Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies - Feminisms Today Speaker Series 2005-2006

November-2005 | October-2005 | September 2005

November 2005

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a long-time activist, university professor, and writer. In addition to numerous scholarly books and articles, she has written three historical memoirs, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie (Verso, 1997), Outlaw Woman: Memoir of the War Years, 1960–1975 (City Lights, 2002), and Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War (South End Press, 2005) about the 1980s contra war against the Sandinistas.

"The Contra War against Nicaragua as a Modern Indian War"
A little known aspect of the Reagan administration's war against the Sandinistas, the "Contra War," took place in the northeastern region of Nicaragua on the border with Honduras, homeland of the Miskitu Indians. The CIA recruited Miskitus, as it had recruited Hmoung and Montegnards in the Southeast Asian war, dividing the Miskitus, as well as dividing North American Indians. Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, tells that story as it was observed by the author.

October 2005

Susan Stryker earned her Ph.D. in United States History at the University of California at Berkeley in 1992, and during 1998-2000 held a post-doctoral fellowship in Sexuality Studies at Stanford University, funded by the Ford Foundation through the Social Science Research Council. She has taught history, feminist theory, and sexuality studies at several San Francisco Bay Area colleges and universities. In addition to numerous short works, Dr. Stryker is co-author of Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area; contributing editor of the transgender studies special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies; author of Queer Pulp: Perverse Passion in the Golden Age of the Paperback; and co-editor of The Transgender Studies Reader, forthcoming from Routledge in 2006. From 1999 through 2003, Dr. Stryker was the Executive Director of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. In 2004 she was a visiting scholar in the Department of Critical and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, Sydney. Her most recent project is a public television documentary about the militant beginning of the transgender rights movement in the mid-1960s, "Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria."

"The Compton's Cafeteria Riot of 1966: Recovering the Militant Roots of the Transgender Movement "
Three years before the more famous 1969 gay riots at New York's Stonewall Inn, transgender street prostitutes in San Francisco fought back against police harassment at Compton's Cafeteria, a popular late-night hang-out in the impoverished Tenderloin neighborhood. Why has Stonewall been celebrated as the beginning of the gay and lesbian liberation movement, while the riot at Compton's has been all but forgotten? Historian and filmmaker Susan Stryker shows clips from her recent film, “Screaming Queens”, to launch a discussion about the riot, transgender history, and the forging of collective historical consciousness.

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September 2005

Sonita Sarker - Chair WGS Open House - It was an event to kick-off the new school-year, for people to gather for food and conversation to learn more about the department, courses, and faculty. Visiting Professor Christine Rose opened the event with a short presentation..

Sucking it Up: Vampire Epistemologies for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, or, Lessons from Dracula
Women’s Studies Departments all over the United States are taking stock of themselves. Approximately 30 years after the first Women’s Studies programs were created, we are now in the process of evaluating how the field has morphed over the years and how we can address the changing parameters of knowledge-formations that inflect our investigations. While some institutions are taking the “that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet” approach, many departments are taking seriously the question “What’s in a Name?” and are recognizing that the nature of our field necessitates the consideration of a host of cultural relations pertaining to gender, sex, and sexuality. This talk participates in the nation-wide conversation by encouraging the field that was historically called “Women’s Studies” to be willing to incorporate a shifting cultural, political, and intellectual milieu and to foreground the increasing role that the study of sexuality (LGBT and otherwise) has come to acquire in our interdisciplinary scholarship. Drawing from the Undead life of the legendary vampire Dracula, Professor Rose will delineate 6 cautionary tales that she argues must be taken seriously by scholars of women, feminism, gender, and sexuality.

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Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies · 651-696-6318

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