First Annual Gender Justice Conference

For decades, LGBTQ+ activists and community allies have worked to create spaces that are safe for queer and trans people to exist within. In the past year, however, organizers' creativity has been tested in adapting to a unique set of limitations. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, restrictions on physical gatherings have disrupted the LGBTQ+ social landscape. This session will explore how LGBTQ+ individuals have found community during this time while highlighting avenues for future-planning. This is a student panel.

Audience members will learn about the histories of QTPOC activism in the past and recent present. We will discuss how gender, race, and sexual orientation are entangled in these historical moments. We will also have a conversation about the importance of remembering these activists and what we gain to learn from them that can inform our activism.

This discussion will discuss battery at work as it relates to the touching of hair, especially as it related to the cultural hairstyles of African Americans women. Participants in this dialogue will learn about the historical context of this contact and how organizations can better support their employees who experience this in their official roles.

In the post-9/11 environment, Muslim women's representation is often articulated within a rights discourse owing much to liberal-secular sensibilities—notions of freedom, equality, rational thinking, individualism, and modernization. Based on her book, Muslim Women's Rights: Contesting Liberal-Secular Sensibilities in Canada, Dr. Ruby unpacks the ways these liberal-secular sensibilities inform, shape, and foreclose public discussion on questions of Islam and gender.

Rape myths are stereotyped or false beliefs surrounding rape, rapists, or rape victims that include elements of clemency for the perpetrator, denying perceived injury, or shifting blame to the victim. While the concept of rape myths has been researched for over fifty years, it is only recently that researchers have attempted to study rape myths involving the LGBTQ community. The current study explores students' views of rape and sexual assault of LGBTQ individuals.

Trauma informed yoga session with Lori Klein & Closing

First Annual Gender Justice Conference Keynote Speakers: Jennifer S. Hirsch & Shamus Khan, authors of Sexual Citizens

In SEXUAL CITIZENS: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus, Columbia professor Jennifer S. Hirsch and Princeton Professor Shamus Khan lay out an expansive, empirically-grounded vision for campus sexual assault prevention. The book, which was listed as one of NPR's 'best books of 2020', is rich with the testimonies of over 150 Columbia students who participated in the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (SHIFT). Startling in their frankness and revelations, these experiences encompass explicit acts of violent rape and more subtle violations of consent that many people may not realize is assault, juxtaposed against consensual sexual experiences that range from sweet and caring to startlingly impersonal and objectifying. Hirsch and Khan's goal, in sharing these stories, is not to make moral judgments or decide what the ideal legal ramifications of assault should be. Rather, with empathy and compassion for the many struggles that young people face, they approach sexual assault as a public health problem and explain it by setting out a broader understanding of how sex is organized and what it means to young people in college.

Sexual Citizens puts forth powerful new concepts to help explain the forces in young people's sexual lives: sexual projects (the various motives college students have for pursuing sex), sexual citizenship (the possession of one's sexual agency, and the respect for another's), and sexual geographies (the landscapes, both physical and social, that shape the power dynamics and contexts of sex). Hirsch and Khan have a remarkable eye for nuance—at every point in their exploration of campus culture they identify the ways race, class, age, and sexuality can intersect with gender to influence who is most at risk and who is most likely to commit offenses. Grounded in the intimate, often painful accounts of the human beings at its center, SEXUAL CITIZENS is a bold and comprehensive analysis of a social ecosystem where sexual assault is a regular feature, concluding with a bracing set of recommendations for what families, teachers, policy makers, and leaders in higher education can do to prevent it.

Consent, as a concept, is one that has historically been downplayed especially on college campuses. This disconnect with young people can be accredited to a variety of factors including but not limited to: Polite expectations from individual to individual, the belief that having clear boundaries and deeper understanding of consent limits enjoyment of activities that are supposed to be uninhibited, and lack of understanding of what it means to maintain consensual boundaries, and fear of mockery. This is a student led panel.

The good sis Nene Leakes once said "I said what I said" and it's a saying I work to live by. The past couple of years have been filled with frustration, grief, sociopolitical uprisings, cultural and political shifts, civil unrest, and a pandemic. It is time that Black non-men save, protect, and serve ourselves even more rigorously than we do for everyone else.

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A presentation and discussion about the concept of mindfulness, followed by a mindfulness meditation.