Gender Studies

Annual Fall Reception
2018-10-10 16:00 - 18:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Los Angeles, CA, United States

Women Writers in the Russian Cultural Economy, 1840-1880
2018-05-24 14:00 - 16:00 | Los Angeles, CA, United States

Representing The Sex Industries
2018-05-15 16:00 - 18:00 | Los Angeles, CA, United States

Authors Meet Critics Discussion: Youth Who Trade Sex in the U.S.: Intersectionality, Agency, and Vulnerability
2018-04-24 12:30 - 14:30 | Los Angeles, CA, United States

Indian Given: Racial Geographies Across Mexico and the United States; A Book Talk by Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo
2018-04-12 15:00 - 16:30 | Los Angeles, CA, United States

Sarah Ahmed: Complaint As Diversity Work
2018-02-13 15:00 - 17:00 | Los Angeles, CA, United States

Samantha Majic: Just like the Movies? Celebrities and the Anti-Human Trafficking Movement
2018-01-17 16:00 - 18:00 | Los Angeles, CA, United States

Film Screening of 'Dolores'
2017-11-13 18:00 - 21:00 | Los Angeles, CA, United States

Mishuana Goeman: Anticolonial Tools, The Digital Terrain and Working with Tribal Communities
2017-11-02 15:00 - 17:00 | Los Angeles, CA, United States

Kathleen Sheldon Book Talk, African Women: Early History to the 21st Century
2017-10-19 16:00 - 18:00 | Los Angeles, CA, United States

Black as Space, Femme as Future: An Afrofuturist Feminist Roundtable
2017-10-19 16:00 - 18:00 | Los Angeles, CA, United States

Performance and Conversation with Merlinda Bobis
2017-10-12 16:00 - 18:00 | Los Angeles, CA, United States

Fall Reception 2017
2017-10-11 16:00 - 18:00 | CA

Divinas Divas Film Screening
2017-10-04 19:30 - 22:00 | Los Angeles, CA, United States

Mobilizing Memory in Struggles Against Racial Violence: Song for the Beloved
2017-05-10 14:00 - 18:00 | Los Angeles, CA, United States
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Hae Yeon Choo, Decentering Citizenship: Gender, Labor, and Migrant Rights in South Korea
2017-05-04 15:00 - 17:00 | Los Angeles, CA, United States

Elora Halim Chowdhury, Dissident Friendships: Feminism, Imperialism, and Transnational Solidarity
2017-04-26 16:00 - 18:00 | Los Angeles, CA, United States

Zeynep Korkman, Gendered Fortunes: Feelings, Labors, and Publics of Divination in Turkey
2017-04-18 15:00 - 16:30 | CA
The UCLA Gender Working Group is pleased to present ~Zeynep Korkman~Assistant ProfessorDepartment of Gender StudiesUCLA “Gendered Fortunes: Feelings, Labors, and Publics of Divination in Turkey” Tuesday, April 18th, 20173:00pm-4:30pm in Haines 279 The Irene Flecknoe Ross Lecture Series is made possible by a gift from Ray Ross in memory of his wife. Gender and sexual minorities seek their fortunes in divination as neoliberalization renders their economic futures ever more precarious and as neoconservative gender politics renders their intimate fortunes ever more bleak in millennial Turkey. Drawing upon media, archival, and ethnographic research on the flourishing economy of commercial fortunetelling, I analyze how and why women and LBGTIQ individuals earn a livelihood from and explore their gendered fates through divination. I demonstrate that fortunetellers are channeled through heteropatriarchal gender norms and limited employment chances into an informal divination economy, where they are criminalized by a secularist ban against fortunetelling and stigmatized by an Islamist condemnation of unorthodox religious practices. I conclude that fortunetellers foster public spaces for the articulation of otherwise marginalized feelings of their women and LGBTIQ clients, ironically, at the expense of the devaluation of the labors of these same underprivileged groups.

Installation Celebration of Distinguished Professor Sherene Razack, Penny Kanner Endowed Chair in Women's Studies
2017-03-15 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
Laura E. GómezInterim Dean of Social SciencesandElizabeth MarchantChair of UCLA Department of Gender Studies cordially invite you to attendthe installation celebration of Distinguished Professor Sherene Razackas the chairholder of thePenny Kanner Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies speaking on the topic ofA Site/Sight We Cannot Bear: The Racial/Spatial Politics of Banning the Muslim Woman’s Hijab and NiqabWednesday, March 15, 20176:00 p.m. LectureReception to followCharles E. Young Grand SalonKerckhoff HallUCLA CampusPlease reply by Friday, March 10koleary@support.ucla.edu(310) 825-4038Parking available for $12 in Structure 4 UCLA College of Letters and Science 1309 Murphy Hall, PO Box 951413 Los Angeles, CA 90095-1413

Ju Hui Judy Han, Queering Geopolitics: The Unruly Spaces of Homophobia in South Korea
2017-03-13 15:00 - 16:30 | Los Angeles, CA, United States
Queering Geopolitics: The Unruly Spaces of Homophobia in South KoreaJu Hui Judy HanAssistant Professor, Department of Geography and PlanningUniversity of Toronto Monday, March 13thCharles E. Young Research Library, Presentation Room3:00pm-4:30pm Whether referred to as “LGBTI” in coalitional terms of identity politics or as “sexual minority” to emphasize relations of power and marginalization, queer formations in contemporary South Korea urge expression of non-normative gender and sexual identity and recognition of dissident political subjectivity. They have challenged masculinist labour movements and heteronormative women’s movements, troubled militarism and ableism, and across the broad social movement landscape queer politics have become more legible. Taking place at the same time, however, is the emergence of intensified bigotry in the political sphere and the persistence of institutional heteropatriarchy, most prominently represented by the conservative Protestant-led homophobia mobilized in the name of national security and the Cold War geopolitical order. Drawing from previous and ongoing research on the cultural politics of religion, difference, and mobilities, this talk examines the contested spaces of queer dissent and minority politics in the context of mass mobilizations and political upheavals underway.

Juliann Anesi, Reframing Tautua: Disabled Women, Service, and Education in Samoa
2017-03-06 14:30 - 16:00 | CA
The Department of Gender Studies presents Juliann AnesiUC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, UC Berkeley, Gender and Women’s Studies Department Reframing Tautua: Disabled Women, Service, and Education in Samoa Monday, March 6th2:30-4:00pm2125 Rolfe Hall In the 1970s, allies, educators, parents and women with disabilities established Aoga Fiamalamalama and Loto Taumafai, two schools for students with intellectual and physical disabilities in the independent state of Samoa. In this talk, I explore how the disabled women organizers challenged the ableist educational system by drawing attention to the exclusion of students with disabilities. Specifically, I trace how the women organizers reframed tautua, a Samoan cultural concept usually defined as one’s obligation to customary and familial events. Traditionally, tautau recognizes one’s service to the church and the village, as with the roles played by male chiefs or ali’i. But how did disabled Samoan women resist such patriarchal and hierarchal facets of tautua? And how did they influence human rights and disability policies in the Pacific region? By drawing from oral histories, I examine how the disabled women organizers used tautau to decolonize cultural practices and K-8 education in Samoa and elsewhere. In this regard, the disabled women reframed tautua to recognize their everyday work while also critiquing the ableist and patriarchal meanings of leadership and inclusion. Juliann Anesi is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley in the Gender and Women’s Studies Department. In 2015, she received her Ph.D. in Special Education and Disability Studies from Syracuse University. Her research interests focus on educational policies, indigenous women with disabilities, and intellectual and physical disabilities in the Pacific Islands. Juliann is also a former Board member of the Society of Disability Studies, and has worked with non-profit organizations and schools in American Samoa, California, Hawai´i, New York, and Samoa. Currently, she is developing a book manuscript, Women’s Tautua: Education and Disability Advocacy in Samoa.

Joshua Javier Guzmán: Latinidad and Form
2017-02-15 14:30 - 16:00 | CA
The Departments of Gender Studies and English present Joshua Javier GuzmánAssistant Professor, Department of English, University of Colorado, Boulder Latinidad and Form Wednesday, February 15th2:30-4:00pmCharles E. Young Research Library, Presentation Room 11348 The late Cuban-born American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres is most noted for his minimal and conceptual installation pieces responding, however subtly, to the AIDS crisis. His work withheld normative visual cues associated with sexuality, ethnicity or the epidemic. The artist’s minimalism reflected the unabated response from the Raegan-Bush administrations to the crisis, an indifference leaving many without adequate care or resources to help prevent and cure the disease. As a result, Gonzalez-Torres lost his lover to AIDS five years before his own death in 1996. During this period, the artist produced a set of pieces that together might be understood as enacting a hermeneutics of care. Therefore, this talk will examine the continuously negotiated link between aesthetics and politics by first underscoring how their ambivalent relationship mirrors the form care takes in Gonzalez-Torres’ work. Care then becomes a useful analytic in describing the definitional incoherence known as Latinidad, a phenomenon emerging at the intersection of loss and desire. Joshua Javier Guzmán received is PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at New York University in 2015. He was a 2015-2016 UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley and is currently Assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is completing a manuscript tentatively titled, Suspending Satisfaction: Queer Latina/o Performance and the Politics of Style, which examines Latino subcultural production in a very contentious post-1968 Los Angeles. He is also co-editor of a recent special issue of Women and Performance entitled “Lingering in Latinidad: Theory, Aesthetics and Politics in Latina/o Studies.”

Unveiling the Veiled in Marjane Satrapi's Two-Volume Graphic Memoir Persepolis and Rajaa Alsanea's Girls of Riyadh: a Revolutionary Perspective
2017-02-07 15:00 - 16:30 | CA
THE DEPARTMENT OF GENDER STUDIES PRESENTSUnveiling the Veiled in Marjane Satrapi’s Two-Volume Graphic Memoir Persepolis and Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh: a Revolutionary Perspective Dr. Engy Ashour TorkyAssistant Professor of English Literature, Sadat Academy of Management Sciences, EgyptFulbright Visiting Scholar, UC BerkeleyTuesday, February 7th, 2017 3-4:30 pm2125 Rolfe Hall This talk will unveil and highlight the different “power” structures imposed on Muslim women in two Muslim dictatorial countries (Iran and Saudi Arabia) through comparing Persepolis, by Iranian-born French graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi, and Girls of Riyadh, by Saudi writer Rajaa Alsanea. The two literary texts are re-visited, tackled and dissected in the light of Foucauldian treatments of “power” and “resistance.”

Academic Freedom at Risk: Turkey, the Middle East and Beyond One-Day Conference
2017-01-27 10:00 - 16:00 | Los Angeles, CA, United States

Insurgency at the Crossroads: A Book Talk by Aisha Finch
2017-01-26 16:00 - 18:00 | Los Angeles, CA, United States

Aurora Levins-Morales Justice is Our Medicine: Ecology, Disability, and Health
2016-11-07 16:00 - 18:00 | Los Angeles, CA, United States

2016 Queer Grad Conference: "(Re)Mapping Queer Mobilities"
2016-10-28 08:00 - 20:00 | CA

Ruha Benjamin The Emperor's New Genes: Science, Race, Justice, and the Allure of Objectivity
2016-10-27 12:00 - 14:00 | Los Angeles, CA, United States

Black Feminist Vision: A Symposium on Possibility and Practice
2016-10-20 16:00 - 2016-10-21 16:00 | Los Angeles, CA, United States
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The Poetics of Fragility: Film Screening and Discussion with Director Lata Mani
2016-10-19 18:00 - 21:00 | Los Angeles, CA, United States
Poetics of FragilityFilm Screening and Discussion with DirectorLata ManiWednesday, October 19, 2016 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM – Reception 7:00 to 9:00 PM – Screening and Discussion Charles E. Young Research Library – Main Conference Room The Poetics of Fragility explores the texture, vitality and aesthetics of fragility. It interweaves stories of bodily frailty with optical vignettes of nature’s delicacy to reclaim fragility as intrinsic to existence, not something to be bemoaned or overcome. Shot in the San Francisco Bay Area in September 2015, the film features internationally renowned scholar-activist Angela Davis, the acclaimed playwright and critic Cherrie Moraga, Nora Cortiñas, the inspiring founding member of Madres de Plaza de Mayo Linea Fundadora, actor-dancer Greg Manalo, feminist performance artists Thao P. Nguyen and Martha Rynberg, theater scholar Jisha Menon, healer Christopher Miles, creative writer Xochitl M. Perales and the young trombone talent, Jasim Perales.The Poetics of Fragility is conceived as a “videocontemplation;” a form that Nicolás Grandi and Lata Mani have been developing to explore how the audiovisual medium with its sensuous possibilities can become a tool for social inquiry with a philosophical impulse. The visually arresting and formally plural film unfolds through stories that build on and amplify each other. Moments of emotional intensity alternate with speculative calm, dramatic narration with poetry and critical inquiry into prevailing understandings of fragility.About the DirectorsLata Mani is a feminist historian, cultural critic, contemplative writer and filmmaker. She has published on a broad range of issues, from feminism and colonialism, to illness, spiritual philosophy and contemporary politics. She is most recently the author of The Integral Nature of Things: Critical Reflections on the Present (2013).Nicolás Grandi is a Buenos Aires based filmmaker, interdisciplinary artist and educator. He has taught film direction and the history of world cinema at the Universidad del Cine, Buenos Aires, and in the Film Department at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore.
