November 14, Monday 3:30 to 5:30pm

Woolworth Building Room 409

RSVP: lysistrata.nyu(at)gmail.com

About the Event:

What is the soft power of the Middle East; media, soccer, facebook, or diplomacy? Have the Obama slogans failed the ‘Arab Street’? What is the role of women in shaping the new Middle East? And what [...]]]> Presented by Lysistrata

November 14, Monday
3:30 to 5:30pm

Woolworth Building
Room 409

RSVP: lysistrata.nyu(at)gmail.com

About the Event:

What is the soft power of the Middle East; media, soccer, facebook, or diplomacy? Have the Obama slogans failed the ‘Arab Street’? What is the role of women in shaping the new Middle East? And what are the aspirations of the Arab youth today?

Ms. Merissa Khurma, director of the office of HRH Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein, FIFA Vice President representing Asia, will be joining us for an informal discussion from Amman, Jordan via skype to shed a light on these questions and more. Born to a family of diplomats and a diplomat herself, she is a firsthand witness to Arab politics and women’s achievements in the public sector particularly in Jordan. Drawing on her experience and participation in the Jordanian government Ms. Khurma will enlighten us with a unique perspective on the current developments in the region and the way forward therein. The discussion will highlight the unique gender dimensions in the field of diplomacy and political participation in the Middle East. We anticipate a robust discussion during the Q&A section, moderated by Lysistrata’s Co-founder and International Relations Concentration Leader, Jumana Kawar.

Ms. Merissa Khurma is currently the director of the office of HRH Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein, FIFA Vice President representing Asia. She served as HRH Prince Ali’s campaign manager for his candidacy for FIFA Vice President (October 2010 to January 2011) and has been HRH’s chief of staff since his victory in these elections in January 2011. Ms. Khurma previously served as the Press Attaché and Director of the Jordan Information Bureau at the Embassy of Jordan in Washington D.C. from 2003 to 2010. Prior to joining the Government sector, Ms. Khurma was a research associate at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy where she focused on democratization in the Arab world, Arab media, and terrorism studies.

Merissa holds a B.A. in political science and French from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Her honor’s thesis focused on the civil society development in Jordan under HM King Hussein’s reign. She also holds a Master’s of Science in International Security and Foreign Policy from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

November 4, Friday 9 am to 5:10 pm

This all-day event will focus on the legal and social challenges that face trans people, with a special focus on the intersection of trans identity with race, class, disability, and age.

Thursday, November 3 3:30 to 5:00 pm Woolworth Building, Room 217 15 Barclay Street NYC

RSVP to lysistrata.nyu(at)gmail.com

About the event:

Jayne Huckerby will highlight findings of a groundbreaking report published by NYU’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, “A Decade Lost: Locating Gender [...]]]> Gender, National Security, and Counter-Terrorism
Lysistrata International Law Event

Thursday, November 3
3:30 to 5:00 pm
Woolworth Building, Room 217
15 Barclay Street
NYC

RSVP to lysistrata.nyu(at)gmail.com

About the event:

Jayne Huckerby will highlight findings of a groundbreaking report published by NYU’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, “A Decade Lost: Locating Gender in U.S. Counter-Terrorism. Throughout the United States’ decade-long “War on Terror,” women and sexual minorities’ experience with counter-terrorism measures has been largely invisible to policymakers and the human rights community alike. Drawing on her experience and participation in the creation of this report, Jayne Huckerby is uniquely qualified to illuminate how the U.S. government’s counter-terrorism efforts impact women and sexual minorities. The lecture will highlight the unique gender dimensions and impacts of U.S. counter-terrorism, including the impact of anti-terror cuts in humanitarian aid to Somalia on women and girls, the experience of Iraqi gay men in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion, and the effects of targeted killings on female family members in Pakistan. We anticipate a robust discussion during the Q&A, moderated by Lysistrata’s International Law Concentration Leader, Sara Birjandian.

About the speaker:

Jayne Huckerby is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Law of the Global Justice Clinic and Research Director at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, where she directs the Center’s project on Gender, National Security and Counter-Terrorism. She co-taught the International Human Rights Clinic from Spring 2009 to Spring 2010. She has worked with various inter-governmental and non-governmental entities, including with the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism, the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW), the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), the U.N. Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), and the U.N. Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, in the areas of gender and counter-terrorism, gender and anti-trafficking initiatives, gender and transitional justice programming, gender budget initiatives, and gender and the political economy.

• Marisa Tramontano and Jumana Kawar – Founders
• Tatiana Bessarabova – Energy/Environment Concentration Leader
• Saghar (Sara) Birjandian – International Law Concentration Leader
• Talia Hagerty – Peacebuilding Concentration Leader
• Erin Hogeboom – Transnational Security Concentration Leader
• Jumana Kawar – International Relations Concentration Leader
• Natasha Lamoreux – Human Rights Concentration Leader
• Erica Mukherjee – Development Concentration Leader
• Dr. Sylvia Maier – Faculty Advisor

147 W.24th Street 3rd Floor New York, NY 10011 Take the A,C,E,1,F,M,N,R,4 or 6 Trains to 23rd Street.

Come join us to hear the personal experiences of Trans and Gender non-conforming immigrant folks followed by a Know Your [...]]]> When: Tuesday, October 11, 2011 – 7:00pm – 9:00pm
Where: Audre Lorde Project – Manhattan Office

147 W.24th Street 3rd Floor New York, NY 10011
Take the A,C,E,1,F,M,N,R,4 or 6 Trains to 23rd Street.

Come join us to hear the personal experiences of Trans and Gender non-conforming immigrant folks followed by a Know Your Rights session by the Sylvia Rivera Law Project!

As the U.S. government continues to intensify its controversial immigration enforcement programs, our Trans and Gender Non-conforming immigrant community has become increasingly vulnerable. The evening will consist of hearing the personal experiences of TGNC immigrants, followed by a Know Your Rights presentation by folks from the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. There will also be space for discussion and brainstorming around how we can further strengthen our communities around these issues.

We encourage LGBTSTGNC People of Color to attend this important event! Spanish interpretation will be provided.

Co Sponsors: Sylvia Rivera Law Project, Audre Lorde Project and Gender Identity Project

For more information contact Aya Tasaki at atasaki(at)alp.org or call 212.463.0342 ext.16

For more information: http://alp.org/intersections.of.injustice

Deadline: September 30, 2011

This panel seeks papers that explore gender and sexuality in contemporary Asian American Fiction. How do gender and sexuality affect experiences of racialization and national belonging? Topics may include (but are not limited to): femininity, masculinity, transnational [...]]]> Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
Annual Convention 2012
Rochester, NY
March 15-18, 2012

Deadline: September 30, 2011

This panel seeks papers that explore gender and sexuality in contemporary Asian American Fiction. How do gender and sexuality affect experiences of racialization and national belonging? Topics may include (but are not limited to): femininity, masculinity, transnational negotiations of gender, queer Asian America, queer diaspora, war brides, comfort women, displacement and migration, family and domesticity, gendered nationalisms, and racialization. Please send 250-500 word abstracts by September 30 to Naomi Edwards at Naomi.Edwards(at)stonybrook.edu

October 21 and [...]]]> MASCULINITY, COMPLEX

a two-day symposium with Jessica Benjamin, Justin Vivian Bond, Judith Butler, Anne Cheng, Nancy Chodorow, Ken Corbett, Muriel Dimen, Jan Gaboury, Katie Gentile, Virginia Goldner, Francisco Gonzalez, Adrienne Harris, Ben Kafka, Tony Kushner, Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Joe Rollins, Eyal Rozmarin, Avgi Saketopoulou, Gayle Salamon, Dean Spade, Warren Spielberg, Brett Stoudt

October 21 and 22, Friday and Saturday
2 to 8 pm and 10 am to 4 pm, respectively

REGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED FOR THIS CONFERENCE. ONLY THOSE REGISTERED WILL GAIN ENTRANCE.

more info: masculinitycomplex.com

Masculinity has finally become a site of inquiry: a problem the way femininity has been regarded for nearly a century. Masculinity, Complex sets out to reflect on the history of masculinity as it became perplexed via psychoanalytic and cultural discourses. We have brought together a renowned group of scholars, clinicians and artists, and are looking forward to what promises to be a memorable conference.

CUNY Graduate Center
Elebash Recital Hall
365 Fifth Avenue
between 34th and 35th Streets

Co-sponsored by Studies in Gender and Sexuality; Gender Studies Program, John Jay College of Justice; Center for the Study of Women and Society, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, New York University.

Youth, Gender and Sexuality: Contemporary Debates Wednesday 25 January 2012 09:00-18:00 East Midlands Conference Centre University of Nottingham, UK

Organisers:

Dr. Andrew Kam-Tuck Yip, University of Nottingham, UK http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/sociology/stafflookup/andrew.yip

Dr. Sarah-Jane Page, Durham University, UK http://www.dur.ac.uk/theology.religion/staff/profile/?id=9274

Aim:

This conference aims to bring together scholars in the social sciences [...]]]> CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS

Youth, Gender and Sexuality: Contemporary Debates
Wednesday 25 January 2012
09:00-18:00
East Midlands Conference Centre
University of Nottingham, UK

Organisers:

Dr. Andrew Kam-Tuck Yip, University of Nottingham, UK http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/sociology/stafflookup/andrew.yip

Dr. Sarah-Jane Page, Durham University, UK http://www.dur.ac.uk/theology.religion/staff/profile/?id=9274

Aim:

This conference aims to bring together scholars in the social sciences and humanities who are doing cutting-edge theoretical and/or empirical research on young people’s lived experiences in relation to gender and/or sexuality in contemporary society.

This deliberately small-scale conference, involving no more than 15 participants, will provide a platform for in-depth and productive dialogue. The organisers intend to publish selected contributions as an edited volume or a special issue for a journal.

The conference is free. Refreshments and lunch will be provided on the day.

Abstract Submission:

Please submit, by 15 October 2011, an abstract of no more than 250 words, alongside a brief biographical note (max. 100 words) to Dr. Yip (andrew.yip[at]nottingham.ac.uk) and Dr. Page (sarah-jane.page[at]durham.ac.uk).

Preparation for Conference:

All participants must submit a fairly developed paper of 5000 words to the organisers by 5 January 2012, which will be distributed among participants in advance of the conference to facilitate in-depth discussion on the day. More guidelines will follow.

Following the conference, fully developed papers selected for publication must be submitted to the organisers by 26 March 2012.

Featured participants:

Lila Abu-Lughod Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor, Department of Anthropology and Institute for Research on Women and Gender Columbia University Director, Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference

Janet Jakobsen Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Women’s, Gender, [...]]]> CCASD Keywords: Interdisciplinary Roundtable Conversations: Movements
Wednesday, September 21st, 5-7pm
754 Schermerhorn Ext., Columbia University

Featured participants:

Lila Abu-Lughod
Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor, Department of Anthropology and
Institute for Research on Women and Gender
Columbia University
Director, Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference

Janet Jakobsen
Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Barnard College
Director, Barnard Center for Research on Women

Paul Scolieri
Assistant Professor of Dance
Barnard College

Dorian Warren
Assistant Professor of Political Science & Public Affairs
Columbia University

CCASD Keywords: Interdisciplinary Roundtable Conversations is a NEW series inspired by the innovative interdisciplinary scholarship promoted by the Center. The series draws participants together from a wide range of disciplinary homes in order to explore the various ways we think about fundamental critical/theoretical ideas and to generate new vocabularies and new methodologies.

For more on the Center and its projects, go to www.socialdifference.org

New Majorities II had a double task: First, the day-long forum continued an initiative launched at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women (CSW), and co-conceived by CSW director Kathleen [...]]]> New Majorities II:
A Cross-Country Duet on the State of Gender and Sexuality Studies in the Academy
New York University, 29 April 2011

New Majorities II had a double task: First, the day-long forum continued an initiative launched at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women (CSW), and co-conceived by CSW director Kathleen McHugh and NYU Professor Lisa Duggan, to respond to the uneven budget cuts affecting gender and sexuality departments—as well as other interdisciplinary programs, such as African-American and Latino/a Studies—nationwide. This conversation/duet began with a one-day conference hosted by UCLA in early March.  Second, the NYU forum was also a celebration of the 11th anniversary of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS). (As CSGS Director Ann Pellegrini mock protested, “why celebrate the even when you can celebrate the odd.”)

The linked conferences proactively, instead of defensively, addressed the attacks on interdisciplinary programs in gender and sexuality studies, ethnic studies, and related fields. These programs are often derided as “identity studies” departments, and this ideological attack along with the increased monetization of higher education has made these programs especially susceptible to budget cuts. In her framing remarks at the beginning of the day, Pellegrini, who, in addition to serving as CSGS director, is Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies, acknowledged the necessity of learning to speak to administrators who control university budgets in the language of dollars and cents. But she also expressed the hope that the day’s conversation might generate a way of talking about the ongoing value of interdisciplinary projects like gender and sexuality studies and ethnic studies that was not reducible to economic inputs and outputs. She stressed that monetary value is not the only – nor even most important — measure of value.

The first panel, Gender and Sexuality Studies at NYU: History, Futures, Institutional Possibilities and Dilemmas, discussed CSGS’s history and the current challenges and possibilities for gender and sexuality studies at NYU. Rahma Abdulkadir, Research Fellow at NYU Abu Dhabi, kicked off the event with unfettered optimism by discussing the interdisciplinary possibilities of NYU Abu Dhabi (NYU-AD). NYU-AD is a research institution with an integrated liberal Arts and Sciences college with an international student body. In the nascient stages of its development, NYU-AD has only 19 majors. Although it currently offers only three classes in gender and sexualities, Abdulkadir believes that the open nature of the core areas of study, which includes “pathways of world literature,” as well as the eagerness of NYU-AD’s leadership to be in conversation with NYU’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and CSGS, has significant space to expand its activities with a deeper incorporation of gender and sexuality-oriented research and pedagogy.

Next Carolyn Dinshaw, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and English at NYU, founding director of CSGS, and and self-professed “living archive,” addressed the changing nature of the center since 1999, when NYU was not yet the global institution it is today. At its inception, CSGS was linked to the Gender and Sexuality degree program in the College of Arts and Sciences, a union that gave the research group a medium to forge long bonds not amenable to the “one night stands” of CSGS events. The relationship between the Gender and Sexuality Studies program (GSS) and CSGS, Dinshaw explained, was multifold: the academic program provided an excellent foundation for the creation of a core audience for CSGS events while the political and pedagogical agenda of the Center helped influence the curriculum of the GSS program with the creation of elective courses like “Transgender histories, identities and politics.”

Don Kulick, who succeeded Dinshaw as CSGS Director and now a Professor of Comparative Human Development at University of Chicago, focused on two events in the Center’s history: CSGS’s shift from a Center linked to an academic program to its current “all university” status, and the permanent appointment of Robert Campbell as Associate Director. The former, Kulick, explained, meant that as a “provostial” center, CSGS represents the entire university and not just the Arts and Sciences. It was thus better positioned to forge connections across the university with faculty and programs doing work in gender and sexuality studies. Campbell’s appointment, preceded by a series of temporary terms, gave the Center a permanent foundation and continuity. Because of these transitions, CSGS didn’t have to legitimate itself as a scholarly institution and was able to popularize its evening programming to include speakers like Heather Boyle and Kate Bornstein, broadening its audience beyond academia.

Drawing from her multiple roles at NYU since 1998, e. Frances White, Professor in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and SCA and former Vice Provost for Faculty Development, spoke to both the evolution of NYU’s Woman’s Studies Program into the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, now housed in SCA, and her role in increasing faculty diversity, which involved getting to know junior faculty of color in particular, and putting people together with similar concerns who were isolated in their respective disciplines.

The panel’s moderator Gayatri Gopinath, Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and Director of NYU’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, brought the conversation full circle by addressing the historical discussion of CSGS and SCA regarding the nuances of the notion of “value” in terms of NYU’s increased corporatization. Attending to this problematic project of NYU’s globalization, Gopinath reminded us of the New Majorities agenda by addressing how we can “create insurgencies within the structure” by theorizing how the interdisciplinarity itself interrupts the ways institutions are formed.

A lively discussion followed between the panelists and with the audience. There was a lot of attention, and concern, focused on the possible imperial dimensions of NYU’s global initiatives at Abu Dhabi and beyond. As was pointed out, NYU is not the only major U.S. university building global satellite campuses, and participants together asked about the political and economic implications of this expansion at this particular historical moment.

The second panel, New Paradigms, New Possibilities broadened the scope of discussion from an NYU focus to the fragile state of interdisciplinary programs nationally. The panel’s speakers came from a variety of institutions: public and private, both colleges and universities. They continued and deepened the project begun in the morning, namely how to articulate why what women’s studies, LGBTQ studies, and ethnic studies do matters at a time when the marketplace of ideas has been reduced to market value. Given the very real crises affecting particular programs, the panelists also sought to develop concrete and local strategies to combat the marginalization of “diversity” programs. There was a recognition that there is no one size fits all approach to the current situation.

Lisa Duggan introduced the panel by discussing New Majorities’ history, which began with a questionnaire asking about the states of various interdisciplinary programs as a way to use local case studies to talk about national situations. This served as an empirical anchor for the subsequent early March conference at UCLA whose aim was to create new knowledges to talk across programs and institutions.

The panel’s first speaker was Kathleen McHugh, Professor of English and the FTVD Critical Studies program at UCLA. McHugh presented how faculty demographics would be affected without the programs under attack by sharing the statistical research she compiled from hypothetical campus UCLX: without such programs, the number of white-male faculty would be unaffected; white-female employment would drop by almost 10%; and faculty of color would be reduced by about 50%. Riffing off David Letterman’s daily top ten list, McHugh also shared the top ten insights of New Majorities. These insights included: New Majorities is proactive rather than reactive; rethinks the marginal; moves being entrenched modes of thinking; and produces alternative structures of university governance.

Providing a perspective from Duke University, Jennifer D. Brody, the embodiment of interdisciplinarity (and over-extended academic labor) herself, is a Professor of African and African American Studies who also teaches Performance Studies, Gender/Sexuality Studies, and Visuality and Black Performance. Among other things, Brody addressed the issues of downsizing, noting in particular how funding for the arts has been slashed at various institutions. This affects diversity at our institutions in at least two ways: the creative arts offer an important site for university-community contact and have also traditionally provided a receptive space for women and people of color. But Brody also pointed to her own position at Duke, where she has a triple appointment, to ask what happens when one body is asked to perform diversity in multiple institutional sites? No body can do it, she said, but particular bodies are commonly asked to. Connecting back to McHugh’s presentation, Brody underscored the unequal division of labor that results when white women and women and men of color are asked to be the institutional face of diversity. Additionally, she pointed out that women and people of color are disproportionately hired in diversity programs, which allows public land grant universities (and she used to teach at one) to claim they are meeting various diversity targets or goals even as they are in fact continuing to segregate the university by knowledge division and department.

Next was Laura Levitt, Professor of Religion and Women’s Studies at Temple University, who is “in belly of beast” of the academic budget crunch. At Temple, five programs—including Woman’s Studies, American Studies, Jewish studies—will be absorbed in the departments of Sociology, English, History, etc. The rationale for this administrative decision, Levitt explains, was fiscal; in other words, these programs are failing and not valuable. After the five programs hand over their autonomy to departments, the continued life of the programs would depend on the voluntary labor of an already over-extended staff, most of whom were highly vulnerable, non-tenured faculty. Levitt reminded us of an important oversight: this restructuring leaves little time for actual teaching and researching.

Following Levit was Janet R. Jakobsen, Professor of Women’s Studies and Director of Barnard College’s Center for Research on Women. As a professor at a women’s college where Women’s Studies and feminist research are not currently under attack, Jakobsen spoke to the particular dangers of being on the receiving end of this capital flow. In the new neoliberal order, she argued, women and feminism were both now seen as good investments through which money might circulate along with imperialism. How would feminist work at U.S. colleges and universities be redefined in the light of this monetized “woman question”? Which kinds of research projects would be funded and supported and which, not? The way in which capital flows are set up to run through academic institutions, she maintained, can have serious dangers for other progressive institutions, like poorly funded activist organizations. Jakobsen’s talk was a warning call against such complicity that marginalizes other projects of resistance.

Licia Fiol-Matta, Professor of Latin American & Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College, CUNY, concluded the panel with an example of the way diversity studies play out in specific institutional sites and in relation to local demographics. At Lehman, Fiol-Matta explains, there is a radical disconnect between the faculty, which consists of mostly of white, relatively wealthy males, and the student body, primarily composed of women of color. Fiol-Matta revealed another paradox: while one would think this population would be receptive to interdisciplinary, diversity-oriented thinking, they succumb to the extreme conservativism expressed through the business model of education, where the student is the consumer and goods are recognizable. As a result, this population is entrenched in an aspirational model toward insertion into the capitalist structure that equates “making it” with “making money.” But Fiol-Matta stressed the complexity of Lehman’s particular students’ identification with this aspirational model, suggesting that it could be seen as a vehicle of Americanization and racialized assimilation. In other words: the consumer-citizen economic circuit works differently, and demands different things, of different student bodies. As scholars of diversity, how do we reckon with this concrete situation?

In (im)proper interdisciplinary fashion, the conference closed with a performance party to celebrate the 11th anniversary of the Center. The performance party – entitled Gender and Sexuality: A Musical Revue – was produced by musician Viva DeConcini and held at a local music venue, the Gallery at Le Poisson Rouge. The cabaret-style event was emceed by Jennifer Miller Circus Amok founder and Associate Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute. About 200 people packed the downstairs gallery space for the musical celebrations. The audience was “schooled” in gender and sexuality by: Karen Finley, Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, Geo Wyeth, Glenn Marla, Neal Medlyn,burlesque performers Darlinda Just Darlinda and Coco Lectric, and Jomama Jones. There was even a surprise musical performance by CSGS director Ann Pellegrini.

If Gender and Sexuality: A Musical Revue showcased the serious play of gender and sexuality studies, it also offered a welcome respite from – and reenergizing bounce to confront – the crises discussed during the day.

–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.

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.