Feminisms Today Speaker Series

In the ‘Feminisms Today’ speaker series, hosted every month by WGSS, we have enjoyed the company of groups and individuals that are renowned for their contribution to local, national and international groups. Just in the last 4 years, we have hosted

(Academic Year 2007-2008)
March | December | November | September | Past Speakers

Ibtisam Barakat A bilingual speaker of Arabic and English, Ibtisam Barakat grew up in Ramallah, West Bank, and now lives in the United States. As an educator, poet, and peace activist, her work focuses on healing social injustices and the hurts of wars, especially those involving young people. Ibtisam emphasizes that conflicts are more likely to be resolved with creativity, kindness, and inclusion rather than with force, violence, and exclusion. Her educational programs include Growing Up Palestinian; Healing the Hurts of War; The ABCs of Understanding Islam; Arab Culture, The Mideast Conflict; and Building Peace. The ABCs was selected by the Missouri Humanities Council as one of its Speaker Bureau programs in 2003 and 2004.

In 2001, Ibtisam was a delegate to the third United Nations conference on the elimination of racism, which was held in Durban, South Africa. In 2004, she was a visiting writer at the Creativity for Peace camp, which brought Israeli and Palestinian teenage girls to Santa Fe to provide an opportunity for them to live together in cooperation and peace. In January 2005, she was a moderator at the fourth international Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace conference in Jerusalem, where Israeli, Palestinian, and international faculty members and students work toward finding creative ways to bring about peace for Israel and Palestine. Ibtisam Barakat lives in Columbia, Missouri, and her first book, Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood, was published in 2007.

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November 2007

WGSS Colloquium: Presentation by Visiting Professor Kulvinder Arora

The Mythology of Female Sexuality : Transnational Receptions Theorists have argued that the nation-state has increasingly become a limited category of analysis as globalization makes us aware of emergent transnational cultures. In this talk, Kulvinder Arora argues that the nation is still an important category for analyzing culture since national debates on gender and sexuality still affect cultural perceptions within national formations. At the same time, transnational dialogue on gender and sexuality allows for a reworking of national and nationalist understandings. She analyzes the transnational reception of Deepa Mehta's film "Fire" and the controversy it generated as a film about same sex love between two women in India.  By analyzing the transnational reception of this film and also the transnational reproductions of Hindu mythological texts on which the film's themes are based, she argues that cultural texts have incredible mutability depending upon specific locales and cultural politics.

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David Román is Professor of English and of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His research focuses on theatre and performance studies, with an emphasis on contemporary US culture; American studies, with an emphasis on race, sexuality, and the performing arts; Latina/o studies with an emphasis on popular culture; and queer studies with an emphasis on archival practices, subcultural histories, and artistic production, primarily in twentieth century America. He is the author of Performance in America: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the Performing Arts (Duke U. Press, 2005) and has written and edited books in the areas of AIDS and the arts and Latino studies. His current projects include a book on the racial politics of American theatre in the 1940s; a study of the memoirs of pre-Stonewall gay and lesbian activists; and a historical project on AIDS and cultural production in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Dance/Liberation
What do queer people do when they dance together? What links might be made between dance and politics? David Román examines the role of dance in lesbian, gay, and queer cultures in the United States immediately before and after the Stonewall Riots of 1969. He is especially interested in addressing the historical relationship between two keywords in queer life: "Dance" and "Liberation." The talk draws from the subcultural archives of queer culture including the memoirs of gay and lesbian veteran activists, the performing arts of the mid-twentieth century, and the political manifestos of early queer liberation movements.

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