Does Gender Matter in Organized Racism?

ISSI’s Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements along with the African American Studies Department, the Beatrice Bain Research Group, the Gender and Women's Studies Department, and the Sociology Department present:

Kathleen Blee,

Distinguished Professor and Chair of Sociology Department, University of Pittsburgh

  

Does Gender Matter in Organized Racism?

with Paola Bacchetta, Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, UC Berkeley, as respondent

Thursday, March 11

4:00-5:30 pm

370 Dwinelle Hall

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ABSTRACT: How do we know if gender matters in right-wing movements?  Drawing on my studies of women in the 1920s Ku Klux Klan and modern U.S. organized racism, as well as new scholarship on women in right-wing movements across the globe, this talk looks at assumptions that enable and circumscribe how we understand gender on the political right.  These include templates of German Nazism, the male right, social movement progressivism, historical & spatial continuity, and mobilization from the private to the public.

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Kathleen Blee is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and History and Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.  She has published two books on racist movements in the U.S., Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement and Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s, and she has written extensively on methodological issues in studying difficult and inaccessible populations, including issues of emotion, reflexivity, legal and ethical concerns, and sampling problems.  She has also co-authored a book on the historical development of poverty, The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia, and edited two volumes on women in protest movements, No Middle Ground: Women & Radical Protest and Feminism and Anti-Racism: International Struggles for Justice.  She is now completing a book based on a comparative ethnography of emerging social movement groups.  She is also coeditor, with Sandy Deutsch, of Women of the Right: Comparisons and Exchanges Across National Borders, which will appear next year from Penn State University Press, building on the path-breaking volume, Right-Wing Women, that was co-edited by Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power.

Paola Bacchetta is Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, at University of California at Berkeley. She is also Director of Beatrice Bain Research Group (BBRG), the research center for gender, sexuality and race based on the Berkeley campus. She earned her Ph.D. in sociology from The Sorbonne, Paris with highest honors. Her geographic areas of specialization outside the U.S. are India and France. She is author of Gender in the Hindu Nation: RSS Women as Ideologists (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2003), and co-editor of Right-Wing Women: From Conservatives to Extremists around the World (New York: Routledge, 2002). She has published numerous articles and book chapters on gender, sexuality, "race"-racism, postcoloniality, Hindu nationalism, political conflict, and feminist and queer movements in India, queer of color theories and practices in France, decolonial feminist and queer theorizing (including in the work of Gloria Anzaldua), and postcolonial feminist and queer theorizing. Her work has been published in the U.S., France, India, Italy, Brazil, Canada, Britain, Australia.  Her articles are accessible in journals such as Social Text; *Feminist Studies; Journal of Women's History; Antipode: A Journal of Radical Geography; Growth and Change; Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, Cahiers du CEDREF, Sexualité, genre et société, Scholar and Feminist, Revista Estudos Feministas, etc.

This event is free, wheelchair accessible, and open to the public.

For more information, call Elizabeth Carlen at 510-642-0813 or email isscucb@gmail.com