Spring 2016


Troubling the Teaching & Learning of Sexuality Diversity in South African Education

a lecture by Dennis Francis with discussants Michael Sean Funk & Cris Beam

January 28, Thursday
7 to 8:30 pm

Dennis Francis, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa

Discussants:
Michael Sean Funk, Administration Leadership & Technology, New York University
Cris Beam, Writing, Columbia University School of the Arts

The lecture is about lesbian, gay and bisexual youth in South African schools. The research globally and in South African on sexuality diversity in education, pivots on two discursive axes of victimization and agency. There is a cost for research to emphasize exclusively this duality. Despite its usefulness, the lecture argues that the victim-agency dualism is counterproductive and four arguments are made – it leads us to a cul-de-sac, reduces heterosexism and heteronormativity to the individual level and fails to take account of the systemic nature of heterosexism, ignores the multiplicity of identities LGB youth hold and it seriously compromises a focus on same sex relationships, intimacy, desire and the aspirations of LGB youth.

Pless Hall
82 Washington Square East, 3rd Floor

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality and Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, & Human Development.



Welcome to This House (79 min., 2015, Dir. Barbara Hammer)

a film screening & discussion with Barbara Hammer & Barbara Browning

February 5, Friday
6 to 8 pm

Barbara Hammer, visual artist & filmmaker

Barbara Browning, Performance Studies, New York University

Welcome To This House (2015) is a feature documentary film on the homes and loves of poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), about life in the shadows, and the anxiety of art making without full self-disclosure. Hammer filmed in Bishop’s ‘best loved homes’ in the U.S., Canada, and Brazil believing that buildings and landscapes bear cultural memories. Interviews with poets, friends, and scholars provide “missing documents” of numerous female lovers. Bishop’s intimate poetry is beautifully performed by Kathleen Chalfant and with the creative music composition by Joan La Barbara brings Bishop into our lives with new ways and unexpected details.

Cinema Studies, Michelson Theater
721 Broadway, 6th Floor

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



Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same (76 min., 2012, Dir. Madeleine Olnek)

a film screening & discussion with Madeleine Olnek & Laura Terruso

February 10, Wednesday
6 to 8 pm

Madeleine Olnek, director & writer

Laura Terruso, producer

The adventures of lesbian space aliens on the planet Earth, and the story of the romance between Jane, a shy greeting card store employee, and Zoinx, the woman Jane does not realize is from outer-space.

Film trailer here.

Department of Anthropology, Kriser Screening Room
25 Waverly Place, Ground Floor

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for Media, Culture and History; Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality; & Department of Cinema Studies.



The Present & Future of LGBT Political Identity

a lecture by Patrick Egan with discussant Leonie Huddy

March 3, Thursday
6:30 to 8 pm

Patrick J. Egan, Politics, New York University

Leonie Huddy, Political Science, SUNY Stony Brook

The U.S. Supreme Court’s extension of the right to marry to all 50 states caps a remarkable transformation in law and policy with regard to gay rights, as well as a change in Americans’ attitudes about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people whose speed is without parallel in recent American history. In this sense, LGBT people are following a path tread by many minority groups as they’ve moved away from stigma and discrimination toward de jure equality and assimilation. What does this mean for their politics? LGBTs are currently among the most loyal members of the liberal Democratic coalition in the United States. Will this cohesiveness persist, or will gay people’s political identity become less distinctive over time?

Department of Politics
19 West 4th Street, 2nd Floor, Room 217

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



A Murder Over a Girl: Justice, Gender, Junior High

a book release celebration for and with Ken Corbett

March 23, Wednesday
7:30 to 9:30 pm

Ken Corbett, Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy, New York University

Please join us to celebrate the publication of Ken Corbett’s new book: A Murder Over a Girl: Justice Gender, Junior High.

Free but registration required.

The New School University Center
63 Fifth Avenue, Starr Foundation Hall

Sponsored by the Sandor Ferenczi Center and the New School for Social Research; co-sponsored by the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & PsychoanalysisNew York Institute for the Humanities; and Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality.



Beyond Normal: The Fantasy Bodies of National Culture

a panel with andrè carrington, Julie Elman, & Ramzi Fawaz

March 25, Friday
10 am to 4 pm

andrè carrington, English & Philosophy, Drexel University

Julie Elman, Women’s & Gender Studies, University of Missouri

Ramzi Fawaz, English, University of Wisconsin, Madison

How do popular culture and mass media shape our notions of what it means to be healthy, happy, safe, and human? And how might imaginative genres like fantasy and speculative fiction break the mold of the “normal life”? This symposium brings together three scholars working at the intersections of critical race, disability, and gender and sexuality studies to consider how the misfit, freak, speculative, and mutant bodies of American culture are variously contained or authorized by different twentieth century and contemporary media and social forms, exploring genres and affective modes like fantasy, speculative fiction, and enchantment.

10 am
Coffee Service and Welcome

10:10 to 11:30 am
Julie Passanante Elman, University of Missouri
Author of Chronic Youth
Discussant: Lisa Duggan, New York University

11:45 am to 1pm
Ramzi Fawaz, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Author of The New Mutants
Discussant: Phillip Brian Harper, New York University

Lunch Break

2:15 to 3:30 pm
andré carrington, Drexel University
Author of Speculative Blackness
Discussant: Heather Masri, New York University

3:45-5pm
Roundtable Discussion

5pm
Reception

Social & Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor

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



‘An Eight Day Passage’: Performance Art, Endurance, & Men

a lecture by Dominic Johnson

April 7, Thursday
6:30 to 8 pm

Dominic Johnson, English & Drama, Queen Mary University of London

‘On the morning of the 25th October 1977 I shall be incarcerated within the confines of a concrete cell and the entrance sealed behind me […]. [My] task within the eight day duration of this work will be to attempt to free myself from the isolation of these chosen limits of time and space.’ So reads in part a statement of intent by the late British artist Kerry Trengove, ahead of his endurance performance An Eight Day Passage (1977), in which he dug his way out of a gallery, through foundations and walls. The action received extensive coverage in the national press, and was iconic among fellow artists and their audiences, yet it has since slipped into obscurity. In this lecture, I “recover” the action and situate it in relation to better-known works of durational endurance in the period, in order to ask critical questions about political, class and masculine struggle in the 1970s.

Performance Studies Studio
721 Broadway, 6th Floor

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



Annual Forum between the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality and Studies in Gender & Sexuality

April 15, Friday
3 to 7:30 pm

Department of Journalism
20 Cooper Square, 7th Floor

3 to 4:30 pm
Reparative Work in a Paranoid Structure: Vulnerability & Harassment Dynamics
a lecture by Jennifer Doyle

Jennifer Doyle, English, University of California, Riverside

Victims of workplace harassment and discrimination who don’t lose their jobs are forced to find ways of repairing their relationship to their work. How does one do this, within a paranoid institutional context? Or in a cultural context that pathologizes openness and vulnerability as forms of naïveté? What would it mean to accept harassment as an organic potential of groups, especially within a large organization identified with the reproduction of knowledge and power? Here Jennifer Doyle revisits Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” in order to bring its ethos to bear upon the ubiquity of harassment. The aim is not to explain where harassment comes from, or to propose solutions to the harassment dynamic. It is, instead, to describe those modes of working-through which are prohibited/rendered unthinkable by contemporary discourse on sex and the workplace (in which one can never be paranoid enough).


4:45 to 7:30 pm
Danger Talk: Sexual Error, Boundary Crossings, & the Limits of Thought
a forum in honor of Muriel Dimen

Confirmed speakers include Anne Dailey, Joseph FischelUmmni Khan, Kimberlyn Leary, & Charles Levin

Anne Dailey, School of Law, University of Connecticut

Joseph Fischel, Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Yale University

Ummni Khan, Law & Legal Studies, Carleton University, Canada

Kimberlyn Leary, Psychiatry, Harvard University; Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow; and Senior Affiliated Researcher, Anna Julia Cooper Center, Wake Forest University

Charles Levin, Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis; Editor-in-chief, Revue Canadienne de Psychanalyse/Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis

This forum brings together clinicians, legal theorists, scholars of gender and sexuality studies, and policy practitioners to discuss the multiple ways “sexual danger” is being discussed, administered, and policed in a variety of settings: from campus debates over sexual assault and affirmative consent to conflicts roiling psychoanalytic institutes over sexual boundary violations between analysts and patients.

This forum is the 7th annual collaboration between CSGS and the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality. As with the previous such events, this year’s was co-curated by Ann Pellegrini for CSGS and Muriel Dimen for SGS. Muriel Dimen’s ground-breaking writings on sexual boundary violations in the analytic space specifically inspired this year’s focus. But a more general goal of these annual gatherings is to spark on-going conversation and exchange between clinicians and cultural theorists of gender and sexuality to see how we might learn from each other and transform the institutional spaces we occupy.

That spark continues, and so does Muriel Dimen’s. We dedicate this day of conversation to her memory.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality and Studies in Gender & Sexuality; and by the NYU Department of Performance Studies.



Otherwise: Queer Theory into Song

an evening of performance conceived by & featuring Kay Turner, Viva DeConcini, Mary Feaster, & many others

April 24, Sunday
7 to 9 pm

Tickets required — $15 each. Click here to purchase now!

Conceived and curated by Ph.D. Professor Punk Rock Singer, President Of The American Folkloric Society, and General BadAss Kay Turner. Turner expertly culls lyrics from impenetrable-to-most Academic Texts and sets them to new original music with the help of Viva DeConcini, Mary Feaster and many special guests.

Joe’s Pub
425 Lafayette Street

Sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality.