Mobilizing Intergenerational Connections for Gender Justice
The Feminist Futures initiative is committed to intergenerational, intersectional, public-facing research and dialogue that will move us toward a more just future.
We will develop our own distinctive best practices for intergenerational leadership transition. We will collaborate across generations on forward-looking research. And we will mobilize research to find innovative solutions to persisting problems of gender inequality.
Feminist research is more vital than ever. It is what drives all effective, evidence-based interventions into gender-related injustice and inequality. Across the social sciences, humanities, and STEM disciplines, feminist faculty at UCSB are fast at work addressing the central role of gender in the most urgent crises of our time.
Feminist Studies professor Laury Oaks writes for a digital symposium on "Adoption, Family Separation & Preservation, and Reproductive Justice" at Harvard Law.
Feminist Futures Projects, 2022-2023
Feminist Futures Projects, 2021-2022
The Feminist Futures Second Book Workshop
Jenn Tyburczy, Queer Traffic: Sex and the Performance of Free Trade
Friday, May 6, 2022 from 2-3pm Pacific | Virtual | By invitation
Readers/Participants: Macarena Gómez-Barris, Rosemary Hennessy, Juana María Rodríguez
Lechedevirgen Trimegisto from México Exhumado. Photo provided by the artist.
In the circuits through which culture travels, sex consistently emerges as a deviant and irreverent flow, the queer traffic of (free) trade. In Queer Traffic: Sex and the Performance of Free Trade, Tyburczy draws inspiration from labor, environment, and indigenous rights activists and visual and performance artists to trace dissident flows of sex and culture. Centrally, the book situates the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as a pivot point in the invention of new categories of “obscenity” and “illegal” personhood. She presents a story of how an international trade agreement nominally about the movement of goods and capital has had and continues to have a profound material influence on the level of the body. To do so, Tyburczy reads NAFTA sideways to examine the document across the time and space of the Mexico/U.S./Canada borderlands from the 1990s to the present. Proposing queer traffic as both an object and a method for conducting queer hemispheric performance research, the book reveals how NAFTA influences the circulation of erotic goods and ideas in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries and illuminates free trade’s erotic investments in hetero- and homonormativity, racial capitalism, markets of dispossession, and (neo)colonialism.
Jennifer Tyburczy is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her first book, Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display, won the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Best Book in LGBTQ Studies. Her scholarship can also be found in GLQ, Women & Performance, Radical History Review, QED, Signs, Feminist Formations, Text and Performance Quarterly, and the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. Tyburczy’s second monograph, Queer Traffic: Sex and the Performance of Free Trade, has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright García Robles Fellowship, the Fulbright Carlos Rico Fellowship, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, UC Mexus, the Feminist Futures Initiative, and the Chicano Studies Institute.
Feminist Futures Projects, 2020-2021
The Feminist Futures Initiative awarded funding to two projects, from a pool of competitive proposals, for the 2020-2021 academic year. Thanks to all those who submitted proposals, and to the selection committee: Amy Gonzalez (Communication); C.J. Jones (Graduate Student, Feminist Studies); Pei-te Lien (Political Science); Laury Oaks (Feminist Studies); Leila Rupp (Feminist Studies); and Omise’eke Tinsley (Black Studies). And thanks to Dean Charlie Hale for financial support for this year’s activities.
And congratulations to the winning projects:
“Intimate Futures: Black Sexualities and the Twin Pandemics of COVID-19 and Anti-Black Racism”
Co-PIs:
Terrell Winder, Sociology
Matt Richardson, Feminist Studies
Felice Blake, English
Ingrid Banks, Black Studies
Micaela Díaz-Sánchez, Chicana and Chicano Studies
Graduate Students:
Amoni Thompson, Jordan Victorian, Mariah Webber; Feminist Studies
UCSB is poised to become an anchoring hub for scholars engaging in and producing innovative research contributing to the field of Black sexualities studies and investigations of anti-Blackness. Through funding from the Feminist Futures Initiative, we will begin the work of institutionalizing a Black Sexuality Studies Collective (BSSC), convening in Spring 2021. The BSSC will bring together an interdisciplinary collective of scholars from the Social Sciences and Humanities to create a space to discuss and build the future of Black sexualities studies, an indispensable arm of the Feminist Futures Initiative at UCSB. During Spring 2021, we will focus on the specific themes of intimacy, touch, and desire under the rubric of Intimate Futures: Black Sexualities and the Twin Pandemics of COVID-19 and Anti-Black Racism. We will bring together scholars of the BSSC, two scholars from outside of the collective, and one community activist/public intellectual in a day-long series of discussions; curate a digital platform to create a living, publicly accessible syllabus focusing on New Directions in Black Sexualities Studies, or Black Intimate Futures; and produce either a publication of conference proceedings, a proposal for a special issue in a key journal, or another publication format that would be accessible beyond our campus.
The Black Sexualities Studies Collective engaged in conversations about the central questions raised by the Intimate Futures project:
“Care Across the Generations”
Eileen Boris, Feminist Studies
Dana Mastro, Communication
Sarah Thébaud, Sociology
This Feminist Futures project addresses how the crisis of the pandemic is also a crisis in care, exacerbating long-term social and cultural divisions of labor. “Care Across the Generations” seeks to document this impact not only to illuminate national trends but also to engage various UC Santa Barbara communities in a public-facing conversation for change. Delaying tenure clocks and time to degree, as well as instituting flexible time for staff, only begin to address systematic inequalities rooted in who cares that have generational as well as racial, gender, and other disparate consequences. We ask, what are we doing to care across the generations and what can we do to mitigate the valuing of the unencumbered worker over those meeting the immediate needs of others? The project combines research and educational activities, including an analysis of questions on care on the upcoming campus climate survey, with the participation of graduate students, and panels focused on child care and elder/adult care with representatives of various campus stakeholders and comments by expert researchers. “Care Across the Generations advances the commitment of Feminist Futures to exploring the changing nature of work, engaging in intergenerational dialogue, applying intersectional feminist theory and scholarship to social concerns, and addressing broader publics—all with the goal of recognizing care in our workplace as well.
The Feminist Futures Initiative would like to thank UC Santa Barbara alumnus and Trustee Blair Hull '75, whose generosity established the Hull Chair in Women's Studies and is making possible the launch of Feminist Futures with generous seed funding.
We are very grateful to Blair for ensuring the immediate future of Feminist Futures.
