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Porn is a longstanding site of feminist debate. In contrast to those who see it as a form of violence against women, this panel centers feminist artists and academics who see pornography as a tool for pleasure and politics. Sex educator, artist, and pornographer Annie Sprinkle inspired the Postpornography movement, which is currently thriving among sexual and gender dissidents throughout Latin America and Europe, who make their own porn from a queer or feminist lens. Black Feminist scholars in the United States have re-examined racialized pornography (which was associated with violence and pain), pushing for reading ecstasy, pleasure, and agency into the work of Black women pornographers. Further, scholars and activists have pushed for seeing porn as a form of labor that can be both a site of exploitation and of pleasure. We invite panelists to reflect upon both new pornographies and new ways of interpreting pornography as they intersect with feminist, queer, and anti-racist approaches.

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2024 marks 50 years since the iconic radical Black feminist group, Combahee River Collective, began meeting. As they write in their statement, which is unanimously recognized as an ur-text of radical feminist politics: “We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974. During that time we have been involved in the process of defining and clarifying our politics, while at the same time doing political work within our own group and in coalition with other progressive organizations and movements.” Taking the work of Combahee as a point of departure, we take the occasion to meditate on “feminist collective/s” as an organizing force, a practice, and concept that is just as urgent in the 21st century as it has been in the history. Whether it reference a group acting together to achieve a goal, a gathering of people to be in community, or the power of collective organizing the idea of the “collective/s” is essential to feminist praxis. Our speakers will ruminate of the collective/s in various forms and from multiple perspectives. 

Join us at our annual film-festival that features films directed by women and about issues relating to gender, race, sexuality, class and/or feminism.  Learn more about each of the individual films here.

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This panel focuses upon emergent creative sexual pedagogies. Formal sex education often emphasizes risk, reproduction, and a cisheteronormative model of sex, seeking to discipline racially marked and low-income populations and often excluding while also pathologizing  queer, trans, or gender nonconforming people. Thinking expansively about sexual pedagogies, this panel incorporates scholars, activists, and artists working in or writing about sexual pedagogy through an intersectional lens in contexts such as educational workshops, performance art, music videos, and postpornography. This panel asks: What is the relationship between sexualities education and social justice?

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Reproduction is increasingly the locus of political panic, from attacks on abortion rights to ethical debates about new reproductive technologies. But moral panics about reproduction are nothing new. The reproduction of bodies and labor has been regulated and surveilled in the service of a variety of projects in a variety of historical contexts–tied to nationalism, capitalism, racial domination, class, gender, and sexual regulation. How can feminist scholarship, art, and activism clarify the forms reproductive governance can take, while pushing us to imagine more radical forms of reproductive care? 

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With every feminist critique of contemporary arrangements lies a vision of the world beyond–a feminist imagination. This panel explores artistic, scholarly, and activist practice and the utopian visions that drive and sustain it. What kinds of worlds do feminist, queer, trans, and other visionaries dream of? How do those worlds not only disrupt the existing gendered, sexual, racial, and imperialist capitalist order, but offer the possibility of new forms of collective and creative existence, and new forms of collaboration? What insights do these utopian visions have for feminist technologies, embodiments, labor relations, ecological arrangements, and creative practice? What fractures or failures do our utopian visions reveal? How do they link our feminist histories to our feminist futures? How do they begin to enact those visions in the present?

Join us at our annual film-festival that features films directed by women and about issues relating to gender, race, sexuality, class and/or feminism.  Learn more about each of the individual films here.

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This panel brings together scholars, activists, and artists whose work attends to pleasure (sexual and otherwise) as a way of creating new worlds in contexts of inequalities and violence. Panelists work in different geographical and cultural contexts who center the powerful pleasures, joys, and world-making of populations at the intersection of sexual/gender dissidence and being marked by their race, class, or caste.

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In the past decade we have seen renewed energy infused to the concept of care in feminist theorizing, writing, teaching, and organizing. How might we articulate a feminist ethic of care, and why does it matter? What does care look like in visual culture, writing, organizing, and thinking? If, indeed Black feminist theory in particular is “emphatically preoccupied with care” (as Jennifer Nash states in Black Feminism Re-imagined) how does one develop, display, and espouse an ethic of care in relation to feminist work? Why has care come to characterize so much of our work and what are the stakes of our preoccupation with care? In the context of 21st century assaults on racialized, sexualized, and gendered bodies, what does turning to care clear space for on the page, in the mind, in the community, and in the world? How does an ethic of care issue a challenge to models of consumption, accumulation, or production? What does it mean, look like, or feel like to place care at the center of feminisms?

Join us at our annual film-festival that features films directed by women and about issues relating to gender, race, sexuality, class and/or feminism.  Learn more about each of the individual films here.