May 17, 2013.

Patricia Melzer, Assistant Professor , German and Women’s Studies, Temple University ;  Research Fellow, Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellsley College                                          
                                                                                                                         

“Women Who Fight are Women Who Live”: Left-wing Political Violence as Feminist Resistance during the 1980s in West Germany                    

Patricia Melzer is Assistant Professor of German and Women’s Studies at Temple University. She currently is a Research Fellow at the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College. Her research focuses on feminist and queer theories and cultural texts, and women in radical social movements in Germany. Her first book Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought was published by Texas University Press in 2006 and since then her work has appeared in journals such as International Feminist Journal of Politics and Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies. Her current book project Death in the Shape of a Young Girl: Gender and Political Violence in West German Terrorism examines the participation of women in the left-wing terrorist groups Red Army Faction (RAF) and Movement 2nd June in the 1970s and 1980s. The book focuses in particular on the implications of women’s political violence for feminist theories of violence and is scheduled to come out in 2014 with NYU Press. (http://sites.temple.edu/patriciamelzer/)

Sign Journal of Women in Culture and Society’s most recent issue includes the winner of the 2013 Catharine Stimpson Prize, Anna Hájková’s “Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto.” Hájková’s article relates a remarkable story about gender power in a transit camp operated by the Nazi SS, in which female sexual and social favors were traded for food, protection, and symbolic capital among inmates. The issue also includes a series of articles on women in contemporary Russia and concludes with a number of explorations of gender in popular culture, from present-date representations of Emma Bovary to burgeoning expressions in hip-hop feminism. Read more about the issue contents here or view the issue on JSTOR.

 February 15

New York University
Center for European and Mediterranean Studies
and the Network of East-West Women

                                                                                              present the 

                                                         Gender and Transformation: Women in Europe Workshop                                                    

                                                            Judith Szapor, Assistant Professor,  Department of History and Classical  

                                                                                               Studies, McGill University   

                                                          “Between Democracy and Dictatorship:

                                                           Hungarian Gender Politics in the 1920s and Today”

Friday 4:30-6:00 p.m.

at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies

New York University
285 Mercer Street, 7th floor
(between Waverly and Washington Place)

The Gender of Institutionalized Corruption in Russia
Tuesday, 12 February 2013, 12:15pm
Marshall D. Shulman Seminar Room (1219 IAB) , Columbia University

Please join the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Janet E. Johnson (Visiting Scholar, Harriman Institute and Associate Professor, Brooklyn College).

Anticorruption experts accuse Russia of being one of the most corrupt countries in the world, but their definition of corruption focuses attention on transactions between individuals, such as bribery or embezzlement, rather than on the systemic problems. My project, part of a larger book manuscript on gender and corruption, recasts corruption as a question of institutions, building on Richard Sakwa’s (2011) dual state framework and theories of post-Soviet neopatrimonialism. Whereas Sakwa describes Putin’s Russia (at least through 2008) as torn between a power-hungry administrative regime and some limited commitments to a constitutionalism, my project spotlights how many of the illustrative institutions and the justifying ideologies of the administrative regime are gendered, even as more women have entered into formal power under Putin than under Yeltsin and even Gorbachev. Putin, the siloviki, and the oligarchs are a male-dominated cabal, who institutionalized heteronormative, often violent masculinities that counter the imagined subordination of the homo Sovieticus. In other words, corruption and violent masculinity are the scaffolding that held the dual state together, and this perspective helps explain why gender and sexuality–most notably in the guise of Pussy Riot and the condom–have been so prominent in the protests that began after the 2011 Duma elections and why the regime has been so coercive in its crackdown.

Janet Elise Johnson is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and, this year, a visiting scholar at the Harriman Institute. Her most recent articles are published or forthcoming in Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Politics & Gender, and Signs: Journals of Women in Culture and Society. Her last book, Gender Violence in Russia: The Politics of Feminist Intervention (Indiana University Press, 2009), analyzes the development of the women’s crisis center movement in Russia. Her current research explores the role of gender in corruption in places such as Russia and Iceland.

For more information, see http://www.harrimaninstitute.org/events/monthly_calendar.html.

                                                                                                          New York University  Center for European and Mediterranean Studies     and the Network for East-West Women

                                                                                                                                                                                          Present

                                                                                                                                                                               January 18, 2013

                                       Marta Kichorowska Kebalo, Ph.D.Anthropology, CUNY; Lecturer, Anthropology, Sociology and Linguistics, 

           “Ethnicity, gender, and class in Interwar Galicia: The Ukrainian women’s movement of the 1920s-30s and beyond.”

Friday 4:30-6:00 p.m.
at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies
New York University

285 Mercer Street, 7th floor
(between Waverly and Washington Place)

New York University

Center for European and Mediterranean Studies
and the Network of East-West Women

 present the
Gender and Transformation: Women in Europe Workshop

 Jane Gary Harris, Professor of Russian Literature and Culture, University of Pittsburgh
“We are not all Buronovskie Babushki: Gender, aging, and social policy in Russia Today”

Friday, Dec.7, 4:30-6:00 p.m.
at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies
New York University

285 Mercer Street, 7th floor

New York University

Center for European and Mediterranean Studies
and the Network of East-West Women

 present the
Gender and Transformation: Women in Europe Workshop

November 9, 2012

Anna Hájková, PhD candidate, History Department, University of Toronto
(winner of the 2013 Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship)
“Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto”

Friday 4:30-6:00 p.m.
at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies
New York University

285 Mercer Street, 7th floor
(between Waverly and Washington Place)

Anna Hájková is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Toronto, finishing her dissertation “The Inmate Society of Theresienstadt: A Laboratory of the Middle Class. A History of the Theresienstadt Transit Ghetto, 1941-1945.” She received her MA in history from Humboldt University in Berlin. From 2006 to 2009, she was coeditor of Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente. She has published on various aspects of Theresienstadt, the Holocaust in the Netherlands, and the Czechoslovak association of concentration camp survivors. She is a recipient of the 2013 Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship for the article on which this lecture is based, forthcoming in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society in the spring 2013.