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.