21st Annual Women’s History Conference (Web)

Time: 01.-02.03.2019
Venue: Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY
Proposals by – extended –: 07.01.2019

Recent high profile legal battles in the U.S. have brought attention to the problems of sexual assault and violence against women. These include the arrest of Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein, the conviction and prison sentence of comedian Bill Cosby, and the battle over the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court. Activism against gender based violence has become the focus of attention by both NGOs and local organizations resulting in social movements like #SayHerName and #MeToo. These concerns are also not isolated to the U.S. Movements in India, Kenya, China, and the UK have amplified the voices of victims of individual and state sponsored violence.

Intersectionality, a term first theorized by feminist activist and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, was based on the previous work of Black women in organizations such as the Combahee River Collective and the Third World Women’s Alliance. These activists, by foregrounding the notion of “simultaneous oppressions,” gave voice to the frustrations surrounding the inability of feminist and anti-racist activists to consider the intersections of oppression that women of color faced. Crenshaw saw intersectionality as a tool to address failures within those movements. It is through Crenshaw’s framework that we seek to interrogate global gendered violence, now and in the past. … read more (Web)