RSS FeedUpcoming EventsRISE! 2024 Women Leader Nominations DUE March 31, 2024, March 31https://events.berkeley.edu/gws/event/240713-rise-2024-women-leader-nominations-due-march-31

Recognize women\ *leaders! RISE! 2024 Leader Awards Nominations are due March 31, 2024 at 11:59pm, and are open to UCB and non-UCB women* leaders. Awardees will be honored at the RISE: Celebrating Women, Community Love and Leadership event to be held in Fall 2024.

The RISE Leader Awards are about highlighting the exceptional endeavors and efforts of women\ *leaders as they continue to support and empower our community of Berkeley women through their participation and representation. Please take the time to nominate a woman* leader (community member, staff/faculty/visiting scholar/postdoctoral appointee and/or student) who has demonstrated strong leadership, care and love for the community, as well as, inspired and empowered other women.

Nomination link at https://tinyurl.com/RISE24 (Please use one form per submission, self nominations are welcome.)

*We welcome all who experience life through the lens of woman in body, spirit, identity - past, present, future, and fluid.

https://events.berkeley.edu/gws/event/240713-rise-2024-women-leader-nominations-due-march-31
A Tale of Two Bodies: gender stereotypes in Ancient Western Asian research, April 3https://events.berkeley.edu/gws/event/243953-a-tale-of-two-bodies-gender-stereotypes-in-ancient

When carrying out research on a distant past, it is easy to fall into the trap to cover uncertainties and gaps with gender stereotypes and expectations, consciously or unconsciously. The way in which we tend to classify anthropomorphic images as masculine or as feminine, always in a binary framework, exemplifies this trap well.

To reflect on this topic, in this talk I discuss two case studies. The first focuses on a thirteenth century BCE Hittite relief from Hattuša (in current Turkey), and the second on some foundation figurines from Nippur (in current Iraq), from the end of the third millennium BCE. Both the anthropomorphic images on the relief and the figurines were almost unanimously considered by scholars to be female when they were first discussed in the early twentieth century, but today they are identified as male. The historiographical approach I propose here to reflect on how and why this shift came about aims to show how contingent and variable are the definitions of what is a female body, and what is a male body, something we often still forget in ancient history and related disciplines.

https://events.berkeley.edu/gws/event/243953-a-tale-of-two-bodies-gender-stereotypes-in-ancient
Diaspora/Situations: Interstitial queer worldmaking, April 10https://events.berkeley.edu/gws/event/241936-diasporasituations-interstitial-queer-worldmaking

Part of the 2023-2023 Decolonizing Gender and Sexuality Lecture Series

Lecture Description

Despite obliteration, peripheralization, and subsequent erasure from white queer movements, decolonial queer diasporic theorization has resisted and survived in France. In contrast to the conventional queer mobilisation focused on same-sex marriage and other attendant economic and social rights, queer of color and queer migrant organisation, albeit occupying disparate temporal and spatial dimensions, has underscored the critique of coloniality of race/ethnicity in their inhabitation of queerness(-es). In so doing, such mobilization has theorized multiple ways of understanding intersections of power, producing multiple terminologies such as diaspora/situations (Tarek Lakhrissi), queers racisé·e·s, queers/trans révolutionnaires and other French-specific conceptual formations.

Informed by my work with the Decolonizing Sexualities Network, this talk focuses on ‘interstitial queer worldmaking’ as theorization specifically emerging from the ‘interstices’ of queer exilic and diasporic thinking in France. It concerns the spacemaking creativity of queer and trans artists, writers and activism scholarship to understand how certain manifestations of queer in the interstices of coerced economic deprivation, racism, coloniality, occupation and exile, and language produce multiple valences of queer futures that underscore both survival and thrival. Through an engagement with the productions of artists and wrtiers such as, Tarek Lakhrissi (Morocco/France), Alexandre Erre (New Caledonia/France), Kama La Mackerel (Mauritius/Canada), Abdellah Taia (Morocco/France), and activism scholarship, it reads a decolonial queer modality of thinking and doing into contemporary France through the various theorizations being developed in the interstices by queer diasporic and exilic enunciations.

Biography

Sandeep Bakshi researches transnational queer and decolonial enunciation of knowledges. He received his PhD from the School of English, University of Leicester, UK, and is currently employed as an Associate Professor of Decolonial, Postcolonial and Queer Studies at Université Paris Cité. He coordinates two research seminars, “Peripheral Knowledges” and “Empires, Souths, Sexualities,” and headed the “Gender and Sexuality Studies” research group (2020-2023). Co-editor of Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions (Oxford: Counterpress, 2016) and Decolonial Trajectories, special issue of Interventions (2020), he has published on queer and race problematics in postcolonial literatures and cultures. He is the co-founder and serves on the board of the Decolonizing Sexualities Network (https://decolonizingsexualities.org).

About the Decolonizing Gender and Sexuality lecture series:

At present, scholars in many parts of the global south(s) - including the south(s) in the north(s) - are inventing extremely meaningful decolonial gender and sexualities approaches, concepts, methods, and other related theorizations. They generally build upon a long genealogy of such scholarship in their contexts and across the world. Unfortunately, due to a multiplicity of relations of power, most of this work remains unknown, marginalized or erased in the global north(s). This speakers’ series brings scholars of decolonial gender and sexuality together, across languages, regions, kinds of theorizations, in the hope of opening up a space for dialogue.

If you require an accommodation for effective communication in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Gillian Edgelow at gilliane@berkeley.edu or 510-643-7172 with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

https://events.berkeley.edu/gws/event/241936-diasporasituations-interstitial-queer-worldmaking
A talk by Prof. Shailaja Paik, author of Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination., April 24https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/114926-a-talk-by-prof-shailaja-paik-author-of-dalit-womens-e

A talk by Shailaja Paik, Charles P. Taft Distinguished Professor of History and Affiliate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Asian Studies, University of Cincinnati and the author of Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination.
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DATE: Wed, April 24, 2024
TIME: 5 - 6:30 pm Berkeley | Calculate Your Local Time
VENUE: 10 Stephens Hall
LIVESTREAM: On FB at ISASatUCBerkeley
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Speaker Bio
Shailaja Paik is Charles P. Taft Distinguished Professor of History and Affiliate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Asian Studies, University of Cincinnati  and the author of Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination (London and New York: Routledge, 2014). Paik’s current research is funded by the American Council of Learned Societies Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship, Stanford Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities-American Institute of Indian Studies Senior Fellowship. She will be a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center next year.

Her first book, Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination (Routledge, 2014 ), examines the nexus between caste, class, gender, and state pedagogical practices among Dalit (“Untouchable”) women in urban India. Paik’s current research is funded by the American Council of Learned Societies Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Humanities-American Institute of Indian Studies Senior Fellowship.

Her second book, The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanityin Modern India (Stanford University Press, 2022), analyzes the politics of caste, class, gender, sexuality, and popular culture in modern Maharashtra. The book won the American Historical Association’s John F. Richards award for “the most distinguished work of scholarship on South Asia”.

Paik is working on several new book projects: Becoming “Vulgar”: Caste Domination and Normative Sexuality in Modern India, Caste and Race in South Asia, and the Cambridge Companion to Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. She has published several articles on a variety of themes, including the politics of naming, Dalit and African American women, Dalit women’s education, and new Dalit womanhood in colonial India, in prestigious international journals. Her research has been funded by Yale University, Emory University, the Ford Foundation, Warwick University, Charles Wallace India Trust, and the Indian Council of Social Sciences and Research, among others. Her scholarship and research interests are concerned with contributing to and furthering the dialogue in human rights, anti-colonial struggles, transnational women’s history, women-of-color feminisms, and particularly on gendering caste, and subaltern history. Paik recently co-organized the “Fifth International Conference on the Unfinished Legacy of Dr. Ambedkar” at the New School, October 2019.
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For DIRECTIONS to the Institute please enter “Institute for South Asia Studies” in your google maps or click this GOOGLE MAPS LINK.

PARKING INFORMATION
Please note that parking is not always easily available in Berkeley. Take public transportation if possible or arrive early to secure your spot.

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If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Puneeta Kala at pkala@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

/live/events/114926-a-talk-by-prof-shailaja-paik-author-of-dalit-womens-e
India Elections 2024: Hindu Nationalism, Ayodhya, and Dispossession (CRG Forum Series), April 26https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/243690-india-elections-2024-hindu-nationalism-ayodhya-and-di

CRG’s Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Initiative presents:
INDIA ELECTIONS 2024: HINDU NATIONALISM, AYODHYA, AND DISPOSSESSION
with

  • Angana P. Chatterji (Founding Co-Chair, Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Initiative, Center for Race and Gender; and Research Anthropologist, UC Berkeley

  • Thomas Blom Hansen (Professor of Anthropology and Department Chair, Stanford University)

  • Audrey Truschke (Professor and Asian Studies Director, School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University - Newark)

  • Ather Zia (Associate Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies, University of Northern Colorado)

Welcome, Moderation & Closing Remarks by:

  • Paola Bacchetta (Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Vice Chair for Research, and Director, Institute for Gender and Sexuality Research, UC Berkeley)
    University of California, Berkeley)

  • Elora Shehabuddin (Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Global Studies, and Director, Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies, UC Berkeley)

  • Leti Volpp (Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law, UC Berkeley School of Law, and Director, Center for Race and Gender, UC Berkeley)

 

*If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) to fully participate in this event, please contact Ariana Ceja at centerrg@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

/live/events/243690-india-elections-2024-hindu-nationalism-ayodhya-and-di
Authors Meet Critics, “Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex,” Juana María Rodríguez, May 1https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/239503-authors-meet-critics-puta-life-seeing-latinas

Join us on May 1 for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex, by Juana María Rodríguez, Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Professor Rodriguez will be joined in conversation by Clarissa Rojas, Assistant Professor of Chicana/o Studies at UC Davis, and Milena Britto, Associate Professor of Literature at the Federal University of Bahia and currently a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley. The discussion will be moderated by Alberto Ledesma, Assistant Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity in the Division of Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley.

The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the UC Berkeley Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.

REGISTER TO ATTEND

About the Book

In Puta Life, Juana María Rodríguez probes the ways that sexual labor and Latina sexuality become visual phenomena. Drawing on state archives, illustrated biographies, documentary films, photojournalistic essays, graphic novels, and digital spaces, she focuses on the figure of the puta—the whore, that phantasmatic figure of Latinized feminine excess. Rodríguez’s eclectic archive features the faces and stories of women whose lives have been mediated by sex work’s stigmatization and criminalization—washerwomen and masked wrestlers, porn stars and sexiles. Rodríguez examines how visual tropes of racial and sexual deviance expose feminine subjects to misogyny and violence, attuning our gaze to how visual documentation shapes perceptions of sexual labor. Throughout this poignant and personal text, Rodríguez brings the language of affect and aesthetics to bear upon understandings of gender, age, race, sexuality, labor, disability, and migration. Highlighting the criminalization and stigmatization that surrounds sex work, she lingers on those traces of felt possibility that might inspire more ethical forms of relation and care.

Panelists

Juana María Rodríguez is a cultural critic, public speaker, and award-winning author who writes about sexual cultures, racial politics, and the many tangled expressions of Latina identity. A Professor of Ethnic Studies; Gender and Women’s Studies, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, she is the author of Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex (Duke UP 2023); Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (NYU Press 2014); and Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (NYU Press, 2003). In 2023, Dr. Rodríguez was honored by The Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies’ with the prestigious Kessler Award, in recognition of her significant lifelong contributions to the field of LGBT Studies.

Clarissa Rojas is a scholar activist, poet, mama, and movement maker. Her mother’s indigenous lineages in the Americas root her in the Arizona/Sonora deserts. Clarissa grew up in Mexicali/Calexico and San Diego/Chula Vista where her family migrated. She lives in Oakland in unceded Huichin and is faculty in Chicanx Studies, Cultural Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies at UC Davis. Clarissa co-founded INCITE! and has authored and co-edited multiple articles, special issues, and books on violence and the transformation of violence, including Color of Violence: the INCITE Anthology, Community Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence and most recently her writing appears in the Journal of Lesbian Studies and Abolition Feminisms.

Milena Britto is an Associate Professor of Literature at the Federal University of Bahia and currently a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on gender, race, literature and strategies of legitimation in the cultural field. She is also a curator, publishing editor, and has worked in several positions of cultural public policy.

Alberto Ledesma (moderator) is Assistant Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity in the Division of Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley. He grew up in East Oakland and received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from UC Berkeley. He earned a Ph.D. in ethnic studies in 1996 and is a former faculty member at California State University, Monterey Bay, and a lecturer in ethnic studies at UC Berkeley. He has held several staff positions at UC Berkeley, including director of admissions at the School of Optometry, and writing program coordinator at the Student Learning Center. He is the author of the award winning illustrated autobiography, Diary of A Reluctant Dreamer.

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