Penguin Family Values: The Nature of Environmental Reproductive Justice
Location: Todd 276
5:45PM - 6:30PM on Saturday, April 5th
This talks explore various popular stories about reproduction, using several examples that promote penguins as symbols of family values, in an attempt to think about how heterosexist ideas about the nature of babies, families, populations, genes, and parenting intertwine with and influence our understanding of environmental issues, or what might be called planetary reproduction. An analysis and a politic that wishes to address both heterosexism and environmental problems, as well as racism, sexism and colonialism, must critically examine discourses about nature and the natural in popular culture, public policy, and grassroots activism.
Dr. Noël Sturgeon is Chair and Professor of Women’s Studies. Her work on environmental, feminist, and anti-racist social movements and culture has been published in many journals and anthologies. She has been a Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture at Rutgers University, a Visiting Scholar at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia; the JFK Institute for North American Studies at the Free University in Berlin, Germany; Tamkang University in Taipei, Taiwan; and the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action (Routledge 1997) and the forthcoming Environmentalism in U.S. Popular Culture: Justice, Gender, Sexuality and Naturalization (University of Arizona Press, 2009). She teaches many Women’s Studies courses, including the Tier 3 course, Race, Gender and Nature in American Culture and the graduate course, Environmental Justice Cultural Studies, both of which she will teach in Fall 2008.