Public Feminisms: Roles, Responsibilities, Challenges
At a moment when feminism’s relevance to the public sphere seems more urgent but also more contested than ever, this roundtable reflects on the promises and pitfalls of public feminisms. Bringing to bear their expertise, the invited participants address the possibilities of using film, social media, and popular writing as public forms of feminist intervention. In so doing, the discussion complicates questions of feminist engagements, their modalities, their “proper objects,” as well as troubles which feminisms stand in for Feminism proper and what counts as the public sphere.
Roundtable discussion participants:
Amahl Bishara, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Tufts University
Amahl Bishara's research revolves around expression, space, media, and settler colonialism. She is currently working on two book projects. The first, tentatively entitled "Permission to Converse: Laws, Bullets, and other Roadblocks to a Palestinian Exchange," addresses the relationship between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank, two groups that are positioned slightly differently in relation to Israeli settler-colonialism. The second ongoing project examines Palestinian popular politics in a West Bank refugee camp. It examines how Palestinians in this refugee camp strive to resist three authorities, the Israeli occupation, the Palestinian Authority administration, and the United Nations Relief Works Agency through struggles over land, water, bodies, and expression. She is the author of Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics (Stanford University Press 2013) and regularly writes for such outlets as Jadaliyya, Middle East Report. She has produced the documentary "Degrees of Incarceration" (2010), an hour-long documentary that explores how, with creativity and love, a Palestinian community responds to the crisis of political imprisonment and has been involved with the production of bilingual Arabic and English children's books about refugee lives, including The Boy and the Wall.
Caroline Light, Director of Undergraduate Studies, Program in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University
Caroline Light is Director of Undergraduate Studies in Harvard’s Program in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her doctorate is in U.S. history, with particular focus on gender, race, and sexuality in immigration and consumer culture. She is the author of That Pride of Race and Character: The Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South, (NYU Press, 2014), which explores how a southern, Jewish benevolent empire emerged in response to the combined pressures of post-Civil War devastation and the simultaneous influx of eastern European immigration. Light is currently working on a critical genealogy of contemporary “Stand Your Ground” (SYG) laws. The book (under contract with Beacon Press) explores the history of deadly self-defense in the United States, and the race and gender implications of our nation’s radical departure from English common law mandates to retreat in the face of danger.
Kim Surkan, Lecturer, Women's and Gender Studies Program, MIT
Kim Surkan has taught in the Women's and Gender Studies Program at MIT since 2005. Dr. Surkan does interdisciplinary work in queer, feminist, and new media studies with a humanities focus, and is currently writing a series of articles on technology and the (trans)gendered body.
Moderator: Jyoti Puri, Professor of Sociology, Simmons College
Jyoti Puri is Professor of Sociology at Simmons College and works at the crossroads of sociology, sexuality and queer studies, and postcolonial feminist theory. Her new book, Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle against the Antisodomy Law in India, is forthcoming with Duke University Press (February 2016). She has published books, articles, chapters, and journal special issues on sexuality, state, gender, and nationalism, including Woman, Body, Desire in Post-colonial India (Routledge 1999) and Encountering Nationalism, (Blackwell Publishers 2004). She is a co-editor for the journal, Foucault Studies.
About Feminisms Unbound
This Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies (GCWS) initiative, Feminisms Unbound, is an event series featuring debates that focus on feminist concerns, theories, and practices in this contemporary moment. This series is intended to foster conversations and community among Boston-area feminist intellectuals and activists. The series, in its open configuration, endeavors to allow the greatest measure of engagement across multiple disciplinary trajectories, and a full array of feminist investments.
The event organizers, who are also visiting scholars with the GCWS this year, are Kimberly Juanita Brown, Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies, Mount Holyoke College, Lisa Lowe, Professor of English and American Studies, Tufts University, and Jyoti Puri, Professor of Sociology, Simmons College, have programmed the four events in this series.