2005 Topic:
"No Cloak to Hide Behind: Jessie Daniel Ames, the Torture at Abu Ghraib, and You"
Speakers: Minnie Bruce Pratt
Minnie Bruce Pratt graduated from Bibb County High School when it was under segregation, and entered the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa a year after George Wallace "stood in the schoolhouse door." She received her B.A there, where she was also Phi Beta Kappa and a member of Chi Omega sorority. She took her Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition to this academic education, she received her education into the great liberation struggles of the 20th century through grass-roots organizing with women in the army-base town of Fayetteville, North Carolina, and through teaching at historically Black universities.
In addition to co-authoring many books, she has published five books of poetry, The Sound of One Fork, We Say We Love Each Other, Crime Against Nature, Walking Back Up Depot Street, and The Dirt She Ate: Selected and New Poems, recently issued by Pitt Poetry Series. Of Pratt's most recent book, The Dirt She Ate, reviewer Joy Parks in Gay Content Link says, "If you read only one book of poetry this year, The Dirt She Ate should be it."
Recently Pratt served as the Jane Watson Irwin Chair in Women's Studies at Hamilton College. She is also a member of the graduate faculty of The Union Institute and University, a non-residential, alternative, Ph.D.-granting university. Her areas of concentration there are Women's Studies, Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender Studies, and Creative Writing. She lives with her partner, transgender activist and writer Leslie Feinberg, in Jersey City, New Jersey.
2004 Topic:
"Too Tall Blondes Do Sex, Death and Gender"
Speakers: Kate Bornstein and Barbara
Carrellas
Kate Bornstien is an author and
performance artist whose published works include the books Gender Outlaw:
On Men, Women and the Rest of Us; My Gender
Workbook; and the cyber-romance-action novel, Nearly
Roadkill with co-author Caitlin Sullivan. Hir plays and
performance pieces include Hidden: A
Gender, The Opposite Sex Is
Neither, Virtually Yours, Cut'n'Paste, and y2kate: gender virus 2000. Kate's
books are taught in over 120 colleges and universities around the
world; and ze has performed hir work live on college campuses, and in
theaters and performance spaces across the USA, as well as in Canada,
the United Kingdom, Germany, and Austria.
Barbara Carrellas, sex educator, sex positivist and pleasure activist,
offers a holistic, metaphysical, practical, humorous and entertaining
approach to conscious sexuality. After a long and rewarding career in
the New York theatre, she has turned the focus of her work and her art
to sexual healing and sex as a spiritual path. Barbara has facilitated
countless healing circles and support groups for women, men,
transsexuals, artists, people with life-threatening illnesses and
people with HIV/AIDS. For four years she was a facilitator for and on
the Board of Directors of the New York Healing Circle, which was
founded in response to the AIDS crisis and incorporated the principles
of Louise Hay's work. As her workshops grew in popularity and in
attendance, her work expanded to include people from all walks of life
and in all stages of sexual evolution.
2003 Topic: "A Chicanadyke Codex of Changing Consciousness"
Speaker: Cherríe L. Moraga
Biography: Cherríe Moraga is a poet, playwright and
essayist, and the co-editor of the classic feminist anthologies This
Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (which
drastically changed American feminism to include women of color) and
Cuentos: Stories by Latinas. She is the author of numerous plays
including Shadow of a Man and Watsonville: Some Place Not Here (which
won the fund for New American Plays award in 1991 and 1995,
respectively), and Heros and saint, which earned the Pen West Award for
Drama in 1992. Her two most recent books include a collection of poems
and essays entitled The Last Generation and a memoir, Waiting in the
Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood. A collection of her plays, Some
Place Not Here, was published in 2001.
Ms. Moraga is also a recipient of the National Endowment for
the Arts' Theatre Playwrights' Fellowship and is the
Artist-in-Residence in the Departments of Drama and Spanish and
Portuguese at Stanford University. Born in los Angeles in 1952, Moraga
now lives in Oakland with her lover and their children.
2002 Topic: "Tough Guise: Violence, Media and the Crisis
in Masculinity"
Speaker: Sut Jhally
Biography: Jhally is a Professor in the Department of
Communication at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst. He
specializes in gender, race, and ethnicity issues in the media and
advertising. He is also executive director of the Media Education
Foundation, a non-profit organization in Northampton, Mass., that
produces educational videos on similar issues. You can find a full list
of Jhally's publications and the Media Education Foundation's videos at
his web site: www.sutjhally.com
Two of the best known of Jhally's instructive and wonderfully
produced video projects are Dreamworlds: Desire/Sex/Power in Rock
Videos (and the follow-up: Dreamworlds 2) and Tough
Guise. Jhally's books and articles also address the portrayal of
gender, ethnicity, and class in the mass media. For example, see his
"The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of
Meaning in the Consumer Society" (New York and London: Routledge,
1990), and "Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth
of the American Dream" (co-authored with Justin Lewis; Boulder:
Westview Press, 1992).
2001 Topic: "Creating Beloved Community: Ending Race, Sex
and Class Domination"
Speaker: bell hooks
Biography: A true public intellectual of our time, bell
hooks
is one of the most prolific cultural workers active today. She is a
frequent lecturer across the United States and abroad, and is
Distinguished Professor of English at City
College, City University of New York. With a passionate voice about the
lived experiences of race, class, sex and gender in America, she has
written over 20 books and countless essays/articles/interviews on
subjects ranging from pop culture, film, pedagogy and poetry to
children's literature, art and Buddhism. Since her early publications
such as Ain't I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism and Feminist
Theory: From Margin to Center, bell hooks has been challenging the
women's movement and anti-racist movements in the US for over two
decades. Crossing disciplinary boundaries within the academy, hooks'
open and urgent writing has also crossed into public discourses about
all forms of domination and the ways that we all can battle them.
Her latest three books show the expanse of her
keen critical eyes:
All About Love
offers radical new ways to think about love. By challenging us to think
of love as an action, not a feeling, hooks offers a rethinking of
self-love (without narcissism) that has the potential to bring peace
and compassion to our personal and professional lives. All About Love
shows us how love can heal the wounds we bear as individuals and as a
nation and is as much about culture as it is about intimacy.
Where we
stand: class matters takes up, in voices of both autobiography and
cultural critique, the infamous 'elephant in the room,' class in the
United States. Weaving stories from her past with a compassionate but
demanding critique of capitalism, hooks encourages us all to examine
the ways that greed and consumerism have infected the ways that we
interact with the world. Bringing such volatile subjects front and
center, hooks once again challenges feminists not to re-trace some of
the most damning footsteps of patriarchal culture: she challenges us
not to perpetuate the myth of a class-free society. And in so doing,
she opens us to the possibilities of living beyond the psychological
and physical damages of a culture driven by material wealth.
Finally, Feminism
is for Everybody: Passionate Politics offers an open-hearted and
welcoming vision of gender, sexuality and society. Here she introduces
a popular theory of feminism rooted in common sense and the wisdom of
experience, giving us a vision of a beloved community that appeals to
all those committed to equality, mutual respect and justice. She
analyzes some of the most contentious and challenging issues facing
feminists today, including reproductive rights, violence, race, class
and work. Calling for a feminism free from divisive barriers but rich
with rigorous debate, hooks encourages us to demand alternatives to
patriarchal, racist and homophobic culture, and to imagine a different
future.
2000 Topic:
"Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and The Environment"
Speaker: Sandra
Steingraber
Biography: Ecologist, poet, and cancer survivor,
Sandra
Steingraber, Ph. D. is an internationally recognized expert on the
environmental links to cancer. She received her doctorate in biology
from the University of Michigan and master's degree in English from
Illinois State University. She is the author of Post-Diagnosis, a
volume of poetry, and co-author of a work on ecology and human rights
in Africa, The Spoils of Famine. She has taught biology at Columbia
College, Chicago, held visiting fellowships at the University of
Illinois, Radcliffe/Harvard University, and Northeastern University,
and was recently appointed to serve on President Clinton's National
Action Plan on Breast Cancer, administered by the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services.
Steingraber's
highly acclaimed book, Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer
and the Environment, presents cancer as a human rights issue. It is the
first to bring together data on toxic releases--now finally made
available under right-to-know laws-- with newly released data form U.S.
cancer registries. In 1997, Steingraber was named a woman of the year
by Ms. Magazine and in 1998 received from the Jenifer Altman Foundation
the first annual Altman Award "for the inspiring and poetic use of
science to elucidate the causes of cancer."
A passionate and
sought-after public speaker, Steingraber has keynoted conferences on
human health and the environment throughout the United States and
Canada--including the First World Conference on Breast Cancer held at
Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario--and has been invited to
lecture at many university campuses, medical schools, and research
centers. She is recognized for her ability to serve as a two-way
translator between the cancer research community and the community of
women cancer activists.
1999 Topic:
"Beyond Fortress Europe: A Feminist Perspective on the 'New' European
Union"
Speaker: Rosi
Braidotti
Biography: Born in Italy, raised in Australia,
educated in
Paris, and now Professor of Women's Studies at the University of
Utrecht in the Netherlands, Rosi Braidotti works in the junctures of
transnationalism and feminism,
calling herself "a nomadic subject." She is General Co-Coordinator of
ATHENA, a Thematic Network on Higher Educaiton in Women's Studies, and
Vice Preseident of AOIFE, the Association of Institutions in Feminist
Education and Research in Europe. Both of these organizations are part
of the European Union's commissions on education and are building
coalitions, in both curricula and institutions, across Southern,
Northern, Eastern
and Western Europe. She is author of _Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and
Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory_ (Columbia, 1994),
_Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development: Towards a
Theoretical
Synthesis_ (Zed Books, 1994), _Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women
in Contemporary Philosophy_ (Routledge, 1991), and recent editor of
_Between Monsters, Goddesses, and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with
Science, Medicine and Cyberspace_ (Zed Books, 1996).
For a sampling
of Prof. dr. Braidotti's work in cyberfeminism, follow this link: www.let.uu.nl/womens_studies/rosi/braidot1.htm
1998 Topic:
"Feminism and Performance: Personal, Political, Professional
Perspectives on Interventionist Practice"
Speaker: Jill
Dolan
Biography: Jill Dolan is currently the Executive
Officer of
the Ph.D. program in Theatre at the Graduate Center, City University of
New York. She is also Executive Director of the Center for Gay and
Lesbian studies at CUNY and currently serves as President of the
Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Dr. Dolan identifies as a
Jewish lesbian feminist and is a prominent contemporary theatre
performance studies scholar. She is the author of "The Feminist
Spectator as Critic" (University of Michigan Press, 1991) and "Presence
and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, and Performance" (University
of Michigan Press,1993). She is currently working on a book called
"Producing Knowledges that Matter: Teaching Theatre Studies, Women's
Studies, Lesbian/Gay Studies as Cultural Intervention" (to be published
by Wesleyan University Press).
1997 Topic:
"Mapping the Color Line: Globalization and the Challenges for
Anti-Racist, Comparative Feminist Practice"
Speaker: Chandra
Talpade Mohanty
Biography: Chandra Talpade Mohanty is an
associate professor
of Women's Studies at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. and is a
member of the core faculty at the Union Institute in Cincinnati. She is
co-editor of
"Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Indiana University
Press, 1991). Her essay "Under Western Eyes" has become a classic in
both feminist and postcolonial studies and has been translated into
German, Dutch and Japanese. More recently, Mohanty co-edited "Feminist
Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures" (Routledge, 1997).
She is a member of the advisory board of Awareness, an activist
organization
working to empower the rural poor in Orissa, India, and is a member of
the Board of Directors of Grassroots Leadership in Charlotte, North
Carolina.
1996 Topic:
"The Fourth World Women's Conference from a Latin American Feminist
Perspective."
The United
Nations Fourth World Conference on Women along with the NGO
(nongovernmental organizations) Forum on Women '95 took place late last
summer. Women from around the world met to discuss the conditions of
their
lives and share strategies for improvement. According to Robin Morgan,
"the Platform for Action emerging from the conference is remarkable --
a document that even with its flaws is the strongest official statement
on
women internationally to date." Clearly, such international meetings
have enormous symbolic value. However, the practical ramifications seem
less clear. This program will explore the history of international
conferences
on women and the role such meetings have played in the development of
Latin American feminisms.
Speaker: Dr.
Marysa Navarro, Dartmouth College
Biography: Dr. Marysa Navarro is the Charles
Collis Professor
of History at Dartmouth College. Born in Spain, she did her
undergraduate work in Uruguay and then received her Ph.D. in History
from Columbia University. She is the author of "Evita" and "Los
Nacionalistas" and co-wrote "Eva Peron". Her scholarly work has been
widely anthologized, and she has written articles and reviews for a
wide variety of periodicals and academic journals
including "Signs, Journal of Latin American Studies, Hispanic American
Historical Review, American Historical Review, Women's Review of Books,
Nation, and Ms."
Professor
Navarro is currently chairing the Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Program at Dartmouth; she has also chaired Dartmouth's Women's Studies
Program. She serves as Project Director for the Ford Foundation/LASA
Committee on Women's Studies in the Americas and, as a board member,
contributes her expertise to various educational and human rights
groups including the Ms. Foundation for Women; the International
Women's Rights Project, Human Rights Watch; and Catholics for a Free
Choice. Professor Navarro is an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa.
Lecture title: "Women Meeting: From the
Conference Table to
the Street. "
1995 Topic:
Workplace Climates in the 1990's: "Women and Men Working Together."
What is sexual harassment all about? Some people
think it is
about sex, while many others believe it is about power. In reality,
sexual harassment can take on many forms and meanings. There have been
several recent books,
such as "Strange Justice" by Mayer and Ambrason, that examine the issue
in both academic settings and the workplace. A recent film,
"Disclosure", looks at sexual harassment from the perspective of a
female harasser and a
male victim. The purpose of this program is to educate our
undergraduate students, faculty, staff, and administrators about
current trends and issues in sexual harassment policy and enforcement
in both academic and
nonacademic settings.
Group Discussions led by Panelists:
Jerry Kendrick - Attorney for the Texas
Employment Commission
The Texas Employment Commission monitors employment conditions and
collects employment data for the federal government.
Gage E. Paine - Associate Dean of Students, The
University of
Texas at Austin
The University of Texas is a large research-oriented university with
over
50,000 undergraduates, graduate students, professors, administrators,
and
staff members.
Deborah Wood - Vice President of Student
Affairs/Dean of
Students Coe College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Coe College is a small, private liberal arts college with approximately
1350 students, most of whom are undergraduates. Coe also has a small
M.A.
program.
Albert Almanza - Apple Computers, Austin, Texas
A leader in high-tech field Apple is a large private employer and is
well-known for its progressive human resources policies.
Camille Campbell Harmon - President and CEO of
Campbell
Industries, Inc.
of Austin, Texas.
Established in 1960, Campbell Industries employs approximately 75
persons
who provide traffic control for construction projects, manufacture and
install traffic and commercial signs construct guardrails, and stripe
roads
and parking lots.
Lecture title: "From Anita & Clarence to Demi
&
Michael: Different Voices on Sexual
Harassement."
1994 Topic:
Women and Culture: Building Bridges That Don't Fall Down.
Speaker: Gloria
E. Anzaldua
Biography: Gloria E. Anzaldua is a Chicana
feminist poet,
fiction writer, and cultural theorist from the Rio Grande Valley of
south Texas; she now lives in Santa Cruz, California. She is the author
of Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and a bi-lingual children's
book Friends from the Other Side/Amigos del Otro Lado; editor of Making
Face, Making Soul/Haciendo caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by
Feminists of Color; and co-editor of This Bridge Called Me Back:
Writings by Radical Women of Color. In 1991 she received the California
Lesbian Rights Award
and National Endowment for the Arts Award for fiction. Anzaldua has
taught creative writing, Chicano Studies and Feminist Studies at the
University of Texas, San Francisco State University, Vermont College of
Norwich
University, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. She has
been Writer-In-Residence (The Loft, Minneapolis) and
Artist-In-Residence (Chicano Studies, Pomona College) as well as a
contributing editor of Sinister Wisdom since 1984.
Lecture title: "Nos/Otras: Making Multi-cultures
and
Alliances."
1992 Fall:
Women and Work
Speaker: Dr.
Mary Childers
Biography: Dr. Childers is the Director of the
Women's
Resource Center at Dartmouth College where she lectures in the Women's
Studies Program. She has taught at Oberlin College, Villanova
University, and as an Andrew
Mellon Professor at Vanderbuilt University.
Topic: "Issues Facing Women and Men At Work."
The larger community in which we all reside is in the midst of many
significant historical changes. We must recognize that there are a
number of gender issues that still
constitute a challenge for a changing society in which women and men
are expected to interact as equals. To make this historic transition
easier, we need to address some of the obstacles and the solutions to
those
obstacles that have been identified. One such obstacle identified by
Deborah Tannen in her book entitled You Just Don't Understand: Women
and Men in Conversation relates to gender differences in communication
or management styles that can cause misunderstandings. The areas of
misunderstanding that are salient for women include assessment of how
seriously women take their work and the inherent seriousness of the
work itself: methods of articulating and responding to disagreement;
misinterpretation of friendlessness, as for instance when one person
assumes another is being unprofessional, inappropriately feminine, etc;
misinterpretation of assertiveness; and judgement of manner. Women are
still primarily evaluated from the male perspective and to succeed in
the
workplace they have been expected to alter their communication and
management styles to fit that perception. If Dr. Tannen's research is
correct that male-female conversation is cross-cultural communication
what impact can this have on women and men in the workplace? We need to
look at patterns of interaction to understand the differences and at
the same time we must learn to give validity to both styles. Such
issues as effective mentoring for women faculty and students,
understanding the differences in male/female interaction in the
classroom and the integration of the study
of women into the curriculum becomes essential to the solution.
1993 Topic:
Men, Women, and Work: Times are Changing.
This symposium
will address issues regarding models for the workplace of the 1990s.
American society is changing and its citizens must be prepared for a
new structure. What will the workplace look like in the year 2,000?
What can you do now that will prepare you for the future? What will be
your impact upon the structure of American society? How will models of
work change on an international basis?
Speaker:
Dr. Juliet B. Schor
Biography: Dr. Schor is a Senior Lecturer on
Economics and
Director of Studies for
Women's Studies at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. . She
has been teaching at Harvard University since 1984. Dr. Juliet B. Schor
is the author of the best-selling book The Overworked American: The
Unexpected Decline of Leisure. Schor earned her BA from Wesleyan
University and holds a Ph. D. in economics from the University of
Massachusetts. Dr. Schor has
written, co-authored and edited a number of books and articles. She has
also been a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, an economic
columnist for Z magazine and founder and editor of South End Press, a
15 year old publishing house. Dr. Schor has spoken extensively on
issues of
time and work to business, labor, government and academic groups in the
U.S. and abroad. Her book, The Overworked American: The Unexpected
Decline of Leisure, has been reviewed in the New York Times, the Los
Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and
Fortune Magazine, among others, and has made the best-seller list of
The Times, Publisher's
Weekly, the Chicago Tribune, the Village Voice, and the Boston Globe.
It has also made the best books lists for the year in Business Week,
The New York Times, and the Boston Globe. Profiles on Dr. Schor, as
well as articles and columns on work spawned by her findings have
appeared in over a hundred publications and major news sources. Dr.
Schor has just begun work on a new book, which is a critical look at
American consumerism.
Topic: "Reflections on the Overworked American:
Transforming
Work and
Gender in the 1990s."
Workshops:
"Topic: Gender Influence on Educational and
Career Choices."
A panel presentation and discussion session for men and women students
on
issues you may face in planning a career and creating a future.
Workshop Leader: Marybeth Hallett from the
Department of
Counseling Psychology,
University of Texas, Austin, Texas. Hallett has authored articles and
made
numerous presentations on women's career development, dual-career
families,
and on women's self-identity. In addition, she has significant
experience
as an individual and group therapist for college women.
Topic: "Men, Feminism, and Social Change."
Workshop leader: Larry Cordle from the Austin
Men's Center,
Austin, Texas. Cordle is a
counselor with the Austin Men's Center, Associate Editor of Man
magazine,
and a member of President Clinton's Task Force, "Americans for Change."
Cordle will discuss issues of this changing society as they affect men.
Topic: "Dual Careers and Gender Dominated
Fields."
Workshop leader: Patricia Gabella is a process
engineer at
Motorola in Austin and is
interested in sharing her educational and career experiences with young
women and men who may be interested in careers in science or other
gender-dominated fields.
Topic: "Gender Segregation and Professional
Development:
Women In Saudi
Arabia."
The issue of women and work is especially sensitive in Saudi Arabia
where the ulama (religious scholars) govern in uneasy conjunction with
the al Saud ruling family. There are powerful militant Islamic
movements as well. At first blush, these seem to dictate against the
employment of women. Yet because the country is dependent upon the
importation of an enormous and expensive expatriate labor force to run
the economy, the issue assumes more complexity. (The question becomes.
"Is it better to depend upon foreigners or our own female population?")
By the year 2000, a higher proportion of Saudi Arabian women will have
university
degrees than American women. Through creative methods these women are
utilizing their skills and developing professional networks within the
parameters of a gender segregated society. It requires extraordinary
patience, innovation and the use of high technology.
Workshop leader: Dr. Gwenn Okruhlik is an
Assistant Professor
of Political Science, St.
Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota
Topic: "Free Trade and Opportunities for Women's
Work in
Mexico."
Workshop leader: Dr. Patricia A. Wilson is an
Associate
Professor, University of Texas' School of Architecture and Community
and Regional Planning, Austin, Texas. Dr. Wilson's main research topics
are maquiladoras, exports and local development of Mexico, the North
American Free Trade Agreement, U.S.-Mexico Border issues, Small
Business Development, and Economic Development Planning/Employment. Dr.
Wilson received her Ph. D. in City and Regional Planning from Cornell
University in 1975. She has worked as a consultant for the Foundation
for International Community Assistance (FINCA), U.S. AID, and as an
Economic Development Training Seminar Instructor for the government of
Puerto Rico and the United Nations Institute of Economic and Social
Planning or Latin America. Dr. Wilson is currently President of the
Sociedad Interamericana de Planificacion and recently authored Exports
and Local Development: Mexico's New Maquiladoras Dr. Wilson's main
research topics are maquiladoras, exports and local
development of Mexico, the North American Free Trade Agreement,
U.S.-Mexico Border issues, Small Business Development, and Economic
Development Planning/Employment. Dr. Wilson received her Ph. D. in City
and Regional Planning from Cornell University in 1975. She has worked
as a consultant for the Foundation for International Community
Assistance (FINCA), U.S.
AID, and as an Economic Development Training Seminar Instructor for the
government of Puerto Rico and the United Nations Institute of Economic
and Social Planning or Latin America. Dr. Wilson is currently President
of the Sociedad Interamericana de Planificacion and recently authored
Exports and Local Development: Mexico's New Maquiladoras.
1992 Spring
Topic: Women And Scholarship
Speaker:
Dr. Johnnella E. Butler
Biography:
Associate Professor and Chair of the American Ethnic Studies Department
at
the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington. Dr. Johnnella E.
Butler,
Chairperson of the American Ethnic Studies Department at the University
of
Washington, has written many articles on curriculum transformation and
offered workshops throughout the country on teaching Afro-American and
other American ethnic literatures in the English curriculum and on
incorporating women of color into Women's Studies and general core
courses.
Author of Black Studies: Pedagogy and Revolution, a Study of the
Teaching
of Afro-American Literature in the Liberal Arts, and co-author and
co-editor with John C. Walter of the recent Transforming the
Curriculum:
Ethnic Studies and Women's Studies, she also has co-directed three
major
grants from FIPSE and the Ford Foundation for the incorporation of
women
and people of color into the curriculum. Her next work will be
Marrowbone:
Ancestry and American Ethnic Literature. She has taught at Mount
Providence Junior College, Towson State College, and Smith College.
Title: "The Multiple Challenges of Feminism and
Multiculturalism."
"How do multiculturalism and feminism challenge one another? Can and do
they stand alone? What is the feminist classroom, the multicultural
classroom? What indeed are our goals for the liberal arts, our
students,
ourselves, as we deconstruct and reconstruct our content and pedagogy
and
explore the dynamics of the student/teacher, student/student, and
student/content relationships within the context of the matrix of race,
class, ethnicity, and gender?"
Workshop Leaders:
Dr. Lisa B. Reitzes
Biography: Assistant Professor of Art History at
Trinity
University, San
Antonio, Texas. Lisa B. Reitzes is an assistant professor of art
history at
Trinity University, where she teaches American art and the history of
architecture; she is also a member of the Women's Studies Advisory
Committee and the San Antonio Women's History Coalition. Her recent
scholarship has been on architectural education for American women in
the
early 20th century, and on New Deal patronage of public architecture.
She
is currently at work on a book entitled Great Agencies of Democracy:
American Public School Buildings, 1918-1945.
Topic: " Reclaiming and Redefining Women's
Studies and the
Fine Arts."
"This workshop will address the contributions of feminist scholarship
and
pedagogy to the fields of art, art history, music, and theatre, and
will
focus on various strategies for integrating women practitioners and
feminist perspectives into the classroom setting. We will also consider
how teaching in the fine arts offers particular challenges and
opportunities for a women's studies program."
Dr. Susan Sage Heinzelman
Biography: Professor of English at the University
of Texas,
Austin, Texas.
Dr. Susan Sage Heinzelman has taught in the English Department at the
University of Texas since 1977. From 1982-1986, she designed and
directed
the Legal Writing Programs in the School of Law. She has published
several
articles on the implications of the relationship between law and
literature
for women; an anthology of essays on women's representation in
contemporary law and literature, edited with Zipporah Wiseman (UT
School of
Law), will be published by Duke University Press in 1992 (Representing
Women: Feminism, Law and Literature). Professor Heinzelman is working
on a
book-length analysis of women's legal and literary narratives from the
mid-eighteenth century to the present, focusing on the ways in which
the
discourses of both law and literature, individually and together,
paradoxically subvert and strengthen culturally-constructed stereotypes
of
femininity and femaleness.
Topic: "Curriculum Integration"
"This workshop is designed to introduce
scholars to the varieties of feminist theory and practice. The workshop
will not confine itself to feminist literary theory but attempt to
situate
contemporary feminism into its larger cultural context. To this end, we
will explore issues that cut across disciplines, attending to the ways
in
which feminist theories create new fields of inquiry both within and
between traditional disciplines, such as history, literature, and law.
The
workshop will be structured, broadly, around the following categories:
gender theory; the essentialist/difference dilemma; canonicity; female
subjectivity; and feminist aesthetics. I will provide sample reading
lists
and course syllabi. There will be ample time for participants to
discuss
the implications of feminist interdisciplinary theory and practice to
their
own scholarly and pedagogical interests."
Dr. Karen Barad
Biography: Associate Professor of Physics at
Pomona College,
Claremont,
California. Dr. Karen Barad, Associate Professor of physics at Pomona
College, has written a number of articles on quark charge distributions
and
lattice gauge theories. She has also offered workshops throughout the
country on feminist science and objectivity. Barad received several
Ford
Foundation and NSF/RUI grants for her work in particle physics. Barad
is
the author of "Physics and Feminism: Meeting the Universe Halfway" for
the
book Making a Difference in the Natural Sciences, edited by B. Spanier
and
to be published in 1992.
Topic: "Women in the Sciences"
" This workshop will address issues of
attracting and retaining women and other under represented minority
students
in the sciences. Programs outside of the classroom as well as
pedagogical
styles inside the classroom will be discussed. We will also talk about
incorporating multicultural and feminist materials in established
science
courses, as well as the importance of offering courses which focus on
gender and science issues."
Dr. Susan Birrell
Biography: Dr. Susan Birrell is Chair of the
Women's Studies
Program and an Associate
Professor of Physical Education and Sport Studies at the University of
Iowa. She teaches courses in Feminist Theory and the Sociology of Women
in
Sport. Her most recent work uses a feminist cultural studies approach
to
investigate issues of gender relations and sexuality in sport. Recent
articles include "Double Fault: Renee Richards and the Construction and
Legitimation of Gender," "Is the Diamond Forever? Feminist
Transformations
of Sport," and "Women of Color, Critical Autobiography and Sport." She
is
the coeditor with Cheryl Cole of a forthcoming anthology entitled
Women,
Sport and Culture.
Topic: "Feminist Analyses of Sport"
"This workshop will consider various
strategies for arranging and maintaining a classroom that actively
works
against sexism, racism, classicism, ageism, and homophobia. Our
specific
focus will be on classes that focus on gender relations and sport,
e.g.,
"Feminist Analyses of Sport" or "Women in Sport," etc. The assumptions
of
any class of this sort is that sport is not at all a trivial activity
but a
social site where the struggle over gendered power relations is public
and
dramatic, and that we all have (different) levels of familiarity with
it.
Theoretically, we will engage in a discussion of the "Politics of
Authority" as they are manifested in the classroom in terms of the
authority of the instructor, the authority of the text, and the
authority
of experience. We will investigate how both the course content and the
classroom situation mirror significant feminist issues, such as
freedom,
and the politics of power. More practically, we will address issues in
the
selection of topics; the choice of course title; the selection of
materials
including articles, books, and films; and the strategies for classroom
arrangements, including rotating chair, show and tell sessions, and
journaling."
1991-92
Topic: Women in Their Own Words. This series of lectures and
performances will be about women as writers and performers of their own
narratives.
Speakers:
Dr. Carolyn See
Biography: Author and Book Reviewer for the Los
Angeles
Times, Professor of English at the University of California at Los
Angeles. Dr. Carolyn See has written for a number of publications and
of her many
books, the most recent are Greetings From Southern California (1988),
1-10
Shanghai Road (1986) and Lotus Land (1983). Dr. See was awarded the
Guggenheim Fellowship in1989-90 for fiction. She was also a recipient
of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the Sidney Hillman
Award, and the Bread and Roses Award given by the National Women's
Political
Caucus.
Topic: "Writing Toward a New American Literature"
"Anyone who looks at American literature right now can see the old
white
guys are out of business. Roth, Bellow, even Mailer, keep writing, but
nobody's buying. Women buy 65% of the books in this country, but men
almost
never (voluntarily) read books by women. This gender split, taken along
with militant blacks who won't read Southern white novelists, and the
new
waves of immigration of every possible race, and the fact that the Sun
belt
is growing in writers and in money, and the Eastern establishment is
beleaguered but still stubbornly in control even while they lose money,
point to an amazing moment in time where something is simultaneously
being
destroyed and born --- a new, a really new, American literature. As a
woman on the Pacific Shore, I have to look at that. What is "family"?
"Sex"? "Age"? "Love"? What are children, poverty, weapons? As a
novelist,
how can I, how do I take the regular novelists' stuff and arrange them
to
reflect this new reality? by Dr. Carolyn See.
Dr. Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Biography: Dr. Lim is a writer and poet. She is
a Professor
of English, Asian Studies
and Women's Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Dr.
Shirley Lim received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Brandeis University. She
is
the recipient of the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, the
Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the best first book of poems from the
British
Commonwealth, the Wien International Fellowship award, the Full bright
Scholarship award and the American Book Award. Dr. Lim is a prolific
writer and has given many workshops on creative writing. Of her many
books,
the most recent are Literature and Nation: Studies in Literature in
English
from the Philippines and Singapore, (1991), Modern Secrets: New and
Selected Poems (1989), and The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American
Women's
Anthology (1989).
Topic: "Aversion and Controversion: What to do
with Feminism
in Asian
American Women's Writing."
"Despite their increasing visibility and success, most Asian American
women
writers have not taken on the rhetoric and agenda of American feminism.
Ironically, Maxine Hong Kingston who has benefited most from feminist
literary critics' privileging of her book, The Woman Warrior, has taken
pains to distance herself from these supporters and their causes. In
fact,
The Woman Warrior can be reread from a non-feminist position, as a text
that denies and controverts feminism and reinscribes Confucianist
patriarchy......... Kingston's work represents a deep seated resistance
in
Asian American women writers to some of the paradigms in feminist
ideology.
.... This resistance must be placed against a history of Asian cultural
forms and values in reference to the construction of women, including
the
South Asian cultures of Hinduism and Islam and the East Asian cultures
of
Confucianism. ...... For Asian American women, I will argue, a critique
of
patriarchy is frequently not separate from a critique of their
ethnicity,
and an adoption of feminist paradigms entails a rejection of their
Asian
cultural identities. ..... But this overt denial of feminist ideology
runs
current with concealed anxieties of race identity that are already an
expression of feminist longing.
Performance:
Student Opera written under the direction of Dr. Nancy McClain.
Topic: "We were such good friends."
"No one could have been closer than we were, no one could have
shared what we shared, and even though time has separated us, our
friendships are of the kind that last a lifetime." (quote from the
bride's
aria.)
The Southwestern University Opera Theater of
1990-91 has
chosen to explore
contemporary women's issues using the multifaceted and powerful medium
of
an opera production. Using the guidelines of Opera America's "Create
and
Produce" program, the students will completely create and produce an
original opera. This includes the subject choice, writing of the
libretto,
music, set design, costumes, and all other components of an operatic
production. This will be the first time in the United States that the
"Create and Produce" program will be carried out at the University
level.
Participants in this year's Opera Theater include Lori Baur, Tanya
Bleke,
Susan Busch, Maryanne Navickas, Molly Tarkington, and Laura Lee Utz.
1990 Topic: "WOMEN'S REALITIES, WOMEN'S CHOICES"
Background:
Written and
performed by Dr. Janice McCullagh, Ms. Kathleen Juhl, and Ms. Mary
Visser.
"We have chosen
to illuminate a selective past content and progress report of women's
visual and poetic images representing women's issues. Too many women
have seen life as a choice of either/or s. Who are we, and why? We will
examine the choices and voices that have emerged and might point the
way to "right decisions" as we face questions of selfhood."
Program:
"Housing Shortage," by Naomi Replansky (1952),
"Autograph Book/Prophesy," by Ann Halley (1972),
Excerpt from " A Woman is Talking to Death": Have
you ever
held Hands with a Woman by Judy Grahn (1973),
"Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff," by Adrienne
Rich (1976),
"Marilyn Monroe" a poem by Judy Grahn, "Poem in
Which My Legs
Are Accepted," by Kathleen Fraser (1966),
"Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying," Lies,
Secrets, and
Silence by Adrienne Rich (1977),
Excerpt from "My Grandmother Washes Her Vessels,"
by F.
Chappell (1981),
Quote, by Jules Michelet (1860),
Excerpt from The Female Body in Western Culture,
by Julia
Kristeva (1977),
"I Like to Think of Harriet Tubman," by Susan
Griffin (1970),
"Housecleaning," by Nikki Giovanni,
"Stations", by Audre Lorde (1986),
"A Beautiful Life,"by Marion Welsh and Marie
Copp,
"The Woman in the" by Marge Piercy (1971),
"Fifty," by Alicia Ostricker (1989),
"One Life," by Adrienne Rich (1988),
"Grand Grand Mother is Returning," by Judy Grahn
(1982),
From the "Afterword," Of Woman Born, by Adrienne
Rich.
Speakers and Discussants:
Connie Arismendi is an artist and representative
for the
Center for Women
and Their Work, Inc. Ms. Arismendi has her M.F.A. from the School of
Art Institute in Chicago. She has exhibited her artwork nationally and
internationally. Her latest exhibition of Monoprints was at the Atelier
Museo Nacional de la Estampa in Mexico City.
Kathleen Juhl is an Associate Professor of
Theatre and
Communication in the Department of
Theater at Southwestern University. Ms. Kathleen Juhl has a special
interest in the oral performance of literature and has been performing
poetry and other non dramatic literature for many years. She has
performed professionally as an actress and director in the theater. Her
interest in
women's literature has led to collaboration with other artists and the
development of several one women shows.
Dr. Janice McCullagh is an Associate Professor of
Art
History at Baylor University. Dr. McCullagh specializes in 20th century
modern artists. She has a long time interest
and concern with the role of women in art and women's artistic
expression.
Dr. Kay Turner is the Associate Director of The
Texas Folk
life Resource
Center. Dr. Turner has a special interest in women's traditional art,
especially religious art. She has written extensively on the subject of
the home alter, its traditions and use by women.
Dr. Kathleen Stewart is an Assistant Professor of
Anthropology at the University of Texas. Dr.
Stewart's work has been with the gender derivation of words and the
subsequent impact upon a culture.
Moderator and producer: Mary Visser is an
Associate Professor
in the Department of Art and Director of The Women's Studies Program at
Southwestern University from 1989-1993. Ms.
Visser is an artist whose work deals with contemporary women's issues.
She has exhibited regionally and nationally in many juried
competitions. Her work can be found in many private and public
collections.
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