In the early afternoon on Palm Sunday, Harvard Square was flooded with faithful churchgoers coming from services, folded bulletins and dried palms in hand. At just about the same time in Sever 113, a small audience gathered before Timothy P. McCarthy ’93 to hear a different sort of sermon.

As he began his keynote address for the “F-Word” conference, a student-run event that sought to explore, complicate, and validate an f-word—feminism—McCarthy reflected on the occasion.

“I was raised in a Catholic home where we went to church every week… so this is kind of like a replacement for church,” he said.

McCarthy, a lecturer in the History and Literature department and an instructor for Literature and Arts A-86: “American Protest Literature,” drew many of his remarks from his own work in social activism; he also addressed the precedents of historic social movements such as abolitionism, first-wave feminism, and anti-war activism.

This event, he said, is “attempting to build bridges between different kinds of communities,” noting that his own inclusion in the conference, as a gay man at a feminist event, was in itself an important indicator of the organizers’ commitment to diversity.

The creators of F-Word, Vanessa V.Pratt ’08 and Katharine E. S. Loncke ’08, took diversity as a guiding principle in planning the conference over the past year.

The composition of the event’s student panel, which took the stage after McCarthy’s remarks, reflected a carefully assembled cross-section of viewpoints.

Margaret C. D. Barusch ’06 gave a comprehensive set of remarks, with her discussion of transgender issues expanding into questions on the borders of feminism.

“Poverty is a feminist issue. Racism is a feminist issue. Classism is a feminist issue,” she said.

Paloma A. Zepeda ’06 also posited a broader definition of feminism in her discussion on what she termed “feminist misdirection.”

Zepeda, author of the conservative blog Bikini Politics, spoke of her concern for equality in education. There is a disturbing trend in the tendency of men to drop out of high school—and fail to complete college—at higher rates than women, she said.

Zepeda’s talk called for a brand of feminism that would rise above the current “politically correct perversion” and turn more attention to men’s issues, as well as women’s.