Gender Breakfast
Where do feminist politics and scholarship intersect? Developed by and for graduate students as a forum to discuss timely topics in gender and feminist studies, the Gender Breakfast, is intended as a space for graduate students and faculty studying women and gender to meet across disciplines in a relaxed, collegial environment. It aims to promote interdisciplinary community and to foster intellectual connections with new colleagues.
Fall 2006 Speakers
Spring 2007 Speakers
Spring 2007 Workshop
Fall 2006
September 15, 2006
Elizabeth Castelli
Associate Professor of Religion, Barnard CollegeElizabeth
Castelli, Associate Professor of Religion, Barnard College, spoke on
"Branded By God: Christian Teen Revivalism and the Culture Wars Remixed
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November 10, 2006
Jean Howard & Ansley Erickson
Vice Provost for Diversity Initiatives & History Department Ph.D. Candidate, respectivelyJean
Howard & Ansley Erickson, speaking on "Glass Ceilings: Parenting
and Academia." Please join us for a discussion of the current situation
facing parents at Columbia and in academia. Parenting is an issue that
is pervasive in academic life, yet it tends to only be discussed when
it is a problem, as a problem, and in segmented chunks: faculty,
adjuncts, students, and others are considered individually. For anyone
whose present or future resides in academia, with hopes for a life
outside of academia.
Columbia's maternity leave policy is available online: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/gsas/pages/cstudents/std-ser/childbirth/index.html
Spring 2007
Friday, January 26th
Carol Sanger
Barbara Aronstein Black Professor of Law, Columbia University
"Developing Markets in Baby ~ Making: In the Matter of Baby M"
Carol Sanger is the Barbara Aronstein Black Professor of Law at Columbia’s Law School. Her research centers on regulation of maternal conduct, minors and abortion, and law's relation to culture. At this breakfast, Sanger will lead a discussion on what might well be termed the custody trial of the century: the case of Baby M.
This case set the stage for debates about the commoditization of children, women’s reproductive autonomy, and the meaning of family in an era of technological possibilities. Sanger asks how it was that two couples, strangers to one another with nothing in common but complementary desires, were able to connect and reach a deal regarding the most intimate of arrangements: insemination, pregnancy, and parenthood. In other words, how did a market for baby-making get going in New Jersey in the mid-1980s?
* The article “Developing Markets” will be sent to you when you RSVP.
Gender Breakfast was developed by and for graduate students as a forum to discuss timely topics in gender and feminist studies. It is intended as a space for graduate students and faculty studying women and gender to meet across disciplines in a relaxed, collegial environment. It aims to promote interdisciplinary community and to foster intellectual connections with new colleagues.
Please click here to download the article Professor Sanger wrote for the Harvard Journal of Gender and Law, forthcoming 2007, that she talked about at Friday's breakfast.
Friday, March 30th
Martha Howell
Miriam Champion Professor of History, Columbia University
"Redefining Marriage: “Movable” Wealth & the Emergence of the Companionate Marriage in Early Modern Europe, 1300-1700"
The history of the rise of the “companionate marriage,” a marriage formed by the mutual consent of the couple alone and based on romantic love and friendship rather than socioeconomic and political interests, is usually told in terms of culture and demography: first, the medieval church’s insistence on consent as the foundation of marriage “freed” people to marry for romantic love and, second, the birth of the nuclear family enabled new, intimate ties between husband and wife.
At this Friday’s breakfast, Martha Howell shares with us from her current book project in asking how property remained part of the equation and arguing that the commercialization of wealth during this period helps account for the ideology and practices associated with the notion of "companionate marriage."
Howell is the author of The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300-1550 and Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities.
Friday, April 27th
Aagje Ieven
Fulbright visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University
"The Subject of Rights (m/f)? The European Court of Human Rights' Jurisprudence on Transsexuals"
This talk considers the European Court of Human Rights’ recent adjudication on transsexualism. While generally seen as having improved the condition of transsexuals, Aajge Ieven questions the Court’s requirement of complete physical adaptation to the new sex. This requirement involves severe physical harm, does not protect transgendered individuals, and reinforces the assumption that legal sex reflects biological sex and that biological sex is unambiguous, singular, static, and binary. Examining different types of legal regulations which differentiate or discriminate on the basis of sex, Ieven argues that only non-discrimination measures are necessary for a stable democratic society, and that, for this purpose, legal sex does not need to be an unambiguous, singular, static, and binary structured category recorded at birth.
Aagje Ieven is a Fulbright visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Human Rights. She is a doctoral candidate in Law at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in Medicine (Leuven, 1998), Ieven completed her master’s degree in Philosophy with a thesis on the tensions between feminism and liberalism. At Columbia, Ms. Ieven will be conducting research for her doctoral dissertation on “Privacy between Autonomy and Identity: an Ethical Political Perspective on Privacy Rights in European and International Human Rights Law.”
*Paper available via e-mail
Friday, April 6th
Workshop #1
Dissertation Prospectus Workshop
The workshop will begin with brief remarks by Sharon Marcus, the Director of Graduate Studies for IRWaG, on the prospectus as a form and the role it plays in your graduate school career.
We will spend most of our time informally discussing a few drafts of prospectuses currently in progress from:
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Fatima Sbaity Kassem
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Lisa Uperesa
Since IRWaG brings together students from many disciplines interested in gender, we will also discuss how the prospectus structure varies by department, and how to incorporate an interest in gender and sexuality into one's dissertation.
For more resources, the following are Defended Prospectuses that you can consult as models, but are not required reading for the workshop; we will not be actively discussing these in the workshop since the focus will be on work-in-progress:
Adela Ramos - “Species of writing”: The genres and species of the eighteenth-century novel
Nadia Guessous - Debating Women, Engendering Tradition: Feminist Activism and the Debates on Legal Reform in Contemporary Morocco
Ernesto Vasquez del Aguila - Transnational Identities: The Intersection of Migration, Masculinity, and Sexuality in the Experience of Peruvian Migrant Men
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