Grace Lavery is giving the annual lecture at qUCL (LGBQT interest group at UCL) tomorrow (Friday 18 March).
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-gender-critical-movement-with-grace-lavery-tickets-276617068097
Subject is:
The Gender Critical Movement, with Grace Lavery
We are delighted to welcome Grace Lavery to give qUCL's 2022 annual lecture.
The rumors are true: academic freedom really is under attack. But the threat doesn’t come from students or from “cancel culture”––it comes from university administrators, an insurgent anti-intellectual media, and powerful celebrity professors. The so-called “gender critical” movement has made the most significant attacks on academic freedom, and has normalized a set of political tools: GC academic activists have normalized a set of political tools: GC academic activists have normalized threats of private legal action against students critical of their work, while senior administrators use institutional procedures to protect them, and threaten retaliatory action against student critics. Yet these sorts of actions, and the victory laps taken across the liberal UK media, are only the most spectacular facet of a wide campaign of intimidation against trans students and workers, and our allies, that is being played out in universities across the UK: abuse of institutional procedures, legal intimidation of students, media whitewashing, and social media swarming. Developing and extending methods of feminist analysis from authors such as Jennifer Doyle and Sara Ahmed, this lecture both describes the systematic threats to academic freedom posed by anti-trans activism, and identifies some possible methods for collective redress.
All are welcome to attend this online lecture and to participate in the Q&A. Please familiarise yourself with qUCL's Virtual Code of Conduct.
About the speaker
Grace Lavery is a writer, editor, and academic living in Brooklyn, NY. As an Associate Professor of English, Critical Theory, and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, her research explores the history and theory of aesthetics and interpretation, with particular interests in psychoanalysis, literary realism, and queer and trans cultures. Her forthcoming speculative memoir, Please Miss, will be published by Seal Press in 2022