38th Annual Gender Studies Symposium Who Cares?
March 13-15, 2019
Anna Guevarra is associate professor and founding director of the Global Asian Studies program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Guevarra’s interdisciplinary scholarly, creative, and teaching interests focus on immigrant and transnational labor, the geopolitics of care work, critical diaspora studies, and community engagement as they relate to dynamics of race, gender, and empire. She has written or edited numerous publications, and she is the author of the award-winning Marketing Dreams and Manufacturing Heroes: The Transnational Labor Brokering of Filipino Workers, an ethnography that narrates the multilayered racialized and gendered processes of brokering Filipino labor, the Philippines’ highly-prized “export.”
Maggie Nelson is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization. Her nonfiction titles include the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and New York Times bestseller The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (Norton, 2011; a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Bluets (Wave Books, 2009; named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years), The Red Parts (Free Press, 2007; reissued by Graywolf, 2016), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (U of Iowa Press, 2007). Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull, 2005; finalist for the PEN/ Martha Albrand Art of the Memoir). In 2016 she was awarded a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. She has also been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA in Poetry, an Innovative Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital, and an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She writes frequently on art, including recent catalogue essays on Carolee Schneemann, Matthew Barney, and Rachel Harrison. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and has taught literature, writing, art, criticism and theory at the New School, Pratt Institute, Wesleyan University, and CalArts. Currently she is a professor of English at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.
Monica Raye Simpson is the executive director of SisterSong, a Woman of Color Reproductive Justice Collective. A native of rural North Carolina, Monica organizes against human rights violations, the prison industrial complex, and structural racism through a feminist and interdisciplinary approach to Black liberation from a southern to a global scale. A true renaissance leader, she is also committed to birth justice as a certified Doula and centers the reproductive rights of black women as part of her practice. Monica’s masterful integration of activism and artistry—“artivism”—created a path for the release of her first live album, entitled Revolutionary Love, an album praised for its blending of her gospel roots and her passion for social justice. This innovative sound is what she calls Revolutionary Soul. As a performer who works to empower marginalized people and tear down broken systems, Monica was named as a New Civil Rights Leader by Essence Magazine and chosen as one of the Advocate magazine’s 40 under 40 leaders.
