Feministing’s at the National Women’s Studies Association conference!

As we mentioned earlier this week, a few members of the Feministing crew are currently in San Juan for the National Women’s Studies Association conference. We’d love to say hi to some Feminsiting readers, so if you’re here too, find us! 

You can catch our resident Academic Feminist Gwen talking about the injustices faced by contingent faculty in an increasingly corporatized university system on a few different panels this weekend. (And be sure to read Julianne Guillard’s column, as well as our previous coverage, explaining why the labor rights of adjunct profs, a predominately female workforce, is a feminist issue.)

Gwen, Lori, Jos, and I will also be doing our own panel on bridging the divide between online and academic feminism — something we think a lot about around these parts, both on the blog and through our work speaking at colleges on using blogging and social media to make change, on campus and off. You can also find Jos talking about The Little Mermaid, and catch our development intern Alexandra on a roundtable on digital tools in the classroom. Read full descriptions of the panels below.

Bridging the Divide Between Online and Academic Feminism, Sat, Nov 15, 7:45 to 9:00am

This session, featuring Feministing’s Lori Adelman,Gwendolyn Beethman, Maya Dusenbery, and Jos Truitt, focuses on dialogue between academic feminism and “online feminism.” While many in the academy read and increasingly produce blogs, and feminists writing online are informed by academic work, there is a lack of deliberate communication about the interrelationship between these fields. This session is an opportunity for dialogue about how digital work is used in the classroom and how it could be most useful for academic spaces, how academic work informs online conversations, and the potential and challenges of this relationship. Participants will gain insight and develop new ideas for productive collaboration. 

Trans* Embodiments in Literature and Performance, Fri, Nov 14, 7:45 to 9:00am

Jos Truitt presents on her paper “I Myself Shall Strive to Win an Immortal Soul”: A Trans-Feminist Analysis of Hans Christian Andersen’s Authoring of The Little Mermaid. Her abstract: “Multiple Hans Christian Andersen biographers write about whether he was gay. The wedding of a his benefactor’s son, whom Andersen expressed unrequited love for, inspired him to write The Little Mermaid, using this transspecies figure to interrogate his struggles with gender and desire. I reject applying a contemporary identity back through the historical record as biographers have done, yet Andersen’s life and the mermaid’s tale both resonate with current tropes about trans women. My queer reading opens space for trans feminine subjectivities in the literary archive, and reveals how colonialist, nationalist, and identitarian projects have foreclosed these possibilities.”

Doing Feminist Activism and Research Digitally, Fri, Nov 14, 2:30 to 3:45pm

This roundtable, featuring Feministing intern Alexandra Natale, demonstrates how new technologies can be powerful tools for expanding feminist research, knowledge production, and praxis. We focus on two successful classroom projects aimed to engage students more deeply into spaces of online research and activism and to teach them to be participants in feminist digital knowledge production. Faculty and students will present together and discuss the possibility of using new digital tools to challenge and transform feminist pedagogies. This roundtable addresses the scholarly and activist potential – and problems – of using new digital tools in women’s studies classes.

A three-part panel series: Feminist Perspectives on Contingency in Academia — Read more here!