Michael Anastario is a Sociologist who conducts population-based research on sexual risk behavior, sexual violence, and mental health. He received his PhD in Sociology from Boston College. He is currently principle investigator on several studies of sexual risk behavior in foreign military personnel.

Current research:

My [...]]]> CSGS Visiting Scholar: spring 2012

Michael Anastario

Michael Anastario is a Sociologist who conducts population-based research on sexual risk behavior, sexual violence, and mental health. He received his PhD in Sociology from Boston College. He is currently principle investigator on several studies of sexual risk behavior in foreign military personnel.

Current research:

My current research at the CSGS is focused on the role of occupations in the production of sexuality. In particular, I am examining how occupational elements of the armed services operate as components of the social field in the class habitus of military personnel. In the applied setting, I aim to understand how these elements dynamically produce patterns of sexual risk behavior which are quantitatively observable in biological and behavioral surveillance surveys of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Further, I am exploring the dilemma of researcher reflexivity in mixed methods research on sexual risk behavior.

February 21, Tuesday 6 to 7:30 pm

Marjorie Garber, English and Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University

Hemmerdinger Hall 31 Washington Place

Marjorie Garber is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Her work ranges broadly across literary studies, [...]]]>

a lecture by Marjorie Garber

February 21, Tuesday
6 to 7:30 pm

Marjorie Garber, English and Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University

Hemmerdinger Hall
31 Washington Place

Marjorie Garber is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Her work ranges broadly across literary studies, gender and sexuality studies, animal studies, and cultural studies. Her books include Shakespeare After All, Patronizing the Arts, Dog Love, and Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety.

This event is free and open to the public.  Venue is wheelchair accessible.

For more information, please call 212-992-9540 or email csgs(at)nyu.edu.

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality; Department of English

February 16 & 17, Thursday & Friday

For more information: abelove.wordpress.com

February 8, Wednesday 12:30 to 1:45 pm

T.L. Cowan, Women’s and Gender Studies and English, University of Saskatchewan; Visiting Scholar, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, New York University

The cabaret—or, more broadly, the variety show—is arguably the most open and resilient form of live [...]]]> a lunch talk with T.L. Cowan

February 8, Wednesday
12:30 to 1:45 pm

T.L. Cowan, Women’s and Gender Studies and English, University of Saskatchewan; Visiting Scholar, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, New York University

The cabaret—or, more broadly, the variety show—is arguably the most open and resilient form of live expressive culture in radical feminist and queer scenes in North America. It is, at once, an eclectic, genre-troubling performance space; a vital, if incoherent, form of entertainment and social commentary; a community-building and sustaining set of activities; a dynamic, responsive and transformative site of political activism and aesthetic innovation; and, ultimately, a mode of existence and way of knowing that is both produced by, and produces, radical feminist and queer lives. Central to my work on the contemporary variety show is the concept of “cabaret consciousness”: a mobile ontology and episteme that privileges unpredictability, pleasure, risk, excess, failure, challenge and confusion, characteristics of the cabaret that are mutually constitutive with their translocal radical feminist and queer scenes. This paper will consider the ways in which the variety format of cabaret reminds us of the importance of confusion. I suggest that a feminist and queer “cabaret consciousness” is a mode of living, being and knowing in confusion; to apprehend the mutually constitutive relationship between political cabaret and feminist and queer scenes across North America, for example, is to apprehend confusion as a political/erotic/social affective register shared across demographic and geographic borders.

Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
41-51 East 11th Street, 7th Floor Gallery
between University Place and Broadway
wheelchair access at 85-87 University Place, between 11th & 12th Streets

Bring your lunch — we’ll provide beverages and dessert!

Facebook event page here.

This event is free and open to the public.  For more information, please call CSGS at 212-992-9540 or email csgs(at)nyu.edu.

image: 2boys.tv perform “Hot Voodoo” in Chiapas, Mexico, 2010. Photo by Marlene Ramirez Cancio. Photo Courtesy of the Artists.

January 27, Friday 12:30 to 1:45 pm

Satarupa Dasgupta, Postdoctoral and Transition Program for Academic Diversity Fellow, New York University

Articulation of sex work entails the commonly observed connection between sex work and trafficking, proposed delegitimization of sex work, and rescue and rehabilitation propositions for sex workers. [...]]]>

a lunch talk with Satarupa Dasgupta

January 27, Friday
12:30 to 1:45 pm

Satarupa Dasgupta, Postdoctoral and Transition Program for Academic Diversity Fellow, New York University

Articulation of sex work entails the commonly observed connection between sex work and trafficking, proposed delegitimization of sex work, and rescue and rehabilitation propositions for sex workers. I analyze the policy documents of global aid organizations and legislations, and examine the case of Sonagachi Project, a HIV/AIDS intervention program that targets sex workers in one of the largest red light districts of South Asia. The project is spearheaded by the sex workers themselves, who act as peer outreach workers, and there are no external organizations involved. By conducting interviews with commercial female sex workers from Sonagachi area I examine the sex workers’ perspectives on the articulation of trafficking and sex work, anti-trafficking legislations in India, the delegitimization and criminalization of sex work, rescue and rehabilitation propositions for sex workers, compulsion and abuse in sex work, and the reasons for pursuing sex work as a profession. I also assess the strategies adopted by the Sonagachi Project to restrict trafficking and the entry of unwilling and minor individuals in sex work.

Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
41-51 East 11th Street, 7th Floor Gallery
between University Place and Broadway
wheelchair access at 85-87 University Place, between 11th & 12th Streets

Bring your lunch — we’ll provide beverages and dessert!

Facebook event page here.

This event is free and open to the public.  For more information, please call CSGS at 212-992-9540 or email csgs(at)nyu.edu.

The screening and panel discussion of Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded, co-sponsored by the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, reflected the importance of “reloading” an analysis of popular representations of Asian women. The [...]]]> Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded: “Things Change A Lot”
New York University, 27 October 2011

The screening and panel discussion of Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded, co-sponsored by the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, reflected the importance of “reloading” an analysis of popular representations of Asian women. The film covers a range of issues very succinctly, reflecting on the progress and/or lack thereof that might be seen in the decades between this and the original 1988 documentary, and presenting contemporary issues and strategies that have arisen in the period between the two films. The documentary was screened after a brief introduction from director and producer Elaine Kim, professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley; it was followed by a panel discussion, moderated by NYU’s Gayatri Gopinath, and featuring Kim, comics guru Jeff Yang, and Benjamin Han, a doctoral candidate in Cinema Studies at NYU.

Both films were produced by Asian Women United, a project-driven activist organization co-founded by Kim in 1981. While the original Slaying the Dragon, released in 1988, was produced with a $300,000 budget—now the equivalent of $800,000—the sequel was produced with $15,000. As Kim stated, they “couldn’t get any funding” for the sequel, because “race and representation of Asian women is kind of an old idea.” Of course, the irony of this statement reflects the intervention of the documentary, which demonstrates, as the saying goes: “the more things change, the more they stay the same”—and, as Kim put it, “things change a lot.” The film presents the prevalence of multiculturalism onscreen as one example of changes in representation in the last 20-odd years, and suggests that while the fact that there are “more brown faces” onscreen now than in the 80s might seem “comforting” in the context of the documentary’s interest in representation, the characters being portrayed are “still white characters,” whose cultural history and experience is erased in the service of presenting “universal” (read: white) experience, demonstrating the “interchangeability and commodification of race” in our current moment.

The tension between universal and particular experience was discussed as a perennial issue for Asian-American writers and performers, who struggle to, as Jeff Yang put it, “depict characters in a way that allows them to live in their skin without being defined by that skin.” Kim offered films like The Motel, Robot Stories, and Colma: The Musical as examples of films that “address and embrace race without being obsessed by it,” while Yang suggested the Harold and Kumar trilogy as another example—yet, as Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded suggests, and Kim reminded us, the strides in representation for Asian-American men onscreen are not yet similarly reflected in roles for women. Of course, these struggles are in large part due to the fact that such stories “haven’t yet been given the budget, the resources, or the freedom” for such complex depictions.

The lack of budget for Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded resulted in a DIY ethos, and led to a number of conceptual choices that differentiate the sequel from the original documentary, in ways that were both necessary and strategic, and reflect the film’s interest in the ways new media and technology productively complicate representation and the primacy of mainstream culture. While Slaying the Dragon was recorded on 16mm film and ran 60 minutes, the sequel is a concise 30 minutes. The shorter running time was certainly not due to a lack of content; rather, Kim wanted to ensure that the film was a functional length for use in classroom contexts, while still allowing time for discussion. Kim’s pedagogical focus can also be seen in the formal composition of the sequel, which was recorded digitally, rather than on film, and was put together on the filmmakers’ laptops. Kim described the process of making the original documentary on 16mm as ultimately finite: “as soon as you make it, that’s it.” In contrast, Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded is a dynamic site that welcomes commentary, response and contribution. Kim described it as an “agglutinative project,” because, ideally, the film will continue to expand through feedback and discussion in order not only to reflect the continued evolution in representation of Asian women, but also to keep such conversations alive.

–Julia DeLeon

Julia DeLeon is a PhD student in Performance Studies at NYU.

The fall CSGS calendar of evening events ended on an amazing note, with a conversation between Shelley Jackson and Rebecca Schneider, hosted by CSGS and NYU’s Department of Performance Studies. Jackson and Schneider, whose books include The Melancholy [...]]]> Performing (at) the Body’s Edge: “This Is Just Like Life”
New York University, 15 November 2011

The fall CSGS calendar of evening events ended on an amazing note, with a conversation between Shelley Jackson and Rebecca Schneider, hosted by CSGS and NYU’s Department of Performance Studies. Jackson and Schneider, whose books include The Melancholy of Anatomy (Jackson) and The Explicit Body in Performance (Schneider), had a lot to say to one another about bodies. They focused their discussion on Jackson’s work and, in particular, on her short story, “Skin.”

In 2003, Jackson put out an ad in Cabinet magazine, calling for participants in a “mortal work of art”: a 2,095-word story that required as many volunteers to provide a surface for her text. Jackson joked that “Skin” is “one of the more expensive books ever published, at $50 to $100 a word.” The story is “still at the printers,” as it is being published one word at a time on living human skin, in the form of tattoos on the bodies of volunteers. Jackson described “Skin” as a project that “blurs to the point of collapse the distinction between body and language,” so that the relationship between body and language “becomes one of identity,” not simply of likeness. With “Skin,” she posits: “if bodies are words, then words are bodies”—and indeed she refers to the participants in the story as “words.” Jackson described her work more generally as “an extension of an obsession with having a body at all,” and a “fascination with how weird it is that we think of the world in terms of ideas” or meanings, instead of materiality—“and yet, we are made of stuff.” Her work plays with the also-weird materiality of words and ideas through the “fantasy of total translatability in the world,” which offers the possibility that “meaning might not be as abstract and remote as it seems,” and so it might “engage with us on a physical level.”

Rebecca Schneider suggested that “the project underscores an always-already operation of language and embodiment: words are always tactile, but we don’t always take note.” She offered a beautifully playful riff on the “incredibly, fabulously material” project, describing the ways it “undoes” the meanings of literature and the “stuff” of books, reworking them in terms of intimacy, collectivity, and consent. In “Skin,” “circulation has to rethink itself,” and “binding holds differently,” as the words “may be bound together in some way, but that way has become immaterial, or affective”—the space between words, and between word and reader, can either be “no space at all,” as close as ink on skin, or reflect the “outrageous expansion” of the physical location of the words, dispersed across continents.

If the meaning of the word literature is “acquaintance with letters,” then Schneider understands Jackson’s aim to be “to unsettle the term acquaintance into something more viscous, porous and flexible”—and, certainly, Jackson has “made matters more interesting.” The participants become the words of the story, and so an acquaintance with these words is relational, as “the words have lives: walking to the grocery store, showering when dirty, turning over in bed.” While Jackson described the participants’ experience in the project, Schneider spoke to the ways Jackson’s “words” might be encountered out of context, if the reader is a person accessing the word on or as another’s body. “Look around,” Schneider said, “surely we have some words among us; or we are all perhaps words among themselves, making a part of a story with spaces between us, as between words, the spaces that separate skin from skin.”

Jackson didn’t read an excerpt from “Skin,” as she has specified that only the participants, or “words,” can read the whole story. She did read another story—also called “Skin”—which she described as “one of the myriad of stories that is not [her] story, but that [her] story could form on an auspicious day,” as it was written using only words from the original “Skin.” Her reading of this brief and haunting version of “Skin” was accompanied by a video of the story’s text, commissioned in 2011 by the Berkeley Art Museum.

The video was cut and pasted together from short video clips of 191 of Jackson’s “words” pronouncing themselves. “Who are we, anyway?… We don’t remember who we are but we are certain we are not dead,” she intoned, as bodies flashed across the screen behind her, echoing her words: “This is just like life.”

–Julia DeLeon

Julia DeLeon is a PhD student in Performance Studies at NYU.

March 2 – 4, 2012

NEW EXTENDED DEADLINE: Sunday, January 15 2012

Submit 300 word panel or paper abstracts to:

elijah.edelman(at)american.edu and dklein(at)laverne.edu

For submission and additional conference information please see http://agreaa.org/conference/

Current speakers include:

Formats:

The conference organizing committee is looking for proposals for panels of papers, roundtable discussions, workshops, dialogues, performances, artwork/poster sessions, storytelling, media arts/digital media, or individual papers.

Commitment:

We are looking for work that discusses new movement strategies for gender [...]]]> Proposals Due: 1 February 2012
Conference Date: 5-6 October 2012
Conference Location: Austin, Texas

Formats:

The conference organizing committee is looking for proposals for panels of papers, roundtable discussions, workshops, dialogues, performances, artwork/poster sessions, storytelling, media arts/digital media, or individual papers.

Commitment:

We are looking for work that discusses new movement strategies for gender justice that work at the intersections of citizenship status, ethnicity, gender identity, indigeneity, nationality, race, and sexuality. We are particularly interested in work that engages and reimagines human rights language (addressing the usefulness of grassroots human rights strategies and/or the harm of neoliberal human rights appropriation) regarding the following issues: Incarceration/Immigration Detention, Forced Displacement and Gentrification, and Gender Violence.

We are concerned with organizing in – or in relationship to – the Americas that is grounded in community organizing, and connected with issues and activism at the transnational level. We also warmly welcome applications that focus on regions and societies aside from the Americas as long as the proposal specifically addresses how the given issue relates across these geographic contexts. We prioritize the work of those directly affected by or self-reflectively allied with people affected by these issues.

This is a bilingual conference in Spanish and English.

Topics:

• Topics include, but are not limited to:
• Alliances among Feminists of Color & Indigenous Feminists
• Challenges to Gender Binaries/Support of Transgender Organizing
• Citizenship/Nationality
• Economic & Political Justice
• Education for Liberation
• Gender, Detention, and Justice
• Space/Borders/Land Rights
• Welfare & Healthcare Justice
• Youth Organizing/Intergenerational Empowerment

Proposal Submission:

Send your 1-page proposal and short bio to genderandhumanrights@gmail.com before February 1, 2012.

Organizers:

• This conference is a project of the University of Texas at Austin Center for Women’s & Gender Studies Embrey Women’s Human Rights Initiative.
• This conference work is supported and co-organized by local organizations including:
• Alma de Mujer: tinyurl.com/almademujer
• allgo: Statewide Queer People of Color Organization: www.allgo.org
• Austin Black and Brown Alliance
• Hutto Visitation Program: www.grassrootsleadership.org
• Mamas of Color Rising: mamasofcolorrising.wordpress.com/
• Texas after Violence Project: texasafterviolenceproject.org
• This conference work is co-sponsored by University of Texas at Austin units including:
• Center for Asian American Studies
• Center for Mexican American Studies
• Community Engagement Center
• Department of English
• Gender & Sexuality Center
• Humanities Institute
• Institute on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault
• Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies
• Native American and Indigenous Studies
• University of Texas Libraries

Convocatoria: Re-imaginando el Poder y la Resistencia: Género y Derechos Humanos Desde lo Local Hasta las Américas Transnacionales

Fecha límite para las propuestas: 1o de febrero 2012

Fecha de la conferencia: 5-6 octubre 2012

Lugar de la conferencia: Austin, Texas

Formatos:

El comité de planificación de la conferencia está buscando propuestas para paneles compuestos de papeles, mesas redondas, talleres, diálogos, presentaciones, sesiones de arte / carteles, narración de cuentos, medios de las artes / medios digitales, o papeles individuales.

Compromiso:

Buscamos trabajo que analiza nuevas estrategias de movimiento por la justicia de género que trabajan en la intersección de ciudadanía, etnia, identidad de género, indigenismo, nacionalidad, raza, y sexualidad. Estamos particularmente interesad@s en el trabajo que aborda y re-imagina el discurso de los derechos humanos (hablando a la utilidad de las estrategias de base relacionadas a los derechos humanos y/o el daño de la apropiación neoliberal de los derechos humanos) con respecto a los siguientes temas: Encarcelamiento / Detención de Inmigrantes, Desplazamiento y Aburguesamiento Forzado, y Violencia de Género.

Estamos interesad@s en el trabajo activista que se realiza en – o en relación a – las Américas que se basa en la organización de las comunidades y que está conectado con los problemas y el activismo al nivel transnacional. También aceptaremos las aplicaciones de personas cuyo trabajo se centra en regiones y sociedades fuera de las Américas, siempre y cuando la propuesta se refiere específicamente a cómo el tema dado se relaciona a través de estos contextos geográficos. Damos prioridad a la labor de las personas directamente afectadas por estos temas y de sus aliad@s.

Esta será una conferencia bilingüe en español e inglés.

Temas:

• Los temas incluyen pero no se limiten a:
• Alianzas entre Feministas de Color y Feministas Indígenas
• Desafíos a los Binarios de Género / Apoyo a la Organización de la Comunidad Transexual
• Ciudadanía / Nacionalidad
• Justicia Económica y Política
• Educación Para la Liberación
• Género, Detención, y la Justicia
• Espacio / Fronteras / Derechos a la Tierra
• Justicia de Asistencia Social y de Cuidado de la Salud
• Organización de la Juventud / Empoderamiento Intergeneracional
• Entrega de Propuestas:
• Envíe su propuesta de una página y una breve biografía a genderandhumanrights@gmail.com antes del 1o de febrero 2012
• Organizadores:
• Esta conferencia es un proyecto del Iniciativo Embrey de los Derechos Humanos de las Mujeres en el Centro de los Estudios de las Mujeres y el Género en la Universidad de Texas.
• Las organizaciones locales que apoyan – y están ayudando a organizar – esta conferencia incluyen:
• Alma de Mujer: tinyurl.com/almademujer
• allgo: Statewide Queer People of Color Organization: www.allgo.org
• Austin Black and Brown Alliance
• Hutto Visitation Program: www.grassrootsleadership.org
• Mamas of Color Rising: mamasofcolorrising.wordpress.com/
• Texas after Violence Project: texasafterviolenceproject.org
• El trabajo de esta conferencia es co-patrocinado por unidades dentro de la Universidad de Texas en Austin, que incluyen:
• Center for Asian American Studies
• Center for Mexican American Studies
• Community Engagement Center
• Department of English
• Gender & Sexuality Center
• Humanities Institute
• Institute on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault
• Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies
• Native American and Indigenous Studies
• University of Texas Libraries

“Desire for the Other: Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis In Conversation” was the latest in a series of collaborations between the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, NYU’s Post-Doctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and the journal Studies in Gender [...]]]> Desire for the Other: “Together and Separately”
New York University, 4 November 2011

“Desire for the Other: Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis In Conversation” was the latest in a series of collaborations between the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, NYU’s Post-Doctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality, with additional support from the NYU Humanities Initiative: Interdisciplinary Freud Reading Group. The series brings together clinicians and critical theorists, in order to “create shared conversations about, and against, psychoanalysis, as well as productively unsettle… received notions of what it means to be given into and by discourse,” according to CSGS director Ann Pellegrini, who introduced the event. The roundtable was organized around the recent volume With Culture In Mind: Psychoanalytic Stories, and the evening was moderated by Muriel Dimen, the book’s editor. Two contributors, Orna Guralnik and Eyal Rozmarin, presented selections from the volume, followed by responses from NYU faculty members Ben Kafka and Amber Musser.

Dimen described the decades-long development of the project, which had its roots in the mid-80s in a seminar at the NY Institute for the Humanities: as she said, “we are finally having the cross-disciplinary conversation we have always wanted to have, and it has taken this long to do it.” The essays in the collection “come out of a common history of research” in the joint between psychic and social theories of psychoanalysis, with a desire to develop a common vocabulary “between the clinical world and the academic world.” Many contributors to the volume traffic in both, with clinical and academic training.

Orna Guralnik started the roundtable with an excerpt from With Culture In Mind, in which she described a pivotal moment in a session with a patient, Grace. During the session, Grace wondered aloud “maybe I’m not really gay,” a question prompted by her ambivalent response to being hit on inappropriately by her straight male friend Joe. While Grace was flattered by Joe’s attention, Guralnik understood Joe’s actions to be unconsciously homophobic, his attempt to “straighten out the situation” and interpellate Grace into socially legible heterosexuality. Guralnik called this “one of those moments” in analysis, a “point of urgency,” in which analysts must make a choice with “profound implications” for their patient. In this particular moment, Guralnik described her choice as deliberately political, informed more by Judith Butler’s description of the “social death of delegitimization” than Freud’s theories of disassociation. She concluded with the sentiment: “in our offices we try to crack open new conditions of possibility,” a statement that also speaks to the evening’s organizing principle.

Eyal Rozmarin began his remarks “with Deleuze and Guattari in mind,” as he considered questions of kinship, real and imagined, particularly in an Israeli context haunted by the spectre of the Holocaust: how much influence do parents have on the choices their children make, and should parents try to persuade children against army service? These questions followed a session in which Rozmarin, as a “transferential father,” was confronted with one of the “realities of parenting,” namely, that social belonging or group identity often takes precedence over familial influence. In the session he discussed, which was also the focus of one of his essays in the volume, his patient, Asaf, whose grandfather survived Auschwitz and who himself joined the Israeli army as a teenager, expressed his support for and identification with the Israeli army. This exchange happened in January 2009, and, as Rozmarin noted, “Israel had just attacked Gaza.” This prompted an argument between Rozmarin and his patient Asaf (both of them Israelis who live in New York) about war, which ended with Asaf calling Rozmarin “crazy”—not an ideal transferential relationship. Reflecting on this session, Rozmarin argued that Asaf was “a hostage of ideology,” a state in which “to be means to belong,” and which lets us “avoid the crisis of identity without resolution.” Rozmarin acknowledged the loss and disorientation to be found outside of that belonging, while also arguing that such a feeling of belonging is perhaps what haunts us, as we search for the elusive “fantasy of personal happiness.” He ended with the provocation: “What might our lives be like if we are not the victims of our own history?”

Amber Musser took up the thread of kinship and belonging in her response, with the question, “how does kinship work with subjectivity?,” and presented the work of Frantz Fanon “as part of a lineage of thinking queer kinship,” in line with recent work by queer cultural theorists David Eng and Elizabeth Freeman. She argued that Fanon “allows us to theorize kinship as a feeling.” This is a move with both clinical and political utility, as it allows us to think about kinship outside of the bounds of nation and family and consider “subjectivity and pleasure” as “the stakes of belonging.” Musser’s presentation added a new question to Rozmarin’s: how we might “enlarge the possibilities” for other histories, other futures?

In the most contentious presentation of the evening, Ben Kafka confessed his critical attitude about With Culture in Mind’s championing of “the new psychoanalysis.” As he said, he is “not yet ready to abandon the old psychoanalysis.” He elaborated this with a championing of Freud, both broadly—“without Freud, no Adorno; no Lacan, no Althusser, no Foucault, no Badiou, no Butler”—and particularly in relation to ideology and interpellation. While he expressed his admiration and respect for the book’s project, agreeing that a conversation between theory and practice is crucial— “critical theory only becomes critical when it encounters psychoanalysis,” and it “only remains critical” so long as it continues to do so, he provocatively suggested—he also insisted that “psychoanalysis is at its best when it preserves the specificity of its object,” namely, the unconscious and its effects. He argued that interpellation is a function of the preconscious—Freud’s term—which is the “grey area” between conscious and unconscious, and “in which we can locate that place in us that is ready to respond to interpellation’s call.”

The roundtable concluded with a heated but productive disagreement between the panelists over the stakes of these terms, which Guralnik called a “territorial battle over the unconscious.” Guralnik responded to Kafka’s distinction between interpellation as unconscious or preconscious by arguing that “the claim that certain things belong to the domain of the unconscious” but that the sociopolitical belongs to the realm of the preconscious is “a little bit of a power move by psychoanalysis.” In other words, she understood Kafka’s reading of Freudian psychoanalysis as stating: “that’s not the unconscious hence that’s not our business.” Kafka responded that he didn’t consider this a power play, but rather an attempt to home in on “what’s true about the truth” of ideology and interpellation.

The fine points of the ensuing discussion took the better part of an hour, and involved all four panelists, Dimen, and several articulate audience members. As the clock ticked the end of the extended session for the forum, the disagreement was ultimately left tantalizingly unresolved, demonstrating both the difficulty of coming to a common conversation between theory and practices of psychoanalysis, and also the richness to be had in continued attempts.

–Julia DeLeon

Julia DeLeon is a PhD student in Performance Studies at NYU.