The Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship stands in solidarity with the University of Waterloo students, faculty, and staff impacted by the horrific stabbing that took place in a gender studies classroom. This action shocks with its violence, antithetical to the classroom’s work of critical and communal reflection. As scholars of gender and sexuality across history, we know too well how questioning the boundaries of these categories frequently instigates violence from those driven by hatred and misogyny. We send our strongest support to the Waterloo community, and we encourage all feminists, academics or not, to call attention to and condemn this latest act of gendered and anti-intellectual violence. For those interested…
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SMFS Advocacy Statement in Support of LGBTQ+ Rights
The Advisory Board of the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship joins the Medieval Academy of America (MAA) in condemning the wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation currently sweeping the United States. At the time of writing, a record-breaking number of 469 anti-LGBT+ bills have been introduced in state legislatures across the country, with 210 of these bills specifically targeting transgender and nonbinary people, more anti-LGBTQ+ bills than in each of the previous five years. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, members of Parliament are deliberating whether to halt the Gender Recognition Act Reform Bill legislation passed by the Scottish Parliament in December 2022, which permits adults to change their gender designation on their…
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CFP: BAD FEELINGS IN THE GLOBAL MIDDLE AGES (MLA 4-7 January 2024)
Medieval Studies, as a discipline, often protests popular understandings of the medieval period as the ‘Dark Ages’. In an effort to counter this imagining of the Middle Ages, scholars have looked for medieval expressions of diversity and tolerance, as opposed to episodes of oppression, persecution, and violence (Gabriele and Perry 2021). Feminist medievalists in particular have adopted a ‘recuperative’ approach to the medieval past, seeking to recover women’s experiences and voices from the archive, in order to rectify enduring perceptions of the Middle Ages as a uniquely misogynistic period. Yet, recent critiques (Blurton and Johnson 2017; Rambaran-Olm 2022) have emphasized that in an effort to ‘recuperate’ the Middle Ages, medievalists…
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CFP: Feminist Futures and Premodern Pasts: Global History in Perspective (AHA 2024: San Francisco, January 4-7)
We invite proposals for the SMFS-sponsored panel at 2024 the American Historical Association conference: Feminist Futures and Premodern Pasts: Global History in Perspective. The panel will cover topics from textbook authorship and source editing to course design and in-class strategies. Teaching nuanced history from a feminist perspective can face challenges from administrators and students, but also speak to students’ desire to understand the relevance of history to how they confront the future in an uncertain present. Strategies of feminist pedagogy include ways of helping students from diverse backgrounds engage with emotionally challenging content. The panel is designed to appeal to historians of all specialties with interests in feminist praxis and global history,…