February 8, Wednesday 12:30 to 1:45 pm

T.L. Cowan, Women’s and Gender Studies and English, University of Saskatchewan; Visiting Scholar, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, New York University

The cabaret—or, more broadly, the variety show—is arguably the most open and resilient form of live [...]]]> a lunch talk with T.L. Cowan

February 8, Wednesday
12:30 to 1:45 pm

T.L. Cowan, Women’s and Gender Studies and English, University of Saskatchewan; Visiting Scholar, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, New York University

The cabaret—or, more broadly, the variety show—is arguably the most open and resilient form of live expressive culture in radical feminist and queer scenes in North America. It is, at once, an eclectic, genre-troubling performance space; a vital, if incoherent, form of entertainment and social commentary; a community-building and sustaining set of activities; a dynamic, responsive and transformative site of political activism and aesthetic innovation; and, ultimately, a mode of existence and way of knowing that is both produced by, and produces, radical feminist and queer lives. Central to my work on the contemporary variety show is the concept of “cabaret consciousness”: a mobile ontology and episteme that privileges unpredictability, pleasure, risk, excess, failure, challenge and confusion, characteristics of the cabaret that are mutually constitutive with their translocal radical feminist and queer scenes. This paper will consider the ways in which the variety format of cabaret reminds us of the importance of confusion. I suggest that a feminist and queer “cabaret consciousness” is a mode of living, being and knowing in confusion; to apprehend the mutually constitutive relationship between political cabaret and feminist and queer scenes across North America, for example, is to apprehend confusion as a political/erotic/social affective register shared across demographic and geographic borders.

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

Bring your lunch — we’ll provide beverages and dessert!

Facebook event page here.

This event is free and open to the public.  For more information, please call CSGS at 212-992-9540 or email csgs(at)nyu.edu.

image: 2boys.tv perform “Hot Voodoo” in Chiapas, Mexico, 2010. Photo by Marlene Ramirez Cancio. Photo Courtesy of the Artists.

“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.

In celebration of the centennial of the birth of LGBT pioneer Harry Hay, CLAGS (the Center for Lesbian & Gay Studies at CUNY) and the Harry Hay Centennial Committee invite proposals for a broad-reaching conference exploring key facets of LGBT life and their evolution over the last six [...]]]> September 27-30, 2012, New York City

In celebration of the centennial of the birth of LGBT pioneer Harry Hay, CLAGS (the Center for Lesbian & Gay Studies at CUNY) and the Harry Hay Centennial Committee invite proposals for a broad-reaching conference exploring key facets of LGBT life and their evolution over the last six decades.

Harry Hay’s life and his impact on LGBT history and culture were extraordinary, and the range of his activities was terrifically diverse. In the 1930s and ’40s, his involvement in progressive politics, avant-garde art, and the Communist Party all shaped and influenced his formulation of the idea that LGBT people were a distinct “cultural minority” who needed to become conscious of themselves as a people and organize for their own liberation. With that insight, he co-founded the Mattachine Society in the 1950s and helped launch the modern LGBT liberation movement. He was an organizer of the first Radical Faerie gathering in 1979 and remained an active participant and inspirational figure in LGBT movements until his death in 2002. In addition, as a gay activist Hay committed himself to a larger progressive agenda, working in the anti-war movement, on behalf of Native Peoples, and within Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. As an intellectual, Hay devoted himself to anthropological and historical research about the origins and meaning of LGBT lives, social roles and consciousness. His research focused particular energy on two-spirit people among Native Americans and matrilineal cultures.

Given this rich array of interests, the conference organizers seek to gather scholars, public intellectuals, activists, students, and artists who will take inspiration from Hay’s life and ideas in order to think together about several strands of LGBT living. In particular, the conference will explore four central themes inspired by and reflective of Hay’s life and times: LGBT arts, political activism, spirituality and sexual identities.

We welcome proposals for full panels, individual research papers, artistic presentations, and “state of the debate” discussions. While some of the conference presentations can focus on Hay himself, we very much encourage proposals that explore and debate how the questions raised and confronted by Hay have continued to evolve. To that end, papers may be historical, theoretical, contemporary or future-oriented and may address, but need not be limited to, any of the following thematic topics:

LGBT POLITICS:

• Significance of Mattachine and homophile political groups, their evolution, and relation to gay liberation activism
• Importance (or not) of homophile and other LGBT political leaders
• Sexuality on the Left
• LGBT radicalism and separatism vs mainstream politics and assimilation
• Coalition-building vs single-issue politics
• Youth as a political constituency
• Assessing LGBT organizing strategies and utopian goals
• Mapping an LGBT agenda for the 21st-century

LGBT SPIRITUALITY

• Historical, cultural, and religious aspects of the Radical Faerie movement
• LGBT perspectives on religion, theology, and spirituality
• LGBT influence on, and conflicts with, mainstream and alternative religions
• Linking the spiritual and the sexual
• Politics of spirituality
• Connections to the natural world
• Queer mysticism, shamanism and spiritual practice
• Ancient roots of queer spirituality
• Native Peoples’ spiritualities

LGBT ARTS

• Harry Hay’s artistic world: John Cage, Will Geer, Lester Horton, Leftist theater, etc.
• Past/present fears of LGBT artistic power (e.g. 1950s “homintern”)
• Representations of LGBT lives in contemporary/historical popular culture
• Past/present uses of art as tool of LGBT political activism (e.g. Gran Fury)
• Role of folk & popular music for political organizing (e.g. People’s Song)
• LGBT contributions to 20th-century avant-garde and popular arts
• Defining a queer aesthetic sensibility
• Studies of specific significant queer artists

LGBT IDENTITIES

• The evolving identities of LGBT/Queer/Questioning/Hetero-flexible/Trans People and others
• The meaning of gender in the LGBT world
• Homophile ­Gay Queer: differences, overlaps, and relations
• Lesbians & Gay men: past/present/future alliances and cleavages
• Class and socioeconomic issues within LGBT organizing
• Transgender inclusions/exclusions
• Queer archetypes
• Meaning of “gay consciousness”
• Identity as “natural,” “historical,” or “learned”
• Two-spirit tradition and alternative gender roles in non-Western cultures
• The future of sexual identities

For each paper proposed, please submit a 300-word abstract and a 2-page CV for the presenter. If you wish to propose a 3 or 4 person panel, please submit a separate abstract & CV for each paper, and an additional abstract of the panel. All proposals should be sent to Daniel Hurewitz at daniel.hurewitz(at)hunter.cuny.edu by January 31, 2012, with “Hay Centennial” in the subject line. You can also visit the conference webpage to submit proposals at: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/clags/pages/hay.html

We may have space to display/screen some artworks and present some performances along the thematic lines above: if that interests you, please email Daniel Hurewitz at the address above and submit a handful of images or performance selections either as a zip file, downloadable file, or DVD by January 31, 2012. If the latter, please send to Daniel Hurewitz, c/o CLAGS, 365 Fifth Avenue, Room 7115, New York NY 10016

Thursday, December 1 6 to 8 pm Kimmel 802 60 Washington Square South

Celebrate AIDS Awareness Day with performances and spoken word by HIV positive (poz) queer people color who are well-known actors and community organizers.

Host & MC: Monroe France

Featuring: Aundaray Guess – PerformerMichelle Lopez – Treatment Educator [...]]]> For more info: https://www.facebook.com/events/223943357674891/

Thursday, December 1
6 to 8 pm
Kimmel 802
60 Washington Square South

Celebrate AIDS Awareness Day with performances and spoken word by HIV positive (poz) queer people color who are well-known actors and community organizers.

Host & MC: Monroe France

Featuring: Aundaray Guess – PerformerMichelle Lopez – Treatment Educator & Community AdvocateSimply Rob – Spoken Word PoetMaya Vazquez – Singer (TO BE CONFIRMED)

The audience will have an opportunity to participate in a post-performance talk back with the performers that will focus on the issues raised in the performances and the work they have done to bring awareness to HIV and the impact it has on communities of color.

Sponsored by:
NYU LGBTQ Student Center’S Storytelling and Performance SeriesCenter for Multicultural Education and Programs’ Multiple Identity Speaker Series

Co-sponsored by:
NYU Student Health Center

Presence Power Progress

A National Conference of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Asian Americans, South Asians, Southeast Asians, and Pacific Islanders to network, organize, agitate, educate, and build capacity of the nation’s LGBT AAPI community.

For more information: http://www.nqapia.org/

Crystal Gateway Marriott 1700 Jefferson Davis Highway Arlington, [...]]]> July 17 to 22, 2012
Washington, DC

Presence Power Progress

A National Conference of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Asian Americans, South Asians, Southeast Asians, and Pacific Islanders to network, organize, agitate, educate, and build capacity of the nation’s LGBT AAPI community.

For more information: http://www.nqapia.org/

Crystal Gateway Marriott
1700 Jefferson Davis Highway
Arlington, VA 22202

Highlights:

• Desi/ South Asian Programming
• Women’s/ Feminist Programming
• Parents Convening
• Youth Gathering
• Trans Programming
• Workshops and Nationally Renowned Speakers and Keynotes
• Cultural performances
• NQAPIA Community Catalyst Awards Banquet
• National Strategy Meeting of LGBT AAPIs

Request for Proposals: Propose a session for the conference and help build this important space!

For more information contact: nqapia(at)gmail.com
NQAPIA
P.O. Box 65238
Washington, DC 20035

The National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance is a federation of LGBTQ Asian American, South Asian, Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander organizations. NQAPIA seeks to build the capacity of local LGBT AAPI organizations, invigorate grassroots organizing, develop leadership, and challenge homophobia, racism, and anti-immigrant bias.

Tuesday November 22 6 to 8 pm

Audre Lorde Project 147 W. 24th St., 3rd Floor NYC

Youth: FREE – adults: $5 – $50

Featuring poetry and spoken word by SAS members speaking out against injustice, criminalization and oppression. With guest performance by Arianne Benford (www.ariannebenford.com) and more! Followed [...]]]> Presented by Streetwise and Safe

Tuesday November 22
6 to 8 pm

Audre Lorde Project
147 W. 24th St., 3rd Floor
NYC

Youth: FREE – adults: $5 – $50

Featuring poetry and spoken word by SAS members speaking out against injustice, criminalization and oppression. With guest performance by Arianne Benford (www.ariannebenford.com) and more! Followed by an LGBTQ youth Open mic!!

Streetwise and Safe is a project by and for youth of color in NYC that shares the in’s and out’s, do’s and don’ts and street politics of police encounters between LGBTQ youth of color and the police. Visit us at www.streetwiseandsafe.org

November 11, Friday 4:15 to 6:15 pm

Jafari Sinclaire Allen, Department of Anthropology and African American Studies, Yale University

CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue Room C415A @ 34th Street NYC

For more info: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/anthropology/events.html

Come learn about Queer Newark and the people and organizations that have contributed to our city’s great history!

November 12, Saturday 9 am to 5 pm Essex Room, Robeson Campus Center 350 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. Newark NJ 07102

Join us on November 12, 2011 to [...]]]> Presented by Rutgers-Newark and Newark Community Leaders

Come learn about Queer Newark and the people and organizations that have contributed to our city’s great history!

November 12, Saturday
9 am to 5 pm
Essex Room, Robeson Campus Center
350 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
Newark NJ 07102

Join us on November 12, 2011 to celebrate the opening of the Queer Newark project. This is FREE, full-day oral history conference that examines queer life in Newark. Three generations of panelists will share their stories of LGBT Newark. Topics will range from childhood and educational life to religion and spirituality, from love and sexuality to work and political activism, from club and ball scenes to friendship, fashion, and more.

Community members, community service organizations, and historians and scholars of Newark history and LGBT history and studies will be in attendance.

For more information visit queer.newark.rutgers.edu

Light refreshments provided.

Help build the archives!

Do you have a story to share about queer Newark life? If so, we’d love to interview you for the Queer Newark Oral History Project. Do you have letters, emails, photographs, documents or other artifacts of queer Newark that you’d like to share? We can add them to our growing archive collection. Please contact queernk@andromeda.rutgers.edu, or sign up for an interview or document donation at the conference.

Immediately following the conference, join us at the Coffee Cave for an evening of dynamic performances by Newark-based artists that reflect the creative liveliness of Newark’s LGBT community.

• Spoken Word
• Vogue Performances
• House and Club music and more

Free and open to the public. All ages are welcome!

Coffee Cave
45 Halsey Street
Newark NJ
Starts at 6pm

For information regarding this event, please contact Kiyan Williams at kiyan.williams(at)gmail.com

Sponsors

Rutgers-Newark Office of the Chancellor; Office of Student Life & Community Affairs; Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience; LGBTQ & Diversity Resource Center; FAS-N Departments of History, Psychology, English, Sociology & Anthropology, Arts, Culture, and Media, African American and African Studies, and Political Science, Graduate Program in American Studies, Program in Women’s & Gender Studies; School of Criminal Justice; School of Public Affairs and Administration; Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies; Center for Migration and the Global City; RU Pride; the Rutgers-New Brunswick Center for Race & Ethnicity; the Committee to Advance Our Common Purposes;Newark LGBT Commission; Pride Arts Initiative; Liberation In Truth Social Justice Center; NMB Models; Frameline; Newark-Essex Pride Coalition, AAOGC, Project WOW!; Newark Pride Alliance; City of Newark’s Advisory Commission on LGBTQ Concerns; HMI and FEMWORKS.

On the eve of the 25th Anniversary of the seminal publication, In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology, edited by Joseph Beam, we are currently seeking submissions for an anthology on the legacy of Joseph Beam and In the Life. This anthology [...]]]> Call for Submissions: Black Gay Genius: Joseph Beam and In the Life

On the eve of the 25th Anniversary of the seminal publication, In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology, edited by Joseph Beam, we are currently seeking submissions for an anthology on the legacy of Joseph Beam and In the Life. This anthology will provide new interpretations of the late 80s and early 90s black gay arts movement, examine the contemporary political and artistic landscape for black gay men, and explore how In the Life has influenced contemporary critical thought as it relates to black gay men. The anthology will be comprised of scholars from a range of disciplines, writers, activists, cultural workers and artists. This project seeks to build upon the work of In the Life, and perhaps explore where black gay men find themselves today.

Topics might include:
-Black Feminism and In the Life
-Biographical and critical treatments of Joseph Beam
-Memory, mourning and In the Life
-In the Life and Black Queer Theory
-In the Life and the invention of the Black gay soul
-Historicizing the emergence of Beam and his contemporaries
-HIV/AIDS activism and early Black gay identity politics
-Black gay artists/ is there a Black gay aesthetic?
-Black gay men and Black lesbians in dialogue
-Sex, sexuality and the politics of black gay writings

We welcome your participation and we invite you to examine the guidelines listed below. Thank you for your potential participation in this important project.

Sincerely,
Steven G. Fullwood and Charles Stephens, editors
Black Gay Genius: Joseph Beam and In the Life

Deadline: December 16th, 2011

Contact Information:
For inquiries: blackgaygenius@gmail.com
For submissions: blackgaygenius@gmail.com

Please send a copy of your paper, essay, poem, or interview to:

blackgaygenius@gmail.com by December 16th, 2011

Files must be in .doc, .docx, .pdf, or .rtf formats. Files should be named with the author’s name and part of title of submission. For example:

“Stephens_Blackgaygenius” or “Stephens-blackgaygenius.pdf”

Essays, articles, stories or interviews should be between 4-8 pages or less. Poems should be should be a page (let’s discuss.) Please note: the editors seek to collect and publish a monograph that covers a wide range of genres and perspectives.

In your email, please include the following:

• Name
• Address
• Email address
• Phone
• Title of submission
• If your submission was previously published please include the publication title, edition, and date

Thank you. We look forward to reading your work!

Sincerely,
Steven G. Fullwood and Charles Stephens, editors