Holly Karibo is a 5^th year doctoral candidate in the Graduate Collaborative Program in History and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation, “Ambassadors of Pleasure: Illicit Economies in the Detroit-Windsor Borderland, 1945-1960,” examines the history of prostitution and heroin economies along the Canada-US border in the mid-twentieth century. She has published work in several journals, including American Review of Canadian Studies and Social History of Alcohol and Drugs. Holly has also received a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Comparative Border Studies Institute at Arizona State University, which she will begin in the Summer of 2012.

Amy Gullage is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning and the Graduate Collaborative Program in Women and Gender Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. In addition to her interest in representations of bodies in popular culture, her research examines how discourses of the body, such fitness and fatness, are manifested in educational institutions. Her current work explores how teachers understand and use these discourses in their teaching practices.

Vasuki Shanmuganathan is a PhD candidate in the Collaborative Program in German Studies and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the intersections of race, colonialism and children in the German and Austro-Hungarian Empire. She is particularly interested in constructions of racialized, animalized and infantalized bodies in literature and culture, representations of colonial children, and imperial German business networks in colonial South Asia. Her research has won several national, provincial and university awards. She has taught in various capacities in German Studies, History and Women’s Studies departments.

Laura J. Kwak is currently a PhD candidate in the department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (SESE) at the University of Toronto. From 2006-2007 she served as the Korean Students Association of Canada (KSAC)’s first 2nd-generation female President. Her experiences in community and anti-oppressive organizing led her to explore representations of race, masculinity, and violence in a case study of the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings for her MA thesis.  Laura’s current project looks at the emergence of racial conservatism in Canada and the United States, charting how Asian Canadian and Asian American political figures are embedded in shifting theories of racial formation.

Click here for more information about the Women and Gender Studies Research Seminar.

Priti Ramamurthy

Towards a feminist politics of agricultural biotechnologies: Smallholder capitalism and ecologies of social reproduction in south India

Date:   April 5, 2012
Time: 4-6 p.m.
Speaker: Priti Ramamurthy
Location: Jackman Humanities Building, Room 100

Professor Priti Ramamurthy has been a member of the Women Studies faculty at the University of Washington since 1997. She is the Director and Chair of the South Asia Center, Jackson School of International Studies, and an Executive Board Member of the Simpson Center for the Humanities.

Her interests include feminist critiques of international economic development, agrarian transitions, consumption and commodity cultures, and transnational feminisms.

This event is free and open to the public.

This event is co-sponsored by the Women & Gender Studies Institute and the  Centre for Diaspora and Transitional Studies .

WGS 460Y: Advanced Research Seminar Student Symposium

Course Instructor: Professor Marieme Lo

Date: April 3, 2012
Time: 3-5pm
Presenters: Joan Densmore, Grace Yoo, Meaghan Morris, Jane Montague, Hoi Yan Mandy Leung, Alexandra Elford and Jenna Lee Forde Caprani
Location: WGSI Lounge, Wilson Hall, New College

Refreshments will be served.

Click here for the WGS 460Y Advanced Research Seminar Student Symposium poster.

The Michael Lynch Distinguished Vistorship

Date: March 29, 2012
Time: 4-6 p.m.
Speaker: Susie Bright
Location: University College, Room 140, 15 King’s College Circle

Susie Bright is the editor of The Best American Erotica series and host of the weekly audio show In Bed with Susie Bright on Audible.com. She has been a columnist for Playboy and Salon, and has been profiled in USA TODAY, Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, and Vanity Fair, among other publications. An international lecturer on sexuality and feminism, she won the 2004 Writer of the Year Award at the Erotic Awards in London.

This event is co-sponsored by the Women & Gender Studies Institute, Centre for the Study of the United States at the University of Toronto, Come As You Are, and the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies.

Date: March 28, 2012
Time: 3-5 p.m.
Speaker: Cheryl Suzack
Location: Wilson Hall, Rm 2053

Cheryl Suzack is an assistant professor of English, and was educated at the University of Guelph and the University of Alberta. Her research explores the intersections between Indigenous law and literature with a focus on Indigenous women’s writing in the post-civil rights period. She is a co-editor and contributor to Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture (UBC Press 2010), a co-editor of “Law, Literature, Postcoloniality,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, and a contributor to a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, “Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the Law,” which was voted best special issue of 2011 by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. She is in the final stages of completing a book manuscript entitled Indigenous Women’s Writing and the Cultural Study of Law. Suzack is cross-appointed to the Aboriginal Studies Program and teaches courses for English and Aboriginal Studies on comparative Indigenous literatures, comparative Indigenous studies, and Indigenous decolonization with a focus on gender issues and Indigenous women’s writing.

Click here for more information about the Women and Gender Studies Research Seminar.

SYNOPSIS

In “Tomboy,” filmmaker Céline Sciamma’s (“Water Lilies,”) second feature, a family with two daughters, 10-year-old Laure and 6-year-old Jeanne, moves to a new suburban neighbourhood during the summer holidays. With her short haircut and tomboy ways, Laure is immediately mistaken for a boy by the local kids, and decides to pass herself off as “Mikael,” a boy different enough to catch the attention of leader of the pack Lisa, who becomes smitten. At home with her parents and girlie younger sister, she is Laure: hanging out with her new pals and girlfriend, she is Mikael. Finding resourceful ways to hide her true self, Laure takes advantage of her new identity, as if the end of the summer would never reveal her unsettling secret. Céline Sciamma brings a light and charming touch to this contemporary coming-of-age story, which is also about relationships between children, children and parents, and the even more complicated one between one’s heart and body.

 ABOUT THE PRODUCTION

At some point, most people have the experience of being the “new kid” in town.  For a fourth grader just beginning to discover grown-up feelings of love and attraction – like Laure, the hero of Céline Sciamma’s contemporary coming-of-age film “Tomboy” – the transition to making new friends in a new home can be particularly challenging.  Laure’s world is already filled with confusion and transition, as her mother and father are distracted by the impending arrival of a new baby.  So perhaps it doesn’t seem that unusual when Laure, with her short haircut, athletic frame, and reserved nature is mistaken for a boy by the kids who live in her suburban housing development.  She introduces herself as “Mikael” and begins a summer-long experiment in trying to fit in by passing herself off as something she is not.

This event is co- sponsored by the Women and Gender Studies Institute.

Myra Marx Ferree is the Alice H. Cook Professor of Sociology and Director of the European Union Center of Excellence at the University of Wisconsin, where she is also a member of the Gender and Women’s Studies Department. She is the author of Varieties of Feminism: German Gender Politics In Global Perspective (Stanford University Press, March 2012). Other recent books include: Global Feminisms: Transnational Women’s Organizing, Activism, and Human Rights (co-edited with Aili Mari Tripp, NYU Press, 2006) and Shaping Abortion Discourse: Democracy and the Public Sphere in Germany and the US (with William A. Gamson, Jürgen Gerhards and Dieter Rucht, Cambridge University Press, 2002).

This event is co-sponsored by the Women and Gender Studies Institute and the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies

Please bring your lunch; beverages and dessert provided.

Ratna Kapur is a faculty member of the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations, Geneva. She was a Coca-Cola World Fund Faculty Fellow at Yale Law School in 2010. She practised law for a number of years in New Delhi, and now teaches and publishes extensively on issues of international law, human rights, feminist legal theory and postcolonial theory. She was the Senior Gender Advisor with the UN Mission in Nepal during the transition period from 2007-2008. She has also been a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University and Harvard Law School. She has held a distinguished Chair in Human Rights at Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, as well as the Endowed Joseph C. Hostetler-Baker and Hostetler Chair in Law at Cleveland Marshal School of Law. Professor Kapur also works as a legal consultant on issues of human rights and international law for various organizations. Her latest books include “Erotic Justice: Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism”(Cavendish, 2005) and “Makeshift Migrants: Gender, Belonging and Postcolonial Anxieties” (Routledge, 2010).

This event is co-sponsored by the Women & Gender Studies Institute, the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, and the Centre for Criminology and Sociological Studies.

This event is sponsored by the Women & Gender Studies Institute.

For more IWD event listings see the International Women’s Day website and the  Status of Women Office.

Date: February 27, 2012
Time: 4:00 p.m.
Location: Room 108, North House, Munk School of Global Affairs

The translocal strategies of resistance to the Europe-wide forms of racialization originate in a queer of color identity and activism shaped by transnational movements — central among them U.S. Women of Color Feminism and Hip Hop –while being rooted in particular geo-historical configurations of race, religion, colonialism, sexuality, nation and “Europeanness.”  Professor El-Tayeb will present the book’s larger framework, then explore the spatiotemporal queering of communities of color through a neoliberal restructuring of the city, in which the symbolic inclusion of the white LGBT community is dependent on the exclusion of people of color and on the erasure of queer of color positionality.

Judith Halberstam described European Others as “a ground-breaking study, a theoretical adventure, and a major contribution to the literature on European racisms, queer diaspora, immigration, queer subcultures, and queer of color critique. No other scholar… has been able to weave together the strands of sexuality, gender, race, and resistance in such a daring and compelling way.”

This event is co-sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States, Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, Department of History, Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, Joint Initiative in German and European Studies, and the Women and Gender Studies Institute.

Date: February 1, 2012
Time: 3-5 p.m.
Speaker: Gada Mahrouse
Location: Wilson Hall, Rm 2053

Click here for more information about the Women and Gender Studies Research Seminar.

Locating Occupy, SlutWalk, and Other Organizing Efforts

Date: January 26, 2012
Time: 5:00 p.m.
Location: William Doo Auditorium

Discussions from the panel will address the transnational and intersectional politics of emerging activist movements like Occupy and SlutWalk in order to look at the dynamics of local and global protest, especially as they relate to marginalised people within and outside the movements. Speakers will consider the causes and consequences of the increasing globalisation of protest, and its relation to increasingly globalised power.

For more information: http://thepoliticsofprotest.wordpress.com

Date: January 25, 2012
Time: 3-5 p.m.
Speaker: Kiran Mirchandani
Location: Wilson Hall, Rm 2053

Abstract

Based on one hundred interviews with workers at call centers in Bangalore, Delhi and Pune over the past decade, I argue that transnational service work provides the landscape for the re-inscription and daily, commonplace exercise of hierarchy between national subjects. Call centers in India are sites of colonial domination, patriarchal reification, identity construction, worker resistance, management control and racist expression – occurring simultaneously – through overt work processes and normative subtexts in place. In these sites, workers negotiate these relations in their daily lives and perform invisible yet vital “authenticity work” in order to hold the tension between diverse and divergent forces. The unique position of transnational customer service workers, which makes them an emerging touchstone of globalization, rests in their location on the multiple borders of class, nation and production.

Click here for more information about the Women and Gender Studies Research Seminar.

Saadia Toor, Associate Professor of Sociology
College of Staten Island, City University of New York

Date: Friday, January 20, 2012
Time: 12-2 p.m.
Location: Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place, 108N, North House

Register online at: http://webapp.mcis.utoronto.ca/EventDetails.aspx?EventId=11072

Saadia Toor is Associate Professor of Sociology at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. A native of Lahore, she has been active in feminist and Left political circles in Pakistan. Her scholarship revolves around issues of culture, nationalism, gender/sexuality, state formation, international political economy and the relationships between them. Her book The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan was recently published by Pluto Press.

This event will feature the work of:

Shahla Talebi’s memoir:

Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran

Chowra Makaremi’s memoir:

Aziz’s Notebook: at the Heart of the Iranian Revolution (Le cahier d’Aziz : au coeur de la révolution iranienne)

Roshanak Jaberi’s dance piece:

Behind the Stained Walls

Shadi Amin’s research work:

Documented Cases of Rape and Sexual Abuse of Female Political Prisoners in the 1980s

This event is sponsored by: Dr. Shahrzad Mojab and Bethany J. Osborne Memories, Memoirs and the Arts: Women Political Prisoners; The Hammed Shahidian Legacy Initiative; Women and Gender Studies Institute; Toronto Arts Council; Shahrvand: The Iranian Newspaper.

For more information about this event, please contact :

Shahrzad Mojab

Bethany Osborne

Date: November 30, 2011
Time: 3-5 p.m.
Speaker: Margot Francis
Location: Wilson Hall, Rm 2053

Abstract

This paper will highlight selected moments from my forthcoming book Creative Subversions (UBC Press, November 2011) in order to explore how whiteness and Indigeneity are articulated through taken-for-granted images of Canadian identity — and the contested meanings these images evoke. I argue that benign, even kitschy symbols of national identity are haunted by ideas about race, masculinity, and sexuality that circulated during the formative years of Anglo-Canadian nationhood.

Through a richly illustrated presentation I will explore how national symbols such as the beaver, the wilderness of Banff National Park, and ideas about ‘Indianness’ evoke nostalgic versions of a past that cannot be expelled or assimilated.  The irony is that insofar as Canadians consume versions of a past that do not nourish, the living can themselves become ghostly. Juxtaposing historical images with work by contemporary artists, I explore how artists are giving taken-for-granted symbols new and suggestive meanings. From the work of Indigenous artists Jeff Thomas, in What’s the Point? and Kent Monkman, in The Moral Landscape, to Wendy Coburn’s sculptural The Spirit of Canada, Eating Beaver, and Shauna Dempsey and Lorri Milan’s performance, the Lesbian Park Rangers, the book explores how banal objects can be re-imagined in ways that offer the possibility of moving from an unproblematized possession by the past to an imaginative reconsideration of it. This presentation will invite us to question taken-for-granted ideas about history, memory, and national identity.

Margot Francis is Associate Professor in Women’s Studies and Sociology at Brock University.

Click here for more information about the Women and Gender Studies Research Seminar.

Date: November 2, 2011
Time: 3-5 p.m.
Speaker: Jasmine Rault
Location: Wilson Hall, Rm 2053

Abstract

This talk will explore the role of positive affect in contemporary feminist and queer scholarship, cultural production, media arts and activism in the hemispheric Americas (North, Central and South America). I am interested in the ways that certain modes of feeling come to galvanise feminist and queer work, serving communicative and community-building functions for subjects and politics excluded from public networks of communication and community. While recent scholarship in feminist and queer theory, based primarily in and on the United States, is characterized by a growing preoccupation with affect, it has tended to configure feelings like optimism, thrill and euphoria as uninteresting at best and hegemonic at worst, investing instead in feelings like melancholy, shame and depression as sources for new generations of critical, creative and political work. I want to suggest that situating negative affect as the primary medium of feminist queer communication could be the result of a crypto-nationalist and ethnocentric critical framework that my work endeavours to expand. Indeed, this limited framework seems to discourage scholars from looking outside U.S. cultural contexts or references and may repeat a distinctly modernist conceit, casting those whose political work revolves around the cultivation and circulation of positive affect as somehow behind, pre-modern and critically underdeveloped. Focusing on positive affect allows us to recognize and take seriously the central mediating role that feelings like hope, celebration and utopia play in the transnational developments of anti-normative queer and feminist grassroots activism, artistic and intellectual culture throughout the Americas.

My research is inspired by several examples of queer feminist works which have emerged since 2002, and compelled by their consistent commitment to unlikely feelings of hope and utopic aspiration. The ‘creative resistance’ in my title refers first to the Resistencia Creativa movement, spearheaded by the feminist queer activist and artist, Jesusa Rodríguez in Mexico City, but also to works such as: the ambitious educational, media and political projects organized by Colectivo León Zuleta ¡Por la emancipación Social y Sexual! in Bogotá, Colombia; the hybridized cultural creations of the Argentine-Mexican, queer-core cumbia band, Kumbia Queers; the Toronto-Pride protest parties for Take Back The Dyke in 2010 and Stonewall TO in 2011; as well as the actions organized by the annual Pervers/Cité festival (dedicated to “The Underside of Pride”) in Montreal, Quebec. I propose that a sort of euphoric utopian striving has reinvigorated feminist and queer efforts with a consistency that cannot be contained or characterised by national borders and cannot be taken seriously by current scholarship that casts such positive affect as delusional or normative. I want to suggest that our critical frameworks need to be reformulated to recognise the positive affective valences that reveal these efforts as a movement of transnational anti-normative mediation rather than marginal, isolated or nationally specific phenomena.

Click here for more information about the Women and Gender Studies Research Seminar.

invites you to

Feminism and the Politics of Appropriation

November 11-12th, 2011

William Doo Auditorium, 45 Willcocks Street, University of Toronto

Open to the public

For more information visit our website at http://politicsofappropriation.wordpress.com/

Keynote: Rosemary Coombe and Carys Craig

“COPYRIGHT AND THE MORAL ARTS OF APPROPRIATION: FEMINIST AND POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES”

November 11^th, 5 p.m., followed by reception

Theme: This conference is animated by the question of how feminisms are shaped by the politics of appropriation.  It brings together feminist scholars from across Canada to collectively deliberate over how contemporary appropriation works and what alternative forms of exchange can be imagined.   Following Marx, appropriation is often theorized as a violent act of taking, producing alienation and property from acts of creation.  Yet, within contemporary arts and new media, acts of digital appropriation are also performed as radical interventions that seek to subvert property regimes and authorial relations.  Within anti-colonial and indigenous struggles, cultural appropriation is a form of epistemic violence that has accompanied material acts of theft and injury. Moreover, to appropriate can also mean to make proper and suitable, and thus to ethicize.

Given these multiple meanings of appropriation, this conference invites participants to track how feminisms and other political projects have also been appropriated, dis-assembled, remade within transnational circuits and new (as well as old) imperialisms.

• How to theorize the work of appropriation today?
• How does appropriation condition politics, as well as feminism?
• What might feminist alternatives to appropriation look like?

Conference Participants: Angela Failler (University of Winnipeg), Dina Georgis (University of Toronto), Ana Isla (Brock University), Kamala Kempadoo (York University), Marieme Lo (University of Toronto), Tracy Locke (York University), Egla Martinez-Salazar (Carleton University), Shahrzad Mojab (University of Toronto), Michelle Murphy (University of Toronto), Katharine Rankin (University of Toronto), Jesook Song (University of Toronto), Sunera Thobani (University of British Columbia), Alissa Trotz (University of Toronto), Carol Williams (University of Lethbridge), Habiba Zaman (Simon Fraser University)

Please direct accessibility inquiries and other questions to sophie.afriat@gmail.com

Speaker: T.L. Cowan, Assistant Professor (on leave) Women’s & Gender Studies Program,  Interdisciplinary Centre for Culture & Creativity, and Department of English, University of Saskatchewan
Title: “How it Feels to Hold Several Balls (in the air) at Once: The Dialectical Aesthetics of Feminist & Queer Cabaret”

Speaker: Jessica Fields, Associate Professor of Sociology, San Francisco State University
Title: “A Worried Lot: U.S. Voters and the Affective Grounds of Sex Education for Queer Youth”

Speaker: Trish Salah, Instructor, Women’s & Gender Studies Program, Interdisciplinary Centre for Culture & Creativity, and Department of English, University of Saskatchewan
Title: “Masculine Energy Entering the Room,” or A Close Reading of What Trans Misogyny Feels Like”

Speaker: Aparna Mishra Tarc, Assistant Professor of Education, York University
Title: “The Queer Character of Race Relations”

This event is co-sponsored by the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies and the Centre for the Study of the United States.

“It’s Not a Gay Thing; It’s a Guy Thing!”

Whiteness, Masculinity, and the Remaking of Homosexual Sex

Jane Ward

Co-sponsored by the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies

Thursday, October 20^th, 2011 at 4 p.m.
Women and Gender Studies Institute lounge
2^nd floor, Wilson Hall, 20 Willcocks Street

Although the U.S. media has recently been abuzz with commentary about heteroflexibility, most accounts have focused on “girls who kiss girls” for the pleasure of male spectators, or men of color “on the down low” who are presumed to be gay and in the closet.  But where do white men—the dominant culture’s most normalized and idealized figures—fit in to these narratives? In this talk, Ward traces straight white men’s homosexual encounters across multiple sites—including the United States military, online personal ads, the “college reality” genre of pornographic film, and the psychotherapeutic industry—illustrating the unique ways that white men leverage whiteness and masculinity to authenticate their heterosexuality in the context of sex with men. Taking sex between straight white men as its point of departure, Ward’s project offers a new way to think about heterosexuality—not as the opposite or absence of homosexuality, but as its own unique mode of engaging homosexual sex, a mode characterized by pretense, disidentification and racialized, heteronormative investments.

Jane Ward is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of California Riverside. She is the author of Respectably Queer (Vanderbilt University Press, 2008), as well as several articles on queer politics, transgender relationships, heteroflexibility, the failure of diversity programs, and, most recently, queer motherhood. She teaches courses in feminist and queer studies.

Questions about this event? Contact Professor Judith Taylor: jtaylor@chass.utoronto.ca

Date: October 5, 2011
Time: 3-5 p.m.
Speaker: Diane Nelson
Location: Wilson Hall, Rm 2053

DIANE NELSON is a Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Women’s Studies at Duke University. Her specialties include: Central America & the Caribbean, Identity, Gender, Political Economy and Popular Culture. Her newest project grows from her interest in cultural studies and cyborg anthropology and explores science and technology development in Guatemala and Latin America more generally. She is the author of Reckoning: The Ends of War in Guatemala.

Click here for more information about the Women and Gender Studies Research Seminar.

Moderator:  Professor Marieme Lo                     Introductions: Professor June Larkin

Join us for a vibrant conversation with top Ghanaian women’s rights activists, working on the frontlines of development, gender and HIV/AIDS, integrated sexual and reproductive health services and community justice.

Hear about how they are overcoming violence against women, empowering women and girls to take a seat at the tables where decisions are made and working from a holistic approach by integrating gender and rights perspectives in programming geared to women affected and those infected by HIV/AIDS.

A joint event between Crossroads International, ABANTU for Development, Pro-Link, Women in Law and Development in Africa-Ghana, Women and Gender Studies Institute, African Studies, and New College.

WGS 273 Y1Y  Gender & Environmental (In)Justice

Environmental justice is not just about the future of the planet, it is about social inequalities that connect and separate us here in Toronto, Canada, and everywhere.

It’s about you.

Learn what is involved in challenging environmental injustice!

We are extremely pleased to announce that Dr. June Larkin is the recipient of a President’s Teaching Award. This prestigious university-wide honour recognizes sustained excellence in teaching, research in teaching, and the integration of teaching and research.

In addition to being a stellar instructor in undergraduate classrooms, June has displayed outstanding educational leadership in developing and transforming the undergraduate curriculum in WGSI and Equity studies, in her publications on pedagogy and with students, and in her roles in numerous collaborative initiatives which have offered University of Toronto students and community members the opportunity to learn from and with one another, in Toronto and international settings. Two key themes characterize June as a teacher: a creative approach to curriculum, embodied particularly in the development of innovative methods for instruction and new or improved institutional structures to support learning in women and gender studies and equity studies, and her development of approaches to community-based, collaborative, socially engaged research and pedagogy. Her pedagogical approach is not only transformative for students, but it also contributes to greater equity at the university, in Toronto, in Canada, and in a variety of global settings, including Belize, Costa Rica, and South Africa.