UCLA CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF WOMEN 

presents

A One-Day Conference:

Feminism Confronts Disability

February 15, 2002
California Room at the UCLA Faculty Center
8:30 am    7:00 pm

This event is free and open to the public.  Registration/RSVP is REQUIRED.

 

     How does our culture define female embodiment through stigmatizing those characterized as disabled? How does thinking of disability as deviance sanction society's anxieties about difference? How does disability desexualize women? Our keynote speaker, the leading theorist of disability and a feminist, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, author of Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature and editor of Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body will frame race, class, and gender, within a politics of disability that effects law, public policy, and cultural representation.

    This conference seeks to contribute to a newly vitalized interdisciplinary debate at the moment when disability, requiring its own methodologies and definitions, is moving from the margins to occupy a central place in public discourse and in such diverse fields as women's studies, anthropology, history, policy studies, literature, sociology, and philosophy.

    We will examine feminism's intellectual and activist relationship to the emerging field of Disability Studies, to a redefined civil rights movement, and to social and medical policy. We will engage with personal narratives, critical race theory, queer theory, performance art, and the disability rights movement. We invite you to think with us about the so-called enabled body vs. the body defined by presumed limitations, about conceptions of mobility, and the relationship of the disabled to space. We will discuss the heterogeneity of disability, bioethical questions of morality and justice, distinctions  between disability and illness, visible vs. invisible impairments, and the production of intellectually rigorous and socially relevant scholarship.

The UCLA Faculty Center is WHEELCHAIR ACCESSIBLE.
Directions: From the 405 freeway take the Sunset Blvd. exit and go east. Turn right on Hilgard Avenue then turn right on Westholme (the second traffic light) and enter the UCLA campus. Go to the parking and information kiosk to your right and ask for parking directions. The Faculty Center is the first building on your right. MAP
8:30-9:30 AM CONFERENCE CHECK-IN
9:30-9:40 Welcome by Miriam Silverberg, Director, UCLA Center for the Study of Women
9:40-10:30 Panel: Personal Narratives I
Moderator Helen Deutsch, Department of English, UCLA
* Kim Hall, Philosophy and Religion, Appalachian State University, "Queerness, Disability, and The Vagina Monologues"
* Kara Aiello, Kardon Institute of the Performing Arts for Persons with Disabilities; graduate student, community counseling, Arcadia University, "Secrets of My Success: One Woman's Journey Through Adversity"
10:30-11:15 Paul Longmore, Department of History, San Francisco State University, "At the Intersection of Gender and Disability: Themes, Thoughts, Questions"
11:15-11:30 BREAK
11:30-1:00 PM KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Institute for Women's Studies, Emory University, "Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory."
Introduction by Felicity Nussbaum, Department of English, UCLA
1:00-2:00 LUNCH
2:00-2:45

Dance Theater Performance:
Catherine Cole, Department of Dramatic Art, UCSB
Christopher Pilafian, Division of Dance, UCSB
 "Five Foot Feat" - A dance theatre piece featuring vignettes of people in ordinary situations who appear trapped by some limitation -- psychological, physical, emotional.
2:45-4:30 Panel: Visibility/Invisibility
Moderator Alice Wexler, Research Scholar, UCLA Center for the Study of Women
* Lillibeth Navarro, Executive Director, CALIF (Community Actively Living Independent and Free) "The Disability Challenge to Feminism"
* Victoria Ann Lewis, Theater, University of Redlands, Founder and Co-Director of the Mark Taper Forum's OTHER VOICES, "A Separate Practice: The Disabled-Women-Only Beginnings of OTHER VOICES"
* Brenda Premo, Founding Director, Center for Disability Issues and the Health Professions, Western University of Health Sciences, "Health Wellness and Women with Disabilities"
4:30-4:45 BREAK
4:45-6:30

Panel: Personal Narratives II
Moderator Emily Abel, School of Public Health and Women's Studies Programs, UCLA
* Mary Felstiner, History, San Francisco State University, "Casing My Joints"
* Catherine Lord, Studio Art, UC Irvine, "The Summer of Her Baldness"
* Ann Stocking, Actor, Los Angeles, "Special Needs"
* Vivian Sobchack, Critical Studies, UCLA Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media, "A Leg To Stand On"
6:30-7:00 RECEPTION
CONFERENCE CO-SPONSORS

UCLA Graduate Division
UCLA Division of Humanities
UCLA Division of Life Sciences
UCLA Division of Social Sciences
UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television
University of California, Institute for Labor and Employment
UCLA Institute of Industrial Relations
UCLA Office for Students with Disabilities
UCLA Tarjan Center for Developmental Disabilities
UCLA Women's Studies Programs
UCLA Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Program
UCLA Communication Studies Program
UCLA Department of Anthropology
UCLA Department of Geography
UCLA Department of History
UCLA Department of Social Welfare
UCLA Department of Sociology
Western University of Health Sciences, Center for Disability Issues and Health Professions