Within the Boulder community there are numerous organizations focused on supporting girls and women. Two of those organizations, Empower Shakti and Angel Organic, have combined their efforts in order to launch a new series of women’s forums to begin this month. These forums have been designed to foster social consciousness regarding gender and the politics of power within society, locally and globally. The women’s forums will explore sources of solidarity in the face of seeming differences, will develop a deeper understanding of what it means for each of us to be active contributors within society, and will examine how our gender roles inform our participation in personal and political realms. The forums will seek answers to questions such as:
- How can the roles we take on be reclaimed as our own?
- What is “sex” and “gender?”
- What does it mean to be of a particular sex or differently gendered?
- What are the effects of social construction and the institutions that wield power to create definitions of who we are?
- What does it mean to say that “the personal is political?”
Forum speakers include women who are experts in their fields of study, including Robin Saltonstall, PhD, RYT, an Integrative Medicine Health Specialist. Robin will be speaking at the first forum on January 10th. Her forum presentation, titled You, Me, S/He: Languaging Sex and Gender, will examine how language reveals, embodies and sustains attitudes toward gender. She will also be addressing how the different and distinctive language users speak or write in reflects their sex (genderlects). Future forum speakers include Diane Z. DeBella, MA, Professor of Women & Gender Studies at CU Boulder, Sarah Massey-Warren, PhD, Professor of Writing & Rhetoric at CU Boulder, and Aditi Devi, PhD, Pujarini (Priestess), Yogini, Lineage Holder of the Kali Kula.
The women’s forums will be held at the Adi Shakti Center, 2014 Pearl Street in Boulder. Forums run from 5:30 – 7:00 pm, and are donation based. For more information, visit www.empowershakti.org.
