Current Gender & Women's Studies Events

"Sexuality and Rights: Uneasy Bedfellows?"

Speaker: Dr. Alice Miller, Lecturer in Residence; Senior Fellow, Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, Boalt School of Law, UC Berkeley

Dr. Miller will speak about contemporary global conversations on sexuality and formal human rights, and the multiple political valences of nation neo instantiations of national culture that are shaping the impulse to make rights claims as well as the posture and scope of these claims in the UN settings. She will consider how health has been both a safe and constraining site for these developments, as exemplified by the 2004 report of a UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Health who attempted to limn out sexual rights as including but not limited to sexual health [health, he thought, having been made safe because of HIV/AIDS] and yet found himself the target of major attacks from both the US and the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

Previously, Ali Miller was an Associate Clinical Professor of Population and Family Health & International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, teaching in the Columbia's Schools of Law, Public Health and International and Public Affairs. Miller's past work includes co-Directing the Center for the Study of Human Rights and the Human Rights Concentration at Columbia University, School of Public and International Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University from 1989. In 1998-1999, she was a Rockefeller Fellow in the Program for the Study of Sexuality, Gender, Health and Human Rights at the School of Public Health. She is a visiting professor at the Sexuality and Rights Institute, Pune, India, for two weeks each year, and at the International School, Summer Institute on Sexuality, Culture and Society, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, for one week each July.

Professor Miller has over 20 years of policy and advocacy experience with non-governmental organizations, including directing the women's rights program at the Human Rights Law Group (now Global Rights) [at the Law Group, 1993-98]; Amnesty International USA's Program against the Death Penalty [1991-1993], and co-founding AIUSA's programs on women's rights, and LGBT rights programs. She continues to work with local and international NGOs, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and local and national NGOs such as the Women's Institute for Leadership Development (USA), and CREA and TARSHI (India) on human rights issues in the US and globally. Her scholarship and policy work has addressed gendering humanitarian law, safe migration and anti-trafficking policies, criminal law, and specifically abolition of the death penalty, women's rights, sexual rights, sexual and reproductive health and LGBT rights.

Li Ka Shing Program in Gender and Science in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies | Sponsored by Science, Technology and Society Center

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
20 Barrows Hall

"Ms. Berne will share a disability justice perspective in which she contrasts the medical and social models of disability, cross-movement organizing, and the role of cultural work in health, sexuality, race, gender, and disability."

Speaker: Patty Berne, Director, Sins Invalid

PATTY BERNE is a Co-Founder and Director of Sins Invalid. Berne's background includes advocacy for immigrants who seek asylum due to war and torture; community organizing within the Haitian diaspora; international support work for the Guatemalan democratic movement; work with incarcerated youth toward alternatives to the criminal legal system; advocating for LGBTQI community and disability rights perspectives within the field of reproductive and genetic technologies; offering mental health support to survivors of violence; and cultural activism to centralize marginalized voices, particularly those of people with disabilities. She is pursuing a Psy.D. focusing on trauma and healing for survivors of interpersonal and state-sponsored violence. In 2008, she had a chapter published in the Routledge Press book, Telling Stories to Change the World, on the work and history of Sins Invalid. She currently chairs the Board of Directors at San Francisco Women Against Rape and is the 2009 recipient of the Empress I Jose Sarria Award for Uncommon Leadership in the field of LGBTQI and disability rights by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

Sins Invalid is a performance project on disability and sexuality that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and queer and gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized from social discourse. Sins Invalid recognizes that we will be liberated as whole beings - as disabled/as queer/as brown/as black/as genderqueer/as female- or male-bodied - as we are far greater whole than partitioned. We recognize that our allies emerge from many communities and that demographic identity alone does not determine one's commitment to liberation.

Sins Invalid is committed to social and economic justice for all people with disabilities - in lockdowns, in shelters, on the streets, visibly disabled, invisibly disabled, sensory minority, environmentally injured, psychiatric survivors - moving beyond individual legal rights to collective human rights.

Sponsored by Science, Technology and Society Center

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
20 Barrows Hall