2021– Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all sentient beings. Her work in this lifetime is to facilitate infinite, unstoppable ancestral love in practice. Her poetic work in response to the needs of her cherished communities has held space for multitudes in mourning and movement. Alexis’s co-edited volume Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (PM Press, 2016) has shifted the conversation on mothering, parenting and queer transformation. Alexis has transformed the scope of intellectual, creative and oracular writing with her triptych of experimental works published by Duke University Press (Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity in 2016, M Archive: After the End of the World in 2018 and Dub: Finding Ceremony, 2020.) Unlike most academic texts, Alexis’s work has inspired artists across forms to create dance works, installation work, paintings, processionals, divination practices, operas, quilts and more. Alexis is currently in residence as a National Humanities Center Fellow, funded by the Founders Award. During her residency, she is writing The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde: Biography as Ceremony (forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux).Her book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals isa series of meditations based on the increasingly relevant lessons of marine mammals in a world with a rising ocean levels and part of adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy Series at AK Press.
2019- Beyond Intersectionality: Race, Class, and Feminst Futures
“Travelling While Black (Feminist Theory): A Quantitative Analysis of Intersectionality’s Circulation”
Starting from the position that it is more epistemologically and politically powerful to state that our feminism is anti-racist and anti-capitalist than to say it is “intersectional,” we ask: How are academic and activist approaches alike both emboldened and limited by intersectionality? Finley and Thomsen, along with their Research Assistants Harper Baldwin and Nell Sather, begin to answer this question by drawing on our mixed-methods and multi-sited data set, the first quantitative analysis of “intersectionality.” More specifically, we explore how “intersectionality” circulates in the following sites: feminist, legal, and critical race academic journals; Twitter accounts associated with the 2018 Women’s March and Black Lives Matter movement; explicitly conservative and liberal media; a survey we conducted at Middlebury College; and job application materials submitted for a recent position in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Middlebury College. In so doing, we consider the circulation of the term “intersectionality” and the citational practices that have enabled its institutional and political cache.
2018- Resist! Feminists Respond to Racism
This year’s Gensler Family Symposium on Feminism in the Global Context considers the tools and theories that feminism offers us to resist racism. Feminists are resisting racism in a variety of ways, from making films to taking to the streets to doing the necessary research to show how racism operates in our worlds and help us imagine how to resist.
2017- Sex and the State
This year’s Gensler Family Symposium on Feminism in the Global Arena will explore Sex and the State. At a time when politicians and political parties around the world are more explicitly patriarchal and even misogynist, we decided to explore how the state is often a masculinist set of actors, policies and effects. Please join us the week of April 10-14 for a variety of talks and activities that will explore the connections between gender hierarchies, the political arena, and feminist resistance.
2016- #IntersectionalTV: Mediating Race, Gender & Sexuality
In recent years our understanding of media and media representations have undergone dramatic transformations. Shows such as Orange is the New Black (Netflix, 2013- present), Girls(HBO, 2012-2016), Transparent (Amazon, 2014-present) have offered us stars, personas, and narrative arcs that were not always visible on mainstream productions. Our screens are populated by people of color, queers, trans, and gender nonconforming people. #IntersectionalTV has been designed to map out the contours of this emerging phenomenon: how social media, web-based productions, as well as diversity among show runners have altered the shows we watch and how we watch them.
Through a range of events #Intersectional TV: Mediating Race, Gender, and Sexuality maps out the contours of these emerging media. Screenings and presentations center on the pleasures, guilty and otherwise, audiences derive. Above all, the week-long series of events are designed to map out the complicated ways in which these media engage simultaneously with questions of race, gender, and sexuality. Together we hope to understand how these new media forms are complicating understandings of feminism, both here in the US and elsewhere around the world.
2015- Punishing Bodies: Feminist Responses to the Carceral State
The Gensler Family Symposium on Feminism in a Global Context will take place April 13-17th, 2015. Supported with generous funds from the Gensler family, this annual conference is part of the Program in Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies and this year will be co-sponsored by the Center for the Comparative Study of Race & Ethnicity at Middlebury College. We have an exciting week of events planned, with speakers and films culminating in a full-day conference on April 17th. The conference is open to all.
This year’s theme is a meditation on what feminism can tell us about mass incarceration, the policing of poor communities, and the highly radicalized violence we see the state commit over and over again. Racial hierarchies have been built upon gender binaries since the birth of modernity. The hyper-masculinization of black and Latino communities and marking them as dangerous goes alongside the “racial innocence” of a white state. Whatever response comes after Ferguson, after Trayvon Martin, after Eric Garner, after Tamir Rice, after decades of a war on the poor, they must include feminism’s intersectional analysis of how race and gender, class and nation, space and sexuality work together to punish some bodies in the name of protecting others.
2014- Sexual Straightjackets & Queer Escapes
The US has progressed to a time of sexual liberation—or so we are told. Gays can marry or join the military. Gay couples can establish nuclear families and rear children. Isn’t that equality? But what if “gay equality” is also a sort of sexual straightjacket that locks us into older notions of gender, family norms, the role of biology and patriotism? What if the only way to escape is through a feminist analysis of marriage, family, the military and a resurgence of biological explanations for everything from sexual orientation to shyness? This symposium explores how institutions embedded in patriarchy and racial hierarchies- like marriage, the military and science—are not necessarily a path to freedom, but a kind of sexual straitjacket. It also explores the possibility of queer solutions. The events highlight the continued salience of queer studies and queer theories. Rather than mourn the death of queer theory the symposium signals the important contributions this analytical framework can make to the liberal arts.
2013- Body Parts
Why do we associate breasts with women and muscled forearms with men? Why do we think six-pack abs are masculine and carefully manicured nails are feminine? Are we the sum of our body parts? Who decides what our body parts mean? These and other questions about our bodies guide the 2013 Gensler Family Symposium on Feminism in a Global Context to be held at Middlebury College during the week of April 8-12. Through an array of events — student panels, performances, film screening, formal presentations – this year’s symposium, entitled “Body Parts”, explores how some body parts come to stand in for our sexed and gendered identities. We will be exploring these questions from a variety of disciplinary perspectives such as biology, literature, and theology. The formal presentations include renowned scholars from the University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins University, University of Massachusetts-Amherst and other schools. The events are spread out over the week of April 8-12 and include student perspectives.
2011- The F Word: Feminist Texts, Feminist Lives
Producing Text, Enacting Change: Stephanie Coontz and Samhita Mukhopadhyay
Fracturing Feminisms: Kimberly Wallace Sanders and Krista Scott Dixon
2010- Interrogating Citizenship: Sex, Race, Class and Regimes of Power
This forum attempts to interrogate the concept of citizenship by looking at the ways it has been and is deployed by regimes of power, as well as in reaction to these regimes. In particular, we will focus on the interaction between constructions of citizenship and those of race, sexuality, gender and class. How has the concept of citizenship been used in projects of nation building, war, empire and labor mobilization? How have categories of race and sexuality entered
into this? Have there been significant cases of counter representations, alternative constructions of citizenship that question received categories in the cases under consideration?
2009- Sexing Money/Racing Capitalism
“Does Capitalism Have a Race and a Gender?”
David Harvey, Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York (CUNY)
Jane Collins, Professor of Rural Sociology and Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Wisconsin in Madison
Panel Discussion: “The Cost of Money”
David Stoll, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Middlebury College: “Women in Trouble: Microcredit, Migration and Foreclosure in a Mayan Town in the Western Guatemalan Highlands”
Laurie Essig, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies, Middlebury College: “American Plastic: A Cultural Economy of Cosmetic Surgery”
Jose Garcia, researcher, Demos Institute: “Demystifying the Democratization of Credit: The Role of Gender, Race and Ethnicity”
Panel Discussion: “The Color of Money”
Bob Prasch, Associate Professor of Economics, Middlebury College: “Race, Sex, Class and the Preconceptions of Neoclassical Economics”
Marcellus Andrews, Professor of Economics, Barnard College and Columbia University: “Capitalism and the Skin Game: An Economist’s Meditation on Math, Models and Racism”
2008- Sex & War
The war in Iraq has dramatically altered the political arena in the U.S., making it a key issue for debate in Washington, D.C. and potentially a pivotal concern in the 2008 presidential elections. Most discussions of the war have focused on the politics behind the military action as well as the human costs. There has been little sustained debate on the role women, sexuality and gender politics have played in the lead up to the war, in combat zones, or in their aftermath.
This symposium was designed to highlight how women and men experience war differently, and the impact wars have on society. In particular, participants will explore how gender operates in all aspects pertaining to war – the preparations leading up to war, the battlefield, the aftermath, and resistance movements. War tends to been seen as the work of men while women are considered victims, bearing the impact in their capacity as mothers, sisters, wives and daughters. This symposium was designed to break down these stereotypes and unmask the realities.
Events included lectures, theatre performances, film screenings and panel discussions. Co-sponsors fo the events included the Program in Women and Gender Studies, Chellis House, the Office for Institutional Diversity, the Academic Enrichment Fund, the Departments of Geography and History, the Program in American Studies’ Spiegel Family Fund, the Rohatyn Center for International Affairs and the Scott Center for Spiritual and Religious Life.