Fall 2011


THE RACIAL GENEALOGY OF EXCELLENCE

a lecture by Roderick A. Ferguson

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September 14, Wednesday
6 to 7:30 pm

Roderick A. Ferguson, American Studies, University of Minnesota

This talk reads the Open Admissions movement at City College through June Jordan’s 1969 essay “Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person.” In that essay, Jordan discusses how the opposition to Open Admissions mobilized discourses of “standards” and “excellence” to cast that movement as one that would bring the College to “the trough of mediocrity.” Jordan’s essay locates the discourse of standards and excellence within the racial genealogies of slavery and colonialism. The talk uses that framing to contextualize the coalitions between African American and Puerto Rican Students. It then uses Jordan’s framing and that historic coalition as a way to rebut post-marxist histories of the American Academy and specifically, those histories’ evacuation of concerns around race, migration, sexuality and empire.

Department of Social and Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor

at Bowery and 5th Street

Co-sponsored by the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.


SEXUAL POLITICS, SEXUAL VIOLENCE AND THE COMMUNIST LEFT

a lecture by Bettina Aptheker

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September 19, Monday
6:30 to 8 pm

Bettina Aptheker, Feminist Studies and History, UC-Santa Cruz

Following the publication of Aptheker’s memoir, Intimate Politics, a storm of controversy ensued in a public debate on the Internet concerning her disclosure of childhood sexual abuse. In addition, Aptheker received literally hundreds of letters from readers who revealed their own experiences with childhood abuse in Communist and Left families about which they had been silenced. Based upon this experience and complemented by work in the Communist Party archives Aptheker will present preliminary approaches towards a history of these issues within the Communist Left between the 1940s and the 1970s.

Department of Teaching and Learning
239 Greene Street, 2nd Floor

between Washington Place and West 4th Street

Co-sponsored by the NYU Department of Teaching and Learning and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.


REPARATIONS AND THE HUMAN

a lecture by David L. Eng

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September 28, Wednesday
6:30 to 8 pm

David L. Eng, English, Comparative Literature, and Asian American Studies, University of Pennsylvania

This presentation explores the relationship between political and psychic genealogies of reparation. Reparation is a key term in political theory, but it is also a central concept in psychoanalysis (specifically object relations theory), yet the two are rarely discussed in relation to one another. In this talk, I will explore how political and psychic genealogies of reparation might supplement one another in theories of the human and discourses of human rights, while helping us to understand better the social and psychic limits of repairing war, violence, colonialism, and genocide. Specifically, I will trace a global genealogy of reparations from John Locke to Melanie Klein to twentieth-century Asia in order to rethink the concept’s transnational significance and the possibility of “racial reparation” in context of the trans-Pacific: the internment of Japanese Americans by the U.S. government during World War II; the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ending that war; and contemporary legal claims by “comfort women,” young girls and women from Japan’s colonial empire conscripted by the imperial army into sexual slavery.

Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
41-51 East 11th Street, 7th Floor Gallery

between University Place and Broadway
If you need wheelchair access, please let us know 24 hours in advance: 212-992-9540

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute, and the Department of East Asian Studies.


FROM IRISH EXILE TO WELSH CELEBRITY: THE QUEER SELF-FASHIONING OF THE LADIES OF LLANGOLLEN

a lecture by Fiona Brideoake

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October 5, Wednesday
7 to 8:30 pm

Fiona Brideoake, Literature, American University

Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby eloped together from Kilkenny in 1778. They settled in the North Welsh village of Llangollen, their location on the road linking Dublin and London ensuring them a steady stream of prominent guests. Throughout their fifty-one years of domestic ‘retirement,’ Butler and Ponsonby were plagued by insinuations that their relationship was sexual. They responded by transforming their cottage into a Gothic mansion clad in local oak, masking their status as impecunious and sexually suspect exiles with a literal veneer of Welsh historicity. They established an extensive private library and located themselves within gentry and aristocratic networks of literary sociability, consolidating their affective alliances and distancing themselves from the charges of female social and sexual mobility associated with public circulating libraries. They cultivated friends including Edmund Burke; the Duke of Wellington; George Canning, and Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, drawing on Anglo-Irish social capital while asserting their enduring association with the picturesque Vale of Llangollen, this performative identity eventually reified by their designation as ‘the Ladies of Llangollen.’ Accounts of their inscrutable intimacy circulated widely in print and epistolary form, rendering them among the most significant cultural celebrities of late-Georgian Britain.

Butler and Ponsonby’s performance of geographic and class identity distanced them from both the putatively metropolitan vices of sapphism and the sexualized ‘stain’ of Butler’s Irish Catholic upbringing. As they were transformed over the course of their retirement into central, and increasingly eccentric, features of the British cultural landscape, they also came to embody the productive slippage between fame and notoriety, rendering their corporate identity a form of the commodified cultural production that Clara Tuite terms “scandalous celebrity.” Butler and Ponsonby may thus be recognized as both sophisticated self-promoters and producers of a distinctive and nationally hybrid form of queer celebrity, their identity as Irish exiles at once underpinning their public prominence and necessarily erased by their successful self-fashioning.

Glucksman Ireland House
One Washington Mews

at 5th Avenue between 8th Street and Washington Square Park

Co-sponsored by the NYU Irish Studies Program, the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, and the Department of English.

1819 image of Butler and Ponsonby is owned by the British Library, call number/ms details Add. 59655 f. 78


MESOAMERICAN BIODIVERSITY, GREEN IMPERIALISM, AND INDIGENOUS WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP IN DEFENSE OF TERRITORY

Convened by CLACS; Latino Studies at NYU; Gender and Sexuality Studies at NYU; Center for Research on Women at Barnard University; PUEG at UNAM

October 19, Wednesday
9:30 am to 6 p.m.

Department of Social and Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor

at Bowery and 5th Street

For more information visit Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at NYU.

9:30 am: Introductory Remarks

10 am to 12 pm: When Environmentalism Kills

Breaking the Silence: State Violence against Triquis Women of Oaxaca, Natalia De Marinis, CIESAS (Center for Research and Doctoral Studies in Anthropology), Mexico

Feminist ‘Sorority’ Against Feminicide: Natural Resources, Militarization, and the ‘Project Mesoamerica’ (Plan Puebla-Panamá), Norma Iris Cacho Niño, Organizer with the Marcha Mundial de las Mujeres en México (World March of Mexican Women, Mexico Branch)

Geopolitics of Emancipations, Ana Esther Ceceña, Director of the Institute for Economic Research (IIEC) at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)

A Continent Under Threat: The Eagle Spreads it Wings, Rodrigo Yedra Rodríguez, Researcher, Geopolitical Observatory for Latin America at the IIEC, UNAM

Chair and Commentator: Marisa Belausteguigoitia, Director Programa de Estudios de Genero (PUEG) UNAM

12 pm to 2 pm: Lunch

2 pm to 4 pm: Appropriate Knowledges and Gender Conservation

Appropriating Territory: Women’s Spaces in the Conservation and Management of the Environment, Martha Eugenia Villavicencio Enríquez, Consultant with Women’s Indigenous Organizations, Chiapas, Mexico

Gendered Knowledges and the Conservation of Biocultural Diversity: Resisting World Bank Supernational Projects, Alberto Betancourt Posada, Professor, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, UNAM

Tseltal Women in Chiapas: Food Autonomy and the Transformation of Gender Politics, Magali Barreto Avila, Researcher, Institute of Anthropological Investigation, UNAM

Race, Indigeneity, and Gender in a New Post-Colonial Conservation Territory: Some Notes from the Maasai Steppe Heartland, James Igoe, Anthropology Department, Dartmouth University

Chair and Commentator: Iván González Márquez, Anthropology Department, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Iztapalapa

4 to 6 pm: Indigenous Territorial Rights Revisited

Territory: Indigenous and Western Juridical Concepts Before the Resolutions of the OAS’s Inter-American Court of Human Rights, x’Rosalbaek Sakubelnichim, Doctoral Student, Law School, University of Salamanca, Spain

Defending Indigenous Territorial Rights and the Struggle for Resources in the Lacandon Jungle, Miguel Angel A. García Aguirre, Co-Founder of NGO Maderas del Pueblo del Sureste, A.C., Chiapas, Mexico

Defending Common Lands, June Nash, Anthropology Department, City University of New York (CUNY), Graduate Center

Reworking Patriarchy: Gender, race and land registration in the Honduran Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve, Sharlene Mollett, Geography Departmet, Darmouth University

Chair and Commentor: TBA

Co-sponsored by the Humanities Initiative at NYU, the Institute for Latin American Studies (ILAS) at Columbia University, the NYU Dean for the Humanities, the NYU Native Studies Forum, the NYU Department of Anthropology, Metropolitan Studies at NYU, the NYU Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU, and the Research Center for Leadership in Action at NYU.

Photograph of Mujeres Mazahuas – México, courtesy of Agua, Ríos y Pueblos


MASCULINITY, COMPLEX

a two-day symposium with Jessica Benjamin, Justin Vivian Bond, Judith Butler, Anne Cheng, Nancy Chodorow, Ken Corbett, Muriel Dimen, Jan Gaboury, Katie Gentile, Virginia Goldner, Francisco Gonzalez, Adrienne Harris, Ben Kafka, Tony Kushner, Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Joe Rollins, Eyal Rozmarin, Avgi Saketopoulou, Gayle Salamon, Dean Spade, Warren Spielberg, Brett Stoudt

October 21 and 22, Friday and Saturday
2 to 8 pm and 10 am to 4 pm, respectively

REGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED FOR THIS CONFERENCE. ONLY THOSE REGISTERED WILL GAIN ENTRANCE.

more info: masculinitycomplex.com

Masculinity has finally become a site of inquiry: a problem the way femininity has been regarded for nearly a century. Masculinity, Complex sets out to reflect on the history of masculinity as it became perplexed via psychoanalytic and cultural discourses. We have brought together a renowned group of scholars, clinicians and artists, and are looking forward to what promises to be a memorable conference.

CUNY Graduate Center
Elebash Recital Hall
365 Fifth Avenue

between 34th and 35th Streets

Co-sponsored by Studies in Gender and Sexuality; Gender Studies Program, John Jay College of Justice; Center for the Study of Women and Society, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, New York University.


SLAYING THE DRAGON: RELOADED

film screening and panel discussion presented by the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute

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October 27, Thursday
6 to 9 pm

Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded
2011, 30 minutes, USA
director Elaine H. Kim

Confirmed panelists:

Benjamin Han, Cinema Studies, NYU

Elaine H. Kim, Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies, UC-Berkeley

Jeff Yang, Asia Society, New York City

Moderated by: Gayatri Gopinath, Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU

Slaying The Dragon gets a reboot in Elaine Kim’s recent documentary Slaying The Dragon: Reloaded. Still exploring Asian images in Hollywood film, the documentary takes into account a new generation of viewers and films. While some Asian archetypes remain the same, others are being explored.

The post-screening discussion will feature director Elaine Kim; Benjamin Han, Cinema Studies NYU; and Jeff Yang, curator of the current A/P/A Institute exhibition “Marvels & Monsters: Unmasking Asian Images in U.S. Comics, 1942-1986,” and will be moderated by Gayatri Gopinath, director of the A/P/A Studies Program at NYU. The discussion will address new and persisting images of Asians in the popular imaginary as well as some of the complexities of shifting archetypes and their psychological and developmental effects on Asian American youth.

Cantor Film Center
Theater 101

36 East 8th Street
between University Place and Greene Street

This event is free and open to the public. Venue is wheelchair accessible.

To RSVP, email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu, call 212-992-9653, or visit A/P/A Institute.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.


DESIRE FOR THE OTHER: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CRITICAL THEORY IN CONVERSATION

a roundtable on the new book With Culture in Mind: Psychoanalytic Stories

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November 4, Friday
4 to 6 pm

Panelists include:

contributing authors Orna Guralnik and Eyal Rozmarin

Ben Kafka, Media & History, NYU

Amber Musser, Draper Program, NYU

moderated by Muriel Dimen, Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, NYU

13-19 University Place
Lecture room 102
(please note room change)
between 8th Street and Waverly Place

This panel continues the project of developing a shared vocabulary between clinical and cultural theorists. With Culture in Mind: Psychoanalytic Stories (Routledge, 2011) reflects a movement emerging in the psychoanalytic world in the wake of feminist, postmodernist, and queer theory, and of gender and race politics. Traditionally, analysts maintain a remote stance towards the social, and are inclined to privilege the wild unconscious as a private space. Not so the writers in this book, all of them analysts, who immerse themselves in the here and now of people’s lives, attempting to navigate the complexity of different paradigms held by psychoanalytic and other critical approaches. They begin with the premise that subjectivity – interior life – is steeped in socio-political forces, and work to demonstrate how this assumption enhances clinical technique.

On this panel, two of the authors — Orna Guralnik and Eyal Rozmarin — demonstrate how critical and cultural theory shapes their very clinical work, including their theses about desire and identity. They will show not only what the clinical experience is like, but how theory lives, how changes when it moves from textual to clinical practices. The psychoanalytic consulting room is a scene of address that requires a way of being with ideas that is continuously responsive to the enigma of the Other. This is theory in the making.

At this forum, Guralnik and Rozmarin will be joined in conversation by two university-based cultural theorists, both of whom are faculty members at New York University: Ben Kafka and Amber Musser. Kafka and Musser will engage with the new psychoanalysis from their own (inter)disciplinary perspectives to rethink how bodies take shape intersubjectively and in relation, as well, to such socio-cultural variables as gender, national origins, race, and sexuality. Along with moderator Muriel Dimen, a clinician who is also the editor of With Culture in Mind, the roundtable as a whole will indicate how theory and embodied subjects live and breathe in different and overlapping kinds of spaces.

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, NYU; Post-Doctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, NYU; Humanities Initiative: Interdisciplinary Freud Reading Group, NYU; and Studies in Gender and Sexuality


FRAMING RESPONSIBILITY: HIV AND THE PERFORMATIVITY OF THE LAW

[please note title change]

a brown bag lunch talk with Kane Race

November 11, Friday
12:30 to 1:45 pm

Kane Race, Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney, and CSGS Visiting Scholar

How can we register the participation of a range of elements, extending beyond the human subject, in the production of HIV events and drug effects? In the context of proposals around biomedical prevention, there is a growing awareness of the need to find ways of responding to complexity, as everywhere new combinations of treatment, behavior, drugs, norms, meanings and devices are coming into encounter with one another, or are set to come into encounter with one another, with a range of unpredictable effects. In this paper I consider the operation of various framing devices that attribute responsibility and causation with regard to HIV events. I propose that we need to sharpen our analytic focus on what these framing devices do; their performativity – that is, their full range of worldly implications and effects. My primary examples are the criminal law and the randomized control trial. I argue that these institutions operate as framing devices: they attribute responsibility for HIV events, and externalize other elements and effects in the process. Drawing on recent work in science and technology studies as well as queer theory, I set out an analytic frame that may help clarify a new role for HIV social research. Attentiveness to the performative effects of these framing devices is crucial, I suggest, if we want better to attend to the global HIV epidemic.

Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
41-51 East 11th Street, 7th Floor, Room 741

between University Place and Broadway
wheelchair access at 85-87 University Place, between 11th and 12th Streets

Organized by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.


PERFORMING (AT) THE BODY’S EDGE: MORTAL WORKS

a conversation with Shelley Jackson and Rebecca Schneider

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November 15, Tuesday
7 to 8:30 pm

Shelley Jackson, writer and artist

Rebecca Schneider, Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, Brown University

The question of the body — the body as question – is a recurring motif in the work of multi-media artist Shelley Jackson. Whether she is spiritualizing anatomy in her short story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy, imagining an alternate universe in which conjoined twins (“twofers) are the avant-garde of identity politics (Half Life), or “publishing” a short story (“Skin”) composed entirely of tattoos inked one word at time on the bodies of 2095 participants, Jackson presses her audience to ask, where does my body begin and end? “Skin” is subtitled “A Mortal Work of Art.” But the relationship among body, art, and mortality cross-crosses her work. This issue — whether or how art preserves the body, and with what de- and re-composing effects — is at the center as well of scholarly investigations by performance studies scholar Rebecca Schneider, whose publications include the books The Explicit Body in Performance and Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. Join us for an exciting evening of conversation between Jackson and Schneider at the body’s edge.

Department of Performance Studies Studio
721 Broadway, Room 612

between Waverly and Washington Places

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

Image courtesy of Shelley Jackson.


SMEARING THE PAP

a brown bag lunch talk with Elizabeth R. Boskey

December 2, Friday
12:30 to 1:45 pm

Elizabeth R. Boskey, CSGS Visiting Scholar

The Pap smear was one of the great public health innovations of the 20th Century. However, the way in which the test is currently used brings up important issues of sexism, paternalism, and autonomy in medical care. This talk will look at how oral contraceptive prescriptions have become linked to cervical cancer screening and examine the issue of birth control access through the lens of reproductive rights.

Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
41-51 East 11th Street, 7th Floor, Room 741

between University Place and Broadway
wheelchair access at 85-87 University Place, between 11th and 12th Streets

Organized by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.