All events are open to the public at no charge. Program subject to change.
For more information, contact Tara James, associate director of the Women’s History Program: (914) 395-2405 or tjames@slc.edu.
Directions to the campus are available here.

Judy Wu

Thursday, October 22, 2009
Library Pillow Room
5:30 p.m.

Dr. Judy Wu, author of Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity will discuss Margaret Jessie Chung (1889-1959), the first American-born Chinese female physician, and a pioneer not only in her professional career, but also in her personal life. This talk, which will include a short digital narrative of Chung’s life, examines her gender presentations and erotic subjectivity through photographs, diary entries, and “love” letters. It also explores how to historically investigate sexuality.

Amy Swerdlow and the Coops

Thursday, November 12, 2009
Library Pillow Room
5:30 p.m.

Amy Swerdlow, author of Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s and former professor and director of the Women’s History Program, was a red diaper baby who spent her childhood among communist activists in the Coops, three apartment complexes in the Bronx that poor Jewish immigrants working in the garment industry founded in the 1920s and managed cooperatively. Swerdlow will show the documentary At Home in Utopia and tell her personal story.

Gina Philogene

Thursday, February 11, 2010
Library Pillow Room
5:30 p.m.

Gina Philogene, psychology faculty member, will deliver a talk, “Why “Queer” Works! The Semantic Loop Against Oppression.” Hate speech designed to neutralize individuals and groups allows also at the same time the emergence of resistance among those thereby targeted. It seems clear that the power of these injuries is the same force, which facilitates the re-appropriation of the hate terms by the group thus attacked. This reclaiming of a hate-speech term represents a sort of reaffirmation of one’s identity, which defies the hegemonic linguistic use of the term by the majority. This presentation analyzes the emergence of the term “Queer,” which signifies “strange,” as a positive identity affirmation, and juxtaposes this re-appropriation with that of the N-word. That latter term is contextualized in a deeply grounded past in America and remains relatively negative despite its re-appropriation by the targeted group.