Spring Colloquium: "Fronteras Embrujades: Tracing Tejana Feminist Tensions and Speculative Statelessness on the Texas-Mexico Border," presented by Yasmine Gomez
Presenter: Yasmine Gomez, GWSS PhD Student
Moderator: Royalti Richardson, GWSS PhD Student
Framed by her upcoming candidacy exams, this presentation introduces Yasmine’s doctoral research on borderland feminisms. Fronteras Embrujadas interrogates the contested boundaries of Tejana activism, cultural production, and collective memory to examine the current political moment in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.
This research examines how borderland identities are negotiated through ongoing methods of state-sanctioned violence/surveillance through technocolonialism and spaces of detainment, while looking to Tejana Speculative archives to reconceptualize the radical position of place in activism.
Further, this work considers the role of global borderlands in developing contemporary transnational feminist archives of solidarity that center anti-extractivism as core principles of feminist activism movement.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Padelford Hall (PDL). Campus room: PDL B110 G. Accessibility Contact: gwss@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Target Audience: Free and open to the public.
Wednesday, April 15, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
BES | The (Printed) Matter of Black Arts Writing: Archives for the Future
Join The Black Embodiments Studio for The (Printed) Matter of Black Arts Writing: Archives for the Future, a panel discussion on the practice of collecting, preserving, and circulating Black arts writing ephemera. Featuring archivists and publishers of printed matter like flyers, zines, pamphlets, notebooks, and books, the program explores the significance of gathering around materials that are fragile and prone to disappearance—and reflects on what contemporary practices of preserving and circulating Black arts writing ephemera can tell us about the futures of the art world in general.
This is the second of two programs for Public Scholarship + Practice: Black Futures + Archives, a new series highlighting University of Washington-led research and practice at the intersections of visual art and culture.
The (Printed) Matter of Black Arts Writing: Archives for the Future is organized in collaboration with The Black Embodiments Studio.
Join us on Thursday, March 12th for the first program in the series, …
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Henry Art Gallery (HAG). Campus room: Auditorium. Accessibility Contact: info@henryart.org. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, April 16, 2026, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM.
For more info visit henryart.org. BES | Visionary Futures: Zines-As-Action
Gather around the printed page as a site of dreaming, organizing, and collective intention-setting.
Join Us for Visionary Futures: Zines-As-Action!
In this zine-making workshop, we will gather around the printed page as a site of dreaming, organizing, and collective intention-setting. Drawing on Walidah Imarisha's concept of visionary fiction—"fantastical writing that helps us imagine new just worlds”—participants will create zines that give form to futures we have been told are unrealistic, and set intentions for the work ahead.
While we create, we will consider the political power of zines as grassroots knowledge production that can be passed hand-to-hand, tucked into a pocket, left on a table for someone else to find. Making, sharing, and archiving this printed matter is a way of directly shaping the communities we circulate within. Participants will thus leave with their own small but durable act of visionary thinking.
Supplies
We'll have some materials on-hand for you to create your own zine. You…
Event interval: Single day event. Accessibility Contact: https://www.eventbrite.com/o/121229296130?contact_organizer=true. Event Types: Workshops.
Friday, April 17, 2026, 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM.
Jacob Lawrence Gallery.
Earl and Edna Stice Feminist Scholar of Social Justice: "Subversion from Within: Coalition-Building and Transfeminist Legal Praxis in Ecuador," featuring Elizabeth Vásquez
In this lecture, Vásquez explores how law can be reimagined as a collective and creative tool for social transformation. Drawing on her concept of subversión desde dentro (“subversion from within”), she examines how legal paradoxes, loopholes, and alternative interpretations can be mobilized to challenge and reshape legal frameworks from the inside out.
Through examples from her coalition-building work, she highlights how diverse movements have come together to secure major legal and cultural changes, including constitutional provisions related to gender identity, family diversity, and aesthetic freedom in Ecuador.
She will also reflect on her current collaboration with the Ecuadorian intersex movement to advance protections for people with diverse sex characteristics.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Allen Library (ALB). Campus room: Allen Auditorium. Accessibility Contact: GWSS, gwss@uw.edu, 206-593-6900. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Wednesday, April 22, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
GWSS RSO Film Screening: "Dialogue / Loving yourself as you would love another"
Please join the GWSS RSO for a film screening of Matthew Judd's drag-video-poem, "Dialogue / Loving yourself as you would love another.".
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Savery Hall (SAV). Campus room: SAV 156. Accessibility Contact: gwss@uw.edu. Event Types: Screenings.
Thursday, April 23, 2026, 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM.
How to Prepare and Test Your Thesis or Dissertation for Digital Accessibility
In this one-hour session, you’ll learn how to prepare your thesis or dissertation with digital accessibility as a focus. You’ll also learn how to test your document for accessibility before saving it as a PDF. This is important because PDFs are notoriously inaccessible.
Event interval: Single day event. Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/j/92163470645. Accessibility Contact: gwss@uw.edu. Event Types: Information Sessions. Target Audience: Graduate Students.
Friday, April 24, 2026, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM.
Zoom.
Research and Relationality in the Peruvian Amazon
Free and open to all. At the Jackson School, opportunities and events are open to all eligible persons regardless of race, sex or other identity.
THIS IS A HYBRID EVENT.
ZOOM REGISTRATION HERE: https://washington.zoom.us/meeting/register/jQSegZVzQFu9Sq-3hhRivg
IN-PERSON LOCATION: HUB 145
This panel features talks on conducting research in the Peruvian Amazon by Justin Perez (UCSC) and Amanda Smith (UCSC). Perez will present “Queer Emergent: Scandalous Stories from the Twilight of AIDS in Peru.” Amidst growing enthusiasm over the 2010s around the possibility of ending AIDS as a threat to global public by 2030, communities of gay men and transgender women in Peru’s Amazonian region paradoxically experienced an intensifying epidemic at the same time. Queer Emergent is an ethnography that explores how they experienced this contradiction. In Peru, efforts to “end AIDS” brought demands that communities denounce homo- and trans-phobic discrimination, embrace egalitarian sexual practices, and re-orient social…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB). Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/meeting/register/jQSegZVzQFu9Sq-3hhRivg. Campus room: HUB 145. Accessibility Contact: lasuw@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Target Audience: Free and open to the public.
Tuesday, April 28, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
"Dangerous Subjects" Colloquium | Research and Relationality in the Peruvian Amazon
Free and open to all. At the Jackson School, opportunities and events are open to all eligible persons regardless of race, sex or other identity.
ALL PARTICIPANTS: Please RSVP to Vanessa Freije (vfreije@uw.edu)
THIS IS A HYBRID EVENT.
ZOOM REGISTRATION HERE: https://washington.zoom.us/meeting/register/5aKlmvf7R0KGbr5naPCOjg
IN-PERSON LOCATION: THO 317
Justin Pérez (UCSC) and Amanda Smith (UCSC) will present their works in progress as part of LACS’s “Dangerous Subjects” colloquium series. This workshop-style event is designed to provide constructive feedback, and the papers will be circulated to participants one week prior. Please RSVP to Vanessa Freije (vfreije@uw.edu).
Justin Perez will present, “Excess and the Ontological Politics of Trans and Queer Worlds in Amazonian Peru,” which experiments with an affinity between two theories of excess. On the one hand, an ontological anthropology that takes seriously the social extension and political agency of beings that exceed the human, and, on the other,…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Thomson Hall (THO). Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/meeting/register/5aKlmvf7R0KGbr5naPCOjg. Campus room: THO 317. Accessibility Contact: lasuw@uw.edu. Event Types: Workshops.
Wednesday, April 29, 2026, 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM.
Dr. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor In Conversation with Dr. Dan Berger
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a leading scholar and speaker on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (2019), which was a semifinalist for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. Her earlier book, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016), received the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book. She also edited How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (2012), which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ nonfiction.
Taylor is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, and her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, The Guardian, The Nation, Jacobin, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, among others. She previously served as a Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times.
Recognized for her impact, Taylor was…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus room: Discovery Hall, Room 061. Accessibility Contact: dso@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Target Audience: Open to all students, faculty, and staff. Refreshments provided.
Thursday, April 30, 2026, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM.
UW Bothell Discovery Hall.
From Malthus to Musk: Searching for Population Equilibrium in East Asia
Please join the East Asia Center for a special public panel featuring:
Yong Cai
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Feng Wang
Professor, Sociology, School of Social Sciences
University of California, Irvine
Sara Curran
Professor, International Studies & Sociology
Director, Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology
University of Washington
James Lin
Associate Professor, International Studies & History
Chair, Taiwan Studies Program
University of Washington
From Malthus’s warnings of overpopulation to Musk’s urge to boost fertility, the drastic turn of humanity’s relationship with population growth is one of the defining features of East Asian societies. Nowhere have demographic shifts been more seismic in their speed, scale, and scope than in East Asia over the past century. Populations in this region now simultaneously exhibit the world's longest life expectancies and its lowest fertility rates.
How did East Asian societies arrive at this point?…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus room: HUB 337. Accessibility Contact: eacenter@uw.edu. Event Types: Academics. Lectures/Seminars. Special Events.
Thursday, April 30, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
HUB 337.
A Larger Freedom: Multiracial Democracy and the Radical Reconstruction of the United States with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
This lecture delves into the enduring struggle for democracy in the United States, challenging the notion that democratic backsliding began with the 2024 presidential election. Instead, it traces the deeper historical and structural forces that have long shaped—and strained—American democratic institutions.
Through a critical examination of evidence pointing to democratic erosion, the lecture will explore what it truly means to live in a democratic society. What are the warning signs of decline? Who is most affected when democracy falters? And most importantly, how can democracy be safeguarded and made inclusive of all?
These questions form the foundation of a timely and urgent conversation about the future of democracy in America.
Registration is required. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Professor in the Department of African-American Studies, Princeton University
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a leading scholar and speaker on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is…
Event interval: Single day event. Accessibility Contact: dso@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, April 30, 2026, 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM.
Town Hall Seattle.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. Screening & Discussion with Director: Shiori Itō | Black Box Diaries
Black Box Diaries, Shiori Itō’s directorial debut, depicts her investigation of the sexual violence she experienced. The film starts with security camera footage of a Tokyo hotel, showing Itō and Noriyuki Yamaguchi, then Washington, D.C. bureau chief of TBS Television and a man with ties to influential politicians. In the video, Yamaguchi is dragging the severely intoxicated Itō out of a car and into his hotel room. After this night, Itō filed a report with the police, claiming that she had been sexually assaulted using a date rape drug. However, the police refused to accept the case, citing a lack of evidence beyond Itō's memory. Even after an investigation was initiated, it was inexplicably halted, and the case was dropped without indictment. Faced with the failure of the investigation, Itō decided to come forward publicly, and made an accusation by revealing both her own and the other party's real names. The case raised widespread public reaction, both in Itō's support and online slander against her. Itō c…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Mary Gates Hall (MGH). Campus room: MGH 389. Accessibility Contact: groening@uw.edu. Event Types: Screenings.
Friday, May 1, 2026, 3:15 PM – 6:15 PM.
CAMP LECTURE | “Against the North as well as the South, Abraham Lincoln as well as Jefferson Davis”: The Civil Wars of Lucy Broaddus, Frederick Douglass, and Franz Sigel | Angela Zimmerman, George Washington University
“If we fight, we must fight against the North as well as the South, Abraham Lincoln as well as Jefferson Davis,” Frederick Douglass declared in May 1861, just a few weeks after the Civil War began. His statement suggests a very different Civil War than the we usually hear about, centered on Abraham Lincoln: a war for the Union giving way to a tentative emancipation within the bounds of the law, the constitution, and private property. Occluded in such conventional narratives are struggles over white supremacy, the extent of Black freedom, capitalism, and patriotic nationalism. We get an entirely different war – not just a different interpretation of that war -- if we center radical perspectives that aimed for freedoms anathema to Union and Confederacy alike. In this talk I will look at the Civil War as it was understood by Lucy Broaddus, a woman born into slavery in Missouri in 1862, Frederick Douglass, and Franz Sigel, a communist German refugee who served as a general in the Union Army. Each presents a…
Event interval: Single day event. Accessibility Contact: histmain@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Wednesday, May 6, 2026, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM.
K-Drama Made Them Tom-Gay: Thai Hallyu Imaginaries and Lesbian Possibilities
Please join the Center for Korea Studies for a special colloquium with Dredge Byung’chu Kang, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California San Diego.
The aesthetics of K-Pop flower boy masculinity, the narratives of K-Drama cross-gender characters, and imagined Korean lesbianism have refashioned contemporary tom (Thai butch lesbian) gender presentation, partnership patterns, and sexual roles. Many Thai youth are “ba kaoli” (crazed for all things Korean), including young lesbians. In this talk, I examine how Korean media, consumer goods, and cultural assets are mobilized to imagine, enact, and embody Asian cosmopolitan identities. I describe a case in which Thai tom become “tom-gay,” by coupling with another tom. This masculine homogender pairing was previously considered inconceivable when tom-dee relationships between a lesbian and a “normal” woman were the heterogender norm. I argue that tom participation in K-pop fandoms, adoption of soft masculine style, and identification with…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Thomson Hall (THO). Campus room: THO 317. Accessibility Contact: uwcks@uw.edu. Event Types: Academics. Lectures/Seminars. Special Events.
Thursday, May 7, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
Memorial Day
Holidays
No classes. Most University offices and buildings are closed. Check with specific offices to confirm.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Spring. Event Types: Academics.
Monday, May 25, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. The Prosecution of Transgender as Heterodoxy in Qing Dynasty China | Prof. Matthew Sommer, Stanford
Professor Matthew Sommer’s new book The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia UP, 2024) considers a range of transgender practices and paradigms in Late Imperial China, illuminating how certain forms of gender transgression were sanctioned in particular contexts and penalized in others. This talk will focus on the crime of “a male masquerading in female attire” (男扮女裝), which was prosecuted by applying the statute against “using deviant ways and heterodox principles to incite and deceive the common people” (左道異端煽惑人民). Anatomical males who presented as women sometimes took a conventionally female occupations such as midwife, faith healer, or even medium to a fox spirit — yet, suspected of sexual predation, they risked death for the crime of “masquerading in women’s attire,” even when they had lived peacefully in their communities for years.
Matthew H. Sommer (BA Swarthmore, MA U. of Washington, PHD UCLA) is the Bowman Family Professor of History…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB). Campus room: 340. Accessibility Contact: histmain@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, May 28, 2026, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM.
GWSS Graduation Celebration
The University of Washington Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies invites you to join us to celebrate our graduates of the 2025-2026 school year! We will honor the accomplishments of our wonderful graduates with presentations by students and faculty.
The University of Washington is committed to providing access, equal opportunity and reasonable accommodation in its services, programs, activities, education and employment for individuals with disabilities. To request disability accommodation contact the Disability Services Office at least ten days in advance at: 206.543.6450/V, 206.543.6452/TTY, 206.685.7264 (FAX), or e-mail at dso@u.washington.edu.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB). Campus room: Lyceum. Accessibility Contact: gwss@uw.edu. Event Types: Ceremonies. Special Events. Student Activities.
Wednesday, June 10, 2026, 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM.
Juneteenth
Holidays
No classes. Most University offices and buildings are closed. Check with specific offices to confirm.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Summer. Event Types: Academics.
Friday, June 19, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. Independence Day (Observed)
Holidays
No classes. Most University offices and buildings are closed. Check with specific offices to confirm.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Summer. Event Types: Academics.
Friday, July 3, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu.