WGS at MU

Trans 101: Tuesday, April 5th from 6-7 PM, Armstrong Community Lounge 2048
We will have an abridged version of GLBTQ Service’s Trans 101 training open to all at our regular general body meeting. It’s a flexible presentation, so if you would like a specific topic addressed, email Peyton at wumj@miamioh.edu.

Safer Sex Fest: Thursday, April 7th from 6-9 PM in Armstrong Community Lounge 2048
Join us for a festival of fun, inclusive sex education, including workshops by professors and sex educators. Free food, information, and useful goodies abound!
This event is sponsored by F-Word and Spectrum.

Take Back the Night: Monday, April 11th. Speakouts start at 6PM in Kreger 222 and the march starts at 7 PM by the Armstrong Seal. Speakouts are a safe and supportive space for survivors to come share their stories. Counselors from Student Counseling Services will be available. The march will meet at the seal and then we will march to Uptown Park where we will read a poem and see a dance performance.

For more information, email our F-Week chair at feldmaa4@miamioh.edu

Meeting with Graduate Students at 2-3pm in Bachelor 341

Death beyond Disavowal utilizes “difference” as theorized by women of color feminists to analyze works of cultural production by people of color as expressing a powerful antidote to the erasures of contemporary neoliberalism.

According to Grace Kyungwon Hong, neoliberalism is first and foremost a structure of disavowal enacted as a reaction to the successes of the movements for decolonization, desegregation, and liberation of the post–World War II era. It emphasizes the selective and uneven affirmation and incorporation of subjects and ideas that were formerly categorically marginalized, particularly through invitation into reproductive respectability. It does so in order to suggest that racial, gendered, and sexualized violence and inequity are conditions of the past, rather than the foundations of contemporary neoliberalism’s exacerbation of premature death. Neoliberal ideologies hold out the promise of protection from premature death in exchange for complicity with this pretense.

In Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Cherríe Moraga’s The Last Generation and Waiting in the Wings, Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People, Ana Castillo’s So Far from God, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston, Inge Blackman’s B. D. Women, Rodney Evans’s Brother to Brother, and the work of the late Barbara Christian, Death beyond Disavowal finds the memories of death and precarity that neoliberal ideologies attempt to erase.

Hong posits cultural production as a compelling rejoinder to neoliberalism’s violences. She situates women of color feminism, often dismissed as narrow or limited in its effect, as a potent diagnosis of and alternative to such violences. And she argues for the importance of women of color feminism to any critical engagement with contemporary neoliberalism.

Dr. Hong is the author of The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Cultures of Immigrant Labor (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and Death beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). She is also the co-editor (with Roderick Ferguson) of Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Duke University Press, 2011) and the Difference Incorporated book series at the University of Minnesota Press.

This event is sponsored by the Humanities Center, the Literature Program (English), the Graduate Program (English), the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program (GIC), the Asian/Asian American Studies Program (GIC), and the Department of Educational Leadership.

2. As a counter to the above examples, social media has also exponentially increased the reach of activist and social justice movements from Malala’s blogging, Black Lives Matter (sparked by the cyber activism of three Black women), Say Her Name, Trans POCC, and many other examples. How to we best harness the transformative potential of social media while intervening in the antisocial aspects?

Feel free to contribute your comments and stories before the panel via the comments section of our blog. This roundtable is part of the MLA Presidential theme of Literature and its Publics.