Past Events

September 14, 2010

Freeman Open House
2:00 p.m. 113 Dickinson Hall

“A Willfulness Archive”

September 23, 2010

4:30pm/Icahn 101
Sara Ahmed

“A Willfulness Archive”

“This paper will consider a feminist and queer politics as a politics of willfulness.  Willfulness has been defined as ‘asserting or disposed to assert one's own will against persuasion, instruction, or command; governed by will without regard to reason; determined to take one's own way; obstinately self-willed or perverse.’  Willfulness has also been thought of as a relation of part to whole: the willful part is the one who does not will the preservation of the whole.  In this paper I explore how the figure of the ‘radical lesbian feminist’ is deeply saturated by the charge of willfulness, as if her very being is an insistence of being, a refusal to give way, to give up, to give up her way.  My argument is simple: if we are charged with willfulness, then we can accept and mobilize this charge.  The paper also explores how feminist consciousness, as well as consciousness of racism, can be understood as willfulness, as being unwilling ‘to get over it.’”

Sara Ahmed is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London.  She was formerly based in Women’s Studies at Lancaster University.  Her publications include Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (1998); Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (2000); The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004); Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects and Others (2006); and The Promise of Happiness (2010).  She is currently completing a book called On Being Included:  Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, and has begun a new project on will and willfulness, from which her presentation will be drawn.  For a preview copy of the paper, please email Prof. Jill Dolan at jsdolan@Princeton.edu.

Sara Ahmed Event Poster

September 27, 2010

12:00 pm/ 210 Dickinson Hall

Lochlann Jain
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Stanford University

"How Can Cancer Make Sense?
Grappling with the Uncertainty of Cancer Production and Treatment in the U.S."

Lunch provided.  Please call 258-4710 or email cwkessel@princeton.edu for reservations.  Copies of the papers will be available outside 42 McCosh Hall one week before the workshop.

Co-sponsored by the Program in American Studies and the Department of Anthropology.

Lochlann Jain Event Poster

Event Paper

September 29, 2010

Elizabeth Abel's talk
12:00pm/McCosh Hall, Room 60

Elizabeth Abel is a Professor of English at the University of California, Berkley, author of Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis and the newly published Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow, as well as the co-editor of several renowned anthologies, including The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, Writing and Sexual Difference, and Female Subjects in Black and White.

Co-sponsored by English Department, Program in American Studies and Center for African American Studies.

Elizabeth Abel Poster

October 6

7:30 p.m./Rocky-Mathey Theater

 Creating 'Queer Comrades' in China

Queer Comrades is a Beijing-based show that raises awareness about LGBT identities and issues in China, a country where same-gender relationships and alternative gender representations are not openly discussed in the workplace or in general social settings. Xiao Gang Wei, the show's creator, will screen some of the talk show episodes and we will have a post screening conversation.

Co- sponsored by the Association of Chinese Students and Scholars, Department of East Asian Studies, Graduate School, LGBT Center, Mathey College, Queer Graduate Caucus

October 7, 2010

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones

Associate Professor of Theater at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of the newly published Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project.

12:00-1:00 p.m.
113 Dickinson Hall

Lunch will be provided and to rsvp, please e-mail Maria Papadakis at mpapadak@princeton.edu

Omi Osun Joni Lee Jones Poster

October 11, 2010

Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron
CNRS Research Director Emerita

Pensée et création au féminin : 
Leonora Carrington et Laure (Colette Peignot)

4:30 pm/Peter B. Lewis Gallery, Princeton University Art Museum

Co-sponsored by the Department of French and Italian, Department of Comparative Literature, and Art & Archeology.

October 11, 2010

 Too Gay! | Too Gay?

6 p.m./ Frist Multipurpose Room B

A panel with Professor Melissa Harris-Perry; Professor Jill Dolan; SHARE Director, Suraiya Baluch; and national teen suicide expert, Dr. Philip Rutter. Don't miss this thought provokingdiscussion. Dinner will be provided.

October 13, 2010

Valarie Kaur

Who Counts as "American"?

A Film Screening and Panel Discussion on Islamophobia
from 9/11 to the "Ground Zero Mosque" Controversy

Screening Valarie Kaur's documentary film 'Divided We Fall.'

7:00PM/Robertson Hall Room 001

The screening of selections from the film will be followed by a panel discussion with Valarie and Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell. Given the "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy and the recent outbreak of hate incidents against Sikhs, Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians, the panelists will examine some of the challenges faced by these minority communities on the 9th Anniversary of the September 11th attacks, along with the implications of these hate attacks on America's national identity. The event also commemorates the anniversary of the first person killed in post-9/11 anti-Muslim violence, which has resurged today.

Valarie Kaur Event Poster

October 13, 2010

Susan Strasser, University of Delaware
“Herbal Medicine and Herbal Commerce in a Developing Consumer Culture”

4:30p.m/ 211 Dickinson Hall

Until the mid-twentieth century, all American doctors prescribed herbs and chemicals extracted from them; many plants had long histories of effective use in clinical practice, though only a few were as powerful as the synthetics that eventually supplanted them.  Prescription coexisted with self-dosing and herbal commerce with backyard medicine; people used what would now be considered mainstream and alternative systems simultaneously. The trade in medicinal plants was based in a broader international commerce that sourced and traded a wide range of natural substances to manufacturers. As chemists isolated molecules from plant material and developed synthetic substitutes, the drug industry created standardized products; scientific progress was incorporated into a larger vision that celebrated the modernity of consumer products. Commercialized relationships to, and commodified perceptions of, nature and bodies were central to that vision.

Susan Strasser, Richards Professor of American History at the University of Delaware, is the author of Never Done: A History of American Housework, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market, and Waste and Want:  A Social History of Trash.  Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations, the German Historical Institute, the Harvard Business School, the American Council of Learned Societies, Radcliffe College’s Bunting Institute, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Cultures of Consumption Programme, Birkbeck College, University of London.
Co-sponsored by the Program in History of Science.

Susan Strasser Event Poster

October 13, 2010

Amy Jo Goddard

Body Freedom: Loving Your Body and Healing Shame
A workshop with Amy Jo Goddard

7:30-9pm,/Campus Club Dining Room

Our relationship to our body is essential to our sexuality. What gets in the way of our fully accepting our own bodies? How can we recognize and address our patterns so that we can be more comfortable in and accepting of our bodies? In this workshop, participants will get tangible tools for recognizing and addressing body shame and harmful patterns of body-centered inadequacy so that they can fully embrace their sexual identity and live more joyfully. Come engage in a thoughtful dialogue and create Body Freedom for yourself!

Co-sponsored by LeTS and the Women's Center.

**Delicious treats will be served!

October 20, 2010

Graduate Colloquium

12pm-1:30pm/113 Dickinson Hall

Faculty Research Round Table.

The session will take the form of a faculty panel, in which Princeton faculty members will present their current work in the field of Women and Gender Studies.  Our distinguished panelists will include:

Jill S. Dolan, Professor of English and Theater. Director, Program in the study of Women and Gender.
Gaetana Marrone-Puglia, Professor of French and Italian
Amy Borovoy, Associate Professor of East Asian Studies
Elizabeth Mitchell Armstrong, Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs  

Lunch will be served.

October 20, 2010

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Novelist

8pm/McCosh 50

The Writer as Two Selves: Reflections on the Private Act of Writing and the Public Act of Citizenship

Spencer Trask Lecture

Born in Nigeria, novelist Chimamanda Adichie is the author of Purple Hibiscus (2003), which was nominated for a Booker Prize, and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), which won the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction and revolves around the Biafran war of 1967-70.  She has recently published a collection of short stories titled The Thing around Your Neck (2009). She was a MacArthur fellow in 2008. She has been a visiting writer at Wesleyan University and at Princeton University, where she was a Hodder fellow.

This is part of Princeton University's Public Lecture Series.

October 21-22, 2010

Terry Galloway

October 21

7:00pm/ Wilson College’s Cabaret Theater

Terry Galloway performance and talk back.

Co-sponsored by the LGBT center.

Performance Poster

October 22

12-1pm/113Dickinson Hall

Terry Galloway, lunch talk & book signing.

The book is MEAN Little Deaf Queer.

Lunch Talk Poster

October 22-23, 2010

Elliot Borenstein
"Undoing Eros: Love and Sexuality in Russian Culture." 

A Graduate Student Conference

 Chancellor Greene Rotunda,  Room 105

 The graduate student conference, Undoing Eros: Love and Sexuality in Russian Culture will examine the different ways Russian writers, artists, and intellectuals have problematized, disassembled, and reinvented the terms of love and sexuality. Ranging from societal trends to the intimate experiences of the individual, the topics of discussion will include: the role of love and sex in state ideology, taboos, familial relationships, gender roles (and their subversion), and the body.

For more details please see:

Conference Program

Co-sponsored by Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

October 25, 2010

Graduate Colloquium

12pm-1:30/113 Dickinson Hall

Diana Budur

“Feminist Readings of Romani Values: Honor, Shame and the Phenomenology of Marimé among Brazilian Romani.”  

Lunch will be served.

October 25, 2010

October 27, 2010

Elizabeth Freeman
4:30pm/Aaron Burr 219
Historicizing Erotohistoriography

What models do we have for recording history in which erotics, bodies, and desires occupy a valuable place? Given recent assertions that "queer" opposes the politically programmatic, even the future itself, what about the past? Is there a historical consciousness with eroticism at the center? This talk will explore some historically specific models of "doing" what I call erotohistoriography, aiming for a discussion about the relationship between sexual pleasure and encounters with the past.

Co-sponsored by the LGBT center.

Elizabeth Freeman Event Poster

October 27, 2010

SOARS: story of a rape survivor
October 27
7:00 p.m.
Frist Campus Theatre

Free tickets available through Frist Campus Center Ticketing office. 

SOARS is a performance about one woman’s journey to reclaim her body, sexuality, spirituality, and self esteem after being sexually assaulted in college.  Performed by a diverse cast of women, SOARS uses photography, modern dance, spoken-word, and music to educate the public about sexual violence and to ease the shame, guilt, and self-blame that rape victims too often feel with a story of hope and healing. 

SOARS is sponsored by the Carl A. Fields Center, Center for African American Studies, Lewis Center for the Arts,  Program in American Studies, Program in Women and Gender Studies, SHARE and the Women’s Center.

November 5-7, 2010

Association of Literary Critics, Scholars and Writers Conference

Hosted by Professors Susan Wolfson and Michael Wood

Co-sponsored by the English Department.

Event Agenda

November 8, 2010

Lisa Diedrich

12:00 pm/Dickinson 210

Underlying Conditions: A Prehistory of AIDS, 1960-1980

Co-sponsored by the Program in American Studies

November 9, 2010

Graduate Colloquium

12:00-1:30pm
113 Dickinson Hall (Lunch and refreshments will be served)

Alix Lerner

"She Who Gave Him For His Country’: The Politics of Motherhood During the Civil War”
by Alix Lerner

Department of  History
 

Abstract:
The breakdown of ideological gender constraints in light of the hardship of the Civil War has long been explored by historians; the framework for such examination, however, has largely focused on women’s material contributions to the state – through the Sanitary Commission or the National Woman’s Loyal League, as nurses, spies, farm managers and arsenal workers.   This paper turns instead to women’s wartime requests – to their desires, calculations and pleas for assistance on a range of military issues. Predicated upon the sacrifice of sons to the Union cause, Northern mothers justified the worthiness of their appeals, becoming the central actors in a new wartime politics. The politics of motherhood, as I call it, was not confined to the household or the private sphere; it was not simply defined by the politicization of everyday life or by struggles over social power. Rather, it entailed the making of requests of the state, the petitioning for preferment or assistance from the President – under the banner of patriotic motherhood and in spite of women’s political disfranchisement. Women sought pardons, exemptions, commissions and appointments for their enlisted sons. When they felt that they had sacrificed enough to the Union cause – whether by the death of family members or by their own poverty – they petitioned Lincoln to discharge their boys. The politics of motherhood, as its characterization as such suggests, was not just ideological; it was teleological; these women employed the rhetoric of motherhood to insert themselves into a relationship with the government – a relationship through which they requested from the President the operations of state power.

November 10, 2010

Steering Committee on Undergraduate Women's Leadership Discussion

12:00-1:30 pm/Dickinson Hall 113

Event Poster

November 10, 2010

Marion Nestle and David Kessler, with Ruth Reichl

Panel on “The Politics of Food and Health Care”
Stafford Little Lecture Fund

4:30pm/ McCosh Hall, Room 50

Marion Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University. David Kessler, M.D. is Professor of Pediatrics and Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the School of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He served as Commissioner of the United States Food and Drug Administration from November 1990 until March 1997. Ruth Reichl, former editor-in-chief of Gourmet, is an American food writer and is a regular host with Leonard Lopate for a live monthly food show on WNYC radio in New York.

This is part of Princeton University's Public Lecture Series.

November 12, 2010

Wine and cheese event to introduce the artists who presented in our Program this year.

You can also view each artist's work.

3:30-4:30pm/113 Dickinson Hall

Group Exhibition

Marsha Goldberg
Priscilla Allgava
Meredeth Turshen
Nina Belfor
Katie Boyce

November 14, 2010

Down Syndrome Conference

Link for more details

Co-sponsored by the Princeton Disability Awareness.

November 15, 2010

State of the LGBTQ Movement
7:30 pm/ Dodds Auditorium, Robertson Hall (New Location!)

FFR LGBTQ Lecture Series
Two weeks after Election Day, hear from this panel of national leaders on the landscape and future frontiers for the LGBTQ Movement in America. Panelists include Marjorie Hill, the Executive Director of Gay Men's Health Crisis; Jody Huckaby, the Executive Director of Parents, Families and Friends of Gays and Lesbians (PFLAG); Mara Kiesling, the Executive Director of the National Center for Transgender Equality;  and Stacey Long, the Legislative Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

Sponsored by the ACLU of New Jersey, Carl A. Fields Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding, Fund for Reunion, Gender and Policy Network, HiTOPS, LGBT Center, Pride Alliance, Program in American Studies, Program in the Study of Women and Gender, Queer Graduate Caucus, Rider University Gay Straight Alliance, and Women's Center

Event Poster

November 16, 2010

Post Election Panel - Women in the 2008 Presidential and 2010 Midterm Elections

7:30pm/Robertson 002

Event Poster

November 17, 2010 

12:00 pm on Wednesday,
Robertson 012 (Lunch and refreshments will be served)

Women and Gender Graduate Works-in-Progress Colloquium

“’Movement’ in the life-narratives of women from post-Socialist countries”
by Izabella Agárdi,
PhD candidate
Utrecht University, The Netherlands


Abstract:
On July 4th, 1920, the Treaty of Trianon was signed in Versailles, France establishing Hungary’s new borders as a nation-state, its lands diminished by two-thirds of what was imperial Hungary.  This created large-scale dislocations for people previously part of a broader Hungarian political-cultural landscape, whose borders were now re-contoured.  My research focuses on the memories of women who were shortly born after this event.  These multiple voices serve to elaborate and, often, counter conventional (national) historical narratives.  In this presentation, I treat life-narratives of three Hungarian women from three distinct post-imperial nation-states (Romania, Serbia, Hungary).  In light of these accounts, my talk touches upon the tight interconnectedness of spatial and “temporal migration”. I argue that the structure and specific tropes of each life-narrative present a distinctive perspective of “home” and “movement” for their narrators. With the constant restructuring of borders following Trianon and the various ideologies which accompanied these restructurings (Interwar Era, WWII, State socialism, the transitions), the accounts, uttered in the present, reflect that “space” as a marker of continuity and change, has been (is) complemented by a movement in “time” to offer them coherence in thinking about their life’s journey.
Applying a theoretical framework of movement, I will analyze the stories in terms of thematic dislocation, such as forced and voluntary movement, and structural-formal narrative movements. These accounts, by their sheer basic structuring principle of movement and change, disrupt historical formulations that posit nation-states as static and confined cultural spaces. (e.g.: Narratives disrupt the conventional image of people locked within static post-Trianon geo-political bordered spaces, which many historians do not find problematic since borders become structuring principles, measuring sticks for writing nationalist histories.) Going further, as life stories are told in the present, they overwrite temporal markers of “historical eras”, making them elusive and visible constructs. (e.g.: Periodical marker “1939” does not hold.) Thus, “movement” here will be a concrete narrative theme as well as a theoretical trope, an angle of analytical vision, which exposes dynamisms of historical continuity and change (rupture), and the morphology these dynamisms take in the specific post-imperial region I investigate.  These accounts open up the category of movement and static-ness.  For some who did not leave their “place,” there was nevertheless a sense that place left them.  Ethnicity, class, religion become marked and then un-marked.  These shifts in consciousness of borders, how one moves ‘through’ them, or ‘under’ them, constantly destabilize previously understood realities about these categories generally perceived as stable that form subjectivities. Looking at life stories in terms of movement (which ties to creating imaginaries of “home”) thus helps us rethink ways in which subjects relate to communities and to larger political forces. 

The complete schedule of this semester’s Women and Gender Graduate Works-in-Progress Colloquium is available here: http://www.princeton.edu/~prowom/events/grad_colloquium.html

November 17, 2010

Party With Consent!

9-10 pm/CAMPUS CLUB

Cosponsored by SHARE (Sexual Harassment/Assault Advising, Resources, and Education) Peer Advisors and The Program in the Study of Women and Gender.

November 18, 2010

SHARE Event
4:30p.m. 101 McCormick Hall

November 21, 2010

8:00pm / Center for Jewish Life

Co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish Life.

November 22, 2010

7:30pm

Strella: A Woman's Way (Greece, 2009)

Wilson College, Black Box Theater

This film explores the relationship between ex convict George and transwoman Strella who meet, fall in love, and try to come to terms with their shared past. A lyrical and surprising meditation on love, gender and kinship.

Screening of the film followed by a Q and A with director Panos Koutras and Professor Gayle Salamon.

Event Poster

December 1, 2010

Project Brainwash: Why Reality TV is Bad for Women

Discussion with Jennifer L. Pozner, founder and executive director of Women In Media & News (WIMN)

7:00 PM/Robertson 001

Women and Gender Graduate Works-in-Progress Colloquium

December 2, 2010

12:00-1:30pm/ East Pyne 205 (Lunch and refreshments will be served)

Danielle Philips, Women’s and Gender Studies Department, Rutgers University-New Brunswick

“Global Formations of Race in Close Quarters: Irish and African American Domestic Workers in New York, 1880-1940”

Abstract: My dissertation, “Global Formations of Race in Close Quarters: Irish and African American Domestic Workers in New York, 1880-1940,” is an investigation of the experiences of southern African American women migrating to northern cities after emancipation and Irish immigrant women, who had already become heavily concentrated in domestic service positions in these same cities after migrating to the U.S. during the potato famines that devastated Ireland. Articulating the views of employers in New York, local periodicals and domestic service manuals routinely characterized new comers from the American South and from Ireland as either the “best” or “worst” domestic workers in the history of the United States.
Although Irish and African American women were clearly marginalized because of their racial, gender, and class status, they moved to the center of debates about the meanings of gender, “blackness,” “whiteness,”  “non-whiteness,” and the ideals of domesticity in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The abolition of slavery, Reconstruction, jobs created by industrialization that gave racial minorities opportunities to enter the wage labor force for the first time in U.S. history, and waves of immigration from Europe and the U.S. South posed a challenge to the status of white Americans. They had long controlled political and economic power denied to most Blacks and immigrants, yet prided themselves on offering at least some non-whites opportunities to access certain privileges. Yet as southern Black, immigrant and white women came into greater contact in the domestic sphere, the supposed “bedrock” of American civilization, it became a site of contention as groups negotiated modes of power and definitions of who was an “American.” My project examines how native-born white employers and Irish and African American domestic workers used personal interactions, letters to the editor, satirical images, and newspaper and journal articles as platforms to construct identities that would allow them to claim the material and ideological promises of the “American Dream”(including livable wages, secure employment, and safe housing).
Debates about race, gender, and the “domestic service problem” in New York City did not occur in isolation, of course. My archival research of periodicals published across the nation reveal that journalists and employers from the far West, including California and Colorado, southern states like Georgia and Virginia, and the Midwest such as Illinois and Missouri offered their opinions about what should be done to address the “problem” of Black and Irish women as well as that posed by female employers who were incapable of caring for their homes without such help. Harper’s Bazaar and other periodicals carried these discussions overseas, featuring transnational conversations between employers in the U.S. and London who exchanged tips about how to deal with the “belligerent” domestic workers who were “invading” their homes and providing “inadequate” service.
My dissertation also examines how periodicals that focused on Black women’s labor issues, such as The Chicago Defender and The Southern Workman, and how Black intellectuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Anna Julia Cooper, inserted their own theoretical contributions into this global debate about domestic service and the particular interaction between Irish and southern African American female laborers in the North.  But my project moves beyond discourses about domestic work and employers. It also addresses the lives of these Irish and African American laborers from their own perspectives. Using oral histories from the Ellis Island Historical Museum and interviews conducted as part of my dissertation research, I seek to provide a more comprehensive understanding of southern African American and Irish women’s lives and their experiences of domestic service and migration in the United States. The discovery of letters to the Brooklyn Eagle, the Amsterdam News, The Crisis and other newspapers allow me to explore as well the attitudes of domestic workers unfiltered through the haze of memory. My examination of these primary materials suggests that particular kinds of racialization circulated across the Atlantic, shaping understandings and expectations of domestic labor in both England and the United States.  Tracing how these racial constructs were formed in relation to global socioeconomic and political processes including the Industrial Revolution, Reconstruction, and England’s colonial relationship to Ireland and the U.S., my dissertation illuminates the migration of African American women at the turn of the century and explores identity formation during a period when what it meant to be an “American” was influx.
In addition, my dissertation explores the shift in racialization within domestic service. By the 1930s, Irish women began to transition into the white racial category and eventually gained access to jobs outside of domestic service. They also gained membership in labor unions, which protected their rights as white workers. Black women had a far more difficult time accessing such resources and remained relegated to the lower ranks of domestic service well into the late twentieth century.

The complete schedule of this semester’s Women and Gender Graduate Works-in-Progress Colloquium is available here: http://www.princeton.edu/~prowom/events/grad_colloquium.html

December 3, 2010

Virginia Scharff talk about her much-anticipated new book, “The Women Jefferson Loved.”

4:30pm/Dickinson 211

December 7, 2010

Patti Smith Singer, songwriter, poet, and visual artist

This is part of Princeton University's Public Lecture Series.

Women and Gender Graduate Works-in-Progress Colloquium

****cancelled****

December 8, 2010

12:00-1:30pm/Robertson 012(Lunch and refreshments will be served)

Matthew Birkhold, JD/PhD student, Columbia Law School/Princeton University, German department

“The Trial of the Marquise of O…: Redefining Gender and Enlightened Jurisprudence in Prussian Law and Literature”

Abstract: The late 18th century was a tumultuous period in Prussia as leading jurists attempted to codify competing laws into the Allgemeines Landrecht für die Preußische Staaten (ALR). Covering criminal, administrative, and public law in over 19,000 paragraphs, the ALR sought to completely reorder society in painstaking detail. As a result, the law touched on nearly every aspect of life and engaged the major jurisprudential, medical, and philosophical debates of the time. Of particular concern for the code’s drafters was the improvement of women’s social standing, especially through the de-stigmatization of extra-marital sex and pregnancy.
As a civil servant at the turn-of-the-century, German writer Heinrich von Kleist was intimately familiar with the ALR and the legal debates it engendered. Nevertheless, surprisingly little juristic attention has been afforded Kleist’s1808 novella, “Die Marquise von O…,” about the confounding circumstances surrounding a widow’s mysterious pregnancy. Several oddities in the text, however, have evaded a satisfying hermeneutic reading, including the parents’ opposing and often bewildering interactions with their daughter.
By reading Kleist’s novella in light of the contemporary juridical discourse, this paper offers new insight into the text. Understanding the ALR reveals a surprising inversion: although men are traditionally associated with the law and women the heart, here, the mother judges her daughter according to the most up-to-date version of the law. Whereas the mother corresponds to the ALR, the father acts according to the previous legal order. Through this opposition, this paper argues that Kleist stages a contest between competing legal norms in the 18th century: as the parents struggle to solve the riddle of the marquise’s pregnancy, the novella interrogates the ostensible superiority of the ALR, contemporary medico-legal notions about pregnancy, and the relation of women to the law.

December 10, 2011

Featuring Catherine Ettman '13 and Lizzie Borges '11 discussing their October 2010 attendance of:

12:00-1:30pm/113 Dickinson Hall (Lunch and refreshments will be served)

December 11, 2010

Women and Gender Graduate Works-in-Progress Colloquium

December 13, 2010

12:00-1:30pm/East Pyne 127(Lunch and refreshments will be served)

Emily Marshall, Department of Sociology and Office of Population Research, Princeton University.

Abstract: Public concern over below-replacement European fertility increased at the end of the twentieth century, as policymakers and mass media devoted increasing resources to discussion of this issue. The accounts of below-replacement birth rates that appear in public debates have important implications for the policy responses that are proposed and enacted, and also illuminate the complex of related issues at stake in these debates, including women’s and men’s roles at home and at work, immigration, and geopolitics. In this paper, I examine the framing of low fertility in mass media accounts, starting in the 1930s, when concern over low fertility was at least as high in much of Europe as it is now, and continuing to the present. I compare media coverage of low fertility in two countries, France and England, using topic modeling, an innovative method for content analysis of texts, to inductively identify themes that occur regularly in media coverage. The analysis examines change and
 continuity over time in the common themes found in media accounts of low fertility, as well as comparison across the two countries. These two countries are a fruitful site for comparison, because although their actual period birthrates were quite similar from 1950 to 2000, and although they experienced widespread public concern over low fertility before World War II, their public discourses and policy approaches diverged in the postwar period.

The complete schedule of this semester’s Women and Gender Graduate Works-in-Progress Colloquium is available here: http://www.princeton.edu/~prowom/events/grad_colloquium.html

January 26, 2011

BOOK CLUB DISCUSSION

All are welcomed

113 Dickinson Hall/12-1pm/Lunch is provided

Discussing:

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
By Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

Synopsis

“Women hold up half the sky”—Chinese proverb

With Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn as our guides, we undertake a journey through Africa and Asia to meet an extraordinary array of women struggling under profoundly dire circumstances—and an equally extraordinary group that have triumphed. Through their stories, Kristof and WuDunn help us see that the key to progress in our world lies in unleashing women's potential—and they make clear how each of us can help make that happen.

Fiercely moral, pragmatic, and inspirational, Half the Sky is essential reading for every global citizen

Biography

Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, are the first married couple to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism for their coverage of China as New York Times correspondents. They received the 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Lifetime Achievement and may other prizes including the George Polk and Overseas Press Club awards.
 
Mr. Kristof won a second Pulitzer in 2006, for “his graphic, deeply reported columns that, at personal risk, focused attention on genocide in Darfur.” He has also served as bureau chief in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo, and as associate managing editor.

Ms. WuDunn, now a business executive, worked at The New York Times, on both the business and news sides. She has been a foreign correspondent in Asia, a business editor and a television anchor. She is the first Asian-American to receive a Pulitzer Prize.

February 6, 2011

Post play panel:

 

Post play panel co-sponsored by the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and McCarter Theater.

February 6, 2011

Post play panel (see above for details)

February 8, 2011

Princeton University Library Resources Available for Research on Gender and Sexuality Topics

By Sandra Rosenstock, General and Humanities Reference Librarian

113 Dickinson Hall

12:00-1:30pm

Lunch will be provided

January 7-Februry 13, 2011

"The How and the Why"

A play* by Sarah Treem

Evolution and emotion collide in Sarah Treem’s thought-provoking and sharp new play about science, family, and survival of the fittest. On the eve of a prestigious conference, an up-and-coming evolutionary biologist wrestles for the truth with an established leader in the field. Featuring Tony and Oscar winner Mercedes Ruehl and Bess Rous, this intimate and keenly perceptive play explores the difficult choices women of every generation face.

*This is not free; for (paid) tickets contact the McCarter Theater http://www.mccarter.org

February 17, 2011

Same Sex Marriage in the United States: Where We Are as a Nation" A Briefing for Policymakers

4:30 - 6:00 p.m.
Robertson Hall, Bowl 016

Panelists:

Suzanne Goldberg is a Professor of Law, Director of the Gender and Sexuality Program, and Director of the Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic, is an expert in sexuality and gender law. Before joining the Columbia law faculty she ran the Women’s Rights Clinic at Rutgers Law School and served as a senior staff attorney at Lambda Legal Defense. Professor Goldberg was co-counsel in Lawrence v. Texas and Romer v. Evans and co-authored Strangers to the Law: Gay People on Trial.

Sean Eldridge is the Political Director for Freedom to Marry, an organization dedicated to nationwide marriage equality. He brings to the organization a range of corporate, nonprofit, and political experience. As a youth organizer for Obama for America, Sean served as one of the principal architects of the campaign's national student movement. Previously, he served on the Board of Directors of the Friends of GLBT Youth in Massachusetts and on the Board of Community Relations for the City of Toledo, Ohio. Sean worked for companies in Cambridge and Silicon Valley and studied at Deep Springs College, Brown, and Columbia University.

Father Joseph Palacios is a sociologist and Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University.  He is the author of The Catholic Social Imagination: Activism and the Just Society in Mexico and the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and numerous articles on faith-based organizing, religion and political culture, and community-based learning and research.  In 2009 he was a Fulbright Fellow at the Universidad de Santiago (Chile) where he taught and conducted research for a project entitled Chilifornia: Chile, Vanguard Latin Nation.  He is a member of the Board of Governors of the Human Rights Campaign and founder of Catholics United for Marriage Equality in Washington, DC.

Co-sponsored by Woodrow Wilson School Office of Public & External Affairs, the Gender and Policy Network, WWAC Student Initiated Projects.

For additional information, please go to http://wws.princeton.edu/event_rep/SameSexMarriagePanel02_17/

February 21, 2011

Modern America Workshop

February 21, 2011

12 noon-1:15pm
Dickinson Hall, Room 210

Lunch Provided

Prof. Jennifer Mittelstadt

"Stepping into It: Lessons Learned from Entering the History You are Writing"
Paper by Jennifer Mittelstadt (Associate Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University). Comment by Daniel T. Rodgers (Professor, Department of History, Princeton University)

This is a paper about the challenges of undertaking the history of the recent past. In this paper, Prof. Jennifer Mittelstadt explores the meaning of a persistent struggle she faced during her research on the social welfare implications of the all volunteer military in the United States: strong resistance among certain audiences to the notion that the military actually plays a social welfare function. Though scholars often cordon off the experiences of research from the written result (a book or article), Mittelstadt's research experiences have become central to how she is  writing the book. In this paper she describes the nature of the resistance she has faced, excavating a long, ongoing, and tendentious relationship between the military and social welfare in the volunteer era, and describes how the insights she gained have revised her understanding of the project.

Papers are distributed to participants and read in advance. They are available in the Graduate and Faculty Lounges in Dickinson Hall, or by email.
Questions? Email Jennifer D. Jones (jdjones@princeton.edu)

February 23, 2011

BOOK CLUB DISCUSSION

All are welcomed

113 Dickinson Hall/12-1pm/Lunch is provided

Discussing:

Thinking about Leadership

***The author, Nan Keohane, will be joining us for the discussion****

Synopsis

Leadership is essential to collective human endeavor, from setting and accomplishing goals for a neighborhood block association, to running a Fortune 500 company, to mobilizing the energies of a nation. Political philosophers have focused largely on how to prevent leaders from abusing their power, yet little attention has been paid to what it actually feels like to hold power, how leaders go about their work, and how they relate to the people they lead. In Thinking about Leadership, Nannerl Keohane draws on her experience as the first woman president of Duke University and former president of Wellesley College, as well as her expertise as a leading political theorist, to deepen our understanding of what leaders do, how and why they do it, and the pitfalls and challenges they face. Keohane engages readers in a series of questions that shed light on every facet of leadership. She considers the traits that make a good leader, including sound judgment, decisiveness, integrity, social skill, and intelligence; the role that gender plays in one's ability to attain and wield power; ethics and morality; the complex relationship between leaders and their followers; and the unique challenges of democratic leadership. Rich with lessons and insights from leaders and political thinkers down through the ages, including Aristotle, Queen Elizabeth I, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Nelson Mandela, Thinking about Leadership is a must-read for current and future leaders, and for anyone concerned about our prospects for good governance.

Biography

Nannerl O. Keohane is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Distinguished Visiting Professor of Public Affairs and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University and former president of Wellesley College and Duke University. She is the author of Higher Ground: Ethics and Leadership in the Modern University and Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton).

Dana Mastrovito Exhibit

January 5-February 28, 2011

9:00am-4:00pm, Monday-Friday

113 Dickinson Hall

February 28, 2011

Modern America Workshop

12 noon- 1:15pm
Dickinson Hall, Room 210

Lunch Provided

Prof. Micki McElya

"Remains of the Day: 9/11 and Arlington National Cemetery's War on Terror".
Paper by  Prof. Micki McElya's (Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Connecticut). Comment By Prof. Alison isenberg (Professor, Department of History, Princeton University)

Co-sponsored by the Department of History.

Executive Committee meeting
March 2, 2011
4:30pm
113 Dickinson Hall
Coffee and snacks will be available

***BY INVITATION ONLY***

A Conversation with Jane Golden and Jan Cohen-Cruz on Community Based Arts

March 3, 2011

4:30pm
Rocky Mathey Theater

Co-sponsored by The Princeton Atelier and the Community Based Learning Initiative.

FFR LGBTQ Spring Lecture
Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Desire
A Lecture by Lisa Diamond
Thursday, March 3, 7pm
Betts Auditorium, Architecture Building
Is love "blind" when it comes to gender? For women, it just might be. University of Utah Psychology Professor, Lisa Diamond’s research will offer a radical new understanding of the nature of female sexuality. She argues that for some women, love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups, and, most important, different love relationships.
Sponsored by the Fund for Reunion, LGBT Center, Office of Population Research, Program in American Studies, Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Psychology Department, and Women’s Center

Carousel (performance)

March 3-5, 2011

Frist Campus Theater

POST-MATINEE TALKBALK after the 2 pm show on March 5. Professors Jill Dolan and Stacy Wolf from the Theater Department will be discussing Carousel's message, its theatrical context, and its history.

2011 Meredith Miller Lecture given by
Judith Butler

March 10, 2011

4:30p.m. 101 McCormick Hall

6:00pm Wine & Cheese Reception, Prospect House (kindly rsvp if you are attending at mpapadak@princeton.edu)

"The Right to Appear: An Arendtian Perspective on the Politics of the Street"

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and the Co-director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984 on the French Reception of Hegel. Judith Butler is the author of Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (Routledge, 1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford University Press, 1997), Excitable Speech (Routledge, 1997), Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Columbia University Press, 2000), Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (2004); Undoing Gender (2004), Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging (with Gayatri Spivak in 2008), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), and Is Critique Secular? (co-written in 2009).  She is also active in gender and sexual politics and human rights, anti-war politics, and Jewish Voice for Peace. She is presently the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities.

MEREDITH MILLER MEMORIAL LECTURE

Dr. Jeffrey and Mrs. Nancy Miller endowed the Meredith Miller Lecture series in memory of their daughter, Meredith, Princeton class of 1993, who was murdered during a carjacking in Arlington, Virginia in 1994.  Although Meredith had not been a women’s studies student, her parents wanted to honor her commitment to the political, economic, and social concerns of women by establishing this lecture as a regular part of our program.  In this way, they chose to mark their daughter’s memory in a public and communal manner and to remember her, not only for her intelligence and her accomplishments as a student, but for her dedication to the ideals of feminism, as well as those of racial and religious freedom.  Meredith Miller was the salutatorian of her high school class and graduated from Princeton with honors, majoring in Politics.  After graduating from Princeton, she began a graduate degree at the George Washington School of Political Management and worked for “Emily’s List” in Washington.  She dedicated herself to her own community in Tampa, Florida and, as a volunteer, committed herself to feminist and Jewish issues.  At the time of her death, she was preparing for a career devoted to the concerns of women.  With this endowment, her parents and her brother have sought to perpetuate her memory and her ideals. 

Former Meredith Miller lecturers have been: Martha Minow (1997); Hazel Carby (1998); Linda Gordon (1999); Carol Gilligan (2000); Mary Gordon (2001); Barbara Ehrenreich (2002); Susan Estrich (2003); Gail Collins (2004); Ellen Gallagher (2005); Adrienne Rich (2006); Nan Keohane (2007); Toril Moi (2008); Blanche Wiesen Cook (2009); Judge Judith Kaye (2010)

March 20, 2011

Crimes of the Heart

2:00pm Perfromance

4:30pm Panel Discussion

Three eccentric sisters, a husband who’s been shot, and a lawyer with a vendetta: the recipe for a 30th birthday gone perfectly wrong. Family cruelty has never been more casually dealt than in Beth Henley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Southern Gothic screwball comedy. Touching, tragic, and daffy, Crimes of the Heart is a darkly comic family feud of epic proportions.

Event Flyer

Graduate Colloquium

March 25, 2011

12:00-1:30pm
113 Dickinson Hall (Lunch and refreshments will be served)

 “Virgin as Priest? Neglected Evidence in Byzantine Art”
    Matthew Milliner, Department of Art and Archeology, Princeton University

The Virgin of the Passion icon type, known in the West as “Our Lady of Perpetual Help,” has been called “perhaps the most popular religious icon of the twentieth century.”  In this image, Mary holds the infant Christ, and above her hover angels bearing the instruments of the Passion. While the image has been characterized as one that encourages women to be “passive nurturers,” attention to the original medieval context of this enormously popular icon shows it to be far more complex.
Rarely, if ever in the history of Byzantine texts is the Virgin Mary referred to as priest. The history of Byzantine art, however, tells a different story.  By examining the Eucharistic controversy that generated the first Virgin of the Passion on a Cypriot fresco in 1192, this paper posits that in this image, the Virgin is emulating the priestly act of consecration. Art historians, not fully accounting for the theological controversy that surrounds this image, have generally missed this connection.
When the first Virgin of the Passion is understood in this way, new light is shed upon later medieval frescoes of the Virgin of the Passion in the Byzantine world, images which, in several cases, are curiously proximate to the altar.  When the fresco was popularized as a portable icon in Crete in the fifteenth century, this connection seems to have been lost (though it endured in Cyprus).  But the icon’s original medieval meaning lingers. Hence, it may not be coincidence that Pope Pius IX, who famously referred to Mary as “Virgin Priest,” was also the Pope who charged the missionary order known as the Redemptorists with spreading this image worldwide, bestowing upon it the popularity it enjoys today.  

The Imprisonment of a Race

March 25, 2011
10:30am - 6:15 pm
McCosh Hall, Room 10
Princeton University

This one-day conference will focus on the prison system in a historical and present day context through the lens of race. Imprisonment of a Race will feature two panel discussions and a keynote conversation. The conference is free and open to the public. Registration is required - register now.

http://www.princeton.edu/africanamericanstudies/events/imprisonment/

The 2006 Census Bureau reported that African Americans comprised 41% of the nation’s 2 million prison and jail inmates. This number has been steadily increasing while the number of African Americans in college remains just a fraction of this.

The conference will provide the opportunity for members of the University community and surrounding communities affected by these issues to be a part of the solution. They will be able to join scholars and intellectuals such as our keynote speakers, Michelle Alexander (OSU) and Cornel West as they discuss the history, present, and future of the US prison system through the lens of race.

Co-sponsored by the Center for African American Studies and the Molecular Biology Department.

"Nero Artifex" will be performed at 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, March 24-25, in Richardson Auditorium, Alexander Hall on the Princeton University. The performances are free and open to the public with tickets provided at the Frist Center box office and at the door.

Princeton University students have collaborated with a professional director in the creation of a historically accurate and dramaturgically pungent opera about the notorious Roman Emperor Nero. "Nero Artifex" will be performed at 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, March 24-25, in Richardson Auditorium, Alexander Hall on the Princeton University. The performances are free and open to the public with tickets provided at the Frist Center box office and at the door.

Nero Augustus is one of the most blackened names in history: a madman rumored to have killed his mother and pregnant wife, castrated and married a slave boy and set fire to Rome so that the city’s flames might inspire his rooftop singing. Only recently have historians, in particular Princeton’s Edward Champlin, attempted to disentangle the mythological accounts and post-mortem propaganda and to reconstruct a more unbiased account of Nero’s reign.

It is these interpretations that three Princeton students have pursued in the opera Nero Artifex. Senior Theo Popov (composer), senior Veronica Shi (translator and historian) and class of 2010 graduate Mariah Min (librettist) have created a musical drama presenting the emperor as a well-meaning but incapable ruler whose artistic nature, combined with the selfish agendas of those around him, leads to a series of assassinations and eventually to the collapse of the imperial dynasty.

Director David Kellett vision blends the historical and the surreal, establishing Nero (Matthew Walsh) and his wife Poppaea (Lieve Hendren) as victims of the political machinations of their courtiers, from the Stoic Seneca (Kevin Zhu) and the sophisticated Petronius (Stephen Daniel) to the brutal Praetorian Prefect Tigellinus (Saumitra Sahi), the rebel Epicharis (Katie Dubbs) and the haunting spirit of Nero’s mother Agrippina (Erin Winker).

The first opera composed in Classical Latin since Stravinsky’s "Oedipus Rex, Nero Artifex" also pioneers the incorporation of ancient folklore into a Classical music framework.

“Many musicologists will tell you that in Rome music was a disregarded art form,” says Popov, “but after months of research in sites around Europe I realized how vibrant and cosmopolitan the art of sound was in the Latin Empire.” His score presents direct quotes of Greek and Roman hymns as well as indirect allusions to the instrumental and modal traditions of Classical antiquity.

"When Theo first approached me with the idea of directing his first opera, we spent many hours discussing the implications of his "Nero as victim" perspective and how to effectively present contradictions to an audience that may have preconceived notions of his life and times” says stage-director David Kellett. “Nero's pursuit of musical and dramatic recognition from the Roman public during his lifetime allows us to use elements of Greek and Roman theatre in telling significant parts of his story including such devices as theatrical masks, Greek choruses and pantomime. Working on a premiere with a living composer gives us the opportunity and flexibility to make changes where necessary in the rehearsal process bringing clarity in both music and drama!"

The creators of Nero Artifex are deeply grateful to Princeton faculty Edward Champlin, Steven Mackey, Paul Muldoon, and Peter Westergaard for the unwavering creative support.

For more information visit NeroOpera.NET.

English supertitles will be projected.

SWAN Day/Support Women Artists Now Day

March 26, 2011

SWAN is a new international holiday that celebrates women artists.  It is an annual event taking place on the last Saturday of March (Women’s History Month) and the surrounding weeks.  The official date of the Fourth International SWAN Day (and the Second Princeton SWAN Day) is Saturday, March 26, 2011.  Last year, Rockefeller College hosted the first Princeton SWAN Day events.  There were readings, a writing workshop by a female performance artist and writer, and an original play written and directed by Jackie Hedeman, who was then a junior. The organizers are looking for original work by women students to be produced in the Rocky/Mathey Theater on Saturday, March 26, 2011 as well as work by visual artists to be displayed in the Rocky Common Room.   If you are interested in participating at any level, please contact Karen Sisti ksisti@princeton.edu.

March 24-26, 2011

2011 Princeton Documentary Festival

Founded by Professor Ricardo Piglia and Argentine film director Andrés DiTella in 2001, the festival showcases the best documentary work from Latin America, Spain and Portugal, screening recent, award-winning documentary films and bringing film directors to campus to present their work and share their views about filmmaking. The series of activities (screenings, talks, workshops, panels, class discussions, academic panels, etc.) around the festival provide faculty and students from Princeton and nearby universities, and the public at large, a window into one of the most exciting and cutting-edge areas of artistic production in Latin America today.

This year the festival's main theme is the relationship between words and pictures, as a way of exploring the role of voice and writing in contemporary Spanish American and Brazilian documentary cinema. The participating films and invited directors are:

Invernadero by Gonzalo Castro (Argentina, 2010)
Cuchillo de palo by Renate Costa (Paraguay/Spain, 2010)
Viajo porque preciso, volto porque te amo by  Karim Aimouz and Marcelo Gomes (Brazil, 2009)
Pan Cinema Permanente by Carlos Nader (Brazil, 2007)

The films will be screened in the original language with English subtitles.

Co-sponsored by Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

March 28, 2011

7.30 pm in Peyton Hall (4 Ivy Lane) 145

Conversation between Dr. Asifa Quraishi, professor of law at University of Wisconsin & Rev. Dr. Alison Boden, Dean of the Office of Religious Life here at Princeton University on the topic of:

'Faith & Feminism: Does Religion Help or Hinder Gender Justice?'

Cosponsored by the Office of Religious Life.

BOOK CLUB DISCUSSION

March 30, 2011

All are welcomed

113 Dickinson Hall/12-1pm/Lunch is provided

Discussing:

Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth's Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa

by Mark Mathabane

Synopsis

Kaffir Boy (1984), one of the best books ever written about apartheid, became a bestseller everywhere but in South Africa, where it is banned. This absorbing sequel, about Mathabane's life in the U.S. since he arrived here at age 18 in 1978 on a tennis scholarship, describes his painful experiences at three colleges in one year and in American society generally. He recalls his editorship of a college paper, disenchantment with the Columbia School of Journalism, encounters with racism, threats to his life, living on a shoestring budget, speaking out against racism, his decisions to become a writer, live in North Carolina and marry a white woman, his success (with Oprah Winfrey's help) in bringing members of his family on a visit to America and in arranging for some of his siblings to remain here to study. Mathabane is a remarkable human being: responsible, committed, reasonable, level-headed, humane, understanding and empathetic. He tells a wonderful, inspiring story and he tells it well.

Biography

Mark Mathabane is the author of Kaffir Boy in America, Love in Black and White, and African Women: Three Generations.

March 30, 2011

3:30-4:20pm

Class of 1970 Theater

Whitman College

"Love in the Time of Greencards"

Event Flyer

Dance Performance

Explores the intertwined issues of gay marriage, sexuality, immigration, and citizenship.

( 8min. performance, followed by a half an hour conversation with the artist/choreographer)

Co-sponsored by Professors Anne Cheng and Hendrik Hartog, AMS 402 Class.

Gayatri Gopinath Lecture

March 31, 4:30pm
McCormick Hall 106

Visualizing Queer Genealogies:
A Conversation with Gayatri Gopinath and Chitra Ganesh

In this talk, Chitra Ganesh (a Brooklyn-based visual artist) and Gayatri Gopinath (a cultural critic who teaches at NYU) explore the ways in which queer diasporic visual artists have negotiated questions of migration, race, and sexuality in their work. Specifically they will address how these artists produce a sense of lineage or genealogy that queers both time and space.

Co-sponsored by The LGBT Center.

Graduate Colloquium

April 1, 2011

12:00-1:30pm
East Pyne 245 (Lunch and refreshments will be served)

 “Will the Real Virgin Please Stand Up?: Locating Agency in Virginity in Postcolonial India”
    Aswini Sivaraman, Department of English, New York University

The Virgin of the Passion icon type, known in the West as “Our Lady of Perpetual Help,” has been called “perhaps the most popular religious icon of the twentieth century.”  In this image, Mary holds the infant Christ, and above her hover angels bearing the instruments of the Passion. While the image has been characterized as one that encourages women to be “passive nurturers,” attention to the original medieval context of this enormously popular icon shows it to be far more complex.
Rarely, if ever in the history of Byzantine texts is the Virgin Mary referred to as priest. The history of Byzantine art, however, tells a different story.  By examining the Eucharistic controversy that generated the first Virgin of the Passion on a Cypriot fresco in 1192, this paper posits that in this image, the Virgin is emulating the priestly act of consecration. Art historians, not fully accounting for the theological controversy that surrounds this image, have generally missed this connection.
When the first Virgin of the Passion is understood in this way, new light is shed upon later medieval frescoes of the Virgin of the Passion in the Byzantine world, images which, in several cases, are curiously proximate to the altar.  When the fresco was popularized as a portable icon in Crete in the fifteenth century, this connection seems to have been lost (though it endured in Cyprus).  But the icon’s original medieval meaning lingers. Hence, it may not be coincidence that Pope Pius IX, who famously referred to Mary as “Virgin Priest,” was also the Pope who charged the missionary order known as the Redemptorists with spreading this image worldwide, bestowing upon it the popularity it enjoys today.  

April 4, 2011

Open House for Sophomores

Refreshments will be served

4:30pm, 113 Dickinson Hall

Graduate Colloquium

April 8, 2011

12:00-1:30pm
East Pyne 245 (Lunch and refreshments will be served)

    “The Egg and the Chicken: Childhood, Literature and Gender in Clarice Lispector”
    Alejandra Josiowicz, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Princeton University

Book Discussion: The Reality Shows by Karen Finley (The Feminist Press, March 2011)

Monday, April 11th

5:30pm, 106 McCormick

The book features the past decade of Karen’s work, as well as a foreword by Riot Grrl musician Kathleen Hanna and introduction by Ann Pellegrini.



The Reality Shows blazes through a dark and vivid era. These seething performance pieces are fully contextualized with introductions by the author and a time-line of cultural and political milestones since the beginning of the twenty-first century.

 Karen Finley's raw and transgressive performances have long provoked controversy and debate.  She has presented her visual art, performances and plays internationally. The author of many books including A Different Kind of Intimacy, George & Martha and Shock Treatment, she is a professor at the Tisch School of Art and Public Policy at New York University.

Co-sponsored by Labyrinth Books and the Lewis Center for the Arts Program in Theater.

April 14, 2011

Marriage Equality Event

Event Flyer

Beginning at 2pm

"Ceremony"

Frist, Multi-Purpose Room

"Reception"

Frist, South Lawn

Come join PEP for its first event, SPEAK NOW for Marriage Equality! On Thursday, April 14th, beginning at 2 pm, we will start with a ceremony featuring Princeton Ph.D. Candidate Josh Vandiver, Dean Paul B. Raushenbush of the Office of Religious Life, Activist and Lawyer Lavi Soloway, and a video testimonial by Representative Rush Holt. Dean Boden of the Office of Religious Life will officiate the ceremony. Our speakers will discuss marriage equality and why it matters.

Marriage equality is an important LGBT issue. Federal laws, such as DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) are denying American citizens basic rights, including the ability to get full legal protection and recognition of their families and relationships. Josh Vandiver and Henry Velandia are a Princeton community couple who are battling the injustice of DOMA. Though married in August of 2010, DOMA denies Josh the right as an American citizen to sponsor Henry's residency. In order to prevent Henry's deportation, his hearing is May 6, we will be asking attendees and passer-byers to sign their petition asking Homeland Security to stop all deportation proceedings until an official ruling on DOMA has been made.

We will then have a reception at 3 pm with further information on the state of marriage equality, and information about Henry Velandia and Josh Vandiver's petition (which you should sign!).  Even if you cannot make the ceremony, the reception is open! We will also have a delicious wedding cake from Olives and goody bags with awesome treats!

Co-sponsored by LGBT activism group, Princeton Equality Project (PEP)

April 15, 2011

"Take Back the Night"

Event Flyer

Frist's south lawn

7:30pm

Take Back the Night (TBTN) is an annual event held around the world in order to shatter the silence about sexual harassment, assault, relationship violence, and more through storytelling. TBTN at Princeton includes musical and dance performances, survivor accounts, and a candle-light vigil. We will also have free drinks and desserts, and we will be giving away umbrellas!

This year, Princeton's TBTN will feature keynote speaker Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry, and performances by Expressions, Patricia Kennedy, The Wildcats, and more! Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry is an Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies at Princeton. She is author of the award-winning book Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought and is a regular contributor to MSNBC and The Nation magazine. In addition, she is currently working on a new book entitled, Sister Citizen: A Text For Colored Girls Who've Considered Politics When Being Strong Wasn't Enough.

Please join us on Friday, April 15, 2011 at Take Back the Night on the Frist South Lawn- a place free from sexual assault and abuse. We invite you--survivors and supporters-- to become part of the solution, part of the end to sexual violence. Here is a place to take a stand, a place to break the silence. Here we can Take Back The Night.

Co-sponsored by SHARE (Sexual Harassment/Assault Advising Resources and Education)

April 21, 2011

Film Screening: Miss Representation

4:30pm & Midnight

Garden Theater

Event Flyer

Here’s a link to the Miss Representation website and trailer:  http://missrepresentation.org/welcome.html

Co-sponsored by the Women's Center.

April 22-23, 2011

(do not) Bend!

Photography, Gender and the Politics of Representation

Friday, April 22

4:00pm-7:30pm

Saturday, April 23

9:30am-6:00pm

Event Flyer

April 25, 2011

2 - 4pm

The State of Higher Education for LGBT People
A Presentation by Sue Rankin
Frist Campus Center, Multi Purpose Room B

With the acknowledgment that institutions differ in the level of attention and emphasis on issues of diversity and campus climate, it is safe to say that a campus climate offering equitable learning opportunities for all students, academic freedom for all faculty, and fairness in employment for all staff and administrators is one of the primary responsibilities of institutions of higher education. In an NGLTF report in 2003, Sue Rankin, nationally known researcher on LGBT Issues in Higher Education and Professor of Higher Education at Pennsylvania State University, concluded that LGBT students find that they must hide significant parts of their identity from peers and others, thereby isolating themselves socially or emotionally. The 2010 State of Higher Education for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People re-visits the campus climate for LGBT students, faculty, and staff.

March/April 2011

Current Exhibit

The oil paintings of Heather Barros will be on display in the lounge of our office, 113 Dickinson Hall.

Please come by and view the art Monday-Friday, 9:00 am-4:00 pm.

April 26, 2011

Suzanne Keller Memorial Event

Public Lecture

“Outsiders on the Inside?  Women in Power, 1971-2011”
                D. Michael Lindsay, Rice University

Betts Auditorium

4:30-6:00pm

Click here for more information

Sociologist Suzanne Keller, who conducted pioneering research on elite life and on community in America, and was the first woman to earn a tenured faculty position at Princeton University, died of a stroke Dec. 9 at Mercy Hospital in Miami. She was 83.

April 26, 2011

Critical Encounters

4:30-6:00pm
Friend Center, Room 004

Event Flyer

Co-sponsored by the English Department and the Center for African American Studies.

April 27, 2011

BOOK CLUB DISCUSSION

All are welcomed

113 Dickinson Hall/12-1pm/Lunch is provided

Discussing:

Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel
by author Jeannette Walls

Synopsis

"Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did." So begins the story of Lily Casey Smith, Jeannette Walls’s no-nonsense, resourceful, and spectacularly compelling grandmother. By age six, Lily was helping her father break horses. At fifteen, she left home to teach in a frontier town—riding five hundred miles on her pony, alone, to get to her job. She learned to drive a car and fly a plane. And, with her husband, Jim, she ran a vast ranch in Arizona. She raised two children, one of whom is Jeannette’s memorable mother, Rosemary Smith Walls, unforgettably portrayed in The Glass Castle.

Lily survived tornadoes, droughts, floods, the Great Depression, and the most heartbreaking personal tragedy. She bristled at prejudice of all kinds—against women, Native Americans, and anyone else who didn’t fit the mold. Rosemary Smith Walls always told Jeannette that she was like her grandmother, and in this true-life novel, Jeannette Walls channels that kindred spirit. Half Broke Horses is Laura Ingalls Wilder for adults, as riveting and dramatic as Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa or Beryl Markham’s West with the Night. Destined to become a classic, it will transfix readers everywhere.

Biography

For two decades, MSNBC.com contributor Jeannette Walls hid her hardscrabble past as the child of two rebellious noncomformists (who sometimes put painting before parenting). With her riveting memoir, The Glass Castle, Walls breaks her silence to reveal a triumphant story of strength, success, and unconditional love.

Graduate Colloquium

April 28, 2011

12:00-1:30pm
East Pyne 245 (Location to be confirmed)

(Lunch and refreshments will be served)

“The World Above the Water Line: From the 1960’s to New York City’s A.I.R. Gallery”
    Elizabeth Dastin, Department of Art History, CUNY Graduate Center

Graduate Colloquium

April 29, 2011

12:00-1:30pm
East Pyne 245 (Lunch and refreshments will be served)

“The Trial of the Marquise of O...: Redefining Gender and Enlightened Jurisprudence in Prussian Law and Literature
     Matthew Birkhold, Columbia Law School / Department of German, Princeton University

May 5, 2011

Senior Thesis Presentations

12:00-1:30pm

Tobias Rodriguez

Amelia Thomson-Deveaux

113 Dickinson Hall Lunch will be provided

May 6, 2011

Graduate Colloquium

12:00-1:30pm
East Pyne 245 (Lunch and refreshments will be served)

    “Masculinity in Caillebotte”
    Aaron Slodounik, Art History Program of The Graduate Center, City University of New York

May 25, 2011

BOOK CLUB DISCUSSION

All are welcomed

113 Dickinson Hall/12-1pm/Lunch is provided

Discussing:

Cinderella Ate My Daughter by author Peggy Orenstein

The acclaimed author of the groundbreaking bestseller Schoolgirls reveals the dark side of pink and pretty: the rise of the girlie-girl, she warns, is not that innocent.

Peggy Orenstein is an award-winning writer and speaker on issues affecting girls and women. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and her work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Vogue, Glamour, Mirabella, Details, Elle, Mother Jones, and The New Yorker. Her new book, Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, and Life in a Half- Changed World, was published by Doubleday in May 2000.

May 30, 2011 (Memorial Day)

Class Day

113 Dickinson Hall
2:00 - 3:00 p.m.          

May 31, 2011

Commencement

Preeti Singh Exhibit

July 4-August 30, 2011

9:00am-3:00pm, Monday-Friday

113 Dickinson Hall

Open House

September 13, 2011

2-3pm, Refreshments will be available

113 Dickinson Hall

Soul Night

Akua Naru & the DIGFLO Band

September 16, 2011

8:00pm

Cafe Vivian

Welcome Reception for Tey Meadow

Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and Sociology. LGBT-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows

September 21, 2011

4:30pm

Frist Campus Center, Room 246

Co-sponsored by the LGBT Center.

Banned Book Week

Read-in of LGBT Children’s books

September 27, 2011

7:00pm

Mathey College Common Room

Milk and cookies will be served

"And Tango Makes Three" – a story based on two male penguins bonding and parenting together at the Central Park Zoo, has been at the top of the national list of censorship challenges since it was published in 2005. An all-star cast of Princeton faculty, including Michael Cadden, Imani Perry, and William Gleason will be conducting a public reading of this book, to celebrate intellectual freedom during Banned Book Week.

Co-sponsored by HiTOPS, Lewis Center for the Arts, LGBT Center, Mathey College, and Princeton Public Library

Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing
A book talk with Lázaro Lima

October 6, 2011

Noon–1:30pm

Wilson College Private Dining Room

Lunch will be provided

Lázaro Lima recently edited Ambientes, an anthology, which presents a collective portrait of Latina/o LGBT experiences in the US and features stories by established authors and emerging voices. Come hear about this work, which crosses cultural and regional borders, reflects a vibrant and creative archive of queer Latino community, and redefines what constitutes normative notions of gay and lesbian cultural identity.

Lázaro Lima is the E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Chair in the Liberal Arts and professor of Latin American and Iberian Studies and American Studies. His publications include The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory; Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing (co-edited with Felice Picano); Trevor Young: The Aesthetics of Displacement; and the forthcoming Sonia Sotomayor: An American Life After Multiculturalism. Professor Lima's interdisciplinary work on inter-American literatures and cultural history has also appeared inAmerican Literary History, Revista Iberoamericana, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Hispanic Review and many other journals.

Co-sponsored by Acción Latina, the Chicano Caucus, Department of English, Carl A. Fields Center, Latino Heritage Month Planning Committee, Latino Princetonians Employee Resource Group, LGBT Center, Pride Alliance, Program in American Studies, Program in Latin American Studies, Program in Latino Studies, and Wilson College.

Sonia Sotomayor: An American Life After Multiculturalism

October 6, 2011

7:00pm

Betts Auditorium, Architecture Building

Based on his forthcoming biography of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, University of Richmond Professor, Lázaro Lima will explore how Sotomayor's life story is admired in American culture as a fulfillment of an exhausted "American dream." With critical questions of inclusion, social mobility, and assimilation, Lima creates a chronological narrative through the social, historical, and cultural happenings that surround the first Latina Supreme Court Justice.

Co-sponsored by Acción Latina, Carl A. Fields Center,  Center for Human Values, Chicano Caucus, Davis International Center, Latino Heritage Month Planning Committee, Latino Princetonians Employee Resource Group, LGBT Center, Pride Alliance, Program in American Studies, Program in Latin American Studies, Program in Latino Studies, Program in Law and Public Affairs, and Women's Center.

Debriefing Sessions for the International Internship Program

October 3 - 10

Times and Locations Vary

During these sessions, students who went abroad on the international internships this summer will be presenting power points about their amazing experiences.

Mara Kiesling Lecture

October 11, 2011

7:30pm

Frist Campus Center

Co-sponsored by Pride Alliance, LGBT Center, Frist Campus Center, Gender Policy Network, Princeton Equality Project, and Women's Center.

Gender, Sexuality and Religion Working Group Meeting

October 11, 2011

4:30pm

Dickinson Hall Room 113

PEDAGOGY DISCUSSION:

The meeting will open with a discussion about incorporating a focus on gender and sexuality in our teaching. This could include such issues as syllabus design, clarification of terms, and choice of material among other things. Please think about problems you have encountered in your teaching, questions you may have about how to approach teaching gender and sexuality, and any examples of things that worked or didn't work.

We will then segue into a discussion of classroom dynamics, in the second half, or more likely, in the last third of our hour and a half meeting. The two subjects may also intertwine in a more organic way than this as well, and the discussion might move back and forth between the two.

A Pre-Release Screening of Miss Representation by Jennifer Siebel Newsom

October 14, 2011

7:00 pm

Friend Center Room 101

When the new documentary film Miss Representation premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, audiences were riveted, and Oprah Winfrey acquired its broadcast rights. Writer/Director Jennifer Siebel Newsom interwove stories from teenage girls with provocative interviews from the likes of Dr. Condoleezza Rice, Lisa Ling, Nancy Pelosi, Katie Couric, Rachel Maddow, Rosario Dawson, Dr. Jackson Katz, Dr. Jean Kilbourne, and Gloria Steinem to give us an inside look at the media and its message. 

As the most persuasive and pervasive force of communication in our culture, media is educating yet another generation that a woman’s primary value lay in her youth, beauty and sexuality—and not in her capacity as a leader, making it difficult for women to obtain leadership positions and for girls to reach their full potential.

The film accumulates startling facts and statistics that leave audiences shaken, armed with a new perspective, and asking the question, “What can we do?”

Co-sponsored by the Department of English and Wilson College.

Graduate Colloquium: Trafficking of Women in Cambodia Today

October 18, 2011

12:00pm

Frist Campus Center Room 220

Lunch will be served

A conversation with The Rev. Dr. Alison L. Boden, Princeton Dean of Religious Life.

9/11 at the Ten-Year Mark: A Decade of Fear and Fantasy

Susan Faludi, Author and journalist

October 18, 2011

8:00 PM

McCosh 50

Recent commemorations have consigned 9/11 to history before we’ve grappled with the role that history—our own national history—played in the country’s psychological response to the attacks. Our reaction to 9/11 further damaged the country because it was based on historic and gender myths forged in the nation’s  earliest days and resurrected reflexively in the wake of the attacks to protect not the nation but its reigning national security fiction. Ten years later, America has yet to inspect that fiction, nor the earliest historic trauma that induced it.

Susan Faludi won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism in 1991 for an article about the human costs of  the leveraged buyout boom. She is the author of Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction, and Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. In her latest book, The Terror Dream, Faludi argues that the events surrounding 9/11 reawakened gender stereotypes that have had a deleterious effect upon domestic and foreign policy.

This is part of the Public Lectures Series.

Film Screening and Panel Discussion

A Walk to Beautiful

Oct 19, 2011

4:30 - 6:00PM

Bowl 1, Robertson Hall (lower level)

Film screening and panel discussion of the award-winning documentary "A Walk to Beautiful". The panel discussion will feature:
- Mary Olive Smith, Director, Producer and Cinematographer, "A Walk to Beautiful";
- Kate Grant *94, Executive Director, The Fistula Foundation;
- Moderator: Kristina Graff *05, Associate Director, Center for Health & Wellbeing, Princeton University.

A reception will follow in the Bernstein Gallery of Robertson Hall, beginning at 6pm.
A Walk to Beautiful: http://www.walktobeautiful.com/. This is an award-winning film about obstetric fistula, a devastating and preventable birth injury that occurs in settings where women have little or no access to emergency obstetric care.

Co-sponsored by the Global Health Program.

Let's Talk About Sex ... Trafficking

October 20, 2011

8:00PM - 11:00PM

Rocky-Mathey Theater

Light Refreshments will be served

Please join PAST: Princeton Against Sex Trafficking, and the GEMS Foundation in a screening of "Very Young Girls", a documentary that follows the lives of girls in New York City as they are seduced into the world of human trafficking.  The film documents the work of Girls Educational and Mentoring Services, a recovery center founded by Rachel Lloyd, a survivor of sexual exploitation herself.  We will be joined in a subsequent Q & A session by a GEMS staff member to discuss the movie and other pertinent questions you may have.

Anita Benarde Exhibit

September 7 - October 31, 2011

9:00am-3:00pm, Monday-Friday

113 Dickinson Hall

Exhibition Poster

PHAEDRA BACKWARDS

October 18 - November 6, 2011 **TICKETS ARE REQUIRED FOR THIS **

Free tickets are available for the October 22nd 3PM Performance

Discussion Following October 22, 3PM Performance

The mythic and the modern collide in a lyrical and fierce new adaptation of the classic Phaedra myth. In a triumphant return to McCarter, one of Ireland’s premier contemporary playwrights, Marina Carr (The Mai, Portia Coughlan), pens a seductive, poetic, and brave work that explores the inexorable pull of fate, the labyrinth of legacy, and the danger of desire.

For more information, including showtimes, please go to McCarter Theatre's website.

Queer Theory Reading Group

October 26, 2011

7:00pm to 9:00pm

Dickinson 113

Light Refreshments will be served

The Princeton Society of Fellows, The Program in the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the LGBT Center announce the launch of a new Queer Theory Reading Group for faculty and advanced graduate students.  
For our inaugural meeting, we will discuss The Queer Art of Failure, by Judith (“Jack”) Halberstam. Please read the book in advance of attendance. Tey Meadow will offer some preliminary steering comments. Future readings will be selected by participants at this meeting.  

GSS Book Club

October 26, 2011

12:00pm-1:00pm

113 Dickinson Hall

Lunch is provided

Jezebel's sexual lasciviousness, Mammy's devotion, and Sapphire's outspoken anger—these are among the most persistent stereotypes that black women encounter in contemporary American life. Hurtful and dishonest, such representations force African American women to navigate a virtual crooked room that shames them and shapes their experiences as citizens. Many respond by assuming a mantle of strength that may convince others, and even themselves, that they do not need help. But as a result, the unique political issues of black women are often ignored and marginalized.
In this groundbreaking book, Melissa V. Harris-Perry uses multiple methods of inquiry, including literary analysis, political theory, focus groups, surveys, and experimental research, to understand more deeply black women's political and emotional responses to pervasive negative race and gender images. Not a traditional political science work concerned with office-seeking, voting, or ideology, Sister Citizen instead explores how African American women understand themselves as citizens and what they expect from political organizing. Harris-Perry shows that the shared struggle to preserve an authentic self and secure recognition as a citizen links together black women in America, from the anonymous survivors of Hurricane Katrina to the current First Lady of the United States.

Graduate Colloquium

November 7, 2011

12:00-1:00pm

Frist Room 220 (Lunch and refreshments will be served)

 “The Voice of Oxum in Mulher no Espelho by Helena Parente Cunha”
 Vanessa Valdes, Spanish and Portuguese, CCNY

Presentation of Work in Progress

David Sayers, Near Eastern Studies

November 8, 2011

4:30pm

1879 Hall, Room 137

The Guiles of Women: Mekr-i Zenan Literature in the Ottoman Empire

A tradition of Ottoman prose literature, Mekr-i Zenan (literally: “the guiles of women”) was a short story genre devoted to what was perceived as the the inherently guileful nature of women. David is writing his PhD dissertation (in the Department of Near Eastern Studies) on Mekr-i Zenan texts ranging from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. In this presentation, he will briefly introduce these stories to you and get your input on how they may be best approached from a gender studies perspective.

Sponsored by the Gender, Sexuality and Religion Working Group.

Gayle Salamon Book Talk

November 10, 2011

4:30pm

Women's Center Conference Room, Frist 243

"Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality" - winner of the 2011 Lambda Literary Award

We believe we know our bodies intimately—that their material reality is certain and that this certainty leads to an epistemological truth about sex, gender, and identity. By exploring and giving equal weight to transgendered subjectivities, however, Professor Salamon upends these certainties. Considering questions of transgendered embodiment via phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and queer theory, Professor Salamon advances an alternative theory of normative and non-normative gender, proving the value and vitality of trans experience for thinking about embodiment.

Co-sponsored by the Department of English, the LGBT Center, and Women's Center.

2011 Danforth Lecture in Religion

November 10, 2011

4:30pm

"The Sexual Cleansing of the Buddhist Sangha" - Jose Ignacio Cabezon

Sponsored by the Department of Religion, and the Gender, Sexuality, and Religion Working Group.

Discussion with Jose Cabezone

November 11, 2011

12:00 - 1:30PM

1879 Hall, Religion Department Lounge

Lunch is provided

Sponsored by the Gender, Sexuality, and Religion Working Group.

An Evening with Jyoti Mhapsekar

November 14, 2011

4:30 - 7:00PM

302 Frist Campus Center

Born tο parents whο wеrе freedom fighters, Jyoti Mhapsekar wаѕ brought up іn аn environment whеrе political debates, discussions, protest rallies, аnd patriotic songs wеrе common. Hеr father wаѕ a political worker, аnd hеr mother wаѕ a school teacher whο hаd worked hard tο establish two secondary schools fοr thе poor іn Mumbai аnd аlѕο a teachers’ union іn thе early sixties. Jyoti attended both schools аnd wеnt οn tο examine zoology аnd thеn library science followed bу a post-graduation іn sociology. In 1975, Jyoti wаѕ one οf thе members οf a feminist group whο established ‘Stree Mukti Sanghatana’ (SMS) οr ‘Women’s Liberation Organisation’ – tο improve thе lives οf disadvantaged women. Today, SMS іѕ thе leading women’s organization іn Mumbai, аnd Jyoti іѕ recognized аѕ a leader іn thе women’s movement аnd аn accomplished playwright аnd songwriter. Shе hаѕ hеlреd establish several organizations including thе Committee οf Store Organization (CORO. Whеn SMS won a grant tο a rυn a nursery іn аn area whеrе rag-pickers lived, іt wаѕ thеn thаt Jyoti turned hеr attention tο thе plight οf women engaged іn rag-picking. In 2002, Jyoti quit hеr job аѕ a librarian аt thе Academy οf Architecture аnd hаѕ ѕіnсе devoted herself full-time tο realizing hеr vision. Establishing partnerships with municipal authorities and other groups to assist in garbage collection and improve the conditions of the dumps is an essential part of Jyoti's overall strategy. Jyoti is improving the lives of women who collect and sort garbage, demonstrating the value of their work to society, and changing the attitudes of the middle and upper classes toward them. Often called "ragpickers," these women are among the most disadvantaged groups in India. Jyoti's organization, Stree Mukti Sangathana (SMS), educates and trains these women and organizes them into labor cooperatives. Jyoti is also partnering with government and neighborhood groups to bring better wages and opportunities to the women ragpickers.

Co-sponsored by the South Asian Affinity Group, Maharashtra Foundation, The Women's Center.

Transgender and Faithful

November 14, 2011

6:00PM

Nassau Presbyterian Church, 61 Nassau Street

Come hear from an interfaith panel of transgender people about how they are able to nourish their spiritual expressions. Afterwards, there will be a dinner to connect LGBTQ friendly people of faith across the region and learn about nearby welcoming congregations. Dinner will be provided.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish Life, LGBT Center, Office of Religious Life, Princeton Presbyterians, Women's Center, and YES! Coalition.

HERS Bryn Mawr Summer Institute 2011 Talk

November 16, 2011

12:00 Noon - 1:00 PM

113 Dickinson Hall

Lunch will be provided

Please join us for a talk on the 2011 HERS (Higher Education Resource Services) Bryn Mawr Summer Institute, speakers include

The HERS Institute provides an intensive 12-day curriculum that prepares women faculty and administrators for institutional leadership roles. HERS Institute participants work with HERS Faculty and HERS Alumnae to develop professional development plans and networks to support their growth as leaders in higher education administration.

Program Flyer

Film Showing and Panel Discussion

No Woman, No Cry: http://www.everymothercounts.org/film. This film is about maternal health complications, spanning four countries including the U.S.

November 16, 2011

4:30pm - 6:00pm

Dodds Auditorium, Robertson Hall

The panel discussion will feature:
- Christy Turlington Burns, Director and Producer, "No Woman, No Cry"
- Elizabeth Armstrong, Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton University
- Anne Case, Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, Princeton University
- Moderator: Stephanie Hauck, PhD Candidate, Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University

In her gripping directorial debut, Christy Turlington Burns shares the powerful stories of at-risk pregnant women in four parts of the world, including a remote Maasai tribe in Tanzania, a slum of Bangladesh, a post-abortion care ward in Guatemala, and a prenatal clinic in the United States.

A public reception will follow the discussion in Shultz Dining Room

Co-sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, the Center for Health and Wellbeing, the Office of Population Research, the Gender and Policy Network, the Princeton Health Care Club, Princeton's chapter of the Foundation for International Medical Relief of Children, and the Global Health Program.

Graduate Colloquium

November 17, 2011

12:00-1:00pm

Scheide Caldwell (Lunch and refreshments will be served)

“Lorenza Bottner: Queer Self-Fashioning and 'Freedom' in Chile's Dictatorship”
Carl Fischer, Spanish and Portuguese, Princeton

Vivian Gornick
Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life

November 17, 2011

6:00pm

Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau Street, Princeton

Emma Goldman's is the story of a modern radical who took seriously the idea that inner liberation is the first business of social revolution. Her politics, from beginning to end, was based on resistance to that which thwarted the free development of the inner self. Please join us for an intimate portrait drawn by acclaimed author Vivian Gornick of a woman whose performance on the stage of history did what Tolstoy said a work of art should do: it made people love life more.

The Occupy Movement has given a sudden, deep resonance to Emma Goldman's legacy and to Gornick's portrait of another moment in American and European history of widespread agitation for greater equality.

The right to stay alive in one's senses, to enjoy freedom of thought and speech, to reject the arbitrary use of power -- these were key demands in the many public protest movements Emma Goldman helped mount. Anarchist par excellence, Goldman is one of the memorable political figures of our time, not only because of her gift for theory or analysis or even strategy, but because some extraordinary force of life in her burned on behalf of human integrity -- and she was able to make the thousands of people who, for decades on end, flocked to her lectures, feel intimately connected to the pain inherent in the abuse of that integrity. In time, she would become a a world-famous symbol for the spirit of resistance to the power of institutional authority over the lone individual.

Vivian Gornick is the author of, among other books, the acclaimed memoir Fierce Attachments and three essay collections: The End of the Novel of Love, Approaching Eye Level, and, most recently, The Men in My Life.

Free and open to the public.

International Trans Day of Remembrance

November 20, 2011

1:00PM

Princeton University Chapel

Please join us as we gather for a moving ceremony to remember and honor all those who have been killed as a result of anti-transgender bigotry, hatred, and violence.

Co-sponsored by Garden State Equality, Gender Rights Advocacy Association of New Jersey (GRAAN), HiTOPS, LGBT Center, Office of Religious Life, SHARE, and Women's Center.

(UN)HEARD: TRANSMASCULINE PEOPLE OF COLOR SPEAK!
AN INTERACTIVE PHOTO & AUDIO EXHIBIT

Exhibition runs November 7 - 22

9am-5pm

Carl A. Fields Center, 58 Prospect Avenue

This exhibit is an audio/visual ethnographic project about the lives and experiences of transmasculine people of color. By utilizing in-depth audio interviews and intimate portraits, (Un)heard seeks to move transmasculine of color identities and community from margin to center, and addresses issues of personal triumph, loss, desire, community, relationships, and discrimination.

Co-sponsored by the Fields Center, Center for African American Studies, LGBT Center, Radclyffe: the social club of record for the discriminating butch-trans-masculine chic woman supported by Fund for Reunion and Yale GALA, and Women's Center.

Graduate Colloquium

November 22, 2011

12:00-1:00pm

Frist Room 220 (Lunch and refreshments will be served)

“The Guiles of Women: Mekr-i-Zenan Literature in the Ottoman Empire”
David Sayers, Near Eastern Studies, Princeton

Historian's Eye: Matthew Frye Jacobsen Lecture

November 29, 2011

4:30pm

101 McCormick Hall

Co-sponsored by The Program in American Studies, the Center for African American Studies and the Department of History.

Queer Theory Reading Group

November 29, 2011

7:00pm to 9:00pm

Dickinson 113

Light Refreshments will be served

The Princeton Society of Fellows, The Program in the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the LGBT Center announce the launch of a new Queer Theory Reading Group for faculty and advanced graduate students.  This month, the group has selected Kevin Floyd's 2009 book, The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism (University of Minnesota Press). The text is available via amazon and online at: http://site.ebrary.com/lib/princeton/docDetail.action?docID=10353999.

For more information, contact Tey Meadow, Cotsen-LGBT Postdoctoral Fellow, Princeton Society of Fellows: tmeadow@princeton.edu.

GSS Book Club

November 30, 2011

12 Noon - 1PM

113 Dickinson Hall

Lunch is provided

"Kids become whole people when they're raised by whole people-the Vachons show us how." -Gloria Steinem

Chances are, you'd rather not forfeit your happy, rested life the moment you become a parent. As a mom, you may want to keep your career, but aren't sure how to balance it with housework and childcare. As a dad, you probably want to witness your child's milestones, but a demanding job may get in the way. And what about time for yourself (never mind your sex life)?
Marc and Amy Vachon were determined to beat this scenario when their first child was born. They vowed to sidestep the world's expectations of new parents and create a parenthood model that worked for them. Their strategy was to share everything-the good and the bad. They became peers in each area of parenthood: childcare, housework, and breadwinning. They also made time for themselves, and for each other. They shared the burdens so nobody was overwhelmed and the joys so neither missed out on the fun.
Drawing on Marc and Amy's experiences, as well as those of dozens of ESP couples, Equally Shared Parenting shows you how to create a balanced life that is rarely experienced by today's parents. It's not just about who vacuums and who does the dishes, or who brings in the paycheck and who tends to the kids. You'll learn how to look at every aspect of parenthood, money, careers, and your individual needs, so you can build a life that works for you both.

Luncheon Reception for Group Art Exhibition

November 30, 2011

1:00 - 2:00PM

113 Dickinson Hall

Please join us to meet the artists of this year's Group Exhibit: Dana Mastrovito, Heather Barros, Glynn Chesnut, Preeti Singh, and Anita Benarde.

The Second Wave: The Resurgence of AIDS Among Young Gay and Bi Men Today

November 30, 2011

7:30PM

Frist Campus Center, Multipurpose Room B

Think AIDS in America is a thing of the past? Today the rates of HIV/AIDS are increasing consistently among 13-29 year old men who have sex with men (MSM).
Thirty years ago, the CDC began reporting about previously healthy gay men who were diagnosed with PCP, a disease that had only been in patients with significantly impaired immune systems. The early disease was known as Gay Related Immune Disease and later renamed AIDS. Since then, more than half a million people in the U.S. infected with HIV have died with a devastating impact on the LGBT community. More than 1.1 million Americans are estimated to be living with the disease today, and MSM accounted for 61% of new cases in 2009.
An all-star panel will discuss the history and science of the epidemic, illuminating the ways AIDS is different today and why this issue is still so critical to our community today.

Panelists Include:

Sarit Golub
Dr. Golub is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY) and Co-Director of the Center for HIV/AIDS Educational Studies and Training (CHEST). She is also a member of the doctoral faculty in the Neuropsychology and Social-Personality subprograms at the CUNY Graduate Center. Dr. Golub’s research interests include the social-cognitive factors that impact clinical, psychological, and behavioral outcomes among individuals living with HIV and those at-risk for future infection. Currently, Dr. Golub is principal investigator of a grant funded by the Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) focusing on neurocognitive factors in the relationship between drug use and risky sex. She is co-investigator on two NIDA funded projects: a) the Young Men’s Health project (designed to reduce sexual and drug-related risk behaviors among young men who have sex with men) and b) Project PLUMS (designed to improve treatment adherence among methamphetamine-using HIV+ men). She is currently piloting a project exploring physical, behavioral, and affective outcomes associated with serosorting among HIV-positive individuals. Dr. Golub has experience in both HIV prevention and treatment, having worked at Mount Sinai Medical Center (Department of Community Medicine; AIDS Center), Dominican Sisters Family Health Services (in the South Bronx), the Teen RAP HIV Prevention program (on Staten Island) and Fenway Community Health (in Boston, Massachusetts). She has consulted for the NYS AIDS Institute, the Boston Public Health Commission, and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. At Hunter College, Dr. Golub also runs the Laboratory for Applied Social Psychology and Health. She has extensive training in biostatistics and multivariate data analysis, and serves as CHEST’s resident biostatistician.

Pablo Tebas
Dr. Pablo Tebas directs the adult AIDS Clinical Trials Unit (ACTU) of the University of Pennsylvania. His main research interests are the treatment of HIV infection and the study of the metabolic complications associated with HIV infection and its treatment. The introduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) has resulted in significant reductions in the morbidity and mortality associated with HIV infection. Unfortunately, the use of HAART has also been associated with significant adverse effects, including dyslipidemia and insulin resistance, bone disease and fat redistribution. Current studies are directed to understand better the mechanisms of these complications and prevent their development. Current outpatient and inpatient clinical activities center in the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania where he follows general ID and HIV infected patients.

Matthew Kavanagh
Matthew has worked with a wide variety of NGOs and social-movement organizations in the US, Latin America, and Southern Africa. He was previously the global campaigns director for the RESULTS Educational Fund and executive director of Global Justice, working on policy and organizing surrounding global health, trade, and development issues. His organizing work has ranged from water rights and Apartheid reparations campaigns in Johannesburg to racial justice work with the Boston Youth Organizing Project. Matthew has been interviewed in outlets ranging from the Washington Post to the BBC to Al Jazeera and writes regularly for the Huffington Post. He holds a BA in political science from Vassar College and a Masters in community organizing and education from Harvard University. Matt lives in DC and is an active member DC Fights Back.

Pernessa Seele
Pernessa C. Seele is Founder and CEO of The Balm In Gilead, Inc., a not-for-profit, non-governmental organization whose mission is to prevent diseases and to improve the health status of people of the African Diaspora by providing support to faith institutions in areas of program design, implementation and evaluation which strengthens their capacity to deliver programs and services that contribute to the elimination of health disparities.
As a pioneer in mobilizing and educating faith communities to become engaged in the fight against AIDS and other health disparities, Dr. Seele is known throughout the African Diaspora for her extraordinary vision and ability to create partnerships among faith leaders of various cultures and religious doctrines to become leaders in health promotion and disease prevention by providing comprehensive educational programs and offering compassionate support to all persons affected by life-threatening diseases.
Under Dr. Seele’s leadership, The Balm In Gilead has supported the establishment of over 12 national health offices within the national headquarters of Catholic, Protestant and Muslim communities in Africa and the United States; Furthermore, the Balm In Gilead has engaged nearly 10 million churchgoers throughout the United States in health awareness campaigns through the effective mobilization of African American churches to address public health issues. Among her many distinguished honors, she has been recognized by TIME 100 as one of the most influential persons in the world.

Co-sponsored by the Fund for Reunion/Princeton BTGALA and co-sponsored by the Center for Health and Wellbeing, Center for Human Values, Grand Health Challenge, LGBT Center, Pace Center, Princeton Equality Project, Program in American Studies, Program in the History of Science, Program in Law and Public Affairs, Student Global AIDS Campaign, and UAID.

Graduate Colloquium

December 1, 2011

12:00-1:00pm

Frist Room 220 (Lunch and refreshments will be served)

“Global Homophobia: A Cross-National Analysis of Attitudes toward Homosexuality”
Alex Davis, Sociology, Princeton

Round table discussion followed by a book signing

December 6, 2011

4:30PM

Lewis Library, Room 120

In Hands on the Freedom Plow, fifty-two women--northern and southern, young and old, urban and rural, black, white, and Latina--share their courageous personal stories of working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement.

Hands on the Freedom Plow is the winner of the 2010 Benjamin L. Hooks Institute National Book Award, 2011. It also received a nomination for the 42nd NAACP Image Awards in the category of Outstanding Literary Work - Non-Fiction, 2011

The roundtable participants will include 4 editors of the book: Martha Prescod Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Beety Garman Robinson and Dorothy M. Zellner, as well as Janet Moses, a contributing author. Professor Tera Hunter will act as the moderator. 

Co-sponsored by the Department of History and the Program in American Studies.

After the Arab Spring: The Emerging Revolution for LGBT Rights in the Middle East

December 6, 2011

4:30pm

Robertson Hall, Room 023

Hassan El Menyawi, former Assistant Professor at the United Nations University for Peace, will explore the new opportunities for LGBT rights resulting from the Arab spring's revolutionary call for human rights and good government.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Human Values, Fields Center, LGBT Center, and Muslim Life Program in the Office of Religious Life.

December 7

5:00 pm

Bowen Hall Auditorium Room 222

As part of the Princeton-Jumpstart Lecture Series on Technology Entrepreneurship, the Keller Center will host a panel of women entrepreneurs in the Bowen Hall Auditorium on Wednesday, December 7, 2011.  The panelists, at various stages in their careers, will share experiences on entrepreneurship. Moderated by Kef Kasdin ’85 of Battelle Ventures, the panelists include: Alexandra Landon ’12, Joy Marcus ’83, Cari Sommer and Mei Shibata. A reception will follow. Read more…

Graduate Colloquium

December 8, 2011

12:00-1:00pm

Scheide Caldwell (Lunch and refreshments will be served)

“Are young women's perceived health and sexual experiences related? Results from two cycles of the National Survey of Family Growth”
Kelli Hall, Office of Population Research, Princeton

Performance Studies Symposium

December 9, 2011

3:30pm - 6:00pm

December 10, 2011

9:00am - 5:30pm

Complete schedule of times/locations can be found here.

A two day symposium with panel discussions on critical race studies, dance, performance ethnography, popular culture, queer identity, reception, and visual culture.

Symposium is free and open to the public, however tickets are required. Performance tickets sold separately.

Funding for this event provided by the Lewis Center for the Arts, Performance Central, the David Gardner Fund, the Department of Anthropology, the Department of English, the Department of Music, and the Center for African American Studies.

Graduate Colloquium

December 13, 2011

12:00-1:00pm

Scheide Caldwell (Lunch and refreshments will be served)

“Death, Masculinity and the Nation in the writings of Rabindranath Tagore”
Debotri Dhar, Women and Gender Studies, Rutgers

Fannie Bialek (Brown University Department of Religion) Presentation of "Vulnerability Empty and Realized: Strategy, Susceptibility, and Submission"

December 13, 2011

4:30pm

1879 Hall, Room 137

Sponsored by the Gender, Sexuality, and Religion Working Group.

Equal Writes Re-Launch Party

December 13, 2011

6:00 - 7:300pm

Campus Club

Join Us for Equal Writes Re-Launch party, featuring Professor Jill Dolan, the director of the Program in Gender & Sexuality Studies and the author of the widely read blog, The Feminist Spectator. Professor Dolan will discuss the role blogging projects can play in building community and encouraging social engagement.

Equal Writes is a writing project that promotes dialogue about gender, sexuality, and social equality issues (including class, race, ability, and nationality).  The blog gives a space for young writers with a diverse range of perspectives on some of the most important issues students face here, and in the world at large.

Equal Writes is looking for new writers and readers, and we hope you will join us for this party in the living room of Campus Club, Tuesday December 13th in Campus Club from 6 – 7:30 p.m. Snacks will be provided (cupcakes from House of Cupcakes, cider from Small World, as well as vegan cupcakes and tea from Infini-T!)

Co-sponsored by Equal Writes and Princeton Equality Project

For more information, email equalwrites@gmail.com

GSS Book Club

December 14, 2011

12 Noon - 1PM

113 Dickinson Hall

Lunch is provided

Early one morning in February 2008, Oates drove her husband, Raymond Smith, to the Princeton Medical Center where he was admitted with pneumonia. There, he developed a virulent opportunistic infection and died just one week later. Suddenly and unexpectedly alone, Oates staggered through her days and nights trying desperately just to survive Smith's death and the terrifying loneliness that his death brought. In her typically probing fashion, Oates navigates her way through the choppy waters of widowhood, at first refusing to accept her new identity as a widow. She wonders if there is a perspective from which the widow's grief is sheer vanity, this pretense that one's loss is so very special that there has never been a loss quite like it. In the end, Oates finds meaning, much like many of Tolstoy's characters, in the small acts that make up and sustain ordinary life. When she finds an earring she thought she'd lost in a garbage can that raccoons have overturned, she reflects, "If I have lost the meaning of my life, and the love of my life, I might still find small treasured things amid the spilled and pilfered trash." At times overly self-conscious, Oates nevertheless shines a bright light in every corner in her soul-searing memoir of widowhood.

Group Art Exhibition

November 1, 2011 - December 22, 2011

9:00am-3:00pm, Monday-Friday

113 Dickinson Hall

Artists:

Dana Mastrovito: Digital art
Heather Barros: Oil Paintings
Glynn Chesnut: Craft
Preeti Singh: Oil Paintings
Anita Benarde: Handmade Paper and Monotype

Kamala Visweswaran

“Genocide/Genre: Rethinking the Archive of Sexual Violence”

January 17, 2012

12:00pm

219 Aaron Burr

Lunch is provided

“Genocide,” “genre,” and “gender” share a common linguistic root in the Latin “genus.” This talk explores the  ways in which gender marks the enunciation of genocide through the genres and aesthetics of visual production. If a Greek understanding of aesthetics encompassed something like an abstract science of feeling, and its negative form, anesthesia, initially referred to a defect of physical sensation, how is it that photographs meant to provide evidence of sexual violence and mass death, may not only numb, but arouse particular passions? In exploring the  mass media production and circulation of working photos of the “Gujarat genocide,” I  ask an unstable archive to yield to a feminist practice of the counter-visual.

Kamala Visweswaran is an anthropologist who works on feminist theory and ethnography, human rights, law, postcolonial theory,  social movements, ethnic and political conflict, transnational and diaspora studies, and comparative South Asia and Middle East studies. She has done field research in Delhi, Tamil Nadu, and Gujarat, India. She is an advisory board member of the journal Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, and a past editorial consultant for Feminist Studies. She is the author of Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minnesota,1994), Un/common Cultures (Duke, 2010), and editor of Perspectives on Modern South Asia (Blackwell, 2011), and Everyday Occupations: Gender, Violence and Democracy in South Asia and the Middle East (Pennsylvania, forthcoming). Her book, A Thousand Genocides Now: Gujarat in the Modern Imaginary of Violence, is under contract with Duke University Press.

Undergraduate and graduate students are invited to meet with Kamala later that day.

3:00-4:00pm

113 Dickinson Hall

Refreshments are provided

GSS Book Club

January 25, 2012

12 Noon - 1PM

113 Dickinson Hall

Lunch is provided

We all know Dorothea Lange’s iconic photos—the “Migrant Mother” holding her child, the gaunt men forlornly waiting in breadlines—but few know the arc of her extraordinary life. In this sweeping account, renowned historian Linda Gordon charts Lange’s journey from polio-ridden child to wife and mother, to San Francisco portrait photographer, to chronicler of the Great Depression and World War II. Gordon uses Lange’s life to anchor a moving social history of twentieth-century America, re-creating the bohemian world of San Francisco, the Dust Bowl, and the Japanese American internment camps. She explores Lange’s growing radicalization as she embraced the democratic power of the camera, and she examines Lange’s entire body of work, reproducing more than one hundred images, many of them previously unseen and some of them formerly suppressed. Lange reminds us that beauty can be found in unlikely places, and that to respond to injustice, we must first simply learn how to see it.

Queer Theory Reading Group

February 2

7:00pm to 9:00pm

Dickinson 113

Light Refreshments will be served

The Princeton Society of Fellows, The Program in the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the LGBT Center host the Queer Theory Reading Group for faculty and advanced graduate students.  This month, the group has selected Tim Dean's 2009 book, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflection on the Subculture of Barebacking (University of Chicago Press). The text is available via amazon and through the Princeton University Library online at: http://site.ebrary.com/lib/princeton/docDetail.action?docID=10317911.

Barebacking—when gay men deliberately abandon condoms and embrace unprotected sex—has incited a great deal of shock, outrage, anger, and even disgust, but very little contemplation. Purposely flying in the face of decades of safe-sex campaigning and HIV/AIDS awareness initiatives, barebacking is unquestionably radical behavior, behavior that most people would rather condemn than understand. Thus the time is ripe for Unlimited Intimacy, Tim Dean’s riveting investigation into barebacking and the distinctive subculture that has grown around it. Audacious and undeniably provocative, Dean’s profoundly reflective account is neither a manifesto nor an apology; instead, it is a searching analysis that tests the very limits of the study of sex in the twenty-first century. Dean’s extensive research into the subculture provides a tour of the scene’s bars, sex clubs, and Web sites; offers an explicit but sophisticated analysis of its pornography; and documents his own personal experiences in the culture. But ultimately, it is HIV that animates the controversy around barebacking, and Unlimited Intimacy explores how barebackers think about transmitting the virus—especially the idea that deliberately sharing it establishes a new network of kinship among the infected. According to Dean, intimacy makes us vulnerable, exposes us to emotional risk, and forces us to drop our psychological barriers. As a committed experiment in intimacy without limits—one that makes those metaphors of intimacy quite literal—barebacking thus says a great deal about how intimacy works.

For more information, contact Tey Meadow, Cotsen-LGBT Postdoctoral Fellow, Princeton Society of Fellows: tmeadow@princeton.edu.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Deadline February 3, 2012

NJ Women’s and Gender Studies Consortium
8th Annual Undergraduate Research Colloquium
Friday, April 13, 2012 hosted by

Undergraduate students are encouraged to submit written and/or creative work on any subject which uses a feminist lens of analysis: interdisciplinary work and work seeking to understand the intersections of gender, race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, and culture are particularly encouraged.

First Place Awards: $250
Honorable Mention Awards: $100

Students who have their papers selected will present at the Colloquium with other students from across the state. All presenters will receive $50 to help cover travel expenses.

The deadline to submit your written and/or creative work to Professor Jill Dolan in the Gender & Sexuality Studies Program is February 3, 2012. A maximum of three submissions will be submitted to NJW&GSC by February 10, 2012.

Deborah Gould - "Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight Against AIDS"

February 6, 2012

4:30pm

Robertson Hall, Bowl 1

Drawing from extensive research on the emergence, development, and decline of the direct action AIDS movent, ACT UP, this talk explores the emotional dimensions of contentious politics, especially the affective stimuli and blockages to political activism. Weaving together interviews with AIDS activists, analyses of documents from the period under study, and reflections on my time as a member of ACT UP, I address the following empirical puzzles: why did lesbians, gay men, and other sexual and gender outlaws become politically active during the earliest years of the AIDS crisis; why did thousands dramatically shift course and defiantly take to the streets in the late 1980s after over a decade of engagement in more routine interest group politics; and why did the movement decline in the early 1990s even as the AIDS epidemic continued unabated? Themes I consider include political imaginaries and their conditions of possibility; the psychic effects of oppression; ambivalence and activism; social movements as sites of collective world-making; the erotics, humor, and intensities of activism; solidarity and its fracturing; and political despair.

Deborah Gould is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Affiliated Faculty in the Departments of Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was involved in ACT UP for many years and is a founding member of the research/art/activism collaborative group, Feel Tank Chicago. Her scholarly interests are in contentious politics and political emotion. Her first book, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (University of Chicago Press, 2009), won the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Best Book Award from the American Sociological Association’s Political Sociology Section (2010), the Ruth Benedict Book Prize from the American Anthropological Association’s Association for Queer Anthropology (2010), and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies (2010).

Elizabeth Bernstein - "Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking, and the Politics of Freedom"

February 8, 2012

4:30pm

Robertson Hall, Bowl 1

Over the course of the last decade, mounting public and political attention has been directed toward the “traffic in women” as a devastating manifestation of global gendered inequalities. Media accounts have rehearsed similar stories of the abduction and sexual enslavement of women and girls, whose poverty and desperation render them amenable to easy victimization in first and third world cities. What accounts for the early twenty-first century resurgence of popular and political narratives of sexual slavery?  How has the idea of a global “traffic in women” arrisen out of a framework of prostitution as a “victimless crime,” which dominated in the 1960s and 1970s, and the movement for sex workers’ rights, which gained prominence in the 1980s and 1990s? While the story of prostitution’s moral and political transformation from a “necessary evil” into “the social evil” of the late 19th century has been amply recounted by numerous scholars, the recent reinvigoration of this discourse has yet to be adequately described. This talk examines the constellation of factors which lead to the (re)discovery of the “traffic in women” in the late 1990s, considering the ways in which burgeoning markets in sexual commerce have intertwined with evolving feminist, evangelical, and state interests.  I demonstrate how the alliances that have been brokered amongst these disparate sets of social actors have facilitated the circulation and entrenchment of the trafficking discourse across a wide swathe of cultural and political terrain.

Elizabeth Bernstein is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and Sociology at Barnard College, Columbia University.  During the 2011-2012 academic year, she is in residence as a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. She is the author of Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2007), which received the 2009 Norbert Elias Prize as well as two Distinguished Book Awards (2009 Sex and Gender; 2008 Sexualities) from the American Sociological Association. She is also co-editor of Regulating Sex: the Politics of Intimacy and Identity (New York: Routledge 2005). Her current book project, Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking, and the Politics of Freedom, explores the convergence of feminist, neoliberal, and evangelical Christian interests in the shaping of contemporary policies around the “traffic in women.”

A Conversation with Winnie Holzman - Musical Theater Symposium, Making Broadway Musicals: Artists and Scholars in Conversation

February 9, 2012

1:30 - 2:50pm

Taplin Auditorium, Fine Hall

Princeton alum Winnie Holzman, dramatist, screenwriter, actress, and librettist for the hit Broadway musical Wicked, will speak about her career. This conversation is the first of a series of talks with prominent artists currently working in the musical theater field.

Co-sponsored by Lewis Center for the Arts Music Theater Lab.

Film Screening - "Guerillas in our Midst"

February 10, 2012

8:00pm and 9:00pm

McCormick 101

In anticipation of a performance by The Guerilla Girls on February 16 (see more info below) we invite you to a film screening of the brief documentary “Guerrillas in Our Midst” about the Guerrilla Girls’ emergence in the 1980s and their message (http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c327.shtml).  

Co-sponsored by the Princeton University Art Museum Student Advisory Board

The Vagina Monologues

February 9 - 10, 2012, 8:00pm

February 11, 2012, 2:00pm and 7:00pm

Forbes Black Box

Ethel Brooks - "Out of Place: Visualities, Archival Practices and Romani Women's Holocaust Testimony"

February 13, 2012

4:30pm

Robertson Hall, Bowl 1

How can we see a visual archive of genocide?  What are the possibilities –and limits—of testimonial narratives and oral histories as they circulate visually?  Is there a possibility for a counter-narrative that tells us something new, on the one hand, and disrupts hegemonic representations of the Holocaust, on the other?  What is the visuality –of history and the future—of an archive?

Through the prism of Romani visuality and cultural production, I hope to engage the gendered production and consumption of, engagements with, and mappings of belonging. How can we understand everyday formations of political economy through visual practice, theories of seeing and other myriad engagements with the visual? How do we “see” Romani subjects, cultural production and the space of the city? By bringing the visual together in conversation with the everyday, I hope to think through connections between the production of visual culture –from film to photography to the mainstream media, to visual fantasies of everyday subjects and practices such as trailers and travelling, family formations, and productive practices. How do such visualities, cultural formations and everyday practices circulate locally, within national imaginaries and transnationally? This paper is part of a larger project that is attempting to excavate a Romani history of the city –one that both disrupts and reinscribes difference, and complicates the neat story of modernity.  Through an attention to testimony and the witness’s refusals, disputes, contention with interviewers expectations and questions, how do we –as viewers, and perhaps consumers, of testimony— take up the claims, the quest for recognition and the potential for disruption of our accepted understandings that are the challenges of the production and circulation of an archive?

Ethel Brooks is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Women's and Gender Studies and Sociology at Rutgers University. She is currently the 2011-2012 US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of the Arts London. Brooks is the author of Unraveling the Garment Industry: Transnational Organizing and Women’s Work (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), which received the award for Outstanding Book for 2010 from the Society for the Study of Social Problems. She is co-editor of the special issue of WSQ on "Activisms,” (2007) and editor of the forthcoming “Comparative Symposium on Romani Feminisms” for Signs. She has contributed articles to a number of academic journals, including Nevi Sara Kali and International Working Class History, as well as book chapters in Sweatshop USA: The American Sweatshop in Historical and Global Perspective (2003) and Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas (2007).

She is currently working on two book projects: Disrupting the Nation: Land Tenure, Productivity and the Possibilities of a Romani Post-Coloniality, and (Mis)Recognitions and (Un)Acknowledgements: Visualities, Productivities and the Contours of Romani Feminism, both of which focus on political economy, gender and racial formations, cultural production and the increasing violence against Romani (Gypsy) citizens worldwide. Her op-eds on the treatment of Romani people in various European countries have recently appeared in the UK’s Guardian.

A Conversation with Emily Mann and Sam Buntrock

February 13, 2012

6:00pm

Class of 1972 Private Dining Room, Whitman College

Join two Tony Award-nominated directors to discuss the art of directing and McCarter Theatre's fresh, innovative vision for Tom Stoppard's comic masterpiece, Travesties.

Sponsored by Whitman College.

Emily Dickinson Song Performance

February 14, 2012

4:30pm-6pm

Taplin Auditorium

Co-sponsored by the English and Music Departments.

Feminist Political Theory Speaker Series

February 15, 2012

12 Noon - 1:20pm

Marx Hall

Lunch is provided

Linda Zerilli, University of Chicago, with comments from Nannerl Keohane.

Papers will be circulated in advance.  To RSVP and request a copy of a paper, please email Julie Rose (julier@princeton.edu).

For more information about the series, the speakers, and the papers, as they become available, please visit: http://www.princeton.edu/~julier/FPTSS.html

The Speaker Series is co-chaired by Julie Rose and Amy Hondo, and is made possible thanks to the generous support of the University Center for Human Values and the Ira W. DeCamp Bioethics Seminar Series.

Guerilla Girls in our Midst

February 16, 2012

7:00pm

McCosh 50

A reception will follow at the Art Museum, and will last until 10:00pm

Two representatives from the Guerrilla Girls, an acclaimed organization of anonymous female artists that fights sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination in politics, art, and pop culture, will perform here at Princeton.  (To find out more about their work, visit www.guerrillagirls.com.)  In their multi-media presentation, the Girls will discuss their activism, and expose the social truths of the art world today through facts and humor.  It will be fun, dynamic, and truly thought-provoking! 

Co-sponsored by Princeton University Art Museum Student Advisory Board

17th Annual Black Solidarity Conference at Yale University

February 16-19, 2012

Times and Locations can be found here

This year the Black Student Union will be comprised of panels and discussions that will look specifically at perceptions of sexuality as unifiers and dividers of the black community. The events will culminate in a Keynote Address by Dr. Angela Davis. For further information please go to www.yale.edu/bsc.

Queering the Air: A Forum on Addressing Heteronormativity in the Classroom

February 21, 2012

4:30pm

Frist Campus Center, Room 302

From foreign language courses to science labs, there are moments in academia where the experiences of LGBTQ folk are marginalized and/or rendered invisible. This event is a public forum to discuss experiences of heteronormativity in the classroom and begin to brainstorm ways to address it on Princeton's campus. Student and faculty panelists will speak to the issue of heteronormative pedagogy from their own perspectives as a way to kick off the general conversation.

Co-Sponsored by the LGBT Center, LGBT Task Force and Pride Alliance

Regina Kunzel - "In Treatment: Psychiatry and the Archive of Modern Sexuality"

February 23, 2012

4:30pm

211 Dickinson Hall

Part of a larger book project on the role of psychiatric scrutiny and stigma in the making of modern sexuality, this talk focuses on the archive of St. Elizabeths Hospital, the federal hospital for the mentally ill in Washington, DC.  It explore the encounters of sexual- and gender-variant people with psychiatry and psychoanalysis in mid-twentieth-century America, and it considers the status of those records as an archive – its logics, its silences, the longings it elicits – to reflect on its challenges to queer history.

Regina Kunzel is the Paul R. Frenzel Chair in Liberal Arts, Professor of History and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, and Chair of the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota.  Before coming to the University of Minnesota, Kunzel was the Fairleigh Dickinson Professor of History at Williams College.  Kunzel received her B.A. from Stanford University and her Ph.D. in History from Yale University. Kunzel writes and teaches on histories of gender and sexuality in the twentieth-century U.S.  Her book, Criminal Intimacy: Sex in Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (University of Chicago Press, 2008) was awarded the American Historical Association’s John Boswell Prize, the Modern Language Association’s Alan Bray Memorial Book Award, the Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality Bonnie and Vern L. Bullough Award, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Studies, and was a finalist for the American Studies Association’s John Hope Franklin Prize.  Kunzel is also the author of Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890 to 1945 (Yale University Press, 1993), and articles on the history of prison sexual culture, single pregnancy, and gender and professionalization.  Her work has been published in The American Historical Review, GLQ, Radical History Review, Journal of Social History, and in several edited volumes.  Kunzel co-edited a special issue of Radical History Review, “The Queer Issue: New Visions of America's Lesbian and Gay Past,” No. 62 (Spring 1995).  She serves as co-editor of the journal Gender & History.  Kunzel has received grants and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Social Science Research Council.  

Marjorie Grigoris Art Exhibition

January 4 - February 29, 2012

9:00am-3:00pm, Monday-Friday

113 Dickinson Hall

Dirty Pink

Oil Paintings, Mixed Media

My abstract drawings and paintings are the visual record of exploration, criticism, trial and error, and discovery. The process is both determined and spontaneous; it includes critical reworking and accident as I look for something I haven’t seen before. There is little pre-planning so the characteristics of the media are in large part responsible for the “look” of each piece. Both drawings and paintings are often built around lines in a relatively shallow space, but then worked over, layered. I put disparate elements in the same pictorial space in order to find ways of making them co-exist or talk to each other. I’m interested in unpredictability, randomness, the absurd, the imperfect, the fluidity of our experience.

“In any kind of creative work a point is reached where our power of free choice comes to an end. The work assumes a life of its own, which offers its creator only the alternative of accepting or rejecting it. A mysterious “presence” reveals itself, which gives the work a living personality of its own.”
- Anton Ehrenzweig

GSS Book Club

February 29, 2012

12 Noon - 1PM

113 Dickinson Hall

Lunch is provided

---AUTHOR, STACY WOLF, WILL BE HERE---

From Adelaide in "Guys and Dolls" to Nina in "In the Heights" and Elphaba in "Wicked," female characters in Broadway musicals have belted and crooned their way into the American psyche. In this lively book, Stacy Wolf illuminates the women of American musical theatre - performers, creators, and characters — from the start of the cold war to the present day, creating a new, feminist history of the genre. Moving from decade to decade, Wolf first highlights the assumptions that circulated about gender and sexuality at the time. She then looks at the leading musicals to stress the key aspects of the plays as they relate to women, and often finds overlooked moments of empowerment for female audience members. The musicals discussed here are among the most beloved in the canon—"West Side Story," "Cabaret," "A Chorus Line," "Phantom of the Opera," and many others—with special emphasis on the blockbuster "Wicked." Along the way, Wolf demonstrates how the musical since the mid-1940s has actually been dominated by women—women onstage, women in the wings, and women offstage as spectators and fans.

Book Reading and Talk - "Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical" by Stacy Wolf

February 29, 2012

6:00pm

Labyrinth Book Store 122 Nassau Street, Princeton

From Adelaide in "Guys and Dolls" to Nina in "In the Heights" and Elphaba in "Wicked," female characters in Broadway musicals have belted and crooned their way into the American psyche. In this lively book, Stacy Wolf illuminates the women of American musical theatre - performers, creators, and characters — from the start of the cold war to the present day, creating a new, feminist history of the genre. Moving from decade to decade, Wolf first highlights the assumptions that circulated about gender and sexuality at the time. She then looks at the leading musicals to stress the key aspects of the plays as they relate to women, and often finds overlooked moments of empowerment for female audience members. The musicals discussed here are among the most beloved in the canon—"West Side Story," "Cabaret," "A Chorus Line," "Phantom of the Opera," and many others—with special emphasis on the blockbuster "Wicked." Along the way, Wolf demonstrates how the musical since the mid-1940s has actually been dominated by women—women onstage, women in the wings, and women offstage as spectators and fans.

Co-sponsored by Labyrinth Books and the Lewis Center for the Arts.

Queer Theory Reading Group

March 1, 2012

7:00pm to 9:00pm

Dickinson 113

Light Refreshments will be served

The Princeton Society of Fellows, The Program in the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the LGBT Center host the Queer Theory Reading Group for faculty and advanced graduate students.  This month, the group has selected Dean's Spade's new book "Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law."

Much of the legal advocacy for trans and gender nonconforming people in the US has reflected the civil rights and “equality" strategies of mainstream gay and lesbian organizations—agitating for legal reforms that would ostensibly guarantee equal access, nondiscrimination, and equal protection under the law. This approach assumes that the state and its legal, policing, and social services apparatus—even its policies and documents of belonging and non-belonging—are neutral and benevolent. While we all have to comply with the gender binaries set forth by regulatory bodies of law and administration, many trans people, especially the most marginalized, are even more at risk for poverty, violence, and premature--or social--death by virtue of those same putatively neutral legal structures.

Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law raises revelatory critiques of the current strategies pivoting solely on a legal rights framework, but also points to examples of an organized grassroots trans movement that is demanding the most essential of legal reforms in addition to making more comprehensive interventions into dangerous systems of repression—and the administrative violence that ultimately determines our life chances. Setting forth a politic that goes beyond the quest for mere legal inclusion, Normal Life is an urgent call for justice and trans liberation, and the radical transformations it will require. 

An attorney, educator, and trans activist Dean Spade has taught classes on sexual orientation, gender identity, poverty and law at the City University of New York (CUNY), Seattle University, Columbia University, and Harvard University. In 2002 he founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a collective that provides free legal services and works to build trans resistance rooted in racial and economic justice. In 2010, The Advocate named Spade one of their "Forty Under 40." Utne Reader named Spade and Tyrone Boucher on their list of "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World" in 2009 for their collaborative project Enough: The Personal Politics of Resisting Capitalism, an online journal focused on the personal politics of wealth redistribution. He blogs at www.deanspade.net. 

Americanist Colloquium - "Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the Circuits of Abolitionist Poetry" Meredith McGill Department of English Rutgers University

March 1, 2012

McCosh 40

Reception to follow in the Thorp Library following talk.

Cosponsored by the Program in American Studies.

Film Screening and Discussion - "America the Beautiful 2: The Thin Commandments"

Director Darryl Roberts will be here to discuss the film

March 7, 2012

7:00 - 9:00pm

Friend 101

In an instant, 29 million Americans became fat, out of shape and dangerously obese… and they did it without taking a single bite of food. It was all the result of a decision to change the national standard for obesity. The question is “What was behind a ruling to declare so many people to be fat? Was it political, financial or for the good of humankind?” You’ll find out that diet companies have raked in huge profits because of the new standards — guidelines the weight loss industry helped structure.
The answer lies in a new film by award-winning director Darryl Roberts who, in a follow-up to “America The Beautiful”, examines the cause of our country’s obsession with dieting. “America The Beautiful 2: The Thin Commandments” also weighs in on the raging debate between doctors who say fat is healthy versus those who disagree.
The movie, which premieres in October, offers a passionate and sometimes humorous documentation of the battle to be… well… thin. You see everything from gastric bypass surgery, an obsessed fitness fanatic and a victim of anorexia.
There’s also the revelation that — based on new “fat” guidelines — LeBron James, one of the world’s greatest athletes, is obese. So are Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Tom Cruise, Will Smith and Christian Bale.
In what once was purely a woman’s issue, more and more men are being targeted by advertisers to diet or bulk up to resemble the Adonis images on the cover of men’s magazines. Covering issues such as America’s unhealthy dieting craze, the use of the outdated and misleading BMI scale and the currently touted “obesity epidemic,” Roberts debates the widely believed concepts that you have to be thin to be healthy. During his journey, he discovers the plethora of factors contributing to America’s body dissatisfaction, many of which are being promoted by doctors, schools, the government, and even the First Lady of the United States.
Roberts’ new film humanizes what has become an intellectual debate over whether weight loss programs should ever be promoted, bringing humor with his own efforts to lose weight.

Darryl Roberts, President of Sensory Overload Entertainment, is an established writer, producer, and director. His award-winning documentary about America’s obsession with beauty, "America the Beautiful," is currently playing in select cities across the United States. Roberts is also celebrated both in the U.S. and abroad for How U Like Me Now, the highly acclaimed independent film about relationships in the 90's.

An entertainment industry veteran, Roberts also has experience in radio and television. He began his career as an on-air personality for radio station WKKC-FM in Chicago, and used his earnings as a salesman at Seagram's wine division to produce his own local cable television program, “Backstage with Darryl Roberts”.

Roberts joined WMAQ-TV's Sunday morning news program as host of “Hollywood Hype,” an insider's look at the entertainment industry. His segment rapidly gained a strong following and was rated among the top entertainment features in Chicago.

Roberts has directed some of Europe's hottest commercials and music videos, including the music video for Gloria Gaynor's European comeback, “I Never Knew.”

Co-sponsored by University Health Services and the Women's Center

GSS Graduate Colloquium
Islam, Women's Agency, and Colonial Citizenship: Anticolonial Feminism in Algeria at the End of Empire - Jaime Wadowiec (SUNY Binghampton, History).  

March 12, 2012  

12:00 Noon – 1:00 pm

Frist Room 114 (Room change)

Jaime Wadowiec is a PhD Candidate in history at Binghamton University. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “The Afterlives of Empire: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in Decolonized France,” explores how the process of decolonization and the immigration of formerly colonized subjects from North Africa entailed lasting consequences in definitions of “postcolonial” Republican citizenship—formulations which she understands as necessarily gendered as well as racialized. Jaime was a recipient of SSRC-IDRF and Mellon research fellowships, a former Managing Editor for the Journal of Women’s History, and is currently teaching a history elective called “Sex & the City” at Binghamton University.

Americanist Colloquium

March 12, 2012

McCosh 40

Reception to follow

"Critical Conversations: The Archives of Race in the Long Nineteenth Century" A conversation between William Gleason, Princeton University Department of English and Robin Bernstein, Harvard University Department of African American Studies and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality

Cosponsored by the Program in American Studies.

CSDP AMERICAN POLITICS COLLOQUIUM
Politics, New Media and Race: Old Disparities or New Beginnings?

March 15, 2012  

12:00 Noon – 1:30 pm

300 Wallace Hall

Cathy J. Cohen is the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science. She is also the Deputy Provost for Graduate Education and the former Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago.

Professor Cohen is the author of two books: Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford University Press 2010) and The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press 1999) and co-editor with Kathleen Jones and Joan Tronto of Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader (NYU, 1997). Her work has been published in numerous journals and edited volumes including the American Political Science Review, GLQ, NOMOS, and Social Text. Cohen is principal investigator of two major projects: The Black Youth Project and the Mobilization, Change and Political and Civic Engagement Project. Her general field of specialization is American politics, although her research interests include African-American politics, women and politics, lesbian and gay politics, and social movements.

Feminist Political Theory Speaker Series

March 16, 2012

12:00 Noon - 1:20 pm

301 Marx Hall

Lunch is provided

Amy Allen, Dartmouth College with comments from Anna Stilz.

Papers will be circulated in advance.  To RSVP and request a copy of a paper, please email Julie Rose (julier@princeton.edu).

For more information about the series, the speakers, and the papers, as they become available, please visit: http://www.princeton.edu/~julier/FPTSS.html

The Speaker Series is co-chaired by Julie Rose and Amy Hondo, and is made possible thanks to the generous support of the University Center for Human Values and the Ira W. DeCamp Bioethics Seminar Series.

Symposium on Slavery, Race and Gender in Islamic Society: a Comparative Perspective

March 18 - 19, 2012

For complete list of times and locations go to to www.Princeton.edu/~slavery and click on the "View Symposium Program Here" link

This symposium, because of the central role given to gender "as a catagory of analysis," represents a significant departure from the norm in the study of slavery, in general, and race and slavery, in particular, within the contexts of Islamic societies. Prior scholarly inquiries into these topics have often compartmentalized gender and sexuality as analytical terms reserved for the discussion of female slaves. In contrast, this symposium will begin with the assumption that gender and sexuality always play a central role in the representation, roles, and experiences of all slaves, as well as in the legal discourses and forms of coercion that define their lives.

Class Visit and Reading with author, Samuel R. Delany

March 26, 2012

11:00 am - 11:50 am

28 McCosh

Class visit and Q&A - Eng 398 "Science Fiction in Global Perspective"
in a discussion about his 1968 novel Nova and science fiction with Dr. Lee Konstantinou.

4:30 pm - 6:00 pm

28 McCosh

Reading from Through the Valley from the Nest of Spiders a "major new novel" about "a gay sexual culture unknown to most urban gay men and women, a network of rural gay relations, an epic novel that ranges in time from the 1980s to sixty years into our future."

Emily Dumler (Princeton Theological Seminary) Presentation of Work in Progress

March 26, 2012

12:15 pm - 1:30 pm

Center for the Study of Religion seminar room at 5 Ivy Lane

Sponsored by the Gender, Sexuality, and Religion Working Group.

"Listening to Chicana Music, Sounding Borderlands Imaginaries" - Deborah R. Vargas

Followed by a reception welcoming Deborah, and Erica Edwards

March 27, 2012

4:30 pm

McCormick 106

Cosponsored by the Center for African American Studies

Covergirl Culture - Film Screening and Q&A with the filmmaker Nicole Clark

March 28, 2012

4:30 pm - 6:00 pm

Whitman College, Class of 1970 Theatre

Being thin, pretty, and sexy brings happiness: young girls receive these messages daily hundreds of times. But who sets these impossible beauty standards—and how can they be changed? In this eye-opening documentary, filmmaker and former Elite International fashion model Nicole Clark, now a champion for girls and their self-esteem, calls for a necessary change: integrity and responsible media for our youth. COVER GIRL CULTURE (60 minutes) pairs images of girls and women in television and print ads with footage from the catwalks and celebrity media. Clark is given rare access to women editors from major magazines like ”Teen Vogue” and ”ELLE”, who provide a shocking defense of the fashion and advertising worlds. The film juxtaposes these interviews with revealing insights from models, parents, teachers, psychologists, body image experts and most importantly, the heartfelt expressions of girls themselves on how they feel about the media that surrounds them. With an insider’s view, the film addresses issues like today’s increasingly invasive media, heightened advertising to tweens, the sexualization of girls, and consumer culture’s disempowerment of young women.

Co-sponsored by the Center for African American Studies.

Feminist Political Theory Speaker Series

March 30, 2012

12:00 Noon - 1:20 pm

301 Marx Hall

Lunch is provided

Sarah Conly, Bowdoin College with comments from Kristi Olson.

Co-sponsored by the Ira W. DeCamp Bioethics Seminar Series.

Papers will be circulated in advance.  To RSVP and request a copy of a paper, please email Julie Rose (julier@princeton.edu).

For more information about the series, the speakers, and the papers, as they become available, please visit: http://www.princeton.edu/~julier/FPTSS.html

The Speaker Series is co-chaired by Julie Rose and Amy Hondo, and is made possible thanks to the generous support of the University Center for Human Values and the Ira W. DeCamp Bioethics Seminar Series.

Human Trafficking in the Twenty-First Century

March 30 - 31, 2012

See Times and Locations Below

Co-sponsored by the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination, University Center for Human Values, Program in Law and Public Affairs, Office of Religious Life, Gender and Policy Network, and the Department of Anthropology.

GSS Graduate Colloquium
The Social Invisibility of Female (Homo)sexuality - Rachel Montana (Princeton University, Psychology)

April 2, 2012  

12:00 Noon – 1:00 pm

Frist Room 114

Rachel Montana is a third year social psychology graduate student. Her primary research interests involve social perceptions of and discrimination directed toward female non-heterosexuality.

Queering the Air: A National Perspective on Heteronormativity in Academia

April 2, 2012

4:30 pm

Robertson Hall, Bowl 1

A panel of national experts will speak about inclusive, rigorous college and university pedagogy that moves beyond heteronormativity to include LGBT people as an essential part of different academic disciplines.

Sponsored by the LGBT Center, LGBT Task Force and Pride Alliance.

Critical Encounters presents "Enabling Violations: Race, Theater, and Experimentation"

April 3, 2012

4:30 pm

106 McCormick

A Conversation with Jorge Ignacio Cortinas and Young Jean Lee, moderated by Anne A. Cheng and Alexandra Vazquez.

Co-sponsored by Center for African American Studies, Department of English, and Program in Latin American Studies.

Sophomore Open House

April 4, 2012

12:00 Noon - 1:00 pm

113 Dickinson Hall

Lunch is provided

This meeting is designed to help sophomores learn about departmental programs and requirements, and to give them a better sense of what it is like to be an undergraduate concentrator. Current concentrators will be here to answer questions and talk about the Gender & Sexuality Studies Program.

Film Screening and Discussion - "Habibi" by Susan Youssef

April 4, 2012

4:30 pm

**New Location: McCormick 106**

"Habibi" (My Beloved) retells in a modern Middle East setting the ancient Arabian story of a tragic romance similar to that of Romeo and Juliet. It is the first fiction feature film set in Gaza in over 15 years. Writer and Director Susan Youssef will be on hand to discuss the film after a screening (80 minutes screening; 30 minutes discussion).

GSS Book Club

April 5, 2012

12:00 Noon - 1:00 pm

113 Dickinson Hall

Lunch is provided

Readers with an eye on European politics will recognize Ali as the Somali-born member of the Dutch parliament who faced death threats after collaborating on a film about domestic violence against Muslim women with controversial director Theo van Gogh (who was himself assassinated). Even before then, her attacks on Islamic culture as "brutal, bigoted, [and] fixated on controlling women" had generated much controversy. In this suspenseful account of her life and her internal struggle with her Muslim faith, she discusses how these views were shaped by her experiences amid the political chaos of Somalia and other African nations, where she was subjected to genital mutilation and later forced into an unwanted marriage. While in transit to her husband in Canada, she decided to seek asylum in the Netherlands, where she marveled at the polite policemen and government bureaucrats. Ali is up-front about having lied about her background in order to obtain her citizenship, which led to further controversy in early 2006, when an immigration official sought to deport her and triggered the collapse of the Dutch coalition government. Apart from feelings of guilt over van Gogh's death, her voice is forceful and unbowed—like Irshad Manji, she delivers a powerful feminist critique of Islam informed by a genuine understanding of the religion.

Meredith Miller Memorial Lecture given by Saidiya Hartman - "The Terrible Beauty of the Slum"

April 9, 2012

4:30 pm

McCormick 101

The Gender and Sexuality Studies Program's signature event will feature Professor Saidiya Hartman (Columbia University, English and Comparative Literature). Her lecture examines the role of sociological aesthetics and visual culture in the making of the slum. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century culture of reform, the poor entered the field of representation as targets of uplift and regulation and as agents of disorder and transformation. The talk considers the role of beauty and danger in the discourse of social reform.

Professor Hartman's major fields of interest are African American and American literature and cultural history, slavery, law and literature, and performance studies. She is on the editorial board of Callaloo. She has been a Fulbright, Rockefeller, Whitney Oates, and University of California President's Fellow. She is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997) and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). Professor Hartman has published essays on photography, film and feminism. She is beginning a new project on photography and ethics.

This year's lecture is co-sponsored by the Center for African American Studies.

Jessica Valenti - Writer and Activist

April 10, 2012

7:30 pm

McCosh 50

This is Princeton University's Women's Center 40th Anniversary Lecture.

Co-sponsored by the Women's Center.

"Out of Bounds? A Critique of the New Policies on Hyperandrogenism in Elite Female Athletes" - Katrina Karkazis (Stanford University)

April 11, 2012

4:30 pm

Robertson Hall, Bowl 2

Part of Princeton's DeCamp Bioethics Series entitled "Fixing Sex"

Commentator: Laurie Shrage

Co-sponsored by the Center for Human Values.

NJ Women’s and Gender Studies Consortium - 8th Annual Undergraduate Research Colloquium

April 13, 2012

Rider University, 2083 Lawrenceville Road, Lawrenceville NJ

Times and Locations can be found here

Rider University is hosting this year's NJW&GSC Undergraduate Research Colloquium. Undergraduate students are encouraged to submit written and/or creative work on any subject which uses a feminist lens of analysis: interdisciplinary work and work seeking to understand the intersections of gender, race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, and culture are particularly encouraged.

GSS Certificate student Kyle Edwards will be presenting “Production and Reproduction: The Relation between Biological and Cultural Discourses in Colonial Latin America” at approximately 1:30- 3:15 pm in Memorial Hall.

Take Back the Night

April 13, 2012  

7:00 p.m. – 9:00 pm

Butler College Amphitheater

This April marks 25 years since an incident on campus sparked the birth of the Sexual Harassment/Assault Advising, Research and Education (SHARE) program at Princeton University. Take Back the Night is one of SHARE's major events. It is a night we celebrate, honor and support our campus community members who have survived interpersonal violence. Many will share their stories. River Huston, a sex educator and college speaker, as well as an award winning poet, journalist, performer and activist, will be the keynote speaker. The evening will end with a candlelight vigil. It is our goal to take back the night from interpersonal violence.

Co-sponsored by SHARE.

GSS Graduate Colloquium
Learning to Fight Back: Roma Women's Activist Movement in Post-Communist Romania - Monica Stancu (Columbia University, Sociology)

April 16, 2012  

12:00 Noon – 1:00 pm

Frist Room 114

Monica Stancu earned her BA in American Studies from the University of Bucharest, Romania, and holds an M.A. in Women’s History from Sarah Lawrence College, NY.  She is the recipient of a Fulbright Junior Award and an AAUW International Fellowship. Monica is currently a visiting scholar at Columbia University where she is conducting research on Romanian women immigrants who came to the US during and after the communist regime.

"Ideologies of Sexual (In)Difference" - Symposium organized by Slavoj Zizek, Princeton Global Scholar

April 18, 2012  

4:30 pm - 8:00 pm

McCosh 50

Center for the Study of Democratic Politics Colloquium - "Advocacy in Hard Times: Marginalization, Representation, and the Political Construction of Crises" - Dara Strolovitch, University of Minnesota

April 19, 2012

12:00 Noon - 1:30 pm

300 Wallace Hall

Dara Strolovitch (Ph.D. Yale University) is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Her research and teaching focus on interest groups and social movements, representation, the causes and consequences of American political inequalities, and the intersecting politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality. She is the author of Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2007), and co-editor (with Burdett Loomis and Peter Francia) of the CQ Guide to Interest Groups and Lobbying (2011). Her work also appears in several edited volumes and in journals including the Journal of Politics, the American Journal of Sociology, the National Women’s Studies Association Journal, Social Science Quarterly, the Du Bois Review, the American Behavioral Scientist, and Politics & Gender. Her current project, When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People, explores battles over political constructions of crises, focusing on the ways in which seemingly episodic shocks intersect with structural inequalities to shape the political opportunities available to, and policy changes affecting, marginalized groups. She is also collaborating on several projects, including research that examines to whom voters look for representation in national politics and an NSF-funded study of delegates and protesters at the 2008 national party conventions.

Faculty, fellows, and graduate students only.

Symposium - Making Broadway Musicals: Musical Theatre Artists and Scholars in Conversation

April 21, 2012

10:00 am - 4:00 pm

James Stewart Theatre, Lewis Center for the Arts

The Symposium, which is free and open to the public, is intended to give students, faculty, and community members a window onto the artistic processes and complex collaborations of this popular form of art and entertainment.  The Symposium also aims to highlight the young field of musical theatre studies, which is growing as an academic field across the country and here at Princeton.

Director of Princeton Atelier, Stacy Wolf, and Harvard musicologist Carol Oja, host a series of conversations on current issues in creating, producing, and studying musical theater. Guest speakers are Brian Stokes Mitchell (Tony award-winning star of Ragtime, Kiss Me Kate, and Man of La Mancha), Lisa Lambert (Tony award-winning composer and lyricist of The Drowsy Chaperone), Kevin Adams (Tony award-winning lighting designer of Passing Strange, Hair, and Next to Normal), Dan Knechtges (Tony nominated director and choreographer of Lysistrata Jones and choreographer of 110 in the Shade and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee).  A roundtable discussion of orchestrators—whose work is crucial to musical theatre but typically undervalued and unstudied—will include Mary-Mitchell Campbell (orchestrator of Sweeney Todd and Company), Michael Starobin (Tony award-winning orchestrator of Assassins and Sunday in the Park with George), and Alex Lacamoire (orchestrator of In the Heights). 

Ten musical theatre scholars and ten PhD students from across the country (and one from the UK) will also be involved:  Tamsen Wolff (Princeton, English), Liza Gennaro (Princeton, Dance), Ray Knapp (UCLA, Musicology), David Savran (CUNY Graduate Center, Theatre), Liz Wollman (Baruch, Ethnomusicology), Lynn Garafola (Columbia, Dance), Jeff Magee (U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Musicology), and Dominic Symonds (Portsmouth, UK, Theatre and Music), Carol Oja and Stacy Wolf.  Each professor is inviting a PhD student whose dissertation research focuses on musical theatre.  From Princeton, Eric Glover (English) and Victoria Aschheim (Music) will participate.

The 16 undergraduates in this spring's GSS/THR/ENG/AMS seminar, “Isn’t It Romantic? The Broadway Musical from Rodgers and Hammerstein to Sondheim,” will interview the artists and moderate the conversations. 

Gender, Sexuality, and Religion Pedagogy Discussion

April 23, 2012

12:00 Noon - 1:30 pm

5 Ivy Lane, Seminar Room

Wallace Best and Judith Weisenfeld will share reflections from their own experiences teaching in the area of sex, gender, sexuality, and religion. Molly Farneth will say a few words from a preceptor's perspective, followed by time for questions and conversation.

Activism in Action: An Informal Discussion about Local Opportunities For Community Engagement

April 23, 2012

4:30 pm - 5:30 pm

113 Dickinson Hall

Prof. Jill Dolan will lead an informal discussion about opportunities for activism. Prof. Gayle Salamon, Caroline Kitchener '14, and others will be on hand to discuss their experiences.

Johanna Furst Art Exhibition

March 1 - April 30, 2012

9:00 am - 3:00 pm, Monday - Friday

113 Dickinson Hall

Twelve Women on the Verge
A Calendar of 21st Century Lives

The series captures a year of looking into the lives of twelve American women. Each painting is accompanied by their own written thoughts which gives a glimpse into the navigation of their own lives.  Many of the women are local, some live out West, another in the Far East. The works are the artist’s impression of each woman’s extraordinary essence.

The artist became fascinated by the women surrounding her when she went through a tragedy in her own life. “I was humbled by my friends’ warm embrace of my situation and amazed by their own unique vision and approach. Some were more practical, some more spiritual, all of them challenged, all of them warriors... it simply took my breath away.”

“Upon comparing these twelve lives I now visualize a wide, flowing river.  Each woman has her own swirl and whirl of life radiating around her. Simultaneously, tragedy, joy, great feats, disappointments, passion, relaxation, focus, burn-out, mystery, inspiration all occur in their lives.  At times we physically intersect and hold each other up at other times we simply transfer our given, innate strength through the power of thought and prayer. While painting each beautiful soul I realized we are all one on the verge of embracing more.  The richness of our lives fuels each one of us and I am left more curious about uncovering the truth of our given destiny." 

Queer Theory Reading Group

CANCELED (will be rescheduled to fall semester)

April 25, 2012

7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

Dickinson 113

Light Refreshments will be served

The Princeton Society of Fellows, The Program in the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the LGBT Center host the Queer Theory Reading Group for faculty and advanced graduate students.  This month, the group has selected "Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Reorientation in Evangelical America" by Lynne Gerber.

Drawing on fieldwork at First Place, a popular Christian weight-loss program, and Exodus International, a network of ex-gay ministries, Lynne Gerber explores why some Christians feel that being fat or gay offends God, what exactly they do to lose weight or go straight, and how they make sense of the program’s results—or, frequently, their lack. Gerber notes the differences and striking parallels between the two programs, and, more broadly, she traces the ways that other social institutions have attempted to contain the excesses associated with fatness and homosexuality.

Questions? Contact Tey Meadow at tmeadow@princeton.edu.

Book Reading and Talk - "The Fantasy of Feminist History" by Joan Scott

April 26, 2012

6:00 pm

Labyrinth Book Store 122 Nassau Street, Princeton

In The Fantasy of Feminist History, Joan Wallach Scott argues that feminist perspectives on history are enriched by psychoanalytic concepts, particularly fantasy. Tracing the evolution of her thinking about gender over the course of her career, the pioneering historian explains how her search for ways to more forcefully insist on gender as mutable rather than fixed or stable led her to psychoanalytic theory, which posits sexual difference as an insoluble dilemma. Scott suggests that it is the futile struggle to hold meaning in place that makes gender such an interesting historical object, an object that includes not only regimes of truth about sex and sexuality but also fantasies and transgressions that refuse to be regulated or categorized. Fantasy undermines any notion of psychic immutability or fixed identity, infuses rational motives with desire, and contributes to the actions and events that come to be narrated as history. Questioning the standard parameters of historiography and feminist politics, Scott advocates fantasy as a useful, even necessary, concept for feminist historical analysis. Professor Gayle Salamon will lead the discussion.

Co-sponsored by Labyrinth Books.

Americanist Research Symposium - "Aesthetics Unbound"

April 26, 2012  

5:00 PM

Jones Hall, Room 100

Aimed to emphasize the many interdisciplinary methodological concerns steering literary studies today, this theme seeks, in particular, to foster conversations about trans-atlanticism and trans-historicism as well as questions exploding the boundaries of genre, time, place and identity. How do 21st century literary and methodological concerns shift previous notions of the 'aesthetic'?

Our keynotes this year are Jacqueline Goldsby (English & American Studies at Yale) and Farah Jasmine Griffin (English, American Studies and African American Studies at Columbia). Professor Griffin is currently visiting faculty at Princeton.

Co-sponsored by the Program in American Studiesand the 20th-Century Colloquium.

Panel Discussion "Theatre Criticism, Gender, and Blogging"

April 28, 2012  

2:00 - 4:00 PM

Garden Room, Prospect House

Reception to Follow, Free and Open to the Public

For complete information please visit http://www.princeton.edu/arts/arts_at_princeton/theater/event/dolan-award/.

GSS Graduate Colloquium
Love for Sale: How working conditions influence the  dramaturgical presentation of self for sex workers in Amsterdam - Elizabeth Scheib (Fordham University, Sociology)

April 30, 2012  

12:00 Noon– 1:00 pm

Frist Room 114

Lunch is provided

Elizabeth Scheib is currently enrolled in the 5-year Sociology BA and MA program at Fordham University’s Rose Hill Campus in the Bronx. Last year, she completed a semester in Amsterdam through SIT (School of International Training) and University of Amsterdam (UvA). In Amsterdam, she conducted research with sex workers in Amsterdam’s Red-Light District. She is a Fulbright Finalist for an English Teaching Assistantship to Germany. She hopes to attain her PhD in sociology and pursue future sociological research in sexuality and gender studies, specifically dealing with sex work. 

GSS Book Club

May 1, 2012

12:00 Noon - 1:00 pm

113 Dickinson Hall

Lunch is provided

In boardrooms and lecture halls, on the field and at home, strong female leaders are making a statement around the globe. In HOW GREAT WOMEN LEAD Bonnie St. John and her teenage daughter, Darcy Deane, explore the qualities that motivate some of the world's most powerful women. Through engaging, out-of-the-spotlight interchanges, the authors discover commonly held values, behaviors, and attitudes, as well as the subtle, special skills inherent in female leaders. From the ethics of Dr. Condoleeza Rice to the fortitude of Hillary Rodham Clinton to the enthusiasm of Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp and the discipline of Geena Davis, each woman in this book shares the exciting story of her rise to the top and the unique qualities it took to get there. Bonnie St. John is a 1984 Paralympics silver medal winner in ski racing. Her education includes a degree with honors from Harvard, a Rhodes scholarship, and an M.Litt in Economics from Oxford. Her career includes positions as an award-winning sales rep for IBM and a Clinton White House member of staff. She now is a much-in-demand speaker, who makes over 100 speeches each year to corporations and civic groups. Darcy Deane is an aspiring writer, and the only thing she loves more than interviewing and travel is doing so with her mother.

Film Screening and Discussion – “Decoding Alan Turing”

May 2, 2012

4:30 pm

Friend Center, Convocation Room

Refreshments will be provided

Alan Turing was a brilliant mathematician, logician and cryptographer.  A Cambridge and Princeton graduate who was fundamental to cracking the Nazi's Enigma Code during WWII, Turing laid the foundation for the field of computer science. He was also gay. And he fell victim to the intolerance and legal prosecution of his time in the UK, which led to his death soon after. Join us for a screening of the short film about his life followed by a discussion.

Co-sponsored by the Computer Science Department and LGBT Center.

Feminist Political Theory Speaker Series

May 4, 2012

12:00 Noon - 1:20 pm

301 Marx Hall

Lunch is provided

Elizabeth Brake, University of Calgary with comments from Stephen Macedo.

Papers will be circulated in advance.  To RSVP and request a copy of a paper, please email Julie Rose (julier@princeton.edu).

For more information about the series, the speakers, and the papers, as they become available, please visit: http://www.princeton.edu/~julier/FPTSS.html

The Speaker Series is co-chaired by Julie Rose and Amy Hondo, and is made possible thanks to the generous support of the University Center for Human Values and the Ira W. DeCamp Bioethics Seminar Series.

Senior Thesis Presentations

May 10, 2012

1:00 pm - 2:00 pm

113 Dickinson Hall

Lunch is provided

Reunions Events

"Feminism in Action" Panel Discussion

June 1, 2012

12:30 pm - 2:00 pm

Robertson Hall, Bowl 1

Alums currently active in feminist organizations, advocacy, and ideas will discuss their work and offer reflections on how feminism shapes their lives, their choices, and their futures.  We welcome discussion among people with multiple perspectives on feminism as a politic and a practice about its usefulness in social justice work and in our daily lives as people affiliated across race, ethnic, gender, and sexual differences.  Join us for a rousing conversation about pressing concerns and commitments, and the communities in which Princeton alums make their voices heard.

* * * * * * * * * *

The Road(s) to LGBTQ Equality: ’87's Contribution to Progress

June 1, 2012

2:30 pm - 3:45 pm

McCormick Hall, Room 101

LGBT alumni and allies discuss their varied leadership roles in support of equal rights and respect for people of every sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as the important and expanding role of allies in the advancement of equality. Panelists: Hayley Gorenberg '87, Deputy Legal Director, Lambda Legal; Shawn Cowls '87, President, Fund for Reunion/Princeton BTGALA; Rev. Amy Ebeling McCreath '87, Episcopal Priest, Diocese of Massachusetts; Robert Gleason '87, National Board Member, Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund. Moderator: Sandra Mukasa '12.

Co-sponsored by the Class of 1987, Fund for Reunion/Princeton BTGALA, Princeton LGBT Center, and the Office of Religious Life.

* * * * * * * * * *

She Roars Film Screening and Discussion - "Miss Representation"

June 1, 2012

4:00 pm - 5:30 pm

James M. Stewart '32 Theater, 185 Nassau Street

Following up on the successful She Roars women’s conference in 2011, Princeton alumnae are invited to come together to watch clips from the award‐winning documentary Miss Representation. This film (rated TV14) explores how the media’s misrepresentations of women have led to the
underrepresentation of women in positions of power and influence. Led by Maria DiBattista, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Jill Dolan, Annan Professor in English and Director of the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Join fellow Princetonians to discuss this topic. Reception to follow.

Sponsored by the Alumni Association of Princeton University.

Class Day

June 4, 2012

2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Prospect House, Presidential Dining Room

Refreshments and light fare will be served

Stacie Speer Scott Art Exhibition

May 1 - June 30, 2012

9:00 am - 3:00 pm, Monday - Friday

113 Dickinson Hall

"Roles With a Punch" The Pleasures and Perils of Personhood - Collage and Paintings

“I often don't have a final vision of the piece of art that I am working on. I am inspired by the materials that I have collected. (In this show, a vintage leather baby shoe, an Egyptian film poster, a needlepoint seat cover, to name a few.) These materials lead to visual relationships, connections which set the emotional and physical journey toward resolution of the work of art. This body of works represents a natural inclination to comment visually on the many roles I've experienced first hand, and by observing our culture. Whether sexy, snarky, angry, or celebratory, the viewer will find their truths within the layers of these creations." 

The Fertile Crescent: Gender, Art, and Society

September 9, 2012

2:00 pm

Voorhees Hall, Rutgers University

For complete information please go to www.fertile-crescent.org.

Freshman Academic Expo

September 10, 2012

9:30 am - 12:00 pm

New Frick Chemistry Lab

The Academic Expo brings together in one place the many outstanding departments and programs that Princeton has to offer, and will allow freshmen to explore courses and consider options.

Paula Everitt Art Exhibition

July 10 - September 14, 2012

8:00 am - 2:00 pm, Monday - Friday

113 Dickinson Hall

PAULA EVERITT: DRAWINGS AND WORKS ON PAPER, 2009-2012

Paula Everitt was born and raised in rural Sussex, NJ, a town founded by her seventh great-grandfather. At the age of 17 she flew to Sweden where she began to pursue a lifelong interest in travel and education, studying art, philosophy and religion at several universities both in the US and abroad. She is a 2011 recipient of a Franz and Virginia Bader Fund grant and a new international member of A.I.R. Gallery in NYC.

“It is my artistic goal to marry the power of Abstract Expressionism with my understanding of the Figurative. I want my work to have meaning and energy as well as texture and history, and thus I employ processes of drawing and working on paper that contribute to those qualities in my work. My drawings range from those that are fairly heavily worked with layers of materials, marks and cuts to those wherein the image seems to have been "preordained". My own artistic language and process is slowly developing, and I am indebted to such trailblazers as Nathan Oliveira, Marlene Dumas and Antoni Tapies, to mention but three. " 

A Conversation on Women and the Revolution in Egypt with Margot Badran (Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars) and Yasmine El-Rashidi (Hodder Fellow, Lewis Center for the Arts)

September 14, 2012

5:00 pm

James Stewart Theater, Lewis Center for the Arts

Gender and Sexuality Studies Graduate Works-in-Progress Colloquium

September 24, 2012

12:00 pm - 1:30 pm

Chancellor Green 015

How to be Gay, A talk by David Halperin

September 24, 2012

7:00 pm

McCormick Hall, Room 101 (Art Museum)

In a culture of old queens and young, sophisticated gays, it seems like something is changing. David Halperin will explore if the rumors about the death of gay culture are really true or greatly exaggerated.

Co-sponsored by the Fund for Reunion/Princeton BTGALA, English Department, LGBT Center, and Program in American Studies.

September 27, 2012

7:00 pm - 9:30 pm

James M. Stewart ’32 Theater, 185 Nassau Street

This inspiring feature-length documentary depicts the birth and life of the AIDS activist movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s, showing ACT UP’s battles against corporate greed, social indifference, and government neglect. Startling archival footage puts the audience on the ground with activists in the trenches, and survivors reflect on how a small group of men and women, of all races and classes, came together to change the world and save each other’s lives.

For more information about the film please go to http://www.unitedinanger.com/.

Co-sponsored with Lewis Center for the Arts, Office of Religious Life, Visual Arts Program, Department of English and LGBT Center with support from Occupy Princeton, the Princeton Committee on Palestine, the Committee for Film Studies, and Queer Graduate Caucus.

Gender and Sexuality Studies Graduate Works-in-Progress Colloquium - "Jock Straps in the Laundry Bin, Tampons Cluttering the Medicine Cabinet": An Analysis of Gender-Neutral Housing and Bathrooms at Colleges and Universities in the United States, by Alexander K. Davis

October 1, 2012

12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

Frist 220

Panel on themes in the works of Middle East women writers with Live Readings by Middle East Women Writers

October 3, 2012

7:30 pm

James Stewart Theater, Lewis Center for the Arts

Readings and panel discussion with writers including Mohja Kahf moderated by Abena Busia.

For further information please go to http://www.princeton.edu/arts/events/fertile-crescent/.

Children’s Story Hour

5:30 - 6:30 pm

Firestone Library, Cotsen Children’s Room

Join us to celebrate intellectual freedom during Banned Book Week. An all-star cast of Princeton faculty will conduct a public reading, which will include “And Tango Makes Three”-the true story of a male penguin couple who become parents at the Central Park Zoo, which has been at the top of the national list of censorship challenges since it was published in 2004.

Co-sponsored by HiTOPS, the LGBT Center, and Program in Creative Writing.

Lifting a Secret, performance by artist Nezaket Ekici

October 4, 2012

8:00 pm

Marie and Edward Matthews '53 Acting Studio, Lewis Center for the Arts

A living installation by Turkish-German artist Nezaket Ekici in which passages from her diary become revealed on walls in the theater, revealing her views on Turkish marriage traditions. Audiences are invited to visit the installation in progress from 2:00 to 8:00 p.m. and to return at 8:00 p.m. for the culminating performance

For further information please go to http://www.princeton.edu/arts/events/fertile-crescent/.

Beyond Binaries: Identity and Sexuality - A Workshop with Robyn Ochs

October 8, 2012

4:30 - 6:00 pm

Campus Club, Dining Room

No two people are exactly alike, so how do we map this landscape and assign labels to our complicated and unique experiences? What is the relationship between experience and self-identity, between self-identity and the way we are read by others, between gender identity and sexual orientation? In this interactive program we will explore different experiences of identity, the complexity of attraction, and more.

Co-sponsored by the College Democrats, LeTS, LGBT Center, and Princeton Equality Project.

Self-Care for Activists - A Workshop with Robyn Ochs

October 8, 2012

8:00 - 9:30 pm

Campus Club, Dining Room

Have you ever felt overwhelmed, unsupported, or exhausted by your activism? Let's discuss strategies for taking care of ourselves while changing the world.

Co-sponsored by the College Democrats, LeTS, LGBT Center, and Princeton Equality Project.

GSS Certificate Student Meeting - "How to Spend Summer 2013 Working on GSS Issues"

October 9, 2012

12:00 noon - 1:15 pm

113 Dickinson Hall

Lunch will be provided.

Performing Architecture Symposium

October 13, 2012

9:30 am - 7:30 pm (complete list of times can be found on the schedule)

James Stewart '32 Theatre, 185 Nassau Street

Participants include: 
Vito Acconci
Mary Ellen Carroll
Liz Diller
Pedro Gadanho
RoseLee Goldberg
Brynn Hatton
Samuel Ray Jacobson
Victoria Øye
Alex Schweder
Jesse Seegers
Tim Simonds
Jill Stoner
Mechtild Widrich
Carlin Wing
Mei Lun Xue

This symposium is free and open to the public. To register, please complete our form HERE.

For updates and complete information, please visit our website: princeton.edu/~perfarch

Co-sponsored by Program in American Studies, Department of Art & Archaeology, Graduate Student Government, Council of the Humanities, Interdisciplinary Program in the Humanities, Program in Latin American Studies, Lewis Center for the Arts, Program in Media+Modernity, Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, with additional support from Jeffrey Brown and Elise Jaffe, and Therrien-Barley.

"Scheherazade Goes West" by Fawzia Afzal-Khan

October 17, 2012

7:00 pm

James Stewart Theatre, 185 Nassau Street

Author, poet and vocalist Fawzia Afzal-Khan performs a piece that explores contradictions in gender and culture. Followed by a discussion with Jill Dolan, Annan Professor in English, Professor of Theater in the Lewis Center, and Director of the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies.

For further information please go to http://www.princeton.edu/arts/events/fertile-crescent/.

Co-sponsored by the Lewis Center for the Arts, Program in Theatre, and The Fertile Crescent conference.

"Intersections": An Inaugural Black Queer Sexuality Studies Graduate Student Conference

October 20, 2012

9:00 am (see full schedule below)

Dodds Auditorium, Woodrow Wilson School

Please note: this event requires registration at http://bqsgraduateconference.eventbrite.com.

Princeton University's first annual Black Queer Sexuality Studies Conference will be held on October 20, 2012. The conference will create a public forum for dialogue on innovative research across the many disciplines and fields that interrogate sites of blackness and queerness and the intersections between the two. We invite graduate students from within and outside of Princeton University to present original work in a multi-panel, one-day conference. Professor Kara Keeling (USC) will serve as our keynote speaker.

The inaugural theme, "Intersections," aims to illumine the interdisciplinary work characteristic of black queer sexuality studies. In the seminal anthology, Black Queer Studies, E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson introduce the field and the volume with a host of claims about how to embrace the intersectionality at its core: "[work in the field should] endorse the double cross of affirming the inclusivity mobilized under the sign of 'queer' while claiming the racial, historical and cultural specificity attached to the marker black." Johnson and Henderson sought to open up space for academic inquiry that married the methodologies and activist impulses of black studies and queer studies in order to finally animate the study of a number of traditional disciplines. Honoring the crucial work of pioneering scholars of black queer studies, our conference seeks to foster dialogue between emerging scholars whose work engages both black and queer studies.

Schedule

8:30 am - 9:00 am: Registration
9:00 am - 9:20 am: Welcome/ Opening Remarks
9:30 am - 10:50 am: Panel One - Conceptualizing Identities/ Desires
•   Jamal Batts (American Studies, California State University: Fullerton): "'Faggots and Dope': Gil Scott-Heron and the Post-Home Life of Queer Black Desires."
•   Octavio Gonzalez (English, Rutgers University): "Reginald Shepherd's 'Misfit Minority' Politics."
•  Kristina Butler (Social Work, University of Washington): "Effects of Racial Discrimination on Intimate Partner Relationships among LGBT People of Color."
•   Heather Vermeulen (African American Studies/ American Studies, Yale University): "‘Always Privily Carryed Corn’: Lordean Erotics in the Diaries of Thomas Thistlewood (Vineyard Penn, 1750-1751)."
11:00 am - 12:20 pm: Panel Two - Literary Queerings
•   Emily Owens (African and African American Studies, Harvard University): "Considering Suicide, Living Forever: The Many Incarnations of Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf."
•   Lydia Nelson (Performance Studies, University of Texas- Austin): "Queering the Dozens: Langston Hughes's ASK YOUR MAMA."
•   Kristyl Dawn Tift (Theatre and Film Studies, University of Georgia): "Queering the Politics of Black Respectability: Plays of the Black Arts Movement."
•   Gabrielle LaVon Royal (English, New York University): "Terror of the Room, Trauma of the Body: Deconstructing White Privilege in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room."
12:20 pm - 1:20 pm: Lunch, Schultz Dining Room
1:30 pm - 2:50 pm: Keynote Address
•   Professor Kara Keeling (University of Southern California): “Queer Times and the Black Radical Imagination”, with an Introduction by Professor Wallace Best (Princeton University).
3:00 pm - 4:20 pm: Panel Three - Global and Domestic Geographies
•   Elizabeth Thompson (English, George Washington University):"Queer Commitments: Marriage, Polyandry, and Black Feminine Desire in Caribbean Maroon Communities."
•   Kai Green (American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California): "Towards a Black Queer Geography: The Struggle Over the Uses of Erotic in a Time of Crisis."
•   Michael Yarbrough (Sociology, Yale University): Not the Performer but a Stage: State Law and Marriage in Two South African Communities."
•   Carla Moore (Gender Studies, Queens University):  "Only Who Can Undastan’ It Cross It: The (Im)possibility of Queerness in the Jamaican Dancehall."
4:30 pm - 5:50 pm: Panel Four - Historical Genealogies
•   Cookie Woolner (History and Women's Studies, University of Michigan): "'Have We a New Sex Problem Here?' The Early Great Migration and the Emergence of African American "Women Lovers."
•   David Green (American Culture, University of Michigan): "The Fictions of Marsha P. Johnson...or Are They? Black Queer History, Literature, and the Archive of Friendship."
•   Carol Lautier (American Studies, George Washington University): "‘If He Says He’s Black’: James Tinney and the Performance of Post-Civil Rights Black, Queer and Christian Identities."
•   Shana Russell (American Studies, Rutgers University-Newark): "Queerly Visible: The History of Radical Queer Activism at Rutgers-Newark."
5:50 pm - 6:00 pm: Closing Remarks
6:15 pm - 8:00 pm: Closing Reception, Shultz Dining Room

Co-sponsored by The Center for African American Studies, The Program in American Studies, The Graduate School of Princeton University, The Department of History, The Davis Center for Historical Studies, The University Center for Human Values, and the Lewis Center for the Arts.

Gender and Sexuality Studies Graduate Works-in-Progress Colloquium - Confessions of Cinema: Pedro Almodovar's Private Theater, by William Clark (Cinema Studies, NYU)

October 22, 2012

12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

Frist 114 (NEW LOCATION!)

Movie Screening and Talk with Lauren Greenfield - "The Queen of Versailles"

October 23, 2012

4:30 pm

Frist Theatre, 3rd Floor

Photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield will screen her feature-length documentary The Queen of Versailles, and discuss her work. The film presents Jackie and David whose fortune was built on the booming time-share industry powered by the real estate bubble as they begin building the biggest house in the U.S. a sprawling 90,000-square-foot mansion inspired by Versailles. The bubble bursts and their reversal of fortune over the next two years is captured in a riveting film fraught with delusion, denial, and self-effacing humor, and ultimately reveals the innate virtues and flaws of the American dream. This event is free and open to the public. Pick up your free ticket at the Frist Box Office.

Her work is in many major collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Getty Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, the Center for Creative Photography, the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), the Smith College Museum of Art, the Harvard University Archive, the Clinton Library, and the French Ministry of Culture. She is represented by the Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York and the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles.

Co-sponsored by Women's Center and Lewis Center for the Arts.

"Queering Lesbian Feminist History: A Conversation about the Politics of Solo Performance" by Holly Hughes

October 24, 2012

7:00 pm

McCormick 106

In this public conversation with Jill Dolan, performance artist/public intellectual Holly Hughes will discuss her career and the political and aesthetic strategies that continue to vitalize the forms and contents of feminist, lesbian, and queer solo performance. 

Part of the fall 2012 “Gender-Politics-Performance” series. Co-sponsored with the Lewis Center for the Arts.

Literary Theatricality: Theatrical Text Conference Program

October 26-27, 2012

Various Campus Venues (click here for complete schedule)

On October 26th and 27th 2012 we will investigate the intersection between text and dramatic performance in several of the most foundational texts of Russian literature. For instance, in Eugene Onegin Pushkin's narrator shifts between masks, using the disguises to create a plurality of voices throughout the structure of his lyrical stanzas. In a similar vein, Gogol's narrators would rely on complex verbal textures borrowed from vocalized turns of speech (skaz). In the 20th century, Silver Age and modernist artists both theorized and explored a synthesis between genres, particularly in the case of dancers and their formulations of movement codes. Early Russian film and film theory freely borrowed from theatrical conventions, while Eisenstein and Tynianov regarded film as structurally analogous to a written text.

This conference will explore this crucial trend to perceive the literariness in terms of performance and, simultaneously, to approach the theatricality as a literary work. Soliciting papers from our graduate student colleagues at other universities, we hope to tease out one of the most fundamental, but largely overlooked, structural and thematic capabilities of the text in Russian literature.

Co-sponsored by Eberhard L. Faber Fund in the Humanities Council; The Slavic Department; Program in Theatre of the Lewis Center for the Arts; Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS); University Center for Human Values; The Center for European Studies.

November 5, 2012

12:00 noon - 1:00 pm

Katzenback Room, 185 Nassau Street, 2nd Floor

An informal conversation about theatre and public engagement with the director of the Center for the Theatre Commons at Emerson College, a site for research into the processes, challenges, opportunities, and best practices for developing new theatre work, and a hub of communication and collaboration tools for the national and international theatre industry.

Part of the fall 2012 "Gender-Politics-Performance" series.

The Alter-Ego of an Arab-American Assimilationist

November 5, 2012

5:30 pm

Crossroads Theater, 7 Livingston Ave, New Brunswick, NJ 08901

Performance by Betty Shamieh with introduction by Andreia Pinto Correia

Lunchtime Seminar with Gary Gates - The Politics of LGBT Identity

November 6, 2012

12:15 pm - 1:30 pm

Williams Distinguished Scholar at UCLA School of Law, Gary J. Gates studies the demography of gay and lesbian populations. He will be a part of the Norestein Seminar Series on the Office of Population Research. Event restricted to students, faculty and postdocs. If you would like to attend, please RSVP to Judie Miller at jlmiller@princeton.edu.

Co-sponsored by the LGBT Center and the Office of Population Research.

For further information please go to http://www.princeton.edu/ams/workshop/.

Gender and Sexuality Studies Graduate Works-in-Progress Colloquium - Confraternity Among all Dark Races:" the (Inter)nationalist Politics of Mittie Maude Lena Gorden, by Keisha Blain (History, Princeton University)

November 13, 2012

12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

Frist 220

International LGBT Human Rights - A Talk by Jessica Stern

November 13, 2012

4:30 pm

Frist Campus Center, Room 302

In the aftermath of the 2012 election, bringing with it both the re-election of President Obama and the first major national success on LGBT ballot initiatives, what is the future for LGBT rights in US foreign policy?  Jessica Stern, Executive Director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), will examine the role of LGBT rights within the historical context of US foreign policy and the progress made during Obama’s first term.  Stern will also discuss how the priorities of the U.S. LGBT rights movement are perceived globally, creating both synergies and challenges for local communities seeking self-determination in what can be the shadow of the American example. 

Jessica Stern is the Executive Director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC). As the first researcher on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) human rights at Human Rights Watch, she conducted fact-finding investigations and advocacy around sexual orientation and gender identity in countries including Iran, Kyrgyzstan, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates. As a Ralph Bunche Fellow at Amnesty International, she documented police brutality for what became its landmark report on police brutality in LGBT communities in the U.S., “Stonewalled.” She was a founding collective member and co-coordinator of Bluestockings, then New York’s only women’s bookstore. She has campaigned extensively for women’s rights, LGBT rights, and economic justice with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Control Ciudadano, the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, and the Urban Justice Center. She holds a masters degree in human rights from the London School of Economics. She is frequently quoted in the Mail & Guardian, Al Jazeera English, the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France Presse, Deutsche Welle, Voice of America, The Guardian and The BBC.

Co-sponsored by the Anthropology Department, Fields Center, Gender Policy Network, LGBT Center, Davis International Center, Princeton Equality Project.

Nil Yalter: An Artist on her Work

November 13, 2012

4:30 pm

Robertson Hall Bowl 1

Co-sponsored by the European Politics and Society Program, and the Center for French Studies. Part of The Fertile Crescent Series.

Traveling Marriage: The Law and Politics of Interstate (Non-)Recognition of Same-Sex Couples - Janet Halley

November 15, 2012

4:30 pm

001 Robertson Hall

Co-sponsored by Comparative Literature and the Program in Law and Public Affairs

GSS Book Club

November 15, 2012

12:00 Noon - 1:00 pm

113 Dickinson Hall

Lunch is provided

What is the meaning of freedom? Angela Y. Davis' life and work have been dedicated to examining this fundamental question and to ending all forms of oppression that deny people their political, cultural, and sexual freedom. In this collection of twelve searing, previously unpublished speeches, Davis confronts the interconnected issues of power, race, gender, class, incarceration, conservatism, and the ongoing need for social change in the United States. With her characteristic brilliance, historical insight, and penetrating analysis, Davis addresses examples of institutional injustice and explores the radical notion of freedom as a collective striving for real democracy—not a thing granted by the state, law, proclamation, or policy, but a participatory social process, rooted in difficult dialogues, that demands new ways of thinking and being. "It is not too much," writes Robin D.G. Kelly in the introduction, "to call her one of the world's leading philosophers of freedom." The Meaning of Freedom articulates a bold vision of the society we need to build and the path to get there. This is her only book of speeches and her first full-length book since Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003).

"Davis' arguments for justice are formidable. . . . The power of her historical insights and the sweetness of her dream cannot be denied."—The New York Times

Angela Y. Davis is professor emerita at the University of California and author of eight books. She is a much sought after public speaker and an internationally known advocate for social justice.

"Gender and Casting: What it Means to be a Casting Director" with Julie Tucker

November 15, 2012

4:30 pm

Katzenbach Room, 185 Nassau Street, 2nd Floor

A public interview with the Emmy Award-winning casting director of Nurse Jackie, The Big C, Rescue Me, Damages, and Law and Order SVU.

Part of the Gender Politics Performance Fall 2012 Series.

"Writing Theatre Criticism: Gender and Nation" with Karen Fricker

November 26, 2012

12:00 noon- 1:00 pm

Katzenbach Room, 185 Nassau Street

An informal conversation with a professional theatre critic with a two-decade-long career in the US, Ireland, and the UK. Fricker reviews for Variety (US) and Irish Theatre Magazine (which she co-founded in 2008), and has written and broadcast for, amongst others, The Guardian, The Irish Times, RTE radio and television (Ireland), The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times.

Part of the fall 2012 "Gender-Politics-Performance" Series.

Culture and Inequality Workshop "The Outsourced Self: Intimiate LIfe in Market Times" with Arlie Hochschild (Sociology, UC Berkeley)

November 26, 2012

12:15 pm - 1:30 pm

Marvin Bressler Conference Room, 165 Wallace Hall

A graduate of Swarthmore College, (B.A.) and U.C. Berkeley (M.A. PhD), Arlie Hochschild is the author of 8 books, among them the best-selling Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home, The Time Bind: When Home becomes Work and Work becomes Home, The Managed Heart: the Commercialization of Intimate Life, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy. (co-edited with Barbara Ehrenreich), Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work, and in 2012,The Outsourced Self: Intimate life in Market Times.

She has been awarded the Jessie Bernard Award, the Charles Cooley Award, the Award for Public Understanding of Sociology from the American Sociological Association, and The Arensberg Award from the American Anthropological Association, as well as Guggenheim, Fulbright and Mellon Awards.  Three of her books have been named as a New York Times  “Notable Non-fiction Book of the Year” and her work appears in 15 languages.  In all her work, she tries to explore the emotional dimension of social life.

Professor Hochschild will speak to us about her latest book, The Outsourced Self: Intimate life in Market Times.