13th Annual Women's and Gender Studies Symposium Feb. 29

Illinois State University will host the 13th annual Women’s and Gender Studies Symposium on Friday, Feb. 29, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the University Galleries at the Center for the Visual Arts.  The Symposium is free and open to the public.

The keynote speaker is lesbian performance artist Holly Hughes at 1 p.m. presenting “Performance and Visual Arts as Activism.”  A faculty member at the University of Michigan and recipient of two Village Voice Obie awards, a Lambda Book Award and a GLAAD media award, Hughes has performed across North America, Great Britain and Australia, including at the Walker Art Center, Wexner Center, Guggenheim Museum, Yale Repertory and the Drill Hall in London.  She has published two books, “Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler” and “O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance.”

The Symposium will begin at 9 a.m. with panels running throughout the day.  At 9 a.m., “Gendering Justice” will open the Symposium panels, followed by “Feminist Artistic Reclamations and Subversions” and at 11:30, the “Women’s Project Performance.”  At 12:45, the Luellen Laurenti Scholarship, Dorothy E. Lee Scholarship and Women’s and Gender Studies Student Achievement Award will be presented.  The afternoon panels begin at 2:10 with “Creative Poetics and Performance,” followed at
3 p.m. by “Feminist Musings on History, Politics and Policy.”

For more information about the Symposium, contact Rozel White at
(309) 438-2947 or e-mailing her at rwhite@ilstu.edu