduate Student Conference. The conference will take place on Saturday,
September 22, 2012 at George Mason University (Research 1 Building, Room
163) in Fairfax, Virginia.

CALL FOR PAPERS

At George Mason University, we acknowledge the need to specify Cultural Studies as an academic field with definable features and particular modes of methodological inquiry. In our view, Cultural Studies examines cultural objects as products of the wider social, historical, economic and political conditions that structure their formation, and acknowledges the interrelationship between these factors. In particular, Cultural Studies focuses on power relations and inequalities, which shape the horizon of possibilities for any cultural object at hand, be it a political discourse, an economic model, or a mass cultural product. As a field, Cultural Studies has expanded both geographically and theoretically, building upon its origins in the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies through the inclusion of a range of critical approaches including Marxist political economy, post-structuralism, feminism, critical theory and post-colonial studies. While the objects of Cultural Studies vary widely, the field aims at political relevance and efficacy.

In an attempt to establish a vibrant community for scholars working in precisely this interdisciplinary vein, the Cultural Studies Student Organizing Committee at George Mason University invites graduate students to submit research papers for a conference specifically oriented toward the examination of cultural objects, whether through Marxist, structuralist/poststructuralist, feminist, or other critical lenses. We encourage the submission of papers related, but not limited, to the following broad themes:

- Political Economy
- Mass & Popular Culture
- Gender & Sexuality
- Race & Ethnicity
- Representation & Aesthetics

And, given that 2012 is an election year, the conference strongly encourages papers that address, critique, or otherwise analyze:

- American Electoral Politics

*Abstracts of no more than 300 words and a current CV should be sent to critiquing DOT culture AT gmail DOT com (critiquing.culture@gmail.com) by 1
June 2012. Please include presentation title, presenter’s name, institutional affiliation, contact information, A/V requests, and any special needs required in the email. Abstracts should be sent as .doc or .rtf file attachments.*

Call for Submissions: Special Issue of Society for International Education Journal Teachers College, Columbia University: Engaging with Difference, Gender and Sexuality in Education

Across such contexts as family, peers, school, religious communities, assumptions of gender and sexuality interact with organizational discourses and practices of race and social class (Stritikus & Nguyen, 2007). This view of differences suggests that within a social category, there could be as many differences as there are similarities. Yet these categories endure, and gender continues to be invoked as a static biological feature. The political, social and cultural contexts through which categories of difference are produced and maintained should be explored, particularly in sites of knowledge production and transmission. Historically, access to particular kinds of knowledge has been stratified by categories of difference such as race, social class, gender and sexuality. One way to understand the politics of knowledge is to acknowledge the social process of knowledge transmission in relation to gendered social relations. These relations are part of the discursive space for structuring notions of gender and sexuality. We are interested in expanding this discussion to understand some of the conditions through which institutions and individuals operate on the boundaries of seemingly clearly defined constructions of gender, sex and sexuality and engage with, produce, negotiate and resist knowledge. Specifically, we would like to explore how differences of gender, sex and sexuality operate and how they are established and maintained in local and international educational contexts. We are particularly interested in papers that interrupt normalized discourses, and engage with the fluidity and unsettledness of masculinities and femininities.

We welcome submissions that address any of the questions below:
- How is difference constructed in educational contexts (defined broadly and ranging from early childhood to postgraduate studies, including the informal education spaces)? How does difference operate? How is difference lived and experienced in/through gendered identities and sexuality/sexual subjectivities?
- Which differences are marked or left unmarked? How are hierarchies established? Why are particular differences maintained and others marginalized, and what are the related investments? In what situations do particular differences command more power, and when and how does this power vary with changing contexts?
- How do educational institutions, educators, administrators, and/or students structure difference? What is the role of formal and informal curriculum in the structuring difference?
- How and in what ways does difference constitute students and teachers who see and act in particular ways? What do teachers and learners learn and internalize about gender and sexuality as desiring subjects? How are “proper” and “improper” desire learned and taught?
- Can (real or imagined) borders of sex, gender and sexuality be conceived of as sites of creative dialogue and social agency? In what ways does the space of ‘trans’ provide opportunities for collaboration as opposed to conflict?
- How do normalized discourses in educational contexts create or limit the space for the performance and enactment of difference? In what ways can we re-imagine these discourses? Consider media discourses that construct youth as either hyper sexual or asexual, school policies for the inclusion and exclusion of those who are different such as immigrants, LGBT youth, ethnic minorities, disabled students, etc.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
- Theoretical papers: These papers are informed by sociological, anthropological, educational and/or feminist theory, and provide new ways of exploring and understanding difference.
- Empirical research papers: These papers present studies of micro or macro social contexts to deepen our understanding of the ways in which difference can be established, enacted and/or resisted.
- Microsoft Word document, double-spaced, Times New Roman 12-point font. American Psychological Association (APA) standard format for citations and references.
- Cover sheet should include name, degree, and school/department affiliation. Name should not appear on any of the pages, except on the cover sheet.
- Please send submissions as .doc attachments to TC.SIE.Journal@gmail.com. All submissions should be copied to Mary Ann Chacko (mac2322@tc.columbia.edu).
- Please direct questions to editors: Shenila Khoja-Moolji (ssk2143@tc.columbia.edu) and Stephanie McCall (sdm36@tc.columbia.edu).
- All submissions will go through a double-blind peer review process.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The second-annual Washington University in St. Louis Graduate History
Conference: The History of the Body

October 26-27, 2012 at Washington University in St. Louis

Keynote speaker: Professor Leor Halevi, Vanderbilt University

The Graduate Conference Committee of the History Department at Washington
University in St. Louis invites graduate students to submit proposals for
its second annual Graduate Conference.

We welcome interdisciplinary submissions for this broadly conceived topic,
and are excited to see in what new and creative directions participants
will take this theme. For example, the “History of the Body” might include
bodies used for political and religious expression, gender and the body,
sexualities, the body politic, the transgression of boundaries, the
movement of people, changing ideas of “good” and “bad” bodies over time,
and the idea of bodies in the formation and appropriation of personal and
impersonal spaces. Very literal uses of the “body” as well as more
representational and less-direct approaches are equally welcome.

The Graduate History Conference chooses a biennial rotating theme, allowing
for deeper examination of historical problems and questions over a period
of time. This year will be the second year to explore the “History of the
Body,” and we are eager to see how this provocative topic will develop in
the concluding installment of the conference.

Deadline for submission of proposals: June 1, 2012

Proposals for papers should be between 200-300 words. Final papers should
be approximately 20 minutes in length. Individual papers as well as
proposals for panels will be considered. We welcome new as well as
returning presenters. Please submit proposals to the conference website,
http://history.artsci.wustl.edu/GHA/Conference/Submissions.  For any
questions please contact Ethan Bennett at ethanrbennett@gmail.com.

The overwhelming success of Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas finally confirmed Stein’s celebrity status in the United States in 1933. Yet she lamented that she had become known less as an important author than as the host of a Parisian salon in which famous writers and European painters gathered amidst her collection of modern art. Her earlier, more challenging writing continued to go unnoticed and unpublished despite the wide public appeal of the autobiography and the success of Virgil Thomson’s production of Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts in 1934. Her growing popularity in the United States induced the reluctant Stein to return for a lecture tour through which she would introduce her more obscure work to an American audience—even if it meant having to explain it to them. As she tells us, she “want[ed] readers not collectors…she want[ed] her books read not owned” (Autobiography 301).

Even so, few scholars took serious interest in Stein before the mid-twentieth  century, and, even then, the criticism that emerged tended to make Stein herself the main subject. In the later 1970s and throughout the 1980s, Stein’s writing began to receive attention from a variety of scholars: those who sought to align her literary aims with the Cubist painters; feminists who read her work as a challenge to patriarchal language; and critics who examined Stein’s writing as a more general subversion of the process of signification. In the 1990s, Stein criticism turned its focus to how her writing engages issues of American national and/or cultural identity. As Lisa Ruddick observes, “work in a cultural
studies mode…moved the conversation about Stein’s artistic innovations beyond a sense of her offering a challenge to patriarchy in the abstract” and into “larger cultural fields—fields defined by discourses of race and ethnicity” (Modern Fiction Studies 648).

Most recently, Stein the celebrity has re-emerged. Her life has again become the focus of scholarly inquiry in articles, books and exhibits: Stein’s politics, Stein’s friendships, Stein the collector, and Stein the visual icon. Popular interest in Stein has of late generated The Steins Collect museum exhibit, a children’s book celebrating her writing, a novel told from the perspective of Stein and Toklas’s Vietnamese cook, and Stein as a character in the Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris. In addition, Seeing Gertrude Stein, the companion book to the current exhibit of the same name, creates a cultural and visual portrait of Stein, rendering “a richly complex woman” whose “contradictions ran deep” (7). No doubt, these recent examinations enrich and complicate our understanding of Stein and of how we might read her work, as she implores us to do.

Here, in response to these current trends, we seek to assemble a collection of essays that turns the lens back on Stein’s writing, in and across all genres in which she wrote. We are interested in scholarly essays that take Stein’s primary works as their core analytical focus. We do not suggest jettisoning contextual approaches, but we do encourage inquiry into the writing itself, in all its historical trajectories and discursive iterations. Essays might ask what it is we learn from the tensions produced in Stein’s work in order to expand fields of inquiry and transform the ways we can read, write about, and teach her writing.

The editors are pleased to report that this project has already received attention from a scholarly press. Please send abstracts of 500-700 words (final essays to range from 4,000-8,000 words), brief bios, and CVs to Janet Boyd (boydj@fdu.edu) and/or Sharon Kirsch (Sharon.Kirsch@asu.edu) by May 15, 2012. Queries are welcomed.

Possible topics (others are welcome):
Genre studies
Rhetoric
Linguistics
Formalism
Poetry
Drama/plays
Autobiography
Travel writing
War narrative
Racial theory/identity
Queer theory
Gender/sexuality
Spatiality/temporality
Geography/landscape
National/ethnic identity
Political discourse
Post-colonialism
Advertising/public relations
Celebrity/fame
Humor
Pleasure

BLACK WOMEN GENDER & FAMILIES
Call for Papers

Deadline for Next Issue: March 13, 2012
Black Women, Gender & Families invites submissions for consideration in upcoming issues. BWGF is an interdisciplinary, generalist journal that publishes original theoretical and empirical research that centers the study of black women and other women of color, gender, families, and communities. Within this framework, BWGF encourages a range of theoretical and empirical research from the social and behavioral sciences, history, and humanities, including comparative and transnational research, and analyses of domestic policies within the U.S.

Authors are encouraged to visit the journal’s web site at: http://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/bwgf/submissions.html

The journal has a rolling submission policy and BWGF editors invite you to try out our new electronic manuscript submission system. This secure, personalized resource will allow you to track your manuscript through each step of the acceptance and production process. To set up your personal account and upload your submission, go to: http://caxton.press.illinois.edu/journals/ojs/index.php/bwgf/user/register.

Black Women, Gender & Families is published semiannually by the University of Illinois Press. It is distributed globally by the Press, the JSTOR Current Scholarship Program, and Project MUSE. BWGF is available electronically to subscribers at http://www.jstor.org/r/illinois/bwgf.

Jennifer Harner, Editor
University of Kansas
jhamer@ku.edu

Call for Proposals: Collection on Violence Against Women in Contemporary American Popular Culture
Deadline: April 1, 2012

Despite significant political advancements for American women in the twenty-first century as well as important feminist work to combat gender-based violence in recent years, statistics on violence against women continue to be staggering. This edited collection seeks to explore the role that American popular culture plays in this social phenomenon by bringing together analyses of representations of violence against women in popular cultural texts and practices of the twenty-first century, including but not limited to television, film, music, bestsellers, magazines, blogs, fashion, sports, and cultural movements. As a whole, the collection will engage cultural texts that perpetuate gender ideologies and social practices that support a culture of violence against women, especially ideologies and practices that intersect with issues of race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality, as well as texts that challenge or interrogate that culture.

Essays may focus on representations of or issues underpinning any gender-based act of violence, including acts of intimidation, dehumanization, exploitation, and deprivation, committed by individuals or by social institutions that cause physical, sexual, psychological, and/or social harm to women. A primary aim of the collection is to examine numerous aspects of and questions about the issue of violence against women, but it might include essays that explore how popular culture perpetuates, challenges, combats, questions, or reconfigures ideas about/conventional practices involving the following:

• Definitions of violence against women
• Victim blaming
• Language and violence against women
• Domestic/intimate partner violence
• Workplace violence
• Sexual violence/“rape culture”
• Femicide
• “Self-Inflicted” violence
• Bullying
• Poverty
• Issues of race, ethnicity, and/or class
• Issues of sexuality/sexual identity
• Technology
• War/militarism
• Marriage/family
• Religious practices
• Education
• The law/criminal justice system
• Health services/medical practices
• Antiviolence movements/institutional responses

Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words and a brief biographical statement with contact information to Kara Mollis at mollisk@lindsey.edu by April 1, 2012. Complete essays chosen from the abstracts will be due on September 1, 2012 and should be 4000-6000 words.

MLA 2013 Boston – African Literatures Division (Nonguaranteed Session)

QUEER SEXUALITIES IN AFRICAN LITERATURES AND FILM.

This panel seeks papers that examine/theorize LGBTIQ issues in African literatures and film.  Africa, here, includes North and Sub-Saharan Africa.  Especially welcome are papers that explore how recent political events and controversies in Cameroon, Malawi, Uganda, Nigeria and Ghana produce new sites of reading or demand new agendas for deciphering the complexities of
African queer sexualities.   Since the appropriateness of the word queer for African sexualities is often questioned, papers may examine/propose alternative conceptualizations of the spaces of same-sex eroticisms in African everyday lives.

Possible topics include:

• Theorizations and representations of LGBTIQ activism in Africa
• Democracy, human rights and African sexualities
• Theorizing African sexualities beyond/outside Western paradigms
• Africa and the globalization of sexuality studies
• African homosexualities and religion
• Homosexualities and Nollywood
• Colonialism, coloniality and African LGBTIQ intimacies
• Anti-LGBTIQ violence
• Pedagogies of/for African sexualities
• Queering canonical texts
• Constitutionalism and Anti-Homosexuality Bills
• Crime and the representation of same-sex sexual practices
• Same-sex marriage in African film/literatures
• International relations and African LGBTIQ politics
• African Diaspora and African LGBTIQ
• The spaces of African homosocialities and their functions
• African queer liberalisms?
• African homonationalisms?
• African heteronormativities?
• Queerness and spatialities of the libidinal

Please send 300-word abstracts and CV to Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi at: taiwo.adetunji.osinubi@umontreal.ca by March 10.

*CALL FOR PAPERS:  Film and Video Production* *

2012 Midwest Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference
Friday-Sunday, October 12 – 14, 2012
Columbus, OH, Renaissance Columbus Downtown Hotel
http://mpcaaca.org

*Deadline: April 30, 2012*

The Film and Video Production area of the Midwest Popular Culture and Midwest American Culture Association is now accepting proposals for our upcoming 2012 conference.

Perhaps more than any other art form, film is tied to available technology and much of its magic comes from the filmmakers’ ingenuity as they navigate their vision and the technological limitations they face.  Not only are filmmakers collaborating with technology, but with other members of the
crew and production team, as well as with actors and documentary participants.

We hope that this area’s presenters will explore how life behind the camera influences the final cinematic products our culture so avidly enjoys. Here’s a list of suggested topics, but please feel free to experiment with the idea of production in your proposals:

-The collaborative nature of filmmaking.
-The difference between producing fiction films and documentaries.
-The dearth of women, people of color and GBLT people in the key roles of film production such as directing, producing and cinematography, as well as ways in which we can help remedy the situation.
-Digital video’s effect on democratizing film production.
-YouTube’s and other online sites’ production values.
-Fanvids.
-Experiences running, founding and/or teaching in film/video production programs at the college or high school level.
-Pedagogical uses of film production.
-Behind-the-camera experiences and how they have informed the presenters’ understanding of the nature of film and video.
-Historical analyses of how technological changes have affected filmmaking (the arrival of sound and color, George Lucas and/or James Cameron’s influence on special effects, cinema verité’s reliance on handheld cameras, CGI).
-3D technology.
-Examinations of the future of film and video production.

More information about the conference can be found at http://mpcaaca.org/. Students are eligible for travel grants.  Visit http://mpcaaca.org/about/grants.html for more information.

Please upload your 250-word abstract along with your name, affiliation, and e-mail address to http://submissions.mpcaaca.org/.  Feel free to email me at ahidalgo@purdue.edu if you have any questions.

Thank you very much,
Alexandra Hidalgo
Film and Video Production Area Chair, MPCA/ACA<http://alexandrahidalgo.com/>
–
Doctoral Candidate and Teaching Assistant in Rhetoric and Composition
Documentary Filmmaker
Editor-in-Chief, *agnès films*, http://agnesfilms.com/
Multimedia Editor, *Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society*,
http://www.presenttensejournal.org/

Department of English
Purdue University
500 Oval Drive
West Lafayette, IN 47907-2038

Hi I’m Jocelyn,

I want to do submit a panel for NWSA (National Women’s Studies Association.) NWSA is going to be in Oakland this year (November 8-11th, 2012.) (Sorry in advance for any redundancy across listservs.) Please feel free to forward to to people who might be interested as well.

The panel title will be *“Unruly Black Women in Public: Respectability in the 21st Century” *and I’m looking for two to three more panelists. As the title suggest you’re work should center around Black women. I am interested in papers that think through Black women and the public sphere and
Respectability Politics. Suggestions include work that examines a genealogy of how the concept of respectability has operated in Black women’s studies, or analysis of how respectability opperates in the daily public lives of Black women. Afro-Diasporic and Transnational notions of Black womanhood are quite welcome as well as work specifically about Black women in the US.

Please feel free to respond at joc.thomas@gmail.com. Interested parties need to submit completed abstracts by Friday February 17th. The full panel abstract is due to NWSA by Monday Feb 20th.

Official CFP for NWSA<http://082511c.membershipsoftware.org//Files/CFP_Final2012.pdf>

Part of this panel’s project is to try to highlight independent scholars, graduate students, activists, and junior faculty.

Jocelyn Thomas
Independent Scholar
joc.thomas@gmail.com

Call for Submissions: New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law, 2 Volumes
Edited by Lynn Comella, PhD and Shira Tarrant, PhD
Deadline: July 30, 2012

Co-editors Lynn Comella (University of Las Vegas, Nevada) and Shira Tarrant (California State University, Long Beach) are seeking submissions for a two-volume edited collection under contract with Praeger.

Description: New Views on Pornography is a two-volume collection of the most current scholarship on pornography. This edited series presents empirical research on a range of contemporary issues regarding pornography’s politics, psychology, cultural and legal debates, providing a comprehensive and multidisciplinary overview of the field of porn studies in one convenient location for students, researchers, and professors across related fields. Our goal as editors is to showcase new and innovative research that examines the culture and politics of pornography in a global context, including but not limited to, questions of production, audiences, market niches, technological innovations, political debates and controversies, obscenity, free speech, public policy and the law. The editors seek well-researched facts and data in order to provide readers with a comprehensive overview of issues on the subject.

Author Guidelines: For consideration, please submit full chapters (5,000-7,000 words), a brief abstract, bio (75-100 words), and complete contact information. Submissions must include endnotes and bibliography, and adhere to Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition. Send submissions in .doc or .docx format to both contact emails below. Submissions not conforming to these guidelines will not be considered.

The Editors Are Specifically Interested in Submissions on the Following:

• Foundations and Controversies in Pornography
• Defining Pornography
• The History of Pornography
• Pornography and the Law: Historical Highlights
• Cultural Trends and Changing Ideas about Pornography
• Key Resources in Media and Cultural Studies of Pornography
• Consumption Practices: Who Is Using Porn?
• Global Porn Production: Practices and Revenue
• Sources of Porn: The Marketplace and Changing Supply Patterns
• The Porn Wars in Historical and Contemporary Perspective
• The Politics of Porn Literacy and Social Control
• Issues of Race, Ethnicity, and Pornography
• Impacts of the Industry: Interviews with Porn Actors and Industry Workers
• Studying Pornography: Research Methods and Methodologies
• Impacts and Effects of Pornography
• Defining the Terms: Problems with Content Analysis and Ideological Bias
• Women Watching Porn: Issues in Data Collection and Self-Reporting
• Pornography and Global Sex Trafficking: Separating Myths from the Facts
• Pathologizing Porn: Questions about Addiction
• The Impacts of Pornography on Intimate Relationships
• Technology and Porn
• Obscenity, Surveillance and Free Speech: Current Issues in the Law
• Varieties and Genres of Pornography
• How the Adult Industry is Organized: Issues of Production and Revenue
• Masculinity, Violence, and Pornography: Correcting the Data
• Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Queer Porn
• Porn Studies in Global Context
• Porn Use and Sexual Satisfaction

Deadline: July 30, 2012

Send To: Please send cc’d submissions to Lynn Comella at lynn.comella@unlv.edu and Shira Tarrant at Shira_Tarrant@yahoo.com. Include Praeger NVOP Submission in the subject line. Submission queries should be directed to the above.

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

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)

The Center for Women’s and Gender Studies
Childhood and Youth Research Cluster

presents a lecture by

ROBIN BERNSTEIN
Associate Professor, Harvard University
Harrington Fellow, University of Texas at Austin

Thursday, April 21, 3-4:30 pm
Texas Union, Chicano Culture Room 4.206

PSYCHOLOGICAL DAMAGE OR RESISTANCE?
RE-EVALUATING THE CLARK DOLL TESTS

From 1939 through the mid-1950s, psychologists Mamie Clark and Kenneth Clark
conducted their famous “doll test” in which they asked African American
children whether they preferred black or white dolls. Most children identified
white dolls as “nice” and African American dolls as “bad”—proof, the Clarks
argued, that segregation damaged black children psychologically. The doll test
figured pivotally in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that
ruled against segregation in public schools, and it installed in American
common sense the belief that doll preference indexes racial self-esteem. Since
Brown, social scientists have identified many flaws in the Clarks’ experiment,
but in the popular sphere, the tests have lost none of their persuasive power.

Bernstein relocates the “doll test” from its familiar history—that of the Civil
Rights Movement—to another, defamiliarizing one: the history of
representational play involving racialized dolls. She re-reads the Clarks’
experiment through the lens of this tradition of performance in everyday life.
A black child’s rejection of a black doll might, as the Clarks argued, reveal
internalized racism; but it could also constitute a rejection of the violently
racist practices of performance-play that had, for a century, been coordinated
through black dolls. Bernstein makes a case for this second possibility. This
talk recuperates the Clarks by defending the doll test not as flawed social
science but instead as brilliant dramaturgy. Furthermore, this argument
redeems the Clarks’ child subjects by offering a new understanding of them not
as passive internalizers of racism instead as resistors to inherited traditions
of performance.

Robin Bernstein, a current Harrington Fellow in the Department of Theatre and
Dance at the University of Texas at Austin, is a faculty member of Harvard’s
Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and Committee
on Degrees in History and Literature. Her new book, Racial Innocence:
Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, is forthcoming from
NYU Press.

Please join us for the seventh installment this semester of our Lecture Series to be held this upcoming MONDAY, March 28th from 12:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. in the new Anthropology Conference Room in SAC 5.118

We are honored to welcome Prof. AMIRA MITTERMAIER from the University of Toronto whose lecture is entitled:

BEYOND SELF-CULTIVATION: EGYPTIAN DREAMS AND SUBJECTIVITIES

Lecture abstract: How do Egyptian dream-stories complicate the paradigm of self-cultivation which has in recent years become hegemonic in the anthropology of Islam? Drawing on narratives of visitational and prophetic dreams, Dr. Mittermaier suggests that self-cultivation works well to describe certain practices that are central to the Islamic piety movement, but it obscures other modes of religiosity that revolve around neither acting-against nor acting-within but that revolve around being-acted-upon. These other modes of religiosity are just as prominent in Egypt today and, as the talk aims to show, pose an even more radical challenge to the liberal autonomous self.

This event is generously sponsored by the UT Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

A *light* lunch will be served.

Loretta Ross, the national coordinator of SisterSong Women of Color
Reproductive Health Collective, co-author of Undivided Rights: Women
of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice, and longtime human rights,
anti-racism, and anti-sexual violence activist, will be speaking to
the public in April at the University of Texas at Austin. We invite
everyone to join us for this inspiring event.

Who: Loretta Ross
Date: Saturday, April 2
Time: 2:00pm-3:15pm (doors open at 1:45)
Place: Utopia Theater, School of Social Work Building, 1925 San
Jacinto Boulevard, Austin, TX
Cost: Free

Feminist Action Project, a student group at UT, is sponsoring Ms. Ross
as part of their student-run activist conference, “Feminism is for
Every(body),” on April 1 and 2. For more information on the event or
to register, please contact feministactionproject@gmail.com or go to
http://feministactionproject.blogspot.com/. For more information on
Ms. Ross and her work, please see her Speak Out biography here:

http://www.speakoutnow.org/userdata_display.php?modin=50&uid=113