Eighth Biennial ACS Gender Studies/Women’s Studies Conference

The Personal is Still Political: Gendered Identities in the Twenty-First Century

March 6-7, 2009
Rhodes College

Photos

Over 125 faculty and students gathered for the Eighth Biennial Gender Studies and Women’s Studies Conference at Rhodes College March 6 and 7. They represented 11 ACS and 17 non-ACS institutions including international presenters from universities in the United Kingdom and France. Plenary sessions, focused panels, artwork and entertainment were blended to present the conference theme, “The Personal is Still Political: Gendered Identities in the Twenty-first Century.” The conference focused on the historical trajectory of feminist theory and activism as well as contemporary assessment of the field. The conference’s goal to reinvigorate a conversation about the enduring structural and institutional effects of gender was certainly met.

Undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty presented original papers grouped into categories such as “Global Perspectives on Women and Politics,” “Science Fiction and Gender,” “Visual Culture and Gender,” “Masculine Privilege,” “International Issues from World War II to the Present,” “How to Put Gender in Women’s and Gender Studies,” “The Gendering of University Life” and “The Gendering of Popular Culture.” There were many other categories as well. The presentations were fresh, thorough, stimulating and engaging.

The keynote speaker was Angela Davis, Professor of History and Feminist Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Dr. Davis, author of eight books, has been deeply involved in our nation’s quest for social justice. Her work as an educator – both at the university level and in the larger public sphere – has always emphasized the importance of building communities for economic, racial, and gender equality. Her talk was informative, impassioned and geared directly to the conference theme. It was open to conference participants, the Rhodes College faculty and students, as well as to the Memphis community. A 450-seat auditorium was filled with intent listeners excited to be a part of this experience.

After another day of fascinating sessions broken up by a theatrical presentation from Rhodes students, the conference ended with a Memphis-style barbeque complete with an authentic live blues band. The conference seemed to end quickly, leaving all anticipating the Ninth Biennial Women and Gender Studies Conference in 2011.

Keynote Speaker

Through her activism and her scholarship over the last decades, Angela Davis has been deeply involved in our nation’s quest for social justice.  Her work as an educator – both at the university level and in the larger public sphere – has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender equality.

Professor Davis’ teaching career has taken her to San Francisco State University, Mills College, and UC Berkeley.  She has also taught at UCLA, Vassar, the Claremont Colleges, and Stanford University.  She has spent the last fifteen years at the University of California Santa Cruz where she is Professor of History of Consciousness, an interdisciplinary Ph.D program, and Professor of Feminist Studies.

Angela Davis is the author of eight books and has lectured throughout the United States as well as in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America.  In recent years a persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination.  She draws upon her own experiences in the early seventies as a person who spent eighteen months in jail and on trial, after being placed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List.”  She has also conducted extensive research on numerous issues related to race, gender and imprisonment.  Her most recent books are Abolition Democracy and Are Prisons Obsolete?  She is now completing a book on Prisons and American History.

Angela Davis is a member of the executive board of the Women of Color Resource Center, a San Francisco Bay Area organization that emphasizes popular education – of and about women who live in conditions of poverty.  She also works with Justice Now, which provides legal assistance to women in prison and engages in advocacy for the abolition of imprisonment as the dominant strategy for addressing social problems.  Internationally, she is affiliated with Sisters Inside, a similar organization based in Queensland, Australia.

Like many other educators, Professor Davis is especially concerned with the general tendency to devote more resources and attention to the prison system than to educational institutions.  Having helped to popularize the notion of a “prison industrial complex,” she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without prisons and to help forge a 21st century abolitionist movement.

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• Agenda
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Hotel Information:
Holiday Inn Select in downtown Memphis
The rates were $149 per night for single and double occupancy and $159 per night for triple and quad occupancy.

Contact Leslie Petty, conference chair, pettyl@rhodes.edu for further information.