Tag Archives | WGS Events

Feminism in Motion 2023 Program

Feminism in Motion 2023

Feminism in Motion (affectionately nicknamed “FeMo”) began in Spring 2018 and is our annual celebration of student scholars and their work on gender-related projects. Students prepare micro-presentations and informational posters to showcase the projects they have been working on throughout the year. These projects, which span disciplines and subject areas, make for a diverse showcase of the WGS program’s best and brightest!

This year is our 5th annual FeMo! We hope that you can join us on Wednesday, April 19, 2023 at the Stern Center Ballroom. The event is 3PM-7PM. Feel free to drop-in or stay the entire event!

WGS Intersections: Dyani White Hawk A Conversation

Dyani White Hawk Panel Event

Join WGS and Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art on Thursday, Feb. 17th at 5:30 p.m. for another WGS Intersections! Don’t miss DYANI WHITE HAWK a Conversation. The panel will feature Lisa Collins (Wassamasaw Tribe), Beckee Garris (Catawba Nation), Chief Michelle Wise Mitchum (Pine Hill Indian Tribe), and Dana Muckelvaney (Edisto Natchez-Kusso Tribe). Moderators are Dr. Kris De Welde (Director & Prof. of WGS), Dr. Brennan Keegan (Religious Studies), and Dr. Annette Watson (Political Science).

This is a virtual event. Watch at halsey.cofc.edu/live. Free and open to the public.

About her exhibit HEAR HER (from Halsey’s website):
Dyani White Hawk’s work illuminates the lived experiences of Native Peoples. With her video, photography, and works in other media, she aims to use language of visual art to bring light to the chasm between our understanding of history and the truth. Her work weaves together forms from the canon of Western art along with the visual languages and traditions of Native people. In doing so, her work spotlights Native women, whose strength and fortitude through centuries of colonization have helped their people’s languages and cultures to survive.

On view in Hear Her, White Hawk’s video installation LISTEN presents a series of Native women speaking the language of their people. Each film takes place on the land of each participant’s nation, and viewers hear the respective languages without translation. As such, White Hawk puts a focus not only on the resonance of each speaker, but she also reveals society’s collective ignorance of the people, culture, and language of those native to the land on which we live. Chapter 1 of LISTEN features eight videos and White Hawk plans to continue the series to include 24 videos. The Halsey Institute commissioned White Hawk to create a video to honor the Catawba Nation, located in South Carolina.

White Hawk’s photography installation I Am Your Relative confronts the gross stereotypes and distorted caricatures that dehumanize and commodify Native women. This installation, along with LISTEN, helps White Hawk shine a light on the misrepresentation of Native Peoples while reinforcing the fact that we are all connected as human beings.

Dyani White Hawk: Hear Her is sponsored in part by South Carolina Humanities, a not-for-profit organization; inspiring, engaging and enriching South Carolinians with programs on literature, history, culture and heritage. This exhibition is also supported by the Center for Sustainable Development at the College of Charleston, which provides students with the opportunities and resources to engage in our community sustainably.


Image Credit: @dwhitehawk in Collaboration with photographer Tom Jones, “I Am Your Relative” [detail], 2020, photo sculpture, © Dyani White Hawk. Courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN.

A Conversation with Abby Stein

Abby Stein

Join Yaschik/Arnold Jewish Studies and WGS on Thursday, Feb. 17th for A Conversation with Abby Stein at 7PM in Arnold Hall or on Zoom! Register at bit.ly/spring22abbystein.

Abby Stein is a Jewish educator, author, speaker, and activist. She was born and raised in a Hasidic family, attended Yeshiva, and completed a rabbinical degree in 2011. In 2012, she left the Hasidic world to explore a self-determined life. In 2015, Abby came out as a woman of trans experience. Since then, she has been working to raise support and awareness for trans rights and those leaving the ultra-Orthodoxy. Her book Becoming Eve: My Journey from Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi to Transgender Woman, is a coming-of-age memoir that examines identity, gender, and religion through personal experience.

From the publisher, Seal Press:

“The powerful coming-of-age story of an ultra-Orthodox child who was born to become a rabbinic leader and instead became a woman


Abby Stein was raised in a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, isolated in a culture that lives according to the laws and practices of eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, speaking only Yiddish and Hebrew and shunning modern life. Stein was born as the first son in a dynastic rabbinical family, poised to become a leader of the next generation of Hasidic Jews.

But Abby felt certain at a young age that she was a girl. She suppressed her desire for a new body while looking for answers wherever she could find them, from forbidden religious texts to smuggled secular examinations of faith. Finally, she orchestrated a personal exodus from ultra-Orthodox manhood to mainstream femininity-a radical choice that forced her to leave her home, her family, her way of life.

Powerful in the truths it reveals about biology, culture, faith, and identity, Becoming Eve poses the enduring question: How far will you go to become the person you were meant to be?”

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