 Feminist Classics
In a series of lectures, colloquia and panel discussions during 2007/08, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender will revisit scholarly, artistic and activist works that have shaped second wave feminism. It is fitting to inaugurate the series with a reading and discussion by leading feminist poet, activist and theorist Adrienne Rich, co-sponsored with the Humanities Center on October 1 and 2. Our fall colloquium on November 2 will celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Hazel Carby’s ground-breaking book Reconstructing Womanhood, and on November 26, a distinguished panel will discuss the past and future of women’s friendship by reconsidering Caroll Smith-Rosenberg’s influential article “The Female World of Love and Ritual.” Among spring semester events, we plan a colloquium on Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying and transgressive feminist writing, a panel on the plays of feminist dramatist Caryl Churchill, and a panel on classic works of feminist art. The series is co-sponsored by the Columbia University Libraries and the Barnard Center for Research on Women.
Spring 2008
April 21, 5pm, Deutsches Haus, Columbia University - 420 West 116th Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive
Top Girls: Caryl Churchill and Feminist Performance
The Columbia University Institute for Research on Women and Gender is
pleased to announce the next event in its Feminist Classics Discussion
Series. "Top Girls: Caryl Churchill and Feminist Performance"
will feature four distinguished scholars of theater and performance
discussing one of the classic feminist plays of the contemporary
theater. Featured panelists will be Elin Diamond, Rutgers University, Shawn-Marie Garrett, Barnard College, Jean Howard, Columbia University, and Joseph Roach, Yale University.
March 28, 2-8pm, Social Hall at Union Theological Seminary, 3041 Broadway at 121st St.
Fear of Flying Conference
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/irwag/events/main/jong/
A discussion of what makes a feminist classic an American classic with Erica Jong, Min Jin Lee, Nancy K. Miller, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Rebecca Traister, and Aoibheann Sweeney
Fall 2007
October 1, 8PM, Schermerhorn 501
Adrienne Rich Reads from her Work
October 2, 12:50-2pm, Heyman Center Common Room
A Conversation with Adrienne Rich
Sponsors: Heyman Center for the Humanities, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Columbia University Libraries, Barnard Center for Research on Women
November 2, 10am-7pm, Sulzberger Parlor, Barnard Hall
"Reconstructing Womanhood: A Future Beyond Empire."
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/irwag/events/main/hazelcarby/
A symposium honoring Hazel V. Carby.
The symposium celebrates the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Hazel Carby's seminal text, Reconstructing Womanhood, and recognizes the importance of Carby's scholarship in Literary and Cultural Studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and post-colonial criticism. Reconstructing Womanhood was concerned with interrogating the ideology and conventions of womanhood that banished black women from the definition of woman, and with analyzing the racialized exclusions constitutive of humanist discourse. This one-day symposium features keynotes by Hazel Carby and four other scholars that revisit the import of this work in relation to an extended set of issues that include re-writing the human, the production of disposable life, refashioning masculinities and queer sexualities, and imagining a future beyond empire.
List of Speakers:
Hazel Carby, Yale University
Lisa Lowe, University of California, San Diego
Anne McClintock, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Robert Reid-Pharr, CUNY Graduate Center
Rinaldo Walcott, University of Toronto
The symposium is free, but space is limited. To pre-register, please email fkb2104@columbia.edu. For additional information on times and location, please visit http://www.columbia.edu/cu/irwag/events/main/one/index.html.
November 26, 6pm, Deutsches Haus, Columbia University - 420 West 116th Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive
The Past and Future of Women's Friendship: "The Female World of Love and Ritual"
List of Speakers:
Farah Jasmine Griffin, Columbia University
Sharon Marcus, Columbia University
Ivy Schweitzer, Dartmouth College
Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, University of Michigan
"The question of female friendships is peculiarly elusive,” writes Carroll Smith-Rosenberg in her landmark 1975 essay, “The Female World of Love and Ritual.” “ We know so little or perhaps have forgotten so much.” Pursuing this elusive question through the diaries and letters of nineteenth-century American women, Smith-Rosenberg finds that a continuum of female intimacies, affections, and sexualities exists within the normative structures of heterosexual marriage and family. Smith-Rosenberg’s call for critical attention to the spectrum of emotional ties between women -- from friendship, to sisterhood, to avowals of love -- been taken up by Farah Jasmine Griffin (Columbia University), Sharon Marcus (Columbia University), and Ivy Schweitzer (Dartmouth College). Griffin’s Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends (1999) traces the close romantic friendship between Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown, two black nineteenth-century Americans, through their letters. In Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England (2007) Marcus explores the multiple manifestations of friendship among women in Victorian England, its centrality to female identity and the ideal of companionate love it helped realize for women and for men. Placing friendship within an Aristotelian ideal that emphasizes its public and political nature, Schweitzer’s Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature shows how early American women and minorities appropriated and redefined the discourse of perfect friendship adapting it to the challenges of interracial relationships that shape American history.
This event brought these scholars together with Smith-Rosenberg, Professor of History at the University of Michigan, in order to discuss the past and future of women’s friendship. Alice Kessler-Harris, R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American Literature at Columbia University, moderated the panel.
Caroll Smith-Rosenberg's article is available at: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/irwag/pdf-files/femaleworld.pdf
For an audio recording of the event, please click here.
This Feminist Classics event is sponsored by the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the Barnard Center for Research on Women. The Feminist Classics series revisits scholarly, artistic and activist works that have shaped second wave feminism.
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