Department Of Gender And Cultural Studies At The University Of Sydney

Postgrads in purple.

GCS wearing it purple in support of young queer people (Dr Anthea Taylor's painted fingernails and Professor Meiji Mo's umbrella prop counted).

This week's GCS Seminar: Dr Peta Malins (RMIT) on "Desiring Assemblages: The Importance of Desire in Critical Drug Studies" and Dr J. R. Latham (Melbourne) on "Multiple Sex: Trans Men and the Politics of Medicine." Come along!

hi everyone, I'm doing the GCS talks at Open Day. Has anyone got a nice photo of the dept? i know there are several floating around. thanks, Elspeth

Call for participants for a GCS student project on women and casual drinking - contact the researcher and find more information on the project's FB information page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/255914287 7444809/about/

Some GCS followers might be interested in this call for essay proposals on "black girls and girlhood". Although largely US-centred as outlined below, there is also reference to a "global" field that leaves some room for Australian and other international scholars.

See below for an event celebrating the anniversary of Edward Said's influential book on "orientalism".

Join us for our GCS Seminar today, Friday 17th Aug, 2-4pm at the Refectory, Main Quad with:
Fiona Lee (Sydney): "English and the Postcolonial Racial Imaginary" and;
Sujatha Fernandes (Sydney): "Out of the Home, Into the House: The Uses of Storytelling in Domestic Worker Legislative Campaigns".

GCS Visiting Speaker: Dr Tanya Serisier (Birkbeck College, University of London)
Thursday 16th August, 4 - 5.30 pm New Law Seminar Room 102... University of Sydney
ALL WELCOME
Speaking Out: Rape, Feminism and Narrative Politics
#MeToo is only the most recent, and most prominent example of survivors of sexual violence telling their stories online in recent years. While much commentary focuses on the novel elements of this online speech in this presentation I want to place it within a history of feminist political practice and belief. I argue that, since the early 1970s, feminist anti-rape politics have been characterised by a belief in the transformative potential of women’s personal narratives of sexual violence. The political mobilisation of these narratives has been extraordinarily successful in many ways, to the extent that a belief in the benefits of 'speaking out' has transcended its feminist origins and can be found across the political spectrum. In this talk, I explore the effects and consequences of this 'narrative politics'. I argue that while personal narratives can be politically powerful, the use of stories of rape as a political strategy has important political limitations and unresolved ethical questions, including the generic limits about what kinds of stories are tellable and in what ways, and the difficulty of basing an anti-rape politics on a genre of stories in which rape has always-already happened.
Dr Tanya Serisier is a Lecturer in Criminology at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research focuses on the cultural politics of sexuality and of sexual violence, and she has published widely on these areas. Her forthcoming book, Speaking Out: Rape, Feminism and the Politics of Narrative is a critical investigation of speaking out about sexual violence as a core strategy of feminist politics, and it attempts to analyse both its strengths and limitations. She is beginning a new research project on the politics of sexual respectability and deviance under neoliberalism.
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Updated Venue info! Hi Dept. of GCST!
Welcome to Semester 2 at the University of Sydney – in case you haven’t met us before we (Charlotte and Emily) are your student representatives for Gender and Cultural Studies. Yay!
... To kick off we’re organising a start-of-semester social movie night, where we will be watching The Danish Girl (2015) based on one of the first recipients of sex reassignment surgery in the 1920s. It’s got art, gender and Eddie Redmayne if that doesn’t convince you to come along!
You should attend this awesome event because:
- It’ll be a great way to meet fellow Gender and Cultural Studies students - Applying some critical analysis to a cultural text based off a true story - Relaxing way to get back into study - Put a face to the name of your (amazing) student reps - And have fun!
DATE: Wednesday, August 8 TIME: 6pm LOCATION: Fisher Library (Exact room TBC)
Hope to see you there!
Charlotte and Emily
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Friday 17th August. 2-4pm Sujatha Fernandes (Sydney): "Out of the Home, Into the House: The Uses of Storytelling in Domestic Worker Legislative Campaigns." Fiona Lee (Sydney): "English and the Postcolonial Racial Imaginary."

CFP for a special issue of M/C on the 'nineties'...
In 2016, The New York Times published an article entitled "The Return of the '90s". In that article, journalist Alexander Fury wrote: "for those who lived through it, there was a sense of transience, of not only a century but of a millennium drawing to a close. Of both relentlessly looking forward to the promise of the brave and the new and back via an exhaustive sputtering of revivals." Fury is correct: the 1990s was a tran...sient, eclectic, unpredictable decade. The recent revival of the series Twin Peaks (originally screened in 1990-1) suggests that this decade has made a kind of "comeback", at least in the realm of popular culture. This issue of M/C Journal will revisit the period spanning 1990 to 1999. Areas of investigation could include: • Shutting down the 20th Century: where did the 1980s end and the 1990s begin? • Paranoia: Y2K and otherwise tilting into the new millennium • Technological insurgence and the widespread emergence of the Internet • Grunge, alternative subcultures and 'Generation X' • Hybridity, globalisation and popular culture • High art/low art collapse and genre fluidity • The function of retro and nostalgia in, and about, the 1990s Prospective contributors should email an abstract of 100-250 words and a brief biography to the issue editors. Abstracts should include the article title and should describe your research question, approach, and argument. Biographies should be about three sentences (maximum 75 words) and should include your institutional affiliation and research interests. Articles should be 3000 words (plus bibliography). All articles will be double-blind refereed and must adhere to MLA style (6th edition). Details • Article deadline: 5 Oct. 2018 • Release date: 5 Dec. 2018 • Editors: Jay Daniel Thompson and Sally Breen Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to nineties@journal.media-culture.org.a u.
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GCS welcome and orientation lunch for new postgrads.

The GCS Seminar Series re-starts for the new semester! Friday 3rd August, 2-4pm. All are welcome. Hope to see many of you there!