Here is a list of our February events:

Monday, February 8 (3:30-5:00): Colloquium Presentation
"Report From Copenhagen: The UN Climate Summit and a Feminist Environmentalist Response"
Talk by Michelle Garvey
Graduate Student, Feminist Studies, U of Minnesota
FORD 400

Thursday, February 11 (3:00-4:30): Colloquium Presentation
"Capote and the Trillings: Homophobia and Literary Culture at Mid-Century"
Talk by Jeff Solomon
Visiting Assistant Professor of English, St. Olaf College
FORD 400

Monday, February 15, (3:30-5:00): Colloquium Presentation
"The Techné of LGBT: A Workshop on the Theories and Practices of the LGBT Classroom"
Talk by Aureliano Desoto
Assistant Professor of Ethnic and Religious Studies, Metro State University
FORD 400

Friday, February 19 (3:00-4:30): Colloquium Presentation
"Queer Kids Here? Mediating the Politics of Gay Visibility in Rural United States"
Talk by Mary L. Gray
Assistant Professor of Communication and Culture, Indiana University
FORD 130

Monday, February 22 (3:30-5:00): Professionalization Workshop
"Teaching with Blogs and Blogging While Teaching: How to use feminist and queer blogs for teaching and writing"
Talk/Workshop by Sara Puotinen
Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, U of Minnesota
Rachel Raimist Feminist Media Center: FORD 468

~ fé ~ esperanza ~ unión ~ justicia ~

Estimada gente, friends of farmworkers, Chicano Studies and Centro
Campesino,

Every year, students in colleges and universities across the country take a lead in organizing with farmworker groups, organizations and unions, a Call to Action through the National Farmworker Awareness Week, which annually is held the week of March 31st-commemorating the birth of Cesar Chavez). The Department of Chicano Studies is proud to participate in this effort in large part through the spring class, Migrant Farmworkers: Family, Work and Advocacy taught by Lisa Sass Zaragoza. This year, students for their group project have organized an exciting multi-media and spoken word event at the Parkway Theater in south Minneapolis. Farmworkers and former farmworkers will have the mic-poetry, comedy and spoken word while the students are putting together a zine and slide show on farmworker issues. Come hear Eden Torres read some her poetry and Joe Minjares will do some of his famous stand-up, to name a few!

Anyone interested in moderating a panel on Feminist Pedagogy at the NWSA conference?
Kandace Creel, Rachel Raimist, M.L. Hedgmon and I are putting together a
panel on feminist pedagogy and we need a moderator. NWSA will be in Atlanta
next fall (Nov. 12-15) and should be a lot of fun.

If you are interested, email me (puot0002@umn.edu) or Kandace (creel005@umn.edu). The deadline
is this Sunday, so we need to know as soon as possible.

Thanks,
Sara

I hope to see you then!
Sara

I'm currently working on a screenplay about gay, bisexual, queer, and
transgender men's experiences as bottoms. I was hoping you could
circulate the press release among
interested students with information about the project and how to
submit. That would be wonderful! Thanks!

Trevor Hoppe
Co-Organizer
"The Bottom Monologues"

WHO: All gay, bisexual, queer, and transgender men
WHAT: A screenplay about bottoms is being developed and needs men's
narratives
WHEN: Deadline is March 31, 2008
WHERE: Submit your stories online at bottommonologues.wordpress.com

PRESS RELEASE

Bottom Monologues Organizers Seek Men's Narratives
Play will reflect diversity of gay, bi, trans, and queer men's lived
experiences as bottoms

December 8, 2008: The organizers of The Bottom Monologues invite
gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer men to log-on to http://
bottommonologues.wordpress.com, where they can submit their stories
to be used in the production of a groundbreaking play about – you
guessed it -- bottoms. In the spirit of Eve Ensler's The Vagina
Monologues, The Bottom Monologues will feature provocative and
challenging stories from GBTQ men about sex, desire, identity, and
the politics of men proudly proclaiming their desire to get fucked.

To bring the play to life, The Bottom Monologues is asking GBQT men
from around the world to log-on to and submit their thoughts through
an anonymous online questionnaire. "We're hoping to get stories from
men who identity as top, bottom, versatile – or not at all. Any queer
man who has something to say about bottoms is welcome and wanted,"
says one of the project's organizers, Trevor Hoppe. Questions range
from the basic ("So… what's a bottom?") to the more complex ("Are
tops, bottoms, and versatile guys all that different?"). Guys who log-
on can choose to respond to the questions as-is, or step outside the
box and develop their own prompts.

The Bottom Monologues began at the recent 2008 Gay Men's Health
Summit in Seattle, where the project's three organizers – Alex
Garner, Trevor Hoppe, and Erik Libey – met for the first time. In
Seattle, Garner organized a reading of the late Eric Rofes'
screenplay, Test / Positive / Now, a beautiful collection of stories
from gay men who have recently tested HIV-positive. The next day,
Hoppe presented his research findings on bottom identity in a session
title, "What Makes a Bottom?" During the Q&A, Garner commented that
bringing the narratives described in Hoppe's research to the stage
would be a much needed public proclamation of bottom desire – a topic
typically seen as taboo even for many GBTQ men. With some
encouragement from Libey after the summit wrapped, the project was born.

Once the stories are collected, the organizers will sift through the
submissions to look for common themes, major differences, and
particularly exciting stories. "We're basically going to take a few
hundred submissions and distill them into a handful of composite
characters," Hoppe says. "In this way, guys who log on and submit
their story will have a direct hand in the stories well tell on
stage." The deadline for submissions is March 31, 2009. Those
interested can log on to the project website at http://
bottommonologues.wordpress.com for more information about the project
and to submit their story.

Organizer bios can be found at:
http://bottommonologues.wordpress.com/about-the-organizers/

Workshop Description:

In this GWSS Tech Talk / Feminist Media Center (FMC) workshop, I will share some theories and practices of feminist teaching, learning, research, and creativity using technology. I will use examples from GWSS courses: Gender, Power and Everyday Life: An Intro to GWSS, Feminist Thought and Theory, Feminist Film Studies, Digital Storytelling In and With Communities of Color, to show how technology can help support and deepen feminist pedagogical practices.

In this session, I will:

+ Demonstrate multiple uses of course blogs // Blogs can be used to create community, continue/deepen course discussions, post creative work (images, sound, video), extend reading responses, track news items, post event info, and easily share content to all members of the classroom community for large and small course enrollments [ see my personal blog on how and why i use blogs for teaching and learning ]

+ Briefly demonstrate key uses of WebVista (formerly WebCT) // WebVista is a course website that can be used as a reading repository for enrolled students, place of accessible web links, announcements, computer-graded quiz tools, message boards, chat rooms, calendar tool, gradebook, and other helpful features. I will forward you the UMN DMC for extended training on WebVista (their workshops are free, many are available online, and they are great!)

+ Illustrate UMN supported multimedia tools // Moodle, Breeze, Wikis, Jabber, and other digital media tools offered through MyU Portal

+ Share UMN tech resources // free and low cost classes, free online tutorials, and new state of the art classrooms available for course use

+ Get you posting to the GWSS community blog - GWSS Tech Talk: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/gwss/blog/
You can advertise courses, events, share calls for papers, funding opportunities, and other information of interest to our community [ and everyone will learn how to post to this blog during this session]

!!! Seating is limited. RSVP is encouraged! Please RSVP to raim0007@umn.edu if you are planning to attend this session.

Best,
Rachel

Ryan Lee Cartwright: American Studies PhD Candidate
"Danger Amid Security": Sex, Class, Race, and Rural Hate Crimes of the 1990s
Monday, December 1, 2008
3:15-5:00pm
Ford Hall 400

Abstract:

Despite the peace and prosperity of the late 1990s, something was amiss in
the wind-swept prairies and piney woods of the U.S. countryside. The 1990s
witnessed three highly-publicized hate crimes in rural Nebraska, Texas, and
Wyoming: the horrific beatings and deaths of Brandon Teena (and his friends
Phillip DeVine and Lisa Lambert), James Byrd, Jr., and Matthew Shepard.
With voyeuristic gazes locked on the homophobia of slow-minded hicks and
the racism of small southern towns, national media discourse and cultural
production about hate crimes from the 1990s announced that but for a few
exceptional instances of intolerance in the hinterland, the U.S. was a
nation accepting of difference. Yet difference - particularly classed and
racialized sexual difference - was central to how such stories were spun.

As this paper examines rural hate crimes discourse, it asks how narratives
about sexuality and family structure were deployed to negotiate social
belonging and normativity. It considers who was imagined as dangerous and
who imagined themselves as secure in "rural America" specifically and the
nation more generally, proposing that rural hate crimes discourse
increasingly separated respectable LGBT identity from "irresponsible" forms
of sexual nonnormativity marked by class and racial difference. In doing
so, the paper addresses the ways such discourses were constructed and
contested by local and regional news coverage, national media and cultural
productions, and LGBT and African American community responses.

For more information, call Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at
612.624.6006.
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS

The Red Queen by Lorena Duarte, Directed by Brian Columbus
An episodic play made up of a collection of stories centered on the experiences of women, expressing the tenderness, the ardor, the life-and-death dance that women - and particularly immigrant women - must do.
Performed by Katrina Hawley, Marie Williams and Katherine Kupiecki

WHERE: The Lowry Lab, 350 St Peter St, St Paul, 55102

TICKETS: ONLY $6 EACH!!! Reservations are the only way to guarantee availability and can be made at: 651-225-8106 or tickets@teatrodelpueblo.org

INFO: www.teatrodelpueblo.org, 651-224-8806 or info@teatrodelpueblo.org

Concepts of “migration� and “travel� abound in the field of Transgender Studies. Many transgender cultural productions explore questions of identity and transition trajectories using metaphors of home, displacement, relocation, etc. To our knowledge there are no full length text(s) or monographs that treat the many possibilities of critical, scholarly investigation of this subject in TG history, identity, and art/cultural production. We are proposing a volume of criticism to fill the void and invite contributions for an interdisciplinary collection on the topic. Broadly conceived Trans/Gender Migrations will explore, trace, and map the myriad meanings and functions of “migration� and “travel� in transgender cultural production, politics, and identity/subjectivity, including related concepts of movement and location like space (and spatiality), place, border(s), bridge(s), home, expatriation, displacement, relocation, etc.

We welcome essays from all academic disciplines and scholarly fields and provide some suggestions. Essays might examine these concepts and metaphors in transgender identities (and subjectivities), politics, and cultural productions like literature, film, dance and other performance arts, photography, music, body-art, etc. Or, how TG Studies is itself an interdisciplinary field of methodologies, theories, concepts, and knowledges that are imported from other disciplinary and artistic sites. When and where do western definitions of transgender (and transsexuality) fail to translate across cultural and geographical borders? Other possible topics include exploring the multiple crossings of gender/sex transitions: how the crossing of borders of sex/gender entails other shifts in identity and subjectivity like social class, race and ethnicity, national and religious identity, etc. What additional borders are crossed in sex/gender transitions? Essays might also examine the surgical re-mapping and re-routing of bodily tissues, nerves, organs, and chemicals on TG/TS bodies. Other topics for exploration might include how sex/gender transitions effect migrations to new sexual and political communities; how the politics of race, class, gender, (trans)sexuality intersect with or manifest in immigration policies of the state; and what politics of sex, gender, (trans)sexuality are operative in the forced displacement and relocation of peoples.

Please send a 500 word abstract, working title, and brief biographical statement (MS Word or PDF) to Trystan Cotten by January 15, 2009 at: Trystan38@hotmail.com. Please send a brief biographical statement along with your abstract. Completed essays (formatted in Chicago guidelines) are due by April 1, 2009.

And did we mention there will be free food? The CD will be on sale for $10 and there will be some short performances by some of the featured artists.

Help us celebrate Minnesota poets and political art! And spread the word...

Let me know if you are interested. You can post a comment to the blog, email me at puot0002@umn.edu, or stop by my office (Ford 429).

Spread the word...

-Sara Puotinen

Here is the information:

GWSS 8190: Feminist and Queer Explorations in Troublemaking, Wednesdays 2-4:30
What are the political and ethical possibilities for making trouble? How have selves or communities made trouble in effective ways? What would it mean to think about troublemaking as a virtue? What are the limits of troublemaking? What are the links between troublemaking and feminist theoretical activism? Radical democracy? Queer theory and practice? Humor? Critical thinking and philosophy?

In this graduate seminar, we will explore all of these questions (and more) as we closely examine the nature and practice of troublemaking. We will begin by examining the specific ways that troublemaking as a practice and a troublemaker as a label have been used to dismiss and deem improper or deviant the theories, experiences, and activities of individuals and communities who challenge the status quo and/or work for social justice. We will closely examine how troublemaking and the troublemaker are represented and performed within specific social contexts and how race, class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity shape our understandings (and evaluations) of them. Then, we will critically explore the ethical and political potential of troublemaking, both as a practice and as an attitude/quality of character. In particular, we will look at how making trouble functions in a wide range of feminist and queer theoretical, political and ethical projects of transgression and transformation. While this course will draw upon a wide range of disciplines and methodologies, we will give particular attention to troublemaking in philosophical and ethical contexts. Some of the authors we will be reading include: Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Kate Bornstein, bell hooks, Cornel West, Chantal Mouffe, Luce Irigaray, Dorothy Allison, María Lugones, Chelá Sandoval, Audre Lorde, Cynthia Willett and Lisa Tessman.