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

Queer Theory & Queer of Color Critique Workgroup

Robert — Tue, 18 May 2010 19:07:54 +0000

Presented by the Summer 2010 NYU Pride in Practice Identity/Expression Education Series
with the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality

Explore power, discourse and identity in a peer study group that will focus on the intersections of race, gender, and sexualities.

Gain accessible foundations in the core concepts of academia: heteronormativity, homonormativity, and homonationalism.

There will be a primary focus on the philosophies of Fanon and Foucault, including contemporary contributions by Butler, Warner, Puar, etc.

The series of 9 weekly meetings is open to the public and free of charge.

Ongoing, open enrollment for all — click here for more information.

Wednesdays: June 2 through July 28, 2010, 7PM to 9PM

Silver School of Social Work
Room 206
1 Washington Square North

Facilitator:
John Hellman, MA, NYU Draper Interdisciplinary Program Alumnus

For more information and workgroup materials, please contact: queer-theory-workgroup@googlegroups.com

Call for Contributions for Edited Book Volume: Black Senior Women: Race, Age, and Sexual Identity

Robert — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 18:27:21 +0000

Publishing House: Palgrave Macmillan

Editors: Bette J. Dickerson, PhD & Nicole Rousseau, PhD

Publication Date: 2011

A truly collaborative project, the first editor of this piece, Bette J. Dickerson, is an associate professor in the department of sociology at American University in Washington. Dr. Dickerson’s research specialties include: ageing and the social aspects of sexuality; the social construction of race and identity in U.S. society; collective memory and public history; Black feminist theory; and intersectionality research methods. She is currently engaged in participatory action research with senior women in South Africa and her work has been included in several publications in the United States and Japan. Co-editor, Nicole Rousseau, is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Kent State University. Her work on the structural and institutional roots of race, class, and gender inequalities, social rhetoric and identity formation, and Historical Womanist theory have been included in several publications in the US and South America.

This edited volume seeks to explore sexuality in the context of age and race/ethnic minority statuses with specific focus on Black senior women. Scant attention has been paid to Black senior women’s sexuality, leaving an astounding gap in the literature. The research within this text will reveal the ways in which scholars have often analyzed a generic sexuality in the United States without regard for the unique social, political, and economic contexts of Black American life or the senior experience. Adequate analysis of the state of and erasure of Black senior sexuality must take into consideration the larger structural and institutional foundation, notably, the economic, political, and social framework.

This text will address the following research themes:

1. To what extent the analysis of Black senior sexuality differs from that of the current hegemonic discourse on White sexuality.

2. To what extent the use of negative propaganda has affected the image of Black female sexuality, and in turn Black senior women’s sexuality.

3. To what extent Black senior women’s sexuality is affected by the unique relationship Black women have historically maintained with the state, as both producers in the wage-labor force and reproducers of the wage-labor pool.

4. The current state of Black senior women’s sexuality, including: practices; taboos; health; freedom of sexual expression; and the sex ratio imbalance.

Submissions are due by 5:00PM Friday August 27, 2010 (electronic submissions preferred)

Forward electronic submission to:

nroussea@kent.edu

Nicole Rousseau, PhD
Kent State University
Department of Sociology
P.O. Box 5190
Kent, OH 44242
(330) 672-2790 (phone)?(330) 672-4724 (fax)

“Queer Privates” @ UC Davis: CALL FOR PAPERS

Robert — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 19:03:50 +0000

2010 Queer Studies Graduate Symposium

University of California, Davis

Date: Friday, May 14

Keynote Speaker: Mel Chen, Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley

Mel Chen’s research interests include queer and feminist theory, critical linguistics, contagion and contamination, critical animal studies, and the cultural politics of race, sexuality, ability, and immigration.

While the theme “queer privates” certainly invites theoretical considerations of the body and embodied practices, this symposium aims to situate discussions of private parts and intimate acts in relation to liberal discourses of privacy and neoliberal processes of privatization. Recent queer scholarship has criticized the tendency for racially and economically privileged lesbian and gay activists to argue for the “right to privacy” in order to gain access to marriage, the military, and health care. Calls for institutional inclusion often demand public recognition of a privatized lesbian and gay identity that further marginalizes queers who cannot or will not conform to the expectations of homonormativity. Queer scholarship has also interrogated the steady dismantling of the welfare state and the increased privatization of public education, the prison-industrial complex, and practices of war and empire. These processes unevenly affect queers of color, working-class queers, queers with disabilities, gender-nonconforming queers, and other queer and trans subjects. In addition to investigating the ways in which discourses of individual privacy work in synchrony with trans/national processes of privatization, this symposium seeks to not simply diagnose the differences but also to understand the convergences between homonormative investments in the imagined private sphere and queer calls for public culture and public accountability. By exploring the multiple iterations of “queer privates” that operate on personal and collective levels, this symposium aims to open up possibilities for imagining other forms of desiring, belonging, and organizing.

For whom is privacy a privilege? How can queer scholarship think critically about the desirability of privacy? What are the limits of activist projects that strategically call for privacy rights? In what ways do notions of privacy depend upon liberal discourses of individualism? How might a consideration of the permeability of bodies allow for a reconceptualization of personhood and privacy? In what ways might a queering of domesticity trouble homonormative conceptions of the private sphere? How can we reimagine queer public culture beyond pride parades and wedding celebrations? What is the relationship between nationalist discourses of respectability and the relegation of certain intimacies to the realm of the private? How has the commodification of queerness led to the professionalization of lesbian and gay politics? In what ways have queer and trans communities responded to the privatization of social services? Which bodies benefit from encounters with medical and scientific technologies, and which bodies are susceptible to medical and state surveillance technologies? How might queer and trans studies critique transnational economies and environmental racism? What strategies have queer and trans people devised for negotiating privatized systems of crime prevention and immigration control? How does the privatization of public education endanger the place of queer, trans, and ethnic studies within the academy while simultaneously excluding those who cannot afford the high cost of tuition?

We invite scholarship from a broad range of disciplines, especially interdisciplinary work in queer theory and trans theory. We especially encourage theoretical work and empirically-informed investigations that critically engages mutually constitutive articulations of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, structures of class, religion and nationality, and hierarchies of dis/ability. We also welcome papers engaging activism and community organizing.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

Body parts, bodily schemas, embodied lives
Affective economies of love, hate, intimacy, shame, etc.
Queer privates in memoirs, journals and other narratives
Medical technologies as coercive and/or transformative
Cyberprivacy and digital bodies
Queer parenting and the erotics of domesticity
Literary and artistic queerings of the private sphere
Children as private property, the child as public figure
Contagion, contamination, and queer bodies / ecologies
Legal discourses of privacy
Private parts in/of public performance
Ethnographies of privacy, privates, and privatization
Citizenship, the private sphere, and national belonging
Temporalities of the private and privatization
Queer effects of privatized education and social services
Surveillance technologies and the “invasion” of privacy
Political responses to criminalization and incarceration
Privatization of immigration control and homeland security

Please send a 500-word abstract and a one-page CV to queersymposium2010@gmail.com by March 1, 2010. Along with this abstract, please indicate if your presentation requires any A/V equipment. Acceptances will be sent out by March 15, 2010.

For more information, please contact the symposium co-chairs, Tristan Josephson and Liz Montegary, at queersymposium2010@gmail.com.

Who Cares About Family? Patricia Hill Collins, Joan Williams, Rhacel Salazar Parrenas

Robert — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:03:58 +0000

Monday, November 16th
6:30 PM

The Andrew W. Mellon Seminars in the Humanities at the CUNY Center for the Humanities

Despite radical changes in family formations, domestic labor still remains raced, gendered, and otherwise devalued. This panel brings together experts from various fields to examine not only who cares about the family, but who does not, who should, and why.

Our distinguished speakers will include Patricia Hill Collins (University of Maryland), author of Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment; Joan Williams (University of California at Hastings), author of Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It; and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas (Brown), author of The Force of Domesticity. Alyson Cole, Resident Mellon Fellow at the Center for the Humanities and author of The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror, will moderate the conversation.

Rooms 9206-07
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

http://www.centerforthehumanitiesgc.org

Two Decades & Counting: Critical Reflections on “Intersectionality”

Robert — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:20:30 +0000

December 1, Tuesday
4 to 6:30 PM

SCA Gallery Space
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
Bowery @ East 5th Street

A roundtable discussion with:

Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, UCLA Law

Lisa Duggan, Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU

Chandan Reddy, University of Washington

Karen Shimakawa, Performance Studies, NYU

This forum commemorates the 20th anniversary of the enunciation and analysis of “intersectionality” by legal theorist Kimberlé W. Crenshaw in her path-breaking essays, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” (1989) and “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color” (1991). Panelists explore the ongoing analytic purchase of “intersectionality” for anti-racist social critique and legal activism and also ask how the term has been transformed as it travels across different historical and disciplinary contexts.

Kimberlé W. Crenshaw is Professor of Law at the University of California Law School. She teaches Civil Rights and other courses in critical race studies and constitutional law. Her primary scholarly interests center around race and the law, and she was a founder and has been a leader in the intellectual movement called Critical Race Theory. She was elected Professor of the Year by the 1991 and 1994 graduating classes. She now splits her time each year between UCLA and the Columbia School of Law. At the University of Wisconsin Law School, where she received her LL.M., Professor Crenshaw was a William H. Hastie Fellow. She then clerked for Justice Shirley Abrahamson of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Professor Crenshaw’s publications include Critical Race Theory (edited by Crenshaw, et al., 1995) and Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech and the First Amendment (with Matsuda, et al., 1993). In 2007, Professor Crenshaw was nominated the Fulbright Chair for Latin America in Brazil. In 2008, she was nominated an Alphonse Fletcher Fellow. In the same year she joined the selective group of scholars awarded with an in-residence fellowship at the Center of Advanced Behavioral Studies at Stanford. You can find out more about Professor Crenshaw’s work through her think tank, The African American Policy Forum.

Lisa Duggan is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. She is the author of Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy and Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence and American Modernity, co-author with Nan Hunter of Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture, and co-editor with Lauren Berlant of Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and National Interest.

Karen Shimakawa is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at NYU. She is the author of National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage and co-editor (with Kandice Chuh) of Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora. Her current project, titled Somatic Citizenship, focuses on the construction and maintenance of bodily regimes of cultural identification and her research and teaching interests include critical race theory, law and performance, and Asian American Jurisprudence.

Sponsored by the American Studies Program, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU; co-sponsored by CSGS.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Berkshire Conference on Women’s History

Robert — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:03:54 +0000

“Generations: Exploring Race, Sexuality, and Labor across Time and Space”

June 9-12, 2011

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Proposals due March 1, 2010.

The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians is holding its next conference at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst on June 9-12, 2011.

2011 marks the 15th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women and the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, which was first celebrated in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland and is now honored by more than sixty countries around the globe. The choice of “Generations” reflects this transnational intellectual, political, and organizational heritage as well as a desire to explore related questions such as:

How have women’s generative experiences – from production and reproduction to creativity and alliance building – varied across time and space? How have these been appropriated and represented by contemporaries and scholars alike?
What are the politics of “generation”? Who is encouraged? Who is condemned or discouraged? How has this changed over time?
Is a global perspective compatible with generational (in the genealogical sense) approaches to the past that tend to reinscribe national/regional/racial boundaries?
What challenges do historians of women, gender, and sexuality face as these fields and their practitioners mature?

To engender further, open-ended engagement with these and other issues, the 2011 conference will include workshops dedicated to discussing precirculated papers on questions and problems (epistemological, methodological, substantive) provoked by the notion of “Generations.”

The process for submitting and vetting papers and panels has changed substantially from previous years, so please read the instructions carefully. To encourage transnational discussions, panels will be principally organized along thematic rather than national lines and therefore proposals will be vetted by a transnational group of scholars with expertise in a particular thematic, rather than geographic, field. All proposals must be directed to ONE of the following subcommittees and should be submitted electronically. Please list a second choice for the subcommittee to vet your proposal but do not submit to more than one subcommittee.

Instructions for submission are posted on the Berkshire Conference website. Preference will be given to discussions of any topic across national boundaries and to work that addresses sexuality, race, and labor in any context, with special consideration for pre-modern (ancient, medieval, early modern) periods. However, unattached papers and proposals that fall within a single nation/region will also be given full consideration. As a forum dedicated to encouraging innovative, interdisciplinary scholarship and transnational conversation, the Berkshire conference continues to encourage submissions from graduate students, international scholars, independent scholars, filmmakers, and to welcome a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Paper abstracts should be no longer than 250 words; panel (2-3 papers and a comment), roundtable (3 or more short papers) and workshop (1-2 precirculated papers) proposals should also include a summary abstract of no more than 500 words. Each submission must include the cover form and a short cv for each presenter.

If you have questions about the most appropriate subcommittee for your proposal or problems with electronic submission, please direct them to Jennifer Spear (jms25@sfu.ca).

The Audre Lorde/Essex Hemphill Memorial Lecture: HORTENSE SPILLERS

Robert — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:31:52 +0000

November 4th, Wednesday
7:00 PM

The Skylight Room (9100)
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue
between 34th & 35th Streets

Sponsored by the Africana Studies Concentration and co-sponsored by IRADAC, The Center for the Study of Women and Society, and the PhD Program in English

Inaugurated by Hortense Spillers, the Lorde/Hemphill lecture commemorates the lives of the American poets Audre Lorde (1934 -1992) and Essex Hemphill (1957 -1995), and encourages exciting scholarship and literary production within the communities to whom their poetry and prose spoke, particularly people of color and members of the LGBT community. Hortense Spillers is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor in English at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of, most recently, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture.

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

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

www.centerforthehumanitiesgc.org

Wayward Lives and the Motion of History

Robert — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:00:21 +0000

A Distinguished Faculty Lecture by Saidiya Hartman

Presented by the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and the Humanities Initiative at New York University

29 October, 5:30pm

Humanities Initiative
20 Cooper Square
Fifth floor

More Information: nd35@nyu.edu

Saidiya Hartman is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Women’s and Gender Studies at Columbia University. She received her PhD. from Yale University (1992) and taught for many years at the University of California at Berkeley. Professor Hartman’s major fields of interest are African American and American literature and cultural history, slavery, law and literature, and performance studies. She is on the editorial board of Callaloo. She has been a Fulbright, Rockefeller, Whitney Oates, and University of California President’s Fellow. She is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997) and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). She has also published essays on photography, film and feminism.

* Image: Howardena Pindell, “Autobiography: Water/Ancestors/Middle Passage/Family Ghosts”, 1988-1988. Museum collection: Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT.

Martin Wong: Exploration in Race and Masculinity in Graffiti Culture

Robert — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:15:08 +0000

Tuesday, November 3, 2009
6 to 8 PM

Presented by the A/P/A Institute at NYU

A/P/A Institute at NYU
41-51 East 11th Street
7th Floor Gallery
between University Place and Broadway

Free and open to the public.

RSVP by Friday, October 30 — Online, via email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu, or call 212-992-9653.

Panelists:

Lady Pink
Sharp
Yasmin Ramirez

Moderated by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé

Artist Martin Wong was a major collector of Graffiti artwork and deeply immersed as a mentor and friend in the graffiti culture and artworlds of New York City. This panel discussion will take his work and life as a jumping point to explore issues of gender, race and graffiti culture with artists Sharp and Lady Pink, critic/scholar Yasmin Ramirez, and moderated by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, author of Queer Latino Testimonio Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails and Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature, Fordham University. With introduction by Gayatri Gopinath, Director of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at NYU.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for Multicultural Education and Programs and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.

For more information, please visit the A/P/A Institute website.