On April 15, 2024, the Mellon Sawyer seminar hosted the session “Digital Harassment and Online Gender Violence,” organized and facilitated by Brandeis professor Dorothy Kim. Featuring Sydette Harry (researcher, writer and strategist) and mattie brice (artist, designer, and educator, UC Santa Cruz), the session centered Black women’s tools for documenting and resisting the far-right occupation of digital and gaming spaces.

Online violence against Black women proliferates today in the context of book bans, moral panics about Critical Race Theory, cynical guttings and weaponizations of DEI, and the Supreme Court’s striking down of race-conscious college admissions. For example, GamerGate, the targeted harassment of women of color and LGBTQIA+ people in the videogame industry, has seen a resurgence since 2023 (brice). 

Yet, as panelists demonstrated, these instances of online violence are nothing new. From the 1994 establishment of the hate site Stormfront, to the 2009 Operation Lollipop in which men’s rights activists impersonated Black women as part of an anti-feminist hoax, to the original GamerGate harassment campaign in 2013-2014, online gender violence is inextricable from upticks of white nationalism. Black feminists have long been sounding this alarm - as Rachelle Hampton put it, women such as Shafiqah Hudson and Mikki Kendall “Saw the Alt-Right Threat Coming” - and yet they have been further scapegoated and surveilled for doing so, often by leftist white feminists. Harry gave the example of Michelle Goldberg’s 2014 Nation article, “Feminism's Toxic Twitter Wars,” which pathologized Kendall as a “bully” for defending herself. Underscoring the glaring disparities in who gets to be defended, Harry asked: “why are the people [Black women] calling out the problem more at risk than the people [white nationalists] you claim to be scared of?”

Panelists also discussed key media inflection points such as the 2008 Racefail conversations about race and science fiction; the rise of the “stream” as a decentralized alternative to traditional mass media; and the DIY Revolution that has seen an increase in people of color and other marginalized folks shaping videogame design at multiple levels.

Harry, brice, and Kim ultimately offered digital historiographies locating ongoing online violence within longstanding patterns. Emphasizing the importance of centering the professional and personal knowledge of those who experience systemic digital harassment, they issued a call for accountability to harassers and non-harassers alike. 

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This event was part of the year-long Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Imperiled Bodies: Slavery, Colonialism, Citizenship and the Logics of Gender-Based Violence” led by PI Anita Hill, co-PI Harleen Singh, and ChaeRan Freeze at Brandeis University. Brandeis University sponsors and resources include the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the Women’s Studies Research Center, the Mandel Center for the Humanities, the Hadassah Brandeis Institute, the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project, the Rose Art Museum, the Kniznick Art Gallery, the Gender and Sexuality Center, and the Prevention, Advocacy, and Resource Center. This seminar is among the signature events of the Heller 65th Anniversary year, Celebrating Knowledge Advancing Social Justice #Hellerat65.

Posted by Carmel Ohman 7/3/24

On April 4, 2024, the Mellon Sawyer Seminar hosted the session “Remake, Resist, Rewind: Surviving the Horror Film,” organized and moderated by Brandon Callender (Assistant Professor of English, Brandeis University). The session featured guest speakers Ashlee Blackwell (Wellenreiter), co-writer and producer of Horror Noire: a History of Black Horror and founder of Graveyard Shift Sisters, and Justin Phillip Reed, poet and author of The Malevolent Volume and the hybrid collection With Bloom Upon Them And Also With Blood: A Horror Miscellany. Discussing a range of horror subgenres (slasher, vampire, extraterrestrial) and motifs (final girl, scream queen), and responding to the contemporary boom in horror film franchise reboots,, the session asked what it means to both represent and consume racialized, gendered, and sexualized violence on screen, particularly for Black creators and viewers in an age of new black horror content and franchise reboots.

A resounding takeaway was that being a Black horror fan is complicated. Horror films blur the line between pleasurable entertainment and trauma, and this applies whether or not they explicitly thematize social issues such as enslavement, lynching, rape, stalking, mass shootings, and microaggressions that risk triggering or retraumatizing Black viewers. Callender began by explaining, for example, that the horror motif of the final girl (the last person to survive, usually white) participates in a long cinematic pattern of depicting the racialized other as a sexual threat to white women. Films such as Birth of a Nation (1915) and King Kong (1933) invoke the fiction of a Black sexual threat as a historical justification for lynching, as Robin R. Means Coleman and Ashlee Blackwell have elsewhere demonstrated. So, even as many fans celebrate the arrival of Black final girls, the motif itself is inextricable from white supremacist patterns of representation.

At the same time, it is deeply important for Black horror fans to see themselves represented onscreen. Blackwell, whose stated website mission on Graveyard Shift Sisters is to “Purg[e] the Black Female Horror Fan From the Margins,” emphasized that structural invisibility onscreen and off is a pressing issue. Horror has its own internal logics wherein fans expect gore, and so for Black women characters to negotiate violence or even die spectacularly is a meaningful form of inclusion. Blackwell gave the contemporary example of Mariama Diallo’s Master (2022), which depicts a dark-skinned Black woman professor (played by Regina Hall) at an elite university navigating an onslaught of violences from microaggressions to hate crimes. The film is impactful in part because it affirms and makes visible a host of real-world vulnerabilities, using devices from the horror genre to tell a complex story of Black women’s experiences in predominantly white institutions.

Complicating the conversation further is that, as Reed emphasized, these representations circulate within a capitalist marketplace. As he puts it in the titular essay from his collection With Bloom Upon Them And Also With Blood, “Black peril is a problem commodity” (154). Particularly in the context of films like The First Purge and other “elevated horror” films that Reed links to studio A24, racialized violence abounds as profitable spectacle. Horror may have its own logics where, as Robin R. Means Coleman and Mark H. Harris put it, “getting a good death” is worth celebrating (The Black Guy Dies First 40), but the weight of history still bears down upon these representations. Indeed, what Callender identified as a general trajectory in horror film franchise reboots from camp to satire to serious means that themes of racial and sexual violence and intergenerational trauma are increasingly at the fore, raising ethical questions about the implications of paying to engage with visions and histories of Black suffering.

As horror film franchises increasingly tackle social issues head on, Black creators and fans are actively debating how to balance horror’s entertainment value with the social harms it can activate. Gathering leading critical-creative experts on Black horror, this session was a testament to the heterogeneity of these conversations.

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This event was part of the year-long Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Imperiled Bodies: Slavery, Colonialism, Citizenship and the Logics of Gender-Based Violence” led by PI Anita Hill, co-PI Harleen Singh, and ChaeRan Freeze at Brandeis University. Brandeis University sponsors and resources include the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the Women’s Studies Research Center, the Mandel Center for the Humanities, the Hadassah Brandeis Institute, the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project, the Rose Art Museum, the Kniznick Art Gallery, the Gender and Sexuality Center, and the Prevention, Advocacy, and Resource Center. This seminar is among the signature events of the Heller 65th Anniversary year, Celebrating Knowledge Advancing Social Justice #Hellerat65.

Posted by Carmel Ohman 6/13/24

On March 26, 2024, the Mellon Sawyer Seminar hosted the session “Crip Justice: Gender, Disability, and Sexual Violence,” organized and moderated by Ilana Szobel (Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature, Brandeis University). Featuring disability justice activists and artists Patty Berne (co-founder, executive and artistic director of Sins Invalid) and Maria Palacios (poet, author, activist, and performance artist), the session condemned patterns of ableist sexual violence against people with disabilities while centering community-based strategies for cultivating what Sins Invalid calls “an unshamed claim to beauty in the face of invisibility.”

Berne began by identifying sexual violence as one tool to regulate people’s bodies and behavior in an ableist political and economical system reliant on profit and punishment. They defined ableism, per T. A. Lewis, as “[a] system of assigning value to people's bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, productivity, desirability, intelligence, excellence, and fitness. These constructed ideas are deeply rooted in eugenics, anti-Blackness, misogyny, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism.” Under this wide-ranging ableist system, violences such as forced sterilization, coerced DNRs, and euthanasia proliferate under a cloak of silence, shame, and invisibility, exacerbated by a medical model that does “not support [people with disabilities] being seen as whole and complete humans.”

Panelists then turned to a recording of Maria Palacios’s Sins Invalid performance piece, “Vagina Manifesto” (2009), in which she personifies her vagina to reflect on gender, desire, and sexuality and to dismantle pervasive “anti-vagina propaganda” (“Vagina Manifesto” 1:03) that devalues women and girls. Imagining a “ceremony of rebirth when across oceans and nations the arrival of a daughter, especially a disabled daughter, is no longer mourned but celebrated” (“Vagina Manifesto” 3:20-3:34), Palacios modeled her approach to art as a powerful tool for personal and community reflection. Art is, as Palacios put it, “a way to fight back, … to leave a mark, to create a legacy, [and] to empower people.” It provides a site where people can organize and affirm that “we deserve to be here.”

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This event was part of the year-long Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Imperiled Bodies: Slavery, Colonialism, Citizenship and the Logics of Gender-Based Violence” led by PI Anita Hill, co-PI Harleen Singh, and ChaeRan Freeze at Brandeis University. Brandeis University sponsors and resources include the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the Women’s Studies Research Center, the Mandel Center for the Humanities, the Hadassah Brandeis Institute, the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project, the Rose Art Museum, the Kniznick Art Gallery, the Gender and Sexuality Center, and the Prevention, Advocacy, and Resource Center. This seminar is among the signature events of the Heller 65th Anniversary year, Celebrating Knowledge Advancing Social Justice #Hellerat65.

Posted by Carmel Ohman 3/28/24

On February 27, 2024, the Mellon Sawyer seminar hosted the session “Violence Knows No Borders: a Continuum of Violence for Latin American and Caribbean Women,” organized and moderated by María Durán (Assistant Professor of Latinx Cultural Studies, Brandeis University). Esteemed guest speakers Rosa-Linda Fregoso (Professor Emerita of Latin American & Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz) and Bernadine Hernández (Associate Professor of English at the University of New Mexico) documented longstanding social movements against feminicide as a condition of vulnerability to death for cis and trans women at the intersection of racial, gender, and sexual power structures. 

Rosa-Linda Fregoso historicized Latin American contra feminicide movements that depart from existing conversations about “femicide” by interrogating gender as a single-axis lens of analysis and exposing the systemic and state-sanctioned dimensions of sexual violence. Such contra feminicide organizing, and the linked academic field of Feminicide Studies, centers the “intersectionality of struggles” in disrupting patterns of violence against cis and trans women. Mobilizing decades of expertise, and drawing on research from her recent book The Force of Witness: Contra Feminicide (Duke University Press, 2023), Fregoso advocated for the implementation of abolitionist frameworks of restorative and transformative justice over punitive models. Fregoso furthermore emphasized the “interconnection of feminist abolitionist struggles” across geopolitical boundaries.

Bernadine Hernández presented research from her award-winning book Border Bodies: Racialized Sexuality, Sexual Capital, and Violence in the Nineteenth Century Borderlands (2022), which puts forward a theory of sexual capital to demonstrate how discursive and material uses of poor Mexicanas’ bodies became economically instrumental in the nineteenth-century Southwest borderlands. Hernández examined cases of gender and sexual violence, from the hanging of Josefa "Chipita" Rodriguez in 1863 to the “West Mesa Murders” in 2009. Attesting to the challenges of archives and discourses that make violence the precondition to visibility for multiply marginalized women in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Hernández emphasized the need for archival work rooted in community accountability.

Panelists ultimately discussed wide-ranging coalitional and comparative strategies for denaturalizing global capitalism and its material and ideological consequences in Latin America and the Caribbean. Framed by María Durán’s calls to “address the expanse of gender-based violence and its contemporary conditions in the region,” Fregoso and Hernández’s talks generated rich discussion about how to bear witness to the complex lives and deaths of women facing linked structures of racial, sexual, and gender oppression.

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This event was part of the year-long Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Imperiled Bodies: Slavery, Colonialism, Citizenship and the Logics of Gender-Based Violence” led by PI Anita Hill, co-PI Harleen Singh, and ChaeRan Freeze at Brandeis University. Brandeis University sponsors and resources include the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the Women’s Studies Research Center, the Mandel Center for the Humanities, the Hadassah Brandeis Institute, the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project, the Rose Art Museum, the Kniznick Art Gallery, the Gender and Sexuality Center, and the Prevention, Advocacy, and Resource Center. This seminar is among the signature events of the Heller 65th Anniversary year, Celebrating Knowledge Advancing Social Justice #Hellerat65.  

Posted by Carmel Ohman 3/5/24

On January 23, 2024, the Mellon Sawyer Seminar hosted the panel “From Comfort Woman to Comfort Child: Genealogies of Gendered and Sexualized Violence in the Korean Diaspora.” Organized by Yuri Doolan (Brandeis University) and moderated by Ji-Yeon Yuh (Northwestern University), the session examined how racialized and sexualized Korean women and children have negotiated linked Japanese and U.S. imperial violences, particularly since World War II. Panelists traced the labor and logics behind the term “comfort woman,” which has variously referred to women coerced into providing sexual labor to Japan’s military during World War II and to women coerced into sexually serving U.S. military personnel in Cold War era camptowns in South Korea. 

Focusing on the figure of the Korean War mascot, Christine Hong (UC Santa Cruz) began by interrogating how indigenous women and children were conscripted into reproductive and affective labor ranging from housekeeping to producing a feeling of “home away from home” for non-native troops during the Korean War. Critical of revisionist U.S. accounts that position the Korean War as a milestone for African American racial integration, Hong’s analysis exposed multiple violences—indeed, multiple wars—waged in the name of the U.S. war machine. Jeong-Mi Park (Chungbuk University) presented research from her forthcoming book The State’s Sexuality: Prostitution and Postcolonial Nation Building in South Korea (University of California Press, August 2024). Documenting the uneven usage of the term “comfort women,” Jeong-Mi Park demonstrated how the nation elided the continuities between the experiences of Kim Hak Sun, who survived Japanese military sexual enslavement, and Yun Kŭm-I, who was murdered by a U.S. serviceman—a stark example of what she terms the “overwriting of the national memory.” Yuri Doolan too underscored continuities between Japanese and U.S. imperialist wieldings of “comfort” before considering their implications for the first generation of Korean adoptees in the United States. Drawing on research from his forthcoming book The First Amerasians: Mixed Race Koreans from Camptowns to America (Oxford University Press, 2024), he showed how it was the sons and daughters of U.S. military “comfort women” who would take on the role of what Jane Jeong Trenka terms the “comfort child,” conscripted, as part of a “clear genealogy of violence,” into easing white American guilt about the Korean War. Finally, Kimberly McKee (Grand Valley State University) presented research from her recent book Adoption Fantasies: The Fetishization of Asian Adoptees from Girlhood to Womanhood (2023). She demonstrated that Korean adoptee girls are positioned at “a nexus of objectification,” negotiating Orientalist fantasies about Korea and about Asian American women. Exposing the violent intimacies that permeate both U.S. popular culture and adoptive families themselves, McKee emphasized the importance of centering the perspectives of adoptees in disrupting racialized and sexualized harassment. 

Attending to the experiences of multiple generations of women and children in the Korean diaspora, panelists interrogated the role of racialized, gendered, and sexualized labor in constructing national and international fictions and relations. Together they exposed layers of imperial violence undergirding fantasies of “comfort.”  

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This event was part of the year-long Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Imperiled Bodies: Slavery, Colonialism, Citizenship and the Logics of Gender-Based Violence” led by PI Anita Hill, co-PI Harleen Singh, and ChaeRan Freeze at Brandeis University. Brandeis University sponsors and resources include the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the Women’s Studies Research Center, the Mandel Center for the Humanities, the Hadassah Brandeis Institute, the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project, the Rose Art Museum, the Kniznick Art Gallery, the Gender and Sexuality Center, and the Prevention, Advocacy, and Resource Center. This seminar is among the signature events of the Heller 65th Anniversary year, Celebrating Knowledge Advancing Social Justice #Hellerat65.  

Posted by Carmel Ohman 1/25/24

On December 12, 2023, the Mellon Sawyer Seminar hosted the panel “Legacies of Colonial and Postcolonial Gender, Sexuality, Caste, and Citizenship.”  Community members engaged with the linked Anglo-colonial histories of South Asia and the Caribbean through the work of esteemed scholars Jyoti Puri, Faith Smith, and Harleen Singh. The panel examined the logics of colonialism that permeate legal structures and social imaginaries well after emancipation and independence.

Colonialism organizes itself in many ways around sexuality, defined broadly in Jyoti Puri’s words as “who does what with whom and under what circumstances.” Formations such as demography, fertility rates, health, kinship, family, inheritance, and property “pivot around this concept of sexuality.” For this reason, Puri says, we must understand sexuality as “constitutive of the social” rather than as being constituted by the social. 

Panelists provided myriad examples of sexuality as a key site of colonial and postcolonial social control. Harleen Singh outlined what she terms “rape scripts” that make and remake themselves under shifting conditions of governance, offering Rudyard Kipling’s 1888 poem “An Interesting Condition” as an example of a text that casts India as a “promiscuous woman” and describes the presence of the English in India using vocabularies of rape. Faith Smith historicized vagrancy laws in the British Caribbean - for example, an iteration in early 20th century Jamaica that regulated the intimate lives of upwardly mobile men primed to run for elected office. Smith underscored the value of tracing small-charge ordinances that regulate gendered clothing, religious and cultural practices, and more, emphasizing how the everyday, non-spectacular regulation of women in particular can otherwise fade from view. Jyoti Puri contextualized the anti-sodomy law in India (section 377 of the Indian Penal Code) through to its overturning in 2018 as a key tool in nation-making, a process inextricable from the production of race and caste. Puri went on to reflect on migrant Muslim and Sikh communities in the U.S. and Canada who faced legal barriers to funeralizing their loved ones in keeping with their cultural beliefs and yet persisted in such key death rites as sewing canvas shrouds and felling wood for funeral pyres. 

When asked about how their various methods illuminate the relationship between the personal and the structural (a question inspired by Sara Ahmed’s insight that “The personal is structural. … [Y]ou can be hit by a structure; you can be bruised by a structure” [2015]), panelists outlined the potentialities of ethnography, archival work, and literary analysis. Puri underscored the value of critical practices that are multiphonal, conveying how cognitive, affective, and emotional facets of lived experience sound together. Smith relayed the powerful example of encountering what appeared to be a fictional short story by queer Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay, only to find that McKay had been writing at his desk as a policeman, narrativizing a real call to which a fellow officer had responded. McKay’s narrative illuminated his own tenuous structural proximity to the state-enacted punishment of genders and sexualities deemed nonnormative. Also reflecting on literary genre, Singh emphasized that the novel form provides “imaginative training” that can challenge selected social conventions (featuring a short-lived romance between a white man and an Indian woman, for example) while reinscribing those conventions most linked to social stability in Anglo-colonial and postcolonial contexts (marriage, inheritance, property).

Ultimately, panelists historicized what Anita Hill termed the formal and informal “violence of the law” while foregrounding the complex conceptualization of self-determination and the production of knowledge, even under hostile conditions. Anglo-colonial legacies may materially and ideologically circumscribe “who does what with whom and under what circumstances,” and yet postcolonial subjects claim space, breathe air, and forge culturally specific paradigms that far exceed colonialism’s insidious logics. 

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This event was part of the year-long Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Imperiled Bodies: Slavery, Colonialism, Citizenship and the Logics of Gender-Based Violence” led by PI Anita Hill, co-PI Harleen Singh, and ChaeRan Freeze at Brandeis University. Brandeis University sponsors and resources include the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the Women’s Studies Research Center, the Mandel Center for the Humanities, the Hadassah Brandeis Institute, the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project, the Rose Art Museum, the Kniznick Art Gallery, the Gender and Sexuality Center, and the Prevention, Advocacy, and Resource Center. This seminar is among the signature events of the Heller 65th Anniversary year, Celebrating Knowledge Advancing Social Justice #Hellerat65. 

Posted by Carmel Ohman 12/21/23. Updated 1/10/24

October 24th marked a special event in this year’s Mellon Sawyer seminar series; Brandeis University Professor Anita Hill moderated a comparative conversation between Crystal Feimster (Associate Professor of African American Studies, American Studies and History at Yale University) and Sarah Deer (enrolled member of the Muscogee Nation and University Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas) that laid bare the roots of gender-based violence in settler colonialism and slavery.

Hill began by uplifting two distinct yet related events from her home state of Oklahoma: the settler occupation of the tribal lands of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, and the Tulsa Race massacre as one stark example of anti-Black violence in the aftermath of slavery. Turning to the experiences of Native and Black women in the face of such harm, Hill then guided the speakers in an interrogation of settler colonialism and slavery as coexisting forms of oppression fundamentally reliant upon racialized gender and sexual terror as a tool of domination.

Gender-based violence against Native and Black women is neither accidental nor new. Sarah Deer explained that sexual assault in Indian Country literally started with Columbus, and that, for European colonizers, raping women was on a continuum with conquering land. Crystal Feimster emphasized that the United States was “built on a foundation of racial violence and sexual exploitation.” In the antebellum period, for example, enslavers used sexual violence against Black women to maintain the plantation system. While contemporary public discussions of gender-based violence often emphasize the harmful actions of individual men, getting at the root of the problem requires systemic thinking and a long historical memory. 

Having interrogated key terms for bodily and cultural autonomy such as citizenship, sovereignty, testimony, and freedom, panelists ultimately emphasized myriad resistance practices on the part of those committed to ending gender-based violence: from the 1883 memoir by Paiute author and advocate Sarah Winnemucca documenting settler violence; to the 1991 statement “African American Women in Defense of Ourselves” in which Barbara Ransby, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Deborah King contextualized the Senate’s racist and sexist dismissal of Anita Hill’s experience as a reflection of systemic “attack[s] upon our collective character” and called to meet such dismissals with “protest, outrage, and resistance”; to the ongoing work of the Celia Project to revisit the case State of Missouri v. Celia, A Slave (1855) and restore Celia to the center of her own story. Activists, witnesses, and scholars across subject positions have long collaboratively historicized, denaturalized, and envisioned worlds beyond gender-based violence, and conversations such as this one are opportunities to be accountable to - and energized by - this ongoing work.

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This was the second of nine sessions in the year-long Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Imperiled Bodies: Slavery, Colonialism, Citizenship and the Logics of Gender-Based Violence” led by PI Anita Hill, co-PI Harleen Singh, and ChaeRan Freeze at Brandeis University. Brandeis University sponsors and resources include the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the Women’s Studies Research Center, the Mandel Center for the Humanities, the Hadassah Brandeis Institute, the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project, the Rose Art Museum, the Kniznick Art Gallery, the Gender and Sexuality Center, and the Prevention, Advocacy, and Resource Center. This seminar is among the signature events of the Heller 65th Anniversary year, Celebrating Knowledge Advancing Social Justice #Hellerat65.  

Posted by Carmel Ohman 10/27/23

On Tuesday September 19th, esteemed Black Studies scholars Erica R. Edwards and Roderick Ferguson of Yale University reflected on sexual politics, racial capitalism, and abolitionist feminism in a packed lecture hall in the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. Brandeis WGS faculty Shoniqua Roach (co-organizer) and V Varun Chaudhry (co-organizer and moderator) led the conversation, which paid homage to queer, trans, anti-capitalist, internationalist, grassroots, and women of color feminist activists and scholars working to dismantle prisons and policing to bring about alternative social formations.

“We can do better than that,” Roderick Ferguson said of prisons and policing, and of theorizations of racial capitalism that fail to deeply engage linked structures of race, gender, and sexuality. Erica R. Edwards echoed this ongoing call to possibility and recovery, also underscoring that we have, in many instances and contexts, done better already. Among those who have are Black women historians and theorists such as Brandeis alumni Angela Y. Davis and Hortense Spillers whose conceptions of political economy account for the enslavement of Black women as an originary scene of racial capitalism. Abolition is based, Edwards emphasized, in such alternative stories that attend seriously to Black women as “historical and liberationist subjects.” 

Having guided speakers in this discussion of multiple sites where knowledge is produced in and beyond the university, moderator V Varun Chaudhry ultimately asked: amidst an onslaught of ongoing structural violences, what feels inspiring? What does it mean and feel like to do the work of recovery? In response, speakers invited attendees to think about the transformative potential of the everyday - from reading and writing to organizing and attending potlucks. These practices are vectors of alternative possibilities, sketching an expansive horizon that far exceeds the dictates of heteropatriarchy and institutionality. Such quotidian practices call upon and channel what Edwards and Ferguson characterize as the “analytical plenitude” offered by Black feminist, queer, and trans of color thinkers, nurturing what Roach called the “deep and abiding belief” that we can do better.

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This was the first of nine sessions in the year-long Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Imperiled Bodies: Slavery, Colonialism, Citizenship and the Logics of Gender-Based Violence” led by PI Anita Hill, co-PI Harleen Singh, and ChaeRan Freeze at Brandeis University. Brandeis University sponsors and resources include the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the Mandel Center for the Humanities, the Women’s Studies Research Center, the Hadassah Brandeis Institute, the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project, the Rose Art Museum, the Kniznick Art Gallery, the Gender and Sexuality Center, and the Prevention, Advocacy, and Resource Center. This seminar is among the signature events of the Heller 65th Anniversary year, Celebrating Knowledge Advancing Social Justice #Hellerat65.

Posted by Carmel Ohman 9/22/23