2006 - 2007 Academic Events
- Shaka McGlotten, "The Bleed: The Murder of J.R. Warren"
- Gregg Bordowitz, "Of the Passions and Art Today"
- Janet Halley, "Split Decisions: A Conversation on 'Taking a Break from Feminism'"
- Colin Johnson, "The Consolations of Familiarity: Cross-Dressing Sunday School Teachers and the Politics of Community in the Deep South"
- ACT UP: 25 Years On: a panel discussion
- Queer Feelings: a panel discussion
- Molly McGarry, "Secular Spirits: A Queer Historiography of Untimely Sexualities"
Shaka McGlotten
Assistant Professor of Media, Society, & the Arts at SUNY Purchase
"The Bleed: The Murder of J.R. Warren"
Thursday, October 26, 2006 @ 4:00 PM
Hinds Laboratory, 5734 S. Ellis Ave., Room 101
Professor McGlotten addressed the racial, sexual, legal, and communal complexities of a West Virginia hate crime.
Workshop:
"A Brief and Improper History of Queerspaces and Sexpublics in Austin, Texas"
Thursday, October 26, 2006 @ 7:00 PM
Center for Gender Studies, 5733 S. University Ave.
In this workshop, Professor McGlotten discussed problems of sexuality, race, public sphere theory, and ethnography in his examination of gay chat room activity in Austin, Texas.
Biography:
Shaka McGlotten is a young scholar and artist who earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in Social Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. In a field he terms "Queer Science Fictions," Professor McGlotten studies racism, sexism, homophobia, imperialism and other "technologies of power."
Gregg Bordowitz
Faculty of Film, Video, & New Media at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago
"Of the Passions and Art Today"
Friday, November 17, 2006 @ 4:00 PM
Harper Memorial, 1116 E. 59th Street, Room 103
Today, waves of sensation overwhelm the individual, dispossessed
of any grounding framework for experience. We are awash in emotions, subject
to suggestion, organized by panic, moved by anxiety. If there is anything
new to say about the current ethos, it can only be described as the unprecedented
intensification of a conflict between stimulus and cognition. A resolution
to this conflict seems possible: we must defeat the time-honored oppositions
between feeling and thought, sensation and knowledge. Is that achievable?
Is that desirable? Do we have a choice? In this talk, Professor Bordowitz
pursued these questions by considering new works of visual art, music, and
literature, most of it, but not all of it, made by queer-identified artists.
Biography:
Gregg Bordowitz graduated from the School of Visual Arts
in New York. He writes and produces films and videos, including the weekly
cable TV show "Living with AIDS: A Gay Men's Health Crisis." His
recent book, The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings, 1986–2003
(MIT Press, 2004), was recognized with the 2006 Frank Jewett Mather Award
from the College Art Association.
Janet Halley
Royall Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
Thursday, January 11, 2007 @ 4:00 PM
Harper Memorial, 1116 E. 59th Street, Room 103
Professor Halley will discuss her new book Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism (Princeton 2006) in an open forum moderated by Lauren Berlant, LGSP director. Halley will focus our attention what it might mean, for people doing critical work on sex, gender, and sexuality in their relations to power, to work sometimes outside the presuppositions brought to us through the last 35 years of work in feminism. What conceptual, descriptive, political and/or law-reform possibilities are opened by such a move? What risks does one run -- for oneself? for women? for feminism?
Biography:
Janet Halley is Royall Professor of Law at Harvard Law School where she teaches family law, discrimination, and legal theory. Before teaching there, she was a professor of law at Stanford and an assistant professor of English at Hamilton College. She has a PhD in English from UCLA and a JD from Yale Law School. Her recent books include Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism (2006); Left Legalism/Left Critique, coedited with Wendy Brown (2002); and Don't: A Reader's Guide to the Military's Anti- Gay Policy (1999). Her current projects address sexual harassment, family law, and the adjudication of sexual violence in war in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.
Colin Johnson
Department of Gender Studies, Indiana University
Thursday, February 8, 2007 @ 4:00 PM
Harper Memorial, 1116 E. 59th Street, Room 103
Johnson, a truly interdisciplinary thinker who works from within literary history, disciplinary history, and critical/sexuality theory, will mobilize material from his forthcoming book, The Little Gay Bar on the Prairie: Gender, Geography and the Invention of Sexuality in Rural America.
Biography:
Colin Johnson is assistant professor of Gender Studies at
Indiana University, with adjunct appointments in History and the American
Studies. His current research focuses on gender and sexuality in non-metropolitan
America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing
on the history and literature of homosexuality in rural America. Other works
in progress include a social history of the Civilian Conservation Corps,
a book about the politics of inter-generational conflict among LGBTQ Americans,
and an essay that examines the revenge fantasy as a feminist trope. His
Ph.D. is in American Culture from the University of Michigan (2003) and
his BA is from the University of Chicago (1996).
ACT UP: 25 Years On: a panel discussion
Thursday, March 8, 2007 @ 4:30 PM
Classics 110
Co-Sponsored by: Feel Tank Chicago
Every media report about ACT UP during its heyday noted participants'
anger, but few commentators have explored the role that anger, and other
feelings, played in the movement. Marking the 20th anniversary of the emergence
of ACT UP/New York, this panel will explore the affective dimensions of
ACT UP. The larger questions organizing the panel include: What role did
affect and feelings play in ACT UP? From the experience of ACT UP, what
can we learn about activism and affect? What is at stake in exploring activism
and affect? Issues to be considered include the pleasures and disappointments
of activism, shared beliefs in political efficacy, the queerness of freedom,
the emotions of new queer subjectivities that formed within the movement,
the feelings associated with "burnout," the making and unmaking
of solidarities, the instrumentalizing of feelings, listlessness, history
and memory. All panelists are former members of ACT UP.
Gregg Bordowitz, "Belief and Volition"
Ann Cvetkovich, "Activism's Oral Histories"
Mary Patten, "Residues and Debts"
Kendall Thomas, "ACT UP/Feel Up: Queering Politics, Queering Freedom"
Debbie Gould, Moderator
Biographies:
Gregg Bordowitz (Born
August 14, 1964, Brooklyn, N.Y.) is a writer, film and video maker. His
films, including Fast Trip Long Drop (1993), A Cloud In Trousers (1995),
The Suicide (1996), and Habit (2001) have been widely shown in festivals,
museums, movie theaters and broadcast internationally. His writings have
been published in anthologies such as AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural
Activism, Queer Looks, Uncontrollable Bodies, Resolutions; and numerous
publications and journals including: The Village Voice, Frieze, Artforum,
American Imago, Art Journal, Documents, and October. In Spring 2002, Bordowitz
had his first solo museum show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
His book --- titled The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings 1986-2003
-- was published by MIT Press in the fall of 2004. For this recent collection,
Bordowitz received the 2006 Frank Jewitt Mather Award from the College Art
Association. In addition, he has received a Rockefeller Intercultural Arts
Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, among other
grants and awards. Bordowitz is a member of the faculty of the Film/Video/New
Media Department at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago, and he is on the faculty of the Whitney Museum Independent
Study Program.
Ann Cvetkovich is professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers, 1992) and An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke, 2003), which includes an oral history project with ACT UP/NY’s lesbians. She edited, with Ann Pellegrini, “Public Sentiments,” a special issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online. She is coeditor, with Annamarie Jagose, of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.
Mary Patten is a visual artist, videomaker, writer, educator, activist and occasional curator whose work is fueled by a desire to address the contradictory worlds of politics and art-making. Recent exhibitions include "Location Matters" in Berlin and "Location: Uncertain" at N.I.U. Art Museum, and "Captive Audience," curated by Marc Fischer. This spring, she is co-organizing "Patho-Geographies (or, other people's baggage)" with Feel Tank Chicago.
Kendall Thomas is the Nash Professor of Law at Columbia University, and a founding co-director of that university's Center for the Study of Law and Culture. He was a founding member of the Majority Action Caucus of ACT UP/New York, and a member and vice-chair of the Board of Directors of Gay Men's Health Crisis. His most recent project is Human Writes, a collaboration with the choreographer William Forsythe and the Forsythe Company.
Debbie Gould teaches in Pittsburgh (Sociology, University of Pittsburgh) and lives in both Pittsburgh and Chicago. She is currently finishing a book, Feelings and Activism: Shifting Political Horizons in the Fight against AIDS. She participated in ACT UP/Chicago and Queer to the Left, and now is part of Feel Tank Chicago.
Queer Feelings: a panel discussion
Friday, March 9, 2007, 4:00 PM
University of Chicago, Social Sciences 122
Co-Sponsored by: Feel Tank Chicago
This panel considered how affect and emotion infuse the most radically personal desires and structural forces, collective actions, and the embodied senses of things that connect people to each other. In direct and oblique ways, it addressed the instabilities and predictabilities of sexual politics and sexual being in the contemporary United States.
Ann Cvetkovich : "Feeling Worried"
Jose Muñoz: "Feeling Utopian"
Lisa Duggan: "Feeling Neoliberal"
Biographies:
Ann Cvetkovich: is professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers, 1992) and An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke, 2003), which includes an oral history project with ACT UP/NY’s lesbians. She edited, with Ann Pellegrini, “Public Sentiments,” a special issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online. She is coeditor, with Annamarie Jagose, of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.
José Esteban Muñoz chairs the Department of Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. A major theorist, analyst, and archivist of public feelings, sexuality, racial formation, and the times and spaces of pleasure and desire in the modern and contemporary United States, his talk will be from his forthcoming Feeling Brown: Ethnicity, Affect and Performance. (Duke). His other books include Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. (Minnesota);Celeste Fraser Delgado, Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America (Duke, 1997), and, Jennifer Doyle and Jonathan Flatley, Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Duke, 1996).
Lisa Duggan's political and textual advocacy for sexual justice, and her analyses of power and pleasure, has had a huge and important impact on debate in and outside the university context. Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Director of the American Studies Program in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Her books include: The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy (Beacon 2003); Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and National Interest, co-edited with Lauren Berlant (NYU 2001); Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence and American Modernity. (Duke 2000); and Sex Wars: Essays in Sexual Dissent and American Politics, ed. with Nan D. Hunter (Routledge 1995). The End of Marriage: The War of over the Future of State Sponsored Love is forthcoming from University of California Press in 2008. Her articles on marriage politics in The Nation are available online at www.thenation.com; her work with the Beyond Marriage project is available online at www.beyondmarriage.org.
Molly McGarry
"Secular Spirits: A Queer Historiography of Untimely
Sexualities"
Molly McGarry, Assistant Professor of History, University of
California, Riverside
Thursday, April 19, 2007 @ 4:30 PM
Harper Memorial, Room 140 (1116 E. 59th Street)
"Sins are sensations that have not yet found their futures." – Oscar Wilde.
This talk explores varieties of nineteenth-century religious experience, practice, and performance, tracing a transAtlantic genealogy of grassroots theology and occult spirituality to excavate sites for queer subject formation. Such embodied spirituality—from trance speaking to faith healing—opens up techniques of remembrance and forms of attachment across temporal boundaries that challenge linear, secular historiography and conjures new futurities.
Biography:
Professor McGarry
is author of Ghosts of Futures Past (forthcoming, University of California
Press, 2007), and editor, with George Haggerty, of The Blackwell Companion
to LGBT/Q Studies (Blackwell Publishing, Inc., 2007). She currently directs
UCR's Program in Public History and has worked as a public historian, curator,
and film consultant with the Chinatown History Project, American Social
History Project, New York Public Library, The Jewish Museum, and the National
Museum of American History/Smithsonian. In 1994, she co curated Becoming
Visible: The Legacy of Stonewall and co-authored a book based on the exhibition,
Becoming Visible: An Illustrated History of Lesbian and Gay Life in Twentieth-Century
America (Viking/Penguin, 1998).