Spring 2018



Third Annual José E. Muñoz Memorial Lecture by JUDITH BUTLER

a lecture on Susceptibility\Solidarity
February 12, Monday
6:30 to 8 pm


Judith Butler, Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley
The Department of Performance Studies inaugurated the distinguished José Esteban Muñoz Memorial Lectures, on an annual basis, starting in the Spring of 2016. They envisioned the series as an annual event that both honors the memory of this celebrated teacher and scholar, and focuses attention on the cutting edge of the field of Performance Studies.


Each year they seek out an eminent scholar whose work is setting forth new waves of interdisciplinary work. In establishing this important series, they hope to bring together campus constituencies across fields (such as Art & Public Policy at Tisch, Social and Cultural Analysis at FAS, and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality), as well as connecting with New York-based artists, performers, and their audiences.


This talk is presented as part of the new SKIRBALL TALKS series. Mondays at 6:30 during the academic terms, SKIRBALL TALKS hosts visionaries from the worlds of politics, the arts, sciences, academia, and more. Future guests include Eckhart Tolle and Marion Nestle.
Skirball Center
566 LaGuardia Place

For more information: NYU Skirball Center, 212-998-4941, skirball.boxoffice@nyu.edu
Facebook event page here.
Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; Department of Performance Studies; and Skirball Center.



The Next American Revolution: Publishing Protest with American Studies Now

a series launch with Lisa Duggan, Roderick Ferguson, Jack Halberstam, & LaMonda Horton-Stallings


February 15, Thursday
6 to 8 pm


Lisa Duggan, Social & Cultural Analysis, New York University
Roderick Ferguson, African American Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago
Jack Halberstam, English & Comparative Literature, Columbia University
LaMonda Horton-Stallings, Women’s Studies, University of Maryland

Short. Accessible. Timely. American Studies Now: Critical Histories of the Present is dedicated to the scholarship we need now. Authors Rod Ferguson (We Demand: The University and Student Protests), J Jack Halberstam (Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Guide to Gender Variability), LaMonda Horton-Stallings (Sex Down Heya: A Dirty South Manifesto for Sexual Resistance in the New South), and series co-editor Lisa Duggan (Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and Neoliberal Greed) will be here to launch this series of books designed to illuminate power, protest and the teachable moments of our political present in historical context.

Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality
285 Mercer Street, 4th Floor

This event is free & open to the public. Venue is accessible. For more information, please contact NYU CSGS at csgs(at)nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.
Facebook event page here.
Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; Department of Social & Cultural Analysis; and Race & Public Space Working Group of the Institute for Public Knowledge.



Contested Memories: Gender, Violence, & Extremism in Sri Lanka

a panel with Fatima Cadre, Nimmi Gowrinathan, & Sujith Xavier, as part of the 10th annual Global South Asia Conference (Feb 23 & 24)


Click here for full conference program.

February 24, Saturday
9 to 11 am


Fathima Cader, Law, University of Windsor
Nimmi Gowrinathan, Founder and Director, Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative
Sujith Xavier, Law, University of Windsor

The tenth annual NYU Global South Asia conference theme is “Justice on the Move.”  The conference will be held at the Institute for Public Knowledge (20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor), on 23-24 February, 2018.  We will be focusing from a range of perspectives on interactions of justice and movement in South Asia, where the term “movement” evokes both mobility and mobilization, at many levels of scale, from the local to global. Justice struggles are ever present in South Asia, from social movements to legislative assemblies, court rooms to street protests, class rooms to NGO debates, newspapers to film, public and private, inside and outside the domains of official politics, audible in some registers and faint in others. In bringing together justice and movement, we want to foreground how justice travels within and across borders in and around South Asia, as ideas and ideals, as repertoires of practice, as solidarities and antagonisms, as expertise and professionalized networks. We want to approach this topic not only as a window into South Asia today, but also with historical and comparative perspectives.


20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor
Click here for full conference program. For more information about this event, please contact South Asia @ NYU.
Facebook event page here.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality and South Asia @ NYU.



The Extractive Zone: Cecilia Vicuña’s Social Ecologies

a Decolonizing Vision Speaker Series lecture by Macarena Gómez-Barris


February 28, Wednesday
6 to 8 pm


EVENT WILL BE LIVESTREAMED HERE.


Macarena Gómez-Barris, Social Science & Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute

Extending arguments in her recently published book The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives, Gómez-Barris considers performative engagement with oceanic space, its social ecologies, and its occupation by transnational mega-extractive industries. During a time of new authoritarianisms in the Américas, she shows how extractive capitalism reorganizes the Pacific Ocean into a normative geography, where questions of stewardship and governance become epiphenomenal to the primary condition of resource accumulation. How does New York-based and mestiza artist Cecilia Vicuña’s sense the sea? How does she address the complexities of Indigeneity in the Global South? And, how might we think about Vicuña’s sea choreographies and similar radical artistic work as forms of embodiment that dissipate human, inhuman, and (after) nature divides?

Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor


EVENT WILL BE LIVESTREAMED HERE.

Macarena Gómez-Barris is Chairperson of the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute and Director of the Global South Center. She is author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives that theorizes social life through five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism, especially upon Indigenous territories (Duke University Press, 2017). She is also author of the forthcoming Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Politics in the Américas (UC Press, 2018) and Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (UC Press, 2009). She is co-author with Herman Gray of Towards a Sociology of a Trace (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and co-editor with Diana Taylor of Duke University Press series Dissident Acts. Macarena was a Fulbright fellow at Sociology and Gender Department in FLACSO Ecuador, Quito (2014-2015).

This event is free & open to the public. Venue is accessible. For more information, please contact NYU CSGS at csgs(at)nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.
Facebook event page here.

Co-Sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; and Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics.

Signs & Grips

a Decolonizing Vision Speaker Series artist talk with Simone Leigh, in conversation with Malik Gaines

March 6, Tuesday
6 to 8 pm

Simone Leigh, multimedia artist
Malik Gaines, Performance Studies, New York University


Simone Leigh’s practice is an object-based on-going exploration of black female subjectivity. She creates sculpture, videos and installations that are informed by her interest in African art, ethnographic research, feminism and performance. In this talk, Leigh discusses her work, Signs and Grips (on view at the New Museum’s 2017 show Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon) with NYU performance studies scholar Malik Gaines. Leigh and Gaines situate this latest work in light of the questions that have long concerned Leigh about race and reproduction, black women’s collective labor, organizing, and strategies for self-defense.


Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality
285 Mercer Street, 4th Floor

This event is free & open to the public. Venue is accessible. For more information, please contact NYU CSGS at csgs(at)nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.
Facebook event page here.

Co-Sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; Contemporary Art Research Collaborative; Department of Art and Art ProfessionsDepartment of Art HistoryDepartment of Performance Studies; and Institute of Fine Arts.

The Rise of the Global Right: Feminist/Queer Critiques

a panel discussion with Lisa Duggan, Masha Gessen, Svati Shah, & Neferti Tadiar

March 22, Thursday
6:30 to 8:30 pm


Lisa Duggan, Social & Cultural Analysis, New York University
Masha Gessen, Staff Writer, The New Yorker
Svati Shah, Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Research Associate, African Centre for Migration & Society, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa
Neferti Tadiar, Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Barnard College, and Center for the Study of Ethnicity & Race, Columbia University

From a forthcoming issue of the feminist journal Signs dedicated to “Gender and the Rise of the Global Right,” to a recent panel at the Pratt Institute on the same topic, feminist and queer scholars and activists are urgently calling our attention to how the rise of right-wing authoritarian regimes is predicated on an investment in toxic masculinity and its attendant homophobia, transphobia and misogyny. This panel brings together feminist/queer scholars and activists to discuss the convergences, and important distinctions, between the gender and sexual politics that undergird the consolidation of power of Trump in the U.S., Putin in Russia, Modi in India, and Duterte in the Philippines.

5 Washington Place, room 101

Facebook event page here


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


Join us after the panel for a RECEPTION across street at the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at 285 Mercer Street, 4th Floor.


Lisa Duggan is a journalist, activist, and Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University.  She is author most recently of Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy.  Her new book Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and Neoliberal Greed is forthcoming in the new e-book series she is co-editing at University of California Press, American Studies Now. She was president of the American Studies Association during 2014-2015.
Masha Gessen began contributing to The New Yorker in 2014, and became a staff writer in 2017. Gessen is the author of nine books, including The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the National Book Award in 2017; and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. Gessen has written about Russia, autocracy, L.G.B.T. rights, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump, among others, for The New York Review of Books and the New York Times. On a parallel track, Gessen has been a science journalist, writing about aids, medical genetics, and mathematics; famously, Gessen was dismissed as editor of the Russian popular-science magazine Vokrug Sveta for refusing to send a reporter to observe Putin hang-gliding with the Siberian cranes. Gessen is a visiting professor at Amherst College and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, and the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary. After more than twenty years as a journalist and editor in Moscow, Gessen has been living in New York since 2013.
Svati P. Shah is an Associate Professor Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where they also hold an adjunct appointment in Anthropology. Additionally, Dr. Shah is a research associate in the University of Witwatersrand’s African Centre for Migration and Society, and has taught at NYU, Wellesley College, and Duke University. Currently, Dr. Shah also maintains research and teaching collaborations with the University of Pune and Jawaharlal Nehru University in India, and with the University of Oslo. Dr. Shah’s Ph.D. is from Columbia University’s joint doctoral program in Anthropology and Public Health. Their first monograph, Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work and Migration in the City of Mumbai, was published in 2014 by Duke University Press and Orient Blackswan in India. Within the auspices of a 2013-2014 Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, as well as other ongoing research support, Dr. Shah has been conducting a long-term ethnographic study of LGBTQ politics and the ‘near history’ of social movements in India. Dr. Shah’s work has appeared in a range of journals and anthologies, including Gender and History, Cultural Dynamics, and New South Asian Feminisms (University of Chicago Press, 2012).
Neferti X. M. Tadiar is Professor of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Barnard College and Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University and co-Editor of the New York-based Collective and international journal of interdisciplinary cultural studies, Social Text. She is the author of the books, Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (2009) and Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004). Her current book project, Remaindered Life, is a meditation on the disposability and surplus of life-making under contemporary conditions of global empire.

Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure

a book talk with Lynn Comella, in conversation with Julie Scelfo

March 29, Thursday
7 to 8 pm


Lynn Comella, Gender & Sexuality Studies, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

In the 1970s a group of pioneering feminist entrepreneurs launched a movement that ultimately changed the way sex was talked about, had, and enjoyed. Boldly reimagining who sex shops were for and the kinds of spaces they could be, these entrepreneurs opened sex-toy stores like Eve’s Garden, Good Vibrations, and Babeland not just as commercial enterprises, but to provide educational and community resources as well. In Vibrator Nation Lynn Comella tells the fascinating history of how these stores raised sexual consciousness, redefined the adult industry, and changed women’s lives. Comella describes a world where sex-positive retailers double as social activists, where products are framed as tools of liberation, and where consumers are willing to pay for the promise of better living—one conversation, vibrator, and orgasm at a time.

The Strand Bookstore
828 Broadway

For more information about this event, please contact the Strand Bookstore at 212-473-1452 ext. 380.
Facebook event page here.

Co-Sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; and by Babeland.


Lynn Comella, Ph.D. is an associate professor of gender and sexuality studies in the department of interdisciplinary, gender, and ethnic studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. An expert on the adult entertainment industry, her research explores a number of broad sociological themes, including the relationship between sexual politics and consumer culture. Her work on the history of the women’s market for sex toys and pornography has been published in the International Journal of CommunicationPorn StudiesFeminist Media StudiesThe Feminist Porn BookCommodity ActivismSex for Sale, and New Sociologies of Sex Work, among other venues. She has also published more than 50 articles about sex and culture in local and national media outlets, including Bitch magazine and Pacific Standard.


Julie Scelfo is a former staff writer/current contributor to The New York Times, where her stories about society and human behavior reframe popular ideas and ask us to rethink our basic assumptions. She has written about transgender pronouns; the intersection of campus suicides with social media and perfectionism; the human health risks from synthetic chemicals in consumer products; homelessness; and how the collapse of Lehman Brothers led to “trickle-down home economics”—thousands of domestics and other low-wage laborers losing their jobs.

 

South Asian American Masculinities & Popular Culture in the Age of Trump

a roundtable featuring D’Lo, Swati KhuranaRajiv Menon, Mallika Rao, & Imran Siddiquee


April 11, Wednesday
6 to 8 pm

D’Lo, actor, writer, comedian
Swati Khurana, artist, writer
Rajiv Menon, Visiting Scholar, Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, New York University
Mallika Rao, essayist, critic, reporter
Imran Siddiquee, filmmaker, speaker, writer, activist


The last several years have seen a marked growth of visibility of South Asian American men in U.S. popular culture (comedians Aziz Ansari, Kumail Nanjiani, Hari Kondabolu, and Hasan Minhaj come to mind, as does the British-Pakistani actor Riz Ahmed’s character in HBO’s The Night Of).  In a moment when our public discourse is defined by explicit racism and misogyny, South Asian American men find themselves at the crossroads of marginality and visibility, vulnerability and privilege. How have artists, writers, activists, and academics responded to this moment of upheaval surrounding brown masculinity?

Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality
285 Mercer Street, 4th Floor

This event is free & open to the public. Venue is accessible. For more information, please contact NYU CSGS at csgs(at)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; and South Asia @ NYU; and by Sakhi for South Asian Women.

D’Lo is a queer/transgender Tamil-Sri Lankan-American actor, writer and comic. His solo shows Ramble-Ations, D’FunQT and To T, or not To T have toured the college circuit, and theaters & festivals internationally. His work has been published or written about in academic journals anthologies (including: Desi Rap: Hip Hop and South Asia America and Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic (co-edited by Sharon Bridgforth) and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics) with features in The Guardian, NBC, and The Advocate. He has appeared in Buzzfeed and Fusion videos and the award-winning documentary on his life/work Performing Girl. He facilitates writing for performance workshops and created the “Coming Out, Coming Home” writing workshop series which have taken place with South Asian and/or Immigrant LGBTQ Organizations nationally. As an actor, you might’ve seen him in Looking (HBO), Transparent (Amazon), Sense 8 (Netflix), Mr. Robot (USA) and the Issa Rae-produced show Minimum Wage. He is also a co-producer with a nationally touring group of Asian American comics, DisOriented Comedy.

Swati Khurana is an artist and writer who contemplates memory, pasts, artifice, artifacts, public spaces, popular culture, and the seductive promises made by rituals.She has received fellowships and residencies from Jerome Foundation, Bronx Arts Council, Center for Books Arts, Center for Fiction, Cooper Union, Bronx Museum, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. Her essays and fiction have been published in The New York Times, Guernica, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Offing, The Rumpus, Art-India and in the Good Girls Marry Doctors anthology. She has presented her artwork in over a hundred group exhibitions and festivals, including at  A/P/A Gallery (NYU), where she debuted her collaborative video installation “Dothead” (1999) featuring clips of Apu from the Simpsons, D.W. Griffith’s Gunga Din, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. In 1997, she was a founding member of the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC), an organization dedicated to the advancement, visibility, and development of emerging and established South Asian women artists across disciplines. Recent projects include organizing a “Writing Politics Across Genres” panel at the 2016 SAWCC Litfest featuring writers whose work engages with Islamophobia, casteism, and racism; and making wood-block letterpress protest posters for SAWCC’s “Freedom Safety Now” action at the Indian Consulate following the Delhi bus gang-rape-murder (2012) and Jaishri Abichandani’s “Me Too” silent performance at the Met Breuer’s retrospective of Raghubir Singh (2017).

Rajiv Menon is an academic and consultant based in NYC and Los Angeles. Rajiv earned his PhD from NYU, focusing on representations of masculinity in Indian and American popular culture. A leading media strategist, Rajiv currently works with television networks and platforms to develop content and communications material based on analysis of the cultural landscape.

Mallika Rao is a writer covering race and culture, with a focus on the South Asian diaspora. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming on the Atlantic, newyorker.com, the New York Times, Vulture and the Village Voice. Her award-winning 2013 story on the legacy of the Simpsons character Apu was recently featured in the documentary The Problem With Apu.

Imran Siddiquee is a writer, filmmaker, and activist challenging limiting representations of gender and race in popular media. His essays on this topic have been published by The AtlanticBuzzfeedLongreads, and more. Imran is also the Communications Director at the Center for Media Justice and a collaborator with the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA). He was previously on the founding staff of The Representation Project, where he led nationwide campaigns to call-out sexist media and advised on The Mask You Live In, a documentary about American masculinity which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.


The Between: Couple Forms, Performing Together

an interdisciplinary two-day symposium with keynotes by Lauren Berlant & Kathleen StewartLisa Duggan & Anna McCarthy;Alexandra T. Vazquez & Germán Labrador MéndezImre Lodbrog et sa Petite Amie (Barbara Browning & Sébastien Regnier)


Presented by the NYU Department of Performance Studies in association with Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 


April 13 & 14, Friday & Saturday
times TBA


Lauren Berlant, English Language & Literature, University of Chicago
Barbara Browning, Performance Studies, New York University
Lisa Duggan, Social & Cultural Analysis, New York University
Imre Lodbrog, musician
Anna McCarthy, Cinema Studies, New York University
Germán Labrador Méndez, Spanish & Portuguese, Princeton University
Kathleen Stewart, Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin
Alexandra T. Vazquez, Performance Studies, New York University


This symposium features co-authored and/or co-performed papers, presentations, and performances, which seek to explode that stalwart object of queer and feminist analysis: “the couple form.” Typically regarded in its normative instantiation as that sexual, romantic, and social unit of relation that sits as a colonial imposition at the core of the bourgeois nuclear family, the couple form is tied to well-worn fantasies of the good life as well as to the violent suppression of other forms of kinship. In calling for a proliferation of coupled collaborations, however, this symposium—by way of a movement from “the couple form” to couple forms in their infinite variation—asserts that the couple form is neither a known quantity nor an exhausted entity. What modes of intellectual practice, erotic exchange, political work, and aesthetic experimentation happen uniquely within couple forms, in their most capacious and non-self- same iterations? What queer and feminist work can they do? How might they function, to use poet Catriona Strang’s (2017) term, as “structures of possibility”? But also, what might they foreclose or disallow? What, in other words, is possible in the infinity between one and two?
Honoring the inextricability of form(s), content(s), and method(s), “The Between: Couple Forms, Performing Together” resists academic siloing, models of individual authorship and originality, and calcified conceptions of mastery, which lead to masculinist and colonialist fantasies of invulnerability (Singh 2018). This resistance takes its inspiration from recent interventions in critical theory––most notably Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman’s Sex, or the Unbearable (2014) and Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013)—which are exemplary in their performative interweaving of form, content, and method. It is our hope that a sustained attention to what Moten (2015) describes as the “intense interaction that comes with playing with others”—to writing and other forms of aesthetic production “in which […] one composes in real time with other people[,] […] where one is discomposed in real time”—will open out onto other ways of writing, living, and working, animated by what Sara Ahmed (2004) calls “feminist wonder” (182): an openness to what might be, to our capacity to be affected, and to the dawning of new feminist futures.


Performance Studies Studio
721 Broadway, 6th Floor, Room 612
For more information about this event click here.


Co-sponsored by: the NYU Center for the Humanities; Department of Media, Culture, & Communication; Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality (CSGS); Department of Spanish & Portuguese Languages & Literatures; Department of Comparative Literature; Department of Art & Public Policy; Center for Multicultural Education and Programs; Department of Drama’s Experimental Theatre Wing.

I ❤️ (Racist) NY: Envisioning Race in the Empire City

a Decolonizing Vision Speaker Series lecture by Jacqueline Nassy Brown

April 19, Thursday
6 to 8 pm


Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Anthropology, Hunter College, City University of New York


In the fall of 2015, a professor of New York City history offered an introductory lecture on that topic to a class of some 200 mostly White students at an elite university. He did so by opining that what sets New York City apart from the rest of the nation is its 400-year long history of “diversity and toleration.” One piece of evidence he provided for this claim was visual. He conjured the image of multiply-colored bodies on the subway.
Based on ongoing research, this paper examines the ways that visual evidence is summoned to make claims and counter-claims about racism, while also comparing the reception of concrete evidence of racism that is received (or not) aurally. It also shows that claims about New York’s self-proclaimed status as a non-racist haven accord inordinate power to the visual in those realms constituted as quintessentially New York—like the subway—while simultaneously ignoring the visual evidence of racism in other kinds of spaces. The essay further suggests that one of the more insidious forms of sensorial power lies in Whites’ use of colored people’s visually available bodies—on the subway and elsewhere– in order to constitute themselves as non-racist, even as some of the more impoverished among that multiracial multitude, for reasons of racist urban policy and patterns of racial discrimination in employment, can barely afford to ride the subway.


Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality
285 Mercer Street, 4th Floor


This event is free & open to the public. Venue is accessible. For more information, please contact NYU CSGS at csgs(at)nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.
Facebook event page here.

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

Jacqueline Nassy Brown is an associate professor of anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at CUNY.  She is a feminist ethnographer who studies the intersection of race, place and nation. She brings an anthropological lens to bear on place and space, local identities and global imaginaries, and diaspora and empire, showing how these variously illuminate the lived experience of Blackness. She is the author of Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool. Her essays have appeared in Social Text, Antipode, American Ethnologist, and Cultural Anthropology, as well as in edited volumes on Race and Globalization and Black Europe. Her current book project studies the fraught racial politics underlying New York identity.

Intrusion: Domestic Violation & the Rise of the Carceral State

a lecture by Sarah Haley

April 23, Monday
6 to 8 pm


Sarah Haley, Gender Studies, UCLA

This talk will explore the role of mundane and ostentatious forms of carceral terror executed in black homes from the 1970s through the 1990s. It will examine the relationship between black domesticity and carceral state buildup as well as the affective and haptic work of life making that black women performed in the face of ubiquitous police violence.


Social & Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor


This event is free & open to the public. Venue is accessible. For more information, please contact NYU CSGS at csgs(at)nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.
Facebook event page here.

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

Sarah Haley is Associate Professor of Gender Studies and African American Studies at UCLA and Associate Director of UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women. She has research and teaching investments in women’s and gender history, carceral studies, labor studies, black feminism, and social movement history. Her first book, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (published by UNC Press in 2016), examines the lives of imprisoned women in the U.S. South from the 1870s to the 1930s and interrogates the role of the carceral state in shaping cultural logics of race and gender under Jim Crow. It has received recognition in the fields of gender and sexuality studies, gender history, Black studies, and American Studies. Her in-progress research uses black feminism as a framework through which to investigate how the policing of black domestic space shaped the rise of mass incarceration from the 1970s through the early 2000s.



What Difference Does the Digital Make? Critical Encounters at the Edges of Psychoanalysis & Technology

a panel discussion with Patricia Clough, Stephen Hartman, & Fred Moten


May 4, Friday
4 to 6 pm


Patricia Clough, Psychoanalyst, Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy
Stephen Hartman, Psychoanalyst, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California
Fred Moten, Professor, Department of Performance Studies, New York University
This is the 9th annual collaboration between NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality. Each year CSGS and SGS select a topic and invite an esteemed group of clinicians and scholars of gender and sexuality studies and other critical studies of difference to talk together across disciplines and across institutional locations, as well. The theme of this year’s forum – What difference does the digital make? – pushes existing conversations on psychoanalysis and technology beyond some of the typical frames, which have tended to focus on the use of Skype, texting, and other new media within the therapeutic treatment. These are valuable areas of focus, but this conversation takes a somewhat different direction. The forum proceeds by understanding psychoanalysis as already itself a technology, and one embedded in particular historical forms and fantasies of conceiving “the human.” As a jumping off point for the conversation, we have asked each of our panelists — who come to the conversation from, variously, performance studies, Black studies, gender and sexuality studies, media and affect studies, political theory , and relational psychoanalysis — to consider how new new technologies are drawing on and redrawing social differences/identity, such as race, gender, sexual orientation, and age. What are the historical violences carried forward in the (new?) digital demographies of the human?


19 University Place, Room 102

This event is free & open to the public. Venue is accessible. For more information, please contact NYU CSGS at csgs(at)nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.
Facebook event page here.

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