Program Highlights
Because there are always more difficult dialogues to be had, the 31st National Conference in 2010 was themed, "Difficult Dialogues II." As did the previous year, the 2010 conference focused largely on panels and sessions, with less of an emphasis on extracurricular programming, and centered the voices and scholarship of women of color. The Keynote and Plenary Sessions were filled by women of color scholars, including two returning speakers from a 2009 Plenary Session. While there was no abstract for the Keynote Session, the speakers – Renya Ramirez and Andrea Smith – paired their session with a signing of their most recent books, respectively, Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond and Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances. Below are more details on the Plenary Sessions.
"Collaboration as Feminist Praxis Revisited"
Chandra Talpade Mohanty and M. Jacqui Alexander
M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty will build on their conversation about the nature of collaborative research and curricular practices, transnational feminisms and alliances, how they see this work as central to the field of Women's and Gender Studies, and how they have come together in their work to engage in their own forms of "difficult dialogues."
"Complicating the Queer"
Juana Maria Rodriguez and Gayatri Gopinath
The move to queer theory in women's studies has both expanded the field and simultaneously reinforced silences about nation, race, ethnicity, class, and religion. Juana Maria Rodriguez and Gayatri Gopinath will examine those tensions and possibilities in this session.
Also like the year before, the conference program laid out the intentions behind each of the conference subthemes. Below are those descriptions, along with relevant sessions from the conference.
Theme 1: Indigenous Feminisms: Theories, Methods, Politics
Language shapes and reflects power relations and terms like "indigenous," "Indian," Native American," "aboriginal" and "First Nation" have different historical, social, and political uses. We invite examination of how serious engagement with indigenous feminisms would shift the questions asked, the methods used, and the power analyses possible in women's studies.
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- "The Uses and Abuses of History: Methodology. Decolonial Feminist Critique and Narratives of lndigeneity"
- "Difficult Dialogues and Resounding Silences: The Twilight Cultural Phenomenon from Indigenous Feminist Perspectives"
- "Indigenous Feminisms: Always Already Breaking White Feminism Linear History"
Theme 2: Complicating the Queer
The move to queer theory in women's studies has both expanded the field and simultaneously reinforced silences about nation, race, ethnicity, class, and religion. We invite women's studies practitioners to apply feminist intersectional and transnational frameworks within queer studies.
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- "'Queer' as an Agent of Complication and Transgression: Rethinking Embodiment and Subjectivity"
- "Latin American Feminist and Queer Liberation Theologies in Translation: New Perspectives for Queer Studies in the United States"
- "The Paradox of Queer in (De)Colonial Orientations"
Theme 3: The Politics of Nations
Taking traditional women's studies topics (i.e., "violence against women") and reformulating them to more adequately account for the role of the state (i.e., incarceration, militarization, land rights, war, immigration/asylum) has the potential to yield new feminist theories, methods, and politics and to shift our understanding of existing frameworks.
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- "The African Female Body as a Site of Regulation and Resistance & Challenging the Rescue Narrative"
- "Five Years after Katrina: The Fall of National Policies and the Rise of Feminist Frameworks"
- "The Tyranny of (Delusion: South Asian Conversations on Feminisms, Secularism and Nation-building"
Theme 4: "Outsider" Feminisms
We seek to consider what it means to be positioned as epistemologically or phenomenologically "outside" of traditional feminist practices, theories, and politics. Meaningful and transformative political and intellectual practice often takes place when so-called "outsiders" both challenge hegemonic epistemologies and simultaneously articulate the barriers to working across difference in contexts of marginalization. We invite analyses of "outsider" feminisms in many forms, including but not limited to masculinity studies, girls studies, and disability studies. We would like to complicate these areas of study by addressing feminist theorizing about progressive masculinities, the experiences of girls transnationally, and issues of race, class and nation in disability discourse.
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- "Outlier Feminisms: Black Women's Art and Affect. Chicana Mestizaje, Black and Native Women's Coalition Politics:
- "Geographies of Nepantla: Theorizing Anzaldúan Spaces of Transformation"
- "Challenging Postfeminism: How Today's Popular Culture Has Pushed Radical Feminisms into the Margins"
Theme 5: The Critical and the Creative
Groundbreaking collections like Toni Cade Bambara's The Black Woman, Gloria E. Anzaldúa's Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color and Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga's This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color refused the false divide between creative expression and theoretical analysis. However, alternative approaches to what "counts" as knowledge have not been fully realized within women's studies. We invite examinations of the epistemological and political dimensions of creativity in many forms, including but not limited to filmmaking, new media technologies, narrative, and the fine and performing arts.
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- "Subaltern Rememberings: Mapping Alternative Approaches to Memory"
- "Fluid Exchanges: lntergenerational Navigation of Ways of Knowing in the Arts"
- "Feminist Revolution at The Interface of The Digital Revolution"