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

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 [...]]]> 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.

Sex Crimes against Black Girls: The Anthology Edited by: Shantrelle P. Lewis & Yaba A. Blay http://www.sexcrimesagainstblackgirls.com/anthology

About the Anthology:

Historically regarded as matters private to our community, those, that if put in plain sight, might inadvertently corroborate White supremacist imaginations of Black pathology, sex crimes against Black girls are the [...]]]> CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Sex Crimes against Black Girls: The Anthology
Edited by:
Shantrelle P. Lewis & Yaba A. Blay
http://www.sexcrimesagainstblackgirls.com/anthology

About the Anthology:

Historically regarded as matters private to our community, those, that if put in plain sight, might inadvertently corroborate White supremacist imaginations of Black pathology, sex crimes against Black girls are the dirtiest of our laundry – nasty, gaping wounds too infected to heal on their own. Whether at levels macro, when children in war torn countries like Uganda, Liberia, and Sierra Leone are forced to take on roles as sex slaves, or on the micro-level, when daughters and nieces are violated by their brothers, cousins, uncles and fathers, sex crimes against Black girls, no matter how secreted, occur every minute, of every day, around the globe. Originally inspired by Hortense Spillers’ (2003) poignant essay, “‘The Permanent Obliquity of an In(pha)llibly Straight’: In the Time of the Daughters and the Fathers,” and subsequently motivated by the overwhelming response to and success of Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation’s Center for Arts and Culture Skylight Gallery’s 2011 “Sex Crimes Against Black Girls” mixed media exhibition curated by Shantrelle P. Lewis, this anthology seeks to uncover realities often shrouded by racial, gender, and cultural mandates – absolute respect for elders, familial loyalty, and/or lifting and supporting the Black man – at all costs, at any expense, even one’s own. Sex Crimes Against Black Girls seeks to give voice to those once silenced.

We invite writers/scholars/artists/activists of African descent, both female and male, to submit creative works that address the molestation, incest, rape, sexual assault, and sexual exploitation/oppression of Black girls (read: Black girls and women). We seek works that not only lend insight into the variety of dimensions for which sex crimes against Black girls have implications (personal, political, social, emotional…), but further challenge prospective viewers/readers to confront their own secrets, violations, painful experiences, fears, and shame. Although we are especially interested in those works that are painfully and unapologetically truthful and revealing, we are also seeking contributions that have a positive and/or hopeful tone with concrete examples of resistance and recovery. In this way, Sex Crimes against Black Girls will both acknowledge painful realities and also strategies for self-, family-, and community-care, love and restoration. And while the book will indeed position the Black female voice as primary and authoritative, in also welcoming the Black male voice, it will present a multiplicity of realities – all valid, and all reflectively necessary for us to propel ourselves into a space of healing, growth, and empowerment – the ultimate goal of this project.

Submissions:

As currently conceptualized, the anthology will consist of a variety of sections, each prefaced by artwork. Each section will then include those contributions relevant to the issues/themes explored by the featured artwork. Potential issues/themes include but are not limited to:

• historical/social/cultural discourse on the Black female body
• childhood sexual “exploration” (child on child)
• childhood sexual violation (adult on child)
• child sex slavery
• child pornography
• sexual assault/rape
• female victimizers
• female complacency/complicity in female sexual exploitation/oppression
• shame/silence/hiding in the aftermath
• finding/claiming voice
• community responsibility
• mending relationships
• healing and recovery

Additionally, we are seeking first-person essays, both reflective and critical, from male writers.

Guidelines:

• We welcome a variety of creative formats, including critical essays, personal memoirs, short fiction, and poetry.
• critical essays, personal memoirs, short fiction: 20-25 pages, inclusive of notes/references/images
• review essays (music/book/film): 10 -15 pages, inclusive of notes/references/images
• poetry– no more than 3 pages per poem and 3 poems per artist
• Please submit abstracts/proposals (300-500 words), along with a brief biographical sketch (75 words or less) no later than May 16, 2011 to the editors at blackgirlvoice@gmail.com and include the word “submission” in the subject line. Include your abstract/proposal and bio in the body of your email as well as a Microsoft Word attachment. Submissions selected for inclusion in the final volume will be due on or before August 31, 2011. All work submitted must be original and should not have been published or under consideration elsewhere.

About the Editors:

SHANTRELLE P. LEWIS is an independent curator of African Diasporan Art who currently serves as the Director of Public Programming and Exhibitions at the Caribbean Cultural Center Africa Diaspora Institute (CCCADI). The granddaughter of New Orleans artist, Charles Lewis and a fourth generation graduate of HBCUs, Ms. Lewis was introduced to the performing and cultural arts of African Americans by her parents who are collectors themselves. A New Orleans native, Shantrelle returned home in September 2007, after a 12-year stint on the east coast, to assist in post-Katrina revitalization efforts. For two years, she worked in the capacity of Executive Director and Curator of the McKenna Museum of African American Art. During that time, she also served as a member of the teaching faculty in the African World Studies Department at Dillard University. Having received a BS in Biology from Howard University, and an MA in African Studies from Temple University, Ms. Lewis has demonstrated a commitment to researching, documenting and preserving African Diasporan culture. Her international travels to places such as Cuba, Ghana, Nigeria, Brazil, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Spain and London have allowed her to observe the manifestation of the African aesthetic first hand. As an independent curator, Shantrelle initiates projects that are meant to incite, inspire, and shift the paradigms of their audiences. Her curatorial credits include exhibitions on a variety of topics ranging from Contemporary Haitian Art, a tribute to Betty Davis, the Haitian Revolution, The Feminine in African Sacred Traditions, and New Orleans sacred traditions. As part of her lifetime commitment to her beloved city, Shantrelle is producing and directing her first documentary The Wild Magnolia, as part of an oral history project of the Magnolia Housing Projects, which will also include a book of photography and a permanent exhibit to be housed at the site’s community center.

YABA A. BLAY is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Lafayette College where she also teaches courses in Women’s & Gender Studies. She received her doctorate in African American Studies and Women’s Studies from Temple University. Her research interests include African cultural aesthetics and aesthetic practices, the politics of embodiment and Black identities, African feminist theory, and critical media literacy. Dr. Blay has published several essays in such publications as Blackberries and Redbones: Critical Articulations of Black Hair/Body Politics in Africana Communities, Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women’s Studies, the Journal of Pan African Studies, Words. Beats. Life: The Global Journal of Hip-Hop Culture, the Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora, the Encyclopedia of African Religions, and the Encyclopedia of Africa and the Americas. In addition to her publications, she is an active editor, having edited special issues of Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women’s Studies and the Journal of Pan African Studies, both focusing on the socio-aesthetic practice of skin bleaching in Africa and the Diaspora, as well as catalogue to the “Sex Crimes against Black Girls” exhibition at Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation’s Center for Arts and Culture Skylight Gallery. Dr. Blay is the recipient of a 2010 Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grant through which she will publish a portrait documentary entitled The Other Side of Blackness, which explores the intersection of skin color politics and negotiations of Black identity.

Please send all inquiries to the editors via email at blackgirlvoice(at)gmail.com with “inquiry” in the subject line.

Gender, Politics and Heteronormativity in Croatia Today: A panel for the Gender and Transformation: Women in Europe Workshop

Speakers:

Vesna Kesic, Croatian feminist activist, journalist, researcher, “Activism and culture as [...]]]> New York University Center for European and Mediterranean Studies and the Network of East-West Women presents:

Gender, Politics and Heteronormativity in Croatia Today: A panel for the Gender and Transformation: Women in Europe Workshop

Speakers:

Vesna Kesic, Croatian feminist activist, journalist, researcher, “Activism and culture as spaces of resistance, provocation and integration”

Gordan Bosanac, The Centre for Peace Studies and The Center for LGBT Equality, “Queer Croatia – rights, politics and culture”

Zvonimir Dobrović, Director and producer of Queer Zagreb and Perforations Festival, “Decentralizing queer art”

March 18, Friday 4:30-6:30 p.m. at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies
New York University
285 Mercer Street, 7th floor
(between Waverly and Washington Place)

For more information, follow us at
http://gendertransformationeurope.wordpress.com/.

February 17 to 20, Thursday to Sunday various times

Contact baldwinconference@gmail.com for information

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

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

a multi-site conference event

February 17 to 20, Thursday to Sunday
various times

Contact baldwinconference@gmail.com for information

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

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

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

Confirmed plenary speakers, respondents, and musicians:

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

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

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

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

February 15, Tuesday 8 to 10 pm

Avgi Saketopoulou, Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, NYU

Discussants:

Tavia Nyong’o, Performance Studies, NYU

Cleonie V. White, William Alanson White [...]]]> RACE DOES GENDER: BRAIDING CULTURAL THEORY AND CLINICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS

a clinical case study presented by Avgi Saketopoulou
with commentary by Tavia Nyong’o & Cleonie V. White

February 15, Tuesday
8 to 10 pm

Avgi Saketopoulou, Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, NYU

Discussants:

Tavia Nyong’o, Performance Studies, NYU

Cleonie V. White, William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis & Psychology

Psychoanalysis’s engagement with questions of racial difference has grown significantly in recent years. However, journeying even further into academic work on racialization and the power dynamics embedding it can deepen our understanding of — and clinical work — with racial embodiment. This forum brings together cultural theorists and clinical practitioners to think race, gender, and sexuality with – and against – psychoanalysis. The event is organized around a case study presentation by Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou, to be followed by commentary by Professor Tavia Nyong’o and Dr. Cleonie V. White. All three presenters are interested in what psychoanalysis might say to questions of racial and sexual difference and how gender and sexuality studies and critical race theory might speak back to clinical practice.

In her case study, Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou will present her work with DeShawn, a nine-year-old African-American transgendered inpatient. She will detail his daily life and treatment in order to track the progression of his therapy over the course of three years. The early part of his hospitalization focused mostly on his psychopathology and on his gender variance, which aroused significant unrest among clinicians and patient. This upset delayed a much-needed clinical engagement with race. As the work progressed, however, his blackness and the analyst’s own whiteness became central to the treatment, which enabled DeShawn to relate differently to his psychiatric illness and to come to a more fluid relationship to his complex gender. The entwinements of these discursive threads reverberated in the individual as well as in the milieu treatment, offering important lessons as to how race presses on gender and desire and underlining as well what is at stake when clinicians fail to adequately attend to racial trauma.

The different institutional and disciplinary locations of this forum’s three speakers promises a meaningful and lively exchange that crosses between race and gender as well as between the classroom and the clinic. There will be ample time for audience discussion after the formal presentations.

Lecture Room 102
13-19 University Place, 1st floor
between 8th Street and Waverly Place

Avgi Saketopoulou is an advanced psychoanalytic candidate at NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is a contributing editor in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, assistant editor in Psychoanalytic Dialogues and an adjunct clinical supervisor at Long Island University. Avgi conducts asylum evaluations for LGBTQ individuals and serves as an expert consultant on trauma for the Bronx Mental Health Court. She teaches and writes on gender, race and sexualities and is especially interested on issues around consent. Avgi is in private practice in NYC.

Tavia Nyong’o is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. The research interests of Tavia Nyong’o include the intersections of race and sexuality, visual art and performance, and cultural history. He teaches courses on black performance, the history of the body, and subcultural performance. His book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), investigates musical, aesthetic, and political practices that conjoined blackness and whiteness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the web editor of Social Text.

Cleonie White, Ph.D. is faculty and supervisor at the William Alanson White Institute for Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology, and the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies. She sits on the Editorial Board of Contemporary Psychonalysis, and is an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. Dr. White’s interests include issues peertaining to race, culture, and politics, to psychoanalysis in culture and politics, and to the body as carrier and witness to, cultural and political trauma. She maintains a private practice in New York City.

Co-sponsored by the Counterpublic Collective; the Gender Studies Program at John Jay College/CUNY; the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, NYU; Pride in Practice, a student group of the NYU Silver School of Social Work; and Studies in Gender and Sexuality: Psychoanalysis, Cultural Studies, Treatment, Research

This event is free and open to the public.  Venue is wheelchair accessible.  If you need sign language interpretation services or other accommodations, please let us know as soon as possible.

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

February 9, Wednesday 6:30 to 8 pm

Gayle M. Salamon, English, Princeton

This talk focuses on Lawrence King, the gender transgressive and gay 15-year-old who was shot to death by a classmate in his Oxnard, California middle school in 2008. Professor [...]]]> READING LAWRENCE KING, RE-READING RODNEY KING

a lecture by Gayle M. Salamon

February 9, Wednesday
6:30 to 8 pm

Gayle M. Salamon, English, Princeton

This talk focuses on Lawrence King, the gender transgressive and gay 15-year-old who was shot to death by a classmate in his Oxnard, California middle school in 2008. Professor Salamon will discuss the ways in which aggressivity is simultaneously attributed to and directed toward queer and gender nonconforming youth, and will consider the place of race in media accounts of the murder through a revisitation of the Rodney King case.

Department of Social and Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
Bowery @ East 5th Street

Gayle Salamon received a Ph.D. in rhetoric from the University of California-Berkeley, where she wrote her dissertation on “Assuming a Body: Transgenderism and Rhetorics of Materiality.” She has held a research fellowship at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, and has taught a broad spectrum of courses at UC-Berkeley on the topics of embodiment and gender. Her new research project at Princeton will explore the role that proprioception and chronic pain can play in shaping a bodily sense of self. Her teaching this year will include courses on themes of “passing” in modern literature, and transgender theory. Salamon holds the new LGBT Studies Fellowship, funded by an endowment from the Fund for Reunion, the bisexual, transgendered, gay and lesbian alumni association of Princeton.

Organized by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality; co-sponsored by the NYU Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, and by Pride in Practice, a student group of the NYU Silver School of Social Work.

This event is free and open to the public.  Venue is wheelchair accessible.  If you need sign language interpretation services or other accommodations, please let us know as soon as possible.

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

Moderated [...]]]> How has the relationship between race and sexuality changed over time? Join three distinguished scholars as they discuss the evolution of these issues, moving from 10th-century Haiti to the 20th-century art market.

• Doris Garraway (French, Northwestern University)
• Arlene Keizer, (English, University of California, Irvine)
• Jennifer Morgan (Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU)

Moderated by Carroll Smith Rosenberg (History, The Graduate Center)

Friday, November 19
4:00pm

Room C198
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
Presented by the CUNY Center for the Humanities

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

David L. Eng, University of Pennsylvania

This talk is drawn from David L. Eng’s recent book [...]]]> 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.