Spring 2007 Events

“Profit and Loss: White Privilege and its Consequences for Racial Equity and Justice” 
Lecture by Tim Wise

Tim Wise is director of the Association for “White Anti-Racist Education” (AWARE) in Nashville, Tennessee and has trained a multitude of teachers, corporate employees, and law enforcement officers in methods for dismantling racism in their institutions. Tim Wise is the author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White. His anti-apartheid work earned him recognition from Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

"Global Health and Challenges for Women Migrants and Refugees"
 Talk by student Tracy Young (’08)

Reception for winter term WAGS faculty

Author and journalist Judith Levine illuminates the ways that history, culture, politics, and the marketplace are entwined in intimate life. Her work is informed by a forceful moral politics that balances a vision of the public good with a fierce defense of personal freedom. A founder of the “ational Writers Union, No More Nice Girls, and Take Back the Future, Levine currently serves as a director for the National Center for Reason & Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union's Vermont chapter. Her book Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping tackles a profound question: Why do we buy and what do we get out of it?

Bill McKibben is a former staff writer for The New Yorker. His books include Hundred Dollar Holiday, Maybe One, The End of Nature, The Age of Missing Information and Hope, Human and Wild. In Hundred Dollar Holiday, he makes a case for a more joyful Christmas. McKibben contends we can have a far more meaningful and satisfying holiday by sharply reducing the amount of money we spend on it. By setting an informal target budget for gifts -- and substituting homemade presents and gifts of time for playstations, camcorders, and five irons -- we can begin to recover the things that really matter: family togetherness, community, faith and fun.

“Vagina Monologues”
Student performance to benefit WomenSafe.

"Making Babies in the 21st Century"
"Life of the Mind" Series, lecture by Catherine Combelles, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Biology, Middlebury College

Tuesday, February 27, 7:00 p.m. Twilight 201

“Hip Hop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes” (Byron Hurt, 2006, 61 mins.)

An official selection of the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, “Hip Hop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes” provides a riveting examination of representations of manhood in hip hop culture. Director Byron Hurt, former college quarterback, gender violence prevention educator and longtime hip hop fan, pays tribute to hip hop while challenging the rap music industry to take responsibility for too often perpetuating destructive, deeply conservative styles of manhood that glamorize sexism, violence, and homophobia. Taking his camera from the street tot the recording studio to the corridors of industry power, Hurt elicits fascinating insights into hip hop masculinity from ordinary kids, aspiring rappers, music mogul Russell Simmons, rap stars Mos Def, Fat Joe, Chuck D. Jadakis and Busta Rhymes, and prominent cultural critics such as Michael Eric Dyson, Kevin Powell and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. The film is at once gripping and educational in its fearless, unflinching engagement with issues of race, gender violence, and the corporate exploitation of youth culture.

Wednesday, February 28, 4:30 p.m. Library 201

“Silent Choices” (Faith Pennick, 2007, 60 mins.)

“Silent Choices” examines the impact abortion has on the lives of African American women. It depicts the juxtaposition between racial and reproductive  politics, and it also tells the stories of three Black women who had abortions. Scholars and activists featured in the film include
National Black Women's Health Imperative founder Bylye Avery, Northwestern University Law School professor Dorothy Roberts, former Black Panther chairman Elaine Brown and Rev. Carlton Veazey, President & CEO of the Religious Coalition of Reproductive Choice. Pro-life African Americans are also interviewed for the film including Rev. Clenard Childress, president of the Northeast chapter of Life Education and Research Network (L.E.A.R.N.). 
 
Thursday, March 1, 4:30 p.m. Library 201

“NO! Confronting Sexual Assault in Our Communities” (Aishah Shahidah Simmons, 2006, 94 mins.)

One out of three women in the United States will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. Through testimonies from Black women survivors, commentaries from acclaimed African- American women scholars and community leaders; impacting archival footage, spirited music, dance, and performance poetry, “NO!” unveils the reality of rape, other forms of sexual violence, and healing in African-American communities. Moving from enslavement of African people in the United States through present day, “NO!” moves from rage/trauma/emotional and physical pain to meditation to action to healing where the consciousness of the featured Black women survivors of rape and sexual assault transforms from victim to survivor to educator, activist, and healer. Based on an understanding that heterosexual violence against women will end when all men, make ending this international atrocity a priority in their lives, the commentary and performance of five Black men activists and cultural workers are also integrated with the African-American women's voices. While “NO!” explores how the collective silence about acts of sexual assault adversely affects African Americans, it also encourages dialogue to bring about healing and reconciliation between all men and women.

Wednesday, March 7, 4:30 p.m. Library 201

“Searching for Angela Shelton” (Angela Shelton, 2006, 94 mins.)

Filmmaker Angela Shelton journeys across the United States meeting other Angela Sheltons in an effort to survey women in America. She discovers that 24 out of 40 Angela Sheltons have been raped, beaten or molested — 25 if she includes herself. Then the filmmaker meets an Angela Shelton who tracks sexual predators and lives in the same town as the filmmaker’s father who molested her and her stepsiblings for years.
The filmmaker’s survey of women becomes a journey of self-discovery during which she decides to finally confront her past and her own father — on Father’s Day. The Angela Sheltons complete the journey by teaching the filmmaker about forgiveness, faith and the power of the human spirit, no matter what your name is.

Panel discussions following each screening.

"Graphic Details: The Black Civil Rights Movement in Contemporary Gay Cultural Production"

Lecture by Siobhan Somerville, author of Queering the Color Line and associate professor of English and the Gender and Women's Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“The ‘Other” Latinas: Brasileiras in the United States”
 

Lecture and panel discussion with Bernadette Beserra, Rockefeller Fellow, Latin American and Latino Studies Program, University of Illinois, Chicago; and Heloisa Galvão, co-founder of the Brazilian Women's Group, an organization that promotes political and cultural awareness, and contributes to the development of the Brazilian community in the Boston area.

"Reproductive Rights Education in Latin America"

Student talk by Kolbe Franklin (’08) on her internship with the Feminist Majority to promote reproductive rights in Latin America and her subsequent work in Buenos Aires hospitals

Alison Fraker Prize Reception

Every year, the Women's and Gender Studies Program awards the Alison Fraker Prize for the best paper in the field of women's and gender studies produced for any Middlebury College course during the preceding calendar year.

“Fun Home”
Lecture by cartoonist Alison Bechdel

Since its inception in 1983, Alison Bechdel’s comic strip Dykes toWatch Out For has become a countercultural institution. The strip is syndicated in dozens of newspapers, translated into several languages and collected in a series of award-winning books. Utne magazine has listed DTWOF as “one of the greatest hits of the twentieth century.” In 2006, Houghton Mifflin published Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. The bestselling coming-of-age tale has been called a “mesmerizing feat of familial resurrection” and a “rare, prime example of why graphic novels have taken over the conversation about American literature.”

“Dateline Afghanistan: Reporting the Forgotten War”
Lecture by William Gentile , assistant professor and artist-in-residence, School of Communication, American University.

William Gentile teaches photojournalism and film and video production at American University. As a newspaper reporter/editor for UPI Photos, NBC Radio, the Baltimore Sun, and Newsweek Magazine, Gentile has covered conflict in Afghanistan, Haiti, the Persian Gulf, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Panama. His book of photographs, Nicaragua, won the Olivier Rebbot Award for Excellence. For his work in television, Gentile has won two national Emmys and been nominated for a third. On assignment for ABC's Nightline With Ted Koppel, he traveled with a producer to Rwanda for a story on rape that won the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Human Rights reporting.

"The beauty and frustrations of short time volunteering: Nicaragua  J-term 2007"

Student talk by Luisa Covaria (’09) and Aakash Mohpal (’09)

“Gobi Women’s Song”
Film screening and Q&A with director Sas Carey

Sas Carey, RN, M.Ed., is a holistic nurse and educator who evolved into a filmmaker and lecturer. She has worked as a Health Education consultant for the United Nations Development Programme. Since then, Sas has frequently traveled to Mongolia, set up five laboratories in rural Gobi Desert hospitals, taken vitamins to Dukha Reindeer herders, and shot Gobi Women’s Song, a documentary on nomadic women and healers.

Thursday, March 15 7:00 p.m. Robert A. Jones (’59) Conference Room

“Memo to John Roberts: The Gender Wage Gap is Real" Keynote address: Dr. Heidi Hartmann

Friday, March 16 12:30 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Library 201

"A Road Less Traveled: Women in Nontraditional Fields"
Panel Discussion Participants: Madelaine Kunin (former governer of Vermont), Dr. Fayneese Miller (dean of the college of education and social services, University of Vermont), Lauren Curatolo (Goldman Sachs), Wendy Love (Vermont Commission on Women)

Friday, March 16 4:30 p.m., Robert A. Jones (’59) Conference Room

"The Living Wage: Pay Equity and Low Income Women in Vermont" lecture: Wendy Love, Executive Director, Vermont Commission on Women

Friday, March 16 6:30 p.m. MBH 219

 “The Motherhood Manifesto" screening and fireside chat

Saturday, March 17 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. LaForce 121 Seminar Room

“Equal Pay for Equal Work” Deliberative Dialogue

Saturday, March 17 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. LaForce 121 Seminar Room 

 “Making America Work for Working Women” Policy Writing Workshop

“Women in the Conquest of America”
Lecture by Juan Maura, Associate Professor of Spanish, University of Vermont. Professor Maura is the author of “Españolas de Ultramar: En la Historia y en la Literatura” (Spanish Women in the Colonial Latin Americas in History and Literature) (University of Valencia, 2005). In this work, he traces the lives of female adventurers, writers, soldiers, and servants as well as of governesses, prostitutes, businesswomen, nuns, and enslaved women from the 15th to the 17th centuries.

Margaret McArthur Tribute Concert

Performers include: the Boys of the Lough, Gordon Bok, Megan, Dan and Gary MacArthur (Margaret's adult children), John Roberts and Tony Barrand, Pete and Karen Sutherland, and Deb Flanders.   

Margaret C. MacArthur (1928-2006) contributed greatly to Vermont’s musical folklore by collecting and recording traditional ballads as well as writing and performing songs of her own about New England folk life. For her work with preserving the oral traditions she was given a Senate Tribute by Jim Jeffords in 1997.

All proceeds will support the Margaret MacArthur Collection at the Vermont Folklife Center in Middlebury. 

“Antigone: Tragic Heroine for Philosophers and Feminist Theorists”
"Life of the Mind" series, lecture by Martha Woodruff, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Middlebury College

For many Europeans, Sophocles’ Antigone was “a work of art nearer to perfection than any other produced by the human spirit.” Major modern philosophers, especially Hegel and Kierkegaard, praise the play for enacting the perennial conflict between polis and oikos, the masculine public sphere and the feminine domestic sphere. Leading feminist scholars, including Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray, have emphasized Antigone as a courageous woman, an outsider who dares to defy man-made laws. This talk will focus on Martin Heidegger’s reading of Antigone by investigating what connects the play’s vision of the wondrous, strange powers of humanity with the remarkable “otherness” of Antigone as a woman excluded from citizenship. It will highlight connections between the ways that philosophers and feminists have interpreted Antigone.

“More than an Ally: Children of LGBTQ Parents”
Student talk by Christine Bachman (’09), member of the board of directors of COLAGE (Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere)

Friday,April 20, 10:00 a.m.- 12:00 noon
Responding to Threats of Terrorism

Friday April 20, 1:30 p.m.-3:30 p.m.
Civic Integration of Muslims

Friday April 20, 4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Muslim Claims-Making vis-à-vis European States

Saturday, April 21, 11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Transnational Islam

Saturday, April 21, 2:00 p.m. - 4:00 pm
Overviews, Conclusions, and Challenges for the Future

"Plastic: A Theory of the Material World"
 "Life of the Mind" series, lecture by Laurie Essig, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Middlebury College

Friday, April 27 2:00 p.m. Robert A. Jones '59 House Conference Room
Making War

“From Burqas to Bikinis: White Women's Burden and 'The Afghani Woman'”
Sanjukta Ghosh, Castleton College

“Gender, Jihad, and Jingoism: Women as Perpetrators, Planners and Patrons of Militancy in Kashmir”
Swati Parashar, University of Lancaster

“Sex, Sadism, and Citizenship in the U.S. War on Terror”
Holly Allen, Middlebury College

“Imperialism, Conquest, and Masculinity: An Elephant in the Living Room”
STAN GOFF, Retired Special Forces Master Sergeant

Friday, April 27 7:00 p.m. Redfield Proctor Dining Room
Resisting War

“Peace Has No Borders” (work-in-progress film excerpt)
Deb Ellis, Middlebury College

“A Mother Survives War”
Nancy Brown, Military Families Speak Out

Sunday, April 29 2:00 p.m. Dana Auditorium
Ahlaam Film screening
(Mohamed Al-Daradji, 2004)