GSFS Advising 

Event

The 2021 Feminist Research Colloquium

Monday, April 12, 2021 18:00to20:00

This year, the Feminist Research Colloquium will be virtual! The presentations are available in an asynchronous video format. The links are guaranteed to work until April 15, 2021. 

On the evening of Monday April 12th, the presenters will participate in a live Q and A session via Zoom. 

More details and video links are forthcoming! 

Live Q and A Session (via Zoom) Schedule

(all times are in ET)

6:00- 6:05 Opening Remarks by Dr. Alex Ketchum and Dr. Rachel Sandwell 

6:05- 6:20 GSFS Honours Students Panel (Hyeyoon Cho, Abigail Drach, and Meera Raman)

6:20-6:40 WMST Graduate Student Panel # 1 (Nina Morena, Sarah Abou-Bakr, Tayana Simpson, Anna Lee White, Sami MacKenzie )

6:40-7:00 WMST Graduate Student Panel # 2 (Amelia Eppel, Safia Amiry, Kit Mitchell, Alana Tumber)

7:00-7:20 WMST Graduate Student Panel # 3 (Rachel Hottle, Lara Balikci, Rebekah Hutten, Sadie Couture)

You need to register to get the zoom link for the live Q and A session. REGISTER HERE!

Abstracts and Asynchronous Video Links (in order of panels)

Video Links will be up by April 10th. 

GSFS Honours Students

Hyeyoon ChoMothering Survival 

My honours thesis explores the history of reproductive politics in South Korea from the 1960s to the early 2010s, by examining the biopolitical motivation behind population policies and family planning. My research is particularly interested in historicizing how reproduction has been enlisted as an instrument of the state’s modernist project, which is by definition gendered, classed, ableist and an ongoing product of struggles between multiple actors. In my presentation, I pay attention to the intersectional, historical account of women and queer communities who have been marginalized in the discourses of reproductive politics. Joining feminist scholarship and activism on reproductive justice, I investigate the assumptions that have become normative in reproductive politics and how they have been mobilized to oppress certain group of women. In doing so, I hope to broaden what reproductive justice could mean in the current Korean context, when the recent call for an amendment to anti-abortion law took place in 2019. By going beyond the pro-choice/pro-life framework, my thesis and this presentation ultimately tries to imagine a queer, decolonial and feminist agenda that can rework the ideas of reproduction, kinship and family. 

Abigail Drach: “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank”: Whiteness, Girlishness, and Biopolitics

Exploring the racial, gendered, and social dimensions of Anne Frank’s ubiquity in American culture, in this presentation I theorize the relationship between Jewishness and whiteness in contemporary American culture. Anne, as a metonymic figure for the white Jewish beneficiary of American multiculturalism (despite the fact that her family was denied refuge in the United States during the Holocaust), is an instructive case study in the ambivalent racial status of white American Jews since World War II. With a methodological framework of Black feminist theory and girl studies, this presentation first analyzes the whiteness of European-American Jews as constructed through visible, gendered, and classed characteristics. Then, using contemporary theories of biopolitics and necropolitics, I examine how some American Jews’ inclusion in whiteness is necessarily predicated on the exclusion, exploitation, and violent treatment of Black, Indigenous, and Brown populations through American white supremacy. Critiquing activist approaches that seek to include more groups within the fold of whiteness, I ultimately aim to demonstrate how we must dismantle the insidious racial hierarchies that structure all aspects of American society. 

Meera Raman: The Revolution will be Aestheticized: An Analysis of the Summer 2020 Black Lives Matter Instagram Activism

In this presentation, I examine the advantages and disadvantages of the Summer 2020 Black Lives Matter activism that took place on Instagram. Through an analysis of Instagram posts, alongside activist theory, I aim to present an argument that highlights the importance of Instagram’s aesthetic dimension in online activism. I will present some of my findings of my data set of Instagram posts, giving detailed explanations on the effects that they produce, and describe why this activism happened so largely on the Instagram platform. It is my aim, through my  thesis and this presentation, to provide a resource to activists and researchers alike who wish to pursue Instagram activism as a productive tool for social justice. 

________

Graduate Students in the Option in Women and Gender Studies

Panel 1

Nina Morena

Sarah Abou-Bakr

Tayana Simpson

Anna Lee White

Sami MacKenzie

_______

Graduate Student Panel 2

Amelia Eppel

Safia Amiry

Kit Mitchell

Alana Tumber

_____

Graduate Student Panel 3

Rachel Hottle

Lara Balikci

Rebekah Hutten

Sadie Couture

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