THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED. WE HOPE TO RESCHEDULE FOR SOMETIME NEXT YEAR.
Elizabeth Freeman, English, UC Davis
Developmentalist accounts of psychological and bodily becoming plot the “growth” and “maturation” of both individual subjects and populations in ways that reduce what counts as a viable social formation or a livable life. Taking issue with the straightjacket of this way of telling time, Elizabeth Freeman instead argues for an “erotohistoriography”: to wit, a politics of unpredictable, deeply embodied pleasures that might counter the neo-liberal demand to narrate time in one direction only. This talk is part of a larger book project that seeks to offer a revised history of sexuality by centering queer pleasures and proposing the body as site of historical encounter–in and across time. Through these encounters across time, we might get a glimpse of historically specific pleasures and ways of organizing a life that exceed the current cramped politics of same-sex marriage as end game of sexual liberation.
Elizabeth Freeman is Associate Professor of English at University of California, Davis. She began her teaching career at Sarah Lawrence College, joining the faculty of UC Davis in 2000. She specializes in American literature and gender/sexuality/queer studies, and her articles have appeared in numerous scholarly journals. Her first book was entitled The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture (Duke UP, 2002). A new book, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. She also edited a special double issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies on the topic of “Queer Temporalities.”
Co-sponsored by NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality; Department of Performance Studies; Department of English; and Gender and Sexuality Studies Program; and by the Barnard Center for Research on Women, Barnard College.
For more information, please call 212-992-9540 or email csgs@nyu.edu.
