Gender & Sexuality Seminar: Arresting Violence, Reconceptualizing Justice

Date: 

Thursday, October 1, 2015, 6:00pm to 8:00pm

Location: 

Plimpton Room, Barker Center 133, 12 Quincy St.

| Arresting Violence |
| Reconceptualizing Justice |

 Policing Race, Policing Sex, Policing Gender

Andrea Ritchie | Soros Justice Fellow, co-author of Queer (In)Justice

Andrea Ritchie is a Black lesbian police misconduct attorney and organizer who has engaged in extensive research, writing, and advocacy around criminalization of women and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people of color over the past two decades. In 2014 she was awarded a Senior Soros Justice Fellowship to engage in documentation and advocacy around profiling and policing of women of color – trans and not trans, queer and not queer.

 Over the past 5 years Ritchie helped found and coordinate Streetwise & Safe (SAS), an organization focused on gender, race, sexuality and poverty-based policing of LGBT youth of color, and now serves as the organization’s Senior Policy Counsel.

 About Ritchie’s book, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, Dean Spade, Dean Spade, founder of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, assistant professor of law, Seattle University School of Law, wrote:

 “Queer (In)Justice is an urgently needed and essential resource for activists and scholars. Accessible and stirring, it clearly and concisely exposes how criminalization is a central issue facing queer and trans politics today. Tracing the historical and contemporary implications of mass imprisonment as a central vector of racial and gender violence this book is a vital tool toward building a movement that challenges the policing of our very identities.”

 In this time of militarized policing, racially targeted state violence, and mass incarceration, how do we envision queer and feminist justice?

The 2015-16 Gender and Sexuality Seminar, Arresting Violence | Reconceptualizing Justice, will examine how race, gender, and sexuality intersect in the criminal legal system, and discuss how they shape the possibilities for—and the risks involved in—intervention and dissent.

 Sponsored by the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, the Open Gate Foundation, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Black and Pink, The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, Harvard College Office of BGLTQ Student Life, Harvard Prison Legal Assistance Program, the Hispanic Black Gay Coalition, and the Sexuality, Gender and the Human Rights Program,
Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School.

 For more information:
wgssymposia@fas.harvard.edu