EcoFeminisms: Rethinking our interdependencies with the planet

Technologies of Resistance: Towards Feminist Futures Panel Series

The graduate students from nine universities of the Boston-area Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality originally organized an interdisciplinary symposium titled "Technologies of resistance: towards feminist futures" to be held at MIT on April 4, 2020. Due to COVID-19 and campus closures, this event was reimagined as four separate panels to be held remotely.

This panel seeks to critically engage with heritage from environmental justice and ecofeminisms by asking questions such as: In the current time of environmental crisis, how can we build affective solidarities with the planet? What lessons can we learn from past debates and how to move toward sustainable feminist futures without essentializing human beings, nature, or technologies?

Speakers include:

• Natali Valdez, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Wellesley College

  Natali’s work examines the production of scientific knowledge with an attention to race and gender. She applies a feminist lens on the emergent field of epigentics, which is part of the postgenomic era that explores how the environment can stimulate changes in gene regulation and expression. Natali studies how women’s bodies and reproduction writ large are a locus of experimentation, control, and treatment in the name of epigenetic science.  

  Natali received her Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. She is currently working on her first book (working title "Weighing the Future: An Ethnographic Examination of Epigenetics and Prenatal Interventions"). The book will draw from ethnographic data collected at two clinical trials, one in the United States and one in the United Kingdom, which test nutritional interventions on ethnically diverse pregnant women deemed obese. Both trials draw from epigenetic theories claiming that women who are obese during pregnancy will have children at higher risk of obesity and diabetes. The book will contribute a critical understanding to how epigenetics is changing the way women are monitored and treated during pregnancy.

• Banu Subramaniam, Professor and Chair of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, UMass Amherst

  Banu Subramaniam is Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Author of Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism (University of Washington Press 2019); and Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity (Illinois University Press 2014), Banu’s work seeks to engage the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology.

• Amy Agigian, Associate Professor of Sociology, Suffolk University

  Amy Agigian, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Suffolk University (Boston), where she is the Founding Director of the Center for Women's Health and Human Rights. She has engaged in public sociology as the co-director of the Practicum in Advocacy at the United Nations, as a principle of the Massachusetts CEDAW Project, and as the director of the (former) Master of Arts in Women’s Health degree program at Suffolk University. She is the author of Baby Steps: How Lesbian Artificial Insemination is Changing the World as well as articles, reviews, encyclopedia entries, and other publications. Trained in the sociology of women, gender, sexuality and health, at both the University of California at Santa Cruz and at Brandeis University, her teaching and many professional presentations have addressed issues including commercial and technological procreation, feminist approaches to infertility, the interrelation of health and human rights, and the politics of women’s health. She is honored and thrilled to be pursuing her feminist dreams as Executive Director of Our Bodies Ourselves Today, which will use the internet to bring critical, intersectional feminist health and sexuality information to further generations of women.

• Heidi Hutner, Professor of Sustainability and English, Stony Brook University

  Heidi Hutner teaches and writes about environmental literature and film, environmental justice, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, and media. Recently, her work expanded to include a larger range of environmental issues as they are represented in literature, film, and other media, such as global warming and climate change, radioactive nuclear pollution, food/agricultural and animal rights, and general sustainability and energy issues. Heidi has a MA and PhD from University of Washington.