Feminist Research Speaker Series

All events will be wheelchair accessible. For access needs, contact chloe3@ualberta.ca

 

WINTER TERM 2024

Valentine's Day with Feminism Lecture
Wednesday, February 14, 2024 3:30 - 5:00 pm MST
Location: Athabasca Hall, 2-27

Professor Ummni Khan, Carleton University

Register Here!

Speaking Pleasure to Power: A Bratty Response to the Feminist Killjoy

This talk uses Sara Ahmed’s Feminist Killjoy as a foil to present the Kinky Brat, a figure and a way of knowing. While the Killjoy’s mission is to call out objectionable phenomena (speaking truth to power), the Brat is interested in playful interventions and teasing out joy (speaking pleasure to power). Understanding the Killjoy and the Brat as rival - but not mutually exclusive – personalities and perspectives, I will analyze a minor scandal that broke out over the sale of “sexy” Halloween outfits based on the recent The Handmaid’s Tale television adaptation.

Please note that this presentation will have a dash of performance art involving dress-up.

Audience members are welcome to don costumes related to Valentine’s Day, Killjoy or Brat identities, or characters from The Handmaid’s Tale TV show.

Bio: Ummni Khan (she/her) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University, which is situated within the unceded territory of the Algonquin people​​. She is an immigrant settler from Pakistan and India who grew up in New York City. Her research addresses the socio-legal construction of deviant sexuality, with a focus on kink, sex work, and representations of hard-core eroticism.

R. v. J.A.: A discussion between feminist law scholars Lise Gotell, Ummni Khan, and Jennifer Koshan
Thursday, February 15, 2024 from 9:30 - 10:50 am MST
Location: Ed 2-103

Abstract: Professors Lise Gotell (University of Alberta), Ummni Khan (Carleton University), and Jennifer Koshan (University of Calgary) will discuss R. v. J.A., a 2011 criminal law decision of the Supreme Court of Canada, in which it was determined that a person cannot legally consent in advance to sexual activity that will take place while they are unconscious. In other words, in Canada for a sexual act to be consensual, all partners must be conscious throughout the activity. This decision has divided feminist law scholars as well as feminist, queer, and kink scholars. The discussion between Professors Gotell, Khan, and Koshan will explore multiple perspectives on the decision.

Speakers Bios:
Lise Gotell is the Landrex Distinguished Professor in Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta and Interim Chair of the department. Her teaching and research focus on law and feminism and on sexual assault law. She is the past National Chair of the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF). She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from York University and is an internationally recognized expert on Canadian sexual assault law who has published widely in legal journals, including Akron Law Review, Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, Constitutional Forum, and Social & Legal Studies. She is co-author, with Brenda Cossman, Shannon Bell, and Becki L. Ross, of Bad Attitude/s on Trial: Pornography, Feminism, and the "Butler" Decision (2017[1997]).

Ummni Khan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University, which is situated within the unceded territory of the Algonquin people. She is an immigrant settler from Pakistan and India who grew up in New York City. Her research addresses the socio-legal construction of deviant sexuality, with a focus on kink, sex work, and representations of hard-core eroticism. She is the author of Vicarious Kinks: S/M in the Socio-Legal Imaginary (University of Toronto Press, 2013) and is currently working on a project concerning the criminalization of sex work clients and the potential for constitutional challenge. She has published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including The Canadian Journal of Law and Society, The University of Toronto Law Journal, Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, and Feral Feminisms.

Jennifer Koshan is Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Calgary. Before joining the Faculty in 2000, she practiced for several years in the Northwest Territories as Crown counsel, and worked as the Legal Director of the B.C. branch of the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF), a non-profit equality rights organization. Professor Koshan regularly sits on LEAF case subcommittees. She is a member of the Equality Effect's volunteer legal team, working with international human rights law to improve the lives of women and girls and is a founding member of the Women's Court of Canada, a feminist judgment writing project. Her research interests are in the areas of constitutional law, equality and human rights, state responses to interpersonal violence, feminist legal theory, and public interest advocacy. She has published in journals such as Constitutional Forum, Osgoode Hall Law Journal, Alberta Law Review, Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, Supreme Court Law Review, and Journal of Law and Equality.

Feminist Reseach Speaking Series
Monday, March 11, 2024 Noon - 1:30 p.m. MDT
Location: ASH 3-30

Professor Elisabeth Paquette, University at Buffalo

Caribbean Universals: Culture & Freedom

Serving as a response to Aimé Césaire’s call for a universal filled with particularity from his infamous resignation from the French Communist Party in 1956, I focus on the role of culture for a project of universal emancipation. To do so, I follow Sylvia Wynter’s statement that the Négritude movement is an example of a universal and cultural project. Recalling Césaire’s words in “Return to My Native Land,” culture that serves universal emancipation must be “free of the desire to tame but familiar with the play of the world.” To this end, I develop a conception of culture that is both local and universal, that centers on the importance of what it means to be human, as life, as being, and as experience by reading culture as necessarily local, collective, disenchanted, and related to play.

Bio: Elisabeth Paquette is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her book, titled Universal Emancipation: Race beyond Badiou (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), engages French political theorist Alain Badiou’s discussion of Négritude and the Haitian Revolution to develop a nuanced critique of his theory of emancipation. Currently, she is working on a monograph on the writings of decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter. She is also the Founder of the Feminist Decolonial Politics Workshop, which takes place annually during the summer.

Dallas Cullen Memorial Lecture
Monday, March 11, 2024, 4:00 - 5:30 pm MST
Location: Tory Building 1-096

Professor Andrea Pitts, University at Buffalo

Register Here

Latinx Abolition Feminisms: Incarceration, Agency, and Coalitional Politics

"Drawing from interdisciplinary fields such as Latinx studies, feminist theory, and critical prison studies, this presentation foregrounds the historical and contemporary work of U.S. Latina/x writers and activists to examine how each offers philosophical contributions to abolitionist feminist frameworks. The talk will address published writings by Latina/x feminist authors, as well as materials from Latina/x activists from the 1960s until today whose philosophical praxis can be gleaned through their interviews, archival documents, and print media."


Bio: Andrea Pitts is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo. They are the author of Nos/Otras: Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Multiplicitous Agency, and Resistance (2021), and co-editor of Beyond Bergson: Examining Race and Colonialism through the Writings of Henri Bergson (2019), Theories of the Flesh: Latinx and Latin American Feminisms, Transformation, and Resistance, and a forthcoming volume titled Trans Philosophy, which will be released later this year with the Univ. of Minnesota Press.