Archive
gender
Freedom Dreaming and Worldmaking: Tourmaline and Hope Dector on Marsha P. Johnson’s Inspiring Life
Oct 20, 2025
Award-winning artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist Tourmaline has spent over two decades lovingly researching and preserving Marsha P. Johnson’s life. In two books published this past spring—MARSHA: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson, the first comprehensive biography of Johnson, and a children’s book, One Day in June—Tourmaline provides a richly textured story of […]
Read More“Brown Sugar Makes the World Go ‘Round”: A Conversation with Kim F. Hall on The Sweet Taste of Empire
Oct 6, 2025
Lucyle Hook Professor of English and Africana Studies Kim F. Hall’s new book, The Sweet Taste of Empire: Sugar, Mastery and Pleasure in the Anglo Caribbean (The University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2025), centers the complicated history of sugar in order to ask what lies beyond its narrative of pleasure. Hall explores how the unique […]
Read MoreThe Scholar and Feminist: Fifty Years of Meeting the Moment
For half of a century, The Scholar and Feminist Conference has provided a mutually activating space for scholars, activists, and artists to confront the most pressing issues at any given moment. Defining scholarship as for activism from the very beginning, the conference has with unflagging regularity “met the moment” with intersectional feminist knowledge and action to inspire and build a robust response to contemporary crises. In many ways, the conference has grown up alongside academic feminism itself, yet, rather than uncritically mirror this history, it has consistently pushed back against feminism’s institutionalization. The conference highlights provocations, controversies, foundational gaps, and struggles that both cement its field-forming position and trouble a feminist progress narrative.
Read MoreThe Sweet Taste of Empire: Sugar, Mastery, and Pleasure in the Anglo Caribbean
Kim F. Hall, Patricia A. Matthew, Debapriya Sarkar, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, and Jennifer Morgan; moderated by Tapiwa Gambura
Lucyle Hook Professor of English and Africana Studies Kim Hall’s new book The Sweet Taste of Empire: Sugar, Mastery and Pleasure in the Anglo Caribbean (The University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2025) centers the complicated history of sugar in order to ask what lies beyond its narrative of pleasure.
Read MoreWe Will Not Be Erased: Queer Archives, Trans Histories
Steven Watson and Tourmaline
For over forty years, cultural historian Steven Watson has documented the stories and artwork at the leading edge of artistic and cultural movements, including the movement for queer and trans liberation. Working in collaboration with filmmaker William Markarian-Martin, Steven recently launched Artifacts, making his collection of rare, firsthand accounts from pioneers such as Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Holly Woodlawn, and many others accessible to students, researchers, and anyone interested in connecting to queer and trans history. Watson’s archival collection foregrounds the importance of engaging with and animating trans and queer histories in order to combat the present-day erasure of trans lives.
Read MoreCaste, Gender, Diaspora
Gaiutra Bahadur and Yashica Dutt in conversation with Anupama Rao
The transnational resonance of the Black Lives Matter movement has incited communities across the globe to raise their voices against discrimination and inequality and to work across demographics and colonial histories to reflect more broadly on shared affinities and political solidarities. The resonances between caste and race have been an especially important site for rethinking […]
Read MoreThe Cunning of Gender Violence: Securitization and the Violence of Law
Lila Abu-Lughod, Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Karen Engle, Janet R. Jakobsen, Vasuki Nesiah, and Rafia Zakaria
Contributors to The Cunning of Gender Violence (Duke 2023) discuss how a once visionary feminist project has folded itself into contemporary world affairs.
Read MoreGender Without Identity
Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini
Rooted in the work of French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, in queer and trans of color critique, and in the authors’ extensive clinical experience with queer and trans people, Gender Without Identity presents a radical theory of gender formation and its ongoing mutations.
Read MoreCrafting Objects, Crafting Community: Gender and Material Culture in American Religion
Jodi Eichler-Levine, Alyssa J. Maldonado-Estrada
Jodi Eichler-Levine and Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada will be in conversation about their new books examining the role of material culture in shaping gender, memory, community, and identity in American Judaism and Catholicism.
Read MorePast as Prologue: Storytelling about Resistance to the Brutality of Incarceration
Kathy Boudin, Monica Cosby, Laura McTighe, and Toussaint Losier. Moderated by Mariame Kaba.
Live transcription available at http://bit.ly/pastasprologue2020 Register here. This event will take place online from 4pm – 6pm ET on 5/8/20. Live captions will be provided. Contact bcrw@barnard.edu with any questions. For centuries incarcerated people and others have painted a grim and gruesome picture of conditions inside prisons and jails. There have been countless reports, testimonies, […]
Read MoreTrans*Revolutions Virtual Symposium
Elliot Montague, Emma Frankland, Texas Isaiah, Tourmaline, and Vick Quezada
#TransRevolutions Live captioning is available here. During the event, you can send questions for the Q&A by emailing bcrw@barnard.edu or via Twitter @bcrwtweets #TransRevolutions Trans*Revolutions is a virtual symposium featuring artist-activists whose work is inspired by and engaged in imagining trans* and genderqueer histories, performances, identities, and aesthetics. Elliot Montague (film), Emma Frankland (performance), Texas Isaiah […]
Read MoreA Gendered Brain? Shattering Sexist Science
Gina Rippon, Daphna Joel, and Giordana Grossi, moderated by Beck Jordan-Young
Neuroscientist Gina Rippon will discuss the historical and political conditions that produced ideas of binary gender differences in our brains, how and why these misperceptions have persisted into the 21st century, and how the latest breakthroughs in neuroscience dispel these fallacies.
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