News & Events

Conversations with Vincent Cianni and Mariette Pathy Allen

The Archive of Documentary Arts has partnered with Daylight Books, the Sallie Bingham Center, the Center for Documentary Studies, and SPECTRE Arts to bring documentary photographers Vincent Cianni and Mariette Pathy Allen to Durham for a series of events April 23-25.

Wednesday, April 23 at 12:00pm - A Conversation with Vincent Cianni and Mariette Pathy Allen, Center for Documentary Studies, 1317 W. Pettigrew Street, Durham, N.C. Lunch will be provided.

Thursday, April 24 at 6:00pm - Artist Talk and Presentation, SPECTRE Arts green space, 1004 Morning Glory Ave., Durham, N.C.

Friday, April 25 at 6:00pm - Book Signing and Opening Exhibit, Daylight Project Space, 121 West Margaret Lane, Hillsborough, NC

Through compelling photographs and interviews made over three years on road trips across the US, Vincent Cianni (born 1952) has created an important historical record of the struggles of gay and lesbian veterans and service members in the US military. As the Human Rights Commission attests, the US military has a long history of civil rights abuses against homosexuals, with harassment and discrimination frequently resulting in lost careers. In many cases, these men and women—highly skilled, well educated, patriotic, courageous and productive—had attained high rank, received numerous medals and held top-level jobs essential to the military. With essays by Alison Nordstrom, Don Bramer and Alan Steinman shedding light on the cultural, personal and political consequences of the ban on homosexuality, this volume tells the stories of men and women who served in silence and oftentimes were penalized and prohibited from receiving the benefits accorded them for serving in the military.

For more than 30 years, New York based photographer and painter Mariette Pathy Allen has been documenting transgender culture worldwide; in 2004 she won the Lambda Literary Award for her monograph The Gender Frontier. In her new publication, TransCuba, Allen focuses on the transgender community of Cuba, especially its growing visibility and acceptance in a country whose government is transitioning into a more relaxed model of communism under Raúl Castro's presidency. This publication therefore records a cultural watershed within Cuba. In addition to color photographs and interviews by Allen, the book also includes a contribution from Raúl Castro's daughter, Mariela Castro, who is the director of the Cuban National Center for Sex Education in Havana. In 2005, Castro proposed a project, which became law three years later, to allow transgender individuals to receive sex reassignment surgery and change their legal gender.

2014 Zine Librarians (un)Conference

Save the Dates: July 18-20, Perkins Library 

This summer a diverse group of energetic zine librarians from academic, public, and independent libraries, and archives will meet in Durham to share ideas and skills for providing access to zines to readers in our communities. The Bingham Center’s collection of women’s and queer zines from the 1990s to the present is one of our signature collections was one of the main draws for the selection committee who chose Duke University as the location for the 6th annual Zine Librarians (un)Conference. Though some elements of the program will be planned in advance, the unconference format allows the attendees to determine their interests, goals, and priorities for learning and sharing their knowledge as a group at the beginning of the event. 

This conference will have no registration fee in order to increase accessibility to attendees, and will be open to all who are interested in zines and libraries. Elements of the program will be broadcast online to allow wider participation. More details forthcoming soon via the zine libraries wiki. 

The Archival is Political: Preserving Women’s History at the Sallie Bingham Center

Merle Hoffman, Eleanor Smeal, Carmen Rios and Jaclyn Friedman in Conversation

Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 6:30pm in the Helen Mills Theater, 139 W. 26th St., New York, NY

Jaclyn Friedman, co-founder and executive director of Women, Action & the Media, will facilitate a conversation with Merle Hoffman, president and CEO of Choices Women’s Medical Center; Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation; and Carmen Rios, Feminist Majority Foundation feminist campus organizer, about the political significance of documenting women’s lives and the importance of informing one’s activism with a historical perspective. Introductory remarks by Dr. Phyllis Chesler.

(Photo credits: Merle Hoffman image by Vanessa Valenti; Jaclyn Friedman by Lindsay Beyerstein)

40 Years Undaunted: Abortion Care and Advocacy by Ipas 

Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 6pm in Perkins Library Room 217

Celebrate the 40th anniversary of Ipas with Merle Hoffman, president and CEO of Choices Women’s Medical Center, and Dr. Raffaela Schiavon, director of Ipas Mexico. Ipas is a global nongovernmental organization dedicated to ending preventable deaths and disabilities from unsafe abortions. This event is a celebration of the collaboration between Duke and Ipas and will feature a display of material from the Ipas records and other reproductive rights collections held by the Sallie Bingham Center and Human Rights Archive (Room 218 following the program). Co-sponsored by the Duke Human Rights Archive, Ipas and the Sallie Bingham Center. Download PDF with directions and parking information.

Women at Duke Wikipedia Edit-a-thon

Thursday, March 20, 2014, 5-9pm at the Duke Women's Center

Please join us for an opportunity to learn how to edit Wikipedia articles, learn more about the rich history of women at Duke University, and then put that knowledge into action by creating and editing entries that document the lives and contributions of women alumnae, faculty, staff, and community members. Bridget Booher, author of the forthcoming publication, Women at Duke, will join us to share some of the highlights of her research on women's history at Duke. This event is part of a worldwide movement to increase the percentage of women editors and woman-focused articles within Wikipedia. Bring your laptop if you have one, or use one of ours. You can also participate from anywhere in the world! Co-sponsored with the Duke Women's Center and Duke University Archives. For more details and to sign up, visit our meetup page.

Envisioning the Future of the Sallie Bingham Center

Thursday, March 27, 2014 at 6pm in Room 217, Perkins Library

The Bingham Center will host an evening with author, playwright, teacher and feminist activist Sallie Bingham, who will reflect on 25 years of documenting women’s history at Duke and offer her vision for the Center’s next 25 years, and Rachel Seidman, Associate Director, Southern Oral History Program, at UNC-Chapel Hill and visiting lecturer in Women’s Studies at Duke University, who will give her perspective on Bingham Center contributions to preservation, teaching, and activism. In 1988, the Women's Studies Archivist position was created thanks to the generosity of author, playwright, teacher and feminist activist Sallie Bingham. In collaboration with pioneering historian Anne Firor Scott, Duke Women's Studies' Founding Director Jean Fox O'Barr and then head of Special Collections Robert Byrd, Sallie Bingham determined that Duke was the right place to create a new archive for women's history. The center was permanently endowed in 1993 and named the "Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture" in 1999 to honor Bingham's vision and legacy.

Sallie Bingham's remarks have been posted on her blog.

Freedom Means Everybody: A lecture by Mab Segrest

Thursday, April 17, 2014 at 6pm in the Richard White Auditorium, Duke University East Campus
RSVP (optional) on Facebook

Dr. Mab Segrest, Fuller-Maathai Professor of Gender & Women's Studies at Connecticut College, received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University, and became active in lesbian-feminist political and cultural work in North Carolina and nationally during the late 1970s and early 1980s. She left the academy in the early 1980s to work full-time in social movements for the next decade. She is a co-founder of North Carolinians Against Racist and Religious Violence, an organization focused on targeting neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan activity. Segrest’s 1995 book, Memoir of a Race Traitor, narrates this experience. Segrest’s 2002 book, Born to Belonging: Writings on Spirit and Justice, uses travel memoirs in a search for alternatives to the apartheid of her southern childhood. She is currently working on a social history of Georgia’s state mental hospital at Milledgeville that grows out of her continuing interest in the interface between the intimate and the historical, specifically what constitutes that redundancy of Southern insanity when viewed through archives of an iconic Southern state hospital.  Segrest’s personal papers are held by the Sallie Bingham Center. This program is the culminating event for the Women’s Studies Senior Seminar, which combines feminist and queer theory with historical research on local activists. Co-sponsored by the Sallie Bingham Center, Durham County Library, and Duke Program in Women’s Studies.