FYI - from the Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of
Women & Gender in the Arts & Media, Columbia College Chicago

CALL FOR REGISTRATION -- PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY
Conference registration website: 
http://condor.depaul.edu/~rsp2008/info.html

*** Race, Sex, Power ***
 
April 11 - 12, 2008
University of Illinois at Chicago
725 W. Roosevelt Road
Chicago, Illinois

Faculty from nine universities and colleges will hold the
largest ever conference on black and Latina/o sexuality on
April 11-12 at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "Race,
Sex, Power: New Movements in Black and Latina/o Sexualities,"
the culmination of more than two years of planning, will bring
together academics, activists, and artists to address topics
ranging from intimacy and desire to HIV/AIDS and teen
pregnancy to humor and Hip Hop.  Organizer Cathy Cohen,
Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago,
calls the conference "a bold effort to rethink what sexuality
means for the two largest racial minorities in the US."  Dr.
Jocelyn Elders, the former United States Surgeon General
appointed by President Clinton, will open the conference on
Friday morning, April 11.

Sponsored by the participating universities with major funding
from the Ford and Arcus Foundations, "Race, Sex, Power" aims
to set a new agenda for studying, organizing, writing, and
developing policy about sexuality.  Juan Battle, professor of
Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center, argues that the
conference is not only ambitious, but timely, as sexuality is
central to current political debates. "Same-sex marriage,
abstinence education, and abortion rights are all at the
forefront."  Marysol Asencio, associate professor of Family
Studies/Puerto Rican and Latino/a Studies from the University
of Connecticut at Storrs, adds that the demographic shifts in
the US mean that "sexuality has to be confronted from the
perspective of race, not merely to challenge the pathologies
historically assigned to Latina/o and Black Americans, but to
explore the dynamism and heterogeneity within these
populations as well."
The conference program takes sexuality and race in all their
complexity.  Panels and speakers selected from hundreds of
submissions will cover, among other things: media, migration
and immigration, religion and spirituality, sexual tourism,
reproductive rights, transgender, community organizing, gay
and lesbian civil rights, poverty, social class, age, and the
sex industry.  Within the wide variety of approaches in both
method and topic, a key idea emerges.  Sexuality can only be
imagined in the context of communities that are embedded in a
national and international context of changing sexual mores
and deeply entrenched habits of thought and representation.

One of the hallmarks of this conference, Cohen stresses, is
its emphasis on collaboration and inclusiveness. The complex
coordination of nine institutions permitted organizers to draw
on a pool of expertise that no one college or university could
hope to contain. The unusual blend of research, activism, and
art encourages all participants to think outside their
personal assumptions and the conventions of their fields.
Finally, the organizers hope to draw an audience of
specialists and non-specialists alike. Asencio reminds us that
knowledge about sexuality is hardly confined to those who make
a profession of its study.  Everyone, Asencio argues, is
engaged in a critique of current sexual conventions. The
conference is simply the space where such knowledge can be
shared, rethought, and transformed.  

SPONSORING UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES:

Chicago State University
Columbia College Chicago
DePaul University
The Graduate Center, CUNY
Northwestern University
Roosevelt University
University of Chicago
University of Connecticut at Storrs
University of Illinois, Chicago
 
Conference website - www.colum.edu/institutewomengender 
For more information, contact: [log in to unmask]
  
Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender
in the Arts and Media
Columbia College Chicago
600 S. Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL  60605
Tel: (312) 344-8829
www.colum.edu/institutewomengender 

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