Dodging the Sisters: Why Queer Nuns Keep Going Viral
Melissa M. Wilcox (any pronouns) is Professor and Holstein Family and Community Chair of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside, where Dr. Wilcox organizes the annual UCR Conference on Queer and Trans Studies in Religion
Knight Hall, Emerson Auditorium
Dodging the Sisters: Why Queer Nuns Keep Going Viral
Melissa M. Wilcox (any pronouns) is Professor and Holstein Family and Community Chair of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside, where Dr. Wilcox organizes the annual UCR Conference on Queer and Trans Studies in Religion
Knight Hall, Emerson Auditorium |
In June 2023, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence went viral in conservative media for the umpteenth time. This time around, it was because the Los Angeles Dodgers had announced plans to honor the Los Angeles House of the order at the team’s annual Pride Night. A month before that all-California game against the San Francisco Giants, Florida Senator Marco Rubio had instigated the protest with a letter to baseball commissioner Robert Manfred claiming the group was offensive to Catholics. A short time into the swelling protest movement the Dodgers disinvited the Sisters, then re-invited them rather quickly following overwhelming backlash; in the end, the nuns’ presence at the game drew masses of protestors and supporters, and required a heavy security presence. Reporting on the scuffle focused on it largely as a story about sports, politics, and culture wars, not about religion, and it largely misrepresented or even overlooked the international order of queer and trans nuns at the heart of the story. So who are these nuns, and why do they keep winding up the right and delighting the left while most people on both sides miss the point that queer nuns, too, are real nuns? Come join us and find out.
This talk is the first lecture in the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics’ series Reverent Irreverence: Parody, Religion, and Contemporary Politics.
Art exhibit and panel discussion featuring scholars Marie Griffith and Heather Bennett and artist Megan Kenyon
Intersect Arts Center, 3636 Texas Ave, St. Louis, MO 63118
The Women’s Chapel
Art exhibit and panel discussion featuring scholars Marie Griffith and Heather Bennett and artist Megan Kenyon
Intersect Arts Center, 3636 Texas Ave, St. Louis, MO 63118 |
What power is there in a woman’s voice? Can the testimony of Christian women help to undo patriarchy and stop spiritual abuse? What can art and the history of evangelicalism teach us about our current political moment and how to move forward? The Women’s Chapel is an interdisciplinary art exhibition created by artist Megan Kenyon and a collaborative group of evangelical women whose stories show how the journey of divesting oneself of Christian patriarchy is one full of rage and grief but ultimately laced with hope.
Ethical Research Data: The Feminist Principle of Examining Power in the Context of Big Data and AI
Lauren F. Klein, the Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor of Quantitative Theory & Methods and English, Emory University
Virtual - RSVP
Ethical Research Data: The Feminist Principle of Examining Power in the Context of Big Data and AI
Lauren F. Klein, the Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor of Quantitative Theory & Methods and English, Emory University
Virtual - RSVP |
In Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020), Lauren F. Klein and her coauthor, Catherine D’Ignazio, established a set of principles for doing more just and equitable data science. Informed by the past several decades of intersectional feminist activism and critical thought, the principles of data feminism modeled how to examine and challenge power, rethink binaries and hierarchies, elevate emotion and embodiment, consider context, embrace pluralism and make labor visible. How can these principles be applied to the current conversation about AI, its present harms and its future possibilities? This talk will briefly summarize the principles of data feminism before moving to a set of examples that show how these principles can be applied — and extended — to our current technological landscape.
Experimental Cinema of Germaine Dulac and Maya Deren
Steinberg Auditorium
Experimental Cinema of Germaine Dulac and Maya Deren
Steinberg Auditorium |
Learn about avant-garde films by women in this screening of Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928, 40 min.), considered one of the first Surrealist films, and Maya Deren’s A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945, 3 min.), which features the dancer Talley Beatty in a magisterial cinematic interpretation of dance. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition The Body in Pieces, these silent films feature innovative special effects that present the human form as physically fractured and fragmented across time.
A discussion following the screening with Dana Ostrander, assistant curator of modern art, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum; Lionel Cuillé, teaching professor in French in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Washington University, and director of French Connexions; and Victor Putinier, PhD student in Romance Languages and Literatures, Washington University, will explore these two key figures in the development of experimental cinema and proto-feminist practice.
Free and open to the public with complimentary popcorn. Registration is requested.
Losing HER Voice: Mental Health Implications of Abortion Restrictions
Megan D. Keyes, PhD, Adjunct Faculty, Brown School, Washington University and Founder, Trauma Empowered Consulting, LLC
Virtual - RSVP
Losing HER Voice: Mental Health Implications of Abortion Restrictions
Megan D. Keyes, PhD, Adjunct Faculty, Brown School, Washington University and Founder, Trauma Empowered Consulting, LLC
Virtual - RSVP |
The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June 2022 adversely impacts women on multiple levels. Research indicates loss of personal autonomy regarding reproductive choice can result in mental health problems and reduced well-being. However, these negative repercussions may be more detrimental for specific cohorts of women including members of marginalized communities as well as survivors of intimate partner violence and sexual assault. Please join Dr. Keyes to learn more about the various life circumstances, potential stressors and trauma exposure, and mental health issues these women often experience and how abortion denial may further complicate their health and welfare. Brown School Open Classroom.
Rafael Soldi is a Peruvian-born artist and independent curator based in Seattle (unceded Indigenous land of the Coast Salish peoples). His practice centers on how queerness and masculinity intersect with larger topics of our time such as immigration, memory, and loss. Soldi's photographic portrait series, Entre Hermanos, is currently on display at The Luminary as part of the Moving Stories in the Making exhibition.
Busch 100
Rafael Soldi Lecture
Rafael Soldi is a Peruvian-born artist and independent curator based in Seattle (unceded Indigenous land of the Coast Salish peoples). His practice centers on how queerness and masculinity intersect with larger topics of our time such as immigration, memory, and loss. Soldi's photographic portrait series, Entre Hermanos, is currently on display at The Luminary as part of the Moving Stories in the Making exhibition.
Playing Sacred: The Camp Aesthetics of Feminist and Queer Art
Anthony Petro is an associate professor in the Department of Religion and in the Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program at Boston University.
Knight Hall, Emerson Auditorium
Playing Sacred: The Camp Aesthetics of Feminist and Queer Art
Anthony Petro is an associate professor in the Department of Religion and in the Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program at Boston University.
Knight Hall, Emerson Auditorium |
In the modern culture wars, conservatives often attack feminist and queer art as sacrilegious or obscene. But why does so much religious iconography animate this creative work? And how? This talk looks at the religious and political possibilities of camp as a style of engagement, focusing on the work of artists Ray Navarro and Judy Chicago. It asks: How do the aesthetics of camp challenge dominant ways that we think about religion and religious attachments?
This talk is the final lecture in the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics’ series Reverent Irreverence: Parody, Religion, and Contemporary Politics.
Panel on the Vital Role of the Arts and Sciences in Public Health: Reconceiving the Sexual and Reproductive Body
Hillman Hall, Clark-Fox Forum
Panel on the Vital Role of the Arts and Sciences in Public Health: Reconceiving the Sexual and Reproductive Body
Hillman Hall, Clark-Fox Forum |
In light of Washington University's momentous decision to establish a new School of Public Health (the first new school in 100 years), panelists will discuss the critical role of the arts and humanities in public health, with emphasis on the sexual and reproductive body.
The panel will take place from 4:30-6:15, followed by a reception, 6:15-7:15, and showing at 6:30 of the 13-minute film by Mary and Patrick Kelley, “This is Offal.”
Internationally noted collaborators, painter Mary Reid Kelley and videographer Patrick Kelley, create ambitious videos informed by history, language and literature that give life to critical observations on gender, class, and the condition of women throughout history.
Mary Fissell, Professor of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, focuses in her esteemed scholarship on Early-Modern Medicine; Patients' Perspective in The History Of Medicine; Gender, Sexuality, and The History Of The Body.
Marlon Bailey is Professor of African and African American Studies, and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Affiliate Professor in Performing Arts at Washington University, who studies Black LGBTQ cultural formations, sexual health, and HIV/AIDS prevention.
Dr. Juliet Iwelunmor is a Professor of Medicine and an Associate Director for Global Health and Dissemination at Washington University School of Medicine. A passionate advocate for health equity and sustainability, Dr. Iwelunmor is widely regarded for understanding how to make evidence-based interventions last, reshaping the focus on community engagement using participatory research, improving the dissemination of health information, while amplifying the voices of young people in health interventions through music and storytelling.
Dr. Hilary Reno is the Medical Director of the St. Louis County Sexual Health clinic, Medical Director of the St. Louis STI/ HIV Prevention Training Center, and a medical consultant with the CDC, Division of STD Prevention.Dr. Reno specializes in sexual health care, with a special focus on the clinical care of sexually transmitted infections (STI) and the intersection with HIV prevention.
The Work of Risk: Guerilla Art for Surviving the Carceral Present
Faye Gleisser, Associate Professor of Art History and Critical Theory, Indiana University, Bloomington
Kemper 103
The Work of Risk: Guerilla Art for Surviving the Carceral Present
Faye Gleisser, Associate Professor of Art History and Critical Theory, Indiana University, Bloomington
Kemper 103 |
As laws governing the freedom of expression and right to occupy space continue to change, artists continue to anticipate the presence of police and the consequences of arrest, especially when creating confrontational or participatory performance and conceptual work beyond art-sanctioned spaces. How has the anticipation of punitive encounter taken shape materially and temporally in art? Relatedly, in what ways has the mis- or under-recognition of the racialized, gendered, and sexualized conditions of artists’ differing vulnerability to state-sanctioned violence contributed to the normalizing of carceral relations in the stories told most often about riskiness and resourcefulness in art practice? Art historian and cultural theorist Dr. Faye Gleisser addresses these questions and their political implications for the present in her new book, Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967-1987 (University of Chicago Press, 2023). In this talk, Gleisser draws upon Black feminist and queer of color theories of spatialized power and argues that artists’ calculation of citation and arrest is a form of knowledge—punitive literacy—that reveals salient insights into the ways carceral violence shapes the history of contemporary art.
Faye Gleisser (she/her) is Associate Professor of Art History and Critical Theory at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society and American Studies. Gleisser is an interdisciplinary art historian and curator of 20th and 21st century art, specializing in the history and theory of political violence in the U.S., and expressions of gendered and sexualized raciality in visual art and material culture. Her research has appeared in a number of exhibition catalogues, as well as in Art Journal, Artforum, Journal of Visual Culture, Women & Performance, and Aperture, and is forthcoming in October and ASAP/J. Her first book, Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967-1987 (University of Chicago Press, 2023) analyzes the relationship of policing, state power, and guerrilla art practice in the United States. In her current book project, "The Color of Hormones," Gleisser is tracing the entanglements of contemporary art, state surveillance, hormonal management, and somatic abolitionist praxis.
Hear from this power couple about what it's like to embrace the same issues from two different perspectives - as a journalist and as a politician. Zooey and Erin will discuss how the fight for LGBTQ rights shows up in elections, laws, and public discourse. Learn how politics affects our personal and interpersonal relationships, and how to find hope and be effective amidst the attacks on our freedoms.
The Masters and Johnson Annual Lecture honors late sex researchers and founders of modern sex therapy, William Masters and Virginia Johnson. Masters and Johnson conducted clinical sex research at WashU from the 1950s through the 1970s. Their clinical observation of sexual behavior enabled them to dispel myths about vaginal orgasm, erectile dysfunction, masturbation, and older adult asexuality.
Assembly Series programming is supported by WashU's ten-year strategic vision, Here and Next, designed to mobilize research, education, and patient care to establish WashU and St. Louis as a global hub for transformative solutions to the deepest societal challenges. When we bring our community together around topics that expand our knowledge and our perspectives, we stimulate the open, vibrant environment that will make our strategic vision possible.
This event is free and open to the public, but you must register to attend. Visitor parking is available in the East End Parking Garage located at Forsyth Blvd and Wrighton Way.
The Masters & Johnson Lecture is organized and sponsored by WashU’s Office of the Provost, WashU Brown School, MSW Sexuality Specialization, and The Sexuality, Health, and Gender Center (SHAG).
