Center for the Study of Women

Gendering Disposability with Sherene H. Razack
2016-02-11 16:00 - 17:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | 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

A Critical Moment: Sex/Gender Research at the Intersection of Culture, Brain, & Behavior
2015-10-23 - 2015-10-24 | UCLA, 330 De Neve Dr., Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Be there when many of the world’s leading scholars from the Humanities and Sciences discuss and debate issues at the intersection of sex/gender, culture, brain, and behavior. Great minds. Thrilling discussions. New connections.
SOME OF OUR TALKS
KEYNOTE: Anne Fausto-Sterling, Brown University
Recent Discoveries and Opportunities for Improved Understanding of Sex-Biasing Biological Factors * Art Arnold, UCLA
A Life History Theory Perspective on Neural, Hormonal, and Genetic Correlates of Variation in Human Paternal Behavior * James Rilling, Emory University
An Evolutionary Perspective on Sexual Orientation, Same-Sex Attraction, and Affiliation * Daniel Fessler, UCLA
Social Neuroendocrinology and Gender/Sex: Asking Hormonal Questions with Social Construction and Evolution in their Answers * Sari van Anders, University of Michigan
Where Does Sexual Orientation Reside? * Lisa Diamond, University of Utah
Technology and Globalization: Emergent Intersections of Culture, Brain, and Behavior * Tom Boellstorff, UC Irvine
Early Androgen Exposure and Human Gender Development: Outcomes and Mechanisms * Melissa Hines, University of Cambridge
Male Infertility, Assisted Reproductive Technologies, and Emergent Masculinities in the Arab World * Marcia Inhorn, Yale University
Naturalizing Male Violence and Sexuality * Matthew Gutmann, Brown University
…More Titles Coming Soon!
Register Now: http://www.thefpr.org/conference2015/registration.php
EARLY REGISTRATION (Reduced Fees) ENDS June 30, 2015

More information about this event…

Ely Guerra
2015-10-20 16:00 - 19:00 | Schoenberg Hall and Royce Hall 314
A Concert by the UC Regents Lecturer
Ely Guerra is a composer, lyricist, and musician acclaimed for her artistic activism on behalf of women’s freedom, rights of indigenous people, and environmental issues of communities along the U.S.–Mexico border. She is an artist whose musical compositions celebrate the popular and folkloric traditions of Mexico with contemporary themes.
Public Reception, Royce Hall 314, October 20, 2015
Concert performance, Schoenberg Hall, October 21, 2015
ORGANIZED BY Department of Spanish & Portuguese
COSPONSORED BY Chicano Studies Research Center, Institute of American Cultures, Department of Chicana/o Studies, Herb Alpert School of Music, and Center for the Study of Women
More info coming soon.

Personal Safety and Conflict Resolution: An Empowerment Self-Defense Workshop
2015-10-19 17:00 - 20:00 | Kaufman 208
This workshop will introduce participants to Empowerment Self-Defense training methodologies, a feminist, anti-racist, gender-inclusive approach to eradicating violence and fostering equality. Empowerment self-defense is based on the premise that, although only an aggressor is responsible for an assault, a defender has options when reacting to violence. ESD provides training for expanding these options. ESD focuses on critical risk assessment, boundary setting, how to recognize healthy and unhealthy relationships as well as on physical defense techniques.
The workshop will be led by Empowerment Self-Defense instructor Susan Schorn. Participants can be UCLA affiliates of any kind. Come prepared to move.
Susan Schorn is an author, martial artist, and empowerment self-defense instructor. She is the author of a memoir entitled Smile at Strangers: Life Lessons from the Art of Living Fearlessly. She writes a regular column for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and is a contributor to popular feminist publications such as Jezebel and The Hairpin. She has also written about academic research on the effectiveness of feminist self-defense training.
Organized by: Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance
Cosponsored by: Center for the Study of Women, 7000 in Solidarity, Bruins for Consent, and UCLA Counseling Center

Fall Reception
2015-10-07 16:00 - 18:00 | Rolfe Courtyard
UCLA Center for the Study of Women and the UCLA Department of Gender Studies invite you to join us as we celebrate the start of a new academic year.
All are welcome. Refreshments provided.
