Tony Award–winning playwright and activist Eve Ensler and UCLA professor and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw will lead a conversation and offer strategies for surviving the current political climate as antiracist feminists at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, May 11, in the Hammer Museum’s Billy Wilder Theater.
Using the intersectional, inclusive framework at the heart of campaigns like Say Her Name, the two feminist icons will address some of the most urgent questions facing our nation.
Crenshaw teaches courses in critical race studies and constitutional law. Pioneering an intellectual movement called critical race theory, the UCLA professor focuses on race and law. Crenshaw's publications include “Critical Race Theory” and “Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech and the First Amendment.”
In 1996, Crenshaw co-founded the African American Policy Forum as an innovative think tank that connects academics, activists and policy-makers to promote efforts to dismantle structural inequality.
Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues” has been translated into more than 48 languages and has been performed in over 140 countries, introducing a wildly divergent gathering of female voices. Inspired by her experiences performing the play, Ensler created V-Day, a global activist movement to stop violence against women and girls. She has devoted her life to stopping violence and envisioning a planet in which women and girls are free to thrive, rather than merely survive.
Ensler released “Insecure at Last,” a political memoir, in 2006 and co-edited “A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer,” an anthology of writings about violence against women published in 2007. In 2010, “I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World” was released by Random House. It made The New York Times' best seller list. Published by Metropolitan Books in 2013, her critically acclaimed memoir, “In the Body of the World,” confronts separation and connection to the body, the self and the world.
All Hammer programs are free, but tickets are required and available at the box office one hour before the program. General admission tickets are available one per person on a first come, first serve basis. Early arrival is recommended.
