SEXUALITY STUDIES OPEN HOUSE: October 8, 4-6PM
Please join the Program in Sexuality Studies for an Open House in our newly-revamped lounge space in Smith Building.
We have redesigned the space to be more inviting and to house our fledgling library, donated by alum, Phillip Poovey. We will have good food and drinks and even a few door prizes.
Event Details:
Location: Smith Building, Third Floor
Time/Date: Tuesday, October 8, 4-6PM
The ‘challenge of the century’: transnational LGBTQ activism and the birth of Britain’s radical HIV/AIDS movement, from Thatcher to the 1990s.
The Triangle Global British History Seminar of the Carolina Seminars presents:
George Severs, U. Cambridge, and U California, Riverside
Oct. 11, 4-6pm, National Humanities Center
From Mr. Severs:
This paper examines the history of Section 28 of the UK Local Government Act 1988, which forbade local authorities in the UK from ‘promoting homosexuality’. Section 28 was spoken of in the gay press as the “challenge of the century,” sparking the largest movement of lesbians, gay men and their allies in British history. Despite this, very little scholarly attention has been paid to Section 28, and that which has is often blinkered by assumption.
I take on two major misunderstandings about the Section’s history: that it was the brainchild of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and that Section 28 had no impact. Though many people in the academy and the media speak of Section 28 as “Thatcher’s Clause,” my research shows that, in fact, Thatcher had no part in its drafting and in its passage through parliament. Her broad assaults on left-wing Labour-controlled councils have been confused with direct support for Section 28, which has served to blind us to the wider cast of actors at work in this story. Moreover, because no council was ever charged with contravening Section 28, many have written it off as an ineffectual piece of legislation. I argue, however, that looking at the last rung of the legal ladder is not a fit model for determining the impact of the law. Instead, I demonstrate that Section 28 was implemented across several councils, with lesbian and gay groups stripped of their funding and ostracised from the local council. Yet the main impact Section 28 had was in creating a large, diverse movement of resistance to it. I chart the history of this international movement, and show how it directly spawned the radical HIV/AIDS movement of the 1990s.
This event is co-sponsored by The Triangle Legal History Seminar, The Transnational and Global Modern History Seminar, Department of History (UNC-CH), Program in Sexuality Studies (UNC-CH), and the Center for European Studies (UNC-CH).
A Conversation with Rhys Ernst: LGBT Representation and Complexity in Cinema
Join us for a conversation with filmmaker Rhys Ernst on Thursday, August 29 at 5:30pm in Toy Lounge (4th floor of Dey Hall).
Rhys Ernst is a filmmaker and artist. He was a Producer and Director on Amazon’s Transparent and created the title sequence for the series. He was nominated for a 2015 Emmy Award for directing and producing the webseries Transparent: This Is Me, which won a Special Recognition GLAAD Award. In 2016 he teamed up with Focus Features to create the online series, We’ve Been Around. In addition to the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Ernst has shown work at Sundance, Oberhausen, and The Hammer Museum; he has won awards at Outfest, Chicago International Film Festival and the LA Transgender Film Festival; and he was a Point Scholar, a Project Involve Fellow, and was awarded with the 2015 Point Foundation Horizon Award and the ACLU Liberty Award for his work on transgender representation in the media. He received a BA from Hampshire College and an MFA from CalArts. He just wrapped his feature film, Adam, produced by James Schamus and Howard Gertler, which premiered at the Sundance 2019 Film Festival.
Lunch and Learn with Vicki Grise, creator of Your Healing Is Killing Me.
Wednesday, April 17, 2019
Reading – Black. Queer. Southern. Women. by Dr. E. Patrick Johnson
February 13, 2019
SXST Lunch and Learn – Jodi O’Brien
Thursday, September 14, 2017 Time: TBA
Donovan Lounge, Greenlaw Hall
SXST Lunch and Learn – Kenneth Sherrill
Wednesday, October 4, 2017
SXST Lunch and Learn – Christina Richie: “Three Lessons from Queer Bioethics”
Monday, November 6, 2017
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on HB2:
Origins, Reactions, and Possible
Consequences for North Carolina
Wednesday, April 27th | 6:30 – 8:00 p.m.
Global Education Center Room 1005
Sponsored by the UNC-CH Department of Public Policy and the Sexuality Studies Program
Experts from across the UNC-Chapel Hill campus will engage the community in an interdisciplinary discussion of the legal, political, economic, and human rights implications of HB2.
Professor Patrick Conway, Economics
Professor Maxine Eichner, School of Law
Professor Ferrel Guillory, School of Media and Journalism
Professor Andrew Reynolds, Political Science
A moderated discussion led by journalist Mr. Steven Petrow
Dr. Lucinda Ramberg
Assistant Professor of Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and of Anthropology, at Cornell University
Casting religion and sexing gender in South India
3:30pm on Monday, April 18th
GEC, room 1009
About the talk:
How are the politics of caste, gender, religion and sexuality entangled in contemporary India? How are they habited by Dalit women? This talk draws on ethnographic research conducted in Karnataka, South India to consider these questions. In particular, it focuses on three women: a pujari of the Devi Yellamma —a jogati or devadasi; a self-described ‘housewife’ who follows both Hinduism and Buddhism; and a college going convert to Buddhism who leads prayers for young women in her room in the ladies hostel. By dwelling on three key themes within anti-caste feminist studies—epistemology (standpoint), mobility, and sexuality—this talk argues for more nuanced conceptualization of importance of religiosity, the question of agency, and the force of heteronormativity in the field of gender and caste studies.
About the speaker:
Lucinda Ramberg is an assistant professor of Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and of Anthropology, at Cornell University. She works at the intersection of several fields including feminist, postcolonial and queer theories; religion and secularism; medicine and the body; and South Asia. Her research projects in South India and the United States have roots in longstanding engagements with the politics of sexuality, gender and religion. Ramberg’s 2014 ethnography, Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion,” won 3 national book prizes in 2015 including the Ruth Benedict prize from the Association of Queer Anthropology, the Michelle Rosaldo prize for a first book in Feminist Anthropology, and the Clifford Geertz Prize for the best new book in the Anthropology of Religion. Her current book, provisionally entitled We Were Always Buddhist: Dalit Conversion and Sexual Modernity queries the politics of sexuality, religiosity and postcolonial governance, extending them into questions of embodiment and the uses of history.
Sponsored by the South Asia Faculty Working Group, the Provost’s Committee on LGBTQ Life, the Carolina Asia Center, the Center for Global Initiatives, the UNC Program in Sexuality Studies, the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, the Department of Anthropology, and the Department of Religious Studies.
UNC’s Sex Week Presents Sexy Weekend
April 14th, 2016
Avilez – Race, Sexuality, and Pop Culture – 3:30pm, Campus Y
Cante – Pornography: Experiences, Histories, & Politics – 4:15pm, Campus Y
LGBTQ Documentary Screening with Filmmaker: *Out Run* (Monday April 11th, 8pm, 118 Murphey Hall)–Followed by Q and A with Co-Director/Producer Leo Chiang
Join filmmaker Leo Chiang for a special UNC-Chapel Hill premiere of the documentary Out Run on April 11th! Out Run follows the dynamic leaders of the world’s only LGBT political party as they wage a historic quest to elect a trans woman to the Philippine Congress.
When: Monday, April 11 @ 8 pm
Where: Murphey Hall, Room 116
More Info and RSVP: https://www.facebook.com/events/247489728927238/
Hosted by UNC-CH’s Program in Sexuality Studies and the LGBTQ Representation and Rights Research Initiative. Co-Sponsored by the Carolina Asia Center, UNC-CH Department of Communication, UNC-CH’s Social and Economic Justice Minor, and the UNC-CH School of Media and Journalism.
Synopsis: As leader of the world’s only LGBT political party, Bemz Benedito dreams of being the first transgender woman in the Philippine Congress. But in a predominantly Catholic nation, rallying for LGBT representation in the halls of Congress is not an easy feat. Bemz and her eclectic team of queer political warriors must rethink traditional campaign strategies to amass support from unlikely places. Taking their equality campaign to small-town hair salons and regional beauty pageants, the activists mobilize working-class trans hairdressers and beauty queens to join the fight against their main political opponent, a homophobic evangelical preacher, and prove to the Filipino electorate that it’s time to take the rights of LGBT people seriously. But as outsiders trying to get inside the system, will they have to compromise their political ideals in order to win? Culminating on election day, OUT RUN provides a unique look into the challenges LGBT people face as they transition into the mainstream and fight for dignity, legitimacy, and acceptance across the globe.
Out Run first premieres in Durham at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival on Friday, April 8. More info here: http://www.fullframefest.org/filmsevents/film-schedule/?date=4/8/2016. Attendees are welcome to meet the filmmakers following the Full Frame screening at Bull McCabes in Durham.
The UNC Program in Sexuality Studies Presents:
“Hysterical!Outrageous Women and Comedy”
Linda Mizejewski, Professor of Women’s Studies, Ohio State University
Friday, April 8, 2016
This event is part of the “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor” Conference, scheduled for April 8-9.
Art for [Late] Lunch at the Ackland Art Museum: “Vision, Male Homosexuality, and Francis Bacon’s Style” (April 7th 2016 at 1:30pm)
BYO lunch/snack to this talk by Rich Cante (Director, Program in Sexuality Studies; Associate Professor of Media and Technology Studies, Department of Communication, UNC-Chapel Hill)
Register Here:
http://ackland.org/events-programs/adult-programs/art-for-lunch/7apr2016/
Guest of Honor: Francis Bacon’s “Study for Portrait VI”
On View 6 January 2016 – 10 April 2016
The Ackland Art Museum is pleased to present Study for Portrait VI (1953) by Francis Bacon, one of the most important British artists of the twentieth century. This work belongs to a series of eight paintings which began as portraits of Bacon’s friend and biographer David Sylvester. They became, in the final stages, studies of a seated pope, in part inspired by Bacon’s long-running fascination with reproductions of the 1650 portrait of Pope Innocent X by Diego Velázquez. These paintings of Bacon’s and later works comprise what is known as his “Screaming Popes” series, a group which solidified his reputation as a major international artist in the 1950s.
The Ackland is especially fortunate to present this significant painting from the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Despite his international stature, works by Francis Bacon have rarely if ever been exhibited in North Carolina and no publicly-accessible collections in the state currently hold any of his major paintings.
This exhibition has been made possible by the Ackland National Advisory Board.
Teach-In on HB2
April 6, 2016 – 6:30pm
Manning Hall, Room 209
On Wednesday, April 6, at 6:30 in Manning 209, faculty and administrators will speak about the impact and implications of House Bill 2 on our university community and the state.
The implications of this bill reach far further than the bathroom, with civil rights, local government, and many minority communities put at risk.
Confirmed speakers include:
Minrose Clayton Gwin, Department of English and Comparative Literature
Kia Caldwell, Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies
Maria DeGuzman, Director, Latina/Latino Studies
Maxine Eichner, Professor of Law
Nora Augustine, Teaching Fellow and Diversity Liaison, English
Rich Cante, Director, Program in Sexuality Studies
Michelle Robinson, Department of American Studies
Sharon P. Holland, Department of American Studies
Sponsored by UNC Young Democrats
Mark Joseph Stern
LGBTQ Issues & Law Columnist, Slate
UNC-CH Campus Visit
Monday April 4, 2016
“LGBTQ Rights and Discrimination on College Campuses”
3pm, Public Talk
University Room, Hyde Hall
Co- Sponsored by The Program in Sexuality Studies and SAGA,
with support from The Provost’s Committee on LGBTQ Life at UNC-CH
“A Conversation with Mark Joseph Stern”
12:00pm-1:30pm, Lunch with Students
All UNC-CH students welcome. Spaces are Limited.
Please RSVP to sexuality@unc.edu
Co- Sponsored by The Program in Sexuality Studies and SAGA,
with support from The Provost’s Committee on LGBTQ Life at UNC-CH
JACK HALBERSTAM (University of Southern California)
Talk: “Becoming Feral: Sex, Death, and Falconry”
April 4 (Monday), 2016, 3:30 pm
Toy Lounge, Dey Hall
Seminar: “Wild Things: Queer and Feminist Theory at the End of the World”
April 5 (Tuesday), 2016
3:30 pm
Donovan Lounge, Greenlaw Hall
Sponsored by the English and Composition Lit Department
Professor Marcia Ochoa Talk
March 29, 2016 – 12:00 (Noon)
Greenlaw Hall, Donovan Lounge
Please come and hear a great talk at the intersection of transnational, queer and ethnographic studies.
Sponsored by the Department of American Studies
CONTESTING AUTISM: STRUGGLES OVER NEURAL CITIZENSHIP AND NEUROCULTURES
Jigna Desai
Chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota
Thursday 2/25, 330-5pm
Donovan Lounge, 2nd Floor Greenlaw Hall, UNC-Chapel Hill
Jigna Desai is the author of Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film. She has written widely on gender, South Asian public cultures, and the politics of Asian American citizenship in the post-911 era.
Desai’s new research concerns the relationship between brain sciences and transnational forms of citizenship. Drawing on queer, disability, and cultural theories, Desai’s presentation will examine how public understandings of “normal” and “abnormal” brains in discourses on autism shape our social and political worlds.
Questions about accessibility for this event? Please contact Neel Ahuja at nahuja@email.unc.edu.
Desai’s visit is jointly sponsored by the South Asia Faculty Working Group; the Initiative in Literature, Medicine, and Culture; the Program in Sexuality Studies; the Institute for Arts and Humanities; and the Departments of Social Medicine, Communication, and English and Comparative Literature.
GerShun Avilez
December 2, 2015
Ackland Art Museum
“Visualizing Black Masculinity”
Sexuality Studies Lunch Colloquium: Maxine Eichner (11/17/15 @ 12:15pm)
The Program in Sexuality Studies is pleased to welcome Maxine Eichner to its colloquium series on Tuesday, November 17 @ 12:15pm. Professor Eichner will be giving a talk on “The Marketized Family.” In this talk, Professor Eichner will consider the critical role of government in buffering families from market forces to protect their wellbeing, as well as to support their caretaking and human development functions. Eichner is the Reef C. Ivey II Professor of Law at the UNC School of Law. She writes on issues at the intersection of law and political theory, focusing on family relationships, social welfare law and policy, sex equality, and the relationship of the family, the workplace, and market forces.
The event will take place in The Incubator Room in Hyde Hall.
Do I Sound Gay? – Screening at the Varsity
November 5, 2015 – 7pm
Varsity Theatre
Do I Sound Gay? is a documentary film which follows the director, David Thorpe, as he attempts to discoer the origins and implications of the “gay voice.” The film explores the topic in the context of homophobia and gender norms, and includes interviews with Margaret Cho, Tim Gunn, Don Lemon, Dan Savage, and George Takei.
Director David Thorpe will be visiting UNC to attend the screening and participate in a discussion/Q&A afterwards.
Sponsored by the UNC Sexuality and Gender Alliance (SAGA), the Department of Communication, the School of Media and Journalism, the Program in Sexuality Studies, the Department of Linguistics, and the Kenan-Flagler Alliance.
Feminism Here and Now Conference
November 6 & 7, 2015
Feminism Here and Now: An Interdisciplinary Conversation seeks to spark a critical conversation about what feminist praxis may look like in the first half of the 21st century and what role feminism may continue to play in critiquing and intervening in a broad range of social, cultural, and political issues.
The conference will be held November 6 & 7 at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Menstruation, Marriage, and Money:How Nepali Girls Fall into the Quicksand of Sex Trafficking
A lecture by independent journalist,Danielle Preiss
Where: GEC 1005
When: November 5, 2015
Time: 5:00pm
Danielle Preiss is an independent journalist who has been working in and on Nepal for most of the last decade with organizations including The Kathmandu Post, the Mountain Institute, and Her Turn (a nonprofit focused on girls’ and women’s health, education, and empowerment). Her reports have appeared in media outlets including The Atlantic, The Guardian, Vice.com, Himal Southasian, and WXXI News.
Sponsored by The Carolina Asia Center, the Center for Global Initiatives, the Nepal Student Interest Group, the South Asia Faculty Working Group, and the UNC-CH Program in Sexuality Studies.
Sexuality Studies Colloquium: Dagmawi Woubshet (10/21 @ 5:00pm)
The Program in Sexuality Studies is pleased to welcome Dagmawi Woubshet to campus on Wednesday, October 21 @ 5:00pm. Professor Woubshet will be giving a talk on his new book The Calendar of Loss: Race, Mourning, and Sexuality in the Early AIDS Era (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015). Looking at a range of high and popular works of grief—including elegies, eulogies, epistles to the dead, funerals, and obituaries—Woubshet identifies a unique expression of mourning that emerged in the 1980s and early 1990s in direct response to the AIDS catastrophe in the U.S. and Ethiopia. Woubshet is a scholar of African American literature and culture, who works at the intersection of African American and African studies.
The event will take place in the University Room in Hyde Hall. Refreshments will be served.
Co-sponsored by the Department of American Studies, the Department of Communication, and the African Studies Center.
Please join us for a panel discussion and reception launching the new publication of UNC-CH’s LGBT Representation and Rights Research Initiative, which investigates LGBT rights in Latin America and the Caribbean.
5:30pm, Mandela Auditorium: Panel Discussion with MP Angélica Lozano, the first out lesbian elected to national office in Colombia, leading gay rights activist Jaevion Nelson from Jamaica, and Professor Javier Corrales of Amherst University. Michael K. Lavers of the Washington Blade will moderate.
7:00pm: Reception.
Co-Sponsored by UNC-CH’s Program in Sexuality Studies, the Provost’s Committee on LGBTQ Life, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Office of the Provost, and the Center for Global Initiatives.
Claire Potter -Professor of History and Co-Director of The Humanities Action Lab at The New School for Public Engagement
“Tenured Radical” Blogger for *The Chronicle of Higher Education*
Co-Director of OutHistory.org
“From Mississippi to Times Square: The Roots of Anti-Pornography Feminism in New Left Social Movements”
Thursday March 19th, 2015 at 430pm
Institute for the Arts and Humanities, University Room
Organized by the Program in Sexuality Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Co-sponsors: UNC-CH’s Departments of American Studies, Communication Studies, History, & Women’s and Gender Studies; The Southern Oral History Program; The Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative; and Duke University’s Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS) Program.
Workshop on LGBTQ Public History and Public Humanities in the Digital Era with Claire Potter Professor of History and Co-Director of The Humanities Action Lab at The New School for Public Engagement “Tenured Radical” Blogger for *The Chronicle of Higher Education* Co-Director of OutHistory.org
“The United States of AIDS: Building a Multi-Media Teaching Resource on the History of ACT-UP”
Facilitator and Discussant: David Johnson, National Humanities Center/University of South Florida Friday March 20th from 11:30am – 1pm Institute for the Arts and Humanities, University Room
Organized by the Program in Sexuality Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Co-sponsors: UNC-CH’s Departments of American Studies, Communication Studies, History, & Women’s and Gender Studies; The Southern Oral History Program; The Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative; The Social and Economic Justice Minor; and Duke University’s Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS) Program.
Beyond Bullying: Stories of LGBTQ Sexuality in Schools
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2015
Murphey Hall 116, UNC, Chapel Hill
6:30 p.m.
Facebook event page:
https://www.facebook.com/events/342459855948059/
Presenters:
Jessica Fields, Department of Sociology & Sexuality Studies, San Francisco State University, author of Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality (Rutgers University Press).
Jen Gilbert, Faculty of Education, York University, author of Sexuality in School: The Limits of Education (University of Minnesota Press).
Professors Fields and Gilbert will be screening excerpts of stories from their multimedia storytelling project, Beyond Bullying, that explores LGBTQ sexualities in high schools. As teachers and students shared stories of LGBTQ sexualities, families, friendship, and cultures, they pushed back against the narrow casting of LGBTQ issues in school with risk, vulnerability and pathology and offered a portrait of LGBTQ sexualities as complex, ambivalent, and ordinary.
Co-sponsors at UNC, Chapel Hill: Department of Sociology; Social and Economic Justice minor; Communication Studies; School of Education; Carolina Women’s Center; Provost’s Committee on LGBTQ Life; LGBTQ Center; Program in Sexuality Studies; Student Government Safety and Security Committee.
The Beyond Bullying Project uses community-based storytelling to understand and interrupt the ordinary hostility in high schools to LGBTQ sexuality and lives (funded by the Ford Foundation). For more information, go here:
http://beyondbullyingproject.com/
The UNC Latina/o Culture(s) Speakers Series presents:
“What’s Love Got To Do With It? White Desire and the Political Potential of Love in Cross-Boarder Romances”
Lee Bebout
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
5:00pm
Incubator Room, Hyde Hall
Dr. Bebout is Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State University, where he is also affiliated with the School of Transborder Studies and the Program in American Studies. He conducts research and teaches in the fields of Chicana/o Studies, American Studies, and critical race studies. He is the author of Mythohistorical Inventions: The Chicano Movement and its Legacies (U of Minnesota Press, 2011). His current book project, titled Whiteness on the Boarder:Mapping the U.S. Racial Imaginary in Brown and White, examines how representations of Mexico, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans have been deployed to construct whiteness and Americanness, or specifically whiteness as Americanness.
Co-Sponsored by the UNC Program in Latina/o Studies, the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, and the Program in Sexuality Studies.
Elizabeth Grosz Lunchtime Colloquium on “Art and Sexualt Selection”
Jan 21, 2015 – 12:00pm-1:30pm
Hyde Hall
This event is sponsored by the Program in Sexuality Studies, the UNC-CH Art Department, and The Provost’s Advisory Board on LGBTQ Life at UNC-CH.
Lunch and Learn with Dr. Sharon Holland, Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of American Studies, UNC-CH
The Topic of Dr. Holland’s discussion will be her new project, entitled:
“Perishment”
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
Noon
Donovan Lounge, Greenlaw
Thursday, September 11, 2014:
- 5pm: Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival, book reading and signing with author, Sean Strub, at the Bull’s Head Bookshop in the Student Stores Building, UNC-CH
- 6:30pm – 9:00pm: Roundtable Discussion with Sean Strub: “The Politics of HIV and AIDS, Then and Now”
- Panel participants:
- Karen Booth, faculty, Women’s and Gender Studies, UNC-CH
- Kia Caldwell, faculty, African, African-American, and Diaspora Studies, UNC-CH
- Richard Cante, faculty, Communication Studies and Director, Program in Sexuality Studies, UNC-CH
- Carolyn McAllaster, Duke University School of Law, Duke AIDS Legal Project, and Southern HIV/AIDS Strategy Initiative
- Panel participants:
Location: Hitchcock Room, Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History, UNC-CH
*Parking: Bell Tower Parking Deck directly behind the Stone Center for free after 5pm
**Both events are free and open to the public
Sean Strub is the founder of POZ Magazine (poz.com), executive director of the Sero Project (seroproject.com), a US-based network of people with HIV combating criminalization and is the author of Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival (Scribner 2014). A longtime activist and HIV survivor, he was the first openly HIV positive person to run for the U.S. Congress, produced the off-Broadway hit The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me and from 2010-2012 co-chaired the North American affiliate of the Global Network of People Living with HIV (GNP+/NA).
Margaret Randall – Poetry Reading/ Talk
Wednesday March 19, 2014.
Noon, Room 039
Graham Memorial Hall
Margaret Randall is a feminist poet, writer, photographer, social activist, and author of over a hundred books– most recently The Rhizome as a Field of Broken Bones, As If the Empty Chair/ Como si la silla vacia, and Daughter of Lady Jaguar Shark (all poetry), More Than Things (essays), Che on My Mind (a feminist poet’s impression of Che Guevara, just published by Duke University Press). She has read her works across the world, taught at several U.S. universities, labored in the Cuban revolution and in Nicaragua’s Sandinista Project. She co-founded El Corno Emplumado/ The Plumed Horn, a bilingual literary journal which published some of the most dynamic and meaningful writing of an era. For years she was ordered deported from the U.S., her writing deemed “beyond the good order and happiness of the United States.” Defended by the Center for Constitutional Rights and supported by writers far and wide, she ultimately won reinstatement of her citizenship. Her vital writing and her astonishing poetry continue to unfold.
Sponsored by: Department of English and Comparative Literature, Department of Women’s and gender Studies, Department of American Studies, Latina/o Studies Program, Sexuality Studies Program, The Provost’s Committee for LGBTQ Life, The Carolina Women’s Center, The Institute for the Study of the Americas, The Institute for the Arts and Humanities
Masha Gessen: Russia’s Leading LGBT Rights Activist Speaks on the Rise of Radical “Family Values” in Russia.
Thursday, November 7,2013 5:30 p.m.
Nelson Mandela Auditorium
FedEx Global Education Center
A talk by Masha Gessen, journalist, author, and human rights activist. Masha Gessen is the author of the forthcoming Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot (February 2014), as well as six other books, including the national bestseller The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. Born in Moscow, she emigrated to the United States in her teens, then returned to Russia a decade later. Writing in both Russian and English, she has covered every major development in Russian politics and culture of the past two decades, receiving numerous awards and fellowships in the process. She blogs weekly for The New York Times and has written for The New York Review of Books, International Herald Tribune, The Guardian, U.S. News & World Report (where she served as Moscow Bureau Chief), Vanity Fair, The New Republic, Granta and Slate; she has also edited several Russian magazines and written for many more. A longtime resident of Moscow, she is in the process of relocating to New York City. This event has been organized by The Program in Sexuality Studies, and is cosponsored by the UNC LGBT Representation and Rights Initiative, UNC Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies, the UNC Provost’s Committee on LGBTQ Life, and the UNC Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. Free and open to the public.