How We Look Back Now: Revisiting the Feminist 1970s and 80s

Mon. Mar. 28 02:30 PM - Mon. Mar. 28 04:00 PM
Contact: Lauren Bosc 997-1847
Location: 1L06

Please join us as scholar and UW alumna (BA, English) Dr. Leah Allen for a free, public lecture. All welcome!

Many activist and academic feminists have long sought to distance themselves from the controversial work of Andrea Dworkin and Kate Millett, who have come to represent the errors of feminism's past. In this talk, Leah Allen examines how Dworkin has been understood as having been "bad" for feminism and how Millett has been cast as a "bad" literary critic. Arguing that the present moment allows us to look back at the history of feminism and Women's and Gender Studies in the 1970s and 1980s without being haunted by an affective dimension of embarrassment by association with these "bad" feminists/critics, Allen traces the surprising history of contemporary literary and cultural studies in these two dismissed figures.

The event is sponsored by the Department of Women's and Gender Studies and by the Institute for Women's and Gender Studies.