February 21, Tuesday 6 to 7:30 pm

Marjorie Garber, English and Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University

Hemmerdinger Hall 31 Washington Place

Marjorie Garber is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Her work ranges broadly across literary studies, [...]]]>

a lecture by Marjorie Garber

February 21, Tuesday
6 to 7:30 pm

Marjorie Garber, English and Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University

Hemmerdinger Hall
31 Washington Place

Marjorie Garber is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Her work ranges broadly across literary studies, gender and sexuality studies, animal studies, and cultural studies. Her books include Shakespeare After All, Patronizing the Arts, Dog Love, and Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety.

This event is free and open to the public.  Venue is wheelchair accessible.

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

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality; Department of English

February 16 & 17, Thursday & Friday

For more information: abelove.wordpress.com

The fall CSGS calendar of evening events ended on an amazing note, with a conversation between Shelley Jackson and Rebecca Schneider, hosted by CSGS and NYU’s Department of Performance Studies. Jackson and Schneider, whose books include The Melancholy [...]]]> Performing (at) the Body’s Edge: “This Is Just Like Life”
New York University, 15 November 2011

The fall CSGS calendar of evening events ended on an amazing note, with a conversation between Shelley Jackson and Rebecca Schneider, hosted by CSGS and NYU’s Department of Performance Studies. Jackson and Schneider, whose books include The Melancholy of Anatomy (Jackson) and The Explicit Body in Performance (Schneider), had a lot to say to one another about bodies. They focused their discussion on Jackson’s work and, in particular, on her short story, “Skin.”

In 2003, Jackson put out an ad in Cabinet magazine, calling for participants in a “mortal work of art”: a 2,095-word story that required as many volunteers to provide a surface for her text. Jackson joked that “Skin” is “one of the more expensive books ever published, at $50 to $100 a word.” The story is “still at the printers,” as it is being published one word at a time on living human skin, in the form of tattoos on the bodies of volunteers. Jackson described “Skin” as a project that “blurs to the point of collapse the distinction between body and language,” so that the relationship between body and language “becomes one of identity,” not simply of likeness. With “Skin,” she posits: “if bodies are words, then words are bodies”—and indeed she refers to the participants in the story as “words.” Jackson described her work more generally as “an extension of an obsession with having a body at all,” and a “fascination with how weird it is that we think of the world in terms of ideas” or meanings, instead of materiality—“and yet, we are made of stuff.” Her work plays with the also-weird materiality of words and ideas through the “fantasy of total translatability in the world,” which offers the possibility that “meaning might not be as abstract and remote as it seems,” and so it might “engage with us on a physical level.”

Rebecca Schneider suggested that “the project underscores an always-already operation of language and embodiment: words are always tactile, but we don’t always take note.” She offered a beautifully playful riff on the “incredibly, fabulously material” project, describing the ways it “undoes” the meanings of literature and the “stuff” of books, reworking them in terms of intimacy, collectivity, and consent. In “Skin,” “circulation has to rethink itself,” and “binding holds differently,” as the words “may be bound together in some way, but that way has become immaterial, or affective”—the space between words, and between word and reader, can either be “no space at all,” as close as ink on skin, or reflect the “outrageous expansion” of the physical location of the words, dispersed across continents.

If the meaning of the word literature is “acquaintance with letters,” then Schneider understands Jackson’s aim to be “to unsettle the term acquaintance into something more viscous, porous and flexible”—and, certainly, Jackson has “made matters more interesting.” The participants become the words of the story, and so an acquaintance with these words is relational, as “the words have lives: walking to the grocery store, showering when dirty, turning over in bed.” While Jackson described the participants’ experience in the project, Schneider spoke to the ways Jackson’s “words” might be encountered out of context, if the reader is a person accessing the word on or as another’s body. “Look around,” Schneider said, “surely we have some words among us; or we are all perhaps words among themselves, making a part of a story with spaces between us, as between words, the spaces that separate skin from skin.”

Jackson didn’t read an excerpt from “Skin,” as she has specified that only the participants, or “words,” can read the whole story. She did read another story—also called “Skin”—which she described as “one of the myriad of stories that is not [her] story, but that [her] story could form on an auspicious day,” as it was written using only words from the original “Skin.” Her reading of this brief and haunting version of “Skin” was accompanied by a video of the story’s text, commissioned in 2011 by the Berkeley Art Museum.

The video was cut and pasted together from short video clips of 191 of Jackson’s “words” pronouncing themselves. “Who are we, anyway?… We don’t remember who we are but we are certain we are not dead,” she intoned, as bodies flashed across the screen behind her, echoing her words: “This is just like life.”

–Julia DeLeon

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

Edited by Doris J. Popovich and Jacqueline H. Boyd

Gender identity is an experience, not an assignment. If you are living this truth and can write about it, we want to hear from you. Together we can dispel myths, give hope to young people, [...]]]> 21 Peaceful Genders – No Boxes, No Bars, No Apologies

Edited by Doris J. Popovich and Jacqueline H. Boyd

Gender identity is an experience, not an assignment. If you are living this truth and can write about it, we want to hear from you. Together we can dispel myths, give hope to young people, educate peers, friends and family and provide an archive / mirror for our own complex gender expressions.

How do you live your peace while navigating the hetero-normative maze? 21 Peaceful Genders – No Boxes, No Bars, No Apologies embodies gender as a place of possibility. Help us cross-pollinate our species with hope. We welcome the edgy and artful, and treasure the peaceful resolution.

Submit original, unpublished Word or text file to www.info(at)21peacefulgenders.com.
1500 word max. Deadline 6/30/12. Paid in copies.

Read a review of this talk!

November 15, Tuesday 7 to 8:30 pm

Shelley Jackson, writer and artist

Rebecca Schneider, Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, Brown University

The question of the body — the body as question – is a recurring motif in the work [...]]]>

a conversation with Shelley Jackson and Rebecca Schneider

Read a review of this talk!

November 15, Tuesday
7 to 8:30 pm

Shelley Jackson, writer and artist

Rebecca Schneider, Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, Brown University

The question of the body — the body as question – is a recurring motif in the work of multi-media artist Shelley Jackson. Whether she is spiritualizing anatomy in her short story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy, imagining an alternate universe in which conjoined twins (“twofers) are the avant-garde of identity politics (Half Life), or “publishing” a short story (“Skin”) composed entirely of tattoos inked one word at time on the bodies of 2095 participants, Jackson presses her audience to ask, where does my body begin and end? “Skin” is subtitled “A Mortal Work of Art.” But the relationship among body, art, and mortality cross-crosses her work. This issue — whether or how art preserves the body, and with what de- and re-composing effects — is at the center as well of scholarly investigations by performance studies scholar Rebecca Schneider, whose publications include the books The Explicit Body in Performance and Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. Join us for an exciting evening of conversation between Jackson and Schneider at the body’s edge.

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

This event is free and open to the public.  Venue is wheelchair accessible.

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

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS) and the Department of Performance Studies.

Image courtesy of Shelley Jackson.

NYU’s Ireland House was the perfect setting for Fiona Brideoake’s talk, sponsored by the Irish Studies Program, the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, and [...]]]> From Irish Exile to Welsh Celebrity: The Queer Self-Fashioning of the Ladies of Llangollen:
“In Your Own Persons, Where You Are”
New York University, 5 October 2011

NYU’s Ireland House was the perfect setting for Fiona Brideoake’s talk, sponsored by the Irish Studies Program, the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, and the Department of English. The old-fashioned, ornate room provided the right sort of ambiance for Brideoake’s discussion of the infamous Ladies of Llangollen, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, who have been described as “‘mascots’ for the no-sex-before-1900 school” of proto-homo romantic friendships, understood to be “emotionally passionate but physically chaste.” Brideoake didn’t venture into the speculative, did-they-or-didn’t-they, even as she carefully situated Butler and Ponsonby in a queer genealogy of intimacy; instead she focused on the important role of their beloved estate in their canny self-fashioning, as they “painstakingly” transformed themselves from “queer Irish exiles” into the honorific “Ladies.”

Butler and Ponsonby successfully “eloped” together in May 1778, leaving Ireland for Wales with the begrudging blessing of their guardians and with small pensions, on which they were to live without further tarnishing their family names. They commenced a fifty-one year retirement just outside Llangollen, a town on the road connecting Dublin and London, which ensured them a “constant stream of prominent guests,” including noblemen and poets; and which, as Brideoake articulated, they used to their benefit in distancing themselves from their scandalous origins—Ireland!—even as their Irish connections remained important in the success of their retirement, as they “styled their home as a family seat, secured by pedigree and illustrious ancestors.”

Brideoake described Butler and Ponsonby as “amongst the most significant cultural celebrities of late Georgian Britain,” and accounts of their “inscrutable intimacy” were widespread and circulated both “in print and epistolary form.” She detailed the ways in which their relationship was “subject to prurient interest” from their contemporaries, including accounts in newspapers of their suspiciously gender-deviant style, meant to imply an untoward sexual relationship. Brideoake argued for their complex negotiation of that interest as evidence of their “sophisticated self-promo[tion],” as they relied upon their potentially scandalous identities to achieve prominence among the British gentry, even while working to deny any claims of scandal. They thus came to embody a “productive slippage between fame and notoriety,” as they simultaneously denied any charges of sexual deviance, while also “capitaliz[ing] on the fascinated frisson that surrounded their shared life.”

Brideoake argued that their extensive architectural improvements of their Welsh home, Plas Newydd, from “humble cottage to Gothic extravaganza,” worked to “subsume their transgressive status beneath an edifice of chaste provincial friendship,” and served, along with their extensive library, as their “material and textual refutation of Sapphic scandal.” They clad the cottage, inside and out, in ornately carved Welsh oak, echoing the architectural style of their neighbors in order to “assert possession of similar temporal and geographical ties.” The “sheer materiality” of the oak-clad house—which they didn’t own, but rented, until 1819, well after its Gothic transformation—allowed Butler and Ponsonby to portray themselves as “sexually virtuous Welsh gentry.”

While Brideoake emphasized that the “irreproachable gentility” of their home and persons shouldn’t imply that their “unconventional ménage” was “accepted uncritically,” she suggested that the “increasing eccentricities” of their later years implies that the success of their material accrual of social capital was such that it “authorized, with time, their increasing oddity.” Thus they were free, eventually, to act “like a couple of hazy and crazy old sailors,” living out their lives together in style. As Ponsonby wrote in a letter before their departure from Ireland: all she wanted was to “live and die with Miss Butler.” After 51 years of romantic friendship and cohabitation, the Ladies were buried together in a three-sided tomb—along with their maid; however, as Brideoake said, that is “a whole other course of interest.”

–Julia DeLeon

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

(1819 image of Butler and Ponsonby is owned by the British Library, call number/ms details Add. 59655 f. 78)

Read a review of this talk!

October 5, Wednesday 7 to 8:30 pm

Fiona Brideoake, Literature, American University

Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby eloped together from Kilkenny in 1778. They settled in the [...]]]> FROM IRISH EXILE TO WELSH CELEBRITY: THE QUEER SELF-FASHIONING OF THE LADIES OF LLANGOLLEN

a lecture by Fiona Brideoake

Read a review of this talk!

October 5, Wednesday
7 to 8:30 pm

Fiona Brideoake, Literature, American University

Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby eloped together from Kilkenny in 1778. They settled in the North Welsh village of Llangollen, their location on the road linking Dublin and London ensuring them a steady stream of prominent guests. Throughout their fifty-one years of domestic ‘retirement,’ Butler and Ponsonby were plagued by insinuations that their relationship was sexual. They responded by transforming their cottage into a Gothic mansion clad in local oak, masking their status as impecunious and sexually suspect exiles with a literal veneer of Welsh historicity. They established an extensive private library and located themselves within gentry and aristocratic networks of literary sociability, consolidating their affective alliances and distancing themselves from the charges of female social and sexual mobility associated with public circulating libraries. They cultivated friends including Edmund Burke; the Duke of Wellington; George Canning, and Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, drawing on Anglo-Irish social capital while asserting their enduring association with the picturesque Vale of Llangollen, this performative identity eventually reified by their designation as ‘the Ladies of Llangollen.’ Accounts of their inscrutable intimacy circulated widely in print and epistolary form, rendering them among the most significant cultural celebrities of late-Georgian Britain.

Butler and Ponsonby’s performance of geographic and class identity distanced them from both the putatively metropolitan vices of sapphism and the sexualized ‘stain’ of Butler’s Irish Catholic upbringing. As they were transformed over the course of their retirement into central, and increasingly eccentric, features of the British cultural landscape, they also came to embody the productive slippage between fame and notoriety, rendering their corporate identity a form of the commodified cultural production that Clara Tuite terms “scandalous celebrity.” Butler and Ponsonby may thus be recognized as both sophisticated self-promoters and producers of a distinctive and nationally hybrid form of queer celebrity, their identity as Irish exiles at once underpinning their public prominence and necessarily erased by their successful self-fashioning.

Glucksman Ireland House
One Washington Mews
at 5th Avenue between 8th Street and Washington Square Park

For more information, please contact the NYU Glucksman Ireland House at 212-998-3950.

This event is free and open to the public.  Venue is wheelchair accessible.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Irish Studies Program, the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, and the Department of English.

1819 image of Butler and Ponsonby is owned by the British Library, call number/ms details Add. 59655 f. 78

Katherine M. Graham, CSGS Visiting Scholar

Wednesday, March 9, 2011 11:30 am to 1:30 pm

The Great Room 19 University Place

*Lunch will be served. Please RSVP by Monday, March 7, 5 p.m. for this event through the following link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/YGNKRP6

Katherine M. Graham is a Visiting [...]]]> Revenge, the Queer and the ‘(neo-) Jacobean’

Katherine M. Graham, CSGS Visiting Scholar

Wednesday, March 9, 2011
11:30 am to 1:30 pm

The Great Room
19 University Place

*Lunch will be served. Please RSVP by Monday, March 7, 5 p.m. for this event through the following link:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/YGNKRP6

Katherine M. Graham is a Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality where she is currently conducting research on the intersections between revenge, the queer and the ‘Jacobean’. She is a PhD student at Birkbeck College, University of London and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, as well as a Visiting Lecturer at University of Westminster, U.K. She holds Master’s degrees in Cultural and Critical Studies from Birkbeck College, University of London and in Text and Performance Studies from King’s College, University of London and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Abstract:

In late-Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedy undertaking an act of revenge arguably works to ‘queer’ both gender and time. Post-1968 British re-imaginings of revenge tragedies – often referred to as ‘neo-Jacobean’ – displace this relationship between queerness and revenge, sometimes implicitly suggesting that the queer itself causes or creates revenge.

This term ‘neo-Jacobean’ is applied to playwrights whose work evokes – either through structure, motif, imagery or language – plays from the Jacobean period. These contemporary re-imaginings utilise extreme violence, foreground the theatrical, employ ‘black humour’ and are often about sex and death. The term ‘neo-Jacobean’ creates a fracture in temporality, establishing difference from the present time by privileging an association with the past – making past present. In this paper I will engage with the ‘neo-Jacobean’ work of two post-68 British writers – Howard Barker and Sarah Kane – considering how the term positions these writers and how they themselves make engagements with their Renaissance forebears. My work is creative as well as critical and part of my current project involves me writing a queer, ‘contemporary’, ‘Jacobean’ revenge tragedy – The Daughter’s Tragedy. My paper will also include a performance of the revenger’s monologue from this piece.

*Please RSVP by Monday, March 7, 5 p.m. for this event through the following link:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/YGNKRP6

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 [...]]]> 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.

February 17 to 20, Thursday to Sunday various times

Contact baldwinconference@gmail.com for information

For conference schedule, locations and other details, click HERE (pdf format).

Staged in the context of global economic insecurity, a planet gripped by the ravages of war and climate change, ever-increasing gaps [...]]]> JAMES BALDWIN’S GLOBAL IMAGINATION

a multi-site conference event

February 17 to 20, Thursday to Sunday
various times

Contact baldwinconference@gmail.com for information

For conference schedule, locations and other details, click HERE (pdf format).

Staged in the context of global economic insecurity, a planet gripped by the ravages of war and climate change, ever-increasing gaps in wealth, as well as rampant fundamentalism (East and West), “James Baldwin’s Global Imagination” is intended as an examination of globality not simply as a matter of demography but as an urgent call to re-consider the contemporary utility of Baldwin’s expansive injunction to William Faulkner (and, in fact, to us all), “[t]hat any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.” These proceedings are thus proposed as an opportunity to take seriously Baldwin’s consistent and insistent proposal that categories of difference represent an early misnaming, a dangerous and cowardly misrecognition of the moral imagination required to confront not only our mortality but also the brutal legacies of our collective histories.

Taking Baldwin’s vision as our starting point, this conference aims, among other related concerns, to make legible the continued impacts of U.S. state racism in this putatively post-racial period. In this post-Civil Rights epoch saturated by disorienting fictions of progress circulating alongside the vulgar traffic in difference that characterizes much of late-capitalist popular consumption, critical appraisals of such processes are timely and necessary. This orienting intellectual posture illuminates the continued structural and identitarian restraints which remain the most dominant features of global life, and has particular implications for policy-making, interdisciplinary scholarship, as well as twenty-first century conceptions of the self that refuse the false, or, more precisely, rigid, character of borders and disciplines.

Confirmed plenary speakers, respondents, and musicians:

M. Jacqui Alexander, University of Toronto
Awam Amkpa, New York University
Eshter Armah, journalist, playwright
Rich Blint, New York University
Marcellus Blount, Columbia University
Nicholas Boggs, Columbia University
Herb Boyd, Baldwin Biographer
Jennifer Brody, Duke University
Guillermo Brown, musician
Courtney Bryant, Columbia University; musician
James Campbell, writer, editor, Baldwin biographer
Margo Crawford, Cornell University
Thulani Davis, author and journalist, New York University
Manthia Diawara, New York University
Douglas Field, Staffordshire University
Steven Fullwood, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL
Rashidah Ismaili AbuBakr, poet
Tamar-Kali, musician
Randall Kenan, author
Lovalerie King, Penn State University
Morely, musician
David Leeming, Baldwin biographer
D. Quentin Miller, Suffolk University
Jennifer Morgan, New York University
Brian Norman, Loyola University, Maryland
Sedat Pakay, photographer, filmmaker; Baldwin friend and collaborator
Robert Pollack, Columbia University
Darryl Pinckney, writer
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, writer
Avital Ronell, New York University
Bill Schwarz, Queen Mary, University of London
Richard Sennett, New York University and the London School of Economics
Nikhil Singh, New York University
Somi, musician
Aisha Karefa-Smart, niece of James Baldwin
Hortense J. Spillers, Vanderbilt University
Greg Tate, writer, journalist, musician
Kendall Thomas, Columbia University
Colm Toibin, writer
Quincy Troupe, poet, editor, New York University
Imani Uzuri, musician
Cheryl Wall, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Patricia J. Williams, Columbia University
Keith Witty, musician
Magdalena Zaborowska, University of Michigan

Conference program committee:
Rich Blint, New York University
Douglas Field, Staffordshire University, UK
Bill Schwarz, Queen Mary, University of London

Co-sponsored by these NYU units: Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, Program in Africana Studies; Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality; Global Programs and Multicultural Affairs; Humanities Initiative; Institute for Public Knowledge; Institute of African-American Affairs;

and by the Brecht Forum; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and the Studio Museum in Harlem.