Upcoming Events
Lucy Somerville Howorth Lecture featuring Jack Jen Gieseking
To honor her long career in public service and her enthusiastic support of women’s rights, the Lucy Somerville Howorth Lecture Series was established at the University of Mississippi. The endowed series brings distinguished speakers to the campus in the area of women’s studies.
Trans Studies Lecture featuring Hil Malatino
The Trans Studies lecture was established in 2021, growing out of a Trans Summit hosted by the Division of Diversity and the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies in 2019.
2024 Asexuality Studies Lecture: “The Ace Gaze is Here and it is Nerdy, Delightful, and Queer: Thinking Compulsory Sexuality, Amatonormativity, and Gender with Asexuality StudieS”
The ACE studies lecture was established in the spring of 2022 as part of the Glitterary Festival, a queer literary conference. We subsequently moved this lecture to the fall, to coincide with Asexuality Week at the end of October.
Queer Studies Lecture featuring Briona Simone Jones
DATE IS TENTATIVE
The Queer Studies Lecture was established in 2014, connected with the development of the queer studies emphasis in the Gender Studies minor.
Student Leadership Workshop: "Present and Accounted For: Embodying Inclusive Leadership"
The student leadership workshop “Present and Accounted For: Embodying Inclusive Leadership” will provide attendees with practical strategies for inclusive leadership, emphasizing the importance of presence and accountability in creating welcoming environments for all.
Sacred Harmony: Navigating Faith and Identity
In his lecture, "Sacred Harmony: Navigating Faith and Identity," Rev. Karmen Michael Smith will share insights from his journey of reconciling his identity with his faith, offering perspectives on how others can navigate these often complex waters.
The Art of the Unexpected Multi-Location Art Exhibition
Nutt Auditorium + Reception
Free Admission
Queer Studies Lecture: On Paranoid and Reparative Writing: Indigenous Creative Methodologies
This fall’s Queer Studies lecture will be given by Joshua Whitehead
Ace Lecture: "Wanting Nothing or Nothing Wanting? Asexuality, Desire, and the Matter of Absence"
This year’s ACE Studies Lecture will be delivered by KJ Cerankowski.
Art Of The Unexpected Multi-Location Art Exhibition
Nutt Auditorium + Reception
Free Admission
Sarahtalk: what we don't talk about - film screening and discussion
Presented by Melanie Ho, MFA (SouthernDocs).
What are you supposed to do when you are no longer able to love someone you’re supposed to? what we don’t talk about unpacks gendered familial tensions in the moments leading up to a wedding.
About: Melanie is a queer Vietnamese American filmmaker and writer with roots in Florida and Mississippi. Her work focuses on trauma, familial relationships, gender, displacement, and intimacy.
Since graduating from the UCSC’s Social Documentation MFA program, Mel has worked on various projects as an editor and a cinematographer. She is currently a director/producer at the University of Mississippi’s Southern Documentary Project (SouthDocs), creating intentional storytelling in the South. Mel is a 2022 NeXtDoc Fellow and Gotham/HBO DDI Fellow.
Sarahtalk: Exploring the Impact of Pregnancy Loss during Adolescence on Maladaptive Coping
Presented by D’Andre Walker, Ph.D (Legal Studies)
Pregnancy loss is associated with a host of negative psychological consequences. Studies have found that those who experience fetal demise are at risk of developing anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. While studies have advanced our understanding on the psychological impact of pregnancy loss, there is a lack of research investigating the behavioral outcomes associated with this life stressor. To address this gap in literature, the current project examines the relationship between pregnancy loss and maladaptive outcomes.
About:
D’Andre Walker received his Ph.D. in Criminology and Criminal Justice from Arizona State University. Prior to his current appointment as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Legal Studies at the University of Mississippi, Dr. Walker served as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Iowa. His primary research and teaching interests include criminology, gender and crime, juvenile delinquency, juvenile justice, and race and crime. His work has appeared in various outlets, including the Journal of Child and Family Studies, Journal of Criminal Justice, and Deviant Behavior.
Finding Mary Jones in New Orleans: Unfinishing Black Trans History
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.
Isom Student Gender Conference
For more information, visit: https://isomstudentgenderconference.org/
Sarahtalk: Queer Cinema and the Sense of Something Better
Presented by Elizabeth Venell, Ph.D. (Gender Studies).
Modern paradigms of sexuality and visibility are nowhere more intertwined than in “queer cinema,” and in 2023, LGBTQ+ representation in film has never been more prevalent. Yet popular writing on queer cinema often laments the normalization of today’s proliferating images. Venell traces the origin and irony of this critical discontent, and reimagines the function of queer cinema from being a diagnostic tool to becoming a transformative one. Recent films in foreign horror comprise test cases for this new approach.
This Sarahtalk will take place via Zoom. Click here to register.
About: Elizabeth Venell earned a PhD from Emory University in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with a concentration in Film and Media Studies. She has been an Instructional Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Mississippi since 2018.
Sarahtalk: FRESH AND CLEAN: A Reading
Presented by LaToya Faulk, MFA (Writing and Rhetoric) .
Feminine hygiene is a billion-dollar industry and women of color are the largest consumers of feminine hygiene products. Studies link excessive use of feminine hygiene products to harmful endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) that cause cancer.
Earlier last year, I learned of Jacqueline Fox, an Alabama woman who died in 2016 of an ovarian cancer linked to talcum use, and I discovered there were countless other women like her. Reports show Johnson & Johnson both knew about the link between talcum and ovarian cancer yet marketed the product to Black and Hispanic women after learning that using baby powder was a vaginal hygiene practice used widely among girls and women in Black and Hispanic communities. In researching hygiene rituals, the expression “fresh and clean” showed up repeatedly when Black women shared feelings that came with their use of tampons, powders, soaps, sprays, douches, wipes, lotions, suppositories, napkins, and creams guaranteed to tame the odorous, fluid draining, and menstruating vagina. The idiom “fresh and clean” isn’t just about the importance and continuous presentation of a newly washed female body, though corporations widely use the phrase in this way. Religious conviction, sexism, and racism are corollaries of the frequent use of harmful, unregulated hygiene products.
I see fiction as a powerful tool for calling into question and reimagining engrained rituals and widely held ideas. We shape the stories we tell, but stories also shape us. In telling the story of two sisters who struggle with ideas of moral uprightness and obsessive feminine cleanliness, the novel FRESH AND CLEAN interrogates the surveillance of Black female bodies and the ways cleanliness instigates ideas about a woman’s worthiness. I also want readers to consider the deadly consequences of our current consumer culture and how easily we place trust in feminine hygiene products simply because they’re on the shelf.
About: LaToya Faulk is a recent fiction graduate of the University of Mississippi’s MFA program and a First-Year Writing instructor in The Department of Writing and Rhetoric. Her work has been published in Scalawag, Southwest Review, Amherst College’s The Common, and Splinter Magazine’s Think Local series. She received a 2022 Pushcart special mention for the essay “In Search of Homeplace,” and she has a forthcoming essay soon to be published in The Global South called “Love is Wanting you Alive.” She lives with her two children in Oxford, Mississippi.
Sarahtalk: Beyond the 'Subaltern': Sounding Sexual Revolt and the Discourse of Oppression among Muslim Women
Presented by Obianuju Njoku, Ph.D. (Music and Gender Studies
This presentation explores how the compendium of music performance, sexual innuendos, comical euphemisms, and other performative mechanisms are invoked in the music-making praxis of Muslim women. I excavate this discourse through the performance of senwele music— a women’s music form in Ilorin, which is commonly fraught with contestation against a background of its sexually suggestive text. Based on fieldwork with a major exponent of senwele, Alhaja Iya Aladuke, this presentation explores the practice, ambivalences and convivialities of senwele music performance within its predominantly Islamic context. Despite the contestations that attend the performance of senwele music, this presentation examines how the sustained practice of senwele music presents a continuum for negotiating socio-religious binaries, gender boundaries, and the multiplicity of the socio-musical experiences of Muslim women.
About:
Obianuju Akunna Njoku is an Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology and Gender Studies jointly affiliated with the Department of Music and the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies. She recently completed her PhD in Music (Ethnomusicology) from Rhodes University. Njoku’s research draws on multi-disciplinary frameworks to examine music and marginality, and the intersection of music, resistance, gender politics and cross-cultural encounters. Her PhD dissertation, ‘Traversing Sonic Spaces: Expressions of Identity, Gender and Power in the Musical Traditions of the Nupe in Northern Nigeria,” examines the prevalent majority-minority binary in Nigeria and how ethnic identity, gender and power are articulated and contested among the Nupe, a minority group, through musical and extra-musical mappings.
Before joining the University of Mississippi, Njoku was a Mellon Postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Music and Musicology/ International Library of African Music (ILAM), Rhodes University. Dr Njoku was recently awarded the African Humanities Program (AHP) Fellowship of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
2nd Annual Ace Lecture - "To Be Free Is Very Sweet": Blackness, Asexuality, and Abolition
Dr. Ianna Hawkins Owen
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.
Isom Fellows Poster Session
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
Sarahfest Art Show: Opening Reception
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.
Sarahfest Art Show
Sarahfest’s annual Art Show kicks off the fall 2022 events calendar. The month of September Powerhouse will feature three mini exhibits: 1) 309 Punk Project by Christopher Satterwhite, 2) creative work of graduate students who participated in a special topics course offered through the Sarah Isom Centered in spring 2022, 3) The story and photography of Elaine Tomlin by Isom Affiliate and Associate Professor of Journalism Alysia Steele.
309 Punk Project by Christopher Satterwhite, who is a former resident of the 309 house and one of the founders of 309 Punk Project, which seeks to draw attention to and preserve the house’s history and connection to DIY movements and aesthetics.
The graduate students exhibit pairs with Satterwhite’s exhibit, and features student’s final projects of their class from spring 2022. The class examined what it means to uncover a queer avant-garde punk south, to wrestle with it, and to participate in it through DIY projects.
Isom Affiliate and Associate Professor of Journalism Alysia Steele delves into the archive to uncover the story and photog- raphy of Elaine Tomlin. Tom- lin captured the Civil Rights Movement with her lens, as the only Black woman staff photog- rapher for the Southern Chris- tian Leadership Conference. The curated images are part of Steele’s dissertation project that seeks to bring Tomlin’s dynamic career and contributions into focus.
Partnering with YAC, Co-Sponsor W// CLA/DCE
Isom Student Gender Conference
Dr. Minnie Bruce Pratt will serve as the keynote speaker for the 2020 ISGC: Feminist and Queer
World Making
Screening: Through the Night
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.
Trans Studies Lecture: I Am Not the Person on My ID!: Legal Gender Transition
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.
Sarahtalk: Craft Talk with Filmmaker Kate Tsang
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.
Club Sarahfest: An Evening with Kelly Hogan & Jenny Conlee
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.
LMR Sarahfest Concert: "The Ladies I Love"
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.