The Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies organises the DOING GENDER Lecture Series in cooperation with her partners. These lectures stress the importance of doing gender work combined with an active involvement in the practice of gender theory and research. The concept of DOING GENDER supports a hands-on approach to gender issues in the sense of social and political engagement with the new forms of gender inequalities that are taking shape in the world today. The lecture series wants to give space to the new generations of gender theorists and practitioners and to perspectives that innovate the field and do gender in new ways. Key is the notion of doing gender: what is the state of the art definition of gender? How do contemporary scholars and activists utilise this definition?

On Friday March 8, 2024, Selma James (women’s rights and antiracist campaigner and author) will give the Doing Gender Lecture Building a Movement: From the International Wages for Housework Campaign to the Global Women’s Strike.

To mark this year’s International Women’s Day, renowned socialist feminist campaigner and thinker Selma James will deliver a Doing Gender lecture on the historical and political trajectories leading from the 1970’s International Wages for Housework movement to the contemporary Global Women’s Strike movement. James launched Wages for Housework in March 1972 and is today coordinator of the Global Women’s Strike. She was also the first spokeswoman of the English Collective of Prostitutes, which campaigns for decriminalization and for viable economic alternatives to sex work. She is a founder of the Crossroads Women’s Centre in London, and a founding member of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. With her husband CLR James (Author of The Black Jacobins about the 1804 Haitian revolution) she was active in the 1960’s movement for the independence and federation of the English-speaking Caribbean. She is the co-author (with Mariarosa Dalla Costa) of the classic The Power of Women & The Subversion of Community (1972) and the author, among others, of Sex, Race & Class (1974), Marx and Feminist (1983) and Our time is Now: Sex, Race, Class and Caring for People and Planet (2021).

Doing Gender Lecture by Selma James
Friday March 8, 2024

Lecture: Building a Movement: From the International Wages for Housework Campaign to the Global Women’s Strike
Time: 15:00h-16:30h.
Location: Janskerkhof 2-3, room 019 (James will be connected via Zoom)
Background reading: Selma James (2021), “The Organisational Strategy of Autonomy”, in Sex, Race, Class, and Caring for People and Planet, pp. 204-215, Oakland: PM Press. Send an email to nog@uu.nl to receive access to the reading.
Chair: Gianmaria Colpani