Graduate Consortium of Women's Studies

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Feminisms Unbound

Queer Diasporas and Futurities

Wednesday, November 18th: 5:30 – 7:30 PM
Location: The Moore Room, Building 6 Room 321

Our roundtable explores the ways in which both "queerness" and "diaspora" each displace normative classifications of sexuality and nationality, with consequences for the imagination of "futurity" in literature, visual culture, and cultural politics. As queerness complicates the boundedness of an ethnic, national or religious collectivity that desires to reproduce its own identity, so may diaspora unsettle the normative white Europeanness of conceptions of same-sex desire. Presenters discuss how diaspora figures both geographical displacement and the crossing of figurative boundaries of person, culture, society, and state, and they elaborate ways that queering describes not only different embodiments of gender and sexuality, but also a skewing of normative epistemology and social organization.

Roundtable discussion participants:

Feng-Mei Heberer, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, MIT

Feng-Mei Heberer studied film and comparative literature in Germany, France, China, and the US. Her research explores Asian and Asian diasporic media cultures, in particular how they partake in and represent contemporary conditions of globalization. She is currently working on her book manuscript on Asian diasporic video in North America, Western Europe, and East Asia, examining how these visual works stage and theorize new forms of minoritarian belonging. In addition, Feng-Mei is involved in programming for several Asian diasporic film festivals.

Umayyah Cable, PhD Student, Department of American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California

Umayyah Cable has a BA in American studies from Smith College and is currently a doctoral candidate in the department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Her dissertation, Cinematic Activism: Palestinian Cultural Politics in Diaspora, focuses on how and why Palestinian cinema—through films and film festivals—has emerged as a site around which Palestinians in the US organize their social justice activism and assert their diasporic identification with Palestine. Umayyah is the recipient of the USC Graduate School Dissertation Completion Fellowship and was recently cited as an Emerging Diversity Scholar by the National Center for Institutional Diversity.

Fatima El-Tayeb, Professor of Literature, University of California San Diego

Fatima El-Tayeb is a scholar of African and comparative diaspora, critical gender studies, queer of color critique, visual culture studies, and media theory. She is the author of European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (U Minnesota, 2011) and articles on topics such as queer heterotopia, queer Muslims in Europe, and transnational feminism. She is also a filmmaker, and with Angela Maccarone, made Alles vird gut/Everything will be fine, (1997).

Fourth roundtable participant TBD

Moderator: Lisa Lowe, Professor of English, Tufts University

Lisa Lowe works in the fields of comparative literature, comparative colonialisms, and the cultural politics of migration. She has authored books on orientalism, immigration and globalization. Her most recent, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke UP, 2015), is a study of settler colonialism, transatlantic African slavery, and the East Indies and China trades. With Jack Halberstam, she coedits the book series, Perverse Modernities, for Duke University Press.

About Feminisms Unbound

This Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies (GCWS) initiative, Feminisms Unbound, is an event series featuring debates that focus on feminist concerns, theories, and practices in this contemporary moment. This series is intended to foster conversations and community among Boston-area feminist intellectuals and activists. The series, in its open configuration, endeavors to allow the greatest measure of engagement across multiple disciplinary trajectories, and a full array of feminist investments.

The event organizers, who are also visiting scholars with the GCWS this year, are Kimberly Juanita Brown, Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies, Mount Holyoke College, Lisa Lowe, Professor of English and American Studies, Tufts University, and Jyoti Puri, Professor of Sociology, Simmons College, have programmed the four events in this series.

Feminisms Unbound 2015-2016 Events

Public Feminisms: Roles, Responsibilities, Challenges
Wednesday, September 16th: 5:30 – 7:30 PM
Location: Building E51 Room 095, MIT Campus

Queer Diasporas and Futurities
Wednesday, November 18th: 5:30 – 7:30 PM
Location: The Moore Room, Building 6 Room 321, MIT Campus

New Terms in Feminist Studies
Wednesday, February 10th: 5:30 – 7:30 PM
Location: The Moore Room, Building 6 Room 321, MIT Campus

A Celebration of Books by GCWS Authors
Wednesday, April 13th: 5:30 – 7:30 PM
Location: The Moore Room, Building 6 Room 321, MIT Campus