Undergraduate Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Futures Reading Group
Starting in 2024, this reading group was run in partnership with Girl* Up! Society and was an opportunity for undergraduates to engage with queer and feminist futures, especially looking at how we might imagine feminist futures. The reading group also provided an insight into postgraduate study as well as deepen understandings of queer/LGBTQ+ and feminist issues from diverse and global perspectives. Students were invited to read and engage in discussion of feminist texts pertaining to three key issues, with wider reading also provided. Whether the texts chosen are academic essays, articles, books, stories or poems, they all centered voices that are often forgotten by mainstream western feminism and will cover issues that encompass a range of experiences.
Each meeting began with a short introduction of the theme and reading from an academic in order to help contextualise the work and provide some starting points before discussion. The rest of the discussion was for the students alone to discuss the reading in order to foster an reflexive setting for discussion and learning.
Past themes and reading lists:
Feminist Abolitionism with Hemangini Gupta
Essential Reading:
- Ruth Wilson Gilmore: "Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence" in Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation (available online through our library).
Supplementary Reading:
- Building an Abolitionist Queer and Trans Movement with Everything We've Got, Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, Dean Spade: https://www.deanspade.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Building-an-Abolitionist-Trans-Queer-Movement-With-Everything-Weve-Got.pdf
Recommended Reading:
- The Challenge of Prison Abolition, Angela Davis in conversation with Dylan Roderiguez https://www.jstor.org/stable/29767244
- Abolition Geography, Dissent Magazine: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/abolition-as-method/
Global South Ecofeminism with Tanushree Kaushal
Essential reading:
- Gaard, Greta. "Ecofeminism and climate change." Women's Studies International Forum. Vol. 49. Pergamon, 2015.
Supplementary readings/ materials:
- Fakier, Khayaat, and Jacklyn Cock. "Eco-feminist organizing in South Africa: Reflections on the feminist table." Capitalism Nature Socialism 29.1 (2018): 40-57.
- Vandana Shiva on Earth Democracy (VIDEO): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNVRtX2-HzY&ab_channel=VoxFeminae
- Adams, Carol. Examples of the Sexual politics of meat (IMAGES): https://caroljadams.com/examples-of-spom
Recommended reading:
- Leonard, K. (2020). Why lakes and rivers should have the same rights as humans (VIDEO)
- Nixon, Lindsay (2015). Eco-feminist appropriations of Indigenous feminisms and environmental violence. The Feminist Wire. https://www.thefeministwire.com/2015/04/eco-feminist-appropriations-of-indigenous-feminisms-and-environmental-violence/
Heterotopia with Wannes Dupont
Essential Reading:
- Foucault, Michel Of Other Places, Heterotopias
Supplementary Reading:
- Kannen Victoria, "These Are Not ‘Regular Places’: Women and Gender Studies Classrooms as Heterotopias", Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 21/1, 2014, 52-67.
Recommended Reading:
- Kong Travis S.K., "A Fading Tongzhi Heterotopia. Hong Kong Older Gay Men’s Use of Spaces", Sexualities, 15/8, 2012, 896-916.
Evans Adrienne, Sarah Riley and Avi Shankar "Postfeminist Heterotopias. Negotiating ‘Safe’ and ‘Seedy’ in the British Sex Shop Space", European Journal of Women’s Studies, 17/3, 2010, 211-229