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Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession MLA 2015 sessions
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The MLA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession has organized three sessions at the 2015 MLA Convention in Vancouver and will participate in a fourth session organized by the Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages. Session #1, the preconvention workshop on women’s public engagement, is open only to those who have preregistered through the MLA; registration is now closed. All MLA members, however, are warmly welcome to join us for the other three sessions, which center on women’s inscription and agency in twenty-first-century biopolitics; women, gender, and public intellectualism; and feminist activism in the workplace. Full details and abstracts (for Session #280: Community, Nation-State, World: Women and Biopolitics in the Twenty-First Century) follow below. We look forward to your attendance and engagement.
—Janice A. Radway and Shaden M. Tageldin, Co-Chairs, Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession
1. Talking with Our Publics: Engagement and Accountability
Thursday, 8 January, 8:30–11:30 a.m., 221, VCC West
Program arranged by the MLA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession
Presiding: Angelika Bammer, Emory Univ.; Rosemary G. Feal, MLA; Liana Silva-Ford, Houston, TX
Session Description:
Good communication skills are critical to our roles as scholars, teachers, and public intellectuals. On-campus colleagues and the general public often wonder what we do and why. We need to be able to respond. This workshop focuses on communicating our work with two kinds of publics—the media and a general, nonspecialist audience—and is divided into two parts, each facilitated by an expert. Preregistration required.
280. Community, Nation-State, World: Women and Biopolitics in the Twenty-First Century
Friday, 9 January, 12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., 210, VCC West
Program arranged by the MLA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession
Presiding: Janice A. Radway, Northwestern Univ.
1. “Exposures and New Precarity under Globalization,” Dina Al-Kassim, Univ. of British Columbia, Vancouver
2. “Black Text and the Biopolitics of Counterinsurgency,” Erica R. Edwards, Univ. of California, Riverside
3. “On Freedom and Beauty,” Mimi Thi Nguyen, Univ. of Illinois, UrbanaABSTRACT: Dina Al-Kassim, “Exposures and New Precarity under Globalization”
Today’s reading is from a current book project, Exposures, which asks, rephrasing Foucault, not “how did sex become the condition of truth of the modern self?” but “how did exposure become the condition of contemporary parrhesia?” Approaching this question from the literature of aftermaths (post-civil war, post-apartheid, post-HIV/AIDS) uncovers blind spots in feminist and postcolonial accounts of freedoms achieved. Turning to the work of K. Sello Duiker and the history of the zoning of sexuality exposes the afterlife of apartheid erasures and inscriptions now deeply carved into the historical sediment of the social landscape.
BIO: Dina Al-Kassim is a comparatist and critical theorist working on contemporary political subjectivation, sexuality and aesthetics in the EU, USA, Middle East and Africa. Having taught for a decade in Comparative Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Irvine, Al-Kassim is now Associate Professor in the English Department and the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia, where she is an Associate at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. Her book, On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the First Order and the Literary Rant, examines ranting as a waste product of modern subjectivity in the library of world literature with emphasis on Arabic, English and French literary production in colonial, postcolonial and metropolitan sites. Al-Kassim is co-editor with Purushottama Bilimoria of Postcolonial Reason and Its Critique: Deliberations on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Thoughts (Oxford UP, 2014) and a special issue of Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies devoted to sexuality (2011). Al-Kassim has been a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Stanford University and a Resident Fellow at the University of California Humanities Research Institute as well as the Harvard University Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Senior Seminar. Publications appear in Grey Room, International Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Public Culture, Cultural Dynamics, and the volumes Islamicate Sexualities and Derrida/Deleuze, as well as the Prison Fellowship International, Center for Justice and Reconciliation.
ABSTRACT: Erica R. Edwards, “Black Text and the Biopolitics of Counterinsurgency”
Over the decades of U.S. empire-building, from 1945 to the present, black women have played a central role in fashioning the imaginary of U.S. dominance around the globe. Given how blackness has functioned to justify the U.S.’s narrative of itself as an exceptional, enlightened multiracial and equitable democracy, the work of racialized gendered subjects on this side of terror—as representatives for the government, the military, the corporation, as leaders in counterinsurgency tactics—has been one of the most significant discursive inventions of our contemporary period. Considering texts such as Condoleezza Rice’s memoirs and the ABC television series Scandal, this talk examines the reformulation of black womanhood for U.S. empire in order to argue that the forms of protection and threat embodied by black women in post-9/11 U.S. culture make emergency visible as a raced and gendered logic of bipower, one that positions black women at the center of a new imaginary of U.S. power.
BIO: Erica R. Edwards, Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Riverside, specializes in African American literature, gender and sexuality, and black political culture. She is the author of Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (U of Minnesota P, 2012), which won the Modern Language Asosciation’s 12th annual William Sanders Scarborough prize. Her work, published in such journals as American Quarterly, Callaloo, American Literary History, and Black Camera, shows how contemporary African American literature challenges us to think in new ways about the relationships between African American narrative, American popular culture, and the contemporary history of black politics and black social movements. Edwards is currently at work on a book on African American literature and the War on Terror.
516. Gendering the Public Intellectual
Saturday, 10 January, 12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., 220, VCC West
Program arranged by the MLA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession
Presiding: Kate Flint, Univ. of Southern California
Speakers: Daphne Ann Brooks, Yale Univ.; Cathy N. Davidson, Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York; Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana; Jack Halberstam, Univ. of Southern California; Marilee Lindemann, Univ. of Maryland, College Park; Sharon Marcus, Columbia Univ.
Session Description:
Panelists discuss how discourse in the public sphere is gendered, both in terms of overall representation and in the assumptions and expectations inherent in its framing, and consider interaction with different publics inside and outside institutions, professional self-representation, news and feature journalism, op-ed writing, radio and TV appearances, book reviewing, and social media.
516. Gendering the Public Intellectual
Saturday, 10 January, 12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., 220, VCC West
Program arranged by the MLA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession
Presiding: Kate Flint, Univ. of Southern California
Speakers: Daphne Ann Brooks, Yale Univ.; Cathy N. Davidson, Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York; Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana; Jack Halberstam, Univ. of Southern California; Marilee Lindemann, Univ. of Maryland, College Park; Sharon Marcus, Columbia Univ.
Session Description:
Panelists discuss how discourse in the public sphere is gendered, both in terms of overall representation and in the assumptions and expectations inherent in its framing, and consider interaction with different publics inside and outside institutions, professional self-representation, news and feature journalism, op-ed writing, radio and TV appearances, book reviewing, and social media.
601. Negotiating Past and Future: Feminist Activism in Language and Literature Workplaces
Saturday, 10 January, 3:30–4:45 p.m., 210, VCC West
Program arranged by the Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages
Presiding: Teresa Mangum, Univ. of Iowa
Speakers: Hester Baer, Univ. of Maryland, College Park; Michelle A. Massé, Louisiana State Univ., Baton Rouge; Rebecka Rutledge Fisher, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Michele Schaal, Iowa State Univ.; Rebecca J. Ulland, Northern Michigan Univ.
Session Description:
A roundtable by leaders from the Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages, the Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession, Feministas Unidas, Women in French, and Women in German. Topics include the need for feminist activism, feminization of the profession, contingent labor, and gendered labor in higher education.
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