27th Annual WGSS Student Research Symposium
Friday, April 12, 2024, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM - Prairie Rooms, Bone Student Center
The Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Student Research Symposium is a day long celebration of student scholarship, creative work, and ideas that are underrepresented in Illinois State University's traditional curriculum.
All events are free and open to the public. For more information please contact Alison Bailey (baileya@ilstu.edu) or Jamie Anderson (jlande4@ilstu.edu).
2024 Symposium
Register now!
Schedule of events
Keynote
1:00 PM in the BSC Prairie Rooms
Dr. Kate Manne, PhD
"He Said, She Listened: On Epistemic Entitlement, Mansplaining, and Gaslighting"
Kate Manne was dubbed “the philosopher of #MeToo” for her timely and widely read analysis of misogyny in Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2017) and her treatment of male entitlement in her most recent book Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (2020). Manne regularly writes opinion pieces, essays, and reviews on moral and political topics—in venues including The New York Times, The Boston Review, the Huffington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Times Literary Supplement. Manne's address begins with the question: What are the underlying causes of misogyny? In many cases, she argues, it stems from a wrongheaded sense of moral entitlement to a woman's sexual, emotional, reproductive, and material labor.
Dr. Lauren Gutterman of the University of Texas, Austin, will deliver her keynote, "Queer Survival: LGBTQ Leadership in the Child Sexual Abuse Survivors' Movement.
Lauren Jae Gutterman graduated with a B.A. in American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies from Northwestern University. Professor Gutterman is the author of Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), which examines the personal experiences and public representation of wives who desired women in the United States since 1945. By demonstrating the remarkable extent to which married women have been able to engage in same-sex affairs, the book calls into question the straightness of marriage, particularly in the postwar period. Her Neighbor's Wife won the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize, was a finalist for the Organization of American Historians' Lawrence W. Levine Award, and received an honorable mention for the Committee on LGBT History's John Boswell Prize.
Professor Gutterman's next book project, Queer Survival: Gender, Sexuality, and the History of Childhood Sexual Abuse (under advance contract with University of North Carolina Press), examines the shifting cultural, political, and intellectual connections between queerness and surviving childhood sexual abuse from the late-nineteenth century to the present.
The WGSS Symposium is sponsored by:
- The Alice and Fannie Fell Trust
- Antiracism, Identity, and Belonging (AIB) Grant
- ISU Philosophy Department
- ISU English Department
- ISU Psychology Department
- ISU Social Work Department
- ISU Sociology and Anthropology Department
- ISU Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program
- College of Arts and Sciences
- Queer Coaltion
Climate and Inclusion Statement
The organizers of The Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Symposium are committed to providing a harassment-free symposium experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, national origin, ethnicity, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Conference participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference at the discretion of the conference organizers.
Harassment includes, but is not limited to:
- Verbal comments that reinforce social structures of domination related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, ethnicity, religion.
- Sexual images in public spaces
- Deliberate intimidation, stalking, or following
- Harassing photography or recording
- Sustained disruption of talks or other events
- Inappropriate physical contact
- Unwelcome sexual attention
- Advocating for, or encouraging, any of the above behavior
- Use of a recording device (mobile phone, camera, etc.) to capture images or presentations, chats, demonstrations, etc. taking place during the annual conference.
Land Acknowledgement
Illinois State University was built on and has benefitted from the land stolen from multiple Indigenous Nations. These lands were the traditional birthright of Indigenous Peoples who were forcibly removed and dispossessed of their land by settlers. Normal, IL is on the lands of the Peoria, Kaskasia, Piankashaw, Wea, Miami, Mascoutin, Odawa, Sauk, Mesquaki, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, and Ojibwe Nations. As settlers, we recognize that we have a responsibility to continue to learn, teach, and understand Indigenous histories and present-day realities as they pertain to these Nations as well as to confront the ongoing violence of settler colonialism.
The WGSS Symposium is sponsored by:
- The Alice and Fannie Fell Trust
- ISU Philosophy Department
- Harold K. Sage Foundation Fund
- ISU English Department
- College of Arts and Sciences
- Queer Coaltion
- ISU Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program