SIG: Virtual Book Event: Scarred: A Feminist Journey Through Pain

The departments of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and International Studies and the CSUN’s Institute for Feminist Studies and Social Action invite you and your students to a virtual book talk by Dr. L. Ayu Saraswati. She will present her book, Scarred: A Feminist Journey Through Pain. Please join us on November 12, 2024, 4:00 – 5:30 PM PST.

 

Meeting ID: 777 004 5181

Passcode: 952826

 

What can we ask of pain? How can we be more creative and courageous in carrying pain in our lives? In this genre-bending work that is equal parts memoir and scholarly criticism, L. Ayu Saraswati provides thought-provoking theories and life-transforming ways to understand pain, specifically in relation to feminism. Arguing that pain is not merely a state we are in, Scarred reframes pain as a “transnational feminist object,” something that we can carry across international borders. Drawing on her experience traveling across twenty countries within just over a year, Saraswati aims to bring readers along on her journey so they might ask themselves, “How can I live with pain differently?” By using pain as a lens of feminist analysis, Scarred allows us to chart how power produces and operates through pain and how pain is embodied and embedded in relationships.

Dr. L. Ayu Saraswati is an award-winning author, award-winning teacher, engaging speaker, innovative consultant, and professor in women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Hawai`i. She is the author and co-editor of five books, including Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia, which won the 2013 National Women’s Studies Association Gloria Anzaldúa book award, and Scarred: A Feminist Journey through Pain, which won the 2024 Association of American Publishers PROSE book award for Biography/Autobiography, 2024 Next Generation Indie Book award, and was included in Library Journals Best Books of 2023. Her work has been included as one of Meridians journal’s most impactful works in the past twenty years. It has been mentioned in The Economist, Aljazeera, Ms. magazine, Publishers’ Weekly, Vogue Australia, and SBS Radio Australia, among others. She is also an acquisition editor at Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly Journal, a  WSQ (Women’s Studies Quarterly) board member, and an associate consultant at “EVERYBODY Consulting.” She received her PhD in women’s studies from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Sponsors: CSULB Departments of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and International Studies and CSUN’s Institute for Feminist Studies and Social Action.