"What Would Harriet Do? Unfinished Liberation or the Dangers of Innocence" by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

What Would Harriet Do? Unfinished Liberation or the Dangers of Innocence

by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

2012 Yulee Endowed Lecture

Wednesday, March 28, 2012, 6:30 p.m.

Marvin Center, Room 309

800 21st Street, NW

Washington, DC 20052

Free and Open to the Public

The world is in crisis and -- as everybody knows -- the effects of structural adjustment and organized abandonment fall most heavily on the shoulders of those most burdened by the cares of everyday life in the first place. In this talk I will discuss some of the crisis-driven opportunities in changing the scale and scope of the prison-industrial complex, and argue that the struggle against the all-purpose use of criminalization to solve social, political, economic, and cultural problems cannot be won with an appeal either to “innocence” or to naming “the real criminals.” That said, how we account for how we got to where we are determines in part what alternative futures we might make. Using the story of Harriet Tubman as a model and case, I will conclude with an argument about what I call the “infrastructure of feeling” and what it means to work in the Black Radical Tradition.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Geography in the Earth and Environmental Studies Ph.D. program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her prize-winning book is Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, published in 2007. She is a founding member of California Prison Moratorium Project; Critical Resistance; the Central California Environmental Justice Network; and many other organizations.

Sponsored by the George Washington University Women’s Studies Program

For more information: 202-994-6942, wstu@gwu.edu

www.gwu.edu/~wstu

Meet a candidate for founding director of the GW Global Women’s Institute: Thursday, February 23, 5 - 6 pm

A committee comprising faculty from all ten schools and colleges at GW, as well as student members and representatives from the Board of Trustees and GW administration, has been carrying out an international search for the founding director of the Global Women's Institute (GWI). As a member of the search committee, I am delighted to report that our first candidate will be on campus Thursday, February 23. As part of the campus visit, a reception is scheduled from 5:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m., Duques Hall 553.

The Women’s Studies Program invites you to attend the reception where the candidate will discuss her achievements and commitment to the GWI mission.  We hope you can join us and hear the candidate's remarks about her work and achievements.

We are searching for the best person to launch the Global Women's Institute and promote its mission of improving the lives of women and girls worldwide through enhanced teaching, research, and service engagement at the George Washington University.

The required criteria for the Director include the following:

• enduring commitment to women's/gender issues in a global landscape

• experience with more than one of the HERS areas (health, education, rights, and security)

• success in institution building

• major fundraising experience through grants and/or individual donors

• demonstrated leadership and management experience

• excellent communication skills (in writing and orally).

If you would like information on the candidate, please contact Robert Luke, Special Assistant, Office of the Provost & Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs: rluke@gwu.edu

Fierce: Nicaraguan feminists protest for their bodies, autonomy, lives

The news of the day was that Democratic representatives walked out of a hearing on“religious liberty and birth control.” Republicans had blocked the testimony of a woman who wanted to speak in favor of the Obama administration’s compromise on birth control.  But the Republicans allowed representatives, men, from conservative religious organizations to testify.  House Representative Carolyn Maloney remarked, “What I want to know is, where are the women?”

A picture tweeted by Planned Parenthood illustrates this question completely.

Where are the women?  In Nicaragua, some women are in the streets.

Yesterday, at the International Poetry Festival in Granada, there was a parade, with dancing and singing and cheers.

There was also a protest by Nicaraguan women.  Nicaraguan feminists.

On the parade route, a group of Nicaraguan women, wearing signs that read “Fui violada y ahora estoy embarazada.  ¿Te parece justo?” (“I was raped and now I am pregnant.  Does that seem just?) lay down in the middle of the parade, stopping the flow of the marching.  They passed out flowers in protest of the ban against therapeutic abortion in the country.

Therapeutic abortion—an abortion performed to save the life of a pregnant woman—had been constitutional in Nicaragua up until October 2006.  When Sandinista politician Daniel Ortega re-assumed the presidency, he kept the law intact, a complete reversal from his stance before his re-election.  Women’s groups have been pressuring the State to repeal the ban, but Ortega’s switch came with the support of an important Catholic bishop.  Within a year of the law’s passing, 82 women had died due to lack to life-saving abortion procedures.

The State passes regulations preventing women from accessing health care that would save their lives.  Then the State uses religious institutions to embolden its position.  Sound familiar?

Violence against women more than often flows from patriarchal institutions trying to police their bodies and autonomy.  It happens globally, outside the United States, and inside the country just as easily.

Women are defending their equality all over the world, in the State and in the streets.  That is where they will be until the job is done.

Paul Seltzer

(Paul Seltzer is a GW Women's Studies major, currently in Nicaragua. This posting is cross-posted from Women In and Beyond the Global: http://www.womeninandbeyond.org/?p=1222.)

GW-led study in Malawi finds cash payments help cut HIV infections among young women

The Guardian today reports: Cash payments help cut HIV infection rate in young women, study finds: Research in Malawi finds girls who receive regular payments are able to resist attentions of older men and avoid infection.”

The headline pretty much says it all … or does it?

The study on which The Guardian report is based on a study that appeared in today’s Lancet: “Effect of a cash transfer programme for schooling on prevalence of HIV and herpes simplex type 2 in Malawi: a cluster randomised trial.” It’s accompanied with an editorial, “Paying to prevent HIV infection in young women?”

The Malawi study was led by Dr. Sarah J Baird, Assistant Professor of Global Health and of Economics at The George Washington University. The interpretation of the findings, as reported in The Lancet, is, for those of us lay folk, the heart of the matter: “Cash transfer programmes can reduce HIV and HSV-2 infections in adolescent schoolgirls in low-income settings. Structural interventions that do not directly target sexual behaviour change can be important components of HIV prevention strategies.”

Pay to prevent HIV infection in young women? You betcha. In effect, when it comes to women’s health, it’s the economy, stupid. In some senses, the larger lesson is that women’s health and well being is always part of the whole life of each woman and girl as well as of women and girls, more generally. HIV transmission is not `simply’ a consequence of sexual behavior, whatever that is. It emerges from the whole life.

Dan Moshenberg

Author and Journalist Nicole Pope discusses her book: Honor Killings in the Twenty-First Century

Author and Journalist Nicole Pope discusses her book: Honor Killings in the Twenty-First Century

When: Wednesday, February 15, 5:45-7pm

Where: Funger Hall Room 220

Nicole Pope will host a conversation about her new book about honor killings and violence against women.  The book examines honor-based violence, its roots and its evolution, as well as the ongoing struggle to eradicate it in Turkey, Pakistan and other countries, including Western European nations.  Thousands of women are murdered every year by close relatives for allegedly violating an unwritten social code or rebelling against the patriarchal order. “Honor” killings and other harmful practices such as forced marriage, child marriage, and bride exchange have been recorded for centuries. Under growing pressure from human rights activists, these old traditions have also evolved and adapted to modern circumstances.  Pope will talk about the process of interviewing women and researching crimes that are often hidden and obscured as simply local customs. 

As one reviewer said of Pope’s work, “In this powerfully written book, Nicole Pope takes a comparative look at so-called honor killings, searching out the patterns and triggers that cause families and relatives to kill women suspected of sexual misconduct or even just defiance or disobedience. Pope compares honor killings in Pakistan and Turkey with violence against women elsewhere in the world, opening the road to new ways of understanding what has often been seen as a Middle Eastern or Muslim problem. Her heart-wrenching interviews with victims’ families and with women who survived illuminate the social and cultural forces that lead families to murder, but also give some glimpse of how this scourge might be eliminated.”  Jenny White, associate professor of anthropology, Boston University and author of Islamist Mobilization in Turkey

Nicole Pope is a Swiss journalist and writer based in Istanbul, Turkey. She worked as Turkey correspondent for the French daily Le Monde for 15 years and has published articles in numerous international publications. She is the co-author of Turkey Unveiled: A History of Modern Turkey (2010, revised edition) and has been conducting research on violence again women for the past decade.