Photo by Alex Barr
The 40th annual Gender Studies Symposium, set to be held from March 10-12, will focus on questions of absence and lack in relation to gender and sexuality. All of the events are accessible through Zoom and require pre-registration on the event website.
Director of the symposium and Associate Professor with Term of Humanities Kimberly Brodkin said that the program offers a wide range of events for students.
“I think there’s something for everyone in this year’s program,” Brodkin said via email. “In addition to presentations by our two distinguished keynote speakers, we’re hosting workshops, performances, and ten multidisciplinary panels. Plus there’s a virtual art gallery, as well as two student-curated historical exhibits (also virtual) organized through Watzek Special Collections and Archives.”
The keynote speakers this year are Jennifer C. Nash and Carmen Maria Machado. Nash is the Jean Fox O’Barr professor of gender, sexuality and feminist studies at Duke University and Machado is the writer in residence for the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania.
Brodkin believes that these speakers, alongside the symposium’s other events, will allow the LC community to interact with the theme of absence and lack.
“We’re hopeful that this will help all of us to think expansively and in new ways about issues of gender and sexuality,” Brodkin said.
Student Co-Chairs Kendall Arlasky ’21 and Phoenix Bruner ’21, in an interview for the PioPod, talked about how this year’s symposium is meant to highlight what has been missing in conversations surrounding gender and sexuality.
“When we started talking about what does lack and absence actually mean, I think the point was that we don’t really have the answer,” Bruner said. “And so when we were thinking about it, I know we talked a lot about posing questions for people to answer — what’s lacking, what’s missing, what does that mean … we didn’t want to limit people in what they could say.”
According to Arlasky, one of the goals of the symposium is to feature as much student work as possible. In doing so, they hope to bring the LC community closer together in a time when many students feel disconnected.
“We have so many amazing proposals from students at LC and students from across the country,” Arlasky said. “We’re really excited to be able to have a platform for them to share their work.”
As part of the symposium, a virtual art exhibit will be shared online through the event website. Student Co-Chair Caroline Spence ’22 believes that the online format will make the exhibit more accessible than in years past.
“We can have alumni look at the gallery, we can have non-LC students look at the gallery, which wasn’t previously an option to us at all,” Spence said. “Now we have the opportunity to keep the gallery going even past the date of the symposium and now there’s a record of it which is really wonderful.”
In curating the art, Spence and fellow Student Co-Chairs Elana Goff ’22 and Zoey Norling ’21 tried to include works from a wide array of LC artists.
“We included all different kinds of artists in the exhibit, whether it’s people who are art majors and really adept in the field or maybe this is their first time creating art,” Goff said.
Each of the co-chairs expressed excitement knowing that all of the artists that contributed were able to connect their artwork to the theme of lack and absence.
“Speaking somewhat broadly … what is lacking and what is absent right now in identity and gender and care is really at the forefront of all of our lives,” Norling said. “What was so emotional about going through these pieces is that they really speak to (that idea).”
If you would like to attend the virtual art exhibit or any of the symposium’s other events, you can sign up for them through the events page on Lewis & Clark’s website.
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