"Imagining Otherwise: Resisting and Queering Racial and Gender Violence"

The UCSC MAP Chapter is delighted to announce that we will be hosting Walter Dill Scott Professor of Philosophy from Northwestern University, José Medina, who received the 2013 North-American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award for his work The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (Oxford University Press). Professor Medina is an activist both within and outside of the academic context and works primarily in critical race theory, feminist and queer theory, political philosophy, communication theory and social epistemology. His current projects include Racial Violence and Epistemic Activism and Theories of the Flesh: Latin-American and US Latina Feminist Theories (with Andrea Pitts and Mariana Ortega).

This talk will explore how gender violence intersects with racist and transphobic violence and how those intersections are erased or distorted in public discourse. I will examine the communicative dysfunctions that exist around gender and racial violence and how sexist, transphobic, and racist imaginaries create vulnerabilities that remain unaddressed. I will discuss how we can exercise the imagination in resistant ways and how we can resist those communicative dysfunctions and oppressive imaginaries by imagining otherwise. I will discuss some specific cases of gender and racial violence and the ways in which they were distorted in the media coverage, showing how critically engaged publics can resist those distortions and the forms of activism that we can engage in to fight gender and racial violence.