Fall 2019

Not Yet Here: Cruising Utopia @ 10

a celebration of the work of José Esteban Muñoz with roundtable featuring Lauren Berlant, Jack Halberstam, Tavia Nyong’o, & Juana María Rodríguez, followed by an evening of performances by Kevin Aviance & Lady Quesa’Dilla

September 20, 2019 — 4 to 8 pm

Hemmerdinger Hall, Silver Center

Lauren Berlant, English Language & Literature, University of Chicago
Jack Halberstam, English & Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Tavia Nyong’o, American Studies and Theater Studies, Yale University
Juana María Rodríguez, Ethnic Studies and Performance Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Please join the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the Department of Performance Studies at NYU as we celebrate the 10th anniversary of José Esteban Muñoz’s groundbreaking monograph Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, with a roundtable featuring Lauren Berlant (University of Chicago), Jack Halberstam (Columbia University), Tavia Nyong’o (Yale University), and Juana María Rodríguez (UC Berkeley), followed by an evening of performance (artists TBA). 


This event is free & open to the public. Venue is wheelchair-accessible.
For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at csgsnyu@nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; Department of Performance Studies; Department of Social & Cultural Analysis. And made possible by the generous support of the NYU Office of the Provost.


Lauren Berlant teaches English at the University of Chicago. She writes on the affects associated with attachment to citizenship, gender, racism, class antagonism, sexuality, trauma and comedy. Recent books include the edited forthcoming volume, Reading Sedgwick(2019); The Hundreds (2019), a book of collaborative poesis written with the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, and Cruel Optimism (2011).
Jack Halberstam is Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of six books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011) and Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and, most recently, a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press). Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality and the built environment. Halberstam is currently working on several projects including a book titled Wild Thing: Queer Theory After Nature on queer anarchy, performance and protest culture the intersections between animality, the human and the environment. 
Tavia Nyong’o is a Professor of American Studies, African-American Studies, and Theatre & Performance Studies at Yale University. His first book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minnesota, 2009), won the Errol Hill Award for best book in African American theatre and performance studies. His second book, Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (NYU Press, 2018) considers memory and history in black art and performance at the intersection of queer and trans aesthetics. Nyong’o is a member of the Social Text collective and co-series editor of the Sexual Cultures book series at New York University press. He also writes cultural criticism for venues such as The Nation, The Guardian, NPR, Art Forum, Frieze, Bully Bloggers, and Texte Zur Kunst.
Juana María Rodríguez is Professor of Ethnic Studies and Performance Studies at the University of California Berkeley. She is the author of two books, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (NYU Press, 2003) andSexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (NYU Press 2014) which won the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize at the Modern Language Association and was a Lambda Literary Foundation Finalist for LGBT Studies. In 2019, she co-edited a special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly on “Trans Studies en las Americas.” She is currently completing a new manuscript entitled, Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex, under contract with Duke University Press.

Comparative Settler Colonialisms

a conversation between Rana Barakat (via Skype) & J. Kēhaulani Kauanui

September 25, 2019 — 6 to 7:30 pm

20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor

Rana Barakat, History & Archaeology, Birzeit University, Palestine
Kēhaulani Kauanui, Anthropology and American Studies, Wesleyan University
Globally, settler colonialism is a present reality not confined to its violent history. The continuing impact of settler colonial practices and institutions continue to shape our political, economic, social and cultural present. J. Kehaulani Kauanui and Rana Barakat (by Skype from Birzeit University in Palestine) will examine this global reality by thinking comparatively across settler colonial landscapes including the Americas, the Pacific Islands, South Africa and Palestine. 


This event is free & open to the public. Venue is wheelchair-accessible.
For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Department of Social & Cultural Analysis.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality and the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis.


Rana Barakat is Assistant Professor of History and Contemporary Arab Studies at Birzeit University in Palestine. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago writing about popular politics and resistance in early twentieth century Palestine. Her research interests include the social history of Jerusalem, colonialism, and revolutionary social movements.
Kēhaulani Kauanui is Professor of American Studies and an affiliate faculty member in Anthropology at Wesleyan University. She is also a radio Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity producer, and the author of: Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Duke University Press 2008); Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism (Duke University Press 2018); and Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders (University of Minnesota Press 2018).

Wild Bore

a performance with Zoe Coombs Marr, Ursula Martinez, & Adrienne Truscott

September 27/28, 2019 — 7:30 pm

Skirball Center

Tickets: https://nyuskirball.org/events/wild-bore/

The first rule of making art is don’t respond to your critics. But in the U.S. premiere of Wild Bore, three masters of smart, political and outrageous comedy delve into the torrent of critical fury that has been aimed at baffling, misunderstood and downright awful works of art — including their own.

Zoe Coombs Marr, Ursula Martinez, and Adrienne Truscott team up to play certain critics at their own game, and prove they too are not afraid to talk out of their arses.


Tickets: https://nyuskirball.org/events/wild-bore/
Presented by NYU Skirball Center; co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality.

Thinking #MeToo Transnationally: Hong Kong, India, Pakistan, Morocco, Taiwan

a roundtable with Zineb Belmkaddem, Mona Eltahawy, Tejaswini Niranjana, Kyla Pasha, & Sarah Suhail, moderated by Fawzia Afzal-Khan & Gayatri Gopinath

October 1, 2019 — 6 to 8 pm

Jurow Hall, Silver Center

Zineb Belmkaddem, activist
Mona Eltahawy, author & activist
Tejaswini Niranjana, Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong
Kyla Pasha, The Feminist Collective, Pakistan
Sarah Suhail, The Feminist Collective, Pakistan

What does #MeToo look like beyond the boundaries of Europe and North America? This roundtable brings together feminist scholars and activists to discuss the different iterations of #MeToo in South Asia, East Asia, and the Arab world. Panelists will consider the shape that sexual violence, and contemporary activism against it, take in local contexts of power and privilege in these different sites. Participants include Zineb Belmkadem (#Masaktach, Morocco), Mona Eltahawy (#MosqueMeToo), Tejaswini Niranjana (Lingnan University, Hong Kong), and Kyla Pasha and Sarah Suhail (The Feminist Collective, Pakistan). Moderated by Fawzia Afzal-Khan (Montclair State University) and Gayatri Gopinath (NYU). 


This event is free & open to the public. Venue is wheelchair-accessible.
For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at csgsnyu@nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.
Facebook event page here.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute; Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; Department of Media, Culture, & Communication; Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies; & SouthAsia @ NYU. And by Sakhi for South Asian Women.


Zineb Belmkaddem is a Moroccan activist residing in the Washington D.C Metro area. She is a member of Masaktach collective against violence against women in Morocco and rape culture. Blamkadden is also a former writer/editor at Mamfakinch.com. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Conflict Resolution from State University of New York (SUNY). 
Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author and activist. She is the author of The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls and Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution
Tejaswini Niranjana is a cultural theorist with a special interest in gender/sexuality, translation, and the cultural history of Indian music. She is the author of Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad (Duke UP, 2006) and Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious (Duke UP, forthcoming in 2020).
Kyla Pasha is poet and feminist activist based in Lahore. Her first volume of poetry, High Noon and the Body, was released in 2010. She is also the co-editor of Two Loves: Faiz’s Letters from Jail. She is a member of the Feminist Collective Lahore and co-founder of Chay Magazine (chaymagazine.org). She researches religious life and national structures interfacing with queerness; and is pursuing a PhD in Religious Studies at Arizona State University, focusing on ritual spaces and utopic longings in marginal Muslim communities. She is currently working on her second book of poems.
Sarah Suhail is a queer feminist organizer who is a member of the feminist collective and queer collective in Lahore. She currently researching movement building struggles of freed bonded women and Trans* women situated in structures of organized violence in Pakistan. She has worked with peasant, fisher-folk and queer movements in Pakistan and works on a number of issues regarding intersectional oppression and the politics of resistance. Sarah is also an advocate of the Lahore High Court and is the co-founder and editor-at-large of Chay Magazine: Sex and Sexuality in Pakistan, South Asia and Abroad (chaymagazine.org).

Bodyminds Reimagined

a book talk with Sami Schalk

October 4, 2019 — 6 pm

239 Greene Street, 8th Floor Commons

Sami Schalk, Gender & Women’s Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison

In Bodyminds Reimagined Sami Schalk traces how black women’s speculative fiction complicates the understanding of bodyminds—the intertwinement of the mental and the physical—in the context of race, gender, and (dis)ability. Bridging black feminist theory with disability studies, Schalk demonstrates that this genre’s political potential lies in the authors’ creation of bodyminds that transcend reality’s limitations. She reads (dis)ability in neo-slave narratives by Octavia Butler (Kindred) and Phyllis Alesia Perry (Stigmata) not only as representing the literal injuries suffered under slavery, but also as a metaphor for the legacy of racial violence. The fantasy worlds in works by N. K. Jemisin, Shawntelle Madison, and Nalo Hopkinson—where werewolves have obsessive-compulsive-disorder and blind demons can see magic—destabilize social categories and definitions of the human, calling into question the very nature of identity. In these texts, as well as in Butler’s Parable series, able-mindedness and able-bodiedness are socially constructed and upheld through racial and gendered norms. Outlining (dis)ability’s centrality to speculative fiction, Schalk shows how these works open new social possibilities while changing conceptualizations of identity and oppression through nonrealist contexts.


This event is free & open to the public. Venue is wheelchair accessible and CART service will be provided.
For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Center for Disability Studies at 212-992-9767.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for Disability Studies and the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality.


Dr. Sami Schalk is an Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison. She earned her BA in English (Creative Writing) and Women’s Studies from Miami University in 2008, her MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from University of Notre Dame in 2010, and her PhD in Gender Studies from Indiana University in 2014.
Dr. Schalk’s first book Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction  (Duke University Press 2018) argues that black women writers of speculative fiction reimagine the possibilities and limits of bodyminds, changing the way we read and interpret categories like (dis)ability, race, gender and sexuality within the context of these non-realist texts. Dr. Schalk has begun a second book project on disability politics in contemporary African American art and activism, including the Black Panthers and the Black Lives Matter movement. She also writes for mainstream outlets, namely Our Lives Magazine, Madison’s local LBGTQ magazine. On a personal level, Dr. Schalk identifies as a fat, femme, black, queer, cisgender, nondisabled, middle-class, polyamorous, body-positive, sex-positive, intersectional feminist woman. Dr. Schalk uses she/her pronouns. You can follow her activities on Twitter and Facebook.

Thinking Unruly Aesthetics

a roundtable with Kandice Chuh, Allan deSouza, & Gayatri Gopinath, moderated by Alpesh Kantilal Patel

October 8, 2019 — 6 to 7:30 pm

CSGS, 285 Mercer Street, 4th Floor

Kandice Chuh, English, Graduate Center, City University of New York
Allan deSouza, Art Practice, University of California, Berkeley
Gayatri Gopinath, Social & Cultural Analysis, New York University
Alpesh Kantilal Patel, Contemporary Art & Theory, Florida International University
This roundtable places in conversation three recently published monographs: Kandice Chuh’s The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man” (Duke 2019), Allan deSouza’s How Art Can Be Thought: A Handbook for Change (Duke 2018), and Gayatri Gopinath’s Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Duke 2018). Chuh, deSouza, and Gopinath will discuss how their work approaches questions of  aesthetics, visuality, and difference, and what it means to decolonize the practice of making, displaying, thinking, and writing about art. 


This event is free & open to the public. Venue is wheelchair-accessible.
For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at csgsnyu@nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.
Facebook event page here.
Co-sponsored by the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute and the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality.


Kandice Chuh is a professor of English and American studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.  The author of Imagine Otherwise: on Asian Americanist Critique (2003) and The Difference Aesthetics Makes: on the Humanities ‘After Man,’ (2019), Chuh is working on a collection of essays on teaching, as well as continuing research on Asian racialization in “the Asian Century.”  Chuh teaches courses focused on such topics as aesthetics, embodiment, decoloniality, queerness, and color. 
Allan deSouza is a trans-media artist whose works restage colonial-era material legacies through counter-strategies of humor, fabulation, and (mis)translation. deSouza’s work has been shown extensively in the US and internationally, including at the Krannert Museum, IL; the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; and the Pompidou Centre, Paris. deSouza’s book, How Art Can Be Thought (Duke, 2018), examines art pedagogy, and proposes decolonizing artistic, viewing, and pedagogical practices that can form new attachments within the contemporary world. The book provides an extensive analytical glossary of some of the most common terms used to discuss art, while considering how those terms may be adapted to new artistic and social challenges. deSouza is represented by Talwar Gallery, NY and New Delhi, and is Chair of the department of Art Practice at University of California, Berkeley.
Gayatri Gopinath is Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, and the Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. She works at the intersection of transnational feminist and queer studies, postcolonial studies, and diaspora studies, and is the author of Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (2005), and Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (2018). She has published numerous essays on gender, sexuality, and queer diasporic cultural production in journals such as Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, GLQ, Social Text, and positions.
Alpesh Kantilal Patel is an associate professor of contemporary art at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami. His monograph Productive failure: writing queer transnational South Asian art histories was published by Manchester University Press in 2017. A frequent contributor of exhibition reviews to international art publications such as Artforum, frieze, Art in America, and hyperallergic.com, he has organized exhibitions both in the US and Europe. Overall, his art historical scholarship, criticism, and curating reflect his queer, anti-racist, and transnational approach to contemporary art.

Terrifying Drag

a conversation with Faluda Islam & LaWhore Vagistan

October 15, 2019 — 6:30 to 8:30 pm

8 Washington Mews

This conversation brings together two fabulous US-based South Asian drag queens, Faluda Islam and LaWhore Vagistan, to discuss a broad array of topics connected to the aesthetics of their practices. Specifically: pastiche as a mode of re-making the world; death as well as conviviality as strategies in drag; camp theory and a discussion of it more broadly in relation to race and ethnicity; “queer Muslim futures,” the title of one of Faluda Islam’s events; the futurity of drag more generally; national/transnational frames of reference; and online vs. live performances. Curated and moderated by A/P/A Institute at NYU Visiting Scholar Alpesh Kantilal Patel (Florida International University).


For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute.


Presented by the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute; co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality.

 

Women & Migration: Responses in Art & History

a book conversation with Kalia Nelson, Ellyn Toscano, & Deborah Willis

October 22, 2019 — 6:30 to 8:30 pm

20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor

Kalia Nelson, African American & African Diaspora Studies, Columbia University
Ellyn Toscano, Programming, Patnerships, & Community Engagement, New York University in Brooklyn
Deborah Willis, Photography & Imaging, New York University

Join us for lively presentations and conversation from some of the dynamic editors and contributors of the recently published volume Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History, edited by Deborah Willis, Ellyn Toscano, and Kalia Nelson. 
The essays in this book chart how women’s profound and turbulent experiences of migration have been articulated in writing, photography, art and film. The volume offers a wide range of migratory events from women’s perspectives, covering the Caribbean Diaspora, refugees and slavery through the various lenses of politics and war, love and family. 
The contributors, which include academics and artists, offer both personal and critical points of view on the artistic and historical repositories of these experiences. Selfies, motherhood, violence and Hollywood all feature in this substantial treasure-trove of women’s joy and suffering, disaster and delight, place, memory and identity.
Refreshments and music will be served!


For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Institute of African American Affairs.


The event is hosted and supported by the NYU Institute of African American Affairs, and supported by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute, the Department of Art & Public Policy, Tisch School of the Arts, the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.

 

An Indefinite Sentence: A Personal History of India’s Inspiring Movements for LGBT & Sex Workers’ Rights

a talk with Siddharth Dube

October 29, 2019 — 6 to 8 pm

70 Washington Square South, AFC Center, room 743

Join us for a book talk with Siddharth Dube, the author of An Indefinite Sentence: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sexa memoir that takes on issues of love, sexuality, and oppression through Dube’s personal and political journey as a gay man. “[A] heart-stopping memoir of being gay in India and the world. . . . [A]lthough this is a personal memoir, it is also a memoir of work. Work helped Dube find himself. And work allowed him to live a life he could be proud of. . . . Dube gives his readers the substantial gift of hope. The sentiment is, in fact, the spine of his memoir.” – New York Times Book Review
Moderated by Gayatri Gopinath, Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, NYU.


For more information about this event, please contact South Asia at NYU.
Organized by South Aisa @ NYU; co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, and by Global Liberal Studies.


Siddharth Dube is a non-fiction writer and specialist commentator on poverty, public health, and development. His books include No One Else: A personal history of outlawed love and sex; In the Land of Poverty: Memoirs of an Impoverished Indian Family, 1947-1997; Sex, Lies and AIDS; and the central essay to photographer Sebastião Salgado’s The End of Polio. In 2020, Viking Penguin India will publish In the Land of Poverty: A Family, A Village, A Nation, 1947-2019.

 

Siting A/P/A Studies: A Celebration of Scholars

book celebration, presentations, & a roundtable discussion with Cristina Beltrán, Liz Ellis, Nicole Fleetwood, Nell Geiser, Ronak K. Kapadia, Manu Karuka, & Jan Padios

November 1, 2019 — 5 to 8 pm

20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor

Ronak K. Kapadia, Gender & Women’s Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago
Manu Karuka, American Studies, Barnard College
Jan Padios, American Studies, University of Maryland
We celebrate three new books by alums from the NYU Doctoral Program in American Studies with a series of presentations, one-on-one conversations, and a roundtable discussion.
In Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Duke University Press, 2019), Ronak K. Kapadia (University of Illinois, Chicago) theorizes the world-making power of contemporary art responses to US militarism in the Greater Middle East. He is joined in conversation by Nicole Fleetwood (Rutgers University). Manu Karuka’s (Barnard College) Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (University of California Press, 2019) boldly reframes the history of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Pawnee tribes, and the Chinese migrants who toiled on its path. Liz Ellis (NYU Department of History) leads the discussion with Karuka. In A Nation on the Line: Call Centers as Postcolonial Predicaments in the Philippines (Duke University Press, 2018), Jan Padios (University of Maryland) examines the massive Philippine call center industry in the context of globalization, race, gender, transnationalism, and postcolonialism. Nell Geiser (Communications Workers of America) serves as her discussant. A roundtable, featuring all three authors and moderated by Cristina Beltrán (NYU Department of Social & Cultural Analysis), concludes the program.


For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute.


Presented by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the NYU and Doctoral Program in American Studies/Department of Social & Cultural Analysis.

 

Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance

a book presentation & talk with Sandra Ruiz

November 20, 2019 — 6 to 8 pm

Performance Studies, 721 Broadway, room 612

Moving between theatre, experimental video, revolutionary protest, photography, poetry, and durational performance art, Ruiz merges the philosophical, social, and psychic at the site of non-linear aesthetic practices. In doing so, the author argues that Ricanness operates as a continual performance of bodily endurance against U.S. colonialism, unfolding via aesthetic interventions in time. In this reading, Ruiz challenges the colonization of time and our normative assumptions of negation, incompletion, exhaustion, endurance, and violence, alongside moments of pleasure, desire, and redemption. A theorization of Ricanness, as the author expresses, supplies a relational way to imagine, dream, and construct alternate forms of existence under colonialism, across bodies of water and beyond the annexation of land.


For more information, please contact the NYU Department of Performance Studies.


Presented by the NYU Department of Performance Studies and co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.