GWS @ Illinois

The Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois is an interdisciplinary academic department that coordinates a wide range of feminist research, teaching, and public service with emphases on intersections and assemblages of gender, race, and sexuality in national and transnational contexts. Find out more about us at gws.illinois.edu, and follow on Facebook.

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Queer Artists: Creating from the Margins 

In this interactive, multi-media workshop Virgie Tovar, writer, fat activist and Managing Director of San Francisco-based queer literary non-profit Radar Productions, addresses the intersections of politics and art, the role of the artist in an output-driven economy, the constructed worth of creative labor, art/ist displacement in the midst of gentrification, and the politics of artist identity. In this workshop, we will discuss: • The construction of labor value: how the body of the worker is an indicator of how the labor is valued / the way labor done by people on the margins is constructed as criminal and/or value-less • how artists from the margins engage with the political landscape in which they find themselves • code-switching professionalization - the intersections of art practice and non profit industrial complex/monetization Virgie Tovar is an author, activist and one of the nation's leading experts and lecturers on fat discrimination and body image. She is the editor of Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion (Seal Press, November 2012) and the mind behind #LoseHateNotWeight. She holds a Master's degree in Human Sexuality with a focus on the intersections of body size, race and gender. After teaching "Female Sexuality" at the University of California at Berkeley, where she completed a Bachelor's degree in Political Science in 2005, she went onto host "The Virgie Show" (CBS Radio) in San Francisco. She is certified as a sex educator and was voted Best Sex Writer by the Bay Area Guardian in 2008 for her first book. Virgie has been featured by the New York Times, MTV, Al Jazeera, the San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Huffington Post, Bust Magazine, Jezebel, 7x7 Magazine, XOJane, and SF Weekly as well as on Women’s Entertainment Television and The Ricki Lake Show. Her most recent speaking engagements have included University of Washington, Earlham College, Hollins University, University of California at Berkeley, University of California at Davis, California College of the Arts, Sonoma State University, and Humboldt State University. She lives in San Francisco and offers workshops and lectures nationwide. See more from Tovar here: http://www.virgietovar.com/ This event is generously sponsored by the Hip Hop and Punk Feminisms Collective with the Research Board, the Student Cultural Programming Fund, Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the University of Illinois Women's Resources Center, and the University of Illinois LGBT Resource Center.

The FB event page is here:

 https://www.facebook.com/events/404199413089621

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SOLHOT's own Michellay Wells made this video about SOLHOT (featuring brief introductions to a number of the homegirls) for a class project! 

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Take GWS 590 Critical Disability Studies with Prof. Toby Beauchamp next Spring semester! Here's the description: 

Informed by feminist, queer, and critical race studies, this interdisciplinary graduate seminar takes up “critical disability studies” in two intertwined ways. In one sense, it explores the critical theoretical and political frameworks that the field of disability studies offers: how does it engage and challenge related interdisciplinary fields? How do disability studies projects draw from, reformulate, and move beyond identity politics? What new approaches does disability studies suggest for questions of access, health, embodiment, citizenship, and knowledge production? In another sense, the course critically assesses the field as it currently stands and imagines its possibilities: what might disability studies exclude even (especially) as it is often grounded in accessibility and inclusion? How are the categories of disability, debility, and impairment produced through militarization, colonization, human rights frameworks, and globalized labor practices? What new forms of knowledge production and new methodologies could disability studies make possible? 

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Register for Spring courses in GWS now, including the ever-popular GWS 378 Fairy Tales and Gender Formation!

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Black Girl Genius Week was magical in it’s ability to transform spaces. For example, during a video shoot for one of the drill tracks, we turned an abandoned campus building (ironically, the former site of the university’s “Black House,” which was a place for fellowship and community building for Black students at the predominantly white university. Black students fought against it’s closure) into a disruptive performance piece. And by conjuring images of the Black people engaging with their community by sitting on the stoop we symbolically transformed university space, traditionally hostile to black girls and women, into a Black girl’s home. Through our collective artistry we were able use SOLHOT practices to shift, or at least clap back at, power relationships.

Sesali B., "SOLHOT's Black Girl Genius Week," Feministing (http://feministing.com/2014/11/14/96490/) 

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WE IN HERE

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Y’ALL AIN’T READY FOR THESE BLACK GIRL GENIUS STUDIO SESSIONS THO!!!! LIT!!! KNOW THAT!

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Performing, “I See You”, at Urbana High School 

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Check out highlights from Black Girl Genius Week at UIUC! 

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November 19th at 6pm, the Prison Justice Project presents, "Prison Vulnerability and Trans Politics," a lecture by GWS Professor Toby Beauchamp.

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Exhibition of No Selves To Defend held on July 18, 2014. Photographer Sarah Jane Rhee. The sign was designed by Antonia Clifford. According to @prisonculture, this is how they framed the actual exhibit: We decided that we would anchor it with the stories of Celia (a 19th century enslaved black woman) and Marissa (a 21st century unjustly prosecuted black woman). All of the photographs created with the sign can be seen on the Prison Is Not Feminist blog, and a few photos of the exhibit itself are on Prison Culture blog.

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Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths is hosting BLACK GIRL GENIUS WEEK during the first week of November! Here is the amazing poster for the week's events, designed by the brilliant Cristy Road!

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The individual posters for upcoming events for BLACK GIRL GENIUS WEEK during the first week of November, including a teach-in with Nikky Finney, a basement party and performance, and a coffeehouse show! 

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Gender and Women's Studies at UIUC held a series of teach-ins with students, faculty, and community members, this last September on academic freedom and political dissent, indigeneity and environmental justice, and this one on how "black lives matter" (pictured is the amazing Prof. Ruth Nicole Brown --author of Black Girlhood Celebration and Hear Our Truths-- starting us out). We also made event-specific buttons for each event, including this collection of buttons for American Indian Studies and the indigeneity teach-in.

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The Hip Hop and Punk Feminisms Collective also organized these Cristy C. Road events!

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We've been neglecting our Tumblr, but here are some flyers and images from some of our recent events, including this screening of OUT IN THE NIGHT organized by the Hip Hop and Punk Feminisms Collective!

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Hip Hop and Punk Feminisms: Theory, Genealogy, Performance (with images, tweets) · Inzombia

Tweets about the 5-6 December 2013 symposium at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, organized by Ruth Nicole Brown, Karen Flynn, Fiona I.B. Ngô, and Mimi Thi Nguyen, with Susan Livingston. These are more or less in chronological order.

Did you miss the conference, or just want to relive the amazingness all over again? Here are the collected tweets about the conference and shows. We will also have photos and videos posted to Hip Hop and Punk Feminisms soon!