In collaboration with Barnard’s Center for Research on Women (BCRW), the Public Feelings Salon, featuring Lauren Berlant, José Muñoz, Tavia Nyong’o, and Ann Pellegrini, inaugurated BCRW’s new Salon series with a [...]]]> Crying in Public, but Something Less Dramatic than That:
Reflections on the Public Feelings Salon At Barnard College
Barnard College, 12 April 2011

In collaboration with Barnard’s Center for Research on Women (BCRW), the Public Feelings Salon, featuring Lauren Berlant, José Muñoz, Tavia Nyong’o, and Ann Pellegrini, inaugurated BCRW’s new Salon series with a bevy of critical theory, beloved objects, political skepticism, and good feelings all around. In her introductory remarks, Janet R. Jakobsen, BCRW Director and Professor of Women’s Studies at Barnard College, described the evening’s focus on the way “‘public feelings’ [draw] our attention to how and why feelings and emotion…influence politics and notions of social belonging and intimacy.” Jakobsen explained that the salon was organized as a response to Berlant’s own long-time work on these questions. Berlant, Professor of English at the University of Chicago, has been instrumental in the Public Feelings Project, an informal assemblage of scholars and intellectuals that emerged post-9/11 to examine how feelings and desires that are not supposed to be public nonetheless drive much of what happens in public life.

As a way to generate a dynamic conversation, the forum was organized around a shared text. Each of the panelists was asked to read and offer a short public response to Berlant’s 2006 essay “Cruel Optimism”. As Jakobsen explained to the audience, by “cruel optimism” Berlant means the affective impasse encountered when “something you desire is an obstacle to your flourishing.” A once “optimistic relation becomes cruel” when the object that draws attachment “impedes the aim that brought you to it initially.”

José Muñoz, Chair of the Department of Performance Studies at New York University, contrasted his investment in utopianism, a longing for queerness that is “not yet here,” with Berlant’s investment in a call for “maintaining traction in our presentness.” While he identified their divergent perspectives by imagining Berlant “hunkered down in the foxhole of the ‘here and now’” while he “looks for the exit sign for ‘futurity,’” Muñoz identified a common agenda: to describe the “affective work we do to sustain ourselves” in the face of precariousness. Through a discussion of the photographs of Mark Morrisroe, a vital figure in the punk art scene in the 70s and 80s, Muñoz explains that enduring is not a nihilist practice. Heeding Berlant’s insight, these attachments keep us ticking despite abuse in the hopes of a better “good life” not yet available to minoritarian subjects.

The second speaker, Ann Pellegrini, Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at New York University, expanded upon the problematics of the “good life” of heteronormative futurity described by Muñoz. Picking up on language earlier used by Berlant, she stressed that how affects “get laminated to our attachments and…get magnetized…is a political question that comes back to the psychic.” To elucidate, Pellegrini turned to two of her own beloved objects—Freud and musicals, in particular to Stephen Sondheim’s Company, a musical about a single man (Bobby) surrounded by couples—to interrogate our perplexing commitments to these modes of attachments that we need to keep us alive. Pellegrini was particularly interested in the multiple endings of Company. Initially, Bobby rejected the couple form, likening it in his final song to “happily ever after in hell.” Sondheim was ultimately persuaded to write a new ending, a happier one in which Bobby seemed to embrace the couple form as the only way of “Being Alive.” “Alone is alone, not alive,” he sang, in the short segment of the song Pellegrini played for the audience. But, “is this the best we can hope for?” Pellegrini asked. As a counter, Pellegrini wondered whether the audience might willfully resist the new ending, and fantasize alternative ways of “being in company.” As Berlant herself argued, and as Pellegrini underlined, we must attach to objects in the world in order to survive. The political question is what forms might these attachments take? Putting up a slide with the final lines of “Being Alive”—“to help us survive being alive, being alive, being alive!”—Pellegrini called for an “us” multiplied well beyond the couple form. “This is not an ending,” she (non)concluded, “And fuck the reality principle.”

Next, Tavia Nyong’o, Associate Professor of Performance Studies at New York University, spoke of his own “object relation, similar to melancholia,” where one refuses to relinquish an object that is not quite lost but that “yokes [us] to [the] future.” Even with its ongoing appearance as a succession of transformed iterations, the object keeps him “stuck in a world” simultaneously “held open” by the object itself. And what was this irresistible object, this apple of Nyong’s I? A public confession: Nyong’o is a Mac guy, who clings to his attachment by “[replacing] each obsolete object with its successor.” Citing both Steve Jobs’ public battle with pancreatic cancer and how man’s technological prosthetics do not “make us feel godlike,” Nyong’o explained how technology is one of the few objects that men in particular can permissibly have public feelings about, allowing them opportunities to reveal their vulnerabilities. This vulnerability is inherent to the unflinching object-love of Mac products itself, where the future promises a steady stream of cruel objects with new capacities—moving laterally from the desktop to the ipad—produced in potentia. Attending to our attachments to this series of prostheses, Nyong’o suggested that our “unwillingness to let go” of objects that promise to be outmoded by the time we’ve figured out how to use them may in fact allow us to critique how the “present [is] poised to unfold…laterally.” This is, he said, a phenomenon “everywhere experienced but infrequently worked through.”

In her response to this set of opening presentations, Berlant explained that: “Public spheres are affect worlds…We don’t attend them but discover them…[We] have to have them to survive.” Occupied by the questions of “how feelings bind us to people [and things] we do and don’t know,” she wondered, “how do you make a better world,” especially when these attachments are what help us endure and simultaneously keep us from flourishing? As she put it, following Freud, “Nobody ever willingly or easily abandons a libidinal position.” For example, our “attachment to politics is the attachment to being [part of] the collective world.” But she made an important distinction, explaining that “politics” is the place of disappointment, but the “political is where you’re always excited.” She sees the “inevitable loss of our object world…as [an] opportunity to build new, better objects for our future.” This approach would thereby create “new forms of optimism we can trust.” But to do so, we “have to be open to nonsovereignty,” particularly in relation to our fantasies. Referring to Pellegrini’s musical critique of romantic normativity, Berlant called for the valorization of multiple forms of attachments to other humans, “different ways of thinking about what a life is…[even when we] have only one and a half models for what a ‘good life’ is.”

–Krista Miranda

Krista Miranda is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at New York University and the Book Reviews Editor for Woman and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. Her prior graduate work includes an MA in Humanities and Social Thought with a concentration in Gender Politics and an MA in Writing and Publishing.

April 12, Tuesday 6:30 to 8:30 pm

READ THE REVIEW! Crying in Public, but Something Less Dramatic than That: Reflections on the Public Feelings Salon at Barnard College

For more information: http://www.barnard.edu/bcrw/events.htm#salon

CSGS is [...]]]> PUBLIC FEELINGS SALON

a panel with Lauren Berlant, Lisa Duggan, Janet R. Jakobsen, José Muñoz, Tavia Nyong’o, and Ann Pellegrini

April 12, Tuesday
6:30 to 8:30 pm

READ THE REVIEW! Crying in Public, but Something Less Dramatic than That: Reflections on the Public Feelings Salon at Barnard College

For more information: http://www.barnard.edu/bcrw/events.htm#salon

CSGS is thrilled to continue its uptown-downtown collaboration with the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW) by co-sponsoring the inaugural event in BCRW’s new Salon series. This evening’s engaged dialogue brings together several prominent and influential scholars whose work explores how affect and emotion influence public life. Just as feminism has sought to identify the ways in which the personal and the political are linked, the study of “public feelings” draws our attention to how and why feelings and emotion (assumed to be a private, personal experience) influence politics and notions of social belonging and intimacy. This interactive conversation, moderated by BCRW Director and Professor of Women’s Studies, Janet Jakobsen, will focus on how perceptions of citizenship and solidarity are often bound up in emotions – like optimism, rage, and disgust – and how feelings can govern policy and political debates.

Barnard College
Sulzberger Parlor — Barnard Hall, 3rd Floor
117th Street and Broadway

Lauren Berlant is the George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago, and the author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship and The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia and Everyday Life. Her most recent book is The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture.

Lisa Duggan is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. She is the author of Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy and Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence and American Modernity.

José E. Muñoz is chair of the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. He is the author of Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics and Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.

Tavia Nyong’o is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at New York University, where he teaches African American and black diasporic performance, popular and subcultural musics, performance historiography and research methods, and queer studies. His book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance and the Ruses of Memory, won the 2010 Erroll Hill Award of the American Society for Theatre Research.

Ann Pellegrini is Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at New York University, where she also directs NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. She is the author of Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race; co-author, with Janet R. Jakobsen, of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance; co-editor, with Daniel Boyarin and Daniel Itzkovitz, of Queer Theory and the Jewish Question; and co-editor, with Jakobsen, of Secularisms.

Organized by the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW); co-sponsored by CSGS and the NYU Office of LGBT Student Services.

This event is free and open to the public.

April 4, Monday 12:30 to 1:45 pm

Elahe Haschemi Yekani, English and American Studies, Humboldt University Berlin

Situated at the interdisciplinary intersections of literary and cultural studies combining approaches from gender studies, postcolonial [...]]]> (M)OTHER SEACOLE’S WONDERFUL ADVENTURES: CLAIMING THE ENGLISH FAMILY IN THE CRIMEA

a Brown Bag Lunch Talk with Elahe Haschemi Yekani

April 4, Monday
12:30 to 1:45 pm

Elahe Haschemi Yekani, English and American Studies, Humboldt University Berlin

Situated at the interdisciplinary intersections of literary and cultural studies combining approaches from gender studies, postcolonial and queer studies, this project seeks to scrutinize conceptions of subjectivity and the family in the English novel. Central questions to the project are: in how far is the establishment of a ‘universal’ family (which becomes indispensable for the conception of modern subjectivity) reliant on narratives of the Other, the disavowed and excluded and how is the affective relationship of the white middle-class heterosexual family to be thought of in relation to space, migration and nation building.

Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
41-51 East 11th Street, Room 741
between University Place and Broadway
(wheelchair access at 85-87 University Place, between 11th and 12th Streets)

Part of the Brown Bag Lunch Talk Series — bring your own lunch and we’ll provide beverages and dessert!

Elahe Haschemi Yekani studied English and American Studies as well as Theatre Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the University of Westminster, London. In 2009, she completed her PhD with a dissertation entitled The Privilege of Crisis on narratives of colonial and postcolonial masculinities which received the Britcult Award for the best new monograph in the field of British cultural studies awarded by the German Association for the Study of British Cultures. Currently, she is a lecturer at the Department of English and American Studies at HU Berlin. From 2005-2007 she was a scholarship holder at the Graduate Research Group “Gender as a Category of Knowledge” funded by the German Research Foundation. Her research interests comprise: Queer Studies and Postcolonial Theory, British fiction, Gender and Intersectionality. Publications include: The Privilege of Crisis: Narratives of Masculinities in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Photography and Film (Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, 2011) (forthcoming); Quer durch die Geisteswissenschaften: Perspektiven der Queer Theory (ed. with B. Michaelis, Berlin 2005); Erlöser. Figurationen männlicher Hegemonie (ed. with S. Glawion and J. Husmann-Kastein, Bielefeld 2007).

This event is free and open to the public.  Venue is wheelchair accessible.  If you need any accommodations, please let us know as soon as possible.

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

On the heels of Elizabeth Freeman’s lecture about erotohistoriography, Carla Freccero, Professor of Literature, Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, explored another historiographic practice predicated on [...]]]> I am, I am following, I am after the animal:
“Derrida’s Queer Cats,” a Lecture by Carla Freccero
New York University, 10 November 2010

On the heels of Elizabeth Freeman’s lecture about erotohistoriography, Carla Freccero, Professor of Literature, Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, explored another historiographic practice predicated on the queering of both time and (human and nonhuman) bodies. In “Derrida’s Queer Cats,” Freccero discussed how queer time, which exceeds or tests the logic of reproductive futurity, also denotes the way affect persists through history. Putting the purr in purr-sistence, Freccero laid stress on the vital importance of thinking both time and affect as a kind of point of friction of human and nonhuman interaction. To develop this argument, she turned Jacques Derrida’s depiction of “animate alterity” in his posthumous L’Animal que donc je suis (The Animal that Therefore I Am). Freccero considered the difficulties of “think[ing] and feel[ing] with non-human animate beings.” The lecture explored how both humans and texts continue to be haunted by these “fantastic, fantasmatic, fabulous,” figures who are “of a fable that speaks to us of ourselves.”

Freccero’s “Queer Cats” (and how can one resist repeating this title?) developed a patient and gorgeously argued case for this fantasmatic fable, building it out of Derrida’s confrontation with his very own, specific cat in L’Animal que donc je suis. As Derrida writes: “I must make it clear from the start, the cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isn’t the figure of a cat” (374-375). Treating this interspecies encounter as just one (very important) example of the “event of the figure,” where the mere presence of a nonhuman animal has very real effects on the subjectivity of the human individual, Freccero went on to develop an interdisciplinary conversation between Derrida, Lewis Carroll, Paul de Man, Donna Haraway, Emmanuel Levinas, and Claude Levi-Strauss, to name a few. Mining the queer possibilities of the cat, Freccero argued, provides alternative modes of understanding ourselves, particularly in terms of the interimplications of sex and species, and points to the usefulness of crafting a queer ethics of relating in general. (Admittedly, while I’ve often contemplated my dog Gnocchi’s queerness, I’ve never acknowledged how Gnocchi’s very existence as my furry companion, in turn, queers me.)

What is particularly queer, or queering, about Derrida’s cat is that it/she is not “an allegory for all the cats on the earth” but is his specific cat—“which is also a female”— who follows him into the bathroom, regards his naked body “to concentrate its vision…in the direction of [his] sex,” and incites an eruption of human masculine shame (374-375, 373).

Meditating on the implications of Derrida’s own slippage from the neuter article to the gendered pronoun, as well as a mistranslation of another neuter possessive pronoun as a gendered possessive pronoun earlier in the text, Freccero argues that the appearance and disappearance of the cat’s gender reveals that “sexual difference and kinship are in trouble when animals enter the scene.” Regarding the politics of friendship, Freccero asks, “what happens to a fraternity of brothers when an animal enters scene?”

For Derrida, this instance of mutual acknowledgement, of “being seen” by “the” animal, spurs a moment of (self and mutual) recognition as well as desire, placing sexual (and species) difference into crisis:

Should I show myself naked when…looking at me, is the living creature they call by the common, general, and singular name the animal? Henceforth I shall reflect (on) the same question by introducing a [full-length] mirror…. The same question then becomes whether I should show myself but in the process see myself naked (that is, reflect my image in a mirror) when, concerning me, looking at me, is this living creature, this cat that can find itself caught in the same mirror… But cannot this cat also be, deep within her [sic] eyes, my primary mirror? (Derrida 50-51)

That the presence of the animal can incite shame and a Lacanian mirror stage, where the self (mis)recognizes his/her self in the mirror, reveals that the mirror stage may function as a psychic formation for nonhuman animals and a reading of sexual difference “that is many.” “The animal in the room or in the mirror,” Freccero proposes, “generates differences from difference.”

Queering happens in a moment of mistranslation that genders the cat—who looks at Derrida, who marks her as female—and enacts not only a mirror stage, Freccero suggests, but a turn to object relations predicated on the assumption that the primary mirror is the mother. Shamefully aware of the subjectivity of the other face (of his female cat), Derrida’s identification with the feminine human and nonhuman other cannot be accounted for by a singular (sexual or species) difference. In her own persuasive textual encounter with Derrida and his cat, Freccero opens a fresh path to queerness by prodding us recognize, and not disavow, the animal. As Derrida writes, and Freccero so beautifully challenged: I am, I am following, I am after the animal…

–Krista Miranda

Krista Miranda is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at New York University and the Book Reviews Editor for Woman and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. Her prior graduate work includes an MA in Humanities and Social Thought with a concentration in Gender Politics and an MA in Writing and Publishing.

READ THE REVIEW! I am, I am following, I am after the animal: “Derrida’s Queer Cats”

Carla Freccero, University of California Santa Cruz

This paper situates some of the dilemmas of the effort to think and feel with non-human animate beings in [...]]]> A lecture by Carla Freccero

November 10, Wednesday
6:30 to 8 pm

READ THE REVIEW! I am, I am following, I am after the animal: “Derrida’s Queer Cats”

Carla Freccero, University of California Santa Cruz

This paper situates some of the dilemmas of the effort to think and feel with non-human animate beings in the western philosophical tradition by examining Jacques Derrida’s posthumous L’Animal que donc je suis (The Animal that Therefore I Am). Derrida’s work on animality is useful for crafting a queer ethics of relating to the living in general, even as his notion of spectrality offers a way to grapple with the traumatic persistence of (historical) affect in the present. Nevertheless, even as Derrida reaches toward a referent by insisting on the particularity and singularity of his (female) cat, what he animates is the lively density of intertextual feline figures in the history of literary and philosophical thinking and writing about questions of figure and reference and questions of inscription. In playfully allegorizing—even as he literalizes—the search for the elusive figure of the animal other as a mode of “chercher la femme,” Derrida subtly demonstrates the web of figural inter-implications (involving both sex and species difference) in efforts to meet and face animate alterity.

Great Room
13-19 University Place, 1st Floor
between 8th Street and Waverly Place

Carla Freccero is Professor of Literature, Feminist Studies, and History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, where she has taught since 1991. She is also the Director of the UCSC Center for Cultural Studies. Her most recent book is Queer/Early/Modern (Duke 2006) and she is currently working on a book titled Animate Figures, from which her talk is derived. Her recent work in animal theory appears in Social Text, special issue on Interspecies (forthcoming) and a collection, Comparatively Queer, forthcoming from Palgrave.

This event is free and open to the public.  Venue is wheelchair accessible.  If you need sign language interpretation services or other accommodations, please let us know as soon as possible.

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

Amber Musser, Gender Politics, Draper Program, NYU

Imagine that you were in love with the Golden Gate Bridge? What would this mean to you? What kind of relationship would develop? This talk is an exploration of objectum sexuals–people who form meaningful and erotic relationships with objects. By [...]]]> March 1, Monday
12:30 to 1:45 PM

Amber Musser, Gender Politics, Draper Program, NYU

Imagine that you were in love with the Golden Gate Bridge? What would this mean to you? What kind of relationship would develop? This talk is an exploration of objectum sexuals–people who form meaningful and erotic relationships with objects. By examining this phenomenon, we can gain insight into how concepts of love, intimacy, agency, and, ultimately, subjectivity are shifting in the twenty-first century.

Amber Musser is an assistant professor/Faculty Fellow in Gender Politics in NYU’s John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program. Dr. Musser received an A.B. in Biology and History of Science from Harvard (2002), a M.St. in Women’s Studies from Oxford (2003), and a Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard (2009).

Dr. Musser’s work focuses on psychoanalysis, queer affect, and theories of subjectivity. Her dissertation, “On the Subject of Masochism,” is a history of the various readings and re-readings that produced masochism’s discursive shift from psychiatry to critical and queer theory. Portions of her dissertation have been published: “Masochism, a Queer Subjectivity” in Rhizomes and “Reading, Writing ,and the Whip” forthcoming in Literature and Medicine. All of Dr. Musser’s work is a dialogue between history and philosophy of science, critical theory, queer and feminist theory, and critical history. In addition to bringing science and gender and sexuality studies together in conversation, she believes that treating these areas together reveals a new space in which to situate and destabilize our prevailing notions of subjectivity and agency. This perspective allows her to focus on understanding race, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, and class as critical dimensions of personal experience, which also extends to the realm of science. In keeping with this theme, she has published an article, “From Our Body to Yourselves,” which discusses the shift in concepts of Woman and community within the Women’s Health Movement in the 1970s. She has also been working on an article, “The Obscure Object of Desire,” that interrogates negotiations of intimacy and sexuality in relationships with inanimate objects. In addition to turning her dissertation into a book, Dr. Musser is currently researching queer attachments to objects and embodiments of multiple subjectivities. While at Harvard, Dr. Musser received the Derek Bok Award for Teaching Excellence.

41-51 East 11th Street, Room 709
between University Place and Broadway
(wheelchair access at 85-87 University Place, between 11th and 12th Streets)

Part of the Brown Bag Lunch Series — bring your own lunch and we’ll provide beverages and dessert!

This event is free and open to the public.  If you need sign language interpretation services or other accommodations, please let us know as soon as possible.

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