Event Archive
- Out at CHS: Exploring the LGBT Past
- French Filmmakers
- Queer Islands
- The Marriage Question
- Past Conferences
- Visiting Lecturers
- Special Projects
- Andy Warhol Film Series
Out at CHS: Exploring the LGBT Past
The LGSP cosponsored "Out at CHS: Exploring the LGBT Past," a lecture series organized with the Chicago Historical Society and the Center on Halsted. Building on the tremendous success of the 2003-2004 inaugural series on the history of queer popular arts, the 2004-2005 series focused on the history of lesbians and gay men in Chicago and in film.
Friends or Lovers? Same Sex Relationships in the 19th Century
Thursday, February 17, 2005 @ 6 PM
A panel discussion with:
- Martha Vicinus, University of Michigan
- Victoria Brown, University of Iowa
- Jay Grossman, Northwestern University
- Chris Castiglia, Loyola University (moderator)
When the Magnificent Mile was Fairytown and Bronzeville was Lavender
Thursday, April 21, 2005 @ 6 PM
Chad Heap, George Washington University
The Celluloid Closet
June 2005
French Filmmakers
A Two-Day Visit With Olivier Ducastel & Jacques Martineau
January 2005
The Lesbian and Gay Studies Project welcomed two of the most innovative and provocative filmmakers working in France today, Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, for a series of screenings and discussions in January 2005. The films of Ducastel and Martineau playfully draw on established genres, such as the musical and road trip, and develop new experimental narrative forms to explore questions of race, immigration, AIDS, national identity, and queer subjectivity in contemporary France. We screened and discussed three of their best known films. During their visit, Ducastel and Martineau also met with student filmmakers to discuss their craft and the state of contemporary filmmaking in France, particularly in competition with Hollywood.
Screening of Jeanne and the Perfect Guy
Friday, January 14, 2005
Ducastel and Martineau's first film, Jeanne and the Perfect Guy (Jeanne et le garçon formidable, French title), made in 1998, tells the story of a young working-class woman, unhappy in romance, who falls in love with an HIV+ man. Influenced by musicals such as Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the film unexpectedly but effectively uses song and dance to explore the harsh realities affecting the treatment of immigrants and people with HIV in contemporary France. Jeanne et le garçon formidable was nominated for both a Golden Bear at the 1998 Berlin Film Festival and a César (France's equivalent of the Academy Award) in 1999.
Screening of My Life on Ice
Friday, January 21, 2005
My Life on Ice (Ma vraie vie à Rouen, French title, 2002) again shifts genres and style to brilliant effect. Using digital video over film, My Life on Ice depicts the video diary kept by 16-year-old Etienne, who in the process of documenting his life comes to terms with his homosexual desire and the isolation he feels as a gay youth in Rouen. More experimental than their previous films in its use of fictionalized digital video diary narration, the film was nominated for a Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival.
Screening of The Adventures of Felix
Saturday, January 22, 2005
Their second film The Adventures of Felix (Drôle de Félix, French title, 2000) shifts from the musical to the "road trip" genre, following the gay HIV+ Arab Frenchman Felix as he hitchhikes from Dieppe, on the northwestern coast of France, to the southern port city of Marseilles in search of his long lost Arab father. Along the way he encounters a range of people, from a gay youth longing to escape the restrictions of life in Chartres to a grandmother who wants to adopt him and a hot truckdriver eager to establish a different sort of relationship with him. He also witnesses the brutal beating and murder of an Arab immigrant, an experience which shadows his entire journey and shapes its meditation on race, immigration, French nationalism, and queer subjectivity. The film won two awards at the 2000 Berlin Film Festival and was nominated for the Grand Prix at the 2000 Paris Film Festival.
Ducastel and Martineau's visit was made possible by a generous UChicagoArts grant from the Arts Planning Council and the cooperation of the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies and the Film Studies Center.
Queer Islands? Caribbean LGBTQ Writers Community
April 15-16, 2005
The University of Chicago Lesbian and Gay Studies Project held a two-day symposium exploring the art and activism of queer Caribbean writers and artists. This symposium--the first academic gathering devoted entirely to same-sex loving writing from the region--was motivated by the unprecedented blossoming of queer Caribbean literature in the last decade, as LGBT literature from Jamaica, Trinidad, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Suriname has debuted to international audiences and acclaim.
We brought the literary voices of novelists, spoken word artists, activists, and singers together to consider how their art and activism bring together Caribbean, queer, and community identities. Discussing intersections between art and gay rights organizing, immigrant rights activism, language politics, publishing markets, song and dance, popular culture, and recovered histories, the panels looked at the complexity of LGBTQ Caribbean literary undertakings as a crossroads with sexual and racial, local and global issues.
Schedule
Friday
Literary Reading and Book Signing held at Women and Children First Bookstore
Saturday
Panel 1: "Acting Gay: Performance and Popular Culture"
- Cheryl Boyce Taylor, Trinidad/New York, on Caribbean music and the New York performance scene
- David Murray, University of Toronto, on queer man's performance in Barbados and Martinique
- Iya Ta'Shia Asanti, Founder, Karade Institute for Ifa & Comparative Studies and Lecturer, University of California, Los Angeles
- Natasha Barnes, University of Illinois Chicago, Moderator
Panel 2: "The Words for It: Queer Identity, History, and Language; Art and Activism"
- Makeda Silvera, Sister Vision Press, Jamaica/Toronto, on literature and uncovering lesbian history
- Emanuel Xavier, Puerto Rico/New York, on literature and diaspora
- Aldo Alvarez, Wilbur Wright College, Moderator
Panel 3: "Art and Activism: Writing Gay/Human Rights"
- Thomas Glave, State University of New York; Jamaica/New York, on writing and his work with JFLAG
- Matt Richardson, UC Berkeley, Curacao/Oakland, on varieties of queer activism (anti-war, civil rights)
- Colin Robinson, Exeuctive Director of the New York State Black Gay Network
- Cathy Cohen, University of Chicago; Moderator
University of Chicago Sponsors
Lesbian and Gay Studies Project (LGSP)
Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture (CSRPC)
Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS)
The Marriage Question
Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate over Gay Equality
A talk with George Chauncey, History, University of Chicago & Patricia Logue, Lambda Legal Senior Counsel
Tuesday, October 5, 7pm
Borders Books
830 N. Michigan Avenue
The Lesbian and Gay Studies Project and Lambda Legal presented a discussion of Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate over Gay Equality with George Chauncey, the book's author, and Patricia Logue, senior council at Lambda Legal. A portion of the sales of Why Marriage? during the event were donated to Lambda Legal to support their continuing work to secure marriage equality.
Anti Oedipus: Untimely Meditations on Same-Sex Marriage
A talk by Didier Eribon,
UC-Berkeley
Friday, October 8, 12:15pm
Center for Gender Studies
5733 S. University Avenue
Didier Eribon is a leading philosopher and historian in France. In addition to his biography Michel Foucault, he is the author of books including Une morale du minoritaire: Variations sur un thème de Jean Genet and Hérésies: Essais sur la théorie de la sexualité. He was in residence at the University of California, Berkeley during the Fall of 2004. Eribon's landmark 1999 book on gay subjectivity, Réflexions sur la question gay, has been translated into English under the title Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, Duke University Press, 2004.
Past Conferences
Since its founding in 1997, the Project has organized numerous conferences, including "The Globalization of Homosexuality and Heterosexuality", "Race, Nationalism, and Sexual Politics", "The Formation of American Sexual Identities and Politics", "The Politics of Respectability," "The Queer Republic? Homosexuality in Greek Politics and Political Thought," "Objects of Desire: Homosexuality and the History of Collecting," "Say it Loud: I'm Black and I'm Proud! A Symposium on Black GLBT Politics in Chicago and Nationally," "Queer Latin(o/a) America: Diasporas and Histories." Additionally, the project regularly organizes conferences featuring the work of Ph.D. students from throughout the Chicago area. Our largest conference to date, "The Future of the Queer Past: A Transnational History Conference" (held in September 2000), attracted 200 historians from a dozen countries to speak on 50 panels, was attended by 600 registered participants, received support from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and also featured exhibitions, performance art, and a film program.
Visiting Lecturers
Every year we invite both prominent established scholars and exciting younger scholars to campus to give lectures or present work to the Gender and Sexuality Studies Workshop. Speakers have included theorists Judith Butler, David Eng, David Halperin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Michael Warner, ethnographers Eric Fassin, Judith Halberstam, Jonathan David Jackson, Esther Newton, and Kath Weston, and historians Allan Bérubé, Richard Dyer, Didier Eribon, Barbara Smith, and Marc Stein. In 2005, we organized the Queer Origins of Modern American Culture, a year long lecture series exploring the influence of of gay artists on American culture following World War II. Speakers included Nadine Hubbs, Susan Manning, Douglas Crimp, and Michael Sherry.
Special Projects
Thinking Sexuality Transnationally
In 1997-98 the LGSP faculty received a grant from the Mellon Foundation to organize a year-long seminar under the auspices of the Franke Institute for the Humanities. The Sawyer Seminar investigated the complex cultural variations in sexual identities, practices, discourses, and politics throughout the world, in order to understand better why lesbian/gay/bisexual identities and identity politics have become central to American culture, why they are often less significant elsewhere, and how globalization has affected them everywhere. The Seminar resulted in the publication of a special issue (Autumn 1999) of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies on "Thinking Sexuality Transnationally, " edited by Elizabeth Povinelli and George Chauncey.
Lift Every Voice:
Affirming Gay & Lesbian People in African American Churches
The LGSP was proud to co-sponsor the 2002-2003 lecture series Lift Every Voice: Affirming Gay & Lesbian People in African American Churches co-organized by Prof. Cathy Cohen and held at St. Martin Episcopal Church. Featured speakers included: The Rev. Irene Monroe, "Debunking the Notion of Hierarchy of Oppressions"; Rev. Dr. Renee Hill, "More Powerful Than We Can Imagine"; Dr. Horace Griffin, "Their Own Received Them Not"; Rev. Dr. Randall Bailey, "Othering: A Key Biblical Strategy, A Poor Practice to Adopt."
Andy Warhol Film Series
Every Friday night in February 2004, the Lesbian and Gay Studies Project presented a series of influential but rarely-seen experimental films by Andy Warhol in original 16mm projection. These rare films played a central role in the development of the (queer) film avant-garde.
February 6: Chelsea Girls
February 13: Couch, Hedy
February 20: Harlot
February 27: Mario Banana, Screen Test #2
The series concluded with a lecture by the renowned art historian and cultural theorist Douglas Crimp. Former editor of the journal October, Crimp is well known as a theorist of postmodernity in visual culture and as a founding influence in AIDS activism and the field of queer theory. Among his many publications are On the Museum's Ruins (MIT Press, 1993), and Meloncholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (MIT Press, 2002). His talk, "Coming Together to Stay Apart: Andy Warhol's Collaboration with Ronald Tavel", drew on his research for a book on Warhol's films and the 1960s avant-garde.
Co-sponsored by:
The Experimental Film Club
The Film Studies Center
The Committee on Cinema and Media Studies.