Calendar

Annual Theme Events for 2008-09

Global Feminisms

For the 2008-9 academic year, the Center for Women's and Gender Studies at UT Austin is proud to sponsor a year of thought provoking and stimulating events examining these questions on Global Feminisms: Can feminism survive the rush to globalization? Can women in Rwanda teach Americans how to organize electoral campaigns? Can Iranian women teach Chinese women how to win gender equity?

Join us as the Center for Women's and Gender Studies explores the ways in which women across the world have advanced both their own cultural agendas and the shared concerns of all women. Throughout the year, we will screen films, present speakers and conduct workshops focused on the shared struggle for gender equity around the globe.

Feminism has many faces: it is by learning about those who are different as well as those who are like us that we come to understand our own lives better.

Global Feminisms Film Series

China, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Iraq and USA – Film series examines feminisms around the globe. Come, watch, and share post-movie conversations with knowledgeable commentators about the serious questions these thought-provoking movies raise.

September 18
Thursday Evening, 7:00 p.m.
Parlin Hall, Room 201
The Woman's Kingdom & Nu-Shu

A Hidden Language of Women in China (Two short documentaries and panel discussion with Yun-Chiahn Sena (Art History) and Madeline Hsu, director of the Center for Asian American Studies, Wei-Hsin Yu (Assistant Professor (Sociology)

The Woman's Kingdom (2006)
Download flier for The Women's Kingdom and Nu-Shu (PDF, 268K)
Directed by: Xiaoli Zhou
German Camera Productions

Keepers of one of the last matriarchal societies in the world, Mosuo women in a remote area of southwest China live beyond the strictures of mainstream Chinese culture — enjoying great freedoms and carrying heavy responsibilities. Beautifully shot and featuring intimate interviews, this short documentary offers a rare glimpse into a society virtually unheard of 10 years ago and now often misrepresented in the media.

& Nu-Shu A Hidden Language of Women in China (1999)
A film by Yue-Qing Yang

A thoroughly engrossing documentary that revolves around the filmmaker's discovery of eighty-six-year-old Huan-yi Yang, the only living resident of the Nu Shu area still able to read and write Nu Shu. Exploring Nu Shu customs and their role in women's lives, the film uncovers a women's subculture born of resistance to male dominance, finds a parallel struggle in the resistance of Yao minorities to Confucian Han Chinese culture, and traces Nu Shu's origins to some distinctly Yao customs that fostered women's creativity.

October 30
Thursday Evening, 7:00 p.m.
Calhoun Hall, Room 100
A Walk to Beautiful (2007)
Movie and panel discussion with Steve Engel, Executive Producer and Adrienne Heinzelman from Engel Entertainment.
Produced by Engel Entertainment
Mary Olive Smith, Director, Producer and Cinematographer
Ethiopia

The award winning feature-length documentary A Walk to Beautiful tells the stories of five Ethiopian women who suffer from devastating childbirth injuries and embark on a journey to reclaim their lost dignity. Rejected by their husbands and ostracized by their communities, these women are left to spend the rest of their lives in loneliness and shame. They make the choice to take the long and arduous journey to the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in search of a cure and a new life.

November 13
Thursday Evening, 7:00 p.m.
Parlin Hall, Room 201
Bombay (1995)
Movie and panel discussion with distinguished Faculty and community experts TBD Produced by Mani Ratnam and S. Sriram
Directed by Mani Ratnam
Written by Mani Ratnam and Umesh Sharma
India

This powerfully provocative political-religious is, on the surface, a love story between a good Hindu man and a devout Muslim woman who leave their village to marry and live in tumultuous Bombay. There they have twin sons and raise each one to understand and accept the disparate religious traditions of their parents.

February 12
Thursday Evening, 7:00 p.m.
Place TBD
Lioness (2008)
Movie and panel discussion with Meg McLagan, Lioness Filmmaker and other distinguished Faculty and community experts TBD
A Room 11 Productions Film
Directed by Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers
Iraq

Meet the members of Team Lioness, the military heroines of one of the most important untold stories of the Iraq war. As per official military regulation, these women received virtually no combat training before being sent to Iraq to serve in non-combat details. But military commanders on the ground needed female soldiers to help defuse tensions with local civilians and sent the Lionesses out on missions with all male combat units. Inevitably, the members of Team Lioness found themselves in deadly firefights.

March 26
Thursday Evening, 7:00 p.m.
Place TBD
Transgeneration (2005)
Movie and panel discussion with distinguished Faculty and community experts
TBD
A Sundance Channel Film
Written by Mathilde Bittner and Ashley York
Directed by Jeremy Simmons

An eight-episode documentary series depicting the lives of four transgender college students during the 2004/2005 school year as they attempt to balance college, their social lives, and their struggle to merge their internal and external selves while gender transitioning. Told with compassion and insight, the fascinating eight-episode documentary Transgeneration focuses on the lives of four college students struggling to fit into a society that doesn't understand why they are the way they are--that is, transgendered young adults trapped in bodies that belie their true selves.

April 9
Thursday Evening, 7:00 p.m.
Place TBD
Persepolis (2007)
Movie and panel discussion with distinguished Faculty and community experts
TBD
Academy Award Nominee for Best Animated Feature
Sony Pictures Classic Directed by Vincent Paronnaud, Marjane Satrapi
Featuring the voices of Chiara Mastroianni, Sean Penn, Catherine Deneuve, Gena Rowlands and Iggy Pop

In 1970s Iran, Marjane 'Marji' Satrapi watches, with her idealistic family, the defeat of the Shah in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. However as Marji grows up, she witnesses first-hand how the new Iran, now ruled by Islamic fundamentalists, has become a repressive tyranny on its own.

Lectures and Panels

September 12
Professor Gloria Careaga
"LGBT Studies in Mexico: Some Feminist Reflections on LGBT Research and Activism in Mexican Society''
Chicano Culture Room, TX Union
4:00 – 6:00 p.m.

Gloria Careaga is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) in Mexico City, and she is a leading scholar and an activist in the field of LGBT studies in Mexico and Latin America.

September 19
PIZZA PARTY POLITICS (Gender, Race, and Voter Participation)
1:00 – 2:00 p.m. GAR 2.108
Panel includes – Daron Shaw and Tffany Gill
Join us for FREE PIZZA as we discuss the upcoming election and the issues that affect all of us.

October 3
PIZZA PARTY POLITICS (Gender and Immigration)
1:00 – 2:00 p.m. GAR 2.108
Panel includes Yolanda Padilla (Social Work), Rebecca Torres (Geography) and Nestor Rodriguez (Sociology).
Join us for FREE PIZZA as we discuss the upcoming election and the issues that affect all of us.

October 17
PIZZA PARTY POLITICS (Feminism andPolitics)
1:00 – 2:00 p.m. GAR 2.108
Panel includes Lulu Flores, President of the National Women’s Political Caucus and Veronica Stidvent, Director, Center for Politics and Governance, LBJ School.
Join us for FREE PIZZA as we discuss the upcoming election and the issues that affect all of us.

October 30
Lecture by Ashok Gadgil and interaction with students on his work in Darfur.
Time and place TBD

October 31
PIZZA PARTY POLITICS 1:00 – 2:00 p.m. GAR 2.108
Join us as we discuss the upcoming election and the issues that affect all of us.

November (Exact date TBD)
Professor Tatiana Barchunova
"Gender, Sexuality and Health in Russia"
SSRC initiative to support social science investigations of HIV/AIDS in the Russian Federation.

November 10
(Time and place TBD)
Talk by Patricia Clough

Professor Clough on her latest book, Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology.

More about the Shirin Ebadi Visit

One of the highlights of this coming year will be the visit of Dr. Shirin Ebadi, 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner. In April of 2009, the Center for Women's and Gender Studies and the Humanities Institute will jointly sponsor the week-long campus residency of Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer, writer, activist, and winner of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize for her pioneering efforts for democracy and human rights, especially women's and children's rights. During her UT residency, Ebadi will hold the Humanities Institute's C. L. and Henriette Cline Visiting Professorship in the Humanities.

Nearly thirty years before she became the first Iranian, the first Shia and the first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Prize, Ebadi was Iran's first woman judge to preside over a legislative court. A supporter of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Ebadi nonetheless was stripped of her judgeship and of her license to practice law when conservative clerics prevailed in their interpretation of Islam as forbidding legal practice by women. In 1992, Ebadi succeeded in regaining her law license. She currently is a lecturer in law at the University of Tehran, a campaigner for legal and human rights reform, a frequent defense counsel for Iranian liberals and dissidents and plaintiff's counsel for victims of civil and human rights abuses. Ebadi helped establish two non-governmental organizations in Iran, the Society for Protecting the Rights of the Child (SPRC) and the Defenders of Human Rights Center (DHRC), and drafted the original text of a law against physical abuse of children, which was passed by the Iranian parliament in 2002. The author of numerous books and articles — including two recent works for Western audiences, Democracy, Human Rights, and Islam and her personal account of her experience of the Iranian Revolution, Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope — Ebadi teaches and lectures worldwide, though she continues to live and work in Iran and rejects foreign interference in the country's affairs. Her recent course and lecture titles include: "Islam and Human Rights"; "Peace and Social Justice in a Global World: The Role of Women and Islam" and "True Islam: Human Rights and The Roles of Faith."