10/30/2024

2025 CSCA Convention - Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity (SOGI) Caucus ... Panel Opportunities

Dear SOGI Caucus members:

I am pleased to announce two different panels as part of our 20th anniversary celebration! Whether you have already submitted, or if you still want an opportunity to be a part of CSCA 2025, this message is for you. Please check out the two panel opportunities below, and if you would like to participate email jimmiem@unr.edu by Tuesday, November 5.

Panel Opportunity #1: CSCA SOGI Book Club (open to all SOGI Caucus members)

This year the caucus will host its first-ever book club featuring Judith Butler's new book Who's Afraid of Gender? (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; ISBN 0374608229). Please see the book description from the publisher at the close of this email.

Those who join this session will purchase a copy of the book, read it before the convention, and then join the conversation. All conference members are invited to attend the session, but if you join as an official panelist on or before November 5 you will be listed in the conference program and have the opportunity to help determine the session's discussion questions and prompts.

Panel Opportunity #2: SOGI Chair Reflection Panel (open to anyone who has served as Chair of the SOGI Caucus)
This year, in honor of the 20th anniversary of the SOGI Caucus, we will have a special panel that looks back and looks forward at the past, present, and future of the SOGI Caucus. Anyone who has served as Chair is invited to join the session - but please RSVP by November 5 so you can be included on the conference program.

That's it for now — I'll have more to share with you as the conference approaches, including news about all the wonderful scholarship we will program and special online panels to lead up to the conference. Don't miss out!

Sincerely,

Jimmie Manning
Chair, SOGI Caucus

Who's Afraid of Gender Book Description:

Judith Butler, the groundbreaking thinker whose iconic book Gender Trouble redefined how we think about gender and sexuality, confronts the attacks on “gender” that have become central to right-wing movements today. Global networks have formed “anti–gender ideology movements” that are dedicated to circulating a fantasy that gender is a dangerous, perhaps diabolical, threat to families, local cultures, civilization―and even “man” himself. Inflamed by the rhetoric of public figures, this movement has sought to nullify reproductive justice, undermine protections against sexual and gender violence, and strip trans and queer people of their rights to pursue a life without fear of violence.

The aim of Who’s Afraid of Gender? is not to offer a new theory of gender but to examine how “gender” has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations, and trans-exclusionary feminists. In their vital, courageous new book, Butler illuminates the concrete ways that this phantasm of “gender” collects and displaces anxieties and fears of destruction. Operating in tandem with deceptive accounts of “critical race theory” and xenophobic panics about migration, the anti-gender movement demonizes struggles for equality, fuels aggressive nationalism, and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation.

An essential intervention into one of the most fraught issues of our moment, Who’s Afraid of Gender? is a bold call to refuse the alliance with authoritarian movements and to make a broad coalition with all those whose struggle for equality is linked with fighting injustice. Imagining new possibilities for both freedom and solidarity, Butler offers us a hopeful work of social and political analysis that is both timely and timeless―a book whose verve and rigor only they could deliver.