Thinking Gender 2024

34th Annual Graduate Student Research Conference

“Dystopian Realities, Feminist Utopias”

Friday, March 1, 2024 (In Person)

View the conference program (PDF)

Thinking Gender 2024’s conference theme, “Dystopian Realities, Feminist Utopias,” considers what it means to live in the cataclysmic wake of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and neoliberalism. At the same time, the theme celebrates how feminist, queer, and BIPOC scholarship, activism, and art enact utopias by imagining alternatives to hegemonic structures.

The theme seeks to explore how dystopianism serves as an apt metaphor to explore and critique social and political issues related to gender, race, class, and sexuality and how utopianism is an ethical mandate to imagine a better present and future.

Our in-person program on Friday, March 1, 2024, will be open to the public. Guests who have not pre-registered may be admitted if space permits.

Raffle: You could be the lucky winner of CSW|Streisand Center swag, UCLA swag, and a gift card to the UCLA Store! The more panels you attend, the more chances you’ll have to win! Raffles include:

$100 gift card to the UCLA Store
UCLA Swag: UCLA backpacks, baseball caps, belt bag, tote bag, and mugs
CSW|Streisand Center Swag Bags
Conference-related books, including The Witches Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense and Queer Times, Black Futures, both by keynote speaker Kara Keeling

Friendly Reminder: Seating is on a first come, first served basis. Due to the high percentage of no-shows, we do overbook our events. Therefore, a reservation does not guarantee a seat, so we suggest you arrive early. We appreciate your understanding and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Program

March 1, 2024

View the conference program.

Conference Overview (All times in Pacific Standard Time)

8:30 AM — 9:15 AM Registration

9:15 AM — 9:30 AM Welcome

9:30 AM — 11:00 AM PANEL 1 Site-Specific Resistance

11:15 AM — 12:45 PM PANEL 2 Queer Worlding

12:45 PM — 2:00 PM LUNCH BREAK

2:00 PM — 3:30 PM PANEL 3 Utopian/Dystopian Aesthetics

3:45 PM — 5:15 PM KEYNOTE SESSION BY KARA KEELING “Notes on the Vestibular”

5:15 PM — 6:00 PM RECEPTION Collins Conference Room Patio

Keynote: Dr. Kara Keeling

“Notes on the Vestibular”

In this presentation, Keeling offers a short meditation on Black feminist Hortense Spillers’s use of the phrase “vestibular to culture” in her seminal essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” She focuses in particular on how sound functions in relationship to a specific sense of “the vestibular” and what attending to this relationship offers to the Black study of sound.

Kara Keeling is professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts and of American Studies and Ethnicity in Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at the University of Southern California. Keeling is author of Queer Times, Black Futures (New York University Press, 2019), and The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007), and co-editor (with Josh Kun) of Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies, a collection of writings about sound and American Studies and (with Colin MacCabe and Cornel West) of a selection of writings by the late James A. Snead entitled European Pedigrees/African Contagions: Racist Traces and Other Writing.

Asian American Studies Center

Bixby Center on Population and Reproductive Health

Chicana/o and Central American Studies

Comparative Literature

Disability Studies

Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

Gender Studies

Graduate Division

Humanities Division

Institute for Research on Labor & Employment

Institute of American Cultures

International Institute

Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, David Geffen School of Medicine

LGBTQ Campus Resource Center

Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies

Theater, Film, & Television

UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy

Social Welfare

Thinking Gender 2024: “Dystopian Realities, Feminist Utopias”

March 1, 2024