March 9-13 - EFSUN International Women's Day Speaker Series

Join EFSUN from March 9-13 in HC L1-L1 for their International Women's Day Speaker Series highlighting the queer and feminist research in the Faculty of Arts.

Monday, March 9 (4:00 pm)
Dr. Marilyn Dumont (EFS): “What’s the history of Indigenous women in Edmonton? Poems dedicated to the unrecognized Indigenous women of Edmonton’s beginnings”

Karen Mcfadyen (EFS, PhD Cand.): “Misogyny’s Death Drive from Freud to Pelicot"
The death drive is Sigmund Freud’s theory of the subject’s unconscious desire for inertia, to go beyond passivity to become an immobile, immutable, and imperceptive entity. While Freud only explicitly refers to desire for one’s own inertia, his foundation essay on the subject, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, betrays his recognition that the inertia of the other is even more deeply desires, particularly by the perpetrator of violence insisting that his action is the passive conveyance of some mysterious other force. From Freud’s essay to the trial of Dominique Pelicot, this talk examines how understanding this narrative of the death drive, culminating in the fantasy of the inert woman, enables us to further understand how sexual violence suffuses contemporary culture.

Dr. Jill Ehnenn (EFS, Chair): “Dreams that exile time: Intertextuality, Queer Temporality and Uranian Love in “Micheal Field’s” Dian, Queen of Earth and Heaven and Hell”

Tuesday, March 10 (4:00 pm)
Dr. Katherine Binhammer (EFS): “Feminist Literary History in a Digital Age”
Did women writers really need a room of their own to write fiction as Virginia Woolf claimed? This talk will overview insights from Orlando’s feminist literary history project and provide fresh insight into the material conditions of gender and its intersection affecting the lives and writing of early women writers.

Reilly Bohen (WGS Grad Student): “(Dis)orientations and Desire: The Affective Capacity of Lesbian Sex-Positive Magazine On Our Backs"
This paper explores how the lesbian porn magazine On Our Backs made pleasure legible during the AIDS crisis and the feminist sex wars of the 1980s. I argue that the erotic imagery within On Our Backs does more than depict desire—it staged disorientation, transforming it into a pleasurable and politically generative practice. Through embodied engagement with the magazine, On Our Backs cultivated a counterpublic organized through affect rather than discourse alone.

Dr. Danielle Fuller (EFS): “Look at me, nonfiction girly!”: Readers, Memoir and Relatability”
Why is this BookToker’s declaration significant for the study of readers’ engagement with popular memoir? How do readers talk about the genre of memoir when they share their reading experiences online? And, what do they really mean when they post that a memoir like the late Baek Sehee’s i want to die but i also want to eat Tkokbokki is “relatable”? In this talk, I’m going to examine data gathered from various social media platforms for the “Reading for Our Lives” research project as a way of beginning to answer these questions. TLDR: some memoirs really resonate with readers; your prof is still figuring out why!

Wednesday, March 11 (4:00 pm)
Dr. Stephanie Dennie (CLASS): "Mitigating Anxiety about Female Inheritance in Seventh Century Sparta: The Link between Alkman’s Partheneion and the Spartan Basileia in Context"
This talk examines how Alkman’s Partheneion, composed around 600 BCE, participates in the institutionalization process of the Spartan dyarchy by utilizing origin myths to punctuate themes of inheritance, property, and marriage, domains which were crucial to the maintenance of elite status and dynastic continuity. In this talk I will argue that the gnome “let no mortal fly to heaven [nor] attempt to marry Aphrodite” (ἀν]θρώπων ἐς ὠρανὸν ποτήσθω / πη]ρήτω γαμὲν τὰν Ἀφροδίταν, 16–17) connects the mythological content of the poem (lines 1–35) to the choral performance of potentially eligible young Spartan women. The key to this linkage is provided by the historical context, firmly rooted in the contemporary anxiety surrounding land ownership in archaic Sparta, heightened by the potential of female inheritance.

Dr. Julie Rak (EFS): “The Return of Commonplacing: Journaling and Information Management for the 21st Century”

Although it is now widely assumed that anyone under the age of 30 does not know how to and does not want to use analog technology, “commonplacing” as a technique shows a very different picture of how a born-digital generation thinks and uses analog tools within digital environments. Unlikely as it may seem, the centuries-old practices of commonplacing are back, enthusiastically used and promoted by compilers under the age of 30, aided by stationery designed for collage and scrapbooking on the go. In an age marked by the increased availability of information, the analog practice of commonplacing enables the compiler to share only what they choose online, and so minimize digital bullying. In this paper, aided by examples of commonplace books from the eighteenth century and by twenty-first century examples of feminist and queer commonplacing on YouTube and Instagram, I think of “commonplacing” as an information management strategy used to resist the excesses of social media, as it makes use of social media for community-building and art-making.

Dr. Angelia Wagner (POLS)

Thursday, March 12 (4:00 pm)
Dr. Eve Nimmo (ANTHR): "How Women Are Sustaining Transformational Food Systems in Southern Brazil"
Traditional erva-mate production systems in southern Brazil are shaped by generations of knowledge rooted in the close relationships between people and forests. This talk focuses on women’s experiences and leadership in maintaining agroforestry systems that support biodiversity, community resilience, and food sovereignty, emphasizing the importance of listening to women’s voices in building sustainable futures.

Dr. Terri Tomsky (EFS): “Girls, women, monsters: Stories about the Islamic State”
My talk addresses the public fascination with terrorist organizations, the Islamic State (IS) and the stories we hear about the IS foreign fighters and their “Jihadi brides.” What do we make of young women travellers, sometimes just teenagers, from places like the UK, Austria, and the US who voluntarily join the Caliphate in Syria? I’ll be examining the recent surge in life narratives and podcasts to explore the way ISIS lives are vilified and how they are being reimagined”

Dr. Cecily Devereux (EFS): “Feminist Fictions: The Case of the Female Detective”
Women have been working as professional sleuths in detective fiction since the genre began to take shape around the middle of the nineteenth century. But their relationship to crime-solving as a workplace moves emphatically to the centre of their stories in the 1980s, when Private Investigators Kinsey Millhone and V.I. Warshawski first appear, establishing a process across the genre that has the female detective confronting crimes that are themselves indexical of the same patriarchal system in which they work. This paper focuses on a contemporary detective—Tana French’s Antoinette Conway—whose narrative in the 2016 hardboiled Irish procedural The Trespasser is grounded in the workplace as itself the scene of crimes against women.

Friday, March 13 (3:00 pm)
Dr. Erina Harris (EFS): "Ontological Intimacies and Research as Relation: A Transgressive Poetics”
Dr. Erina Harris will deliver a hybrid presentation: part Research-Creation Lecture, part Literary Reading

Dr. Carrie Smith (Vice-Provost): "The World-Making Possibilities of Queer-Feminist Leadership"

Dr. Adriana Rincon (POLS): “The State and I: A decolonial feminist research agenda on emergency masculinities in the Americas”
I’m interested in the gendered state in the Americas, specifically centered on one core question: How do displays of force and states of emergency/exception function as gendered state mechanisms that perform and reproduce hegemonic masculinities (the decisive protector, the man of action, the sovereign who restores order by bypassing ordinary limits?). In this presentation, I will also reflect on what it means to approach this work from my positionality as a migrant woman from the Global South working within decolonial feminism.