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Sally Miller Gearhart Lecture Series

The Sally Miller Gearhart endowment advances lesbian history and culture, promotes dialogue about sexual orientation and gender identity, supports diversity and empowers lesbian voices in higher education.

Presenting  Two Upcoming lectures in Spring 2022:
Poster for two Gearhart Lectures 2022

Sally Miller Gearhart – History, Herstory, and Mystery

Deborah Craig, Documentary Filmmaker and Lecturer, San Francisco State University – Department of Public Health
Date: Monday, 4/25/22 at 12:00 – 1:30 pm – Knight Library Browsing Room and YouTube live-stream

Sally Miller Gearhart was a tremendous force and a bit of a mystery. She was at the forefront of the battle for gay rights in the 1970s, but for her last several decades lived in a modest and rustic cottage in the words of Northern California, beloved in her small community but otherwise largely off the radar screen. She has been described as a “beacon” and a “lighthouse” by lesbians who came of age in the 1960s through the 80s, but if you ask young LGBTQ+ / queer folks about her, you’ll mostly likely elicit a blank look. This talk will show scenes from our documentary-in-progress about Sally Gearhart, and explore three key themes:
– History: Like countless brilliant women, Sally is a “hidden figure” largely written out of the story. Among other things, she played a key role in the struggle for gay rights and co-founded one of the first Women Studies programs in the country at San Francisco State University. Our film hopes to highlight her key role in our history.
– Herstory: But, by focusing too exclusively on individuals we risk perpetuating a patriarchal narrative. All of Sally’s contributions—whether activist or academic—were part of a much larger collective enterprise, driven primarily if not exclusively by women.
– Mystery: We are all different things to different people, especially Sally! Ultimately, there are many Sallys. Our documentary will weave together this beautiful kaleidoscope of different stories and perspectives, offering a window into Sally’s humanity, complexity and mystery.

[Un]Framing Sor Juana: The “Worst Woman” in the World

Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Professor, University of California, Los Angeles – Chicana/o and Central American Studies
Alma López, Visual Artist and Lecturer, University of California, Los Angeles – Chicana/o and Central American Studies
Date: Thursday, 4/28/22 at 12:00 – 1:30 pm – Knight Library Browsing Room and YouTube live-stream

In this “dog and pony show” (Alicia is the Dog, Alma the Horse), the author and the artist discuss the historical figure of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the 17th-century Mexican nun/poet/scholar known the world over as “the first feminist of the Americas.” Alicia’s presentation, “[Un]Framing “La Décima Musa” explores Sor Juana’s veiled identity as both a feminist and a lesbian nun who challenged and defied the gender codes imposed on all women, regardless of class or caste,  in the colonial  society of New Spain. Alma’s presentation, “Sor Juana,” a series of 3’ x 4’ color digital photographs inspired by Alicia’s historical novel, Sor Juana’s Second Dream hopes to open a dialogue on Sor Juana that not only humanizes her as a body as well as a mind, but also constructs a new community of “sisters” for Sor Juana composed of Chicana feminist and Chicana lesbian writers, scholars, students, activists, and poets who embody or in-habit the nun’s identity in the 21st century to create a more inclusive sisterhood of “bad women.”

 

Past lectures:

2019 Mignon Moore: Towards a Sociocultural History of Black Lesbian Sexuality and Community

Date: April 12th, 2019

This work examines the development of community and identity around sexual desire for black sexual minority women in the 1950s and early 1960s. Drawing from archival materials, oral histories, in-depth interviews, and African-American periodicals, it argues that the practice of black lesbian identity is historically shaped by two areas of social life: the church, or religious ideologies and structures that organize racial communities, and the streets, or the nightlife and informal economy where public and semi-public expressions of same-sex desire take place.

It is through the intersection of race and sexuality that we learn more about how cultural experiences unify populations organized around same-sex desire. The findings encourage researchers to think more purposefully about the relationships between racial/ethnic identity and culture in the development of sexual minority communities.

2017: Feeling Photography, Visualizing Testimony, Imagining Alterity, Juana Maria Rodriguez

Date: January 27, 2017

Poster for Sally Miller Gearhart event 2017What does “seeing” tell us about the subjective experiences of those whose life stories we are invested in knowing? And how does the visual presence of the speaking subject of auto/biography complicate narratives of their lives? Rodríguez probes the ways forms of representation that combine biographical narrative with visual documentation transform our affective encounters with the social and sexual lives of sex workers in order to question the kinds of interpretive practices we bring to these knowledge projects. In the process, she reflects on how images and text function as complicated triggers for the attachments,  identifications, desires, and traumas of our own corporeal embodiments and sexual histories.

2016: Queer Longings in Straight Futures: Notes Towards Prehistory for Lesbian Speculations, Alexis Lothian

Date: December 1, 2016

Event poster [see PDF version for recognizable text]The story of lesbian science fiction is generally assumed to begin in the 1970s, as feminist political and literary movements converged with gay liberation. For her forthcoming book Old Futures: The Queer Cultural Politics of Speculative Fiction, Dr. Lothian researched speculative narratives by women, queers, and people of color that are not often included in genre histories of science fiction, from nineteenth-century utopias to twenty-first-century digital media. This talk expands upon arguments made in the book, drawing on her research in early-twentieth-century feminist speculative fiction to examine moments of desire and connection among women. Appearing amid futuristic visions that otherwise reproduce straight and narrow understandings of gender, race, and sexuality, these fleeting nonheteronormative imaginaries complicate our understanding what it has meant, and what it could mean, to speculatively enact the possibility of lesbian worlds.

 

2015: Afro-Sappho Futurisms: Drawing on the Past to Imagine us into the Future, Ana-Maurine Lara

Date: April 13, 2015

Poster for Sally Miller Gearhart event 2015

Drawing on poetry and critical scholarship, Ana-Maurine Lara will lead audiences into the archives of the imagination, to consider some invisible spaces of lesbian desire, love and freedom from the past as a lexicon for imagining new collective futures.

 

 

 

 

 

 

2013: On Moving Politics: Emotion, Act Up, and Beyond, Deborah Gould

Date: April 17, 2013

Poster for 2013 Sally Miller Gearhart lecture

 

2011: The Kids Are All Right, But the Lesbians Aren’t: Queer Kinship in Modern Media, Suzanna Danuta Walters

Date: April 12, 2011

poster for 2011 Sally Miller Gearhart

 

2009: The Incredibly Shrinking Lesbian World and Other Queer Conundra, Arlene Stein

Date: May 27, 2009

Poster for 2009 Sally Miller Gearhart eventThe first annual Sally Miller Gearhart Lecture in Lesbian Studies, featuring Arlene Stein. Stein is the author of three books and the editor of two collections of essays including Sex and Sensibility: Stories of a Lesbian Generation. The first Sally Miller Gearhart Lecture in Lesbian Studies attracted a full house — community members, faculty, staff and students. Subsequently, Arlene Stein published her work in the Journal of Sexualities with reference to her presentation, the inaugural presentation of the Sally Miller Gearhart Fund.

Download Arlene Stein’s article, “The Incredible Shrinking Lesbian World and other Queer Conundra