Speaker: Laura Briggs, Chair and Professor, Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst, author of How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics

Talk description: For many inside and outside the United States, the election of Donald J. Trump seemed to come out of nowhere—what happened to the nice US that elected Barack Obama? This talk explores the ways that both white supremacy and neoliberalism have been enacted through attacks on the reproduction and family forms particularly of women of color across the past forty years—from welfare “reform” that eliminated support for single mothers (by portraying those receiving government benefits as Black and Latina) to crackdowns on immigrants that have particularly targeted household workers to a home-loan debacle that crashed the global economy while blaming (surprise!) Black and Latina single mothers, not banks or lenders. Meanwhile, the pain of the neoliberal austerity policies that these events authorized was centered on households, by turning an ever-widening series of former government functions into the “private” labor of households.

This event is sponsored by the Center for Women's & Gender Studies and is supported by the “Sterling Clark Holloway Centennial Lectureship in Liberal Arts”