Speakers

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author Susan Faludi spoke on “Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure Age," a talk based on her latest work, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. The Terror Dream answers the question: Why did an assault on American global dominance provoke an almost hysterical summons to restore "traditional" manhood, marriage, and maternity? The answer, Faludi finds, lies in a historical anomaly unique to the American experience: the nation that in recent memory has been least vulnerable to domestic attack is also a nation haunted by a centuries-long trauma of assault on its home soil. For nearly two hundred years, our central drama was not the invincibility of our frontiersmen but their inability to repel invasions of non-Christian, nonwhite "barbarians" from the homestead door. To conceal the insecurity bred by those attacks, American culture would generate an ironclad countermyth of cowboy swagger and feminine frailty, which has been reanimated whenever the nation feels threatened. On September 11, Americans were once again returned to an experience of homeland terror and humiliation. And, once again, they fled from self-knowledge and retreated into myth.

Faludi is also the author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, which won the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, and Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man.

Professor Gayatri Reddy, of the University of Illinois at Chicago, spoke on Indian hijras, the so-called third sex of India. The author of With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India (University of Chicago, 2005), Reddy's work challenges the standard representation of hijras as a third-sex and the usual analysis that explains their identities solely in terms of sexuality and gender performativity. Instead, Reddy expands the analysis to place these figures of sexual difference within a broader field of social difference, exploring the intersections of gender and sexuality with religion, race, ethnicity and class in South Asia and its diaspora. Professor Reddy has presented her work at conferences and universities throughout Asia and the U.S.

In September, Lara Deeb, a cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University of California, Irvine, spoke at the Women's Center on Muslim women in Lebanon. The talk, "Pious Modern: Lebanese Shi'i Women and the Transformation of Religiosity," examined the relationship among gender, piety, and modernity in Shi'i Islam in the context of the Lebanese nation-state. Professor Deeb is also a Harvard Academy Scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International and Area studies at Harvard University and a founding member of the Task Force on Middle East Anthropology and the Radical Arab Women's Activist Network. She is also the author of "An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi'i Lebanon" (Princeton, 2006).

In February, 2005, Ethel Long-Scott, Executive Director of the Women's Economic Agenda Project (WEAP) in Oakland, California, spoke to interested students and faculty. WEAP was founded in 1982 and works to eradicate poverty by teaching low-income communities to break the silence around poverty and by offering poor women and men training opportunities to lift themselves and their families out of destitution permanently. WEAP is also involved with the national "Poor People's Human Rights Campaign." This movement hopes to raise awareness about poverty in the U.S. and to influence social policy by examining poverty, hunger, lack of health care and homelessness through the lens of human rights. The United Nation's 1948 "Universal Declaration of Human Rights," which includes economic human rights, serves as the movement's foundational document. Among her numerous honors and activities, Long-Scott was awarded Essence magazine's 2003 "Street Warrior" citation and served as co-chair of the African American Women's Caucus at the NGO Forum on Women, Beijing, China. Dr. Long-Scott's visit was one aspect of the spring 2005 Capstone course for Women's Studies Concentrators, which examined women and poverty in the U.S. and globally.

During the Fall semester, the Women's Studies Program arranged for three speakers to visit Sewanee's campus to speak on issues affecting immigrant and working class women in the US and abroad.

Aparna Bhattacharya, Executive Director of Raksha Inc., a South Asian women's self-help organization based in Atlanta, Georgia, presented a lecture entitled, "South Asian Women: Confronting Life in America," which used the problem of domestic violence as a prism through which to see the multiple issues facing South Asian immigrant and refugee women in the U.S. today. These issues include the status of wives and children who are here as dependents of men with employment-based visas, tensions between the norms of the immigrant community and the wider society, and intergenerational issues triggered by the "Americanization" of Children and Young People.

Tracy Chang, Assistant Professor, Center for Labor Education and Research, University of Alabama at Birmingham, gave a talk entitled, "From Bread and Roses to Jobs with Justice: Women in the Workforce and the Labor Movement Today." Chang's presentation emphasized the problems facing women workers and unions in the context of economic globalization.

Ryan Bodanyi is Campus Organizer for the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, a campaign dedicated to fighting for the victims of the 1984 chemical gas disaster in India. Bodanyi's presentation, "Justice for Bhopal: The Struggle of Two Women and their Community Against the World's Largest Chemical Company," provided an overview of the disaster at the Union Carbide plant in India, including its deadly impact on some 20,000 people, the continuing public health and environmental problems associated with the release of toxic gas, and the on-going struggle for justice waged by the women's union.