Title:  "The Figure of the Homosexual:  Right-Wing Nationalism, Sexual Perversion, and the Crisis in Social Reproduction"

In 2012-2014, a right-wing panic took hold of mainstream media and social networking sites in the post-Soviet Republic of Armenia. Within the rhetoric of this panic, homosexuals and the concept of "gender" were leading to the annihilation of the nation as it existed. These notions of national annihilation were expressed through the dangerous mechanism of "sexual perversion." It might be easy to dismiss some of the absurd narratives of these panics,f or instance that the homosexual and the concept of "gender" were leading to children no longer recognizing their parents as mother and father or to not know if they were themselves boys or girls and thus would lead to a failure in reproducing a next generation. In this talk I argue that a nuanced analysis of the elements of these panics reveals real, material underlying anxieties about social reproduction. I trace these narratives about the homosexual's destruction of Armenian society to contemporary panics regarding transgender persons in the U.S. to reveal a pattern of the intimate and moral dimensions of global economic crisis.

Please join the GWS community for the latest edition of our ongoing “How I Wrote It” event. Dr. Aria Halliday will be discussing the process of writing her new book, Black Girls and How We Fail Them, forthcoming from UNC Press. Dr. Thais Council (Asst. Prof of Literacy in the College of Education) will help guide our conversation.

This event has been cancelled for Feb 13 and will be rescheduled for a later date.  Thank you. 

This talk examines the role of Black women in the 2024 elections and Kamala Harris' failed bid for the White House.  Moving forward, what can Black women-and Black feminist in particular-teach us about liberatory politics that will allow for self-preservation during a 2nd Trump administration?

Sponsored by Gender & Women's Studies and Political Science

How I Teach It

This series highlights innovative pedagogies, with a focus on how scholars across UK's campus teach complex gender and women's studies concepts in their home disciplines. 

Dr. Regina Hamilton-Townsend is an Assistant Professor of English and affiliated faculty in the African American and Africana Studies Program and the Gender and Women's Studies Department at UK. 

45 minute discussion followed by Q&A and lite refreshments and snacks. 

Lynn Paltrow's talk “Who Counts as a Person? Women, Wombs, and Project 2025,” on Wednesday October 16 at 2pm in Law School Room 291, is co-sponsored by the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and the J. Rosenberg College of Law. 

Lynn M. Paltrow, JD, is a feminist lawyer who founded Pregnancy Justice (formerly National Advocates for Pregnant Women). 

Last fall the campus faced demonstrators and speakers who claimed that “women are property” and asked, “what is a woman?” This fall we are making space on our campus for equal time for scholarly analysis that does not presume that a woman is property or a “what” instead of “who.” 

For more than 30 years, Ms. Paltrow pioneered legal advocacy that acknowledged how abortion and pregnancy are not separate issues. Come and learn how all people with the capacity for pregnancy – not just those seeking to end a pregnancy – are harmed by the loss of Roe v Wade and what we can do about it now.