The Center for Race & Gender Thursday Forum Series presents...

Bodies as Borders: A Spotlight on Undergraduate Research
 
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Istifaa Ahmed, Ethnic Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies
 
The performance we will analyze is Untitled (2012), by black artist Tameka Norris, directly inspired by Ana Mendieta’s performance piece, Untitled (Body Tracks) (1974). In her work, Norris paints a wall using her body as both tool and medium. Norris runs a knife through a lemon before cutting her tongue. Pressing her body against the wall, she uses the trail of blood and saliva to create a minimalist landscape upon the gallery walls. The painting disrupts the notion of an institutional space, implying the undeniable presence of a body and its painful experience of sexual violence. Norris’s piece powerfully uses blood and body as medium, conveying a deliberate performance of frustration and agency while alluding to a legacy of performance art by women of color projecting their blood and body into public spaces. By projecting her body into public and historical spaces, Norris demands a decolonial, intersectional visibility of her body that forces questions of her race, gender, class and sexuality, and her interaction with the imperialist, capitalistic, white heteropatriachy. As black women’s bodies have historically been sites of sexual violence in private spaces, Tameka Norris has contests this secrecy by invoking her body and its pain endured into public spaces, forcing confrontation from the public domain. I will conduct my research through the lens of performance art in order to trace how these bodily performances address the historical and political violences committed against the black female body.
 
Queering Sovereignty: Conflict and Human Rights in the Tohono O’Odham Nation
Bonnie Cherry, Interdisciplinary Studies: Statelessness and Forced Migration
 
This project seeks to study how and if the Tohono O’Odham Nation (a sovereign tribal nation bifurcated by the US Mexico border and the site of increased irregular migration due to border militarization) can maintain political and cultural sovereignty in the face of the dynamics of violence, capitalist markets, US border imperialism, and the humanitarian asylum crisis which resulted from the confluence of these forces.

http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/bodies-borders

Bodies as Borders: A Spotlight on Undergraduate Research

On this episode James talks with Erica Lorraine Williams, Assistant Professor at Spelman College and author of 'Sex Tourism in Bahia: Ambiguous Entanglements.' They discuss Erica’s book, which explores how Brazil’s sex tourism industry affects Afro-Brazilian women’s lives in the Brazilian state of Bahia. They also look more broadly at how Afro-Brazilian women have been impacted by the election of president Jair Balsanaro, and the ways they have organized to resist this current regime.

You can learn more about Erica's book here: [https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/67nsg8gz9780252037931.html]

How Black Feminists Activists Are Resisting Brazil’s Conservative Turn

The Center for Race and Gender (CRG) is an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley that fosters explorations of race, gender, and their intersections.

Bodies as Borders: A Spotlight on Undergraduate Research

Center for Race & Gender

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