Laura Briggs, Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Friday, April 26 12:30 to 1:45 pm

Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality 41-51 East 11th Street, Room 709 (please note room change)

Leena-Maija Rossi, Gender Studies, University of Helsinki; Visual Culture, University of Turku; and CSGS Visiting Scholar

[image on poster courtesy of Sunaura Taylor, "Lobster Girl", oil paint on digital print on paper, 5.5' x 3.5' (66" x 42"), 2011]

The Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at New York University presents

a disability studies mini-conference with Patrick Anderson, Toby [...]]]>

[image on poster courtesy of Sunaura Taylor, "Lobster Girl", oil paint on digital print on paper, 5.5' x 3.5' (66" x 42"), 2011]

The Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality
at New York University
presents

Cripistemologies

a disability studies mini-conference with Patrick Anderson, Toby Beauchamp, Mel Chen, Christina Crosby, Lisa Duggan, Morgan Holmes, A.B. Huber, S. Lochlann Jain, Katerina Kolarova, Robert McRuer, Mara Mills, Karen Nakamura, Alyson Patsavas, & C. Riley Snorton

Friday, April 19

This conference is being organized in collaboration with the editors of two special issues of the new Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies titled “Cripistemologies,” parts 1 and 2. Panels will address the intersections of disability studies paradigms with those of gender and sexuality studies. Panels will address points of overlap and contention among these scholarly projects, focusing especially on questions surrounding illness, injury, chronic pain, and transgender and intersex embodiment.

9:30 am to 7:30  pm @ 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor (Social and Cultural Analysis)

9:30 to 11:30 am

Panel 1: Cripistemologies: Special Double Issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies

Katerina Kolarova, Gender Studies, Charles University

Robert McRuer, English, George Washington University and co-editor of issue

Aly Patsavas, Disability Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago

moderated by Lisa Duggan, Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University

***

1 to 3 pm

Panel 2: Injury, Illness, Chronic Pain and Disability Studies

Patrick Anderson, Critical Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego

S. Lochlann Jain, Anthropology, Stanford University

Karen Nakamura, Anthropology, Yale University

moderated by Christina Crosby, English, Wesleyan University

***

4 to 6pm

Panel 3: Trans/intersex and Disability Studies

Toby Beauchamp, Gender and Women’s Studies, Oklahoma State University

Morgan Holmes, Sociology, Wilfrid Laurier University

C. Riley Snorton, Communication, Northwestern University

moderated by A.B. Huber, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University

***

6 to 7:30 pm

keynote address by Mel Chen, Gender & Women’s Studies, University of California, Berkeley

introduction by Mara Mills, Media, Culture & Communication, New York University

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THE PANELS AND KEYNOTE ONLY.

8:30 to 10 pm @ 721 Broadway, 6th Floor, Room 612 (Performance Studies)

CLICK HERE TO RSVP TO THE PERFORMANCE ONLY.  SPACE IS LIMITED.

This event is free and open to the public.

Venues are wheelchair accessible.

Sign language interpretation services will be provided.  If you need additional accommodations, please let us know as soon as possible.

For more information, please contact the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at 212-992-9540 or email csgs(at)nyu.edu.

Facebook event page here.

Tuesday, April 9 6 to 8 pm

Department of Social & Cultural Analysis 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor

Desiree Lewis, Women and Gender Studies, University of the Western Cape, South Africa “Scripting Sexualities [...]]]>

Queer Africa

the third in the series Globally Queer? — a talk with Desiree Lewis, Keguro Macharia, & Tavia Nyong’o

Tuesday, April 9
6 to 8 pm

Department of Social & Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor

Desiree Lewis, Women and Gender Studies, University of the Western Cape, South Africa
“Scripting Sexualities in Post-Apartheid South Africa”

Keguro Macharia, English, University of Maryland

Introduction and comments by Tavia Nyong’o, Performance Studies, New York University

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

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

Facebook event page here.

Friday, April 5 12:30 to 1:45 pm

Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality 41-51 East 11th Street, Room 741

Margaret Frohlich, Spanish and Portuguese, Dickinson College, and CSGS Visiting Scholar

Fidel Castro’s acknowledgement in 2010 of the imprisonment of [...]]]>

Homoerotic Subjectivities Against, With, and Beyond Cubanía

a lunch talk with Margaret Frohlich

Friday, April 5
12:30 to 1:45 pm

Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
41-51 East 11th Street, Room 741

Margaret Frohlich, Spanish and Portuguese, Dickinson College, and CSGS Visiting Scholar

Fidel Castro’s acknowledgement in 2010 of the imprisonment of homosexuals in military-agricultural work camps and assumption of personal responsibility for not putting an end to discrimination based on sexuality is part of Cuba’s current social, cultural, and political climate. Through an analysis of literature, film, and media, together with interviews conducted at the Cuban National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX), this presentation considers the antagonism and alliance between the homosexual subject and changing understandings of Cuban nationalism. The role of sexuality in the island’s current financial and cultural reforms is situated within a broader international context of challenges to the homogenizing effects of Gay Pride celebrations and the de-politicizing of the Gay Rights Movement in consumer culture. The talk will explore the implications of both championing sexual diversity and implementing regulatory practices of identity and what this coupling tells us not only about the mobilization of sexualities in Cuba but also about sexuality as a site of contestation of power between the state and culture.

Margaret Frohlich is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Dickinson College with a PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literature from Stony Brook University. Her book, Framing the Margin: Nationality and Sexuality across Borders , won the international competition for the Victoria Urbano Prize for Criticism awarded by the International Association of Feminine Hispanic Literature and Culture. Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 8.2 (2012) recently published her article “What of unnatural bodies? The discourse of nature in Lucía Puenzo’s XXY and El niño pez/The Fish Child.” Her research also appears in the anthology Lesbian Realities/Lesbian Fictions in Contemporary Spain and in the journals Letras Femeninas and Romance Review.

This event is free and open to the public. Wheelchair access is at 85-87 University Place.

For more information, please contact CSGS at 212-992-9545 or email csgs(at)nyu.edu.

Facebook event page here.

Presented by the NYU Performance Studies Forum.

Wednesday, April 3rd 7 pm

Department of Performance Studies 721 Broadway, 6th Floor, Studio 612

Moderated by Tavia Nyong’o, Performance Studies, New York University.

In conjunction with “Stand Close, [...]]]>

Stand Close

a conversation on feminist rage, artist-writer collaboration, and the archive — moderated by Tavia Nyong’o

Presented by the NYU Performance Studies Forum.

Wednesday, April 3rd
7 pm

Department of Performance Studies
721 Broadway, 6th Floor, Studio 612

Moderated by Tavia Nyong’o, Performance Studies, New York University.

In conjunction with “Stand Close, It’s Shorter Than You Think”, an Artist Curated Projects (ACP) at The One National Gay and Lesbian Archive in Los Angeles. Examining the way rage is filtered and rethought in the work of contemporary queer and feminist artists, this conversation explores manifestations and responses to the thematic of rage in our current moment. “Stand Close” cocurator Katherine Brewer Ball, artists RJ Messineo (co-curator) and Guadalupe Rosales, and catalogue contributors Corrine Fitzpatrick and R.E.H. Gordon discuss the promises and pitfalls of thinking with rage as a meditation, an inspiration, a medium, and a process.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Department of Performance Studies and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.

For more information about this event, please contact Performance Studies at 212-998-1620 or email performance.studies(at)nyu.edu.

plus an interlude with Moe Angelos

Thursday, March 28 5:30 to 7 pm (please note time change)

Department of Social & Cultural Analysis 20 Cooper Square, [...]]]> How Soon Is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time

a roundtable with Carolyn Dinshaw, and Emanuela Bianchi, Carla Freccero, Amy Hollywood, & José Muñoz

plus an interlude with Moe Angelos

Thursday, March 28
5:30 to 7 pm (please note time change)

Department of Social & Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor

Carolyn Dinshaw, Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University

Emanuela Bianchi, Comparative Literature, New York University

Carla Freccero, Literature, History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies, University of California Santa Cruz

Amy Hollywood, Divinity, Harvard Divinity School

José Muñoz, Performance Studies, New York University

How Soon Is Now? performs a powerful critique of modernist temporal regimes through its revelatory exploration of queer ways of being in time as well as of the potential queerness of time itself. Carolyn Dinshaw focuses on medieval tales of asynchrony and on engagements with these medieval temporal worlds by amateur readers centuries later. In doing so, she illuminates forms of desirous, embodied being that are out of sync with ordinarily linear measurements of everyday life, that involve multiple temporalities, that precipitate out of time altogether. Dinshaw claims the possibility of a fuller, denser, more crowded now that theorists tell us is extant but that often eludes our temporal grasp.

Whether discussing Victorian men of letters who parodied the Book of John Mandeville, a fictionalized fourteenth-century travel narrative, or Hope Emily Allen, modern coeditor of the early-fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe, Dinshaw argues that these and other medievalists outside the academy inhabit different temporalities than modern professionals operating according to the clock. How Soon Is Now? clears space for amateurs, hobbyists, and dabblers who approach medieval worlds from positions of affect and attachment, from desires to build other kinds of worlds. Unruly, untimely, they urge us toward a disorderly and asynchronous collective.

Carolyn Dinshaw is Professor of English, and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. She is the author of Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern, also published by Duke University Press, and Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics . Dinshaw is a founding coeditor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

Moe Angelos has written and performed six plays and other stuff with her collaborative theatre ensemble The Five Lesbian Brothers. Moe has also worked with The Builders Association since 1999 and is currently peddling Songtag: Reborn, a theatrical adaptation of the early journals of Susan Sontag. She has also appeared in the work of many stars of the Off-Broadway firmament including Brooke O’Harra, Carmelita Tropicana, Anne Bogart, Holly Hughes, Lois Weaver, Marianne Weems and The Ridiculous Theatrical Company. Moe has been a member of the WOW Café since 1981 and to hear more visit http://madehereproject.org/ and browse the artists.

Emanuela Bianchi received her Ph.D in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research in 2005. She has taught in the departments of Philosophy at Haverford College and UNC Charlotte. She is completing a manuscript, The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos exploring the intertwining of Aristotle’s metaphysics with tropes of sex and gender, arguing that the traditional understanding of the female as allied with passive matter is inadequate, and should be supplanted by an understanding of the feminine asymptomatic, representing chance and what disrupts the teleological system. She has published numerous articles on sex and gender in ancient metaphysics, and her interests encompass a genealogical approach to understanding matter and bodies, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and the politics of temporality in queer theory and feminism. Her current work engages the thought of Reiner Schürmann to help think through the complex inceptions and destructions of patriarchal kinship in classical Greek literature and philosophy, as well as in various cultural and political present day contexts.

Carla Freccero is Professor and Chair of Literature and History of Consciousness, and Professor of Feminist Studies at UCSC, where she has taught since 1991. Her books include Father Figures (Cornell,1991); Popular Culture (NYU, 1999); and Queer/Early/Modern (Duke, 2006). She co-edited Premodern Sexualities (Routledge, 1996). Her current book project, on nonhuman animals and figuration, is Animate Figures. In 2010 she won the Critical Animal Studies Faculty Paper of the Year. Her fields include early modern European literature and history; critical theory; feminist and queer theories; popular culture and cultural studies; psychoanalysis and animal studies.

Amy Hollywood is the Elizabeth H. Monrad Professor of Christian Studies at Harvard Divinity School. She is the author of The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), which received the Otto Grundler Prize for the best book in medieval studies from the International Congress of Medieval Studies; Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (University of Chicago Press, 2002); and, forthcoming from Columbia University Press, Acute Melancholia and Other Essays. She is also the co-editor, with Patricia Beckman, of The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism (2012). Professor Hollywood is currently exploring the place of the mystical, often redescribed as enthusiasm, within modern philosopy, theology, and poetry.

José Esteban Muñoz is Professor of Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. He teaches courses in comparative ethnic studies, queer theory and aesthetics. He is the author of Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), Cruising Utopia: The Here and Now of Queer Futurity (2009) and the forthcoming The Sense of Brown. His edited and co-edited collections include the volumes Pop Out: Queer Warhol (1996), Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America, (1997) and special issues of the journals of Social Text (“Queer Transextions of Race, Gender, Nation, 1997 and “What’s Queer About Queer About Queer Studies Now,” 2005) and Women and Performance (“Queer Acts,” 1996 and “Between Psychoanalysis and Affect: A Public Feelings Project, 2009”). He co-edits the book series Sexual Cultures for NYU Press.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Medieval and Renaissance Center.

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

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

Facebook event page here.

Thursday, March 7 6 to 8 pm

Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre for the Performing Arts 1 Washington Place

Elsa Dorlin, Political Science, University of Paris VIII

One winter morning in 2008, a man called out “Hot Ching Chong!” to Suyin Looui in [...]]]>

Dirty Care: Violence, Feminism, & Subjectivity

a lecture by Elsa Dorlin

Thursday, March 7
6 to 8 pm

Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre for the Performing Arts
1 Washington Place

Elsa Dorlin, Political Science, University of Paris VIII

One winter morning in 2008, a man called out “Hot Ching Chong!” to Suyin Looui in the street on her way to work. Shocked, infuriated and revolted, she decided to create the video game “Hey Baby!” in which women are the heros. Entering the program, you find yourself in the streets of a city like New York, armed with a gun. You are accosted by men, most of them young: “Hey baby, nice legs!”, “Do you have time for me, baby?”, “Wow, you’re so beautiful”, “I like the way you bounce”, “I would blow your mind”, etc. Here, you have to make a choice: either you say “Thanks!” and continue on your way (the harasser appears to leave, but then comes back again a few seconds later) OR you draw your firearm and shoot him dead. The man lies in a pool of blood, and then he is quickly replaced by a headstone inscribed with whatever final words he addressed to you. You win nothing (there is an infinite number of harassers) other than the chance to move freely in the street.

What is the cultural narrative of feminist violence? Is representing and expressing our rage the same thing as living and experimenting with (experiencing?) our violence? Could our violence take care of us? If “Hey Baby!” is a kind of “dirty ethics of care” and if this video game is an apology for our own desirably violent fantasy when faced with the nagging violence of sexual harassment, it constitutes an attempt to challenge the dominant political subject of feminism and queer movements and communities (and we will focus on several underground or “minor” praxis of self-defense, mainly in North America and Western Europe). How can one recognize herself as a “victim” and remain — or, more likely, become against all odds — a subject capable of her own defense and worthy of being defended? And what place does our own violence occupy in this process? Given the tragic historical and contemporary context of the self-defense issue, it would be difficult to brush aside the reference to the right of armed self-defense – especially in the US and especially now. Yet, our purpose is to think about violence within a genealogy of the concept of self-defense and to develop a phenomenology of our own violence.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study.

Elsa Dorlin is Professor of political and social philosophy at the department of political science and involved in the department of women’s studies and gender and sexuality studies at Vincennes/St. Denis Paris 8 University (France). Dorlin specializes in feminist philosophy and theory and historical epistemology of sexuality. Dorlin’s research also focuses on critical theory and postcolonial studies. She is the author of several books and articles in French, including La Matrice de la Race: Généalogie sexuelle et coloniale de la nation française (Paris, La Découverte, 2006), Sexe, genre et sexualité (Paris, PUF, 2008), and the editor of Black Feminism: Anthologie du féminisme africain américain 1975-2000 (Paris, L’Harmatta, 2007) and Sexe, race, classe: Pour une épistémologie de la domination (Paris, Puf, 2009). Her last book Defenseless: Violence, Body and Subjectivity will be available next September.

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

For more information, please contact the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at 212-992-9540 or email csgs(at)nyu.edu.

Facebook event page here.

Thursday, February 28 12:30 to 2 pm

Department of Social & Cultural Analysis 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor

Sima Shakhsari, Women’s and Gender Studies, Wellesley College

Co-sponsored by the NYU Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near [...]]]>

Killing Me Softly with Your Rights: Iranian Transgender Refugees and the Politics of Death

a talk by Sima Shakhsari

Thursday, February 28
12:30 to 2 pm

Department of Social & Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor

Sima Shakhsari, Women’s and Gender Studies, Wellesley College

Co-sponsored by the NYU Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.

Sima Shakhsari earned her Ph.D. in Cultural and Social Anthropology from Stanford University in 2010 and was the 2010-2012 teaching and research Postdoctoral Fellow in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Program at the University of Houston. Professor Shakhsari has taught Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality and Anthropology courses at Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, San Francisco State University, and the University of Houston. Between earning her B.S. in physiology and her MA in Women’s Studies at San Francisco State University, she worked at San Francisco Women Against Rape as the Director of Adult Education Program and volunteered for several queer, women’s, and immigrant rights organizations.

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

For more information, please contact the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at 212-998-8877 or email kevorkian.center(at)nyu.edu.

Facebook event page here.

Department of Performance Studies 721 Broadway, 6th Floor, Room 621

Join us for the first Performance Studies Forum event of the semester: Justin Vivian Bond on the Good Life! Mx Bond will present on the the critical theme [...]]]>

Justin Vivian Bond on the Good Life

Tuesday, February 5
6:30 to 8:30 pm

Department of Performance Studies
721 Broadway, 6th Floor, Room 621

Join us for the first Performance Studies Forum event of the semester: Justin Vivian Bond on the Good Life! Mx Bond will present on the the critical theme of “the good life” from v’s own perspective. Come for the presentation, be part of the larger dialogue, and stay for a reception to follow!

Mx Justin Vivian Bond is a writer, singer, painter, and performance artist. Mx Bond is the author of the Lambda Literary Award winning memoir Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels, published by The Feminist Press and Susie Says a collaboration with Gina Garan (Powerhouse Books, 2012). V’s debut CD Dendrophile was self-released on WhimsyMusic in 2011 and was followed by Silver Wells in 2012. In 2011 Justin Vivian’s art exhibition The Fall of the House of Whimsy was presented at Participant Inc. in New York City. Mx Bond was nominated for a Tony Award for Kiki and Herb Alive On Broadway in 2007. Other notable theatrical endeavors include starring as Warhol Superstar Jackie Curtis in Scott Wittman’s production of Jukebox Jackie: Snatches of Jackie Curtis as part of La Mama E.T.C.’s 50 Anniversary Season, originating the role of Herculine Barbin in Kate Bornstein’s groundbreaking play Hidden: A Gender, touring with the performance troupe The Big Art Group and appearing in John Cameron Mitchell’s film Shortbus. Other films include Sunset Stories (2012), Imaginary Heroes (2004), and Fanci’s Persuasion (1995). Mx Bond is a recipient of The Ethyl Eichelberger Award, The Peter Reed Foundation Grant, and The Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award for Performance Art/Theater, an Obie and a Bessie. Please visit www.justinbond.com to download and enjoy v’s music and blog, Justin Vivian Bond is Living!

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

For more information, please contact the NYU Dept of Performance Studies at performance.studies(at)nyu.edu or call 212-998-1620.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Department of Performance Studies and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.