Fall 2017 Feminist Studies Colloquium Series: "Agrarian Questions in Urban India" Vinay Gidwani, University of Minnesota Priti Ramamurthy, University of Washington Based on recent life histories of urban migrants who work within informal sector occupations in Delhi and Hyderabad, we ask how “agrarian questions” orient workers’ attitudes to forms of labor and habitation. By also considering gender […]

Fatima Mojaddedi, "Body Mike: Alternating Words on the Afghan Frontier" This talk examines how the U.S. military’s counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan relies on a fetishistic misrecognition of speaking as inspiration, and takes linguistic expression as the dissemination of terroristic violence through oral networks of exchange and emboldening. It suggests that the more obvious powers of […]

We Bring Home the Roots: African American Women Touring Brazil and Bearing their Nation Patricia de Santana Pinho, Associate Professor, UC Santa Cruz The talk presents a chapter of my nearly completed book manuscript Diaspora Detours: African American Roots Tourism in Brazil. Previous chapters examine the effects of national identities on the connections between black […]

What Transpires Now: Transgender History and the Future We Need Susan O’Neal Stryker, Associate Professor, University of Arizona History is a story we tell in the present that links what we know of the past to a future we envision. In this talk, drawn from her forthcoming book of the same title, gender theorist and […]

QT Reproduction: Queen and Transgender Use of Assisted Reproductive Technologies Doris Leibetseder, Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley In this paper I present part of an allied queer-feminist and transgender ethics of reproduc-tion. I look at ARTs and how they raise challenges for transgender and queer people. My focus lies in the ways these technologies confront queer […]

Comparative urban studies are on the rise, raising new questions about translation, fungibility, and transit. How can we study the material effects of global capital in various urban spaces without conflating the spatial struggles and transformations of one space upon another? How can superimposing Western understandings of gentrification upon non-Western places impose onto-epistemological violence? This […]

The Iranian Women's Movement: Rights and Difference Omid Mohamadi, Lecturer, Feminist Studies My talk centers on the Irania women's movement and the One Million Signatures Campaign that seeks equal rights for all Iranian women within the laws of the Islamic Republic. Focusing on the campaign's central text, The Effect of Laws on Women's Lives, and […]

Towards Other Scenes of Speaking and Listening: Palestinian Anticolonial Queer Spatialities Mikki Stelder, Visiting Scholar In 2010, Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions called upon international queer communities to support the Palestinian calls for BDS. My dissertation emerged as one way to respond. First, I lay out the terms within which scholars and activists […]

Parenting Binary Trans Children on the Edge of the Bay Area Soma de Bourbon, Lecturer, Feminist Studies Parents feel urgency to mitigate the disproportionally high rates of depression and suicide among trans youth. There is evidence (Olson at al. 2016)that a gender-affirming environment can, in part, accomplish this. Many Bay Area families are gender supportive, […]