Past Events

Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum: (UN)MASKING HEALTH

Sexual Violence and Armed Conflict: Theories, Myths and Holistic Responses

St. Louis University 2022 (Virtual) Bridge Lecture: "Wicked, Licentious, and Free: African Women in the French Atlantic World"

Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University and a Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is also the Director of LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure. Johnson is a historian of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic African diaspora. She is the author of Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2020).

Author Page: https://www.jessicamariejohnson.com/

Book page: https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/16139.html

Sponsored by the Department of African American Studies, SLU Mellon Grant, Dean’s Office of College of Arts and Sciences, and the Women’s and Gender Studies Department

St Louis Public Library Presents: Who is the St. Louis Queer+ Support Helpline (Not an Intro event)

Raising Queens: The Important Role of Racial Socialization in the Lives of Black Girls

Join this presentation as we examine how culturally strength-based assets serve a protective role for Black girls experiencing racism. Strategies for promoting culturally strength-based assets for youth-serving organizations will be discussed.

St Louis Public Library Presents: Trailblazers: Navigating the World of Academia as a Woman

A panel of incredible women working at St. Louis University  will give insight into the field of academia. Feel free to ask questions, share stories, and empower each other to pursue your highest dreams.  

This event will be held virtually through Zoom. Please register for the event in order to receive the link.

Leadership Perspectives: 'She Suite'

For International Women’s Day, WashU Olin is proud to celebrate the successes of professional women who have faced challenges and made an impact. This year’s impressive panel exemplifies the talent, drive and leadership women bring to the workplace. Building on the IWD’s #BreakTheBias theme, the panel will share stories, lessons learned, business philosophies and how their values have impacted their decision-making.

Join us for this engaging event that lifts up women and honors their accomplishments.

MEET OUR PANEL

MARILYN BUSH  President, Bank of America St. Louis

PARIS FOREST, EMBA '18  Senior Director, Information Technology, Boeing

LYNN GORGUZE, PMBA '86  President and CEO, Cameron Holdings

CASSANDRA RAY Chief Financial Officer, St. Louis Zoo

OUR MODERATOR   STACI THOMAS Professor of Practice in Communications, WashU Olin Business School

A Queer Perspective on Successful Aging

This presentation will introduce the experiences of transgender and gender-expansive older adults in the context of successful aging, a paradigmatic concept in the field of gerontology. More specifically, the presentation will highlight the experience of pursuing a gender transition in later life and what this means for new ways of thinking about aging “successfully” in a diverse and inequitable society. Brown School Open Classroom.

St Louis Public Library Presents: Women Artists Panel Discussion

 This panel features five women of various backgrounds and art styles. They will discuss how their identity influences their work, has affected their career, and how they view art as a whole from their perspective. Join us to learn more about these local artists and their art journey. Attendees will be able to ask the panel questions of their own, if time permits

Katarra From serenading ballads at jazz lounges to championing all women beat battles, pianist, producer and singer-songwriter Katarra Parson has performed in venues locally and across the nation. This St. Louis native brings a variety of talents and styles to the table, pulling audiences into her impassioned performances with vocals and keys that blend Jazz, Soul, R&B, Hip-Hop, and Classical influences. With raw sultriness and transparency, Katarra’s soulful runs and revival of the jazz scat style, is a musical revolution all wrapped up in one woman.

Delia Rainey is a writer and musician from St. Louis, Missouri. She received her MFA in nonfiction from Columbia College Chicago in 2021. Her recent lyrical and personal nonfiction can be found in DIAGRAM, Brink, and forthcoming in new_sinews. She is the author of the chapbook CRUMBBOOK (Bottlecap Press, 2021).

Allison Sissom is an artist and educator based in St. Louis, Missouri. Her work is informed by memory, emotion, and my experiences as an art educator. She works in multiple media and often take objects that people discard and transform them into something new. For the past several years, Allison has been focused on found paper collage, where she cuts up books and finds novel connections that form new narratives.

Supporting Transgender Youth - Transgender Day of Visibility

Adolescence is a tender time full of profound self-discovery. Coming into your own is complicated enough, and many transgender youths face extra challenges posed by the attitudes/ideologies of peers and adults, the practices and policies of the institutions in which they engage, and political efforts to strip away rights with abhorrent anti-trans legislation. On Transgender Day of Visibility, join us for a conversation about the needs and experiences of transgender youth. Information will be shared and ideas will be suggested for how each of us can take steps to create a more caring and inclusive society. 

The Mark S. Bonham Centre for Diversity Studies Presents: Joint Book Launch

Cossman’s The New Sex Wars: Sexual Harm in the #MeToo Era (New York University Press, 2021) revisits the sex wars of the 1970s and ’80s and examines their influence on how we think about sexual harm now. From the ’70s to today, Cossman examines tensions between the need for recognition and protection under the law, and the colossal and ongoing failure of that law to redress historic injustice. By circumventing law altogether, #MeToo has led us to question whether justice can be served outside of the courtroom. The New Sex Wars explores what can been learned from these debates, how we have been denied our anger, and where to begin to make law work.

Berg’s Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) takes readers behind the scenes to explore what porn performers think of their work and how they intervene to hack it. Blending extensive fieldwork with feminist and antiwork theorizing, Porn Work details entrepreneurial labor on the boundaries between pleasure and tedium. Rejecting any notion that sex work is an aberration from straight work, it reveals porn workers’ creative strategies as prophetic of a working landscape in crisis. In the end, it looks to what porn has to tell us about what’s wrong with work, and what it might look like to build something better.

Brenda Cossman is Professor of Law at the University of Toronto and was Director of the Bonham Centre from 2009-2018. Her publications include Sexual Citizens: The Legal and Cultural Regulation of Sex and Belonging (Stanford University Press, 2007), the co-authored Bad Attitudes on Trial: Pornography, Feminism, and the Butler Decision (University of Toronto Press, 1997) and Censorship and the Arts (Ontario Association of Art Galleries, 1995). Her teaching and scholarly interests include family law, law and gender, and law and sexuality. She has published widely in University of Toronto Law Journal, Harvard International Law Journal, Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, Canadian Journal of Family Law, American Journal of Gender, Social Policy and the Law and many others. Cossman is also a frequent commentator in the media on issues relating to law and sexuality, most frequently for The Globe and Mail.

Heather Berg is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University, St. Louis. Her research and teaching interests include sexuality studies, Marxist feminist and queer thought, and resistance studies. Her research appears in Signs, Feminist Studies, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Porn Studies, and has been featured in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and El País. At Washington University, she teaches courses on Sexuality and the State, Sex and Money, Everyday Unruliness, and Feminist Theory. Her second project, “Sex Workers Against Work,” is an intellectual history of the sex worker left. It engages anti-capitalist sex workers’ critiques of straight work, unpaid sex, and state violence and explores their experiments with alternatives.

"Monsters, Cyborgs, and Vases: Specters of the Yellow Woman"

In this lecture titled Monsters, Cyborgs, and Vases: Specters of the Yellow Woman, Anne Anlin Cheng, professor of English at Princeton University and Visiting Hurst Professor in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences at Washington University, considers a series of humanoid art objects—monsters, cyborgs, and standing vases—as visual fulcrums through which to explore how racialized gender, specifically the specter of the yellow woman, animates European-American narratives about the past and designs for the future, as well as how contemporary Asian artists disrupt these representations of Asiatic femininity.

Neuroscience & Society Colloquium: Sex and Gender Development in Research and Healthcare

Panelists for this event are:

Amy Cislo, PhD, Senior Lecturer of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Washington University
Melissa Hines, PhD, Professor of Psychology,University of Cambridge
Christopher Lewis, MD,Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Washington University
Joshua Rubin, MD PhD, Professor of Pediatrics,Washington University

Who Owns Women’s Rights?: Reflections on The UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)

‘She Leads’ symposium to focus on empowering women leaders presents the Inaugural Karl King Hoagland, Jr. Speaker: Paula Boggs, Founder, Boggs Media, LLC, Tedx©Speaker, Writer, Lawyer, Army Veteran, and Musician