Spring 2011

COMING OUT OR INVITING IN?: REFRAMING DISCLOSURE PARADIGMS

a Brown Bag Lunch Talk with Darnell L. Moore

February 7, Monday
12:30 to 1:45 pm

Darnell L. Moore, CSGS Visiting Scholar

Click here for a PDF transcript of the talk.

Does “coming out of the closet” properly function as the most useful way to name one’s quest towards self and communal liberation and expression? Does usage of the “coming out” idiom–and “the closet” metaphor–facilitate or impede the liberatory potential of affirming theologies and pastoral counseling approaches? Moore’s talk will consider such questions and argue for a turn to a new intervention, or what he names, the process of “inviting in.”

Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
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!

Darnell L. Moore’s research seeks to put the broad notion of religiosity (and the theologies and practices of African American denominational churches, in specific) in conversation with theoretical interventions like queer theory, cultural studies and ethnic studies. A central concern that figures in his writing is the notion of religiosity as an additional social force that aids in the construction, and constriction, of bodies and of human lives. His writing has appeared in Black Theology: An International Journal, Theology & Sexuality, Pneuma: The Journal of the Society of Pentecostal Studies (forthcoming), and Transscripts: A Journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences – UC Irvine (forthcoming). Darnell has served appointments as a Visiting Fellow at Yale Divinity School and Lecturer in the Women & Gender Studies Department at Rutgers-New Brunswick. He is also an active member of the queer activist community in Newark, NJ where he serves as the Chair of Mayor Cory Booker of Newark’s Advisory Commission on LGBTQ Concerns and Education Chair of the Newark Pride Alliance. During his “regular” life, he is the Associate Director of the Newark Schools Research Collaborative (NSRC) and an Affiliate of the Institute on Education Law and Policy (IELP) both at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey-Newark. He holds a BA in Social & Behavioral Sciences (Seton Hall University), MA in Counseling (Eastern University) and MA in Theological Studies (Princeton Theological Seminary).

Co-sponsored by the NYU Office of LGBT Student Services, and by Pride in Practice, a student group of the NYU Silver School of Social Work.


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.

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.


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.


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; Office of LGBT Student Services;

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


FEMINIST AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTIONS: PERFORMING THE SELF ON STAGE AND ON THE PAGE

a book talk with Barbara Browning, Linda Schlossberg, & Alina Troyano (aka Carmelita Tropicana)

February 22, Tuesday
7 to 8:30 pm

Barbara Browning, Performance Studies, NYU
author of The Correspondence Artist

Linda Schlossberg, Women, Gender and Sexuality, Harvard University
author of Life in Miniature

Alina Troyano (aka Carmelita Tropicana), writer and performance artist
author of I, Carmelita Tropicana: Performing Between Cultures

This panel opens a feminist space — call it genre trouble — between self and “self” to explore the tension and productive possibilities between memory and imagination, autobiography and audience, printed text and embodied performance. Reading from and discussing their own creative fictions, our three speakers reflect on the political and artistic stakes of performing identities and re-staging histories, both intimate and public.

Department of Performance Studies
721 Broadway, Room 612
between Waverly and Washington Places

Co-sponsored by the Tuesday Night Forum Series, NYU Department of Performance Studies.


NEW MAJORITIES, SHIFTING PRIORITIES

difference and demographics in the 21st century university

March 4, Friday
all day

participants include Laura Briggs, Lisa Duggan, Rod Ferguson, Inderpal Grewal, Laura Kang, Kathleen McHugh, Angela Riley, Sarita See, Jenny Sharpe, Sandra Soto, and Kathryn Bond Stockton

University of California, Los Angeles
Royce 314

for more information, please visit http://www.csw.ucla.edu/events/new-majorities-shifting-priorities

The UCLA Center for the Study of Women (CSW) and NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS) have undertaken a joint project to address the challenges currently facing the fields of gender and sexuality studies, women’s studies, LGBT studies, ethnic studies, and postcolonial studies. As part of this project, the CSW will be hosting a conference related to the way we define our programs, as well as how they are organized.

Co-sponsored by: UCLA Division of the Social Sciences, University of California Humanities Research Institute, UCLA Division of the Humanities, UCLA Department of Women’s Studies, UCLA LGBT Studies Program, UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, UCLA César Chávez Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies, UCLA Afro-American Studies Program, UCLA American Indian Studies Center, UCLA American Indian Studies Program, UCLA Asian American Studies Center, and UCLA Department of Asian American Studies.


CREATING PROPER MEN: MASCULINITIES, EMBODIMENT AND AGENCY IN THE WEST BANK

a Brown Bag Lunch Talk with Maria Malmström

March 7, Monday
12:30 to 1:45 pm

Maria Malmström, CSGS Visiting Scholar

In this talk, Dr. Malmström will discuss constructions of gender, embodiment and agency among male Hamas youths in the West Bank through the prism of violence. She will highlight the importance of analyzing the body in such processes – both as agential and as victimized. To be able to move away from the sensationalist Western media that often portray Middle Eastern Muslim men as ‘violent’, and as terrorists, we need to understand the motivations and the meanings of violence. This talk will discuss constructions of masculinities in a complex interplay of violence, political Islam, suffering and loss. The method of analysis is to use a discourse-centered approach and to use experience-near ethnography that begins with men’s own practices and attends to how they understand themselves, how their bodies are involved in this process, and how they live out norms and ideologies in their everyday lives. Thereby we are able to understand how men’s realities and identities are interpreted, negotiated and constructed and how the body actively is involved in these processes. This approach is relevant since it is possible to analyze the singularity of experience, not only as a form of social interaction, but as linked to social structures and discourses, which implies negotiations of tensions, conflicts, and uncertainties.

Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
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!

Maria Malmström is a Swedish anthropologist and her areas of interest are the MENA region, gender, body, sexuality, politics, violence, and security. She received her PhD from the School of Global Studies, Social Anthropology, University of Gothenburg. Her dissertation examined how female gender identity is continually created and re-created in Egypt through a number of daily practices, of which female circumcision is central. The study explored how the subject is made through the interplay of global hegemonic structures of power and the most intimate sphere, which has been exposed in the international arena. She is today involved in the inter-disciplinary research project “Hamas between Sharia rule and Demo-Islam.” The study aims to investigate in what way Hamas will adopt to the new realities on the ground (together with Michael Schulz et al.). Additionally, Dr. Malmström is involved in ground research on sexual violence and armed conflict in a globalized world (together with Maria Stern and Maria Eriksson Baaz). Furthermore, she is a gender consultant (UNFPA and others), and member of several academic/policy networks, e.g. Think Tank for Arab Women.


ON HOSTILE GROUND

a film screening and discussion

March 9, Wednesday
6:30 to 8:30 pm

Introduction by Faye Ginsburg, Anthropology, NYU

Post-screening discussion with co-director Jenny Raskin

a film by Liz Mermin and Jenny Raskin
71 minutes, 2001, USA

For more film information and trailer, please visit http://www.aubinpictures.com/ohg/.

On October 23, 1998, a sniper carrying a high-powered rifle assassinated Dr. Barnett Slepian in his home, altering forever a family, a community, and the bounds of our imaginings about anti-abortion violence. This horrific act punctuated a decade of escalating harassment and violence against women’s heath care providers – a decade marred by murders, assaults, death threats, stalking, clinic blockades, arsons, bombings, and chemical attacks. How do these events affect the personal and professional lives of abortion providers? What motivates them to continue their work in the face of such terrorism?

This compelling film explores the issues of anti-abortion and women’s health care violence through the eyes of three dedicated U.S. abortion providers. The film puts a “human face” on abortion provision, challenging the campaign of misinformation perpetuated by the anti-abortion movement. Through the voices of sons, daughters, spouses, coworkers, and patients emerges a heartwarming portrait of committed health care professionals rooted in their families and communities and appreciated by the women they serve.

Department of Cinema Studies, Michelson Theater
721 Broadway, Room 648

between Waverly and Washington Places

Co-sponsored by the NYU Department of Cinema Studies and the Center for Religion and Media.


BEYOND DON JUAN: RETHINKING IBERIAN MASCULINITIES

March 31 & April 1, Thursday & Friday
click here for pdf of program with all times and location

for more information, please visit the Catalan Center website or click here for a pdf of the full program schedule.

Organized by NYU’s Catalan Center.

Keynote speaker: Josep-Anton Fernàndez-Montolí, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
Danny M. Barreto, Vassar College
Eduardo Barros-Grela, Universidade da Coruña
Marta Bosch, Universitat de Barcelona
Israel Burshatin, Haverford College
Angels Carabi, Universitat de Barcelona
José R. Cartagena-Calderón, Pomona College
Javier Lorenzo Castro, Universitat de Barcelona
Sergio Cobo, Universidad de Sevilla
Justin Crumbaugh, Mount Holyoke College
Jennifer Duprey, Rutgers University
Kathryn Everly, Syracuse University
Joseba Gabilondo, Michigan State University
Antonio García, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Iker González-Allende, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Inmaculada Gordillo, Universidad de Sevilla Research Group
Virginia Guarinos, Universidad de Sevilla Research Group
John Hemingway, presenting his paper, “Ernest Hemingway, the False Macho”
Alberto Hermida, Universidad de Sevilla
Juan Herrero-Senés, University of Colorado at Boulder
Maja Horn, Barnard College
Jesús Jiménez-Varea, Universidad de Sevilla
John C. Landreau, The College of New Jersey
Travis Landry, Kenyon College
Amparo Lasen, Complutense University Madrid
María Liñeira, The Queen’s College, Oxford
Vicente Lledó-Guillem, Hofstra University
Fran López, Universidad de Sevilla
Joaquín Marín, Universidad de Sevilla
Jaume Martí-Olivella, University of New Hampshire
Helena Miguélez-Carballeira, Bangor College
Rosa-Àuria Munté, Universitat Ramon Llull
Manus O’Duibhir, Santiago de Compostela
Miquel Pérez-Gómez, Universidad de Sevilla
Susanna Perez-Pamies, University of Colorado at Boulder
Montserrat Piera, Temple University
Begoña Regueiro, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
RETEVIS GROUP: Sue Aran-Ramspott, Pilar Medina-Bravo, Miquel Rodrigo-Alsina
Aurélie Vialette, University of Texas at Austin
Aishih Wehbe-Herrera, University of Edinburgh
Elena Valdez, Rutgers University
María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar, Santiago de Compostela

Organizing committee:
Josep M. Armengol (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha)
Àngels Carabí (Center Women and Literature/UNESCO Chair “Women, Development, and Cultures”, Universitat de Barcelona)
Michael Kimmel (Men and Masculinities, SUNY at Stony Brook)
Mary Ann Newman (The Catalan Center, New York University)

Co-sponsors:
King Juan Carlos I Center, New York University
Office of the Dean for Humanities, New York University
Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, New York University
Center for Galician Studies, CUNY’s Graduate Center
Center Women and Literature / UNESCO Chair “Women, Development, and Cultures,” Universitat de Barcelona
Vicerrectorado de Relaciones Internacionales y Cooperación al Desarrollo, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha


(M)OTHER SEACOLE’S WONDERFUL ADVENTURES: CLAIMING THE ENGLISH FAMILY IN THE CRIMEA

a Brown Bag Lunch Talk with Elahe Haschemi Yekani

April 4, Monday
12:30 to 1:45 pm

Elahe Haschemi Yekani, English and American Studies, Humboldt University Berlin

Situated at the interdisciplinary intersections of literary and cultural studies combining approaches from gender studies, postcolonial and queer studies, this project seeks to scrutinize conceptions of subjectivity and the family in the English novel. Central questions to the project are: in how far is the establishment of a ‘universal’ family (which becomes indispensable for the conception of modern subjectivity) reliant on narratives of the Other, the disavowed and excluded and how is the affective relationship of the white middle-class heterosexual family to be thought of in relation to space, migration and nation building.

Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
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!

Elahe Haschemi Yekani studied English and American Studies as well as Theatre Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the University of Westminster, London. In 2009, she completed her PhD with a dissertation entitled The Privilege of Crisis on narratives of colonial and postcolonial masculinities which received the Britcult Award for the best new monograph in the field of British cultural studies awarded by the German Association for the Study of British Cultures. Currently, she is a lecturer at the Department of English and American Studies at HU Berlin. From 2005-2007 she was a scholarship holder at the Graduate Research Group “Gender as a Category of Knowledge” funded by the German Research Foundation. Her research interests comprise: Queer Studies and Postcolonial Theory, British fiction, Gender and Intersectionality. Publications include: The Privilege of Crisis: Narratives of Masculinities in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Photography and Film (Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, 2011) (forthcoming); Quer durch die Geisteswissenschaften: Perspektiven der Queer Theory (ed. with B. Michaelis, Berlin 2005); Erlöser. Figurationen männlicher Hegemonie (ed. with S. Glawion and J. Husmann-Kastein, Bielefeld 2007).


KE KULANA HE MAHU: REMEMBERING A SENSE OF PLACE

a film screening and discussion with producer Connie Florez

April 5, Tuesday
6 to 9 pm

a film by Brent Anbe and Kathryn Xian
67 minutes, 2001, USA

For more film information, please visit http://www.zangpictures.net/Projects/KeKulanaHeMahu.html

This documentary examines how colonialism has profoundly shifted attitudes toward gender and sexuality for indigenous Hawai’ians, and has shaped the marginalization of transgendered communities in Hawai’i today.

This special screening will be accompanied by a selection from Connie Florez’s current documentary project The Glades Project and a discussion with the director in dialogue with members of the Pacific LGBT community in NYC including Kristabelle; and Elizabeth Conley, MPH Sexuality & Health, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University

The program will be moderated by Gayatri Gopinath, Director of the Gender & Sexuality Studies Program at the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU.

NYU Kimmel Center
60 Washington Square South

Shorin Performance Studio, Room 802
between LaGuardia Place and Thompson Street

To RSVP: email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu, or call 212-992-9653

Co-sponsored by NYU’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute; Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis; Center for Media, Culture and History; and Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality; and by Na ‘Ōiwi NYC.


THE REALITY SHOWS

a conversation with Karen Finley

April 6, Wednesday
6:30 to 8 pm

READ THE REVIEW! Reclaiming Hysteria in The Reality Shows: A Conversation with Karen Finley and Ann Pellegrini

Karen Finley, Art and Public Policy, NYU

Ann Pellegrini, Performance Studies & Religious Studies, NYU

The Reality Shows collects a decade’s worth of performance pieces by internationally renowned artist and cultural provocateur Karen Finley. One of the hallmarks of Finley’s work—and nowhere more urgently showcased than in this new collection—is the way she uses multiple aesthetic forms in order to disturb settled emotional and political responses to both individual and collective trauma. To mark the publication of The Reality Shows, Finley sits down for a wide-ranging conversation with performance studies scholar Ann Pellegrini to discuss ongoing currents in Finley’s artistic practice and the work of performance art in an age of virtual reality.

Department of Performance Studies
721 Broadway, Room 612

between Waverly and Washington Places

Karen Finley’s raw and transgressive performances have long provoked controversy and debate. She has appeared and exhibited her visual art, performances, and plays internationally. The author of many books, including A Different Kind of Intimacy, George & Martha, and Shock Treatment, she is a professor in the Department of Art and Public Policy at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Ann Pellegrini is Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at New York University, where she also directs NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. She is the author of Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race; co-author, with Janet R. Jakobsen, of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance; co-editor, with Daniel Boyarin and Daniel Itzkovitz, of Queer Theory and the Jewish Question; and co-editor, with Jakobsen, of Secularisms.

Co-sponsored by NYU’s Department of Art and Public Policy, Department of Performance Studies and Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics; and by The Feminist Press.


PUBLIC FEELINGS SALON

a panel with Lauren Berlant, Lisa Duggan, Janet R. Jakobsen, José Muñoz, Tavia Nyong’o, and Ann Pellegrini

April 12, Tuesday
6:30 to 8:30 pm

READ THE REVIEW! Crying in Public, but Something Less Dramatic than That: Reflections on the Public Feelings Salon at Barnard College

For more information: http://www.barnard.edu/bcrw/events.htm#salon

CSGS is thrilled to continue its uptown-downtown collaboration with the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW) by co-sponsoring the inaugural event in BCRW’s new Salon series. This evening’s engaged dialogue brings together several prominent and influential scholars whose work explores how affect and emotion influence public life. Just as feminism has sought to identify the ways in which the personal and the political are linked, the study of “public feelings” draws our attention to how and why feelings and emotion (assumed to be a private, personal experience) influence politics and notions of social belonging and intimacy. This interactive conversation, moderated by BCRW Director and Professor of Women’s Studies, Janet Jakobsen, will focus on how perceptions of citizenship and solidarity are often bound up in emotions – like optimism, rage, and disgust – and how feelings can govern policy and political debates.

Barnard College
Sulzberger Parlor — Barnard Hall, 3rd Floor
117th Street and Broadway

Lauren Berlant is the George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago, and the author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship and The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia and Everyday Life. Her most recent book is The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture.

Lisa Duggan is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. She is the author of Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy and Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence and American Modernity.

José E. Muñoz is chair of the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. He is the author of Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics and Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.

Tavia Nyong’o is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at New York University, where he teaches African American and black diasporic performance, popular and subcultural musics, performance historiography and research methods, and queer studies. His book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance and the Ruses of Memory, won the 2010 Erroll Hill Award of the American Society for Theatre Research.

Ann Pellegrini is Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at New York University, where she also directs NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. She is the author of Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race; co-author, with Janet R. Jakobsen, of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance; co-editor, with Daniel Boyarin and Daniel Itzkovitz, of Queer Theory and the Jewish Question; and co-editor, with Jakobsen, of Secularisms.

Organized by the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW); co-sponsored by CSGS and the NYU Office of LGBT Student Services.


NEW MAJORITIES II: THE MULTIPLE FUTURES OF GENDER AND SEXUALITY STUDIES

The NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS) and the UCLA Center for the Study of Women (CSW) have undertaken a joint project to address the challenges currently facing the fields of gender and sexuality studies, women’s studies, LGBT studies, ethnic studies, and postcolonial studies.

April 29, Friday

READ THE REVIEW! New Majorities II: A Cross-Country Duet on the State of Gender and Sexuality Studies in the Academy


Conference: 10 am to 4:30 pm

5 Washington Place, Room 101
between Broadway and Mercer Street

Confirmed participants:

Rahma Abdulkadir, Research Fellow, NYU Abu Dhabi

Jennifer D. Brody, African & African American Studies, Duke

Carolyn Dinshaw, Social & Cultural Analysis, NYU

Lisa Duggan, Social & Cultural Analysis, NYU

Licia Fiol-Matta, Latin American & Puerto Rican Studies, Lehman College, CUNY

Gayatri Gopinath, Gender & Sexuality Studies, NYU

Janet R. Jakobsen, Barnard Center for Research on Women, Barnard College

Don Kulick, Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago

Laura Levitt, Religion and Women’s Studies, Temple University

Kathleen McHugh, English and FTVD Critical Studies, UCLA

Ann Pellegrini, Performance Studies and Religious Studies, NYU

e. Frances White, Gallatin School of Individualized Study and Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU

Schedule

10:00 am: Welcoming remarks: Ann Pellegrini

10:30 am to 12:45 pm
Roundtable I: Gender and Sexuality Studies at NYU: History, Futures, Institutional Possibilities and Dilemmas

Moderator: Gayatri Gopinath
Confirmed Panelists: Rahma Abdulkadir, Carolyn Dinshaw, Don Kulik, e. Frances White

Lunch Break: 12:45 to 2 pm

2:00 pm to 4:30 pm
Roundtable II: New Paradigms, New Possibilities

Moderator: Lisa Duggan
Confirmed Panelists: Jennifer D. Brody, Licia Fiol-Matta, Janet R. Jakobsen, Laura Levitt, Kathleen McHugh

The above portion of the day is free and open to the public. Venue is wheelchair accessible. Please let us know if you need any accommodations.


7 to 8:30 pm: Gender and Sexuality: A Musical Revue!

The day’s conversation will be followed by an early evening performance party — with music and queer burlesque highlights! — to celebrate the 11th anniversary of CSGS. Producer Viva DeConcini is rounding up a bevy of special guest stars, so put on your dancing shoes and get ready to celebrate the odd year with us!

Confirmed performers:

Darlinda Just Darlinda
Viva DeConcini
Karen Finley
Geo Wyeth
Daniel Alexander Jones (Jomama Jones)
Coco ‘Lectric
Glenn Marla
Neal Medlyn
Peggy Shaw
Lois Weaver
and Jennifer Miller as the MC

The Gallery at LPR
Le Poisson Rouge
158 Bleecker Street
between Sullivan and Thompson Streets

$10 at door


Co-sponsored by the NYU Gender and Sexuality Studies Program and the Office of LGBT Student Services.