Author: Rachel Darius

The Women’s, Gender, and Diversity Initiative (WGDI), in collaboration with the Humanities Research Center, is proud to present the first seminar in our pilot event series: Body Liberation and Feminism: A Series. The WGDI is an informal collective of DKU students and faculty who are working together to initiate conversations rooted in contemporary questions of power and inequality and how they connect to intersectional themes like race, gender, and sexuality.

In this series, we hope to engage students in dialogue surrounding the body by organizing a series of academic seminars that focus on the experiences of underrepresented groups in society. The body, apart from its physical experience, is also home to ideas of self and belonging. Discourse on the body transcends appearances as gender, sexuality, race, disability, and other axes of diversity continue to inform and frame the conversation. This includes dialogue on fatness and the fat experience; the beauty construct—especially for women, the experiences of neurodivergent people, the disabled community, and how this diversity is represented in queer spaces. Connecting these distinct topics are notions of beauty, femininity and masculinity, social acceptance, and the systemic and institutional erasure of these communities in broader society. We hope that through engaging with these complex themes and ideas, we can push forth the concept of body liberation by taking an intersectional, feminist approach.

For more information, please contact Honey at huang.bihui@dukekushan.edu.cn