Bulletin News
10/06/2009
Barbara Sutton, a scholar in women's studies at the University at Albany, will explore the connection between discourses and practices of gender violence and state terrorism in Argentina on Wednesday, Oct. 21, at SUNY Cortland.
Her talk, titled "'It Was Torture': Traveling Discourses and Practices of Gender Violence and State Terrorism in Argentina," begins at 4:30 p.m. in Moffett Center, Room 2125, and is free and open to the public. A reception to welcome Sutton starts at 4 p.m. in the Rozanne M. Brooks Museum's new location, Moffett Center, Room 2126.
The lecture continues the 2009-10 Rozanne M. Brooks Lecture Series at SUNY Cortland, which this year will encompass the theme of "Women's Worlds."
"Feminist scholars and activists have taught us a great deal about how militarization and gender-based/sexualized forms of violence are connected — both during wartime and in peace, in combat zones and in the home front," said Sutton, an assistant professor in the Department of Women's Studies at the University at Albany since 2006 who is also an affiliate in the university's Sociology Department and Latin American, Caribbean and U.S. Latino Studies Department.
From 1976 to 1983, Sutton relates, a military dictatorship implemented a regime of terror, torture and disappearance in Argentina.
"The wounds that this experience left in the general population and the political fabric of the country are still open," she said.
Drawing on narratives from women in Argentina, interviewed for a project centered on the politics of women's bodies, this presentation examines traveling discourses and practices of gender violence and state terror, which have marked the bodies and consciousness of many women in Argentina.
"From women murdered during democracy using techniques similar to those applied to the people 'disappeared' by the dictatorship, to women who speak of domestic violence in ways that evoke the experience of state terrorism, we can see the fluidity of gendered violence deployed across seemingly unrelated sites," Sutton said.
Her talk encompasses the subject of her book that is forthcoming next year from New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, titled Bodies in Crisis: Culture, Violence and Women's Resistance in Neoliberal Argentina. Sutton is co-editor with Sandra Morgen and Julie Novkov of the 2008 text, Security Disarmed: Critical Perspectives on Gender, Race, and Militarization.
Sutton holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Oregon, where her dissertation was on "Body Politics and Women's Consciousness in Argentina." She also earned bachelor of arts and master of arts degrees in sociology from University of Oregon and has a law degree from National University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Sutton has a Certificate from the International Women's University in Germany.
The lecture series honors the late Rozanne Marie Brooks, a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor and SUNY Cortland professor emerita of sociology and anthropology. A SUNY Cortland faculty member for 36 years, Brooks died in 1997. The series is sponsored by a grant from Auxiliary Services Corporation (ASC). For more information, contact organizer Sharon R. Steadman, sociology/anthropology and coordinator of the International Studies Program, at (607) 753-2308.