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

REVIEW: Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded: “Things Change A Lot”

Robert — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 21:08:35 +0000

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.

–Julia DeLeon

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

REVIEW: Desire for the Other: “Together and Separately”

Robert — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 17:16:07 +0000

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 and Sexuality, with additional support from the NYU Humanities Initiative: Interdisciplinary Freud Reading Group. The series brings together clinicians and critical theorists, in order to “create shared conversations about, and against, psychoanalysis, as well as productively unsettle… received notions of what it means to be given into and by discourse,” according to CSGS director Ann Pellegrini, who introduced the event. The roundtable was organized around the recent volume With Culture In Mind: Psychoanalytic Stories, and the evening was moderated by Muriel Dimen, the book’s editor. Two contributors, Orna Guralnik and Eyal Rozmarin, presented selections from the volume, followed by responses from NYU faculty members Ben Kafka and Amber Musser.

Dimen described the decades-long development of the project, which had its roots in the mid-80s in a seminar at the NY Institute for the Humanities: as she said, “we are finally having the cross-disciplinary conversation we have always wanted to have, and it has taken this long to do it.” The essays in the collection “come out of a common history of research” in the joint between psychic and social theories of psychoanalysis, with a desire to develop a common vocabulary “between the clinical world and the academic world.” Many contributors to the volume traffic in both, with clinical and academic training.

Orna Guralnik started the roundtable with an excerpt from With Culture In Mind, in which she described a pivotal moment in a session with a patient, Grace. During the session, Grace wondered aloud “maybe I’m not really gay,” a question prompted by her ambivalent response to being hit on inappropriately by her straight male friend Joe. While Grace was flattered by Joe’s attention, Guralnik understood Joe’s actions to be unconsciously homophobic, his attempt to “straighten out the situation” and interpellate Grace into socially legible heterosexuality. Guralnik called this “one of those moments” in analysis, a “point of urgency,” in which analysts must make a choice with “profound implications” for their patient. In this particular moment, Guralnik described her choice as deliberately political, informed more by Judith Butler’s description of the “social death of delegitimization” than Freud’s theories of disassociation. She concluded with the sentiment: “in our offices we try to crack open new conditions of possibility,” a statement that also speaks to the evening’s organizing principle.

Eyal Rozmarin began his remarks “with Deleuze and Guattari in mind,” as he considered questions of kinship, real and imagined, particularly in an Israeli context haunted by the spectre of the Holocaust: how much influence do parents have on the choices their children make, and should parents try to persuade children against army service? These questions followed a session in which Rozmarin, as a “transferential father,” was confronted with one of the “realities of parenting,” namely, that social belonging or group identity often takes precedence over familial influence. In the session he discussed, which was also the focus of one of his essays in the volume, his patient, Asaf, whose grandfather survived Auschwitz and who himself joined the Israeli army as a teenager, expressed his support for and identification with the Israeli army. This exchange happened in January 2009, and, as Rozmarin noted, “Israel had just attacked Gaza.” This prompted an argument between Rozmarin and his patient Asaf (both of them Israelis who live in New York) about war, which ended with Asaf calling Rozmarin “crazy”—not an ideal transferential relationship. Reflecting on this session, Rozmarin argued that Asaf was “a hostage of ideology,” a state in which “to be means to belong,” and which lets us “avoid the crisis of identity without resolution.” Rozmarin acknowledged the loss and disorientation to be found outside of that belonging, while also arguing that such a feeling of belonging is perhaps what haunts us, as we search for the elusive “fantasy of personal happiness.” He ended with the provocation: “What might our lives be like if we are not the victims of our own history?”

Amber Musser took up the thread of kinship and belonging in her response, with the question, “how does kinship work with subjectivity?,” and presented the work of Frantz Fanon “as part of a lineage of thinking queer kinship,” in line with recent work by queer cultural theorists David Eng and Elizabeth Freeman. She argued that Fanon “allows us to theorize kinship as a feeling.” This is a move with both clinical and political utility, as it allows us to think about kinship outside of the bounds of nation and family and consider “subjectivity and pleasure” as “the stakes of belonging.” Musser’s presentation added a new question to Rozmarin’s: how we might “enlarge the possibilities” for other histories, other futures?

In the most contentious presentation of the evening, Ben Kafka confessed his critical attitude about With Culture in Mind’s championing of “the new psychoanalysis.” As he said, he is “not yet ready to abandon the old psychoanalysis.” He elaborated this with a championing of Freud, both broadly—“without Freud, no Adorno; no Lacan, no Althusser, no Foucault, no Badiou, no Butler”—and particularly in relation to ideology and interpellation. While he expressed his admiration and respect for the book’s project, agreeing that a conversation between theory and practice is crucial— “critical theory only becomes critical when it encounters psychoanalysis,” and it “only remains critical” so long as it continues to do so, he provocatively suggested—he also insisted that “psychoanalysis is at its best when it preserves the specificity of its object,” namely, the unconscious and its effects. He argued that interpellation is a function of the preconscious—Freud’s term—which is the “grey area” between conscious and unconscious, and “in which we can locate that place in us that is ready to respond to interpellation’s call.”

The roundtable concluded with a heated but productive disagreement between the panelists over the stakes of these terms, which Guralnik called a “territorial battle over the unconscious.” Guralnik responded to Kafka’s distinction between interpellation as unconscious or preconscious by arguing that “the claim that certain things belong to the domain of the unconscious” but that the sociopolitical belongs to the realm of the preconscious is “a little bit of a power move by psychoanalysis.” In other words, she understood Kafka’s reading of Freudian psychoanalysis as stating: “that’s not the unconscious hence that’s not our business.” Kafka responded that he didn’t consider this a power play, but rather an attempt to home in on “what’s true about the truth” of ideology and interpellation.

The fine points of the ensuing discussion took the better part of an hour, and involved all four panelists, Dimen, and several articulate audience members. As the clock ticked the end of the extended session for the forum, the disagreement was ultimately left tantalizingly unresolved, demonstrating both the difficulty of coming to a common conversation between theory and practices of psychoanalysis, and also the richness to be had in continued attempts.

–Julia DeLeon

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

Soft Power, Diplomacy, and Gender in the Middle East

djm489 — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 19:06:29 +0000

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.

Scenes from a Jamaican Childhood

djm489 — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 19:00:29 +0000

Scenes from a Jamaican Childhood

Tuesday, November 1st 2011:

Co-sponsored by CLAGS, the CUNY Center for the Humanities, and the NYPL

Join Thomas Glave (English, General Literature, and Rhetoric, SUNY Binghamton) for this year’s Audre Lorde/Essex Hemphill Memorial Lecture. Thomas Glave is the author of Whose Song? and Other Stories, The Torturer’s Wife, and the essay collection Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent (winner of a 2005 Lambda Literary Award). He is editor of the anthology Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles (winner of a 2008 Lambda Literary Award).

The Audre Lorde/Essex Hemphill Memorial Lecture is meant to commemorate the lives of the American poets, Audre Lorde (1934 -1992) and Essex Hemphill (1957 -1995), as well as to encourage exciting scholarship and literary production within the communities to whom their poetry and prose spoke. Both Lorde and Hemphill were instrumental in the development of distinctive forms of writing among American poets, particularly people of color and members of the LGBT community.

The Skylight Room (9100)
CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Begins at 6pm

*This event is free and open to the public*

Justice in Transition: Serving the Transgender Community in Law and Practice

djm489 — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 17:19:56 +0000

Justice in Transition: Serving the Transgender Community in Law and Practice
Presented by NYU OUTLaw

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.

Vanderbilt Hall
40 Washington Square South
NYC

Please register at http://nyulaw.imodules.com/justiceintransition

“Justice in Transition” will begin with a trans awareness workshop that aims to introduce audience members to the terminology and background of transgender issues and to challenge them to confront their privileges and assumptions. Three panels will follow throughout the day. The first panel, “Challenging the Criminalization and Detention of Trans Communities,” will examine the impact of policing and prison policies on the trans community. The second panel, “Challenges Facing Trans Youth,” will explore the experiences of trans young people and the ways that social and economic justice work can support their fight for self-determination, access, and rights. The third panel, “Disability Justice and Trans Liberation,” will explore the ways that disability justice informs the trans rights movement. On each panel, OUTLaw hopes to present a variety of perspectives from a diverse group of individuals.

9:00 – 9:10 Welcome & Opening Remarks
9:10 – 11:00 Trans Awareness Workshop
11:10 – 12:40 Panel One: Challenging the Criminalization of Trans Communities
12:40 – 2:00 Lunch
2:00 – 3:30 Panel Two: Challenges Facing Trans Youth
3:40 – 5:10 Panel Three: Disability Justice and Trans Liberation

Gender, National Security, and Counter-Terrorism

djm489 — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 17:17:29 +0000

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

Call for Papers: 7th International Gender and Language Association Conference

djm489 — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 17:07:40 +0000

Call for Papers: 7th International Gender and Language Association Conference
IGALA 7
June 20-22, 2012
São Leopoldo, Brazil

http://www.unisinos.br/eventos/igala/

Abstract Submission Deadline: October 31, 2011

Chamada de Trabalhos: 7th International Gender and Language Association Conference
IGALA 7
20-22 de Junho de 2012
São Leopoldo, RS, Brasil

http://www.unisinos.br/eventos/igala/

Prazo para submissão de resumos: 31 de Outubro de 2011

Paisley Currah talk at the CUNY Graduate Center 10/20

djm489 — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 18:16:05 +0000

Seminar in Sexuality and Gender

Thursday, October 20 · 12:00pm – 1:30pm

Paisley Currah works in the intersections of political theory, gender and sexuality studies, studies in law and society, LGBT studies, and transgender studies. He has widely written on the transgender rights movement.

His current work investigates state constructions of sex for the purposes of recognition and national projects that use gender as a distributive mechanism.

Paisley Currah received an M.A. and Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University and a B.A. (Hon.) in Political Studies from Queen’s University at Kingston, Canada.

Refreshments will be served.

365 5th Avenue @ 34th Street
Sociology Department, Room 6112

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Women and Society and the PhD Program in Sociology — at CUNY.

This event is free and open to the public.

For more information see the Women’s Studies Website: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/womenstudies

Desire for the Other: Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory in Conversation

Robert — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 23:26:05 +0000

a roundtable on the new book With Culture in Mind: Psychoanalytic Stories

Read a review of this talk!

November 4, Friday
4 to 6 pm

13-19 University Place (map)
Lecture room 102 (please note room change)
between 8th Street and Waverly Place

Panelists include:

contributing authors Orna Guralnik and Eyal Rozmarin

Ben Kafka, Media & History, NYU

Amber Musser, Draper Program, NYU

moderated by Muriel Dimen, Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, NYU

This panel continues the project of developing a shared vocabulary between clinical and cultural theorists. With Culture in Mind: Psychoanalytic Stories (Routledge, 2011) reflects a movement emerging in the psychoanalytic world in the wake of feminist, postmodernist, and queer theory, and of gender and race politics. Traditionally, analysts maintain a remote stance towards the social, and are inclined to privilege the wild unconscious as a private space. Not so the writers in this book, all of them analysts, who immerse themselves in the here and now of people’s lives, attempting to navigate the complexity of different paradigms held by psychoanalytic and other critical approaches. They begin with the premise that subjectivity – interior life – is steeped in socio-political forces, and work to demonstrate how this assumption enhances clinical technique.

On this panel, two of the authors — Orna Guralnik and Eyal Rozmarin — demonstrate how critical and cultural theory shapes their very clinical work, including their theses about desire and identity. They will show not only what the clinical experience is like, but how theory lives, how changes when it moves from textual to clinical practices. The psychoanalytic consulting room is a scene of address that requires a way of being with ideas that is continuously responsive to the enigma of the Other. This is theory in the making.

At this forum, Guralnik and Rozmarin will be joined in conversation by two university-based cultural theorists, both of whom are faculty members at New York University: Ben Kafka and Amber Musser. Kafka and Musser will engage with the new psychoanalysis from their own (inter)disciplinary perspectives to rethink how bodies take shape intersubjectively and in relation, as well, to such socio-cultural variables as gender, national origins, race, and sexuality. Along with moderator Muriel Dimen, a clinician who is also the editor of With Culture in Mind, the roundtable as a whole will indicate how theory and embodied subjects live and breathe in different and overlapping kinds of spaces.

This event is free and open to the public. Venue is wheelchair accessible. No RSVPs — seating is on a first-come basis.

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

Facebook event page click here.

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, NYU; Post-Doctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, NYU; Humanities Initiative: Interdisciplinary Freud Reading Group, NYU; and Studies in Gender and Sexuality

Captive Genders at Bluestockings Bookstore in NYC

djm489 — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 17:47:40 +0000

Come celebrate the release of Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press)
Wednesday, October 26 · 7:00pm – 9:00pm
Bluestockings Bookstore, Café, & Activist Center
172 Allen Street
New York, NY

A night of reading, discussion, and conspiring!

Pathologized, terrorized, and confined, trans/gender non-conforming and queer folks have always struggled against the enormity of the prison industrial complex. The first collection of its kind, Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith bring together current and former prisoners, act…ivists, and academics to offer new ways for understanding how race, gender, ability, and sexuality are lived under the crushing weight of captivity. Through a politic of gender self-determination, this collection argues that trans/queer liberation and prison abolition must be grown together. From rioting against police violence and critiquing hate crimes legislation to prisoners demanding access to HIV medications, and far beyond, Captive Genders is a challenge for us all to join the struggle.

with:

Eric A. Stanley works at the intersections of radical trans/queer politics, theories of state violence, and visual culture. Eric co-edited Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press, 2011) and along with Chris Vargas, directed the films Homotopia (2006) and Criminal Queers (2011).

Ralowe T. Ampu is the seductive fragrance wafting through milieus of unbridled danger and intrigue. Yes, whether it be outing gay Castro realtors as AIDS profiteers with ACT UP and GAY SHAME or trying to free the New Jersey 4, or prevent the non-profit management company in her SRO from killing her neighbors, Ralowe is there.

Reina Gossett lives in Brooklyn & works at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project supporting SRLP’s membership and community organizing work. She believes creativity & imagination are crucial for growing strong communities and practicing self-determination.

Toshio Meronek is on the editorial collective for The Abolitionist, Critical Resistance’s newspaper and runs whereslulu.com, a website on disability and popular culture.

Michelle Potts is a PhD student in the department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. Her work looks at the intersections of labour, race and health. She lives in Oakland, CA.

Kimma Walker lives in East Orange, NJ and is the PROUD MOTHER of Terrain Dandridge who is one of the New Jersey 4. http://freenj4.wordpress.com/

Event cosponsored by Counterpublic NYC and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project

Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press, Oakland, CA) Eric A. Stanley, Nat Smith (eds.)

http://bluestockings.com/directions/

http://captivegenders.net/