The Global Women’s Studies Conference takes place every fall. This year, the conference featured presentations covering everything from women’s political resistance in Egypt to unrealistic expectations for women’s bodies.
PROVO, Utah (November 1–2, 2018)—This year’s annual Global Women’s Studies Conference was centered on the theme “Bodies of Women.” And while some of the conference presenters focused specifically on aspects of the female body, its representation, and its functions, the theme was also explored as a figure of speech. How do bodies of women effectively organize to improve society? And what is possible when bodies of women work together?
Split into two days according to the presentations’ respective subjects, the conference began with a service project at the Kennedy Center on Thursday, November 1, after which the conference’s first group of sessions commenced. Centered on the notion of “Bodies (groups) of women,” these speaker sessions were led by Sister Cecelia Cavanaugh from Chestnut Hill College, Lisa Olsen Tait from the LDS Church Historian’s Office, and Sherine Hafez from UC Riverside.
Cavanaugh, a nun from the Order of the Sisters of St. Joseph in Philadelphia, explored the unifying significance of living and working with other nuns as a “body without a body,” while Tait spoke on the LDS Relief Society’s maternal health movement of the 1920s, claiming that at least in part due to the Relief Society’s efforts, “By some estimates, Utah led the nation in reducing the maternal mortality rate and became one of the five lowest states in the nation for maternal and infant deaths.”
Titled “Gender and Corporeality in the Egyptian Uprising,” Hafez’s presentation served as a precursor to the conference’s second day as it explored the ways women’s bodies can function as “vehicles of resistance.” Women’s bodies, she said, “are not always the victim of the male gaze, and even when there are powers as huge and as dominant as the military, [women’s] bodies can push back.”
The second day of the conference featured three additional speaker sessions that were in some way related to women’s physical bodies. Joan Chrisler, professor of psychology at Connecticut College, spoke on attitudes toward menstruation. Menstruation, she said, is such a taboo that we hardly call it by its proper name. It is vitally important, she argued, to destigmatize the completely normal, irrefutable reality of menses.
Kristen Pullen from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and Elizabeth Daniels from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs focused on the ways women are perceived by others as well as the ways in which women perceive themselves and their bodies. Pullen—who specializes in theatre and the history of performance—gave a presentation titled “Watching Women: The Body of the Performer, the Performing Body, and the Body of the Audience.” Daniels’ presentation, on the other hand, explored the influence of images of female athletes on girls’ and young women’s body image. In concluding her session, Daniels said that we need to “shift the narrow focus on women’s appearance to value girls’ and women’s abilities and accomplishments.”
In addition to its speaker sessions, the conference also included discussion groups for all participants, faculty, and students, and co-sponsored the screening of two documentary films with the Ballard Center’s Peery Film Festival. The films, Afghan Cycles and Shout Gladi Gladi, are both award-winning documentaries—the first tells the story of young, Afghan women cyclists and the second highlights the efforts of those who rescue African women and girls from obstetric fistula. The content of these documentaries corresponded directly with the conference’s simultaneous emphasis on the power of women’s physical bodies and the power of bodies of women.
Elizabeth Barton (English and French Studies ’18)