Center for the Study of Women

The Poetics of Fragility: a Film Screening and Discussion with Lata Mani
2016-10-19 18:30 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Charles E Young Research Library Conference Room
A film screening and conversation.
Lata Mani is a feminist historian, cultural critic, contemplative writer and filmmaker. She has published on a broad range of issues, from feminism and colonialism, to illness, spiritual philosophy and contemporary politics. She is most recently the author of The Integral Nature of Things: Critical Reflections on the Present (2013).
Nicolás Grandi is a Buenos Aires based filmmaker, interdisciplinary artist and educator. He has taught film direction and the history of world cinema at the Universidad del Cine, Buenos Aires, and in the Film Department at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore.
The Poetics of Fragility explores the texture, vitality and aesthetics of fragility. It interweaves stories of bodily frailty with optical vignettes of nature’s delicacy to reclaim fragility as intrinsic to existence, not something to be bemoaned or overcome.
Shot in the San Francisco Bay Area in September 2015, the film features internationally renowned scholar-activist Angela Davis, the acclaimed playwright and critic Cherrie Moraga, Nora Cortiñas, the inspiring founding member of Madres de Plaza de Mayo Linea Fundadora, actor-dancer Greg Manalo, feminist performance artists Thao P. Nguyen and Martha Rynberg, theater scholar Jisha Menon, healer Christopher Miles, creative writer Xochitl M. Perales and the young trombone talent, Jasim Perales.
The Poetics of Fragility is conceived as a “videocontemplation;” a form that Nicolás Grandi and Lata Mani have been developing to explore how the audiovisual medium with its sensuous possibilities can become a tool for social inquiry with a philosophical impulse. The visually arresting and formally plural film unfolds through stories that build on and amplify each other. Moments of emotional intensity alternate with speculative calm, dramatic narration with poetry and critical inquiry into prevailing understandings of fragility.

Christina Sharpe, "In the Wake: On Blackness and Being"
2016-10-13 16:00 - 18:00 | Humanities 193, UCLA
Christina Sharpe is Associate Professor of English at Tufts University and the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subject. Her research interests are in black visual culture, black diaspora studies, and feminist epistemologies, with a particular emphasis on black female subjectivity and black women artists.
This talk will draw from In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, forthcoming from Duke University Press.
In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the “orthography of the wake.” Activating multiple registers of “wake”—the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness—Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation. Initiating and describing a theory and method of reading the metaphors and materiality of “the wake,” “the ship,” “the hold,” and “the weather,” Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora and how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation, and punishment, but also something in excess of them. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Formulating the wake and “wake work” as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward.

Women's Reproductive Health and the Environment
2016-06-21 08:00 - 14:00 | The California Endowment, 1000 North Alameda Sreet, Los Angeles, CA, 90012, United States
Advocacy Through Education
Women’s Reproductive Health and the Environment: Best Practices for Los Angeles County
A free symposium that will bring together health professionals, community activists, researchers, academicians, civic and business leaders, politicians, and government officials to learn about best practices related to research, policy, and community advocacy.
Plenary Session
Update on the Hidden Reproductive Health Hazards of Environmental Toxins
Symposium Topics

What’s New in Policy for 2016?
Grassroots Advocacy: Community-Based Preconception Program: Planning for a Healthy Home, Body, and Baby
Applying Research into Action: Using Data to Investigate Health Effects of Environmental Toxins

Chinyere Oparah
2016-05-25 13:30 - 15:00 | Charles E. Young Research Library, Presentation Room
Birth Matters: Research Justice and Black Life
African American women are 3 to 4 times as likely as white women to die of childbirth related causes, our infants are twice as likely not to survive their first year. “Birthing while black” is a site of struggle, which for too many leads to disabling, trauma or even death. Birth matters in conversations about black life and death, yet the reproductive autonomy of black women and trans/gender nonconforming pregnant and birthing individuals has only recently gained recognition with the #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName movements. Research justice is a strategic framework within which those directly affected by structural violence and discrimination use research tools in order to achieve self determination and lasting social change. Using a research justice approach, Oparah worked alongside members of Oakland-based collective Black Women Birthing Justice to document black women’s experiences of childbirth, and to publish an anthology of critical essays and activist and personal testimonies on black bodies and birth justice. In this talk, she explores the role of activist scholars in the movement to #LiberateBlackBirth.
Chinyere Oparah is an activist scholar, social justice educator and experienced community organizer, who is dedicated to producing critical scholarship in the service of progressive social movements. Oparah is an African diaspora specialist, whose interests span a number of different social concerns, including activism by women of color, violence against women, women and the prison-industrial complex, restorative justice, queer and transgender liberation, race and adoption, research justice and birth activism. Her work is informed by personal experiences of crossing racial, gendered and national boundaries as a biracial, transracial/ transnational adoptee, survivor of intimate violence and queer parent with ties to Britain, Nigeria and the U.S.
Oparah is Associate Provost and professor and department chair of Ethnic Studies at Mills College. She played a leading role in the establishment of Mills’ Queer Studies Program and sits on the Advisory Committee for that program. She recently led the College’s Gender Expression and Identity initiative, leading to the production of an important report on improving the experiences of transgender and gender-fluid students at Mills.
Oparah was awarded the Rockefeller Fellowship in Sex, Race and Globalization in 2002, and held the prestigious Canada Research Chair in Social Justice and Diversity at the University of Toronto from 2004-6. Educated at Cambridge University and Warwick University, she has graduate degrees in Sociology and Ethnic Studies. In addition, Oparah trained in community development. Prior to entering academia, she coordinated a black women’s center in the UK, and was executive director of a national development agency for non-profits serving communities of color.
Oparah is author of Other Kinds of Dreams: Black Women’s Organizations and the Politics of Organization, the only comprehensive history of the black women’s movement on Britain. She is editor of Global Lockdown: Race, Gender and the Prison-Industrial Complex, a seminal work that mapped the connections between globalization, gender and mass incarceration. She is also co-editor of 3 books: Activist Scholarship: Antiracism, Feminism and Social Change, Color of Violence: the Incite! Anthology. and Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption.
She is working with the grassroots community organization Black Women Birthing Justice on a participatory action research project about black women’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, and editing an anthology on black women in the birth justice movement. In her spare time she practices mindfulness meditation and vinyasa yoga, sings along to gospel music, hangs out with toddlers and is learning horse-riding. Oparah has Nigerian (Igbo) and British origins, and immigrated to the US in 1995. She lives in East Oakland with her partner and daughter.
Each of the six speakers in this series, “In the Interests of Justice: Bringing Theory into Practice,” is engaged in producing vital knowledge about the relationships between health. social inequity. race. gender. and power. Featured scholars will share their recent or ongoing work. and comment on the implications for changing and improving practice. in the fields of law. healthcare. or social services. in order to meet the needs of populations facing complex social. health. or disabling challenges. This series is a collaboration between Repair, a Los-Angeles based health and disability justice organization and the UCLA American Indian Studies Center, the UCLA Program in Disability Studies. and the UCLA Department of Gender Studies. Funding and support are provided by NetCE.
Organized by: UCLA Department of Gender Studies
Cosponsored by: UCLA Center for the Study of Women, UCLA Program in Disability Studies, and UCLA American Indian Studies Center

Racialized State Violence in Global Perspective
2016-05-25 - 2016-05-26 | Royce 306 & 314 and Harry and Yvonne Lenart Auditorium of the Fowler Museum
RSVP! eventsrsvp.ucla.edu/RacializedViolence
Conference schedule now available! Download here or view online!
Questions? Email: rsv@csw.ucla.edu

The conference brings together scholars who work on racialized police violence in North America with others who work in Brazil, Central America, the UK, the Caribbean, and elsewhere to consider questions of pressing global importance including economic inequality, state power, racism and indigeneity, legacies of imperialism and colonialism, and gendered violence. Featuring intellectuals in the social sciences, humanities, and arts, the symposium not only analyzes racialized state violence but also engages possibilities for justice.

“Living With Certain Uncertainty: Violence, Exile, and Black Life”
KEYNOTE by EDWIDGE DANTICAT

May 25, 6 pm, Lenart Auditorium, Fowler Museum
The extraordinary novelist and public intellectual Edwidge Danticat (left) will deliver the conference’s keynote lecture on Wednesday evening May 25th, with Kelly Lytle Hernandez, associate professor, Department of History, UCLA, as respondent. Danticat is an award-winning author of short stories and novels that often engage with the history of her native Haiti. She also writes about the immigrant experience—what she calls “dyaspora”—and the reality of life in Haiti today. Her works include Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994); Krik? Krak! (1996); Claire of the Sea Light (2013); Mama’s Nightingale (2015); and Untwine (2015). She wrote and narrated the film Girl Rising (Haiti) in 2013. In 2007, she received a National Book Award nomination for Brother, I’m Dying. She was shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for Claire of the Sea Light in 2014.
PANELS and ROUNDTABLE: May 26, 9 am to 5:30. Royce 314
On Thursday, May 26th, we will hold two panels of speakers and a lunch scholar-activist roundtable on policing in Los Angeles.

SPEAKERS
Melina Abdullah, Professor and Chair, Pan-African Studies, California State University, Los Angeles, is a womanist scholar-activist – recognizing that the role that she plays in the academy is intrinsically linked to broader struggles for the liberation of oppressed people. Her research interests include activism and movement building and Critical Race Theory. Abdullah was appointed to the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission in 2014 and is a member of the California State University Chancellor’s Taskforce for the Advancement of Ethnic Studies. She is currently writing a book manuscript that examines Hip Hop and political mobilization.
Mohan Ambikaipaker, Assistant Professor, Communications, Tulane University School of Liberal Arts, is a social anthropologist and cultural studies scholar who studies the dynamics of multiracial societies. His research aims to examine the shifting configurations of racism and racial structures that go beyond bipolar frameworks of analysis. He is the co-author (with Robert Berkeley and Omar Khan) of What’s New about New Immigrants in 21st Century Britain? (Runnymede Trust/Joseph Rowntree, 2006).
Aisha Beliso-de Jesus, Associate Professor, African American Religions, Harvard Divinity School, is a cultural and social anthropologist. She has conducted ethnographic research with Santería practitioners in Cuba and the United States since 2003. Her book, Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion (Columbia University Press, 2015) details the transnational experience of Santería, in which racialized and gendered spirits, deities, priests, and religious travelers remake local, national, and political boundaries and actively reconfigure notions of technology and transnationalism. Her current research, “Policing African Diaspora Religions,” draws on ethnographic research with police and religious practitioners in the United States exploring questions of race, religion, and policing.
Maurice Magaña, Lecturer, Chicano/a Studies, UCLA, researches youth activism and social movements in Mexico and the United States. He received his Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Oregon in 2013 and was the Institute of American Cultures Visiting Researcher in Chicano Studies in 2013-14. His dissertation, Youth in Movement: the Cultural Politics of Autonomous Youth Activism in Southern Mexico, was named as one of the “50 Best Dissertations in Cultural Anthropology of 2013”.
Ana Muñiz, Criminology, Law, and Society, UC Irvine, does research on gang injunctions, social control, state violence and surveillance, militarization, and race. She is the author of Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries (Rutgers University Press, 2015) which examines how the LAPD, city prosecutors, and business owners struggled to control who should be considered “dangerous” and how they should be policed in Los Angeles.
Laurence Ralph, Associate Professor, African & African American Studies and Anthropology, Harvard University, researches how the historical circumstances of police abuse, mass incarceration, and the drug trade naturalize disease, disability, and premature death for urban residents, who are often seen as expendable. He is the author of Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Audra Simpson, Associate Professor, Anthropology, Columbia University, is energized by the problem of recognition, by its passage beyond (and below) the aegis of the state into the grounded field of political self-designation, self-description, and subjectivity. Her work is motivated by the struggle of Kahnawake Mohawks to find the proper way to afford political recognition to each other, their struggle to do this, and the challenges of formulating membership against a history of colonial impositions. She is the author of Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Duke University Press, 2014) and co-editor with Andrea Smith of Theorizing Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2014).
Christen Smith, Assistant Professor, Anthropology; African & African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas at Austin, does research in the areas of performance, race, gender, violence and the black body in the Americas with a particular emphasis on transnational black liberation struggles and racial formation. Her book, Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence and Performance in Brazil (University of Illinois Press, 2016) explores the visual and performatic economies of the Black body in pain as an ironic transfer point for the production of Brazil’s racial state.
Shannon Speed is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. She is Director of American Indian Studies and Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Anthropology at UCLA. Dr. Speed has worked for the last two decades in Mexico, and her research and teaching interests include indigenous politics, legal anthropology, human rights, neoliberalism, gender and feminist theory, indigenous migration, and activist research. She has published five books and edited volumes, including Rights in Rebellion: Human Rights and Indigenous Struggle in Chiapas, Human Rights in the Maya Region: Global Politics, Moral Engagements, and Cultural Contentions, and Dissident Women: Gender and Cultural Politics in Chiapas. She serves on the Council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) and as co-chair of the Otros Saberes/Other Knowledges section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), and on the editorial board of AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples. In 2013, she was awarded the Chickasaw Nation’s Dynamic Woman of the Year, and in 2014 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the State Bar of Texas Indian Law Section.

Rinaldo Walcott, is Professor and Director of the Women & Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. As an interdisciplinary scholar Rinaldo has published on music, literature, film and theater and policy among other topics. All of Rinaldo’s research is founded in a philosophical orientation that is concerned with the ways in which coloniality shapes human relations across social and cultural time. Rinaldo is the author of Black Like Who: Writing Black Canada (Insomniac Press, 1997 with a second revised edition in 2003); he is also the editor of Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism (Insomniac, 2000); and the Co-editor with Roy Moodley of Counseling Across and Beyond Cultures: Exploring the Work of Clemment Vontress in Clinical Practice (University of Toronto Press, 2010). In all of Rinaldo’s research and publication he focuses on Black cultural politics; histories of colonialism in the Americas, multiculturalism, citizenship, and diaspora; gender and sexuality; and social, cultural and public policy

RESPONDENTS
Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Associate Professor, Department of History, UCLA, does research on twentieth-century U.S. history with a concentration on race, migration, and police and prison systems in the American West and U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Her book, MIGRA! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010) is the first book to tell the story of how and why the U.S. Border Patrol concentrates its resources upon policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration despite the many possible targets and strategies of U.S. migration control. Her current research explores the social world of incarceration in Los Angeles between 1876 and 1965.
Saree Makdisi, Professor, Department of English, UCLA, does research at the crossroads of several different fields, including British Romanticism, imperial culture, colonial and postcolonial theory and criticism, and the cultures of urban modernity, particularly the revision and contestation of charged urban spaces, including London, Beirut and Jerusalem. His recent books include Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (WW Norton, 2008; revised and updated, with a new foreword by Alice Walker, 2010) and Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race and Imperial Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Sarah Haley, Assistant Professor, Gender Studies, UCLA, does research on African American history, critical prison studies, social movements and labor studies. She received her Ph.D. in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale University in 2010 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University’s Center for African American Studies from 2010-2011. She is author of the book No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
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Organized by Hannah Appel, Jessica Cattelino, Norma Mendoza-Denton, and Jemima Pierre
Cosponsored by Alessandro Duranti, Dean, UCLA Division of Social Sciences; David Schaberg, Dean, UCLA Division of Humanities; UCLA Center for the Study of Women; Institute on Inequality and Democracy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs; Robin D.G. Kelley, Distinguished Professor of History & Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in United States History; Eric Avila, Associate Dean, UCLA Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion; UCLA African Studies Center; UCLA American Indian Studies Center; Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA; UCLA Department of Gender Studies; Disability Studies at UCLA; UCLA International Institute; and UCLA Postcolonial Theory & Literary Studies.
Photo credits: Black Lives Matter march, Minneapolis, Minneapolis, Minnesota, July 31, 2015, Fibonacci Blue, https://www.flickr.com/photos/fibonacciblue/; Photo of E. Dandicat courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Black Feminism, The Carceral State, and Abolition
2016-05-19 16:00 - 18:00 | Royce 314
A Book Talk by Sarah Haley with responses by Mariame Kaba and Dayo Gore
Drawing upon black feminist criticism and a diverse array of archival materials, Sarah Haley’s No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity illuminates black women’s experiences of imprisonment in the South to uncover how gendered regimes of incarceration were crucial to the making of Jim Crow modernity. No Mercy Here examines the brutalization of imprisoned women in local, county, and state convict labor systems, while also situating them within the black radical tradition by illuminating practices of resistance, refusal, and sabotage that challenged ideologies of racial capitalism and patriarchy, offering alternative conceptions of social and political life and envisioning a world beyond prisons.
Sarah Haley is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and African American Studies.
Mariame Kaba is a public scholar and organizer, and the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a long-term vision of ending youth incarceration.
Dayo F. Gore is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego and the founder and co-director of the Black Studies Project (BSP@UCSD). She is the author of Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War.
Cosponsored by Center for the Study of Women

Ungrid-able Ecologies: Cultivating the Arts of Attention in a 10,000 Year-Old Happening
2016-05-17 16:00 - 18:00 | Royce 306
In “Ungrid-able Ecologies,” Natasha Myers will explore what can a queer, feminist, decolonized ecology can reveal about the relationships that develop between species.
Ecology is not just an object of study. It is also a mode of attention to worldly relations. Where the sciences of ecology have traditionally been grounded in teleological, militarized and economizing logics, and bound to heteronormative reproductive imperatives, this talk insists that ecology could be otherwise. It describes my efforts to cultivate a queer, feminist, decolonized ecology within an ancient oak savannah in Toronto’s High Park, a site 10,000 years in-the-making. For millennia these lands were shaped by Aboriginal peoples who used fire to keep the woodlands open for hunting and farming. Today, it is a site of massive ecological restoration efforts in the midst of a bustling city. The aim is to bring back the oak savannah through the use of controlled burns, and the planting of native grasses and wildflowers. But today the oldest oaks are falling and the next generation is just 15 years old.
Kinesthetic images by Ayelen Liberona with Natasha Myers
What modes of attention can help us learn how to pay attention to this remarkable naturalcultural happening which is both in-the-making and coming undone? Working at the cusp of anthropology, art, and ecology, this project interrogates the self-evidence of approaches to conservation ecology and environmental monitoring by throwing open the very question of what it means to pay attention. It proposes an “ungrid-able ecology” to disrupt conventional ecology’s normative, moralizing, and economizing discourses. This ecological practice reconfigures the naturalist’s notebook by innovating techniques for tuning in to the “affective ecologies” and the “involutionary momentum” that propel plants, insects, animals, and people to get involved in one another’s lives (see Hustak and Myers 2012). Through an ongoing collaboration with filmmaker and dancer Ayelen Liberona, this research-creation project experiments with sensory practices that can document the growth, decay, combustion and decomposition that are essential to the life of this remarkable land. In the process, we explore new forms of collaboration to cultivate plant/people relations that are fit for earthly survival.

Natasha Myers is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University, the convenor of the Politics of Evidence Working Group, director of the Plant Studies Collaboratory, a member of Sensorium, and on the editorial board of Catalyst. She works alongside Michelle Murphy as co-organizer of Toronto’s Technoscience Salon, and is co-founder of the Write2Know Project with Max Liboiron. Her ethnographic research examines forms of life in the contemporary arts, sciences and ecologies. Her book, Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter (Duke University Press, 2015) is an ethnography of an interdisciplinary group of scientists who make living substance come to matter at the molecular scale. In her new work, she is experimenting with ways to document the affective ecologies that take shape between plants and people, and among plants and their remarkably multi-species affinities.
Support provided by Estrin Family Lecture Series Fund
Cosponsored by the Institute for Society and Genetics
RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/natasha-myers-tickets-23195678900

Racializing Normative Markets: Whiteness, Masculinity, and the "Efficiency" of Networks
2016-05-12 12:00 - 13:30 | Haines 352
A talk by Karen Ho, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota.
While critical scholarship has made important contributions to the understandings of markets and difference, many of these approaches have focused on how dominant markets have actively depended upon, as well as excluded groups based on, hierarchies of raced, gendered, classed, sexualized, and national differences. That we better understand how capitalism depended on enslavement, how US real estate markets segregated and excluded African Americans, and how productive labor cannot be jettisoned from reproductive labor are due to this crucial research. However, we need to go further. Even as dominant, capitalist markets are depicted as exclusionary and exploitative of differences, they themselves are often held stable, and not directly analyzed as composed of particular bodies, assumptions, actions, and values. This presentation, inspired by critical race theory, cultural histories of risk and the construction of the risk-bearing individual, as well as ethnographic accounts of financial markets, examines both the underbelly of what makes financial markets possible as well as the whiteness and classed masculinity of financial markets themselves. I will explore how the very underpinnings of what makes markets and market exchange possible are arrangements of exchangeability, commensurability, and liquidity made possible, in part, through the instruments and assumptions of racial fraternity and exclusion.
Karen Ho is the author of Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Duke University Press, 2009). Her research areas include cultural studies of finance capital; finance, globalization, and capitalism; ethnography; feminist studies; political economy; and comparative race and ethnicity.
Organized by UCLA Anthropology – Culture, Power, and Social Change. Cosponsored by the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment and the UCLA Center for the Study of Women
Culture, Power, and Social Change is open to students, faculty, and invited guests only. If you would like to be added to the mailing list, email Hannah Appel at happel@ucla.edu.

The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks
2016-04-27 16:30 - 17:00 | Humanities Room 135
Jeanne Theoharis is the biographer of Civil Rights organizer, Rosa Parks. She will be speaking about her landmark, paradigm-shifting biography, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, which won the NAACP Image Award for outstanding biography and the Leticia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. Theoharis contributes invaluable insight into Parks’s significance to the gendered history of social movements, and Civil Rights specifically, revealing how misconceptions regarding Parks’s politics and legacy shape understandings of the movement writ large. In contesting Parks’s image as a quiet seamstress known only for a single political act, and instead excavating her long and radical political career, Theoharis illuminates the role of ideas about gender in shaping ideas about radicalism, social movement participation, and popular representation.
Cosponsored by Robin Kelley, Gary B. Nash Chair in History, and Center for the Study of Women

How Societies and States Count
2016-04-21 16:00 - 18:00 | Royce 306
Censuses in Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom
A Discussion with the authors of Antecedents of Censuses From Medieval to Nation States: How Societies and States Count (Volume 1) and Changes in Censuses from Imperialist to Welfare States: How Societies and States Count (Volume 2), Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Featuring Rebecca Jean Emigh, UCLA, Sociology; Dylan Riley, UC Berkeley, Sociology; and Patricia Ahmed, South Dakota State, Sociology.
These two volumes are a comprehensive survey of censuses (and before censuses, census-like information gathering) starting in the early medieval period to the present in England/UK, the US, and Italy. They develop a new theory of information gathering to explain the social and state forces that shape how and when information gathering is undertaken. Central to this process of information gathering is classification, that is, how people are put into socially relevant groups, such as men and women, and how social and demographic characteristics are attached to these groups. For most of history, until very recently, much more information was collected about men than about women, as early censuses were generally collected to assess resources and distribute political benefits, which were more often attached to men, not to women. However, as the purpose of censuses shifted towards collecting population information, which then became construed socially as knowledge, information collection about men and women became more symmetrical. The books trace this shift from resource collection to knowledge collection over time and region, and thus, contribute to understanding how our knowledge of women and men shifted over time and place.
Organized by: UCLA Department of Sociology
Cosponsored by: UCLA CAPPP, UCLA Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies, and UCLA Center for the Study of Women

Climate Change: a Department-Wide Conversation About the Shared Impact of Gender Inequity and Discrimination
2016-04-14 12:30 - 14:00 | CA
Women in History, a group which seeks to foster discussion about the unique challenges faced by women in academia, invites you to its Spring 2016 Roundtable on April 14th from 12:30-2pm in the History Department Conference Room (Bunche 6265).
A co-ed panel of faculty guests, including Soraya de Chadarevian, Toby Higbie, Eric Avila, and Ghislaine Lydon will address the theme of the event:”Climate Change,” a department-wide conversation about the shared impact of gender inequity and discrimination and strategies for changing the culture of the UCLA History Department and the academy at large. This event, geared toward both men and women in UCLA History, aims to explore the ways in which inequities affect everyone, and it hopes to encourage all colleagues, regardless of gender, to work together to affect change.

Masen Davis
2016-04-12 16:00 - 18:00 | Royce 314
The Movement of Our Time: Transgender Equality at the Crossroads
A talk by the 2015-2016 Regents’ Lecturer
Mason Davis, Executive Director, Transgender Law Center
Masen Davis has more than two decades of leadership and activism in the LGBT movement. Under his direction, TLC’s impact litigation secured groundbreaking federal protections in 2012 against employment discrimination for transgender and gender non-conforming people under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. From securing $1M in public funds for transgender employment programs, to sweeping changes to California law under the 2011 Gender Nondiscrimination Act, to unprecedented healthcare access initiatives for transgender people within the state – Masen’s leadership has had a tremendous and positive impact on countless constituents. Masen works tirelessly as a preeminent voice in local, state, and national forums, and is increasingly identified as an international leader in the trans equality movement.
He received his B.A. from Northwestern University, M.S.W. from UCLA, and completed the Program for Senior Executives in State and Local Government at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Cosponsored by: Center for the Study of Women and Williams Institute

Urgent Issues Forum/Foro Urgente: The Assassination of Berta Cáceres and the Future of Indigenous and Afrodescendant Environmental and Land Rights in Honduras
2016-04-08 09:00 - 14:00 | Charles E. Young Research Library, Presentation Room
On March 2, 2016, award-winning Lenca environmental and indigenous rights activist Berta Cáceres was assassinated in her home in Honduras. She had received multiple threats from military and paramilitary groups linked to the mining and dams interests that she opposed. Gustavo Castro, a Mexican activist who was in Berta’s home and was injured in the attack, is now being held illegally in Honduras and there are international concerns that he is being framed for the attack. This urgent forum explores the issues of resource extraction and state violence and their impact on the future of indigenous and environmental rights activism in Honduras.
Participants include:

Olivia Cáceres (Lenca)
Activist and daughter of Berta Cáceres
Rony Castillo (Garifuna)
PhD student UT Austin, Advisor on Education Issues OFRANEH, President of the Garifuna Education Council and Co-founder of the Garifuna Intercultural University
Suyapa Portillo
Pitzer College
Chris Loperena
University of San Francisco
Joseph Berra
UCLA Law School

Hosted by the UCLA American Indian Studies Center. Co-sponsored by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, UCLA Center of Study for Women, UCLA Chicano Research Studies Center, UCLA Institute of American Cultures, and Grassroots International.

Françoise Girard
2016-04-07 16:00 - 18:00 | UCLA Law School, Room 1457
Sex in the time of Zika: Reproductive Rights and Women’s Health in a World in Turmoil
A public lecture in honor of International Women’s Day
Françoise Girard is a longtime advocate and expert on women’s health, human rights, sexuality, and HIV and AIDS. Prior to becoming President of the IWHC, she served as Director of the Public Health Program at Open Society Foundations, where she was also a Regional Director for Central and Eastern Europe and Haiti. From 1999 to 2003, she was Senior Program Officer for International Policy at IWHC, and thereafter a consultant for IWHC, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and DAWN, a network of women’s rights ac-tivists from the global South. She has played a key role in advocacy on reproductive health and women’s rights with UN agencies and at UN Conferences, and was the Chair of the Leadership Programme Com-mittee of the 2010 International AIDS Conference. Françoise Girard serves on the Civil Society External Advisory Panel of the UN Popula-tion Fund, and on the Advisory Committee of the Health and Human Rights Division of Human Rights Watch.
RSVP: Sanderson@international.ucla.edu
Cosponsored by: International Institute, Center for World Health, Luskin School of Public Affairs, Iris Cantor/UCLA Women’s Health Center, International and Comparative Law Program/School of Law, and UCLA Center for the Study of Women

Thinking Gender 2016
2016-04-07 11:30 - 2016-04-08 18:00 | Grand Horizon Ballroom, Covel Commons, UCLA
VIDEOS NOW ONLINE!
Thinking Gender is a public conference highlighting graduate student research on women, sexuality and gender across all disciplines and historical periods. This year’s theme is “Spatial Awareness, Representation, and Gendered Spaces.”
PRELIMINARY PROGRAM! Download now! Or view on online!
REGISTRATION INFORMATION
General Registration (FREE) includes access to the keynote speech, paper and film panels, and poster session: https://uclacsw.submittable.com/submit/54090
Prime Registration ($20) provides access to conference workshops, networking lunch, and keynote cocktail reception. You will also receive a souvenir mug. [Prime Registration is now closed. If you are still interested in Prime Registration, check in at the “General/Prime Registration” tables at the Conference. Availability is first-come, first-serve.]
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Our keynote speaker is Aili Mari Tripp. Her address is titled “Unexpected Consequences: Women and Power in Postconflict Africa” and is based on her recently published book, which looks at gender-related consequences of the decline of major conflict in 17 countries in Africa over the past 20 years. It explains why postconflict countries in Africa have significantly higher rates of women’s political representation compared with countries that have not undergone major conflict. It also looks at why these countries tend to have been more open to passing legislation and making constitutional changes relating to women’s rights. It shows how and why the postconflict countries have adopted a distinct trajectory compared with non-postconflict countries, recognizing that from the point of view of activists, this trajectory is still too slow and fraught. The talk is based on comparative research across Africa as well as fieldwork in Uganda, Liberia, and Angola.
Aili Mari Tripp is a professor of Political Science and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently a visiting Fulbright Scholar at the Hillary Rodham Clinton Center for Women’s Empowerment at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco. She is conducting research on women and legal reform in North Africa. Her past research has focused on women and politics in Africa, women’s movements in Africa, transnational feminism, African politics (with particular reference to Uganda and Tanzania), and on the informal economy in Africa. For more information: https://ailitripp.wordpress.com
PROGRAM

Click here for the full program — including panelists and paper titles!
Thursday, April 7, 2016
11:30 am to 1 pm
Registration
1 to 1:30 pm
POSTER PRESENTATIONS
1:30 to 3 pm
WELCOME by Jessica Cattelino, CSW Associate Director
SCREENINGS
For the first time, Thinking Gender will feature film, video, and mixed-media shorts followed by a moderated discussion.
3 to 3:30 pm
POSTER PRESENTATIONS, continued
3:45 to 4:45 pm
KEYNOTE: UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCES: WOMEN AND POWER IN POSTCONFLICT AFRICA
featuring Aili Mari Tripp, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Copies of Professor Tripp’s new book, Women and Power in Postconflict Africa, will be available for sale.
5 to 7 pm RECEPTION
5:30 pm AWARDS PRESENTATION by Rachel C. Lee, CSW Director
Friday, April 8, 2016
8 to 8:45 am
Registration
9 am to 6 pm
SESSIONS will take place from 9 am to 12:15 pm and from 2:45 to 6 pm
12:20 to 1:20 pm
Networking lunch
1:30 to 2:30 pm
WORKSHOPS
Intersection of Gender, Justice, and the Environment, featuring Martha Dina Argüello, Executive Director, Physicians for Social Responsibility – Los Angeles
At this workshop, participants will learn techniques to reduce their contact with harmful toxins and about issues of reproductive justice and environmental racism.
Mindfulness…Self Care and Beyond, featuring Giselle Jones, MSW, CMF (trained at UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior)
This workshop will explore the applications of mindfulness from stress reduction to increasing sensuality and relational awareness.
COSPONSORED BY: Graduate Division, Division of Social Sciences, International Institute, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Office, Center for European and Russian Studies, Center for Chinese Studies, Department of Political Science, Department of History, African Studies Center, Department of Musicology, Center for Near Eastern Studies, Department of Asian American Studies, and Department of African American Studies.
THINKING GENDER COORDINATOR
Amanda Domingues is a second-year MA student in the Department of African Studies. Her current academic focus is on twentieth-century social and political movements of women in East Africa. More specifically she is examining the effectiveness of constitutional gender quotas as a means to increase both descriptive and substantive representation for women. She is also interested in measuring women’s ability to direct public goods and policies towards women’s issues (both at the national and local level). In her free time Amanda enjoys German-style board games, eating delicious food, and spending time outdoors.
LOCATION AND PARKING INFORMATION
Parking spots for conference attendees are held in Structure 7, located just southeast of the conference location. Passes are $12.00 each (CASH AND EXACT CHANGE ONLY) and are valid for all-day use. Attendants will be selling passes at the lot from 1:30-3:30pm on Thursday and 7:30-9:30am on Friday. We highly advise that you arrive during these time slots (also conveniently during registration times); if you arrive outside of these time slots, you need to find a pay-by-space in the visitor parking area (see below) or go to the parking kiosk in Structure 4 (adjacent to Structure 7 and closes at 12pm on Friday). Please allow a few minutes to walk west to Covel Commons after parking.
For guests with disabilities:

Please proceed to the Sunset Village (SV) Lot. Attendants will be selling passes at the lot between 11am and 2pm on Thursday and between 7:30 and 9:30am on Friday. If you arrive outside of this time, please enter the Sunset Village visitor parking area and purchase a daily (discounted rate) pass from the pay-by-space kiosk. The fee is $5 for those with any state-issued handicapped plate or placard.
Unreserved “Pay-by-Space” Visitor Parking Areas
If you arrive outside of the reserved parking times, you can find parking at a self-service station. The closest and recommended lots are Sunset Village (SV, right beside the conference location) and Recreation Center (RC, just north of Covel). All-day passes are $12.00 each (cards or exact change accepted) and hourly passes range in amount. Please be aware that spaces are limited and allow yourself time to walk to the event if you do not park at the SV lot.
See http://www.transportation.ucla.edu/portal/pdf/paystationmap.pdf for all locations.
For additional info or questions, please contact UCLA Transportation: 310-825-3169
For info about Thinking Gender, you can email: thinking gender@csw.ucla.edu
Call for Submissions
Submission Guidelines
Panel Cover Sheet
Description of this year’s themes

Lee Ann S. Wang
2016-04-05 12:00 - 14:00 | Rolfe 2125
Asian American Feminisms and the Re-writing of the Legal Voice: Immigration Law, Criminal Enforcement, and “Cooperation”
A talk by the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, UC Berkeley
This talk will discuss the U Visa, a new form of legal protection designed to rescue undocumented immigrants from gender and sexual violence – but only if they willingly agree to cooperate with the police state. She argues that the visa’s requirement for “cooperation” binds any future for Asian immigrant women to the criminality of blackness and the whiteness of universal innocence. Visas such as these have been overlooked within contemporary immigration and policing debates that largely focus on moments when the law fails as evidence of racial violence. Instead, this talk takes the law’s proclaimed successful protection over legal innocence as the very site from which the violent constitution of legal personhood unfolds. Drawing from ethnographic interpretations of legal advocates who assist Asian immigrant women with visa applications, she interrogates the law’s evidentiary relationship between lived experience, humanness, and “voice” that make legible the legal subject of the crime victim. The 2001 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) created the U Visa alongside a host of other immigrant provisions that were not originally included in the first iteration of VAWA in the early 1990s when it passes as part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. I argue that the U Visa’s requirement for legal cooperation is a form of coercion that cannot be fully understood outside its elemental arrangement within criminalization and security regimes. This talk is part of her manuscript, “Of Law’s Protection and Punishment: Gender Violence, Asian Immigrant Woman, and the Enforced Safety of the Security State,” a legal ethnography of Asian American citizenship and the making of legal personhood at the intersections of immigration law, criminal enforcement, and American humanitarianism.
RSVP: http://leeannwang-aasc.eventbrite.com
Organized by: Asian American Studies Center
Cosponsored by: Department of Gender Studies; Department of Asian American Studies; Center for the Study of Women; School of Law; and UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship

‘If You Should Lose Me’ The Archive, the Critic, the Record Shop and the Blues Woman
2016-03-10 15:30 - 17:30 | Charles E. Young Research Library, Presentation Room
This talk examines the problem of iconic blues women who’ve been “lost” to history, Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas, as well as the critics who’ve loved and chased after them. By placing the politics of queer archival studies and black performance theory in conversation with canonical blues historiographies, the talk will explore the aesthetics and cultural resonances of Wiley and Thomas’s rare recordings. It aims as well to trace a black feminist counter-history of record collecting and listening publics in order to tell a different story of blues lives that mattered.
Daphne A. Brooks is a professor in the departments of African American Studies and Theatre Studies at Yale. She earned her Ph.D. in English at UCLA. She is the author of two books: Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham, NC: Duke UP), winner of The Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship on African American Performance from ASTR and Jeff Buckley’s Grace (New York: Continuum, 2005). Brooks is currently working on a new book entitled Subterranean Blues: Black Women Sound Modernity (Harvard University Press, forthcoming). She has authored numerous articles on race, gender, performance and popular music culture such as “Sister, Can You Line It Out?: Zora Neale Hurston & the Sound of Angular Black Womanhood” in Amerikastudien/American Studies, “‘Puzzling the Intervals’: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Narrative” in The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative, “Nina Simone’s Triple Play” in Callaloo and “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Surrogation & Black Female Soul Singing in the Age of Catastrophe” in Meridians. Brooks is also the author of the liner notes for The Complete Tammi Terrell (Universal A&R, 2010) and Take a Look: Aretha Franklin Complete on Columbia (Sony, 2011), each of which has won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for outstanding music writing. She is the editor of The Great Escapes: The Narratives of William Wells Brown, Henry Box Brown, and William Craft (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2007) and The Performing Arts volume of The Black Experience in the Western Hemisphere Series, eds. Howard Dodson and Colin Palmer (New York: Pro-Quest Information & Learning, 2006).

Organized by: UCLA Department of Musicology and the UCLA Center for the Study of Women
This event is part of CSW’s Feminism + The Senses Speaker Series and CSW’s Gender Research and Equity Committee initiative, with support from the Office of Interdisciplinary & Cross Campus Affairs.
This event is also the Department of Musicology’s 14th Annual Robert Stevenson Lecture.
Cosponsored by: Charles E. Young Research Library; Robin Kelley, Gary B. Nash Chair in History; the Department of Theater; and the Department of African American Studies.
RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/daphne-brooks-tickets-21037556899

Own Your Voice: Assertive Communication and Negotiation
2016-03-07 13:00 - 17:30 | CNSI Auditorium
Advancing Women in Science and Engineering presents Emilie Aries, the Founder and CEO of Bossed Up and award-winning women’s development coach, for a two-part interactive workshop on Monday, March 7th from 1 to 5:30pm at the CNSI Auditorium. “Own Your Voice” helps participants cultivate a leadership identity, navigate fear and uncertainty, and practice strategies for assertive communication and negotiation.

These two sessions are open to both male and female graduate students, postdocs and faculty members in all disciplines across campus. Each attendee has the option of choosing one or both workshops to fit with his or her busy schedule. There will also be a networking coffee hour between sessions with a LinkedIn photo booth and drop-in career counseling, complements of the UCLA’s Career Center, Grad Division, gradSWE, and Graduate Programs in Biosciences.
Please help advertise this event by distributing the attached flier to the CSW listserve. By promoting soft skill development workshops, we aim to break down existing gender barriers across UCLA and beyond.
RSVP: ownyourvoiceucla.eventbrite.com

Sponsored by UCLA’s Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, Office of Postdoctoral Affairs, Center for the Study of Women, Graduate Programs in the Biosciences, Graduate Division Society of Women Engineers, and Biotech Connection Los Angeles.

Death Beyond Disavowal
2016-03-03 16:00 - 18:00 | Royce 306 & 314 and Harry and Yvonne Lenart Auditorium of the Fowler Museum
Grace Hong will be talking about her new book, Death Beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference, which utilizes “difference” as theorized by women of color feminists to analyze works of cultural production as expressing a powerful antidote to the erasures of contemporary neoliberalism. Death beyond Disavowal finds the memories of death and precarity that neoliberal ideologies attempt to erase.
Grace Kyungwon Hong is an associate professor of Gender Studies and Asian American Studies at UCLA. She is author of The Ruptures of American Capital (Minnesota, 2006) and coeditor of Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization. She is also a member of the CSW Advisory Committee.
Kara Keeling is an associate professor in the School of Cinematic Arts at USC. Her current research focuses on theories of temporality, spatial politics, finance capital, and the radical imagination; cinema and black cultural politics; digital media, globalization, and difference; and Gilles Deleuze and liberation theory, with an emphasis on Afrofuturism, Africana media, queer and feminist media, and sound. She is the author of The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, The Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense, and the co-editor of a special issue of American Quarterly called “Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies,” among many other publications.
Organized by: Asian American Studies Center
Cosponsored by: Department of Gender Studies, Department of Asian American Studies, Dean of the Social Sciences, Vice Chancellor of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion, and Center for the Study of Women
RSVP: http://deathbeyond-aasc.eventbrite.com
Read a blog post by Savannah J. Kilner about Prof Hong’s book.

Memorial Tribute to Lena Astin
2016-03-02 16:00 - 18:00 | Faculty Center, California Room
Please join us in remembering the life and work of Professor Helen “Lena” Astin, cofounder of CSW and longtime advocate for women. A reception with light refreshments will be held immediately following the program.
Organized by: UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies
Cosponsored by: In recognition of Lena’s philanthropy towards students in the College of Letters & Science, the Deans of the College have generously contributed sponsorship toward this program on behalf of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women and the Department of Psychology at UCLA.
RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/memorial-tribute-to-lena-astin-tickets-21098684734
Parking can be purchased from kiosks in Parking Structure 2.

Theory Traveling
2016-02-18 16:30 - 18:00 | Royce 314
Chela Sandoval’s meditation is on Third World liberation, “US Third World Feminism,” Chicana Lesbian and Indigenous feminisms, the decolonization of “identity,” and the methodology of the oppressed.
“There were the sixties movements, fueled by earlier anticolonial movements all over the world, climaxing in Vietnam, Algeria and elsewhere, all such humanly emancipatory struggles, all then so fiercely fought for. You bring them together, and the world system began to question itself.” – Sylvia Wynter, 2015
We are living in an epochal shift where the very idea of what counts as “human” is being challenged. We can say that the anti-colonial and social movements of the 1960’s have gotten us to this point, yet these remain unfinished revolutions. Where do we go from here? Every academic discipline is reaching toward what being-human means during this transition to other forms of becoming. The new intellectual “decolonial turn” represents a major challenge to these institutions of knowledge and power. It asks every discipline, from Biology to English, to understand how knowledges are organized around a dominant notion of what a human being is. Doing so means recognizing that the white male European can no longer be used as the standard of what is “human” against which all other forms of life are to be measured. The “decoloniality of power” expressed in writings by Franz Fanon, Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa and many others provides us epochally new mutational options for being human.
The Nahual-Witness Ceremony and the SWAPA technology (Story-Wor(l)d-Art-Performance-as-Activism) represent one option for accomplishing what black feminist theorist bell hooks calls “de-self-actualizing,” undoing what we have become, to instead become “human-as-process” (what Sylvia Wynter names “being-human-as-praxis.”) For Anzaldúa, such practitioners are nepantleras who can be understood, in part, as beings-who-bridge.
Chela Sandoval is Associate Professor and former chair of the Department of Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her book Methodology of the Oppressed (University of Minnesota Press, 2000) is one of the most influential contemporary theoretical texts worldwide. She has published a variety of articles and chapters on social movement, third space feminism and critical media theory. Her current book project is on spoken-wor(l)d-art- performance-as-activism (SWAPA) and the shaman-nahual/witness ceremony. She is co-editor of the Chicano Studies Reader and Performing the U.S. Latina and Latino Borderlands. Her most recent book, published by UNAM last month, is Metodologia de Emancipación, a trans-interpretation of Methodology of the Oppressed. Sandoval teaches courses on decolonial feminism, liberation philosophy and radical semiotics. She received a PhD in the History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Graduate Student Colloquium in Armenian Studies
2016-02-12 10:00 - 18:00 | CA
This colloquium will feature
Erin Marie Pinon (Southern Methodist University)
Gohar Grigoryan (University of Fribourg, Switzerland)
Ari Sekeryan (University of Oxford, UK)
Piruza Hayrapetyan (Central European University, Hungary)
David Leupold (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany)
Elli Ponomareva(European University at St. Petersburg, Russia)
Gary D. Glass Jr. (University of Missouri)
Lusine Sargsyan (Yerevan State University, Armenia)
Anna Gevorgyan (Yerevan State University)
Babken Der Grigorian (London School of Economics, UK)
Mari Mamyan (Yerevan State University, Armenia)
Marieta Bazinyan (Yerevan State University, Armenia)
Levon Aghikyan (Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the National Academy of Armenia, Armenia)
Narine Jallatyan (UCLA)
Cosponsored by: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Center for European and Russian Studies, Center for Religious Studies, Gustav E. Von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies, Department of Linguistics, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and Center for the Study of Women

Gendering Disposability with Sherene H. Razack
2016-02-11 16:00 - 17:30 | Hacienda Room, Faculty Center
In 2011, 36 year old Cindy Gladue, a Cree woman, bled to death in a hotel bathtub in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada after having sex with Brad Barton, a trucker and a white man who had purchased her sexual services. Barton was charged with murder and the Crown argued that the 11 centimetre wound visible in her vagina had been caused by a knife. In a bid to demonstrate its theory about the knife, and on the advice of the senior pathologist on the case, the Crown introduced as evidence Cindy Gladue’s vagina, apparently severed from the rest of her body, into the courtroom. Evoking as it did a history of both the sexualizing and dehumanizing of colonized women, the presence of Gladue’s vagina in the courtroom caused a public furor and it emphasized the gendered locus of the contemporary colonial relation: Indigenous women’s sex. In this presentation, I explore the intensity of sexual violence directed at Indigenous women such as Gladue, proposing that we understand this violence as colonial terror.
A professor in the Department of Social Justice at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, SHERENE H. RAZACK is a noted postcolonial feminist scholar whose books include Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody (2015), Looking White People in The Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms (1998), and Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics (2008).

Coming Out As...
2016-02-08 14:00 - 17:00 | Charles E. Young Research Library, Presentation Room
A colloquium on how the phrase “coming out” has expanded, migrated, and been re-purposed by various marginalized groups, such as transgender individuals, undocumented immigrants, or the plural marriage rights movement.
SPEAKERS: Abigail Saguy, UCLA, and Kristen Schilt, U of Chicago, Laura Enriquez, UC Irvine, and Nicole Iturriaga, UCLA.
RESPONDENT: James Schultz, UCLA
DATE: February 8, 2016
TIME: 2 to 5 pm
PLACE: Charles E Young Research Library
RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/coming-out-as-tickets-2919920561
JOINTLY HOSTED BY: UCLA Center for the Study of Women and the Williams Institute
COSPONSORED BY: César E. Chávez Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies, Chicano Studies Research Center, UCLA Library, LGBT Studies, LBGT Resource Center, and the UCLA Sociology Gender Working Group
This event is part of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women’s Research and Equity Committee initiative, which is supported by the Office of Interdisciplinary and Cross Campus Affairs.
Abigail C. Saguy is Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at UCLA. She is the author of What’s Wrong with Fat? (2013, Oxford University Press) and What is Sexual Harassment? From Capitol Hill to the Sorbonne (2003, University of California Press). Her teaching and research interests include gender, culture, the body, politics, law and public health. Here is her description of her presentation:
What does it mean to “come out” as a particular type of person? How and why are people using this specific term to resist various sorts of stigma and demand rights? What does the cultural schema of coming out make possible? How does the history of the term, and its close association with coming out as lesbian or gay, color other usages of this term? Finally, how, in turn, are new usages changing the term’s very meaning? In collaboration with several current or former UCLA graduate students, I have been examining these questions over the past several years. I will discuss some of the central questions of the broader project before two of my collaborators—Laura Enriquez and Nicole Iturriaga—discuss two of the case studies in greater depth.
Kristen Schilt is Associate Professor, University of Chicago. Her research interests center on sociology of gender and sexualities, the sociology of culture, and the sociology of work and occupations. A central focus of her work is finding new ways to make visible the taken-for-granted cultural assumptions about gender and sexuality that serve to naturalize and reproduce social inequality. In 2010, she published the monograph, Just One of the Guys? Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality (University of Chicago Press). In this book, she illustrates how the workplace experiences of transgender men can help to illuminate the organizational and interactional processes that contribute to the persistence of gender, race, and sexuality-based inequalities in the workplace. Here is her description of her planned presentation, titled “Coming Out or Becoming? The Cultural Logics of Major Life Change”:
“Coming out the closet” has been a political strategy in the gay rights movement since the early days of gay liberation in the 1960s. Yet, while “coming out” can be a strategic decision to embrace, and to some degree, reclaim a stigmatized identity, it can also be a claim about essentialism – about making public an innate aspect of identity and/or embodiment that cannot be acted upon or regulated by informal social control or state regulation – a logic often encapsulated in the 2010s LGBTQ activist slogan “born this way.” I explore the idea of “born this way” as a political strategy for addressing stigma and marginalization through the lens of my book project, Before and After, that centers on the experiences of people who make major changes to their embodiment and identity. Drawing on a preliminary analysis of my interview and ethnographic data, I explore two competing frames people use to make sense of such changes: coming out as your true self or becoming a new you.
READ BLOG POST ABOUT KRISTEN SCHILT
Laura Enriquez is Assistant Professor at UC Irvine. She earned undergraduate degrees in Sociology and History from Pomona College. During her time there she began working closely with undocumented immigrant students and researching issues related to undocumented immigrant communities. Earning her Master’s and Doctoral degrees at the University of California, Los Angeles, she has researched, presented, and published on a range of issues related to the educational, economic, political, and social experiences of undocumented young adults who immigrated to the United States as children. Putting her research into practice, she works directly with colleges and community organizations to help them better serve undocumented immigrants. Additionally, she is a contributing blogger at the Huffington Post and participates in community-based workshops and panels to raise awareness about undocumented immigrant issues. READ BLOG POST
Nicole Iturriaga is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at UCLA. Her project, “Finding the Lost: Forensics, DNA, and Transnational Advocacy Networks of Human Rights Workers,” looks at how human rights workers use forensic and genetic technologies to resist repression and challenge dominant narratives of past political violence while also fighting for the goals of transitional justice, memory, and identity restitution of the disappeared. This project employs a multi-methodology approach including ethnographic, comparative historical, and content analysis to look at the rise and spread of forensic and genetic technologies in the field of human rights, as well as how these technologies are used by activist groups. Here is her description of her planned presentation:
My talk will be on the tactics used by “plural marriage” activists to cast members of such marriages as an oppressed minority and portray polygamy as empowering to women. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Mormon fundamentalists—34 polygamist women and men—involved in the plural marriage rights movement, she will explain how they not only distanced themselves from Mormon fundamentalist groups known to force underage girls into marriage but also rhetorically liken themselves to two populations with whom they have moral objections: Blacks and sexual minorities. Moreover, movement leaders reinforce the analogy with gay men and lesbians by strategically and self-consciously employing a language of “coming out of the closet” to talk about revealing and affirming their polygamist status. This talk will argue that they are drawn to this particular language not merely because it is culturally ubiquitous but also because of how same-sex marriage and polygamy have been connected via discursive networks. Additionally, this talk will consider the respondents’ claims that polygyny offers women advantages over monogamy, while also examining how post-feminist discourse about choice can reinforce patriarchal structures.
READ BLOG POST ABOUT NICOLE’S WORK
James A. Schultz is Professor of German and former Chair of LGBT Studies at UCLA. He is the author of three previous books, including, most recently, The Knowledge of Childhood in the German Middle Ages, 1100–1350.

CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap
2016-02-05 12:00 - 14:00 | Melnitz 1409: James Bridges Theater
This film screening and panel discussion will feature:
Robin Hauser Reynolds, Producer; Jane Margolis, UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies
This event will explore the systemic factors and barriers that prevent women and minorities from advancing in technology. This would facilitate a productive, scholarly partnership between the acclaimed producers of this award-winning film, garnering allies with much momentum and publicity behind their project.
Organized by the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation and cosponsored by UCLA Center for the Study of Women, UCLA Office of Instructional Technology, Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media at UCLA, and Creative Artists Associates.
DOWNLOAD FLYER
RSVP: www.regonline.com/CODEscreening

Ordinary Lesbians and Special Collections: The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives at UCLA
2016-02-03 16:00 - 17:30 | Cypress Room, Faculty Center
Ann Cvetkovich
Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin
Ordinary Lesbians and Special Collections: The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives at UCLA
Wednesday, February 3rd
Cypress Room, Faculty Center
4 to 5:30pm
Reception to Follow
What happens when a grassroots lesbian feminist archive finds its way to the special collections of a major university research library? Does it lose its counterarchival aura, or can it carry its powers of critical intervention into new spaces? This talk explores these questions through the case of the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives, which have recently been housed and catalogued at UCLA. It will focus in particular on how the self-archiving practices of “ordinary lesbians” make available the lives of those who may not be publicly recognized but whom the archive can make valuable. And it will explore this case history within the broader context of her research on queer archival politics, which includes the models provided by artists whose creative approaches to the archives are simultaneously critical and transformative.
Ann Cvetkovich is Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers, 1992); An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke, 2003); and Depression: A Public Feeling (Duke, 2012). She is writing a book about the current state of LGBTQ archives and the creative use of them by artists to produce counterarchives and interventions in public history.

The Myth of the Superwoman Revisited
2016-01-28 16:00 - 18:00 | Bunche 6275, UCLA Bunche Hall, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
The history of modern Black Feminism is unimaginable without the courage, words, and insights of Michele Wallace. From her 1978 memoir/manifesto, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, through her brilliant cultural criticism of the last quarter century, she has always written with extraordinary honesty, intelligence and beauty. This event is a great chance to hear her in person, as she continues to consider and reconsider the conditions of black women’s lives and the importance of their artistic contributions. — Ellen DuBois, Professor in the Department of History at UCLA
Michele Wallace, Professor of English, Women’s Studies, Film Studies & Africana Studies, City University of New York
DATE: January 28
TIME: 4 pm
PLACE: 6275 Bunche (History Department Seminar Room)
ORGANIZED BY: History Department, Emphasis on Women, Men and Sexuality
COSPONSORED BY: Robin Kelley, Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA; and UCLA Department of Gender Studies; and the UCLA Center for the Study of Women’s Gender Research and Equity Committee initiative (supported by the Office of Interdisciplinary and Cross Campus Affairs).
Photo credit: Stacy Long

Precarious Lives: Gendered Engagement with Neoliberal Development and the Contemporary Academy --CANCELLED
2016-01-01 12:30 - 14:00 | 352 Haines Hall
This talk is an engagement with the conditions of precarity that characterize the current moment. Linking my ethnographic research on offshore banking in the US-owned Virgin Islands to scholarship detailing the troubling neoliberal turn made by the American academy, this lecture is an engagement with neoliberalism and its effects. Building on black feminist scholarship, I take up the notion of intersectionality and consider its continued salience vis-à-vis contemporary operations of capital. I do this in order to demonstrate the ways in which neoliberal logic builds upon, and deepens, existing hierarchies—divisions that are most often named in relation to class, but are equally significant along lines of gender, race, and color.
Taking seriously the notion that the American academy is in crisis (with institutions relying increasingly on nonsecure, poorly-paid adjunct teaching, offering ever-fewer tenure track positions for the steady stream of newly-minted Ph.D’s that are produced each year), I examine the effects of this precarity on teaching, faculty/staff research agendas, and student advising. I pay particular attention to the ways female faculty members and scholars of color are positioned in this financial-academic environment. Linking these concerns to my own research agenda on economic development in the US Virgin Islands, my work provides a gendered analysis of the neoliberal project, as I examine the Economic Development Commission (EDC) initiative, a tax holiday program that has attracted a number of primarily American bankers to the island of St. Croix. In this talk, I explore the issue of gender vis-à-vis the EDC program, as I work through the gendered expectations governing the local women working in the EDC sector, a group known locally as ‘EDC girls.’ These workers, a group of local women who have contributed to the creation of a new social category on St. Croix, are expected to dress, act, and dispose of their generous salaries both conspicuously and in ways that benefit the broader community of St. Croix. I argue that far from serving as unwitting participants in these processes, these women perform a mediating role in neoliberal globalization, actively participating in the creating of new social and economic realities. — Tami Navarro
Tami Navarro is the Associate Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW) and Managing Editor of the Center’s journal, Scholar and Feminist Online. She holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University, and her research interests include Caribbean Studies, Gender and Labor, Development, Identity Formation, Globalization/Transnationalism, Capital, Neoliberalism, Race/Racialization and Ethnicity. Her work has been funded by the Mellon Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Anthropological Association, and the Ford Foundation.
Tami Navarro has held fellowships in Anthropology at Rutgers University and taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University. Before joining Barnard, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University. She is currently at work on a manuscript entitled Virgin Capital: Financial Services as Development in the US Virgin Islands which explores the way in which neoliberal initiatives that advocate the freeing of markets and purport to mark the way toward greater global integration build upon—and often lead to the entrenchment of—existing gender disparities and processes of racialization. Virgin Capital argues not simply the unevenness of contemporary globalized capital but also traces the ways that these circulations are rooted in historical dynamics of race, gender, and geopolitical positioning and argues these new circuits nevertheless produce emergent subjectivities, particularly as related to gender and class.
Organized by: Department of Anthropology – Culture, Power, Social Change Colloquium
Cosponsored by: UCLA Institute for Research on Labor & Employment and UCLA Center for the Study of Women

Dying From Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody
2015-12-03 16:00 - 18:00 | Law School Room 1314
A book talk by Sherene Razack, Professor of Social Justice Education, University of Toronto
What do inquests and inquiries reveal about how and why Indigenous people die in custody? What is said about a sixty-seven-year -old man who dies in a hospital in police custody with a large, visible, purple boot print on his chest, a mark no one in the hospital or among the police notice? How do we account for the police dropping off a barely conscious, alcoholic older man, Frank Paul (Mi’kmaq), in a dark alley on a cold Vancouver night, a man who could be seen on a video recording being dragged into the police station, presumably unable to walk on his own? What sense are we to make of the patterns of these deaths – patterns involving a repeated failure to care, a systemic indifference and callousness, and sometimes, outright murder? I advance the argument that the violence state actors visit on Indigenous bodies imprints colonial power on the skin, as much as the branding of slaves or the whipping and abuse of children in residential schools once did. Such a branding declares Indigenous bodies, and crucially their lands, to be settler property, and simultaneously announces that Indigenous people are subhuman, the kind of human one can only deal with through force. Importantly, the power imprinted on bodies need not take the form of a boot print. The failure to provide care, indeed to care, marks the body as a lower form of humanity, one that is already in between life and death. Legal processes such as inquests and inquiries endorse the racial hierarchy that a boot print produces through routinely declaring such actions as lawful, necessary, or inevitable. Through a legal performance of Indigenous people as a dying race who are simply pathologically unable to cope with the demands of modern life, the settler subject is formed and his or her entitlement to the land secured. The settler and the settler state are both constituted as modern and as exemplary in their efforts to assist Indigenous people’s entry into modernity. In this way, a killing becomes saving, and murder brings redemption.
Organized by: Critical Race Studies, UCLA School of Law
Cosponsored by: the UCLA Department of Gender Studies, the UCLA American Indian Studies Center, and the UCLA Center for the Study of Women’s Research and Equity Committee initiative (supported by the Office of Interdisciplinary and Cross Campus Affairs)
Sherene Razack is a Professor at the University of Toronto.
COPIES OF DYING FROM IMPROVEMENT WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE AT THE EVENT.
Read blog post about Sherene Razack

Refusing to Eat: Sensations, Solidarities and the Crises of Detainee Hunger Strikes
2015-10-28 16:00 - 18:00 | Charles E Young Research Library Conference Room
Nayan Shah, American Studies, USC
Why, when and how does the refusal to eat while in detention become a viscerally potent and politically volatile protest that challenges the legitimacy and conditions of incarceration. The presentation examines mass hunger strikes of political prisoners in South Africa, Israel, Guantanamo and refugees in the U.S., Australia and Europe. Drawing on feminist theories of bodily subjectivity, affect and ethics, Shah explores how sensory data, sensation, and sensitivity to human suffering mobilizes social justice movements, bioethical controversies and challenges to state power.
Nayan Shah is a historian with expertise in U.S. and Canadian history, gender and sexuality studies, legal and medical history, and Asian American Studies. He is the author of two award-winning books – Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (University of California Press, 2011) andContagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (University of California Press, 2001). Shah is also the editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (Duke University Press). Shah is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, van Humboldt Foundation and Freeman Foundation.
Organized by: UCLA Center for the Study of Women, as part of CSW’s Gender Research and Equity Committee initiative, with support from the Office of Interdisciplinary & Cross Campus Affairs.
Cosponsored by: Charles E Young Research Library
