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The Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies educates about issues of gender and sexuality, promotes interdisciplinary research, and advocates for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

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Isom News
Sarahfest: D.I.Y. Style
Sarahfest: D.I.Y. Style

Singer Kelly Hogan services as first Sarahfest Artist-in-Residence.

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Events Calendar
Sarahtalk: “‘Where the Girls Are:’ Riot grrrl, Feminism, and Queer 1990s Culture”
Sep 9
Sarahtalk: “‘Where the Girls Are:’ Riot grrrl, Feminism, and Queer 1990s Culture”

Presented by Dr. Cookie Woolner, Assistant Professor of History, Memphis.

Isom Blog
Meet Michelle Bright, Our New GA for Communications
Meet Michelle Bright, Our New GA for Communications

She has been a part of the Lafayette-Oxford-University community for over seventeen years.

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Find Us!

Suite D, 3rd Floor, Lamar Hall, University, MS 38677

 
via @oxfordmspride • Happy Pride, y’all! This year's festival, themed "Out in the Grove", will take place on June 12, from 4-8pm. Out in the Grove is an historic event—the very first time an event honoring Pride month has been held in the heart of the University of Mississippi’s campus. It is a sign of how far our community has come in the last decade in valuing and honoring our LGBTQ+ community, and recognizing how fortunate the University of Mississippi, Oxford, and North Mississippi are to have such a vibrant and resilient queer community. This festival, from 4pm to 8pm in the Grove, has something for everyone. From the stage, we will feature local musicians and end the evening with a drag performance for the ages: Drag Under the Stars. In between, our Lip Sync Battle will invite university and community members to join in the fun, in a playful competition that we hope all will enjoy. We will also feature local vendors and local organizations, ar
To close out this month’s theme of Queering the Curriculum, we’re featuring Minnie Bruce Pratt, southern lesbian feminist poet, educator, and activist. Raised in Centreville, Alabama during the height of segregation, Pratt was introduced to the world of feminist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist grassroots activism as a graduate student in North Carolina in the 1970s. In the late ‘70s, she helped form WomonWrites, the Southeastern lesbian writers conference and was a member of the southern feminist writing collective Feminary. Together with Elly Bulkin and Barbara Smith, she co-authored Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism (1984). Pratt has published eight books of poetry, including the Lamont Poetry Award winning Crime Against Nature (1989), written about losing custody of her children after coming out as a lesbian. In her collection of non-fiction lyrical vignettes S/HE (1995), Pratt “explores the inconsistencies, the i
As part of our April theme of Queering the Curriculum, today we’re highlighting Gloria Anzaldúa, a trailblazing lesbian-feminist Chicana poet, writer, activist, and theorist. Anzaldúa’s contributions to U.S. literature, Chicana/o studies, queer theory, feminist theory, and postcolonial theory cannot be overstated. She is perhaps best known for ‘Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza’ (1987), a genre-defying hybrid work of poetry, prose, memoir, history, and critical theory. In ‘Borderlands/La Frontera,’ Anzaldúa extends the conventional understanding of “the borderlands” as a distinct geographical location to encompass all types of boundaries and crossings: geopolitical, sexual, psychic, cultural, and spiritual. Anzaldúa is also known for co-editing with Cherríe Moraga ‘This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color’ (1981), a feminist classic that emphasizes intersectionali
Continuing our April theme of Queering the Curriculum, today we’re featuring the inimitable Dorothy Allison, a southern lesbian feminist writer whose work focuses on lesbianism, feminism, class struggle, transgressive sexuality, desire, and trauma. While she is perhaps best known as a purveyor of working-class southern literature, Allison’s writing career began in the early feminist and women in print movements. In her early twenties, Allison immersed herself in the women’s movement, joining a lesbian-feminist collective, directing a women’s center, and working at a feminist bookstore. She later edited a number of early feminist and lesbian & gay journals, including Quest, Conditions, and Outlook. Her first book of poetry ‘The Women Who Hate Me’ (1983) was written mostly as a response to backlash she faced from some feminist circles who opposed Allison’s and other sex-positive feminists’ frank discussions of “politically incorr
Glitterary Festival is THIS WEEK! Join us this Friday and Saturday for an incredible ✨free✨ celebration of queer literature. We’ll have virtual panels and two in-person events for folks in North MS: a reading at @violetvalleybooks Friday evening and a watch party for Dorothy Allison’s keynote Saturday evening in the Grove. Can’t wait to see you there! —————————————————— Head to glitteraryfestival.com to register and learn more!
As part of the Isom Center’s 40th anniversary celebrations, we’re dedicating the month of April to our theme “Queering the Curriculum.” We’ll be highlighting writers whose work enriches our pedagogical explorations of gender and sexuality. To start, we’re featuring Vietnamese-American writer Monique Truong whose novels ‘The Book of Salt’ and ‘Bitter in the Mouth’ explore themes of sexuality, diaspora, race, and national and regional identity. Her work compellingly complicates understandings of the “South” and southern identity beyond the black/white racial binary and beyond the boundaries of the United States. Truong writes of her southern identity, “I often tell people that I’m a southern girl twice over, meaning that I was born in South Vietnam and that I was reborn in the American South with a new name and a new language. Of course, only one of these places is written on my body. Only one of these