“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 [...]]]> 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.

November 11, Friday 12:30 to 1:45 pm

Kane Race, Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney, and CSGS Visiting Scholar

How can we register the participation of a range of elements, extending beyond the human subject, in the production of HIV events and drug effects? [...]]]> a brown bag lunch talk with Kane Race

November 11, Friday
12:30 to 1:45 pm

Kane Race, Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney, and CSGS Visiting Scholar

How can we register the participation of a range of elements, extending beyond the human subject, in the production of HIV events and drug effects? In the context of proposals around biomedical prevention, there is a growing awareness of the need to find ways of responding to complexity, as everywhere new combinations of treatment, behavior, drugs, norms, meanings and devices are coming into encounter with one another, or are set to come into encounter with one another, with a range of unpredictable effects. In this paper I consider the operation of various framing devices that attribute responsibility and causation with regard to HIV events. I propose that we need to sharpen our analytic focus on what these framing devices do; their performativity – that is, their full range of worldly implications and effects. My primary examples are the criminal law and the randomized control trial. I argue that these institutions operate as framing devices: they attribute responsibility for HIV events, and externalize other elements and effects in the process. Drawing on recent work in science and technology studies as well as queer theory, I set out an analytic frame that may help clarify a new role for HIV social research. Attentiveness to the performative effects of these framing devices is crucial, I suggest, if we want better to attend to the global HIV epidemic.

Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
41-51 East 11th Street, 7th Floor, Room 741
between University Place and Broadway
wheelchair access at 85-87 University Place, between 11th and 12th Streets

This event is free and open to the public.  Bring your lunch, we’ll provide beverages and dessert!

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

Organized by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.

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 [...]]]> 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

Wednesdays: June 1 through July 27, 2011, 7 pm to 9 pm

Silver School of Social Work 1 Washington Square North

This summer, The Counterpublic will produce their second FREE summer intensive workgroup. From the organizers that bought you the Queer Theory & Queer of Color Critique Workgroup [...]]]> Queer Social Theory Summer Intensive Workgroup

Wednesdays: June 1 through July 27, 2011, 7 pm to 9 pm

Silver School of Social Work
1 Washington Square North

This summer, The Counterpublic will produce their second FREE summer intensive workgroup. From the organizers that bought you the Queer Theory & Queer of Color Critique Workgroup in summer 2010, we are proud to invite you to participate in our new project on queer social theory.

Explore key historical, theoretical, and political texts that examine the ways in which capitalism and oppression are understood to those working to change it.

Gain accessible foundations on the works of Karl Marx, the Gay Liberationists of the 1970’s, and recent Queer and Queer of Color attempts to transform our political present.

The series of 9 weekly meetings is open to the public and free of charge. Ongoing, open enrollment for all: you are not required to attend all sessions and will have access to free reading materials that have been approved for fair use and are not in violation of copyright laws; for those outside of NYC, you will also be able to follow the workgroup readings online and engage in discourse with peers through our discussion tab.

Join the Google Group to access workgroup materials — http://groups.google.com/group/counterpubliccollective

RSVP for the Event — https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=208292622534157

“Like” our Facebook Page for updates — https://www.facebook.com/counterpubliccollective

Facilitator — Juanes Hellman, MA, NYU Draper Interdisciplinary Program Alum

Moderator — Mito Logia, MSW (Expected May 2011) NYU Silver School of Social Work

Co-sponsors:
Progressive Student Think Tank, NYU
Pride in Practice, NYU Silver School of Social Work
Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS), NYU

In collaboration with Barnard’s Center for Research on Women (BCRW), the Public Feelings Salon, featuring Lauren Berlant, José Muñoz, Tavia Nyong’o, and Ann Pellegrini, inaugurated BCRW’s new Salon series with a [...]]]> Crying in Public, but Something Less Dramatic than That:
Reflections on the Public Feelings Salon At Barnard College
Barnard College, 12 April 2011

In collaboration with Barnard’s Center for Research on Women (BCRW), the Public Feelings Salon, featuring Lauren Berlant, José Muñoz, Tavia Nyong’o, and Ann Pellegrini, inaugurated BCRW’s new Salon series with a bevy of critical theory, beloved objects, political skepticism, and good feelings all around. In her introductory remarks, Janet R. Jakobsen, BCRW Director and Professor of Women’s Studies at Barnard College, described the evening’s focus on the way “‘public feelings’ [draw] our attention to how and why feelings and emotion…influence politics and notions of social belonging and intimacy.” Jakobsen explained that the salon was organized as a response to Berlant’s own long-time work on these questions. Berlant, Professor of English at the University of Chicago, has been instrumental in the Public Feelings Project, an informal assemblage of scholars and intellectuals that emerged post-9/11 to examine how feelings and desires that are not supposed to be public nonetheless drive much of what happens in public life.

As a way to generate a dynamic conversation, the forum was organized around a shared text. Each of the panelists was asked to read and offer a short public response to Berlant’s 2006 essay “Cruel Optimism”. As Jakobsen explained to the audience, by “cruel optimism” Berlant means the affective impasse encountered when “something you desire is an obstacle to your flourishing.” A once “optimistic relation becomes cruel” when the object that draws attachment “impedes the aim that brought you to it initially.”

José Muñoz, Chair of the Department of Performance Studies at New York University, contrasted his investment in utopianism, a longing for queerness that is “not yet here,” with Berlant’s investment in a call for “maintaining traction in our presentness.” While he identified their divergent perspectives by imagining Berlant “hunkered down in the foxhole of the ‘here and now’” while he “looks for the exit sign for ‘futurity,’” Muñoz identified a common agenda: to describe the “affective work we do to sustain ourselves” in the face of precariousness. Through a discussion of the photographs of Mark Morrisroe, a vital figure in the punk art scene in the 70s and 80s, Muñoz explains that enduring is not a nihilist practice. Heeding Berlant’s insight, these attachments keep us ticking despite abuse in the hopes of a better “good life” not yet available to minoritarian subjects.

The second speaker, Ann Pellegrini, Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at New York University, expanded upon the problematics of the “good life” of heteronormative futurity described by Muñoz. Picking up on language earlier used by Berlant, she stressed that how affects “get laminated to our attachments and…get magnetized…is a political question that comes back to the psychic.” To elucidate, Pellegrini turned to two of her own beloved objects—Freud and musicals, in particular to Stephen Sondheim’s Company, a musical about a single man (Bobby) surrounded by couples—to interrogate our perplexing commitments to these modes of attachments that we need to keep us alive. Pellegrini was particularly interested in the multiple endings of Company. Initially, Bobby rejected the couple form, likening it in his final song to “happily ever after in hell.” Sondheim was ultimately persuaded to write a new ending, a happier one in which Bobby seemed to embrace the couple form as the only way of “Being Alive.” “Alone is alone, not alive,” he sang, in the short segment of the song Pellegrini played for the audience. But, “is this the best we can hope for?” Pellegrini asked. As a counter, Pellegrini wondered whether the audience might willfully resist the new ending, and fantasize alternative ways of “being in company.” As Berlant herself argued, and as Pellegrini underlined, we must attach to objects in the world in order to survive. The political question is what forms might these attachments take? Putting up a slide with the final lines of “Being Alive”—“to help us survive being alive, being alive, being alive!”—Pellegrini called for an “us” multiplied well beyond the couple form. “This is not an ending,” she (non)concluded, “And fuck the reality principle.”

Next, Tavia Nyong’o, Associate Professor of Performance Studies at New York University, spoke of his own “object relation, similar to melancholia,” where one refuses to relinquish an object that is not quite lost but that “yokes [us] to [the] future.” Even with its ongoing appearance as a succession of transformed iterations, the object keeps him “stuck in a world” simultaneously “held open” by the object itself. And what was this irresistible object, this apple of Nyong’s I? A public confession: Nyong’o is a Mac guy, who clings to his attachment by “[replacing] each obsolete object with its successor.” Citing both Steve Jobs’ public battle with pancreatic cancer and how man’s technological prosthetics do not “make us feel godlike,” Nyong’o explained how technology is one of the few objects that men in particular can permissibly have public feelings about, allowing them opportunities to reveal their vulnerabilities. This vulnerability is inherent to the unflinching object-love of Mac products itself, where the future promises a steady stream of cruel objects with new capacities—moving laterally from the desktop to the ipad—produced in potentia. Attending to our attachments to this series of prostheses, Nyong’o suggested that our “unwillingness to let go” of objects that promise to be outmoded by the time we’ve figured out how to use them may in fact allow us to critique how the “present [is] poised to unfold…laterally.” This is, he said, a phenomenon “everywhere experienced but infrequently worked through.”

In her response to this set of opening presentations, Berlant explained that: “Public spheres are affect worlds…We don’t attend them but discover them…[We] have to have them to survive.” Occupied by the questions of “how feelings bind us to people [and things] we do and don’t know,” she wondered, “how do you make a better world,” especially when these attachments are what help us endure and simultaneously keep us from flourishing? As she put it, following Freud, “Nobody ever willingly or easily abandons a libidinal position.” For example, our “attachment to politics is the attachment to being [part of] the collective world.” But she made an important distinction, explaining that “politics” is the place of disappointment, but the “political is where you’re always excited.” She sees the “inevitable loss of our object world…as [an] opportunity to build new, better objects for our future.” This approach would thereby create “new forms of optimism we can trust.” But to do so, we “have to be open to nonsovereignty,” particularly in relation to our fantasies. Referring to Pellegrini’s musical critique of romantic normativity, Berlant called for the valorization of multiple forms of attachments to other humans, “different ways of thinking about what a life is…[even when we] have only one and a half models for what a ‘good life’ is.”

–Krista Miranda

Krista Miranda is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at New York University and the Book Reviews Editor for Woman and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. Her prior graduate work includes an MA in Humanities and Social Thought with a concentration in Gender Politics and an MA in Writing and Publishing.

April 12, Tuesday 6:30 to 8:30 pm

READ THE REVIEW! Crying in Public, but Something Less Dramatic than That: Reflections on the Public Feelings Salon at Barnard College

For more information: http://www.barnard.edu/bcrw/events.htm#salon

CSGS is [...]]]> PUBLIC FEELINGS SALON

a panel with Lauren Berlant, Lisa Duggan, Janet R. Jakobsen, José Muñoz, Tavia Nyong’o, and Ann Pellegrini

April 12, Tuesday
6:30 to 8:30 pm

READ THE REVIEW! Crying in Public, but Something Less Dramatic than That: Reflections on the Public Feelings Salon at Barnard College

For more information: http://www.barnard.edu/bcrw/events.htm#salon

CSGS is thrilled to continue its uptown-downtown collaboration with the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW) by co-sponsoring the inaugural event in BCRW’s new Salon series. This evening’s engaged dialogue brings together several prominent and influential scholars whose work explores how affect and emotion influence public life. Just as feminism has sought to identify the ways in which the personal and the political are linked, the study of “public feelings” draws our attention to how and why feelings and emotion (assumed to be a private, personal experience) influence politics and notions of social belonging and intimacy. This interactive conversation, moderated by BCRW Director and Professor of Women’s Studies, Janet Jakobsen, will focus on how perceptions of citizenship and solidarity are often bound up in emotions – like optimism, rage, and disgust – and how feelings can govern policy and political debates.

Barnard College
Sulzberger Parlor — Barnard Hall, 3rd Floor
117th Street and Broadway

Lauren Berlant is the George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago, and the author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship and The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia and Everyday Life. Her most recent book is The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture.

Lisa Duggan is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. She is the author of Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy and Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence and American Modernity.

José E. Muñoz is chair of the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. He is the author of Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics and Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.

Tavia Nyong’o is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at New York University, where he teaches African American and black diasporic performance, popular and subcultural musics, performance historiography and research methods, and queer studies. His book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance and the Ruses of Memory, won the 2010 Erroll Hill Award of the American Society for Theatre Research.

Ann Pellegrini is Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at New York University, where she also directs NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. She is the author of Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race; co-author, with Janet R. Jakobsen, of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance; co-editor, with Daniel Boyarin and Daniel Itzkovitz, of Queer Theory and the Jewish Question; and co-editor, with Jakobsen, of Secularisms.

Organized by the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW); co-sponsored by CSGS and the NYU Office of LGBT Student Services.

This event is free and open to the public.

Co-sponsored by CLAGS, the PhD Program in English and the Poetics Group

Abigail Child

Michael D. Snediker

Timothy Liu

This series of talks by and about contemporary poets and artists, curated by Tim Peterson (Trace) and titled in honor [...]]]> Tendencies: Poetics and Practice

Co-sponsored by CLAGS, the PhD Program in English and the Poetics Group

Abigail Child

Michael D. Snediker

Timothy Liu

This series of talks by and about contemporary poets and artists, curated by Tim Peterson (Trace) and titled in honor of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, explores the relationship between queer theory, poetic manifesto, poetic practice, and pedagogy. This event will feature poets Abigail Child, Michael D. Snediker, and Timothy Li. Abigail Childis a poet, director, producer, and writer of a number of films; her most recent book is This is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film (2005). Michael D Snediker is the author of Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions (2009) and the poetry collection Nervous Pastoral (2008). Timothy Liu is the author of eight books of poems, most recently Polytheogamy and Bending the Mind Around the Dream’s Blown Fuse (2009); he has also edited Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry (2000). Visit http://tendenciespoetics.com

Visit http://centerforhumanities.pmailus.com/pmailweb/ct?d=cwAFAAAJWwAENLw for commentary and sample recordings from past events, as well as news about upcoming events.

Thursday, December 9, 7:00pm
The Skylight Room (9100)
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Ave (btwn 34th & 35th )

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

No registration. Please arrive early for a seat. 212-817-2005

www.centerforthehumanitiesgc.org

November 22, Monday 12:30 to 1:45 pm

Alpesh Patel, CSGS Visiting Scholar and Independent Art Historian/Cultural Arts Producer

In the Western art world, a curious alliance has formed between those that are sympathetic to identity politics and those that [...]]]> CAMP AESTHETICS AND DESI VISUAL CULTURE

A Brown Bag Lunch Talk with Alpesh Patel

November 22, Monday
12:30 to 1:45 pm

Alpesh Patel, CSGS Visiting Scholar and Independent Art Historian/Cultural Arts Producer

In the Western art world, a curious alliance has formed between those that are sympathetic to identity politics and those that have always been suspect of aesthetic judgment being tied to any notion of identity: both groups agree that we are in a post-identity era. The former does so purportedly to distinguish between different waves of artistic production concerned with primarily racial, gendered, and sexual difference, but seems to fall back on conceptualizing identity as positional or fixed; while the latter suggests that we are post or over identity, but only to return artistic value back to a dis-embodied art object. Drawing on camp theoretical models and their connections with theories of aesthetics, phenomenology, and identity construction (colonial, gender, and queer) and honing in on an exploration of Desi (the Hindi word meaning “from my country”) as affective and visual knowledge, this talk examines a series of contemporary artworks that suggest much more complex understandings of difference as multi-sensorial, spatial, and temporal configurations between and within subjects.

41-51 East 11th Street, Room 741
between University Place and Broadway
(wheelchair access at 85-87 University Place, between 11th and 12th Streets)

Part of the Brown Bag Lunch Talk Series — bring your own lunch and we’ll provide beverages and dessert!

Image: detail of artist Rina Banerjee’s 2003 mixed media installation, Take Me, Take Me, Take Me . . . to the Palace of Love. Installed in Peabody Essex Museum, Essex, MA.

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=323299477808&ref=nf

The New School for Social Research

Saturday May 1, 2010 10 am – 6 pm

Wollman Hall – 65 West 11th St. 5th floor

free and open to all

Featured speakers:

Lisa Duggan Jasbir Puar Jonathan Ned Katz Jose E. Munoz

Contact info:

Web: www.politicallyqueer.tumblr.com

Email: [...]]]> 2010 Department of Politics Graduate Student Conference

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=323299477808&ref=nf

The New School for Social Research

Saturday May 1, 2010
10 am – 6 pm

Wollman Hall – 65 West 11th St. 5th floor

free and open to all

Featured speakers:

Lisa Duggan
Jasbir Puar
Jonathan Ned Katz
Jose E. Munoz

Contact info:

Web: www.politicallyqueer.tumblr.com

Email: queerconfnssr@gmail.com

Presented by the the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law and the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia Law School

Each year the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law devotes a day-long symposium to the significant contributions of a senior scholar to the literature [...]]]> Friday, March 5, 2010 9:00 am

Presented by the the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law and the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia Law School

Each year the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law devotes a day-long symposium to the significant contributions of a senior scholar to the literature of gender and/or sexuality law and theory. This year’s symposium will recognize the work of Judith Butler, the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Her works have had significant, and in many cases paradigm shifting influence in the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. The Symposium will take up Butler’s work on gender, sexuality, kinship, terrorism, torture, war and free speech.

Register here for the Symposium.

Her work of greatest influence in law includes:

Gender Trouble (1990), Bodies That Matter (1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997), Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), Giving An Account of Oneself (2005), and Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009).