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Women's and Gender STudies lecture series

FALL 2009

 

	"Black Holes: The Erasure of Race and Class in Contemporary Television Science-Fiction"   Dr. Brenda A. Risch Director and Assistant Professor Women's Studies, University of Texas at El Paso September 8, 2009   Bailey Science Center Auditorium (Room 1011) 7:00pm
	Dr. Brenda Risch is currently the director of the Women’s Studies Program at UTEP and an assistant professor in Women’s Studies. Her research interests include film and television studies, visual and narrative representation of the body, and working class culture. Dr. Risch holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

 

"Gender Issues on the U.S.-Mexico Border" Dr. Irasema Coronado Associate Professor and Associate Provost at the University of Texas at El Paso   October 6, 2009 Bailey Science Center Auditorium (Room 1011) 7:00pm

Dr. Coronado received her bachelor's degree in political science and a certificate of Latina American Studies from the University of South Florida. She has an Masters degree in Latin American Studies and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Arizona. Her area of specialization is comparative politics. Her research interests include border politics, cross-border cooperation, environmental and gender issues on the U.S.-Mexico border region. She is co-author of the book titled Fronteras No Mas: Toward a Social Justice at the U.S.-Mexico Boarder and several academic articles. She is co-chair of the Coalition Against Violence Toward Women and Families on the U.S.-Mexico Boarder.

 

 

 

 

PAST EVENTS

FALL 2008

Film - “The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo” November 12, 2008

Since 1998 a brutal war has been raging in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Over 4 million people have died. And there are the uncountable casualties: the many tens of thousands of women and girls who have been systematically kidnapped, raped, mutilated and tortured by soldiers from both foreign militias and the Congolese army. The world knows nothing of these women. Their stories have never been told. They suffer and die in silence. In The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo these brave women finally speak. Emmy Award winning producer/director Lisa F. Jackson spent 2006 in the war zones of eastern DRC documenting the tragic plight of women and girls in that country’s intractable conflict. She was afforded privileged access to not only the grotesque realities of life in Congo (including interviews with self-confessed rapists) but also to examples of resiliency, resistance, courage and grace. Jackson was herself gang raped in 1976 and shared her experience with the survivors she interviewed. These women in turn recount their stories with an honesty and immediacy pulverizing in its intimacy and detail. The film is a journey into a literal heart of darkness, a search for survivors who pay witness to their own experiences, and break the silence.

 

“Venereal Disease and the Politics of Social Control in Virginia 1920-1940” Dr. Pippa Holloway Associate Professor of History, Middle Tennessee State University October 29, 2008

Pippa is an associate professor of history at Middle Tennessee State University. She is the author of Sexuality Politics and Social Control in Virginia 1920-1945 (UNC Press, 2006) which won the Willie Lee Rose prize from the Southern Association of Women's Historians. She is the editor of Other Souths: Diversity and Difference in the U.S. South, Reconstruction to Present (University of Georgia Press, 2008). For the 2007-2008 academic year she was a Soros Justice Fellow with the Open Society Institute, where she pursued research on the history of disfranchisement for crime in the 19th and 20th century south. Her forthcoming article, "A Chicken-Stealer Shall Lose His Vote: Disfranchisement for Larceny in the South, 1874-1890," will be published in the Journal of Southern History in Novemeber 2009.

 

“Your Negro Tour Guide” Kathy Wilson Writer September 22, 2008

The Women’s and Gender Studies program presented “Your Negro Tour Guide” a one woman play based on Kathy Y. Wilson’s book, Your Negro Tour Guide: Truths In Black and White (2004, Emmis Books). The play, performed by Actress Torie Wiggins, explores African American identity, racism, and the American racial divide by tearing down racial constructs and stereotypes in thought provoking ways. Kathy and Torie will conduct a talk-back session and book signing after the show. Besides writing "Your Negro Tour Guide: Truths In Black and White (2004, Emmis Books), Kathy is a senior editor at Cincinnati Magazine and an adjunct instructor teaching Women's Studies and Journalism at the University of Cincinnati. She frequently lectures university audiences on The Big Three: gender, race, and class identity. Torie Wiggins, Actor Torie has been performing since the age of two. She trained in Atlanta, Chicago's Second City, and was the second African-American actress to graduate with a BFA in Dramatic Performance from the University of Cincinnati-College Conservatory of Music. She served as Artistic Director of the Black Arts Collaborative and appeared in Love's Fire, The Tempest, The Grapes of Wrath, The Mutilate, Marisol, Blues for an Alabama Sky, The Colored Museum and The Vietnam Project. Currently residing in New York, she has appeared on All My Children, the new feature film Love Me Through It and her voice can be heard on national television and radio commercials for The Home Depot, Burger King, H & M, The WNBA and The National Center for Family Literacy.

 

FALL 2007

 

“Ending Violence Against Women & Girls” Carol M. Poteat-Buchanan President, US National Committee for UNIFEM November 27, 2007

Each year rougly two million girls between the ages of 5 and 15 are trafficked, sold, or coerced into prostitution. An estimated 130 million women have undergone Female Genital Mutilation and an additional 2 million are being subjected to it each year. Women's bodies have become a battleground for those who use terror as a tactic of war-- they are raped, abducted, humiliated, and made to endure forced pregnancy, sexual abuse, and slavery. Carol Poteat-Buchanan will talk about UNIFEM's experiences in combating violence against women and girls.

 

 

 

“Whiteness: Seeing the Invisible” Dr. Gail Griffin Writer & Parfet Distinguished Professor November 6, 2007

Dr. Gail Griffin, Kalamazoo College, Michigan will be talking about critical whiteness studies, the study of racial whiteness and its role in systems of racism. Her talk will explore the confluence of whiteness studies, feminism, teaching, and learning. Dr. Griffin is the author of two books of essays: Calling: Essays on Teaching in the Mother Tongue, and Season of the Witch. She has also published many articles, poems and short nonfiction pieces. She has completed a book of essays on whiteness and teaching that she hopes to publish soon. She holds a BA from Northwestern University and a MA, PhD, from University of Virginia. Dr. Griffin's teaching interests and responsibilities include women's literature, nineteenth-century British literature, creative nonfiction, and autobiography. Her reserach and writing are in those areas as well. She writes autobiographical essays and creative nonfiction, as well as literary scholarship. Most recently, she is very interested in the emerging field of Critical Whiteness Studies and is writing essays on the topic of whiteness and teaching.

 

 

“What the War Taught My Mother” John Guzlowski Writer & Pulitzer Prize Nominee September 11, 2007
John was born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, and came with his parents Jan and Tekla and his sister Donna to the United States as Displaced Persons in 1951. His parents had been slave laborers in Nazi Germany. Growing up in the immigrant and DP neighborhoods around Humboldt Park Chicago, he met Jewish hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who sitll mourned for their dead horses, and women who walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. His poems try to remember them and their voices. These poems have appeared in his chapterbook Language of Mules and in both editions of Charles Fishman's anthology of American poets on the HOlocaust, Blood to Remember. Recently retired from teaching American Literature, he is still writing about his parents. His new poems about them appear in his books Lightning and Ashes (Steel Toe Books, 2007) and Third Winter of War: Buchenwald (finishing Line Press). His book Third Winter War: Buchenwald was nominated this year for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.	What the War Taught Her My mother learned that sex is bad, Men are worthless, it is always cold And there is never enough to eat . She learned that if you are stupid With your hands you will not survive The winter even if you survive the fall. She learned that only the young survive The camps. The old are left in piles Like worthless paper, and babies Are scarce like chickens and bread. She learned that the world is a broken place Where no birds sing, and even angels Cannot bear the sorrows God gives them. She learned that you don't pray Your enemies will not torment you. You only pray that they will not kill you.

 

FALL 2006

 

"“Women & Rape in 19th Century State Appellate Court”   Dr. Mary Block Assistant Professor of History September 25, 2006

 

 

“Break the Silence. Stop the Violence”   Alyx Kellington Photojournalist October 26, 2006

 

“African American Women in S. GA: Segregation, Race Relations, & Farming Experiences” Velma Miles Lowndes Co. Social Worker November 6, 2006

 

“U.S. Women’s History as a Separate Discipline”   Dr. Cathy Oglesby Professor of History November 27, 2006