Welcome to the redesigned and interactive website of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. Our many new features include a blog, “School for Scandal,” which we hope will serve as a conversation starter around issues concerning gender and sexuality. There will be regular posts from yours truly as well as from an exciting array of guest bloggers. Look here, too, for follow-up reports on the Center’s events throughout the year.
Our website makeover is deliberately—and playfully—tabloid in style, with the bubble gum colors reminiscent of US Weekly. Now, playful is not the opposite of serious. Indeed, if we are openly courting scandal, we do so to mark the ongoing caricature of gender and sexuality studies as at once too trivial to count as serious scholarship and too dangerous for impressionable students.
These two accusations may seem like throwbacks to the culture wars of the late 80s and 90s. But, when it comes to the combustible combination of queers, classrooms, and budgetary bad times, certain accusations, to quote the well-known ad from Master Card, are priceless. So, rather than refuse the charge, we thought we’d go straight at it (well, not exactly “straight,” but you know what I mean…). After all, critics of gender and sexuality studies are hardly pulling their punches.
For example, in February 2009, Republican legislators in the state of Georgia took aim at classes in queer theory and the sociology of sex at both Georgia State University and the University of Georgia, promising to team up with the Christian Coalition to rid public universities of faculty teaching these scandalously inappropriate topics. The Athens Banner Herald headlined the controversy, “Steamy sex courses fire GOP’s ire.” Luckily, “ire” was the only thing fired, and no faculty lost their jobs—this time round.
However, as historian and self-avowed “tenured radical” Claire Potter has pointed out in her blog, we should not be surprised by the return of these old-school attacks on queer and feminist faculty and queer and feminist studies. Let me quote her at some length: “In the face of declining state revenues, right wingers are once again ‘Mapplethorping’ the public. They are shilling their ideologically rigid view that even more school privatization, and deep cuts in higher education, are an appropriate fix for a plunging economy that has been jointly devastated by pirate capitalists, corporate lobbyists, and decades of neoliberal fiscal policies. How can the dismantling of higher education be turned into a happy thing, you might ask? Because you can get rid of fields of knowledge that students don’t need to know, and that might even harm them, like queer and feminist studies, while preserving the teaching of ‘universal values.’ And by doing this, you can divert attention from the real consequences to real people of policies that are turning our public universities into a simulacrum of the wretched, privatized Postal Service.”
Potter wrote these comments well before “death panels” and “abortion on demand” became rallying cries for right-wing talk show hosts, who urged on a “grassroots” social movement to oppose Obama’s “socialist” take-over of national health care. (We should be so lucky.)
No matter the actual facts of the matter, these particular attacks on health care reform have succeeded in sowing confusion, mistrust, and outright anger in no small part because of the way they link into morally loaded issues concerning bodily life, and sexual life remains a hot button issue no less under the Obama administration than during the Bush years, progressive hopes notwithstanding. There is already plenty of evidence that Obama’s much-trumpeted talent for finding the center falters when it comes to sexual equality, never mind sexual freedom. Attacks on gender and sexuality studies, and ongoing attempts to defund them, are thus part of larger battles over the meaning and limits of sexual justice and gender equality.
This is no laughing matter, to be sure, but it is all the more reason to make room for serious play as we dig in for the long haul. Social change is not built in one election cycle. Obviously, we need to do more than “just” laugh in the face of outlandish attacks on queers and feminists and anti-racist organizers, but laughter is one way to start girding our loins. (Thank you, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.) Otherwise it’s gonna be one unhappy march to the revolution.
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.
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
a two-day conference with Henry Abelove, Rebecca Connor, Jasper Cragwall, Douglas Crimp, Lisa Duggan, Phil Harper, Neville Hoad, Allan Isaac, Janet Jakobsen, Michael Lucey, Steven Maynard, Tavia Nyong’o, Claire Potter, Daniel Rosenberg, Michael Roth, Todd Shepard, Marc Stein, Michael Trask, and Dorothy Wang
Panelists:
Steven Maynard (Queen’s University)
Tavia Nyong’o (New York University)
Michael Roth (Wesleyan University)
Todd Shepard (Johns Hopkins University)
Panelists:
Rebecca Connor (Hunter College)
Jasper Cragwall (Loyola University)
Daniel Rosenberg (University of Oregon)
11:30 to 1 pm lunch
1 to 2:30 Panel 3: Poetry and Literature
Chair: Allan Isaac (Rutgers University)
Panelists:
Phil Harper (New York University)
Michael Trask (University of Kentucky)
Dorothy Wang (Williams College)
2:30 to 2:45 pm Break
2:45 to 4:15 pm Panel 4: Queer Studies
Chair: Lisa Duggan (New York University)
Panelists:
Janet Jakobsen (Barnard College)
Michael Lucey (University of California, Berkeley)
Neville Hoad (University of Texas, Austin)
4:15 to 4:30 pm Break
4:30 to 5:30 pm Keynote: Douglas Crimp (University of Rochester)
5:30 to 6 pm Closing Remarks from Henry Abelove (Wesleyan University, visiting New York University, Spring 2012)
This event is free and open to the public. Venues are wheelchair accessible.
Co-sponsored by the Departments of Performance Studies, English, and Social & Cultural Analysis; the Programs in American Studies, Women’s & Gender Studies; the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; Fales Library and the Humanities Initiative at NYU.
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!
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!
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.
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.”
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 [...]
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 [...]
Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded: “Things Change A Lot”
Performing (at) the Body’s Edge: “This Is Just Like Life”