{"id":30649,"date":"2024-03-21T07:09:50","date_gmt":"2024-03-21T11:09:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/?p=30649"},"modified":"2024-03-21T09:03:23","modified_gmt":"2024-03-21T13:03:23","slug":"womens-history-month-in-academia-and-activism-women-speak-through-the-generations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/womens-history-month-in-academia-and-activism-women-speak-through-the-generations\/","title":{"rendered":"Women\u2019s History Month: Exploring the \u2018gendered origins\u2019 of the hunger strike"},"content":{"rendered":"

Women\u2019s History Month at Furman<\/a>
\nRead more stories >><\/a><\/em><\/h4>\n

Years before Muhammad Ali risked imprisonment for refusing to serve in the Vietnam War, track star Eroseanna Robinson refused to file her income taxes. Jailed in 1960, she used the only tool she had to keep public attention on her cause: a three-month hunger strike.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t really have a voice in prison, but you do have the ability to say, \u2018You may think you have control over my body, but you don\u2019t. I have control over my body, so I\u2019m not going to eat anymore.\u2019 It\u2019s a fairly effective way to resist in prison,\u201d said Victoria Wolcott, a professor of history at the University at Buffalo.<\/p>\n

On Thursday, March 21, at 5 p.m., Wolcott will talk about \u201cThe Resistant Body: Female Hunger Strikers in Modern America” in McEachern Lecture Hall in Furman Hall. The talk is part of a yearlong Cultural Life Program (CLP) speaker series<\/a> centered around the theme \u201cThe Body,\u201d presented by Furman\u2019s Women\u2019s, Gender and Sexuality Studies (WGSS<\/a>) program and the Furman Humanities Center. <\/a><\/p>\n

Hunger strikes were seen in the early 20th century, when women\u2019s suffragist activists in the United Kingdom and the United States began their own highly publicized hunger strikes behind bars.<\/p>\n

But what Wolcott, director of the Institute for Research and Education on Women and Gender<\/a>, calls \u201cthe gendered origins of the hunger strike\u201d have largely been overlooked in a society that is more likely to associate a woman\u2019s self-starvation with eating disorders than political activism.<\/p>\n

The suffrage movements\u2019 tactics inspired later hunger strikes by Mahatma Gandhi and Irish nationalist Bobby Sands, \u201cusing their bodies as a way to protest within the prison walls,\u201d Wolcott said.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Kathleen Casey, director of Furman\u2019s Women\u2019s, Gender and Sexuality Studies<\/p><\/div>\n

Speakers in the CLP series have all represented different disciplines, including psychology, biology, art and poetry, and have addressed topics such as body image, trans representation and abortion, said WGSS program director Kathleen Casey<\/a>, a professor of history.<\/p>\n

For Casey, who studied under Wolcott as an undergraduate and doctoral student at the University of Rochester, inviting her former professor to campus was a chance to highlight the importance of mentorship among women scholars during Women\u2019s History Month.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis has been a year to relaunch and expand the WGSS program,\u201d Casey said. \u201cIt was also an opportunity for me to bring someone to campus who has had an enormous impact on my own development as an academic. It\u2019s a wonderful full-circle moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat Kathleen is trying to do (with the WGSS program) covers the entire university,\u201d Wolcott said. \u201cEven though we\u2019re of somewhat different generations, we actually are facing some of the same challenges. When you\u2019re an academic, you need to foster these ongoing relationships.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wolcott\u2019s lecture, also sponsored by the Department of History<\/a>, the M.A. in Advocacy and Equity Studies<\/a> program and the Center for Inclusive Communities<\/a>, is \u201cperfectly aligned\u201d with the theme of the WGSS speaker series, which concludes in April with a reading by trans South Carolina poet Evelyn Berry<\/a>, Casey said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kathleen Casey, director of the Women\u2019s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program, is enjoying a \u201cfull-circle moment\u201d by bringing her academic mentor, Victoria Wolcott, to campus for a discussion of hunger strikes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":30651,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[70,30,93],"tags":[1931],"class_list":["post-30649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-diversity-equity-and-inclusion","category-top-stories","category-womens-gender-and-sexuality-studies","tag-womens-history-month"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30649\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}