During the spring 2023 semester, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) organized four invited lectures as part of the WGSS speaker series. Each highlighted intersectional issues and topics related to the WGSS discipline with a focus on local and community expertise. Events were open to the public and held at the Multicultural Center.
Dr. Ericka Wills, Illinois State alum and current assistant professor in the School for Workers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, began the series with her discussion of “Women’s Crucial Roles in Sustaining Mining Strikes and Solidarity.” The talk featured Wills’ participatory research with unionizing miners in both the U.S. and Mexico, drawing cross-border connections between labor organizing initiatives, and demonstrated how women’s auxiliary work is necessary for successful strikes.
Dr. Juan Ríos Vega of Bradley University and Dr. Ela Przybylo in the Department of English at Illinois State continued the series as QueerTalks, a WGSS mini-series of emerging scholars in LGBTQ+ studies, queer theory, and transgender theory. Ríos Vega presented “Testimonios of a Queer and Transnational Mariposa,” in which he analyzed his experiences as a queer man teaching middle and high school English to multilingual learners. Przybylo spoke about compulsory sexuality and other matters essential to understanding asexual and aromantic identities in her discussion, “Aces and Aros: We’re Sexy and We Know It.”
Dr. Armen Álvarez concluded the speaker series with her work “Bombazos: A Cross-Examination of Caribbean TransIndigenous and Transcolonial Feminist Intersubjectivities,” in which she invited students in the audience to play a traditional Puerto Rican bomba drum while sharing her experience as an Indigenous woman in academia.
Thank you to WGSS speaker series sponsors, the Department of Geography, Geology, and the Environment; the Latin American and Latino/a Studies Program; the Department of Educational Administration and Foundations; Queer Coalition; and the Department of English, for making these events possible. Information regarding WGSS’s 2023-24 QueerTalks and speaker series will be provided in the fall.
