December 11: What's Gaga Got to do With It? Gaga Feminism and Queer Anarchy

a talk by J. Jack Halberstam
December 11, Tuesday
6:30 to 8 pm
Department of Social and Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
J. Jack Halberstam, American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California
In Gaga Feminism, Jack Halberstam locates Lady Gaga as less an icon than an avatar for new forms of gender and sex politics. The power of “gaga” bubbles up from surrealist movements of the 1920’s to situationist happenings in the 1960’s and then takes the shape of queer anarchist politics in our unfolding present. This talk traces “gaga” back to earlier musical and political moments of going gaga and forward to occupation movements and direct action groups, and finally asks what, if anything, Lady Gaga has to do with feminism, queer studies or anarchism.
Halberstam will be preceded by a brief history of queer performance in New York City by Victor P. Corona, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Hofstra University. Corona is currently writing a book that traces a social and aesthetic lineage from the Warhol Superstars to the Club Kids and the current generation of performers, artists and nightlife personas in New York.
J. Jack Halberstam is Professor of English at the University of Southern California. Halberstam is the author of five books — Female Masculinity, The Drag King Book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, and most recently The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011) and Gaga Feminism (Beacon Press, 2012) — and numerous articles, and the editor of several volumes. Halberstam teaches in Gender Studies and American Studies and Ethnicity at USC and is currently writing and reading about new ways of unbeing human.
This event is free and open to the public.  Venue is wheelchair accessible.
For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at 212-992-9650.
Co-sponsored by the NYU Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, Program in Asian/Pacific/American Studies and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.