Gustavus Adolphus College will host internationally recognized Chicana writer and feminist activist Cherríe Moraga for the biennial Moe Lecture in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies on Wednesday, April 11, at 7 p.m. in Cec Eckhoff Alumni Hall. Moraga will take the audience on a journey through Chicana indigenous art practice and political consciousness by using excerpts from her recent work. The event is free and open to the public and will be streamed live online.
“Cherríe Moraga’s work has helped define the fields of women, gender, and sexuality studies for nearly 40 years. Faculty members at Gustavus continue to teach her early work as well as her most recent book, poems, and plays,” Gustavus political science professor and director of the gender, women, and sexuality studies program Jill Locke said.
Moraga is recognized internationally as a poet, playwright, essayist, and memoirist whose writing career began as the co-editor of the avant-garde feminist work, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. As a political and literary essayist, she has published several collections of writings, including A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness, The Last Generation, and, Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood. As a playwright, Moraga has published three volumes of plays with her newest work, The Mathematics of Love, appearing at the Brava Theater Center in San Francisco last year.
Moraga has received the United Sates Artist Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature, the American Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Lambda Foundation’s “Pioneer” award. Furthermore, she has won two Fund for New American Plays Awards, the NEA’s Playwrights’ Fellowship, a Drama-logues and Critics Circle Award, and the Pen West Award, among other honors.
Serving as an Artist in Residence in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University for over 20 years, she mentored a full generation of now-published writers and professional playwrights who credit her as one of their most influential teachers.
“Moraga’s account of intersectionality and the relationships among multiple identities within us and how they shape our community and politics framed an entire generation of feminist and LGBT scholarship,” Locke said. “We need her voice now as much as ever.”
Hosted by the Gustavus Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (GWSS) Program, The Moe Visiting Lectureship is endowed by Karin and Robert Moe in honor of their daughter, Kris Burke Moe, class of 1984. Since its inaugural year in 2000, the Moe Lectureship has allowed GWSS to bring top feminist scholars to the Gustavus community. The Moe Lectures represent the interdisciplinary and intersectional nature of the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Program, bringing expertise from various field including anthropology, cultural studies, biology, literature, philosophy, history, and law.
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