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

REVIEW: The Racial Genealogy of Excellence: “Excellence Is The Watchword”

Robert — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 15:54:58 +0000

The Racial Genealogy of Excellence:
“Excellence Is The Watchword”
New York University, 14 September 2011

Roderick A. Ferguson kicked off the fall CSGS calendar of events with a chapter from his provocatively titled forthcoming volume, The Reorder Of Things: On The Institutionalization of Difference. Professor Ferguson contextualized this project in relation to his previous work,the influential Aberrations in Black, which he called a book he wrote because “[he] wanted to write a book [he] wanted to read.” Following that trend, he began The Reorder of Things in 2009,when he became chair of the American Studies Department at University of Minnesota, and wanted to write a book to “make sense of [his] own life,” as well as “the life we all inherited.”

He described the project as his attempt to answer the question: “how did we get here?” by examining the institutionalization of interdisciplinarity and “rethink[ing] some shibboleths about the contemporary university” as strictly a corporate setting. Instead, he asked: how do we inhabit and exceed corporatization, and what might be in excess of corporate culture? His talk resonated with the roundtable discussions on negotiating institutionalization from last spring’s New Majorities II conference, as he thoughtfully considered “how we might be in the university but not necessarily of it,” using both historical context and examples from his own experience at the University of Minnesota.

The chapter he presented, “The Racial Genealogy of Excellence,” focused on the discourse of excellence in relation to what he called the “undertheorized” open admissions movement at New York’s City College—particularly as articulated in June Jordan’s essay “Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person”—in order to track the contradictory impulses that shape our contemporary experience of institutionalization. While excellence was circulated as a discourse that promised a future of anti-racist liberal democracy, Jordan described excellence as “fundamentally antagoniz[ing] democratic understandings of the people, constructing them as the antithesis of that category’s principles.” This “critical suspicion of excellence” prompted Ferguson to consider the exclusivity of the category of excellence, and its intimate ties to racial and economic projects.

In 1969, when Jordan was on faculty at City College, 200 students shut down campus for two weeks before the college agreed to the students’ demands for the admission of more minority students. In his close readings, Ferguson described Jordan’s essay, which elaborates the demands made by student activists, as a prompt that “begs us to interrogate the histories of racial domination that make up the underside of excellence,” pointing to the ways standards of excellence are part of racialized genealogies of slavery, racism and neo-colonialism. He argued that the discourse of excellence– and the activist responses to its effects– are crucial in comprehending contemporary social relations. The category of excellence in the 60s “shaped social relations nationally and globally,” with real effects on ideological and economic spheres through the dynamic relationship between governments and universities. College campuses, which were more and more coming to be funded by the state, were considered a way to “restage the degradations of slavery” because excellence theoretically allowed minoritized subjects to “break free from days of debasement,” signaling instead “that long-awaited morning” when the “past could finally be sloughed off and the day could begin anew.” Yet the tension between getting as many people into classrooms as possible and maintaining high standards of admission demonstrated the difficulty of preserving an ideal of excellence while striving for the creation of an egalitarian society—a still-relevant dilemma.

The demands from City College activists in the face of the discourse on excellence demonstrate the contradiction that shapes our contemporary moment, as their demands included what Ferguson described as both a desire for the “dynamism of community,” and a “desire for institutional forms that would ultimately restrict that dynamism.” Now, interdisciplinary fields are “inheritors and negotiators of this living contradiction,” between the seductive and restrictive potential of institutionalization.

Having thus answered his initial query—“how did we get here?”—Ferguson followed up in the Q&A with a volley of responses to the implicit next question: what do we do now? Calling on James Baldwin’s desire to educate students in ways the academy never intended, Ferguson insisted that the work of scholarship must be tied to institutional transformation and “change we can see,” for both scholars and students. “We have to assume power over this stuff,” he said; and sometimes that means recognizing funding as a technology of interpellation in the university, and paying for our own lunch.

–Julia DeLeon

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

Pink Dollar Monsters: Why Queers are Gaggin’ at GaGa and Glee

Robert — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 13:58:21 +0000

Tuesday, April 19
7 to 9 pm

The last Counterpublic Collective session of the spring season will look at pop artist Lady Gaga and hit TV show Glee through the relationship between capitalism and queer identity. Both Lady Gaga and Glee have been praised for their impact on and promotion of gay culture and politics: Gaga advocates for issues like the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell; Glee features gay and lesbian actors, same-sex storylines, and has tackled imminent topics like bullying in high schools. What happens when we look at Lady Gaga and Glee as a part of what Ann Pellegrini calls “commodity capitalism”?

Gaga throughout her career has referenced the continuum of queerness (bisexuality in Poker Face, trans/intersex references and voguing in Telephone, the origins of same-sex desire in Born This Way) while Glee depends on representing the panoply of “the Other” (the overweight Black girl, pregnant cheerleader, boy in a wheelchair, boy with a single mother, Asian girl with a stutter, girl with two gay dads, Jewish boy with an afro, etc.) to market and expand its viewership.

According to Forbes magazine, Lady Gaga is the 7th most powerful woman in the world, and just recently, Glee broke the record of most singles on the Billboard music charts with 113, a record previously held by the Beatles. Do Lady Gaga and Glee represent cultural and political progress or evidence of a depoliticized and commodified gay movement?

Facilitator: Juanes Hellman, Counterpublic Collective

Moderator: Jules Marx, Pride in Practice

NYU Silver School of Social Work
1 Washington Square North, Parlor
NYC

Required Readings:

Pellegrini, Ann. “Consuming Lifestyle: Commodity Capitalism and Transformations in Gay Identity” in Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism p.134-145

Suggested Readings:

“Has Lady GaGa Redefined What it Takes to be a Gay Icon?” from Gay.com Daily.

“Glee: A Money Making Machine”.

Presented by the Counterpublic Collective and the NYU Silver School of Social Work Pride in Practice; co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.

Facebook event page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/event.php?eid=137190839688136

Panel Discussion on International Solidarity with India’s Sex Workers’ Rights Movement

djm489 — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 20:52:32 +0000

Panel Discussion on International Solidarity with India’s Sex Workers’ Rights Movement

Wednesday, April 13
5-7pm
The Brecht Forum, 451 West St. (West Side Highway), betw. Bank and Bethune

Click here for directions!

Free and open to the public!

Dr. Smarajit Jana, one of the founders of the DMSC (Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee) in Calcutta, India, and his colleague, a member of DMSC’s organizing committee, are visiting the US in April, and will be speaking at the Brecht Forum on Wednesday, April 13, 5-7pm.

The DMSC is a collective forum of 65,000 sex workers and serves as a model of labor organizing within the sex worker rights community. DMSC has been extremely successful in securing support for their work from the communist-led government of the Indian state of West Bengal, making the organization unique in the kinds of allies it has made in the course of doing its work. However, opportunities for sex workers from the Global South to meet with fellow activists, like-minded scholars and allies in the Global North are few and far between, unlike the opportunities for networking among anti-human-trafficking activists, which abound, due to governmental support for the abolition of prostitution. This exciting event will bring together sex workers’ and labor rights activists in New York with activists from India in a rich discussion on what’s happening, and what the way forward might be.

This event is sponsored by: the Sex Workers’ Outreach Project (SWOP)-NYC, The Brecht Forum, South Asia Solidarity Initiative, the Barnard Center for Research on Women, the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a coalition of sex workers’ rights advocates in New York City.

James Baldwin’s Global Imagination: a multi-site conference event

Robert — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 16:42:04 +0000

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.

Intimacies Deferred: Genealogies of Freedom – Lecture with Lisa Lowe

djm489 — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 20:31:39 +0000

Intimacies Deferred: Genealogies of Freedom

The Helen Pond McIntyre ’48 Lecture with Lisa Lowe
Thursday, 11/4, 6:30 pm
James Room, 4th Floor Barnard Hall
Barnard College
3009 Broadway (at 117th Street)

Historians characterize the early nineteenth-century arrival of Chinese “coolies” to the Americas as “the transition from slavery to free labor,” in which the abolition of slavery and the introduction of indentured labor comprised the conditions for the emergence of liberal political reason, connecting the rise of bourgeois political economic institutions in Europe and North America to plantations in the Atlantic and the Pacific. In this lecture, Lisa Lowe, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego, will explore the 1840s-50s as a period of the ascendancy of “free trade,” the rubric under which Britain and the U.S. sought to “open” Chinese ports, observing that the “coolie” not only figured a new division of labor, but became a sign of the shift from colonial mercantilism to a new international trade in manufactured goods.

Lisa Lowe teaches in the departments of Comparative Literature, Ethnic Studies, and Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She studied European intellectual history at Stanford, and French literature and critical theory at UC Santa Cruz. Her research and teaching interests are French, British, and U.S. literatures, and the topic of Asian migration within European and American modernities. She has published books on orientalism, immigration, and culture within globalization.

This event is free and open to the public. For more information, please visit www.barnard.edu/bcrw or call (212) 854-2067.

Lucy Trainor
Program Manager
Barnard Center for Research on Women

Phone: (212) 854-2067
Fax: (212) 854-8294
http://www.barnard.edu/bcrw

States of Devotion: Religion, Neoliberalism, and the Politics of the Body in the Americas

Robert — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 15:35:03 +0000

STATES OF DEVOTION:
RELIGION, NEOLIBERALISM, AND THE POLITICS OF THE BODY IN THE AMERICAS

November 4 & 5, Thursday & Friday
10 am to 7 pm

For more information: http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/announcements/728-nov-4-5-states-of-devotion

For a PDF of the full program, click here.

This conference aims to promote and strengthen interdisciplinary dialogue about the changing role and place of religious discourses and practices in the wake of the transformations wrought by neoliberal globalization upon communities, societies and polities across the Hemisphere. This event is part of a multi-year project on ‘Religion and Politics in the Americas’ funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. Starting from the understanding that conceptions and models of “pluralism” or “secularism” vary across national contexts and regional geographies, we want to focus our attention on the ways in which the retraction of the state and the unrestrained acceleration of economic forces and market logics—neoliberal globalization—have transformed the experience of religiosity as well as the role and influence of religion across the Americas. As religious life has become increasingly channeled through the complex mechanisms of a neoliberal marketplace, the market has increasingly taken on roles and functions previously occupied by the state across broad social arenas. These transformations have not only affected discrete areas of social and economic policy, such as health care, education and security, but have also given rise to new private-public interfaces such as faith-based initiatives and discourses of volunteerism that have supplanted the discourses of rights. This shift has also required the production of new kinds of subjects, emblematized by the shift from citizen to consumer. We are particularly interested in the ways in which religious diversity has been variously enabled, foreclosed, harnessed and even commodified by the neoliberal state. In this context, we also wish to explore how public debates over gender and sexuality serve as flashpoints illuminating the wider workings of the state’s ongoing negotiation with religion and religious difference. Sexuality and sexual life more broadly connect individuals to the state as citizens, to the market as consumer-laborers, and to the supposedly traditional values represented by religion. But how this happens, and with what policy implications on a range of issues, will not be the same in every national context.

Confirmed participants include:

Ana Amuchástegui (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana)
Roberto J. Blancarte (Colegio de México)
Susana Cook (Independent artist)
Rafael de la Dehesa (City University of New York)
Emerson Giumbelli (Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro)
Marcial Godoy-Anativia (New York University)
Macarena Gómez-Barris (University of Southern California)
Janet Jakobsen (Barnard College)
Leda Martins (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais)
Elizabeth McAlister (Wesleyan University)
Bethany Moreton (University of Georgia)
Kemy Oyarzún (Universidad de Chile)
Ann Pellegrini (New York University)
Anthony Petro (New York University)
Reverend Billy (The Church of Life After Shopping)
Jesusa Rodríguez (Resistencia Creativa)
Pablo Semán (IDES/Colegio de México)
Peggy Shaw (Split Britches)
Winnifred Sullivan (University of Buffalo)
Diana Taylor (New York University)
Moysés Zúñiga Santiago (Independent photojournalist)

Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor
Bowery @ East 5th Street

Co-sponsored by the NYU Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and CSGS and underwritten by generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation.

*Picture by: Adam Peleg*

The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism & the Racialization of Intimacy: David L. Eng

Robert — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 15:44:34 +0000

THE FEELING OF KINSHIP:
QUEER LIBERALISM AND THE RACIALIZATION OF INTIMACY

A lecture by David L. Eng

This talk has been CANCELED — we will reschedule for the fall 2011 semester — we apologize for the inconvenience.

David L. Eng, University of Pennsylvania

This talk is drawn from David L. Eng’s recent book The Feeling of Kinship. In that project, Eng investigates the emergence of “queer liberalism,” the empowerment of certain gays and lesbians in the United States economically through an increasingly visible and mass-mediated queer consumer lifestyle, and politically through the legal protection of rights to privacy and intimacy. Eng argues that in our “colorblind” age the emergence of queer liberalism is a particular incarnation of liberal freedom and progress, one constituted by both the racialization of intimacy and the forgetting of race. Through a startling reading of Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark legal decision overturning Texas’s antisodomy statute, Eng reveals how the ghosts of miscegenation haunt both Lawrence and the advent of queer liberalism.

Eng develops the concept of “queer diasporas” as a critical response to queer liberalism. A methodology drawing attention to new forms of family and kinship, accounts of subjects and subjectivities, and relations of affect and desire, the concept differs from the traditional notions of diaspora, theories of the nation-state, and principles of neoliberal capitalism upon which queer liberalism thrives. Eng analyzes films, documentaries, and literature by Asian and Asian American artists including Wong Kar-wai, Monique Truong, Deann Borshay Liem, and Rea Tajiri, as well as a psychoanalytic case history of a transnational adoptee from Korea. In so doing, he demonstrates how queer Asian migrant labor, transnational adoption from Asia, and the political and psychic legacies of Japanese internment underwrite narratives of racial forgetting and queer freedom in the present. A focus on queer diasporas also highlights the need for a poststructuralist account of family and kinship, one offering psychic alternatives to Oedipal paradigms.

David L. Eng is Professor in the Department of English, the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, and the Program in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America and co-editor of Loss: The Politics of Mourning, Q&A: Queer in Asian America, and a special issue of Social Text, “What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?”

Organized by CSGS; co-sponsored by the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute and the Department of Performance Studies.

This event is free and open to the public. Venue is wheelchair accessible but please call in advance to gain access. If you need sign language interpretation services or other accommodations, please let us know as soon as possible at 212-992-9540.

How Obscene is This! The Decency Clause Turns 20

Robert — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:25:50 +0000

How Obscene is This! The Decency Clause Turns 20: Panel I

Wednesday, September 15, 2010
6:30 to 8:30 p.m.

Tishman Auditorium
66 West 12th Street

free

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Congressional decision to require the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to consider “general standards of decency and respect” in awarding grants, the National Coalition Against Censorship and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School collaborate on two panel discussions and a video interview project evaluating censorship and arts funding today.

Prominent artists, non-profit arts organization directors, art dealers, and founders of alternative spaces examine issues related to how the introduction of the decency clause in particular, and the culture wars in general, have affected funding, free speech and self-censorship, and how attitudes towards notions of decency and respect for the values and beliefs of the American public have changed over the past twenty years.

Panel Discussion I

Survival vs. Autonomy: Public Funding of the Arts, Free Speech and Self Censorship

Have arts organizations modified their programming in the aftermath of the culture wars? What alternative funding sources and strategies have they had to employ? How does the commercial market relate to the issue of decency and community standards? What is the future of government funding for arts institutions and individual artists?

The panel examines how the introduction of the decency clause and culture wars over arts funding in general have contributed to a growing distinction between conservative and avant-garde institutions. A number of alternative organizations have sprung up that simply forfeit – or are prepared to forfeit – government funding. Panelists include founders of new alternative spaces that seek autonomy from government funding, leaders of art projects that have been supported by the NEA, and key figures in public art funding.

Moderated by Laura Flanders, GRITtv.

Participants:

Beka Economopoulos, Founder of Not an Alternative and No-Space Gallery
Bill Ivey, Former Chair of the NEA (1998-2001)
Magdalena Sawon, Owner and Director of Postmasters Gallery
Nato Thompson, Chief Curator at Creative Time
Martha Wilson, Founding Director of Franklin Furnace

The Politics and Poetics of Refugees

Robert — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:54:53 +0000

An Interdisciplinary Symposium at New York University

September 23 to 25, Thursday to Saturday

Keynote lecture by Thomas Keenan

Other participants include Eliot Borenstein, David Campbell, Ilana Feldman, Sara M. Green, Nina Ha, Zenia Kish, Jana Lipman, Louisa Schein, April Shemak, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Celina Su, and Miriam Ticktin

For more information, click HERE.

This symposium will explore the contributions that the humanities and cultural studies make to our understanding of refugee experience, by bring together scholars and practitioners who engage refugees as artists, activists, and combatants, rather than as “fearful people” without agency.

Department of Social and Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th & 5th Floors

Thursday, Sept. 23rd 6:00 – 8:30pm: opening remarks, documentary screening of Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, and discussion with filmmaker Zach Niles and Prof. Awam Amkpa, Associate Professor of Drama and Social and Cultural Analysis, Director of Africana Studies at NYU to be held at the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, 20 Cooper Square 4th Floor.

Friday, Sept. 24th 9:00am – 4:00pm: conference panels to be held at the Institute for Public Knowledge, 20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor.

Friday, Sept. 24th 4:30pm – 7:00pm: Keynote address by Thomas Keenan followed by discussion and reception to be held at the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor.

Saturday, Sept. 25th 9:30am – 1:00pm: conference panels to be held at the Institute for Public Knowledge, 20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor.

Eliot Borenstein
Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, Borenstein is the author of Overkill: Sex, Violence, and Russian Popular Culture after 1991 and Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1929. He is also editor and co-translator of Russian Postmodernism: Dialogue with Chaos by Mark Lipovetsky and has published numerous articles on contemporary Russian culture.

David Campbell
Professor of Cultural and Political Geography and a member of the Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies at Durham University. His many publications include the books National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, and Politics Without Principle: Sovereignty, Ethics and the Narratives of the Gulf War. He is currently working on a book about the global image economy and its production of pictorial representations of atrocity, famine, and war.

Ilana Feldman
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at George Washington University. She has published articles in a number of journals including Cultural Anthropology, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and History and Memory. Her book, Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority and the Work of Rule (1917-67), is in press with Duke University Press. She is editing a volume in progress entitled Government and Humanity.

Sara M. Green
Sara is Executive Director of A.R.T. (Art for Refugees in Transition), which she founded in 1999 in response to the humanitarian crisis in the Balkans. She has worked with refugee populations in Kosovo, Colombia and Thailand, where A.R.T. develops self-sustaining programs that draw on each community’s indigenous art forms and enable community elders to educate and incorporate younger generations in their cultural traditions. Sara earned her MBA from Columbia University, and also has a BFA in dance and danced professionally for ten years in the U.S. and Europe.

Nina Ha
Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Director of the World Literature Program at Creighton University. Her book in progress is titled American ‘Gook’ Examining Diasporic Vietnamese Masculinity and Sexuality.

Thomas Keenan
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and the Director of the Human Rights Project at Bard College. His publications include the book Fables of Responsibility as well as articles in PMLA, The New York Times, Wired, Aperture, Bidoun, and Political Theory. He is the editor of The End(s) of the Museum and the co-editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, New Media, Old Media, and other titles.

Zenia Kish
Ph.D. student in the American Studies Program at New York University. Her Master’s thesis in Media Studies examined representations of survivors and the politics of refugeeness in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. She has published on post-Katrina hip-hop in American Quarterly. Her doctoral studies concentrate on human rights, the reproduction of third world underdevelopment, agricultural imperialism and right to food movements.

Jana Lipman
Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Tulane University. She is the author of Guantanamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution, as well as articles about the role of the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay in foreign relations. She is currently writing about the relation of U.S. military bases and their significance for refugees and human rights in the second half of the twentieth century.

Louisa Schein
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural Politics and the book-in-progress, Rewind to Home: Hmong Media and Gendered Diaspora. She is also the co-editor of Translocal China: Linkages, Identities and the Reimagining of Space and the forthcoming Media, Erotics and Transnational Asia.

April Shemak
Assistant Professor of English as Sam Houston State University. She has published articles in Modern Fiction Studies, Textual Practice, and Postcolonial Text and is the author of the forthcoming book, Asylum Speakers: Caribbean Refugees and Testimonial Discourse.

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi
Currently a doctoral student at New York University writing her dissertation on the protection and governance of refugees as expressed in the architecture of camps and the broader urban, geographical, and cultural impacts of emergency planning for refugees. She is the author of The Library Book: Design Collaborations in the Public Schools about an initiative to revolutionize the culture of education to combat poverty in low-income New York City neighborhoods. Her background includes nonprofit work, freelance journalism, and architectural practice.

Celina Su
Associate Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Her work looks at civil society and the cultural politics of education and health policy. She is the author of Streetwise for Book Smarts and co-authored Our Schools Suck (with Gaston Alonso, Noel Anderson, and Jeanne Theoharis). She is the co-founding Program Officer for the Burmese Refugee Project, a non-profit organization that develops participatory models for community development among Shan refugees living in Thailand.

Miriam Ticktin
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at the New School for Social Research. Her research interests include anthropology of the human and humanitarianism; migration, camps and borders; sexual violence/violence against women; PTSD/trauma, and psychiatric humanitarianism. Her articles appear in American Ethnologist, SIGNS, Interventions, Ethnicities, and The Political and Legal Anthropology Review. Her forthcoming book, The Moral Emergency Complex: Humanitarianism, Sexual Violence and the Politics of Immigration in France, looks at how politics are enacted in the name of care and protection, under threat of emergency. She has also co-edited with Ilana Feldman the forthcoming volume, In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care.

Organized by the NYU Department of Social and Cultural Analysis; co-sponsored by CSGS.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Sexual Nationalisms

Robert — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:28:56 +0000

Gender, Sexuality and the Politics of Belonging in the New Europe

International Conference – 27 & 28 January 2011 – University of Amsterdam

Since 1989, and even more so after 9/11, the rise of new nationalisms has been inextricably linked to a refashioning of the politics, identities and imaginaries of gender and sexuality in Europe. The old virile nationalism analyzed by George Mosse is now being reinvented in the light of a new brand of sexual politics. Feminist demands and claims of (homo)sexual liberation have moved from the counter-cultural margins to the heart of many European countries’ national imaginations, and have become a central factor in the European Union’s production of itself as an imaginary community. Rhetorics of lesbian/gay and women’s rights have played pivotal roles in discourses and policies redefining modernity in sexual terms, and sexual modernity in national terms. How are these baffling shifts in the cultural and social location of sexuality and gender to be understood?

In Europe and beyond, the refashioning of citizenship contributes to the redefinition of secular liberalism as cultural whiteness. Homophobia and conservatism, gender segregation and sexual violence have been represented as alien to modern European culture and transposed upon the bodies, cultures and religions of migrants, especially Muslims and their descendants. In the process, the status of Europe’s ethnic minorities as citizens has come under question. How can the entanglement of sexual and gender politics, anti-immigration policies, and the current reinvention of national belonging be analyzed? How are we to understand the appropriation of elements of the feminist and sexual liberation agenda by the populist and Islamophobic right?

The prominence of sexual democracy in the remaking of European national imaginaries requires bringing the critique of gender and sexuality beyond second-wave feminism and post-Stonewall liberationist perspectives. In late-capitalist, post-colonial Europe, struggles for sexual freedom and gender equality no longer necessarily challenge dominant formations; on the contrary, they may be mobilized to shape and reinforce exclusionary discourses and practices. The new politics of belonging is thus inseparable from the new politics of exclusion. This shift has not been without consequences for progressive social movements. Whereas in social and cultural analysis, nationalism has long been associated with male dominance, sexual control and heteronormativity, certain articulations of feminism and lesbian/gay liberation have now become intimately entwined with the reinforcement of ethnocultural boundaries within European countries.

As feminist historian Joan W. Scott recently argued when she coined the provocative notion of ‘sexularism’, new forms of sexual regulation have been introduced, especially targeting migrants, their descendants, and other ‘non-whites’. Discursively defining the new national common sense, sexularism also operates at the level of the visceral, reaching deep into the sexual and racial politics, habits and emotions of everyday life. A required allegiance to sexual liberties and rights has been employed as a technology of control and exclusion – what could be called a ‘politics of sexclusion’. Symmetrically, the Europeanization of sexual politics has entailed counter-reactions both inside and outside Europe. In Eastern Europe admission to the European Union has been conditioned on the acceptance of the new standards of sexual democracy, which sometimes led anti-European reactions to also frame themselves in sexual terms. In Western Europe ‘non-‘whites can sometimes be tempted to identify with the caricatures imposed upon them.

An increasing number of scholars in the humanities and social sciences have begun to investigate the important shifts taking place in discourses of sexual freedom and gender equality across the continent. These shifts open up new arenas for ethnographic and other empirical research. What role do sex and gender play in various European nationalisms? In which cultural terms are sexual and gender boundaries articulated? What different trajectories can be discerned, and how can differences between countries be explained? What are the effects of these transformations at the level of the formation of community and subjectivity? How do these discursive shifts become tangible in everyday life? And how can sexual politics avoid the trap of exclusionary instrumentalization without renouncing its emancipatory promise?

In order to discuss such questions, we invite contributions grounded in ethnography and other empirical research along the five following themes:

1. The Nationalization of Gender Equality

In secular European imaginations of immigrants and their descendants, the Islamic headscarf in particular has been perceived as an axiomatic signifier of religious and gender oppression. It has been listed along other ‘uncivilized’ ills also attributed to ethnic minorities and disadvantaged neighborhoods, whether they be domestic violence, forced marriage, or female genital mutilations. In contrast, recently acquired milestones in gender equality, like the legal right to abortion, have been adopted by Left and Right politicians alike as new symbols of timeless national essences. What representations of gender have been conveyed by contemporary constructions of the nation? How have forms of domination between men and women been challenged and/or reproduced in neonationalist and secularist projects? In what ways are migrant women’s lives affected by the entwinements of feminist discourses and movements with these projects? How have those women experienced and handled being framed as simultaneously the main victims and the main accomplices of the new Islamic threat?

Whereas religion is understood as operating at the level of the embodied, the habitual, material and visceral aspects of secularism are generally ignored or obscured. But what is the secular counterpart of the religious body? What does a gendered politics of secularism look like? At times, restrictive policies against women wearing headscarves have been justified in terms of the necessary limitation of religion to the private sphere; at other times, they have been framed in terms of gender equality and feminist ideals. Should this justificatory plurality be taken at face value, or does it point to deeper and more complex resentments against postcolonial and other ‘non-white’ migrants?

2. The National Politics of Sexual Freedom

In Europe, ideals and practices of sexual freedom have mostly been experienced as a tangible break with formerly hegemonic religious traditions and the restraints of community and family. In particular, gay people have sometimes been framed as the very embodiment of modern liberalism, as self-fashioning, unattached, and autonomous subjects. Why have such representations been so effectively tied to the nationalization of modernity in some countries but not in others? What have been the specific trajectories of such representations, and how have they affected lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender identified people in everyday life? What new normativities have been shaped in the process? And what have been the consequences of these discourses for those who have been framed as the ‘others’ of sexual democracy – Muslims and ethnic minorities?

What have been the implications of such reinventions of sexual whiteness for everyday life in the global cities of Western Europe, and the sexual, cultural, religious and political diversity they offer? How have feminist and lesbian/gay movements been affected by these shifts in the social location of sexual and gender politics? What does ‘race’ have to do with the refashioning of sexual politics and identities? If sexual freedom and gender equality are being mobilized in a culturalist re-enactment of European racism, how does this affect white imaginaries and subjectivities? How are those (historically) excluded from whiteness affected by it? Which bodies come to be constructed in the sexual politics of neonationalisms? Which forms of ‘queerness’ are being authorized and which articulations of sexual otherness are being ‘queered’ and thus excluded from sexual normality? On what grounds does this occur, and how do these processes materialize in everyday life?

3. The Urban Geographies and Class Politics of Sexual Democracy

The interweaving of urban governance with sexual politics has been normalizing certain sexual spaces at the exclusion of others. In the context of an emergent urban entrepreneurialism and as part of gentrification processes, sexual others have been conscripted into urban politics and spatial renewal, while new hetero- and homonormativities have taken shape in the process. Gender representations have also played important roles in framing and representing cities as aesthetically and commercially attractive for business, tourists and aspiring residents. Simultaneously, certain brands of urban theory have celebrated gay men and women as the avant-garde of urban change, hence of the conquest of formerly working class and ethnic minority neighborhoods by bohemian middle and upper classes. What roles have sexuality and gay urban presence played in processes of gentrification? How have sex and gender been articulated in the urban governance of social marginalization?

How are the sexual politics of neoliberalism to be understood? What role does the market play in the sexual reinvention of nationalism and citizenship and in shaping new (homo)normativities? Is the stigmatization of Muslim migrants as sexually conservative a reenactment of discourses that in the past stigmatized working class communities as immoral, archaic or authoritarian? What do the class politics of ‘sexularism’ look like? What kinds of subjectivities are produced in new regimes of sexual progress?

4. The Sexual Politics of Immigration Policies

The ever-stricter immigration policies of Europe – both at national levels and at the level of the E.U. – have often been justified in terms of sexual democracy: migrants, especially from Africa or other Islamic countries, have been ostensibly kept out, not on racial, but on sexual grounds, in order to preserve the hard-won democratic values of Europe in the treatment of sexual minorities, and even more crucially, of women. As a consequence, these same migrants, whose matrimonial (forced, fake, etc.) or sartorial (hijab, niqab, etc.) practices have thus been under constant scrutiny, are expected to demonstrate a sincere adhesion to sexual democracy that is presumed inherent to European cultures, despite its very recent history and contemporary limitations.

How does such a constraint redefine the subjectivities of migrants – as well as that of their European partners? What does it mean for a woman of Islamic culture to be encouraged to reject her family’s expectations in order to express her sexual modernity? What are the strategies available to migrant women and sexual minorities who attempt to resist oppression, even violence, while refusing to be co-opted by anti-immigrant, if not xenophobic or racist, politics? In other words, what are the interactions between the sexual logic of immigration policies and the sexual imaginaries and practices of the migrants thus targeted?

5. European Sexual Modernization and Its Discontents

Today, the borders of Europe are also sexual boundaries. Admission into the E.U. requires identifying with the agenda of sexual democracy. At the same time, almost by definition, non-European countries are suspect. Turkey’s tradition of secularism largely inspired by the French historical model has not been sufficient to dispel the suspicion that this Muslim country is alien to European sexual democracy – as evidenced by the visible presence of the Islamic headscarf. In the same way, international campaigns against homophobia have largely been about the homophobia of others: the logic of human rights has focused more on legal repression than on legal discrimination – the penalization of homosexuality outside Europe rather than the exclusion of gays and lesbians from rights of marriage and adoption within Europe.

Conversely, the Europeanization of sexual democracy has fueled reactive nationalisms, not only in those countries that are bound to remain on the margins of Europe, such as the Maghreb, but also in recent E.U. members – regarding homosexuality in particular, for example, in Poland or Lithuania. How are European and non-European sexual politics reconfigured in this new context, i.e. what are the political consequences, in various countries within and outside of Europe, of this geopolitical context?

We invite all those interested to submit a one-page abstract and a short CV by: September 1, 2010.

Abstracts as well as questions can be sent to: Robert Davidson

Confirmed senior participants and speakers include: Jon Binnie, Sarah Bracke, George Chauncey, Stefan Dudink, Lisa Duggan, Didier Eribon, Eric Fassin, Jasbir Puar, Joan Scott, Judith Surkis.

Art exhibition: The conference will also include an exhibition displaying the work of artists who have been critically exploring those issues during the past decade.

Organizing Committee: Laurens Buijs, Sébastien Chauvin, Robert Davidson, Jan Willem Duyvendak, Eric Fassin, Paul Mepschen, Rachel Spronk, Bregje Termeer, Oscar Verkaaik

Organizing Institutions:

Amsterdam Research Centre for Gender and Sexuality (ARC-GS), UvA
Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire Sur Les Enjeux Sociaux (IRIS), EHESS, Paris
Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies, UvA
Research Cluster Dynamics of Citizenship and Culture, UvA
Research Centre for Religion and Society, UvA
Research Cluster Health, Care, and the Body, UvA