National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) Annual Conference 2023
A Luta Continua/The Struggle Continues: Resistance, Resilience, Resurgence
October 26-29, 2023 | Baltimore, MD | Program
WORKSHOPS
“Feminist Carrier Bag Pedagogical Praxis: Engaging Intergenerational Bodies in Everyday Practices of Resistance and Hope”
As a trans-disciplinary feminist motherscholar collective, we draw on biological and affective experiences of mothering (broadly defined) to inform our teaching-and-learning. We share pedagogical tips that help us transgress the neoliberal classroom, still premised on the colonial mind/body duality. We show ways to practically (re)connect to the body in the classroom. By acknowledging the power of the body, the Carrier Bag (Le Guin)- the earth, the mother- that carries us and was once carried, we engage a feminist pedagogical praxis that teaches and learns with our students how connected we are inter-corporeally and inter-generationally to (non)human others.
Moderator: Sasha Su-Ling Welland, University of Washington
Presenters: Akanksha Misra, Gender and Women's Studies, SUNY Plattsburgh; Mairi McDermott, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary; Stephanie Tyler, University of Calgary; Sheliza Ladhani, University of Calgary; Bridget Haina; Michelann Parr; Ghada Alatrash
PAPERS
"The visibility/invisibility of pain: a feminist debate over labor anesthesia in China and beyond," Presented by Anna Zhao
This paper approaches the history of medicalized childbirth in contemporary China from a gendered perspective. To historicize and contextualize the current feminist debate over the need for labor analgesia in China, I will trace back to early socialist endeavors in framing and relieving labor pain and examine how the socialist past impacts Chinese society's attitudes and practices towards labor pain management today. I aim to unpack how labor pain’s symbolic meaning is remembered across generations, why "labor pain" plays an important role in current feminist debates in China, and how female reproductive bodies embody socio-economic transformations. (part of the Pan-Asian and Transnational Solidarities panel)
"Politicizing Marianismo under the Philippine 'War on Drugs,'" Presented by Marielle Marcaida
This study analyzes the rhetorical agency of grandmothers, mothers, and widows who engaged in human rights activism after losing their loved ones from the state-sanctioned extrajudicial killings (EJKs) caused by the Duterte administration’s “war on drugs.” By employing the analytical framework of the Latin American gender role script marianismo, the myth of a non-confrontational, apolitical, and self-sacrificing mother often criticized for being oppressive to women, this research seeks to argue that traditional motherhood can serve as a catalyst for women’s activism as it reconciles its conservative tendencies and radical potential in the context of a human rights crisis. (part of Migration, Mobilization, and Motherhood panel)
"Invisible No More: Black Trans* & Queer HBCU Activism," Presented by Ramon Johnson
Research regarding historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have detailed how these campuses have a rich political history and affirming environments for Black students. While the aforementioned may be true, there's a lack of literature that explores the trans* and queer political history of HBCUs ,the ways in which Black LGBTQ+ institutional politics are institutionalized and its impact on LGBTQ+ populations in a HBCU context.This qualitative content analysis conjures how LGBTQ+ student activism has evolved and been depoliticized at one Black liberal arts college for men and makes visible how campus stake holders respond to these organizing efforts over 30 years. (part of the Revisiting and Reclaiming Queer History and Activism panel)
ROUNDTABLES
"Feminist Studies in Contested Times"
This roundtable will discuss the state of the field of feminist studies in the current political moment. Participants will reflect on their own positions in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Departments, how they are responding to contemporary contestations in higher education in the US, and their visions for the future.
Moderator: Patti L. Duncan, Oregon State University
Presenters: Amanda Swarr, University of Washington; Stephanie Troutman, Gender & Women’s Studies, University of Arizona; Nana Osei-Kofi, Oregon State University; Melissa W. Wright, Penn State University; Zenzele Isoke, University of Maryland College Park
“Creativity as Dissidence & Resistance: Artistic genres linking feminism and activism from Iran to Palestine”
This roundtable offers an analysis of gendered forms of artistic resistance and bridging across theory and practice by exploring the themes of solidarity and creativity, building community across space and place, interdisciplinarity across art and social sciences, and collaborative creation and transformation. Through an examination of art as resistance, the discussants offer examples of film, visual art, zine-making and collective writing and social media movement building across these sites and locations within the USA and transnationally.
Moderator: Cricket Keating, University of Washington
Presenters: Laila Farah, DePaul University Women's and Gender Studies; Isis Nusair, Denison University; Lamise Noor Shawahin, Purdue University
“Teaching (at) ‘the intersectionality of struggles’”
In Freedom is a Constant Struggle (2016), Angela Y. Davis encourages us to develop an analysis of “the intersectionality of struggles" in order to forge strong “international solidarities and connections across national borders” (144). This roundtable directly addresses this provocation through the lens of research and activist informed pedagogical approaches. Participants will gain insights regarding both the form and content for teaching transnational feminist solidarity.
Moderator: Pascha Bueno-Hansen, University of Delaware
Presenters: Cricket Keating, University of Washington; Amy Lind, University of Cincinnati; Isis Nusair, Denison University; Laila Farah, DePaul University Women's and Gender Studies; Ann Russo, DePaul University; Armaghan Ziaee, California State University San Marcos
“Towards Long and Wide Selves: Maria Lugones and the Praxis of Popular Education”
Central to decolonial feminist philosopher María Lugones’s political praxis is a deep commitment to popular education. In her work with the popular education collective la Escuela Popular Norteña (EPN) and in her writing, Lugones practiced a distinctly coalitional approach to popular education, one grounded in the recognition that our own understandings and potential enactments of our lives are closely tied to one another and to the meanings that we create together. Bringing together Lugones’ popular education collaborators, this roundtable will focus particularly closely on the theory and practice of popular education as it relates to building a decolonial feminist politics.
Moderator: Cricket Keating, University of Washington
Presenters: Shireen Roshanravan, Northeastern Illinois University; Cindy Cruz, University of Arizona; Gabriela Veronelli, Binghamton University; Manuel Chavez, Monmouth University
FEMINIST AUTHORS SHOWCASE
Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine
Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine was published on March 8, 2023 by Duke University Press (ISBN: 978-1-4780-1961-9) and is written by Amanda Lock Swarr, Associate Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. This year’s NWSA conference theme, A Luta Continua/The Struggle Continues, is inspired by a song of the name name by South African singer Miriam Makeba. “A Luta Continua” was a rallying cry for justice that emanated from southern Africa to the rest of the world in the 1970s. This book and the proposed “Author Meets Critics” session extends Makeba and other Africans’ calls from this region to the present moment with a focus on intersex justice.
Envisioning African Intersex answers the question posed by the NWSA conference organizers: how can calls for freedom and reflections on historic liberation movements inspire struggles in the twenty-first century? One of the most important contemporary struggles is intersex activists’ movement against nonconsensual medical violence. There are few more pressing issues than forced surgeries and other procedures that attempt to fit bodies into rigid binaries without their consent. This book links these ongoing unethical and violent practices to the deep entrenchment of scientific racism, eugenics, and colonial taxonomies. It unpacks how gender testing in sport and broader anxieties over the expansion of the category of “woman” are inherently racist.
Women’s Studies has always been at the forefront of exploring what it means to be a woman, and in the current moment this must include prioritizing intersex and trans women’s struggles as essential to our field. Envisioning African Intersex advances that project. Coalitions of activists from across the African continent—including South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, and Zambia—are calling for intersex justice. By unseating colonial visions of gender, intersex South Africans are actively disrupting medical violence, decolonizing gender binaries, and inciting policy changes. This book and the proposed “Author Meets Critics” session focused on it puts their efforts in historical perspective and follows their theories and actions to the present moment.
Panelists: Amanda Swarr, University of Washington, Seattle; Hil Malatino, Penn State; Xavier Livermon, University of Texas, Austin; David Rubin, University of South Florida