Prof. KRISTEN GHODSEE, Bowdoin College, USA and Freiburg Institute for Advanced Study, Germany
June 1, 2015, 17.00, AMERIKA FOR BULGARIA HALL, I floor, FACULTY OF LAW, REKTORATA
"Victors Writing History: U.S. Anti-Communism and the Worldwide Women’s Movement"
For this talk, I will present material from a draft chapter of the book that I have been working on this year. The focus of this presentation will be on the ways in which the U.S. government generally viewed women’s movements as “communist fronts” throughout most of the 20th century. Using declassified documents and internal communications from the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, I examine U.S. government attitudes toward women’s emancipation and the threat they posed to capitalist and conservative values at home. Only in the early 1970s – due to increasing pressure from feminists at home and the ongoing success of communist women’s organizations at forming strategic allegiances with women in the developing world – did the United States government start to take women’s issues seriously. U.S. foreign aid to support global women’s organizing emerged from a Cold War strategy to win the “hearts and minds” of leaders in the newly independent states.
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Kristen R. Ghodsee
Society for Humanistic Anthropology
Association of Members of the Institute for Advanced Study (AMIAS)
Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS)
Bowdoin College
Personal webpage: <a href="http://scholar.harvard.edu/kristenghodsee/home" mce_href="http://scholar.harvard.edu/kristenghodsee/home">http://scholar.harvard.edu/kristenghodsee</a>
Prof. Annegret Staiger, Clark University, USA
June 2, 2015, 17.00, AMERIKA FOR BULGARIA HALL, I floor, FACULTY OF LAW, REKTORATA
The Powers and Perils of being a Pay-Sex Client: Scenes from the German Prostitution Industry
In this presentation I am exploring how men present themselves as pay-sex clients, much maligned category in the public discourse on prostitution. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in various brothel venues and pay-sex client forums, I explore how men positions themselves vis-à-vis sex workers, but also how they position themselves vis-à-vis other prostitution clients. This illustrates the complex but tenuous system of relationships prostitution culture generates.