Devi (1960)

Devi (1960), directed by Satyajit Ray, is a haunting critique of blind faith and patriarchal control. Set in 19th-century Bengal, it tells the story of a young woman who is suddenly declared a goddess by her father-in-law. What follows is a slow, painful unraveling of her identity and autonomy. Through quiet visuals and subtle performances, Ray exposes the dangers of superstition and the suffocating expectations placed on women-making *Devi* one of his most powerful and unsettling works.

La città femminista non si sgombera! / The Feminist City will not be Evicted!

Rome, Spring 2018. In recent months, repression towards social centers in Rome has increased. Now also the feminist social spaces and women's anti-violence centers are at risk of being evicted. In this documentary we follow the feminist struggles in Rome and the feminist movement ”Non una di meno” in defense of these social spaces. The Municipality of Rome, despite an increasing structural violence in Italian society, wants to close the self-organized women’s anti-violence centers. These are often the only psychological and material support for women who want to find a path out of violence. We meet activists from various parts of the city.

From "Lucha y Siesta" in Cinecittà to the "Centrodonna LISA" in Tufello to "International House of Women" in Trastevere. We follow the movement in the streets, from the demonstration in Campidoglio to the occupation at the Policlinico hospital and the global women’s strike of the 8th March 2018. As the movement “Non una di meno” says: “We won’t stop: hands off the women’s house, we will defend it with our struggle! You cannot evict the feminist city”.

Town Bloody Hall (1979)

Town Bloody Hall from Pennebaker Hegedus Films on Vimeo.

On the evening of April 30, 1971, a standing room only audience of local literati and feminists packed New York City’s Town Hall to watch Norman Mailer, who had just written “The Prisoner of Sex,” grapple with a panel of passionate feminists. The subject was Women’s Liberation, an issue on which Mailer seemed like the devil’s own advocate.

 

There to test him was a fearsome panel of feminist representatives, among them journalist and lesbian spokeswoman Jill Johnston; legendary literary critic Diana Trilling; president of The National Organization of Women (NOW), Jacqueline Ceballos; and possibly his toughest match, the glamorous and razor-tongued author of The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer.

 

On the streets it was simply Mailer versus Greer in a knockdown debate on women’s liberation. The event, produced by Shirley Broughton and her ongoing Theater For Ideas, turned into true theater for the celebrity-stuffed audience, who vigorously offered opinions and roared their approval and disdain throughout the raucous affair. It remained the most stimulating and entertaining action to date in the continuing comedy/drama of the war between the sexes and is reverently referred to by writers on the subject.

“A Path So Twisted”: Thinking Wildly With and Through Punk Feminisms

Jack Halberstam, professor of American studies and ethnicity, gender studies and comparative literature at the University of Southern California, has written five books, including Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (2012). A popular speaker, Halberstam lectures on topics such as subcultures, sex and media, and gender variance. In the 1980 queer punk film Times Square, two teenage girls, sensing a mutual instinct for rebellion, escape from a psychiatric ward in New York City, don garbage bags and become part of the discarded denizens of Times Square. Pammy and Nicky and the queer worlds they inhabit are regarded by a homophobic world as obstacles to a safe and clean city. This talk will explore with Pammy and Nicky the potential of the unsafe and unclean. Taking terminology from a Patti Smith song at the core of the film as a vocabulary for punk feminism, we’ll venture into the wild world and genders of Times Square to unlearn the lessons of compliance that are nested within discourses of improvement, recovery and health.

Voices of Black Panther women (October 26, 1990)

A panel discussion of women who are members of the Black Panther Party in which they relate their personal struggles and experiences as "Panther women" engaged in civil rights activism. This event was organized by the Graduate Assembly, University of California, Berkeley and took place on October 26, 1990 at Booth Auditorium, Boalt Hall, University of California, Berkeley.

Braidotti: Nomadic Feminist Theory In A Global Era

Braidotti: Nomadic Feminist Theory In A Global Era from bkm on Vimeo.

This lecture addresses the so-called ‘post-human’ turn in contemporary feminist theory in the light of three main considerations: firstly the shifting perception and understanding of ‘the human’ in the Life sciences; secondly the effects of globalization as a system that functions by instilling the process of ‘timeless time’ and perverse, multiple time-lines. Thirdly, the impact of wars and conflicts in contemporary governmentality and the new forms of discrimination they engender on a planetary scale. Last but not least this talk examines the implications of this historical context for progressive, affirmative politics in general and gender issues in particular.

Rosi Braidotti, who holds Italian and Australian citizenship, was born in Italy and grew up in Australia, where she received a First-Class Honours degree from the Australian National University in Canberra in 1977 and was awarded the University Medal in Philosophy and the University Tillyard prize. Braidotti then moved on to do her doctoral work at the Sorbonne, where she received her degree in philosophy in 1981. She has taught at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands since 1988, when she was appointed as the founding professor in women’s studies. In 1995 she became the founding Director of the Netherlands research school of Women’s Studies, a position she held till 2005. Braidotti is a pioneer in European Women’s Studies: she founded the inter-university SOCRATES network NOISE and the Thematic Network for Women’s Studies ATHENA, which she directed till 2005. She was a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College in 2005-6; a Jean Monnet professor at the European University Institute in Florence in 2002-3 and a fellow in the school of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1994. Braidotti is currently Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University and founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities.