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

A Conversation with Queer Women in Public Service: A Panel Discussion

Robert — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:20:16 +0000

March 25, Thursday
7 to 9 PM

Margarita Lopez, Board Member of the New York City Housing Authority

Rosie Mendez, Member of the New York City Council from the 2nd District

Ann Northrop, journalist and activist, current co-host of TV news program Gay USA

Melissa Sklarz, first openly transgender public official in New York State

Moderated by C. Nicole Mason, PhD, Assistant Professor and Executive Director of the Women of Color Policy Network at NYU Wagner

With the election of Annise Parker as the first openly gay mayor of Houston, the nation’s 4th largest city, women are increasingly at the forefront of LGBT equity and American politics. As the New York Times recently observed regarding queer women and the entertainment industry, “The lengthening list of prominent “out” lesbians on the small screen — Ellen DeGeneres, Rachel Maddow, Suze Orman, Jane Velez-Mitchell, Wanda Sykes — isn’t quite mirrored by a comparable list of openly gay men.” Can the same be said for queer women in public service?

University Lecture Hall, Room 101
19 West 4th Street

The LGBTQ Alumni Council of New York University strives to foster a supportive and vibrant community for LGBTQ-identified alumni and allies; to educate LGBTQ alumni beyond their tenure at the University; to provide networking opportunities among and between LGBTQ alumni and students; and to advocate on behalf of the LGBTQ students, faculty, staff and alumni of NYU.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the NYU Office of LGBT Student Services, OUTLAW, Stonewall Policy Alliance, and CampGrrl

A Feminine Palette: Women Artists of the 19th and Early 20th Centuries

Robert — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:54:43 +0000

Presented by the Mount Vernon Hotel Museum & Garden

Friday, March 5th at 6:30 PM

Panelists Dr. Katherine Manthorne of City University of New York’s Graduate Center; Catherine Coleman Brawer, M.A. Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; and Ph.D student Whitney Thompson, also of City University of New York’s Graduate Center, discuss the work of three extraordinary yet often- overlooked 19th and 20th century artists. Eliza Pratt Greatorex was an illustrator of rural Manhattan; Hildreth Meière was famous for her murals in buildings throughout the country; and Fanny Palmer was a prolific Currier and Ives Lithographer. Guests are invited to learn about these unique women and how they became successful artists.

This program funded by the New York Council for the Humanities.

General admission to A Feminine Palette is $12 for Museum members and students and $15 for non-members. Reservations are recommended and can be made at (212) 838-6878. The Mount Vernon Hotel Museum & Garden is located at 421 East 61st Street between York and First Avenues. Nearest subway: N, W, R, 4, 5, 6 at the 59th Street/Lexington station.

ABOUT THE MOUNT VERNON HOTEL MUSEUM & GARDEN

The Mount Vernon Hotel Museum & Garden is dedicated to the collection, preservation, exhibition and research of art and artifacts pertaining to the Mount Vernon Hotel.

New York City’s only surviving day hotel, this landmarked building, which was constructed in 1799, brings the bygone era of old New York alive by promoting the dissemination of historical knowledge through docent-guided tours of its historic rooms, education programs, exhibitions, publications, lectures and symposia. For more information, please call 212.838.6878.

They Won’t Budge: African Diaspora in Europe

Robert — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:54:48 +0000

Panel Discussion & Film Screenings Exploring African Migration in Europe

The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts & The Africana Studies Program at New York University proudly present:

Sunday, November 15, 2009

PANEL DISCUSSION 10am—1pm

PART I: “Multivocal Identities of Africans in Europe”

PART II: “Metropolis: Africans and Mass Urbanization”

MEMBERS OF THE PANEL INCLUDE:

Awam Amkpa
Associate Professor, Drama/Social and Cultural Analysis (NYU)
Co-curator of They Won’t Budge: Africans in Europe

Annalisa Butticci
Research Fellow, University of Padua, Italy
Postdoctoral Fellow (08-09) Social and Cultural Analysis, Africana Studies Program (NYU)
Co-curator of They Won’t Budge: Africans in Europe

Rich Blint
PhD Candidate, American Studies Program (NYU)
Coordinator of Special Projects, Ctr. for Labor, Community & Policy Studies, CUNY

FILM SCREENINGS 2pm—6pm

FILMS INCLUDE:

Africa: Le Cri de la Mer (The Cry of the Sea) [Senegal, 2008]
Dir. Aicha Thiam

Dirty, Pretty Things [UK, 2002]
Dir. Stephen Frears

Africa Underground: Democracy in Dakar [USA, 2009]
Nomadic Wax & Sol Productions

Yes I Am! [Germany, 2006]
Dir. Sven Halfar [FILMTANK Germany]

Special Book Signing with Manthia Diawara, Author of We Won’t Budge

New York University
Department of Social & Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor New York, NY 10003 T: 212.992.9650

6 Train to Astor Place/B, D, F, V Trains to Broadway-Lafayette

RECAP: Biopolitics of the ‘Modern Body’: Contemporary Dilemmas

lmb294 — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:59:58 +0000

Emily Martin, Ed Cohen and Rebecca Young

“Biopolitics of the ‘Modern Body’: Contemporary Dilemmas”
Ed Cohen, Rutgers University
Emily Martin, New York University
Rebecca Young, Barnard College
@ the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU
October 7, 2009

This forum moderated by Emily Martin with Ed Cohen and Rebecca Young brought together their work in fascinating ways. It was both a two-pronged lecture and a meditation on “the” body and the ongoing search for the physical addresses of concepts like health, immunity, and sexuality. Together the two lectures made an ultimately Foucaldian point about just where that hinge is between the individual and the population and how we navigate the two.

My left arm sore from the hinge between self and community—arming myself for the ones I love at the NYU Medical Center that day, I was prepped for Ed Cohen’s talk. Beginning with the presumed equivalence between being a person and having a body (“just who or what has the body that I supposedly am?”), Cohen moved through the juridico-political history of the ways that immunity has been constructed as defense. In this idea of immunity we declare, “war on cancer” and “kill the germs that cause bad breath” creating untimely political acts in which defense is something very different than healing and our individuality provides the front line against disease. (And all this is quite topical, as Cohen points out, when you look at the current debates in Washington in which nationalized health care really will swiftly take down all vestiges of American individualism.) With something like SWINE FLU (about which I feel I can use this parenthetical venue to safely admit my 24hr-news-cycle-style-total-horror-all-the-time) Cohen raises the point: Why is the political question how fast can you get out the vaccines and who is first in line to take them instead of why the hell are so many people living next door to so many pigs? Why the focus on defense and not coexistence? At this point my notes devolve into speculative swine flu fantasy, but I have ordered Cohen’s book:

Because it looks amazing.

Rebecca Young’s was illuminating in a very different direction. Positing her talk within three sites—two recent and well-publicized sexuality studies and the historical struggle for a physical diagnosis of pedophilia—Young examines the scientific search for “objective measures of desire ” through scientific apparatus. The terms penile or vaginal plethysmography were new to me (but since her talk, I have been saying “plethysmography” in my head a lot), and the Internet has provided some illustrations:

Take a gander over at io9 to see some more.

Young points us to Straight, Gay or Lying? Bisexuality Revisted from the New York Times in 2005 in which bisexuality in men is scientifically disproved (ahem) by the kinds of “scientific and objective” measurements like the kinds depicted in the above images. In the later study What Do Women Want published this year in the New York Times women are shown scientifically and objectively (ahem) to have no kind of fixed sexuality because they are aroused by a multitude of sexual images. Including of primates. Well then. This omni-sexuality is theorized as an evolutionary adaptation to the constant threat of rape. Young provides us with not only with a problematized view of the merits, scientific or otherwise of these studies, but also brings up the question: where is the pressure coming from to do them? How is it that sexual orientation is “an important and meaningful thing to know about people in the first place?”

Far more troubling is the use of penile plethysmography in studies that seek to define pedophilia. The penile plethysmograph was developed in the 1950s by researcher Kurt Freund and first used to weed out draft dodgers claiming to be homosexual. As work with the plethysmograph continued, Freund began turning his work to the study of pedophilia and hebephilia in the 1960s at the Clark Institute in Canada. Young highlights the ways this work is deeply flawed—the fact that the tests can be learned and responses controlled after as little as one session, the weight of the tests falling on homosexual contact (to be designated as a pedophile an individual had to have sexual contact with two girls or one boy) and the exclusion of cases of incest from the control group. Family abuse situations were considered too “messy” and thus fathers and stepfathers that abused their daughters (a frequently unreported crime) were not included in testing—amounting to a systematic denial of incest.

In all three of these studies, the scientific search for the “physical address” of sexual orientation and desire in physical responses leaves skewed notions of safety and sexual danger, a physical address that in the end leads us to the bio-politics of the modern body. Paraphrasing Young: “in what way is this a good measure?”

Carole Vance and Rebecca Young

The panel was followed by lively debate that, as always, you are encouraged to continue in the comments section below.

by Lydia Brawner, NYU Peformance Studies Ph.D. candidate