Details coming soon!

Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson will deliver the joint 2023 Isom Student Gender Conference Keynote/Lucy Somerville Howorth Lecture/Trans Studies Lecture entitled “Finding Mary Jones in New Orleans: Unfinishing Black Trans History”

Description:

Where does the association of trans womanhood and sex work come from? This talk considers the remarkable life of Mary Jones, a Black trans woman arrested in 1836 in New York City. At trial, Jones testified to the Black social world in which she lived and worked, including a reference to visiting New Orleans. Following the riddle of her journey from New York to the Mississippi Valley, Jones prompts how trans womanhood as a modern way of life may have been built into the emergence of the service economy in the antebellum era, with Black gender caught in the contradictions and symbiosis between enslaved labor and wage labor.

About Dr. Gill-Peterson:

Jules Gill-Peterson is an associate professor of History and Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Histories of the Transgender Child (2018) and a general co-editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Her next book, A Short History of Trans Misogyny, will be published by Verso.

At 4 PM on Wednesday, October 26, the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies will host the Second Annual Asexuality Studies Lecture featuring Dr. Ianna Hawkins Owen. His lecture is entitled “To Be Free is Very Sweet”: Blackness, Asexuality, and Abolition and is co-sponsored by the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement and the College of Liberal Arts.

Dr. Owen hopes that his lecture will encourage participants to think about “freedom” as a key word with a shifting set of meanings, to make it easier for everyone to “see and imagine the coalitional possibility between two overlapping—but often discretely imagined—sets of politics and concerns. I hope to think collectively with participants about the ways asexuals can draw inspiration from abolitionist interventions and simultaneously how abolitionists can draw inspiration from asexual interventions.”

When asked about what inspired the lecture and the topics he plans to discuss, Dr. Owen expressed the following:
“In 2010 when I was involved in the GLBT Historical Society’s intergenerational dialogue series, a former Black Panther Party leader, also in the series, drew parallels between her experiences of celibacy in solitary confinement and the descriptions of asexuality I shared. She named that overlap “stillness” and I have wanted to write about the ideas stemming from our conversations ever since. Pivoting from black and asexual felt knowledge toward black and asexual coalition is what led me to think about abolition as an urgent site of connection.”

In this exciting time for research on race and asexuality, Dr. Owen recommends participants read Justin Smith’s Feminist Formations essay, “Asexuality as Resistance to Social Reproduction in Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem.” He also recommends his own work, “Still, Nothing” in Feminist Review. For anyone with a general interest in asexuality studies, Dr. Owen suggests also explore the new Asexuality and Aromanticism database, supported by the University of Toronto’s Digital Humanities Initiative— acearobiblio.com. If interested in other works by Dr. Owen, check out his articles in Social Text, Feminist Review, Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, Post45 Contemporaries, Radical Teacher, and more.

Dr. Owen shares his gratitude for the invitation with the following: “Thank you so much for having me. When my cohort of asexuality studies scholars were getting started, we were met with skepticism about the value of the subfield and its potential for longevity. Ole Miss’s recognition and commitment to asexuality studies expressed by this annual lecture series would have been unimaginable to me when I was a grad student. I hope institutional commitments like this one inspire the next generation of students to follow their intellectual passions wherever they may lead.”

The lecture will be held on Zoom. To register, please visit: https://olemiss.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIof--rqDooEtMuu4jAd-tlYoQ7clww8_hN

About Ianna Hawkins Owen:
Ianna Hawkins Owen is currently an assistant professor of English and African American Studies at Boston University. Previously, Owen was an assistant professor of English at Williams College. Owen earned a PhD in African Diaspora Studies at the UC Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality. Owen’s areas of interest include African diaspora theory, asexuality, failure and freedom. Owen’s book manuscript is titled Ordinary Failure.

Owen earned a BA in Africana Studies from CUNY Hunter College. While at Hunter, Owen organized with a Freirean activist group called All City and worked for the Audre Lorde Project.

Come and engage with the Isom Fellows and learn about their interdisciplinary research projects.

Presenting Fellows:

Lauren Bone Noble  ~ Theatre and Film

LaToya Faulk  ~ Writing & Rhetoric

Ari Friedlander ~ English

Tyler Gillespie  ~ Writing & Rhetoric

Owen James Hyman ~ African American Studies

Deanna Kreisel ~ English

Alex Lindgren-Gibson ~ History

Diane Marting  ~ Modern Languages

Eva Payne  ~ History

Susan Pedigo ~ Chemistry

D’Andre Walker ~ Criminal Justice & Legal Studies

We invite you to join us for the opening reception for this year’s Sarahfest Art Show. Show curators Christopher Satterwhite, Joshua Nguyen, Marina Greenfeld, Lenna Mendoza, and Kallye Smith will be in attendance. The show is sponsored by the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies in partnership with the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council.

The Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies and the Chancellor’s Commission on the Status of Women are hosting a special screening of Through the Night, a documentary that focuses on the childcare needs of parents who don’t work 8-5 jobs and one facility in New York City that specializes in meeting their needs. The screening will raise awareness about issues of childcare, foster discussion about the myriad of ways the lack of access affects parents and children, and engage and promote conversation around the topic in the larger campus and Oxford community. A short panel discussion will follow. Learning Activities for children will be available onsite during the event. Free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies, the Chancellor’s Commission on the Status of Women, the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council, OxFilm, the Graduate Center for the Study of Early Learning, the UM Teachers of Tomorrow, the UM Working Mothers Network, and the William Magee Center for AOD and Wellness Education

Registration is requested but not required. Click here to register.

This year’s Trans Studies Lecture features Dr. Tre Wentling, an assistant professor of Women’s and Ethnic Studies at the CU--Colorado Springs.

About the lecture:

Over the last decade, the Department of Motor Vehicles, in more than twenty U.S. states, along with D.C., have added a third gender designation option: “X.” And, President Biden’s administration recently announced that the Department of State will add the same for U.S. passports. Even Mastercard’s “True Name” project now allows individuals to display a chosen name instead of one’s dead name on credit cards. In this talk, I will explore who takes on the challenging task of changing some identity credentials embedded on identification documents and records, as well as why people of transgender experience are motivated to do so. This talk intends to draw attention to likely misunderstood aspects of legal gender transition: its near impossibility and result in fragmented recognition.  

About Dr. Wentling:

Dr. Tre Wentling is an Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Ethnic Studies Program at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS). His research and teaching broadly include trans studies, queer theory, intersectionality, and citizenship studies. A first-generation college graduate, he completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Sociology, along with a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Women’s and Gender Studies from Syracuse University. Prior to that he attended the UCCS for his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in Sociology. Wentling is a co-editor of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality: The New Basics and some of his other publications can be found in Sexual and Gender Minority Health: Volume 21, Journal of Homosexuality, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Teaching Sociology. When not teaching, writing, or reading, you can likely find him on the dance floor with other West Coast Swing enthusiasts or spending quality time with his family.

Artist, Filmmaker, and Emmy-nominated Writer Kate Tsang will discuss the creation of her debut film Marvelous and the Black Hole and film-making by women of color.

Singer and Inaugural Sarahfest Artist-in-Residence Kelly Hogan, accompanied by musician and Artist-in-Residence Jenny Conlee and UM music students, will perform an evening of music covering different styles and decades.

Award winning Producer, Director, Actor, Singer, and Songwriter Blake McIver Ewing, who will be serving as a visiting faculty artist in the Department of Music, will be performing an evening of songs from some of his favorite female voices from Barbra Streisand and Carole King to Lady Gaga and Alicia Keys.

Hosted by the Department of Music, Living Music Resource, and the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies.

Presented by Dr. Karen Tongson, Chair, Gender Studies Program, and Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, English and American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern

Click here to register!

The old adage “if you want something done, you’ve gotta do it yourself,” is especially true with feminist and queer world making.  And on October 7, at 4pm, Jaime Harker, director, Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies, and professor of English, is going to share some of the ways she’s been doing just that with her talk, “Feminist and Queer World Making in North Mississippi.” Her talk will be in the LGBTQ Lounge on the fourth floor of Lamar Hall, a site itself that represents the literal and figurative space the Isom Center strives to create for students, faculty, and staff, on campus. 

Harker credits the Isom staff, University, community partners, and students with the feminist and queer world making work that the Center has been doing since she first served as interim director in 2014-2015. “Collectively, we have been creating feminist and queer worlds in the Oxford area for many years, and I hope that this story will inspire students, faculty, and staff to embark on their own world-making,” she says. Harker plans to discuss how some of these feminist and queer events and organizations have impacted the community. Oxford had its first drag show in the spring of 2015, which was so immensely popular that it sold out with standing room only, and the venue, Lamar Lounge, had to turn people away. The iconic John Waters gave a special performance at the University that same spring and that fall, Sarahfest, which started as a music festival, expanded into an annual arts and music festival that highlights women and queer artists. According to the website, sarahfest.rocks, “Twining the arts and education enables us to create dynamic spaces for change, where we can envision new realities that reflect a better more equitable world for all.” 

Along with the special programming and classes offered, the Isom Center’s newsletter also serves as an extension of the world-building that the Center aims to achieve:

“The newsletter started as a simple announcement of our events, but it has come to be much more - a statement of philosophy and aspiration, a manifesto, a commemoration, and an invitation. We write about what we plan to do but also about our dreams, our hopes, our commitments, our beliefs.  If folks read it and then contact us with their own most-desired projects, then it will have been a success.”

To better understand Harker’s inspirations for helping build a world that she wanted to be a part of in North Mississippi, take a listen to Episode 1 of Season 4’s Swerve South. You can hear about how Harker’s first experiences with world-making were in Provo, Utah, when she was working on her Master’s at Brigham Young University. She discovered a coffee shop with three bookshelves in a back that served as a bookstore. Soon realizing this was the first feminist bookstore she had ever been in, it sparked the inspiration for her to start her own bookstore, years later in Violet Valley, in Water Valley, Mississippi, also known as the only queer, feminist, trans-inclusive bookstore in Mississippi. 

The impetus for opening a bookstore, adding to the queer world-making she found after arriving in the South in the early 2000s, was entertwined with her research on Southern queer feminists. According to violetvalley.org, in her research for what became her book, The Lesbian South, Harker discovered a “glorious, feisty, and caring queer tribe, in love with books, and freedom, and each other, who reimagined the South as radical, liberated, and inclusive.” Harker shares that during her book tour, many Southern queers were “surprised and delighted to find that they were part of a long tradition of activists and writers, working to make the place that raised them into a place that could truly value them. They could imagine a future for themselves in the South, sometimes for the first time, and inspired by their lesbian feminist forerunners, they started to believe in their own power.”

She admits that writing the book did the same thing for her. “I discovered that most of these writers were also involved in the Women in Print movement. They founded feminist presses and bookstores, learned to set type and run businesses, and they refused to separate their work as writers from their work as activists and citizens. They inspired me to do the same,” she says. 

Another example of feminist and queer world-making Harker brought to the University of Mississippi from her graduate school days at BYU was inspired by something called Feminist Home Evening, a play on the Mormon tradition of Family Home Evening, where Mormon families, led by the father, gather every Monday evening to learn more about the Mormon faith in a Sunday-school style gathering, which inspires how she conducts her own graduate courses now. 

Harker and her fellow graduate students at BYU started these weekly gatherings as a response to BYU’s refusal to allow the English department to offer a feminist theory course:

“For Feminist Home Evening, we met every Monday night at our professor’s home to discuss the feminist theory we had decided to read together. It was incredibly empowering to realize that we didn’t need permission from an institution to do the work we care about.  We created our own feminist school, and we invited each other to be teachers and scholars and activists.”

Harker incorporates the Feminist Home Evening spirit into her own graduate classes by setting up what she calls, “an intellectual journey on a particular topic--this semester, it is Gender Theory, which I began learning in that unofficial seminar at my professor’s house -- where we read certain essays in common, and then I provide choices about longer works for students to select based on their interests.” It is important to Harker that her students’ own intellectual passions guide their reading and she also wants them to have the collective experience of sharing their discoveries with peers. She says, “Final seminar paper topics are selected with the same freedom of choice--as long as the paper relates to the course topic in some way, the specifics are left to the student. In graduate classes, we are investing students to develop as independent scholars, and that means the more autonomy students have, the more they grow as scholars.”

These are just a few examples Harker will touch on in her talk. Come to the fourth floor LGBTQ Lounge in Lamar Hall on Thursday, October 7 at 4 pm to hear more about Harker’s experiences with Feminist and Queer World-Making in North Mississippi. To request information about disability access, please contact the Sarah Isom Center at 662.915.5916 or isomctr@olemiss.edu.

See Us Differently will feature the creative works and writings by Common Good Atlanta (CGA) alumni. CGA is a nonprofit that takes the humanities into the prison system by providing college courses to the incarcerated (and formerly incarcerated). The panel discussion will include CGA alumni and organizers and participants in the University's Prison-to-College Pipeline Program.