“Feminism and the Senses” is a lecture series that addresses how social movements around gender, sexuality, and race have a crucial relationship to sense data, sentimentality, and sensitivity—as in the accusation that women who speak out against injustices are just “too sensitive.”  In our current globalizing world of precarity and speculative finance, news reports tune-in their listeners to the sensitivity of financial markets to interest rate changes, habituating those in the global North to the sensitivity of impersonal entities such as financial markets. At the same time, the lag-time between technological inventions and their unsettling effects on people’s health and social well-being mean that only retrospectively do we realize the moral, social, and ecological costs consequent upon our lack of sensitivity to future risks, or to those populations predominantly bearing risk or whose injuries are discounted as politically negligible.

This project opens up for collective exploration the question of which sensory registers have been favored by our scholarly disciplines where they intersect with feminist and queer activism. At the same time, this series aims to catalyze reflection on the “sensitizing concepts” that have historically been of value to feminist and queer scholarship and those prospective concepts arising in other social justice movements that have yet to become sensitizing to feminism.