Thinking Gender 2015

Thinking Gender is an interconnected scholarly space for graduate students studying gender, race, and sexuality across all disciplines and historical periods. Augmenting the scale and the scope of this annual conference organized by CSW, Thinking Gender 2015 will feature a keynote, networking workshops, a poster exhibition, and more than forty presentations, over two days from April 23 to 24.  2015. 

With the theme of “Power, Contested knowledge, and Feminist practices,” the twenty-fifth graduate student research conference will focus on feminism and sciences, exploring the participation and/or contributions of marginalized individuals or groups who had been historically excluded from knowledge production, and analyzing how the feminist approach has altered the existing understanding of scientific knowledge and practices. The topics of panels include the bodies of medicine; gender movement in contested spaces; construction and representations of bodies in the arts; faith and feminism; gender in conflict zones; technology and power; gender, cultures, and environmental crisis; consumerism in reproduction and maternal identities; gendered networks; gender disparities in sciences; language, communication, and gender; and feminist epistemology.

Expanding upon the one-day format of previous conferences, CSW invites to participate in a two-day conference at UCLA Covel Commons. In addition to the keynote on gender studies and sciences, we also include workshops and interactive activities for the participants. including an introduction of Krav Maga.This self-defense technique is based on the self-protective principle and knowledge/practices generated from real experiences in real contexts. In terms of scope, we envision a broad range of presenters and an audience interested in interdisciplinary, transnational, cross-regional studies that engage with both contemporary and historical issues. In addition to presenting research papers in panels, we plan a poster exhibition on the themes of the conference. Undergraduate students are eligible to submit poster proposals. 

Thinking Gender provides a scholarly and social milieu for graduate students from around the world to present and discuss their work, as well as to expand their networks and connect with their peers and participating scholars. We expect the presenters to pose incisive questions to, and respond to topical comments from, the faculty and scholars moderating the panels, as well as the audience. Participants may receive travel grants and the top presentations may be published in a edited volume. 

We welcome submissions of individual papers, pre-constituted panels, and posters now. The deadline is December 15, 2014. More details please visit http://www.csw.ucla.edu/conferences-1/thinking-gender

 – Chien-Ling Liu

Chien-Ling Liu is the conference coordinator of Thinking Gender 2015. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at UCLA. Her dissertation is on the microbiological studies and public health work by the Pasteur Institutes in China between 1899 and 1950, particularly concerning prophylaxis of smallpox and rabies. She is interested in power dynamics of scientific knowledge production and practices in cross-cultural contexts, relating to the issues of modernity. When not writing her dissertation, she enjoys going to movies and playing badminton. 

Sonia Henríquez

 Long focused on the economic, health, and human rights of indigenous women,  Sonia Henríquez is a leader of Olowagli, a women’s organization of the Guna Yala region, which is along the Caribbean coast of Panama.  Since 1996, Henríquez has also served as the president of the National Coordinator of Indigenous Women of Panama (CONAMUIP), representing the Guna people. The organization formed in 1993, when the women from three ethnic groups—Guna, Emberá, and Ngobe—came together to form an organization of indigenous women. The objectives of the organization are to strengthen the participation and leadership of indigenous women within the regional, national and international sphere, as a manager and player involved in the social, economic, cultural, and political development of society; to strengthen the historical and cultural identity, by recovering the wisdom and spirituality of indigenous women; to raise the economic level of indigenous women and their families; and to improve all aspects of the living conditions of indigenous women.

Henríquez has also served as Executive Coordinator for the Continental Network of Indigenous Women of America, a network of indigenous women’s organizations from North, Central, and South America that provides a space for indigenous women to exchange experiences and to develop continental strategies and collaborative international action. As coordinator for the Continental Commission of Commercialization and Intellectual Property, she addresses issues of native women’s art production and its commercialization and cooptation, a crucial issue given that a major part of the economy of the Guna Yala region is focused on the production and sale of molas. These colorful, appliquéd textiles have been part of the traditional dress of the women since cotton cloth was introduced after the Spanish colonization. Henríquez participated in a successful lobbying effort to protect the Guna people against the misappropriation of indigenous craftsmanship, after imitations of molas were being mass-produced and sold.  These lobbying efforts resulted in a national law, Law No. 20, the Special System for the Collective Intellectual Property Rights of Indigenous Peoples for the Protection and Defense of their Cultural Identity and their Traditional Knowledge, on June 26, 2000.  Following the passage of this law, the group organized the First National Crafts Workshop in in 2005 to provide craftspeople and designers with information on intellectual property law and the regulations concerning registration of use, which protects various indigenous craft models.

As an activist for women’s and indigenous rights, Henríquez has also conducted national and regional seminars on gender and development, domestic violence, reproductive and sexual health, leadership, and strengthening community organizations.  She has also participated in international workshops and conferences including the Continental Indigenous Women's Workshop (1996), the Indigenous Women's Caucus on the Issues of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (2001), and the Central American Congress on STD/HIV and AIDS. 

Henríquez has been recognized with many awards and scholarships, including a full scholarship to attend an intensive course on Human Rights at the University of Geneva in 2006 and a World Organization of Intellectual Property Medal of Merit from the for her defense in the Protection of Traditional Knowledge of Indigenous Peoples.

In 2009, twenty years after the Convention on the Rights of the Child, UNICEF in conjunction with CONAMUIP published Ina and Her Tagua Bracelet, a storybook about a Panamanian girl and her experiences moving to the city.  At the public event to celebrate its publication, she introduced the book and the interactive CD that accompanied it. Distributed for free to schools and libraries, the book addresses discrimination, identity, friendship, and the notion that we may be different but we have the same rights. Distributed, so that children could learn about the culture and traditions of indigenous peoples.

At the publication in 2010 of Sociolinguistic Atlas of Indigenous Peoples in Latin America, a linguistic and sociocultural analysis for Latin America also published by UNICEF with CONAMUIP (along with the Ministry of Social Development and the support of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation), Henríquez noted the importance of the volume for the indigenous peoples and those seeking to support them,  "It is a tool to learn about the situation of indigenous peoples in Latin America and Panama."

Earlier this year, she participated in a Dialogue on the Rights of Indigenous Women in the Inter-American System in Guatemala City put on by the Organization of American States (OAS).  Along with leaders from Mexico and Costa Rica, Henríquez spoke about experiences of indigenous women in relation to the protection mechanisms offered by the inter-American human rights system.

____

Organized by the UCLA Center for the Study of Women and cosponsored by the UCLA Latin American Institute, the UCLA Dean of the Social Sciences, UCLA Institute for American Cultures, the UCLA Center for Oral History, and the Charles E. Young Research Library, Henríquez’s lecture will take place on November 20, 2014, from 4 to 6 pm in the YRL Conference Room on the UCLA campus.  It is part of the series "Women's Activism and International Indigenous Rights" curated by Maylei Blackwell, Associate Professor, Department of Chicano/a Studies at UCLA. Updated information can be found on CSW’s website: http://www.csw.ucla.edu/events/womens-activism-and-international-indigenous-rights-sonia-henriquez

SOURCES

http://www.unicef.org/panama/spanish/children_youth_16384.htm

Queers w/o Borders: 014 UCLA Queer Graduate Student Conference

 “Queers w/o Borders,” this year’s QGrad Conference, was kicked off with opening remarks from Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Chair of LGBT Studies and Professor in the Departments of Chicana and Chicano Studies, English, and Gender Studies. Instead of addressing her remarks to “Ladies and Gentlemen,” she greeted “Lesbians, Gays, Queers, Allies, Transgender, and Those with Variations of Fluid Identities.” After thanking all the people who helped the conference come to fruition, she posed this question: “Can we exist without borders?” Whether we like it or not, borders have become a crucial part of our lives. Power, however, comes from navigating between and outside such borders (hence the title of the conference). I attended two of the sessions: “Cultural Representations of Queer Lives” and “Cross-cultural and International Exchanges.”

Cultural Representations of Queer Lives

This panel featured “The Amercanized Queer of Historical Television,” Britta Hans, USC; “Does Emotion Matter? An Examination of Affect in Queer Social Protest,” Eric Baldwinn, UCI, and “From Intimate Expressions to International Publication: the Poetry of Marcel Proust,” Louise Brown, UCLA. Sue-Ellen Case, Distinguished Professor and Chair of Ph.D. Program in Theater and Performance Studies at UCLA, was the moderator. Hans argued that even in historical television shows that are located in Europe (for instance The Borgias and Spartacus), queer characters conform to contemporary American queer stereotypes. The shows only depict queers to the extent that the audience will be comfortable watching and hence resort to ahistorical and stereotypical methods of depiction. Baldwinn’s presentation explored records on social movements and suggested that even though popular assumption is that emotions play a big role in mobilization of social movement, emotions actually play no role in the actual mobilization. It is likely, he argued, that only after successfully carrying out the movement’s goals to mobilize citizens that emotions come into play in the formation of a narrative of mobilization. Lastly, Brown explored the poetry of Marcel Proust, which was written when he was an adolescent boy. Suggesting that the use of obscurity was a tactic that Proust deployed, Brown suggested that such a method could also be incorporated into social interactions to garner more diverse methods of exchange among queer folks.

Cross-cultural and International Exchanges

Paola Concia

Moderated by Laure Murat, Professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at UCLA, this panel featured “Locating the Filipina Lesbian: Navigating Spaces of Inclusion and Exclusion in Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) Centers in the Philippines,” Mylene DeGuzman, University of the Philippines-Diliman, Philippines; “Mapping LGBT Discourse in Italy,” Cate Fugazzola, University of Chicago; and “To Celebrate Diversity between the West and Asian: the Desire of Tokyo Rainbow Pride,” Kyohei Itakura, UC Davis. DeGuzman explored BPO call centers in Philippines and how lesbians working in them coped with their sexuality in a seemingly but not actually inclusive work environment. For instance, she discussed common microaggressions. Being asked, for example, “Who’s the guy in the relationship?” or “Were you ever raped?” Fugazzola discussed her research—using regional newspapers and how they portrayed events or people related to LGBT—on the LGBT movement in Italy. Some of her findings show that these newspapers did not acknowledge the LGBT community as a community but instead as individuals with no sense of community. Moreover, male politicians who come out as gays are labeled with feminine adjectives, whereas Paola Concia, a female politician who came out as a lesbian received more honorary and respectful adjectives—perhaps because she was perceived as less like a woman and more like a man. Lastly, Itakura explored the Tokyo Rainbow Pride (TRP) website in its Japanese and English translated version and the differing agendas and messages of the two websites. By examining the homonationalist rhetoric of the Japanese website, he demonstrated that TRP seeks to be the bridge between Western queer culture and the rest of Asia, thereby idealizing competition.

Although I only attended two sessions, my expression at QGrad made me realize the true intersectionality of queer studies. Circling back to the question—can we exist without borders?—from Gaspar de Alba’s opening remarks, I believe the diversity of the conference itself provided the answer. Looking at the identity of queer in the past, present, and future not only in the U.S but in various countries, I felt that borders do exist whether it is national borders, borders of personal interest, or borders of language. However, as presenters of different research interests came together on this day under the very large idea of queerness, perhaps borders can be transformed into spaces that create powerful interaction (like this conference) and agency rather than boundaries that section people off and enforce hierarchies of power.

-- Min Joo Lee is a doctoral student in the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA.

Complete conference schedule of “Queer w/o Borders: 2014 UCLA Queer Graduate Student Conference” is available at the website: http://qgradconference.com/tag/qgrad-2014/

Banu Subramaniam

With a life story that is relevant to her choice of research subjects, Banu Subramaniam has shared bits of autobiography in many of the papers she has published. In a 1988 article in Women’s Review of Books, she explains that her movement into the liminal space between academic disciplines, “… all began when I got on the plane at the Bombay Sahar International Airport on a warm still night ten years ago, with visions of donning that revered white lab coat amid a sea of white-skinned, white-lab-coated male scientists studying the proverbial white male rat.” (1)Feeling a growing sense of marginalization in her doctoral program at Duke University, she decided to take courses in the department of women’s studies—from which she eventually earned a graduate certificate, in addition to her PhD in zoology-genetics. Rather than leading her away from evolutionary biology, the tools that Subramaniam acquired studying feminist critiques of science allowed her to return to her home department in a more engaged and political manner.

Since then, she has practiced and advocated a science that is activist, liberatory, and progressive. Such a science is still entirely committed to producing knowledge about the natural world, but with the awareness that this world—and this science—is embedded in society and culture and that this embeddedness must be explicitly recognized and discussed. Early evidence of this orientation can be seen in Subramaniam’s 1998 paper, co-authored with Mary Wyer, “Assimilating the Culture of No Culture in Science: Feminist Interventions in (De)Mentoring Graduate Women.” For this project, three groups (men and women faculty; women graduate students; and women faculty and graduate students) met separately over the course of ten months to discuss their experiences in academia. The attitudes revealed are startling, and the results slightly disheartening. The authors conclude that “to truly transform the educational experience for graduate women, we need to deconstruct a ‘culture of no culture’”—that is, the ideal of the objective and decontextualized scientific researcher—“and name the interpersonal interactions, behaviors, and rules that govern this culture.” (2)

Subramaniam’s writing is exhilarating to read not only for the range and depth of her ideas but also for her enactment of these ideas in a remarkable variety of styles. Three papers published in 2000 excellently illustrate this point. Published in Evolution, "Balancing Selection on a Floral Polymorphism" describes an experiment to determine the mechanism by which flower color polymorphism is maintained in the common morning glory. She and co-author Mark Rausher planted five plots, with proportions of dark, light, and white flowers varying from those observed in natural populations. After monitoring the changes in gene frequency for a generation, they were able to show “the first direct evidence indicating that selection acts to prevent the elimination of the white allele.” (3) The paper nimbly describes their experiment and analysis, giving a clear example of balancing selection at work.

Published in the same year, yet entirely divergent in tone, is “Snow Brown and the Seven Detergents: A Metanarrative on Science and the Scientific Method.” Here she tells the tale of the courageous girl Snehalatha Bhrijbhushan, who travels from “deep within a city in the Orient” to “the land of the kind and gentle people.” Here she enters “the Building of Scientific Truth,” which lies within “the Land of the Blue Devils” (mascot of Duke University). After a traumatic interview with “the mirror” (embodying “the collective consciousness of all the Supreme White Patriarchs”), Sneha decides to enter “the Great Washing Machine” and subject herself to its “Seven Detergents.” To see their effect, you must read the story—but be warned: Subramaniam will implicate you directly by putting before you three alternate endings to the (tragic) tale.(4)

Subramaniam’s third paper from the year, “Archaic Modernities: Science, Secularism, and Religion in Modern India” (Social Text) begins with an evocative jumble of dream fragments, ranging from a filmic depiction of a mysterious Western illness entering India, to squabbles in the corridors of American academia, scenes of religious fervor, school-board renunciations of evolution, and extensive home remodels based on the science of energy flow. These fragments deftly introduce the paper, which explores the rhetoric of religious nationalists in contemporary India, comparing the country to the secular India where Subramaniam grew up. She ends this paper with another dream, less fragmented and more hopeful than the others: "I dream of a world where the project of building a progressive, antiracist, feminist politics within the social institutions of science and religion becomes possible.” (5)

These three early papers provide a good introduction to Subramaniam’s body of works, which has grown in scope yet retained a connection to many of these same themes. Her current research focuses on xenophobic responses to invasive plant species and on how the resulting emphasis on border policing diverts resources away from habitat preservation. Her first publication on this problem was “The Aliens Have Landed! Reflections on the Rhetoric of Biological Invasions.”(6) This essay also appeared Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), which Subramaniam co-edited with Betsy Hartmann and Charles Zerner. More recently, she and co-author Karen Cardozo related invasion biology to Said’s Orientalism, Deleuze and Guattari’s “assemblages,” and Haraway’s “naturecultures,” in “Assembling Asian/American Naturecultures: Orientalism and Invited Invasions” (Journal of Asian American Studies, 2013).

Subramaniam is currently finishing work on a book, to be titled “A Question of Variation: Race, Gender and the Practice of Science,” which will deal with these and other issues. What makes this book (and all of Subramaniam’s work) so unique is that she actually practices the science—in this case, performing field and lab studies of Southern California’s flora and soil—while simultaneously attending to the contexts of language and history from which the science cannot be separated.

This interdisciplinary practice is in line with Subramaniam’s view that “women's studies programs must make it a goal to produce a scientifically and technologically proficient group of students and faculty who are not relegated only to the role of ‘critics’ (important though this is) but are also members of the scientific enterprise, producing knowledge about the natural world, a world that is deeply embedded in its social and cultural histories.”⁶ Subramaniam has been heavily involved in this project through her participation in feminist science studies. She co-edited a foundational volume of the field, Feminist Science Studies: A New Generation (Routledge, 2001), and has also published more reflective papers, such as “A Conversation on Feminist Science Studies” (Signs, 2003) with Evelynn Hammonds, and “Moored Metamorphoses: A Retrospective Essay on Feminist Science Studies” (Signs, 2009).

"Banu's work has been inspirational to myself and my graduate students," says Rachel Lee, who invited Subramaniam to speak at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women on November 5th. "She is an intrepid experimenter in both the scientific and writerly domains following the example of feminist STS trailblazers like Donna Haraway."

--Devin Beecher

Beecher is a doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Literature at UCLA. His research focuses on the intersections and spaces between literature and medicine.

--

On November 5, 2014, from 4 to 6 pm in Royce 314, Banu Subramaniam and Deboleena Roy will give talks in the Life (Un)Ltd speaker series. Titled “Surrogating the Cradle of the World: On the Onto-Epistemological Illusions of Matter,” Subramaniam's talk will focus on an analysis of surrogacy in postcolonial India. By incorporating aspects of caste, as well as genetics and evolutionary biology, she aims to bring new perspectives to the debates of nature and nurture. Roy will speak on “Germline Ruptures: Methyl Isocyanate Gas and the Transpositions of Life, Death, and Matter in Bhopal.” Organized by Rachel Lee, Associate Director of UCLA Center for the Study of Women and Associate Professor in the Departments of English, Asian American Studies, and Gender Studies, this event is presented by the UCLA Center for the Study of Women and cosponsored by the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics. More information is available on the website: http://www.csw.ucla.edu/events/life-un-ltd-deboleena-roy.

Notes

1. Subramaniam, Banu. 1998. “A Contradiction in Terms.” The Women’s Review of Books 15 (5): 25.

2. Subramaniam, Banu, and Mary Wyer. 1998. “Assimilating the “culture of No Culture” in Science: Feminist Interventions in (De)mentoring Graduate Women.” Feminist Teacher 12 (1): 25.

3. Subramaniam, Banu, and Mark D. Rausher. 2000. “Balancing Selection on a Floral Polymorphism.” Evolution 54 (2): 691–95.

4. Subramaniam, Banu. 2000. “Snow Brown and the Seven Detergents: A Metanarrative on Science and the Scientific Method.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 28 (1/2): 296–304.

5. Subramaniam, Banu. 2000. “Archaic Modernities: Science, Secularism, and Religion in Modern India.” Social Text 18 (3 64): 84.

6. Subramaniam, Banu. 2001. “The Aliens Have Landed! Reflections on the Rhetoric of Biological Invasions.” Meridians 2 (1): 37.

From Chiapas to the UN: Women in the Struggle for Indigenous Rights

"Indigenous peoples are being permanently alienated from our being. We are being stripped, ripped off, and plundered of our values, our spirituality, our spirits, even of our gods," says Margarita Gutiérrez Romero (left), an Nha-ñhu activist who will be speaking at UCLA on October 22. She has been involved in the movement for two decades, a time period that has seen a dramatic increase in indigenous rights activism on the global scene. Indigenous women have been key leaders in these efforts to ensure rights--including women's rights--for indigenous peoples during this time. For decades, activists worked tirelessly on behalf of a UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, which was passed in 2007.

The first World Conference on Indigenous Peoples was recently held in New York City on September 22 and 23, 2014. In conjunction with this conference, UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women is sponsoring a series of lectures on “Women’s Activism and International Indigenous Rights.” Curated by Maylei Blackwell, Associate Professor, Department of Chicano/a Studies at UCLA, this series will explore the intersection of women’s rights and indigenous rights and will reflect on women’s role globally. 

Blackwell accompanied indigenous social movements for the past sixteen years developing a research expertise on the intersection of women’s rights and indigenous rights within Mexico and California.  More recently she has conducted community-based and collaborative research documenting cultural continuity and political mobilization with Zapotecs and Mixtecs from both the northern sierra as well as the central valleys of Oaxaca as well as the increasingly Mayan diaspora from Guatemala in Los Angeles.  In addition, she is a noted oral historian and author of ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (U of Texas Press, 2011) which was a finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize and named by the Western Historical Association as one of the best book in western women and gender history. Her research focuses on indigenous women’s organizers in Mexico, Latin American feminist movements, and sexual rights activists, all of whom are involved in cross-border organizing and community formation.

Blackwell selected her as a speaker for this series because of Gutiérrez Romero’s long history of activism on behalf of indigenous people, which began in community radio and continued as she studied journalism at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Part of the indigenous rights movement that burgeoned in the early 1990s, Gutiérrez was a founding member of the National Plural Indigenous Assembly for Autonomy (ANIPA), which advocated for constitutional reform to establish a system of regional autonomy, and co-founded Enlace Continental de Mujeres Indígenas de las Américas (ECMI), which includes organizations in twenty-six countries in North, Central, and South America. "The powerful growth of [this organization]," says Blackwell, "reflects the emergence of indigenous mass mobilizations and social movements across Latin America and the Caribbean throughout the 1990s as well as the development of a specific set of gendered demands surrounding indigenous autonomy in the region." (2)

ECMI's member organizations are committed to training, research, and advocacy in areas including nonviolence and ancestral justice; territory, environment, climate change and food sovereignty; international law instruments; intellectual property and biodiversity; health and spirituality: sexual and reproductive health; political participation; indigenous intercultural education; and racism and discrimination. In 1995, the group organized the First Continental Meeting of Indigenous Women in Quito, Ecuador. It has gone on to “consolidate [itself] as a network that links indigenous women from throughout the Americas to promote the formation of women's leadership and influence, from the perspective indigenous spaces of representation and international, regional, national decision and the organizations they lead in order to strengthen policies that allow us to fully exercise our human rights.”(2)

In 1994, Gutiérrez Romero was as an advisor at the negotiations on Indigenous Rights and Culture, Dialogue and Negotiation in San Andrés, between the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, the Chiapas State government, and the Mexican national government. These negotiations resulted in the San Andrés Accords, which were never implemented due to governmental incalcitrance.  A key component of the negotiations regarded “the triple oppression suffered by indigenous women (because they are poor, indigenous and women)” (3) Included in the demands was this request:  “Among the public resources which belong to the indigenous peoples there should be a special consignment for women, administered and managed by them. This will give them the economic capacity so that they can begin their own productive projects, guarantee them potable water and enough food for everyone, and allow them to protect health and improve the quality of housing” (3) Only a portion of these demands was actually included in the Accords, and the Indigenous Law ratified in May of 2001 was a even further watered down version of the original demands. (4,5) The law only states that officials have a responsibility “to promote the incorporation of indigenous women into development, through the support of productive projects, the protection of women’s health, the creation of incentives to favor women’s education, and their participation in the decision-making related to communal life.”(6) 

As the indigenous movement grew after the 1994 Zapatista rebellion, Gutiérrez Romero went on to serve as a member of the National Indigenous Council (CNI) and was National Coordinator of Mexico’s Indigenous Women (CONAMI) and Secretary for Political Education in the Executive Committee of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD). From 2001 until 2010, she was President of the International Instruments Commission for Continental Network of Indigenous Women.  She is currently President of the State Coordinator of Indigenous Women Organizations in Vinajel, Chiapas, Mexico. In that capacity, she participated on a panel for the Organization of American States Policy Roundtable on  “Inclusion and Democracy in the Americas” in April of 2011.

Highlighting the ongoing efforts of activists and organizations to secure equality and full participation in governance for indigenous women is the focus of this series.  "These transnational social movement networks that were developed to engage the UN," according to Blackwell, "have resulted in new indigenous solidarities and policy advocacy strategies. Critically, this transnational network not only orients activists toward the international arena but it provides a critical space for exchange to build indigenous women’s political identities and forms of political analysis that they take back to their communities. Through this multi-scaled activism, they localize a wide range of strategies against violence against indigenous women, militarization, ecological destruction (mining and resource extraction), intellectual property rights, racism against indigenous people, and the need for women’s human rights within their own communities."

 ____

Organized by the UCLA Center for the Study of Women and cosponsored by the UCLA Latin American Institute, the UCLA Dean of the Social Sciences, UCLA Institute for American Cultures, and the UCLA Center for Oral History, Gutiérrez Romero’s lecture will take place on October 22, 2014, from 2 to 4 pm in Royce 314 on the UCLA campus.  Updated information can be found on CSW’s website: http://www.csw.ucla.edu/events/womens-activism-and-international-indigenous-rights-margarita-gutierrez-romero

Notes

1. “Indigenous Groups Challenge Doctrine of Christian Discovery and Domination,” July 22, 2011, Jason Coppola, Truthout, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/2169:indigenous-groups-challenge-doctrine-of-christian-discovery-and-domination

2. ECMIA website, http://ecmia.org/origen 

3. The Dialogue of San Andres and the Rights of Indigenous Culture, EZLN, http://www.csuchico.edu/zapatist/HTML/Archive/Communiques/advisors_on_SA_deal.html

4. “18 years after the signing of the San Andrés Accords on Indigenous Rights and Culture, these continue not to be recognized by the State,” SIPAZ, International Service for Peace Blog, http://sipazen.wordpress.com/2014/03/01/chiapas-18-anos-years-after-the-signing-of-the-san-andres-accords-on-indigenous-rights-and-culture-these-continue-not-to-be-recognized-by-the-state/

5. “Mexico Ratifies Indian Rights Law Amid States' Opposition,” Los Angeles Times, July 13, 2001, http://articles.latimes.com/2001/jul/13/news/mn-21878

6. “Autonomy and Resistance in Chiapas: Indigenous Women’s Rights and the Accords of San Andrés,” Petra Purkarthofer, International Social Theory Consortium, Roanoke, May 18-21, 2006