Updated: Fri, 10/11/2024 - 12:00

Campus/building access, classes and work will return to usual conditions, as of Saturday, Oct. 12. See Campus Public Safety website for details.


Accès au campus et aux immeubles, cours et modalités de travail : retour à la normale à compter du samedi 12 octobre. Complément d’information : Direction de la protection et de la prévention.

GSFS Advising 

Event

"A Good Woman With a Gun: U.S. Mythologies of Race, Gender, and Self-Defense" Public Lecture

Thursday, January 10, 2019 16:00to17:30

Caroline Light “A Good Woman With a Gun: U.S. Mythologies of Race, Gender, and Self-Defense”

Dr. Caroline Light, Director of Undergraduate Studies and Senior Lecturer, Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality, Harvard University

Abstract: What accounts for the rhetorical power of the recurring trope of the self-possessed, heroic, and implicitly white “good woman with a gun,” and against whom is she presumed to defend herself? This talk will explore some of the early iconography by which the armed white woman became a symbol of virtuous and vulnerable nationhood while addressing the intersecting racial and gender logics that contributed to a national ideal of what historian Barbara Cutter calls “innocent violence” in the name of collective self-defense.

Bio: Caroline Light is the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Harvard. She has a doctorate in history, and her work explores the ways in which race, gender, and region shape collective (mis)memory and archival silence. Her first book, That Pride of Race and Character: the Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South (NYU Press, 2014) discusses how gendered and racialized performances of elite, white cultural capital served as a critical mode of survival for a racially liminal community of southerners. Her recent book, Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense (Beacon Press, 2017) tracks the history of lethal self-defense in the U.S., from the duty to retreat to the “shoot first, ask questions later” ethos that prevails in many jurisdictions today.

Public Lecture: Thursday, January 10th, 2019: 4:00pm, Arts W-215
Seminar (registration required): Friday, January 11th, 2019: 9:00 am to 11:00am, Arts W-220

Sponsors:
Prof. Jason Opal, Chair History and Classical Studies McGill University
Prof. Charmaine A. Nelson, Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University
Prof. Alanna Thain, Director, IGSF, McGill University

 

 

Back to top