Feminisms Unbound

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Carceral Archipelagos opens Feminisms Unbound with a sharp look at the prison industrial complex, the carceral logics that reach far beyond prison walls, and the feminist organizing working to build more liberatory worlds.

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On April 15, we wrap up our Feminisms Unbound season with a vital conversation: How do beauty and ugliness function as tools of power, settler-colonial logic, and even resistance?

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Join us for the second installment of our groundbreaking 2025-2026 Feminisms Unbound series on Wednesday, March 18 — a powerful exploration of "Transfeminisms" that challenges and redefines the future of feminist thought.

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Our kickoff panel for the outstanding Feminisms Unbound panel series is on the subject of “Global Antifascist Feminisms”. The panel is designed to share organizing strategies and feminist practices across the globe, that have emerged to resist the resurgence and intensification of global authoritarianism today and to build more democratic and liberatory worlds.

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Our inspiration for this roundtable comes at a crucial time in light of the current administration; we want to amplify the importance of Black feminist scholarship and inquiry in this moment by offering multiple perspectives from different disciplines. 

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Porn is a longstanding site of feminist debate. In contrast to those who see it as a form of violence against women, this panel centers feminist artists and academics who see pornography as a tool for pleasure and politics. Sex educator, artist, and pornographer Annie Sprinkle inspired the Postpornography movement, which is currently thriving among sexual and gender dissidents throughout Latin America and Europe, who make their own porn from a queer or feminist lens. Black Feminist scholars in the United States have re-examined racialized pornography (which was associated with violence and pain), pushing for reading ecstasy, pleasure, and agency into the work of Black women pornographers. Further, scholars and activists have pushed for seeing porn as a form of labor that can be both a site of exploitation and of pleasure. We invite panelists to reflect upon both new pornographies and new ways of interpreting pornography as they intersect with feminist, queer, and anti-racist approaches.

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With the provocation of return we invite panelists’ meditations in any of a number of possible directions. Return suggests resumption and rootedness, with attendant notions of convention, propriety, and origin. If it is commonplace to invoke detour and routes to counter these conscripting tendencies (or to question the desire for “returning to normal” in a year that has starkly illuminated the inequities we have learned to live with) are there also registers of precarity that may make return inviting or comforting? How is the returnee potentially persecuted (forced out to “secure borders”) in one space, and/or welcomed back as privileged national subject in the other? Return transforms the space of presence into perpetual deferral, into a scene of waiting, an interregnum. Repatriated cultural artifacts press us to imagine imperial histories of violent accumulation as well as orders of value, as in the assessment of returns on an investment. Finally, if return also suggests that which perpetually haunts, the refusal of what has been violently disappeared to stay away, then what are the spiritual practices that either counter or invite such visitations? We invite panelists to think through these and other inflections with us.

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This roundtable is interested in the ways that sex, intimacy, and erotics are not only objects of study but also methods and methodologies for feminist, queer, and transgender studies. Queer ethnography has offered an extended engagement with the value of intimacy and desire in the field, and Black feminist theory has developed erotics as a means of thinking the political, sacred, and sexual together. In critical race and colonialism studies, intimacy has been used to describe the proximities and frictions that result from geopolitical rearrangements of power and capital. In queer and trans studies, BDSM, dungeons, public sex, erotic vomiting, and other dissident acts are crucial venues for re-organizing hegemonic formations of gender, class, and race, dragging colonial histories to the present, and inventing sexual futures. These are but some of the ways that sex, intimacy, and erotics open up new ways of thinking across disciplines.

Subaltern histories and lives within this apparatus are narrated through the lenses of dispossession, disenfranchisement, and social disposability. Feminist and queer cultural production nevertheless while conjuring such normative representational aesthetics simultaneously reimagine suffering, futurity, and human aspirations. Beyond representational revision, correction or uplift, expressive cultures have the capacity to call into question the very grounds of knowledge that make them possible and at the same time hint at new horizons of surviving and thriving.

“Going Viral” is an opportunity to think with the logics and lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic about the ways that intimacy, mobility, information, body, nation, gender, and sexuality are imbricated through viruses, and other transmittable forms.

The current pandemic is an accumulation of many viral histories. This panel invites scholars to draw form their original research to explore the traffic in viral discourse and the pathways of transmission—of data, bodies, feelings, ideology—through feminist, queer, and trans lenses.

From Australia to Hong Kong, USA to UK, Brazil to Bangladesh people are marching – masked, undeterred and resistant- demanding attention and justice with bold messages like “Silence is Violence”, “I Can’t Breathe”, and “No Justice No Peace.” These messages and movements lay bare the asymmetries of privilege and oppression, the unevenness of growth and wellbeing, and simultaneously encourage a social transformation that takes seriously interdependencies of life, humanity, and ecology. We invite panelists to think through the lessons of their areas of research and expertise and to shed light on how they are thinking about the paradoxes and power of protests.

As some statues are torn down and disappear before our very eyes, some quietly deteriorate unseen and unheralded, raising questions about posterity, and about the extent to which movements for justice depend on visual representation: what, then, of the resources of opacity and abstraction? Recent protests convened nightly vibrate with energy as statues are made to move differently, countering a terrible decades-long visual sovereignty. In this way removal also prompts reflection on the ways in which subaltern creativity has long been fueled by ingesting rather than excising the objectionable element. Finally, how do these public forms convene us (publicly or otherwise) as mourners, as defenders of the republic, as newly independent, as agents of reparative justice?

This panel takes its inspiration from our insistent critique of the academic corporation in which we find ourselves working today. Increasingly, our new colleagues are temporary and underpaid hires, who are nevertheless often expected to give service beyond teaching. Our senior administrators, compensated at the same levels as the corporate structure, are hired as much for their fundraising abilities as for their academic inclinations or interests. Juggling multiple jobs, our students are enmeshed in an aggregation of precarity that is not only financial: their protests of the institution’s raced, gendered, sexed and classed inequities, for instance, are repurposed into website photographs designed to advertise the institution’s openness to critique.

This panel invites scholars to consider the confluences between science and technology studies and gender and sexuality studies in their own research. Feminist, queer, and trans studies scholars attending to science, technology, environment, and disability are dismantling the rubrics of gender and body at the core of our fields in order to think more critically about the material conditions of living inside racial capitalism.

We invite panelists to respond to the questions of how human rights narrations have evolved and been expressed through fictional imaginations in literature, film and visual culture. How can we conceptualize the ethico-politics of human rights in such a way that it cannot be reduced to humanitarian “right to intervene” in the affairs of others?

This roundtable features a conversation about the genealogies and futures of black queer and trans studies across geographic and disciplinary borders, conversations that can help us take stock of the contradictory and complicated cultural moment we are in.

Can feminist praxis embrace an inherently anti-disciplinary vulnerability and refuse strictly bound notions, labels, frameworks, fields, or genres – including those assumed by invocations of ‘feminisms,’ ‘ethnography,’ or ‘research? Can notions such as solidarity and responsibility, trust and hope, vulnerability and reflexivity serve a useful purpose in ethically navigating the forms of epistemic violence in which metropolitan academics are, and will always remain, complicit?

With "The time of the border” we mean to invoke, of course, the terrible urgency of our current moment: the distinct but also overlapping historical, geographical, and other contexts that bear on the displacements of our time; border-crossings that claim our attention and others that remain invisible; conceptual frameworks that have meaningful explanatory power, but also do harm.

Roundtable discussion about Undoing Empire: Form, Function, Feminism

Roundtable discussion about Women of Color Feminisms in Authoritarian Times

This panel engages artistic practitioners who utilize their own bodies in their work. Three multi-media/performance artists will discuss the geographic parameters of their creative productions, the promise and perils of using their bodies as art, and the future of visual culture.

The final event of the Feminisms Unbound 2016-2017 year will be a roundtable of current GCWS doctoral students who are participating in the GCWS Workshop for Dissertation Writers in Women's and Gender Studies. 

This roundtable hosts scholars and activists who intervene in the racialized, gendered, and queer aspects of our thoroughly mediated worlds, perspectives, subjectivities, and selves. These participants write and reflect critically on media forms, working within and across multiple modalities, ranging from the conventional to the digital and the emergent.

This roundtable brings together queer and feminist scholars of race, diaspora, performance, and religion to reflect on the gendered and sexualized dimensions of contemporary crises within racial capitalism, such as:  masculinity and the militarization of policing;  gender, race, and incarceration; the gendered criminalization of immigrant and diasporic religions; and queer responses to policing and the “war on terror.”