CSGS Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University » feminist

Cabaret of Confusion: Political Performance and the Work of Variety

Robert — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:04:05 +0000

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.

REVIEW: Sexual Politics, Sexual Violence, and the Communist Left: “Complexities and Contradictions”

Robert — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:16:29 +0000

Sexual Politics, Sexual Violence, and the Communist Left:
“Complexities and Contradictions”
New York University, 19 September 2011

Bettina Aptheker’s engaging talk “Sexual Politics, Sexual Violence, and the Communist Left,” organized by NYU’s Department of Teaching and Learning and co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS), showcased both her incredible history of activism, and her continued scholarly commitment to issues of human rights. Aptheker, who is a frequent visiting scholar at NYU, described the impetus for and development of her new research project to an attentive seminar-style gathering of 25, and shared some of her initial findings through her archival work with NYU’s Tamiment Library.

Aptheker’s current research emerged in the wake of controversy surrounding her memoir, Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought For Freedom, And Became A Feminist Rebel, which was published in 2006. The memoir “weaves the personal and political through a feminist lens, and tells the story of childhood sexual abuse, the consequences of later experiences of sexual violence, FBI surveillance, police violence, and imprisonment,” as well as issues of Jewish and lesbian identity. As she joked, “it’s very light reading.”

Aptheker described responses to the memoir as, fittingly, both personal and political. Some readers considered Aptheker’s description of years of abuse at the hands of her well-known and respected father, Herbert Aptheker, to be untrue, opportunistic or irrelevant, and internet-wide debates—from articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education, to radical left messageboards and forums—were waged over the extent to which Aptheker’s revelations should affect her father’s legacy. At the same time, in letters, phone calls and in person, hundreds of people thanked Aptheker for articulating the violence and discrimination she had experienced within the Communist Party, as her experiences resonated with their own and their loved ones’. This spectrum of responses suggested to Aptheker the necessity for the left to take up these common but rarely discussed issues, including childhood sexual and physical abuse, neglect, domestic violence, and homophobia, as important “political and human rights issues.”

While she acknowledged the difficulty of admitting the possibility of such disturbing violences within an organization ostensibly dedicated to human rights, Aptheker argued that there is “very little understanding [in the Party] of the ways different kinds of oppression, such as class, race, gender, and sexuality, are interconnected.” These issues, “so often disdained and abandoned by the left,” have shaped the direction of her research into the official policies and disciplinary actions in the history of the Communist Party, particularly in relation to the Party’s explicitly homophobic history, and a contemporary atmosphere in which queer communist identity is “more tolerated than celebrated.”

In addition to the Tamiment collection, which houses the sealed files of the Party’s disciplinary committees, she is using the NYPL’s LGBT Archives, the Mazer Lesbian Archives, and the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives. Her current line of analytic inquiry into these archives is on the question of personal and political effects of closeting, and particularly the “double, maybe triple closeting” required for some queer party members, who were required both to deny their sexuality within the party, and deny their party involvement to the broader political arena. She described this experience, with which she is intimately familiar, as “very difficult to maintain… filled with painful contradictions and denials,” and “rife with terrible pressures, fears and suffering.”

In tracing the historical shifts over time of the Party’s official and unofficial policies on the treatment of its gay and lesbian members, including such prominent figures as Bertha C. Reynolds and Harry Hay, Aptheker is helping a whole history of queer communism to come out of the archival closet, in an effort to “contribute to a useful social, personal, psychological, and political historiography”—a tall order, but one that Aptheker is certainly well-equipped to fill.

–Julia DeLeon

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

The Feminist Wire

djm489 — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 20:55:47 +0000

The Feminist Wire!

Please check out, read, share, follow and contribute to The Feminist Wire, a new online journal co-founded by Hortense Spillers and Tamura Lomax.

http://www.thefeministwire.com/

The work and mission of The Feminist Wire is to provide a socio-political and cultural critique of anti-feminist opinions, practices, orientations, etc., that block or limit the satisfaction of goods or ends that humans minimally require for maintaining a biological life.

Vision

The founding of this site was inspired by the sense of crisis that we respectively feel regarding the state of the nation, including popular misperceptions about the achievements of feminist critique. Some of the concerns that we believe need immediate attention are:

* Our shattered political culture, brought on in part by our country’s ill-fated pursuit of wars abroad and the abandonment of a vision of social justice at home.

* The threat to democratic possibilities induced by rampant corporatism and unbridled neo-liberal economic practices; as an accompaniment to the latter, American society is permeated by propaganda most demonstratively expressed at media sources defined by a commitment to unrelenting right-wing doxa.

* The lapse of sustained citizen participation (as the recent election turn out will attest) and the ongoing dismantling of the public sphere as a result.

* The threat to women’s reproductive freedom and health, exacerbated by violence directed at medical personnel and health-care givers.

* The failure of America’s political class to act honestly, democratically, and boldly in the current political climate and to do so along a series of faultlines and stress points, i.e., comprehensive immigration reform, campaign finance reform, and industrial policy, among them.

* The dangers of “ presentism” unleavened by a respect for history and knowledge of it.

Each of these issues has the potential to open out into all the others. It is our hope that The Feminist Wire might intervene by making common cause with voices and visions similar to our own.

Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Brandeis University
415 South Street, MS 023
Waltham, MA 02454
781.736.2165 (p)
781.736.2179 (f)
aliabdur(at)brandeis.edu
http://www.brandeis.edu/departments/english

Activism and the Academy: A Barnard Center for Research on Women Anniversary Conference

djm489 — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 20:26:18 +0000

Call for Papers and Panels

Activism and the Academy: A Barnard Center for Research on Women Anniversary Conference Celebrating 40 Years of Social Justice Work

September 23-24, 2011
Barnard College

Confirmed speakers: Sonia Alvarez, Lisa Duggan, Jacqueline Ebanks, Amber Hollibaugh, Ana Oliveira, Ann Pellegrini, and Ai-jen Poo.

Forty years ago, the Barnard Center for Research on Women began its mission of using research and knowledge to advance feminist scholarship and long-term partnerships with activist groups. Inspired by the new women’s movement, BCRW became part of an historic moment that witnessed the proliferation of feminist activism, the establishment of women’s studies programs and women’s centers, and the founding of women’s bookstores and other cultural projects.

In the last forty years, feminism has become more or less institutionalized and broadly dispersed while the context of academic and activist work has shifted dramatically with the advent of neoliberalism and the intensification of globalization. Injustices against women across many vectors of difference – race, class, sexuality national identity, religion – persist, underscoring the need for a vision and practice of feminism informed by an ethos of sustained social justice. To this end, BCRW has engaged in collaborations with activist groups that advance both feminist knowledge and the goals of such groups. Our commitment to bringing feminist scholars, activists and artists together in conversation and collaboration has always been at the center of this work. We have forged alliances between activists and the academy through our programming, including our cornerstone, nationally-recognized annual conference, “The Scholar and the Feminist”; and through our publications, which have grown to include S&F Online, a webjournal of feminist theories and women’s movements, as well as the New Feminist Solutions series of reports written in collaboration with individuals and organizations who share our vision of linking feminist knowledge with other struggles for social justice.

On the occasion of its 40th anniversary, BCRW invites scholars and activists to reflect on the promises, perils and possibilities of scholar-activist collaborations. We will invite our past, present and future collaborators as well as kindred institutions, scholars and activists engaged in social justice feminism to consider what kinds of collaborative projects are possible when scholarship and activism are joined. We will devote part of the conference to exploring transnational collaborations and launching a new BCRW transnational initiative.

We also invite proposals for papers and panels. We seek contributions on a wide range of topics about activism and academic work and might include the following:

Participatory action research
Activist knowledge production
Building long-term academic and activist partnerships
The role of art, performance and culture in social justice movements
Media activism and new technologies
Social justice curricula
Pedagogies
Methodologies
Creating scholar-activist networks
Transnational feminisms
Locations
Sex Panics
Scholarship and activism during wartime
Reading and writing activism

Please send brief proposals for either papers or panels by April 15, 2011 to BCRW Program Committee at bcrw(at)barnard.edu.

Catherine Sameh
Associate Director
Barnard Center for Research on Women
Barnard College
3009 Broadway
New York, NY 10027
Telephone 212.854.2067
Fax 212.854.8294
http://www.barnard.edu/bcrw/
http://www.barnard.edu/sfonline/

IRWaG Feminist Interventions with Rebecca Jordan-Young, 3/28

djm489 — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 19:48:10 +0000

The Columbia University Institute for Research on Women and Gender presents FEMINIST INTERVENTIONS with:

REBECCA JORDAN-YOUNG
Women’s Studies, Barnard

“Sexual Logics: Dissecting Some Links Between Bodies and Desires in Current Sexual Science” with comment from Alondra Nelson, Sociology, Columbia

Monday, March 28th
4:10-6pm
754 Schermerhorn Extension (1200 Amsterdam Avenue)
Columbia University

We hope to see you there!

The Institute for Research on Women and Gender
Columbia University
212.854.3277
irwag(at)columbia.edu
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/irwag
http://twitter.com/irwag

Egyptian activist and author Dr. Nawal El Saadawi @ NYU March 22 & 24

Robert — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 17:33:05 +0000

March 22nd and March 24th

Fresh from the revolution in Tahrir Square, Dr. El Saadawi will discuss the current political developments in Egypt and her life as a writer, physician, feminist, and human rights activist.

Creativity, Dissidence & Women: A Multidisciplinary Conference

Tuesday, March 22, 2011
6:00-9:00 p.m.

Kimmel Center
60 Washington Square South
Eisner/Lubin Auditorium- 4th Floor

Literary Reading & Book Signing

Thursday, March 24, 2011
6:30-8:00 p.m.

NYU Bookstore
726 Broadway

The NYU Bookstore will be offering a 20% discount on Dr. El Saadawi’s books during the week of events.

For more information, click here.

Events are co-sponsored by: SCPS Paul McGhee Division; New York Literary Club at McGhee, NYU SCPS; Undergraduate Student Council, and the NYU Bookstore.

Feminist Autobiographical Fictions: Performing the Self on Stage & On the Page

Robert — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 16:53:11 +0000

FEMINIST AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTIONS: PERFORMING THE SELF ON STAGE AND ON THE PAGE

a book talk with Barbara Browning, Linda Schlossberg, & Alina Troyano (aka Carmelita Tropicana)

February 22, Tuesday
7 to 8:30 pm

Barbara Browning, Performance Studies, NYU
author of The Correspondence Artist

Linda Schlossberg, Women, Gender and Sexuality, Harvard University
author of Life in Miniature

Alina Troyano (aka Carmelita Tropicana), writer and performance artist
author of I, Carmelita Tropicana: Performing Between Cultures

This panel opens a feminist space — call it genre trouble — between self and “self” to explore the tension and productive possibilities between memory and imagination, autobiography and audience, printed text and embodied performance. Reading from and discussing their own creative fictions, our three speakers reflect on the political and artistic stakes of performing identities and re-staging histories, both intimate and public.

Department of Performance Studies
721 Broadway, Room 612
between Waverly and Washington Places

Co-sponsored by the Tuesday Night Forum Series, NYU Department of Performance Studies.

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.

REVIEW: “Where is Ana Mendieta?”: A Revisitation of the Artist’s Life and Work

Robert — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 16:56:03 +0000

“Where is Ana Mendieta?”: A Revisitation of the Artist’s Life and Work
New York University, 7 October 2010

A capacity crowd, their bodies packed against each other in the Studio at the Department of Performance Studies, came out on October 7th for a symposium on the work and legacy of the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta on the 25th anniversary of her death. The symposium was a culminating event of a two-month exhibition held at Fales Library and Special Collections, which was curated by Richard Move (PhD candidate in Performance Studies). Fales was also co-sponsor of the October 7th symposium along with the Department of Performance Studies, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Department of English, the Grey Art Gallery, the Hemispheric Institute, and Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory.

An homage to her legacy through the presentation of photos, film, scholarly presentations, as well as personal reminiscences, the event revisited Mendieta’s “iconoclastic earth, body, performance, and site-specific and visual art works,” explored the breadth of her influence in the world of feminist and multidisciplinary art, and revisited her controversial death. Mendieta died in September 1985; she fell or was thrown from her 34th floor apartment, on Broadway and Waverly Place. In a haunting irony, the chair’s office in the Department of Performance Studies directly overlook the rooftop of the deli where Mendieta’s body landed. Her husband, the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, was charged and acquitted in her death–an acquittal several participants in the symposium frankly called an “injustice.” The symposium looked both backward–to the influences on Mendieta’s work, her contemporaries, and the protests after Andre’s acquittal–and forward, with participants addressing the ongoing relevance of her body of work as well as the nature and complexity of its reimagination and revisitation by artists and scholars today.

The evening began with Richard Move’s explanation that the exhibition and symposium’s title–”Where is Ana Mendieta?”–was borrowed from The Women’s Action Coalition’s protest outside the Guggenheim Museum Soho’s opening in 1992. At that action, WAC held up a banner that read “Carl Andre is in the Guggenheim. Where is Ana Mendieta? Donde está Ana Mendieta?” Move then “channeled the affective force” of Mendieta’s work with his fifteen-minute film, BloodWork-The Ana Mendieta Story (2009). BloodWork is a cinematic tribute to Mendieta’s work, imaginatively recreating some of Mendieta’s signature pieces, including Rastros Corporales (Body Tracks) and variations of the Untitled (Silueta Series). The film does not aim at exactitude so much as a kind of affective approximation. These creative reimaginations were intercut by interviews with Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, B. Ruby Rich, José Esteban Muñoz, and Lisa Paul Strietfield. In the words of Carolee Shneemann, who was friends with Mendieta, BloodWork is a “true and deep homage [that] clarifies so many deep threads Ana opened, then tangled again.” Significantly, the film and interviewees did not shy from addressing the ongoing controversy over the circumstances of Mendieta’s death.

Kat Griefen, Director of the A.I.R. Gallery responsible for Mendieta’s archive, discussed Mendieta’s 1977-1982 residence. Although much of Mendieta’s work is “practically unsellable,” Griefen explained, A.I.R. was the home of the artist’s first solo exhibit. Mendieta felt the gallery was a great vehicle for her work, but also came to believe it was not as politically motivated as Mendieta would have liked. Griefen also asked what it means, in terms of dislocation, a prevalent theme in Mendieta’s oeuvre, that the artist’s name was constantly misspelled in A.I.R.’s literature, especially considering Mendieta’s active role in the artist-run gallery.

Exploring Mendieta’s affinity with Cuban-American singer La Lupe, Genevieve Hyacinthe, assistant professor of Art History at Purchase College, investigated the influence of Santeria on Mendiata’s work. Arguing that Mendieta referenced elements of Santeria to align herself with the disenfranchised, Hyacinthe explained that the artist, aware of how her color and position could delegitimate her, “abjected” her own body in order to assault her whiteness and its socially afforded privileges.

Multidisciplinary artist Carolee Schneemann juxtaposed slides from her own work and Mendieta’s, commenting on their remarkable coincidence and correspondence. Schneemann explained how their work “[submitted] to the sensory psychic realm” through a commitment to the saturation of the body in natural materials, for “the body moves and is sustained by saturation.” As feminist artists navigating a male-centered artworld, Schneemann and Mendieta both confronted the “dangers of depicting the sensuous female body” and found ways to identify with the “vital energies of nature” while presenting the body as neither essentialist nor abject.

José Esteban Muñoz, Chair of the Department of Performance Studies at NYU, asked what Mendieta’s loss signifies and argued that the “sense we make or take from her work cannot be reduced to her biography.” Drawing from his forthcoming book Feeling Brown, Muñoz discussed the effects of Mendieta’s displacement from Cuba and how that sense of loss permeated her work, “a kind of loss that feels like the charred remains of a pandemic.” Muñoz described the affective tone of her work as a contagious “sense of brownness” that “radiatesŠas a thing that is not politics, but not not politics.”

Diana Taylor, University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at NYU, concluded the evening by asking, “What is reperformance?” Explaining that reperformance maintains “an eye towards fidelity” as opposed to originality, Taylor compares the intentions of Marina Abromovich’s recent retrospective at the MOMA and the recreations in Move’s BloodWork. While the Abromovich’s retrospective reveals an intention “to keep the original work alive,” BloodWork, Taylor suggests, acts more like a “project about memory,” more a vindication of Mendieta than a preservation of the work itself. Pointing to the “strong sense of if-ness” to the recreations, Taylor suggests that the “‘re’ is the ‘re’ of the reappearance of the violently disappeared Mendieta; ‘re’ as in the reassertion of her work; and ‘re’ as in remains, work that remains to be done.”

–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.

Experience, Echo, Event: Theorizing Feminist Histories

djm489 — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 20:03:09 +0000

Experience, Echo, Event: Theorizing Feminist Histories

For more information: http://www.stonybrook.edu/hisb/index.shtml

A Symposium featuring:
Event, Excess, Abyss
Tani Barlow
T.T. and W.F. Chao Professor of Asian History
Director of the Chao Center for Asian Studies
Rice University
“Flyers Into the Unknown”: Gender, History, and Psychoanalysis
Joan W. Scott
Harold F. Linder Professor, School of Social Science
Institute for Advanced Study

Friday, October 15, 2010
2 to 6 pm
Stony Brook Manhattan
387 Park Avenue, 3rd Floor (btwn 27th and 28th streets)

Reception to follow

In anticipation of the 20th anniversary of Joan W. Scott’s now-classic essay “The Evidence of Experience,” first published in Critical Inquiry in 1991, we have organized a symposium around several concepts that we take to be key in feminist theorizations of history in the current fin de siecle—experience, echo, and event. We draw the first two concepts from Scott, who has for a generation been at the forefront of important theoretical and methodological developments in feminist historical studies, and the third from Tani Barlow, author of the conceptually exciting and historically rich book The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (Duke 2004).

In conjunction with the symposium, we have also organized a reading group for graduate certificate students in Women’s and Gender Studies. For more information, please contact Lisa Diedrich at ldiedrich@notes.cc.sunysb.edu.

This event was generously supported with a FAHSS Grant from the Provost’s Office at Stony Brook University, with additional support from the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, the History Department, the Humanities Institute, and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at Stony Brook.

Makeshift Reclamation: New Feminist Art and Activism

djm489 — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 18:51:29 +0000

Thursday, October 14
6:30 pm
James Room, 4th Floor Barnard Hall
Barnard College
3009 Broadway (at 117th Street)

A multimedia event showcasing how contemporary feminists are resisting and creating alternatives not only to gender-based oppression but also to a collapsing economic system, the climate crisis, and more. Featuring live readings, performances, and video works by artists and activists including Jessica Hoffmann, coeditor/copublisher of make/shift; Hilary Goldberg, whose new project, recLAmation, is a Super 8 experimental documentary/narrative film in which queer superheroes navigate a future beyond capitalism; and a rotating cast of artists and activists including Maegan “la Mala” Ortiz, Mariana Ruiz Firmat, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

For more information, please contact BCRW at (212) 854-2067 or visit http://www.barnard.edu/bcrw or http://www.makeshiftreclamation.com

This event is FREE and open to the public.