Performance Studies Research Group

The Performance Studies Research Group is presenting a talk by Steven Bruhm, the English Department's new Lumsden Professor. Professor Bruhm will be giving a talk entitled "Red Shoes Read: A Queer Dance of Death." The talk will be held on Thursday October 8th at 4pm in UC224a. All are welcome to attend.

Reminder!!

Tomorrow is the first Feminist Reading Group meeting of the academic year, from 1-3pm in UC274. Please come out to discuss the role of women in politics especially in relation to the Canadian and American elections.

Please see the Urls below for links to possible discussion points.

Hope to see you there!

The FRG

Women in Politics: Interesting links to articles/discussion

These are a few interesting links in regards to our women in politics FRG discussion group meeting for October 8th 2008. Please feel free to email Allison other links or comments that you feel will be useful to contextualize or spark discussion during our meeting and I will add them to this list.
Cheers,
Ann

Take our girls to vote (Equal Voice)
Take our girls to vote article in Toronto Star
Women are front and centre in U.S. politics, unlike here
Don't Mess with Elizabeth May
Womens votes Up for Grabs
When we talk about the Glass Ceiling
Palin Sexism Watch
Pakistan president calls Palin "gorgeous"
Women Against Sarah Palin
SNL Palin-Clinton skit
Paglia on Palin
Palin is Rosie the Riviter?

"Women in Politics," First FRG Meeting of 08-09

The Feminist Reading Group invites all interested participants to join us for our first meeting of the term on Wednesday, October 8^th, from 1:00-3:00 pm in UC 274: “Women in Politics.” Scheduled on the heels of Canada’s English-language Federal Election debate, as well as the U.S. Vice-Presidential debate (October 2^nd), this meeting will provide us with a forum for discussing women in politics (more broadly), but will take a special interest in the phenomenon of Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin (more specifically). Discussions may be preliminarily concerned with how Palin’s candidacy has been framed in terms of identity politics, or how it has by turns engaged, re-ignited, or ignored historical and ongoing feminist debates.

No formal preparation for this meeting is required, as we will provide select material from news and media sources at the meeting itself. If anyone has material that they would like to contribute for discussion (including online sources), please feel free to send it along ahead of time. All are welcome!

For more information on the Feminist Reading Group, please visit:

http://www.uwo.ca/english/site/rgroups/fem.html

Thanks,

The FRG

Problematizing Power in Buffy:Last FRG Meeting of the Term!

For our last scheduled meeting of the term, the Feminist Reading Group will be screening select scenes from Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s final season. The brief screening will be followed by some discussion around how Buffy negotiates individualized and collective forms of power for women.

A Burden We Can’t Share?: Problematizing Power in Buffy
Tuesday, April 8th – 1:30-3:00 pm
UC 274

We hope to see you there!

Performance Studies Research Group Event THIS WEEK!!

The Performance Studies Research Group is hosting Dr Susan Fast, of McMaster University's Department of English and Cultural Studies, on March 19 from 3-4pm in UC 224A. Dr Fast, whose current SSHRC-funded research initiative explores the politics of representation in the work of all-girl rock tribute bands, will be delivering a talk entitled "Theorizing the Copy: Gender, Virtuosity, and Originality in Tribute Band Performances." Dr Fast will speak for approximately 20-25 minutes, and will then open the floor to a broader discussion of the issues her paper will raise. Please mark your calendars, and encourage your students to join us for what will be a stimulating paper and discussion!

Susan Fast is a musicologist, who began her academic career as a Medievalist, with a focus on the Aristotelian-influenced scholasticism of the late 13th and early 14th centuries in Northern France. Her focus shifted to popular music in the mid 1990’s, and has, since then, been focused on constructions of identity in popular music performance; theoretical perspectives from performance studies have been particularly influential in her work. She has produced two books, the first of which is a critical edition of the fourteenth-century treatise Musica speculativa, by the Parisian music theorist and mathematician Jean de Meurs (published by the Institute of Medieval Music, 1994). She is also author of In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music (Oxford, 2001), a collection of essays that explores the body in performance, gender and sexuality, cultural appropriation/hybridity, and ritual/mythology in rock music. Her publications also include articles on Live Aid and cultural memory, constructions of authenticity in U2, Tina Turner’s gendered and racialized identity in the 1960’s, issues of feminism and rock criticism, and on the mass-mediated benefit concerts that appeared after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Her current project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, investigates issues related to gender, race and normative genre boundaries in all female tribute bands to hard rock and heavy metal.

The Axe Effect: Targeting Advertising Campaigns – A FRG focus group/coffeehouse

The first FRG meeting of 2008 will be held on March 4 from 1:30-2:30 in UC274. The theme for our meeting will be "The Axe Effect: Targeting Advertising Campaigns." This meeting will be an interactive discussion on the representation of women in current advertising. Some of us are coming equipped with examples from print and television advertising – feel free to bring along your own examples, or just come as you are. We have reserved a smart classroom space, so the access of internet resources or other electronic material will not be a problem.
Please see the link below for a small sample of the type of advertising we will be discussing in relation to representations of women, and issues of feminist politics.
Hope to see you all there!

Click Here to See a Sample Axe Ad

Click Here to see another "Axe Effect" Ad that Amber has suggested