Fall 2010

SEXED ASIAN MACHINES:
ON THE COMMUNICABILITY OF MULTIMEDIA

A Brown Bag Lunch Talk with Jian Chen

September 20, Monday
12:30 to 1:45 pm

Jian Chen, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU

Prior to the multimedia convergence initiated by mass digitalization, documentary and pornographic film/video offered the experiences of communicability and interactivity now attributed to “post-cinematic” multimedia. Pornography and documentary are arguably anti-cinematic forms that work through communicative relays between viewers and film/video, rather than immersive spectatorship, and through visible technological mediation, in contrast to aesthetic signatures or spectacle. Whether through claims to authenticity or the pleasure of fantasy, these two genres also initiate the kinds of cross-cultural contact celebrated more belatedly, and with more polished veneer, in global Hollywood cinema. Chen’s talk will focus on semi-documentaries on sex work and mainstream online pornography, which feature Asian feminine subjects. Chen contends that these docu/porn forms make potentially explicit the paradoxical relationships between autonomy and control, enjoyment and labor, shaping image consumption and cultural visibility within transnational neoliberal capitalism. And Chen’s talk will explore the racial, sexual fantasies that support the imagined free-flow circulation of images and information within multimedia public spheres.

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

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

Jian Chen is Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. Chen’s current research explores new demands made on cultural consumption, representation, and politics, with the transnational circulation of sexed racial and ethnic images in post-cinematic film and media. Chen’s work brings into conversation the areas of queer and transgender critique; film, new media, and visual cultures; East Asian diasporas; and comparative racial politics. S/he received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine in 2009 and B.A. degrees in Ethnic Studies and English at the University of California, Berkeley. Chen’s article “Sex Without Friction: the Limits of Multi-Mediated Human Subjectivity in Cheang Shu Lea’s Tech-Porn” is forthcoming in the electronic journal Postmodern Culture.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute.


THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF REFUGEES

An Interdisciplinary Symposium at New York University

September 23 to 25, Thursday to Saturday
times to be announced

Keynote lecture by Thomas Keenan

Other participants include Eliot Borenstein, David Campbell, Ilana Feldman, Sara M. Green, Nina Ha, Zenia Kish, Jana Lipman, Louisa Schein, April Shemak, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Celina Su, and Miriam Ticktin

For more information, click HERE.

This symposium will explore the contributions that the humanities and cultural studies make to our understanding of refugee experience, by bring together scholars and practitioners who engage refugees as artists, activists, and combatants, rather than as “fearful people” without agency.

Department of Social and Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th & 5th Floors

Thursday, Sept. 23rd 6:00 – 8:30pm: opening remarks, documentary screening of Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, and discussion with filmmaker Zach Niles and Prof. Awam Amkpa, Associate Professor of Drama and Social and Cultural Analysis, Director of Africana Studies at NYU to be held at the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, 20 Cooper Square 4th Floor.

Friday, Sept. 24th 9:00am – 4:00pm: conference panels to be held at the Institute for Public Knowledge, 20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor.

Friday, Sept. 24th 4:30pm – 7:00pm: Keynote address by Thomas Keenan followed by discussion and reception to be held at the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor.

Saturday, Sept. 25th 9:30am – 1:00pm: conference panels to be held at the Institute for Public Knowledge, 20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor.

Eliot Borenstein
Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, Borenstein is the author of Overkill: Sex, Violence, and Russian Popular Culture after 1991 and Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1929. He is also editor and co-translator of Russian Postmodernism: Dialogue with Chaos by Mark Lipovetsky and has published numerous articles on contemporary Russian culture.

David Campbell
Professor of Cultural and Political Geography and a member of the Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies at Durham University. His many publications include the books National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, and Politics Without Principle: Sovereignty, Ethics and the Narratives of the Gulf War. He is currently working on a book about the global image economy and its production of pictorial representations of atrocity, famine, and war.

Ilana Feldman
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at George Washington University. She has published articles in a number of journals including Cultural Anthropology, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and History and Memory. Her book, Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority and the Work of Rule (1917-67), is in press with Duke University Press. She is editing a volume in progress entitled Government and Humanity.

Sara M. Green
Sara is Executive Director of A.R.T. (Art for Refugees in Transition), which she founded in 1999 in response to the humanitarian crisis in the Balkans. She has worked with refugee populations in Kosovo, Colombia and Thailand, where A.R.T. develops self-sustaining programs that draw on each community’s indigenous art forms and enable community elders to educate and incorporate younger generations in their cultural traditions. Sara earned her MBA from Columbia University, and also has a BFA in dance and danced professionally for ten years in the U.S. and Europe.

Nina Ha
Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Director of the World Literature Program at Creighton University. Her book in progress is titled American ‘Gook’ Examining Diasporic Vietnamese Masculinity and Sexuality.

Thomas Keenan
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and the Director of the Human Rights Project at Bard College. His publications include the book Fables of Responsibility as well as articles in PMLA, The New York Times, Wired, Aperture, Bidoun, and Political Theory. He is the editor of The End(s) of the Museum and the co-editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, New Media, Old Media, and other titles.

Zenia Kish
Ph.D. student in the American Studies Program at New York University. Her Master’s thesis in Media Studies examined representations of survivors and the politics of refugeeness in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. She has published on post-Katrina hip-hop in American Quarterly. Her doctoral studies concentrate on human rights, the reproduction of third world underdevelopment, agricultural imperialism and right to food movements.

Jana Lipman
Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Tulane University. She is the author of Guantanamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution, as well as articles about the role of the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay in foreign relations. She is currently writing about the relation of U.S. military bases and their significance for refugees and human rights in the second half of the twentieth century.

Louisa Schein
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural Politics and the book-in-progress, Rewind to Home: Hmong Media and Gendered Diaspora. She is also the co-editor of Translocal China: Linkages, Identities and the Reimagining of Space and the forthcoming Media, Erotics and Transnational Asia.

April Shemak
Assistant Professor of English as Sam Houston State University. She has published articles in Modern Fiction Studies, Textual Practice, and Postcolonial Text and is the author of the forthcoming book, Asylum Speakers: Caribbean Refugees and Testimonial Discourse.

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi
Currently a doctoral student at New York University writing her dissertation on the protection and governance of refugees as expressed in the architecture of camps and the broader urban, geographical, and cultural impacts of emergency planning for refugees. She is the author of The Library Book: Design Collaborations in the Public Schools about an initiative to revolutionize the culture of education to combat poverty in low-income New York City neighborhoods. Her background includes nonprofit work, freelance journalism, and architectural practice.

Celina Su
Associate Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Her work looks at civil society and the cultural politics of education and health policy. She is the author of Streetwise for Book Smarts and co-authored Our Schools Suck (with Gaston Alonso, Noel Anderson, and Jeanne Theoharis). She is the co-founding Program Officer for the Burmese Refugee Project, a non-profit organization that develops participatory models for community development among Shan refugees living in Thailand.

Miriam Ticktin
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at the New School for Social Research. Her research interests include anthropology of the human and humanitarianism; migration, camps and borders; sexual violence/violence against women; PTSD/trauma, and psychiatric humanitarianism. Her articles appear in American Ethnologist, SIGNS, Interventions, Ethnicities, and The Political and Legal Anthropology Review. Her forthcoming book, The Moral Emergency Complex: Humanitarianism, Sexual Violence and the Politics of Immigration in France, looks at how politics are enacted in the name of care and protection, under threat of emergency. She has also co-edited with Ilana Feldman the forthcoming volume, In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care.

Organized by the NYU Department of Social and Cultural Analysis; co-sponsored by CSGS.


GAWKING, GAPING, STARING:
LIVING IN MARKED BODIES

A performance by Eli Clare

October 4, Monday
7 to 9 pm

READ THE REVIEW! Eli Clare, “Building Community/Resisting Shame”: Another side of living in Marked Bodies

For more information: please contact the NYU Office of LGBT Student Services at 212-998-4424.

 

Disabled people, trans people, fat people, and people of color all know what it’s like to be stared at. Through words and images, Eli explores the internal experiences of living in marked bodies and the external meanings of oppression and bodily difference.

Kimmel Center, Room 804
60 Washington Square South

White, disabled, and genderqueer, Eli Clare happily lives in the Green Mountains of Vermont where he writes and proudly claims a penchant for rabble-rousing. He has written a book of essays Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (South End Press, 1999, 2009) and a collection of poetry The Marrow’s Telling: Words in Motion (Homofactus Press, 2007) and has been published in many periodicals and anthologies. Eli speaks, teaches, and facilitates all over the United States and Canada at conferences, community events, and colleges about disability, queer and trans identities, and social justice. Among other pursuits, he has walked across the United States for peace, coordinated a rape prevention program, and helped organize the first ever Queerness and Disability Conference. When he’s not writing or on the road, you can find him reading, hiking, camping, riding his recumbent trike, or otherwise having fun adventures.

Organized by NYU Pride Month/Office of LGBT Student Service; co-sponsored by CSGS, and by the CUNY Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS).

Portrait of Eli Clare by Riva Lehrer from the series Circle Stories


WHERE IS ANA MENDIETA?
¿DÓNDE ESTA ANA MENDIETA?

25 Years Later: An Exhibition and Symposium

READ THE REVIEW! “Where is Ana Mendieta?”: A Revisitation of the Artist’s Life and Work

Non-NYU affiliates please RSVP to PSLectures@gmail.com

September 8, 2010 marks 25 years since artist Ana Mendieta’s fatal fall, naked, from the window of the 34th floor apartment she shared with her husband of just eight months, the renowned sculptor, Carl Andre. NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts directly overlooks the rooftop of the Delion delicatessen, the site of her violent end. And, the Fales Collection at NYU contains the A.I.R. Gallery archive, with a significant number of Mendieta’s original works. Mendieta’s haunting proximity and continually felt presence at NYU make it the most appropriate locale for this Exhibition and Symposium. And, after 25 years, it is time to ask this question once again, ‘Where is Ana Mendieta?’*

The Exhibition and Symposium will reveal vital aspects of Mendieta’s iconoclastic earth, body, performance, site-specific and visual art works, while addressing her influences, legacy, and the era of Feminist Art from which she emerged. This will be the first Exhibit and Symposium to explicitly address the debate surrounding her tragic death and what many believe to be Carle Andre’s unjust acquittal of her murder. ‘Where is Ana Mendieta?’ examines both this important, influential artist and the lingering memory and controversy surrounding her tragic death.

Symposium
October 7, Thursday
7 to 9 pm

Panelists include:

Kat Griefen, Director of the A.I.R. Gallery
Genevieve Hyacinthe, Professor of Contemporary, African/Afro-Atlantic Art History at Purchase College (SUNY)
José Esteban Muñoz, Chair, Associate Professor, Performance Studies at NYU
Carolee Schneemann, Multidisciplinary Artist, Author, Mendieta’s friend and ‘aesthetic sister’
Diana Taylor, University Professor, Performance Studies and Spanish at NYU and Founding Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics

Performance Studies Studio
721 Broadway, 6th Floor

Exhibition
August 1 to October 8
Fales Library, 70 Washington Square South

The Fales Collection exhibit includes the original works of Mendieta, most of which were not exhibited in her lifetime, related personal effects and the film BloodWork: The Ana Mendieta Story by Richard Move.

Sponsored by the Department of Performance Studies and the Fales Library and Special Collections, with the collaborative co-sponsorship of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), the English Department, Grey Art Gallery, and CSGS at NYU; and by Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory.

Image: Ana Mendieta, Tree of Life, 1976, courtesy of A.I.R. Gallery Archives


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?”

Co-sponsored by the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute and the Department of Performance Studies.


THE POLITICS OF B-GIRLING AND BATTLING

A Brown Bag Lunch Talk with Imani K. Johnson

October 18, Monday
12:30 to 1:45 pm

Imani Kai Johnson, Department of Performance Studies, NYU

In a dance culture like breaking, how does movement shape gender politics and the cultural meaning of b-girling?

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

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

Imani Kai Johnson is an Academic Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Performance Studies at New York University.


A BRIEF HISTORY OF EROTOHISTORIOGRAPHY

A lecture by Elizabeth Freeman

October 28, Thursday
7 to 8:30 pm

READ THE REVIEW! Queer Time Makes Queer Bodies: Elizabeth Freeman Historicizes Erotohistoriography

Elizabeth Freeman, English, UC Davis

Proposing the body as site of historical encounter–in and across time—Elizabeth Freeman traces a history of carnal historiographical practices that she calls “erotohistoriography.” Within this paradigm, it is possible to imagine historical consciousness in terms of pleasure. From medieval relic worship through Romantic-era sympathetic historiography through a re-evaluation of Modernist “shock,” Freeman examines the discredited and disavowed role of enjoyable physical sensation, even sexual pleasure, involved in specific methods of accounting for the past. These methods revise not only the progressive and developmental models of time that have dominated history as a discipline, but also the Marxist tendency to assume that painful oppression is the only motor of collective action toward change. In this sense, erotohistoriography names the possibility not only of doing history otherwise, but of imagining futurity as the outcome of sex practices and body performances unhinged from the reproductive imperative.

Department of Social & Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor

Elizabeth Freeman is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of numerous journal articles and of the books The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture (Duke UP, 2002) and Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (forthcoming from Duke UP in fall 2010).

Co-sponsored by NYU’s Department of Performance Studies; Department of English; and Gender and Sexuality Studies Program; and by the Barnard Center for Research on Women, Barnard College.


STATES OF DEVOTION:
RELIGION, NEOLIBERALISM, AND THE POLITICS OF THE BODY IN THE AMERICAS

November 4 & 5, Thursday & Friday
10 am to 7 pm

For more information: http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/announcements/728-nov-4-5-states-of-devotion

For a PDF of the full program, click here.

This conference aims to promote and strengthen interdisciplinary dialogue about the changing role and place of religious discourses and practices in the wake of the transformations wrought by neoliberal globalization upon communities, societies and polities across the Hemisphere. This event is part of a multi-year project on ‘Religion and Politics in the Americas’ funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. Starting from the understanding that conceptions and models of “pluralism” or “secularism” vary across national contexts and regional geographies, we want to focus our attention on the ways in which the retraction of the state and the unrestrained acceleration of economic forces and market logics—neoliberal globalization—have transformed the experience of religiosity as well as the role and influence of religion across the Americas. As religious life has become increasingly channeled through the complex mechanisms of a neoliberal marketplace, the market has increasingly taken on roles and functions previously occupied by the state across broad social arenas. These transformations have not only affected discrete areas of social and economic policy, such as health care, education and security, but have also given rise to new private-public interfaces such as faith-based initiatives and discourses of volunteerism that have supplanted the discourses of rights. This shift has also required the production of new kinds of subjects, emblematized by the shift from citizen to consumer. We are particularly interested in the ways in which religious diversity has been variously enabled, foreclosed, harnessed and even commodified by the neoliberal state. In this context, we also wish to explore how public debates over gender and sexuality serve as flashpoints illuminating the wider workings of the state’s ongoing negotiation with religion and religious difference. Sexuality and sexual life more broadly connect individuals to the state as citizens, to the market as consumer-laborers, and to the supposedly traditional values represented by religion. But how this happens, and with what policy implications on a range of issues, will not be the same in every national context.

Confirmed participants include:

Ana Amuchástegui (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana)
Roberto J. Blancarte (Colegio de México)
Susana Cook (Independent artist)
Rafael de la Dehesa (City University of New York)
Emerson Giumbelli (Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro)
Marcial Godoy-Anativia (New York University)
Macarena Gómez-Barris (University of Southern California)
Janet Jakobsen (Barnard College)
Leda Martins (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais)
Elizabeth McAlister (Wesleyan University)
Bethany Moreton (University of Georgia)
Kemy Oyarzún (Universidad de Chile)
Ann Pellegrini (New York University)
Anthony Petro (New York University)
Reverend Billy (The Church of Life After Shopping)
Jesusa Rodríguez (Resistencia Creativa)
Pablo Semán (IDES/Colegio de México)
Peggy Shaw (Split Britches)
Winnifred Sullivan (University of Buffalo)
Diana Taylor (New York University)
Moysés Zúñiga Santiago (Independent photojournalist)

Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics
20 Cooper Square
, 5th Floor
Bowery @ East 5th Street

Co-sponsored by the NYU Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and CSGS and underwritten by generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation.

*Picture by: Adam Peleg*


DERRIDA’S QUEER CAT(S)

A lecture by Carla Freccero

November 10, Wednesday
6:30 to 8 pm

READ THE REVIEW! I am, I am following, I am after the animal: “Derrida’s Queer Cats”

Carla Freccero, University of California Santa Cruz

This paper situates some of the dilemmas of the effort to think and feel with non-human animate being in the western philosophical tradition by examining Jacques Derrida’s posthumous L’Animal que donc je suis (The Animal that Therefore I Am). Derrida’s work on animality is useful for crafting a queer ethics of relating to the living in general, even as his notion of spectrality offers a way to grapple with the traumatic persistence of (historical) affect in the present. Nevertheless, even as Derrida reaches toward a referent by insisting on the particularity and singularity of his (female) cat, what he animates is the lively density of intertextual feline figures in the history of literary and philosophical thinking and writing about questions of figure and reference and questions of inscription. In playfully allegorizing—even as he literalizes—the search for the elusive figure of the animal other as a mode of “chercher la femme,” Derrida subtly demonstrates the web of figural inter-implications (involving both sex and species difference) in efforts to meet and face animate alterity.

Carla Freccero is Professor of Literature, Feminist Studies, and History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, where she has taught since 1991. She is also the Director of the UCSC Center for Cultural Studies. Her most recent book is Queer/Early/Modern (Duke 2006) and she is currently working on a book titled Animate Figures, from which her talk is derived. Her recent work in animal theory appears in Social Text, special issue on Interspecies (forthcoming) and a collection, Comparatively Queer, forthcoming from Palgrave.

Great Room
13-19 University Place, 1st Floor

between 8th Street and Waverly Place


QUEER RICAN PERFORMANCE

an evening with Ignacio Rivera and Awilda Rodriguez Lora

November 15, Monday
6 to 8 pm

NYU Kimmel Center
60 Washington Square South
Room 802

Presented by the NYU Office of LGBT Student Services’ Storytelling and Performance Series

For more information: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=157347347637869

Join Puerto Rican performers Ignacio Rivera and Awilda Rodriguez Lora as they celebrate Trans Awareness Week and Latino Heritage Month at NYU!

Dancer
by Ignacio Rivera

Solo performance about sex work, colonialism and gender identity.

IGNACIO RIVERA is a queer, gender fluid, trans-entity, Black Boricua performance artist who performs skits, spoken word, one-person shows through intentional storytelling. Ignacio is also a lecturer, activist, new filmmaker and self-proclaimed sex educator.

I wanted to be a cheerleader but my cuntry didn’t have it
by Awilda Rodriguez Lora

A multimedia solo performance about identity, family and intimacy.

AWILDA RODRIGUEZ LORA is a dancer, performer, producer, activist, yogi, lover and traveler who has been performing and creating her own work for over 10 years. She has collaborated with Darell Jones, Tim Miller, Kortney Ryan Ziegler, Baraka de Soleil and others.

Co-sponsored by:
Latino Heritage Month
Trans Awareness Week
Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
Office of LGBT Student Services clubs: BodyQueer, Campgrrl, T-Party


CAMP AESTHETICS AND DESI VISUAL CULTURE

A Brown Bag Lunch Talk with Alpesh Patel

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

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

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

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

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

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


LIVING OUT LOUD

Men of color creating HIV awareness through their stories, art, & activism

Presented by NYU’s Office of LGBT Student Services Storytelling
and Performance Series/Multiple Identity Speaker Series

November 29, Monday
6 to 8 pm

Jeffrey S. Gould Welcome Center
50 West 4th Street

To see the Facebook Invite: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=171571102869379

Join NYU’s Office of LGBT Student Services and the Center for Multicultural Education and Programs in celebrating AIDS Awareness Month with performances and spoken word by HIV positive (poz) men of color who are well-known writers, actors, hip hop performers and political activists.

Tim’m T. West: Hip Hop Artist, Scholar, Poet

Cornelius LIFE Jones: Actor, Writer, ARTivist

Brandon Lacy Campos: Organizer, Writer, FierceCook

Pedro Julio Serrano: Communicator, Activist, Blogger

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 you’ve done to bring awareness to HIV and the impact it has on communities of color.

For more information, please contact the NYU Office of LGBT Student Services at 212-998-4424.

Co-sponsors:
Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
Office of LGBT Student Services clubs: BodyQueer


SEX IN AN EPIDEMIC

A screening and discussion with filmmaker Jean Carlomusto

a documentary by Jean Carlomusto
70 minutes, color, USA, 2010

December 8, Wednesday
6:30 to 8:30 pm

Click here for trailer.

This pioneering documentary explores the personal, political and structural challenges that have continually hampered the best efforts of HIV educators and community groups to curb HIV infection rates in the United States. It is a compelling history of the devastating early days of the epidemic in NYC, when men with “GRID” were a stigmatized population that died swiftly of a terrifying new disease.

Few concepts have had as great an impact on sexuality over the past 28 years as that of “safer sex.” Yet, as a concept, it is important to remember two things: first, safer sex had to be invented amidst an alarming lack of information that existed before the discovery of HIV in 1984; and second, safer sex as a concept had to be sold by the persistent and creative persuasion of community-based groups all across the country.

Michelson Theater, Cinema Studies
721 Broadway, 6th Floor

Co-sponsored by NYU’s Department of Cinema Studies; the Center for Health, Identity, Behavior, and Prevention Studies (CHIBPS); and CSGS.