2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

In the face of the persisting and new hardships they faced during the final decades of the twentieth century, workers, feminists, students, people living with HIV/AIDS, and others struggled for the health, safety, and economic security of their communities. Our Lightning Session features research on the experiences of the people who endured—and resisted—this era’s structural and cultural transformations. Our panel aims to highlight the social, economic, and education policies that shaped this historical moment, and to understand them in human terms.

Seven panelists will present research exploring the lived experiences of this complex era. Jeannette Estruth shows how the women of color who worked in the semiconductor factories that undergirded Silicon Valley’s technological boom organized for regulatory legislation. Laura Renata Martin highlights industrial workers’ fight against displacement caused by their own union in deindustrializing San Francisco. Natalia Mehlman Petrzela demonstrates how resistance to tax-funded bilingual and sex education conflated the public and the private. Timothy Stewart-Winter investigates the impact of Reagan-Era spending cuts on people with HIV/AIDS, and the networks that formed in the place of adequate services. Dara Walker illustrates how Detroit high school students envisioned alternatives to the rising police presence in their schools—a sign of the punitive turn. Jessica Wilkerson analyzes how antipoverty activists mobilizing for community health in Kentucky transformed the region’s gender and class dynamics. Amy Zanoni explores struggles for social welfare and comprehensive health in a deindustrializing mining town. Clayton Howard, historian of sexuality, the state, and postwar housing policy, will comment.