Natalya Lusty will present the First Friday Seminar ‘Widening Feminism’s Political Horizons: Race, Gender and Sexuality’ on 3 July 2020.
Widening Feminism’s Political Horizons: Race, Gender and Sexuality
The Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement” (1977) offered an important correction to the feminist movement’s articulation of women’s oppression as a totalizing and indivisible experience. While acknowledged as one of the earliest articulations of identity politics, it is also one of the first political statements to foreground the political and social ramifications of intersectional identity through its analysis of “interlocking oppressions”. In acknowledging the strategic alliances between black feminists and other progressive movements (in particular Black Marxist and Black Nationalists movements) alongside the power struggles endured by black lesbian women within the civil rights movement and within the feminist movement, the statement forced a reconsideration of the uneven political structures embedded within a feminist critique of “patriarchy”. While intersectional politics has become something of a mainstay within feminist and queer politics and theory, The CRC statement’s attention to “interlocking oppressions” is perhaps best exemplified by the Black Lives Matter movement with its own fusion of feminist grassroots protest culture and a revised civil rights coalition politics formed around interlocking forms of discrimination.
About the Speaker
Natalya Lusty is Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2018-2022). She is the author of Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Ashgate 2007; Routledge, 2017), Dreams and Modernity: A Cultural History (Routledge, 2013) with Helen Groth, and the co-edited collections, Modernism and Masculinity (CUP, 2014) and Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images (Routledge, 2019). She is currently completing a book on Feminist Manifestos and will be the Eberhard L. Faber Short-Term Visiting Fellow at Princeton University in (Spring) 2020.
About the Series
Deakin University Gender and Sexuality Studies holds a public monthly seminar series on the first Friday of each month at Deakin Downtown in Melbourne’s CBD.
Find out more and register for future seminars.
Monthly postgraduate masterclasses are also open to Deakin University students.
