Need Some Feminist Fun? Here’s Where To Find It This Week

Ready for all the great feminist events coming up this week? I know I am, as always.

This week signals one of my favorite holidays (for me it counts as a holiday): the National Women’s Studies Conference. Difficult Dialogues II picks up the complicated conversations started in Atlanta last year, this time in Denver, Colo., Nov. 11 through 14. Expect to find panels ranging from transnational Asian feminist critiques to ones looking at feminism, whiteness and sexual identity in popular culture. Keynote speakers Andrea Smith and Reyna Ramirez will speak as well as sign books, and you can also interview for jobs and buy discounted books (a personal favorite). Don’t miss the high-powered feminist analyses!

On Wednesday, Nov. 10, Counterpublic Collective is presenting “Femmes Fatale and Reading Gender” at NYU’s Steinhardt School. Joan Nestle and Barbara Cruikshank will read “I’ll Be the Girl: Generations of Fem” from Femme: Feminists, Lesbians & Bad Girls, and Biddy Martin will read “Sexuality Without Genders and Other Queer Utopias.”

In Los Angeles, the Upright Cabaret presents “It Gets Better: The Concert” on Thursday, Nov. 11, featuring performers from music, film and theater (best known: singer Taylor Dayne). All proceeds go to The Trevor Project, a GLBTQ suicide hotline.

The Renfrew Center Foundation for Eating Disorders is holding their 20th annual conference in Philadelphia, Nov. 12 through 14. Entitled “Feminist Perspectives and Beyond: Honoring the Past, Embracing the Future,” the keynote speaker will be none other than our own Gloria Steinem. Panelists will explore such topics as “girls bodies and the body politic”, feminist psychoanalytic theory, “body-mind-spirit interventions” and the Maudsley method, a topic Aimee Liu tackled here on the Ms. Blog.

And for you film buffs, writer/director Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture, which has been garnering some feminist film buzz, opens in limited release on Nov. 12. The film looks at Aura, a recent college graduate, who returns to live at home with her artist family and find her place in the world. From the trailer (below), I have a feeling this film will have no problem meeting the Bechdel test.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWnLjMHBOG0&feature=player_embedded

If you have a fun feminist event happening this week, post a notice about it in the comments section. If you have future events that you think deserve featuring, email me at kcadenas@msmagazine.com.

Photo of Gloria Steinem under Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons 3.0.

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About

Kerensa Cadenas is a freelance writer who is obsessed with all things entertainment, pop culture, television and film. She lives in Los Angeles and is obsessed with that too.