events
FALL 2013 EVENTS
WONDER WOMAN PHOTO SHOOT
REG DAY
Tuesday - September 3, 2013
11am-4pm
Lobby 10
Free and open to the MIT Community.
Wonder Woman costume: lasso of truth, tiara & T-shirts and skirts for children and adults of all sizes provided at the photo shoot.
Free Wonder Woman swag for all participants!
MIT Women's and Gender Studies Program and Student Activities Office present a traditional REG DAY film screening...
WONDER WOMEN!
THE UNTOLD STORY OF AMERICAN SUPERHEROINES
A film by Kristy Geuvara-Flanagan
REG DAY
Tuesday - September 3, 2013
7PM
BLDG [6-120]
WONDER WOMEN! THE UNTOLD STORY OF AMERICAN SUPERHEROINES traces the fascinating evolution and legacy of Wonder Woman. From the birth of the comic book superheroine in the 1940s to the blockbusters of today, WONDER WOMEN! looks at how popular representations of powerful women often reflect society's anxieties about women's liberation.
WONDER WOMEN! goes behind the scenes with Lynda Carter, Lindsay Wagner, comic writers and artists, and real-life superheroines such as Gloria Steinem, Kathleen Hanna and others, who offer an enlightening and entertaining counterpoint to the male-dominated superhero genre.
Free & open to the public.
Discussion with WGS Professor A. Walsh to follow.
The Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies @ MIT presents...
Progressive Porn: What Women and Other People Need from Dirty Movies
A lecture by Carol Queen, Ph.D.
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
BLDG [ 32-155 ]
6:30 - 8:30 PM
Pornography is a medium of entertainment and spectacle, not education -- though many people, especially youth, may use it to supplement lax sex education. This is one of porn's most controversial aspects: What's it teaching us about sexuality, gender roles, and norms? Sexologist Carol Queen, PhD, author of Exhibitionism for the Shy, founding director of San Francisco's Center for Sex & Culture and longtime staffer at Good Vibrations, unpacks some of pornography's messages and considers its impact through both a sex-positive feminist and media literacy lens. What do we want from our smut? Is that what we're getting?
Co-sponsored by the MIT Women's and Gender Studies Program, Community Wellness at MIT Medical, and the Gender and Cultural Program at Simmons College
MIT Women's and Gender Studies Program and MISTI Foreign Film Series celebrate International Day of the Girl with a film screening of...
GIRL RISING
Educate Girls. Change the World.
Friday - October 11, 2013
7PM
[ 32-155 ]
Girl Rising is a global action campaign for girls' education, founded by award-winning journalists at The Documentary Group and Paul G. Allen's Vulcan Productions, along with strategic partner, Intel Corporation. Girl Rising uses the power of storytelling and the leverage of strategic partnerships to deliver a simple, critical truth: Educate Girls and you will Change the World. Directed by Academy Award nominee Richard Robbins, Girl Rising tells the stories of 9 extraordinary girls from 9 countries, is written by 9 celebrated writers and narrated by 9 renowned actresses. The film showcases the strength of the human spirit and the power of education to change the world.
Q & A with Professor A. Walsh to follow.
Free and open to the public.
MIT Women's and Gender Studies Program and Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies present a Work-in-Progress screening of...
Left on Pearl: Women Take Over 888 Memorial Drive
a film by Susan Rivo
edited by Iftach Shavit
Thursday - October 17, 2013
7PM
[ E25 - 111 ]
In 1971 classified ads for employment were still segregated by gender, battered women's shelters did not exist, abortion was illegal, and a married women couldn't open a bank account without her husband's permission. LEFT ON PEARL is about the movement that changed all that.
LEFT ON PEARL is a documentary-in-progress about a little-known but highly significant event in the history of the women's liberation movement, the 1971 takeover and occupation of a Harvard University-owned building by hundreds of Boston area women. The ten-day occupation of 888 Memorial Drive by women demanding a Women's Center and low income housing for the community in which the building stood, embodied within it many of the hopes, triumphs, conflicts and tensions of Second Wave feminism. One of the few such takeovers by women for women, this action was transformative for the participants, and led directly to the establishment of the longest continuously operating Women's Center in the U.S.
Through television news from the time, newspaper headlines, found footage, and extensive interviews with participants and eyewitnesses of varied sexual orientations, racial, class and ethnic backgrounds (including both supporters and opponents of the takeover) LEFT ON PEARL provides a riveting and often humorous look at a fascinating historical moment.
Q & A with filmmakers after the screening.
Free and open to the public.
The MIT Program in Women's and Gender Studies presents the Fall 2013 McMillan-Stewart lecture...
Secularism, Sexuality, and Sectarian Conflict
with Professor Saba Mahmood
Tuesday - November 12, 2013
4PM
BLDG [ 3-133 ]
The relegation of religion and sexual reproduction to the private sphere is widely regarded as a key feature of modern secular societies. While postcolonial states of South Asia and the Middle East are heir to this arrangement, they are also distinct in that they retain religious laws for the regulation of family affairs. As a result, both minority and majority religious communities of these polities continue to exert a fair degree of juridical autonomy over family affairs. Prof. Mahmood's talk tries to rethink the classical debate around "family law" and "minority rights" by parsing out how the modern secular political order has produced a unique and noxious cathexis between religion, sexuality and gender.
Saba Mahmood is associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, which received the 2005 Victoria Schuck award from the American Association of Political Science. Professor Mahmood's work focuses on the interchange between religious and secular politics in postcolonial societies with special attention to issues of embodiment, cultural hermeneutics, law, and gender/sexuality. Her work is best known for its interrogation of liberal assumptions about the proper boundary between ethics and politics, freedom and unfreedom, the religious and the secular, and agency and submission.
She is the recipient of a number of fellowships, most recently: the American Academy in Berlin (Spring 2013); Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (2009-10); the Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (2009-10); and the Carnegie Scholars award (2008-09).
This event is free and open to the public.
