Transnational Feminisms Summer Institute/Feminist Summer Camp at OSU

TFSIoption2This summer, OSU will be hosting a weekly-long Transnationalism Feminisms Summer Institute (TFSI) from July 7-11.  This idea is inspired by a Summer Seminar that the Radcliffe Institute/Schlesinger Library hosted on “Sequels to the 1960s.”  I was only there for a day to give a talk, but the experience felt like a summer camp for feminist scholars.  This past summer, I reconnected with Laura Briggs, chair of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst;  along with Karen Leong at Arizona State University (who is co-editing a special issue of Frontiers:  A Journal of Women’s Studies on transnational feminism), we decided to organize the TFSI.

Since that initial inspiration, the TFSI organizing team has expanded to include a number of faculty, students, and staff at OSU who are volunteering their time to plan the institute.  We have received cosponsorships from a number of other institutions, including Emory University, Indiana University, Rutgers University, University of California, Santa Barbara, University of Minnesota.  Our hope is that we can collectively sponsor future summer institutes on other feminist topics and that the host institution will rotate among campuses.

At the TFSI at OSU, we plan to begin each day of the institute with a roundtable that engages with important issues in the field of transnational feminism.  The roundtable topics include:  “A State of the Field,” “Indigenous Transnational Feminism,” “Body Politics,” Locating Transnational Feminisms and Activism” and “The Transnational Turn and Borderland Epistemologies.”  We have invited over twenty roundtable speakers who come from academic institutions in Canada, Mexico, Russia, and the U.S. to speak on these topics.  To complement the theme of “Indigenous Transnational Feminism,” the TFSI will sponsor a tour of the Newark Earthworks.

Following these roundtables, institute attendees will attend paper workshop sessions.  These panels are designed to provide feedback to authors so that they might strengthen and revise their work for publication.  We received 142 applications for our initial call for papers.  Most of these applicants were interested in workshopping their papers.  To keep the institute to a manageable size, we selected 27 workshop participants.  Their topics encompass examinations of international organizations, labor, media representations, social movements,  as well as translating and transnationalizing feminism.  Their studies analyze these developments in various parts of the world, including Argentina, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Burma, China, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Haiti, Japan, Liberia, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Patagonia, the Philippines,  Rwanda, and Syria.  The scholars themselves will be coming from Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America.

We hope that feminist scholars and students at OSU will take advantage of this opportunity to engage with establish and emerging scholars of transnational feminisms.  We ask that attendees commit to attending the entire week.  That way, we can talk, eat, and fully immerse ourselves in this feminist summer camp experience.  – Professor Judy Tzu-Chun Wu

Check out the Registration Site here!

Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics

My book Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics (due out in March, 2014) is about the surprisingly political and feminist work being done by some of our most popular women comics these days.  Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, acclaimed hosts of the Golden Globes two years in a row, are known for their feminism; Kathy Griffin, annual host of CNN’s New Year’s Eve bash, claims gay men as her most important fans and proclaims she has “nothing to say” to straight men who might be in the audience; Wanda Sykes, a popular guest on every talk show right now, was the first black female comic to come out as gay.  And our most beloved American comic right now is Ellen DeGeneres, a butch lesbian.   How did all this happen?

Comedy by its nature is subversive; it’s a place where women can be unruly and  talk back.  But in the past, most women in comedy have been stars of romantic comedies, where they can be as subversive as they like because they end up in a  safe, traditional place: married, or at least as part of a couple.   The actresses in these comedies aren’t comedian/writers; they’re actresses with good comic timing.  And unlike men in film comedies, they can’t be funny-looking or they wouldn’t get these parts.

But there’s also been a tradition of female writers/performers who were doing stage or stand-up comedy, an aggressive performance style that was certainly not considered feminine or “pretty.”  There are far far fewer of these women in pop culture history, but their numbers are growing.  From Fanny Brice through Phyllis Diller, Lily Tomlin, and Joan Rivers, these comics often made fun of notions of “pretty” by satirizing femininity.  Mae West based her whole career on the lampooning of gender roles.  And some of  today’s most popular women comedians continue that tradition.  Take a look at the cover of Tina Fey’s book Bossypants, which does quite a job on “pretty.” Also, a major point in my book is that “pretty” usually means white.   Margaret Cho fiercely demonstrates this in many of her performances, Mindy Kaling takes this up on her TV series, and Wanda Sykes has some devastating routines about “white looks” at the black female body.  If you think about all the old complaints about humorless feminists, what we’re seeing here is exciting and also pretty funny.   -Linda Mizejewski