Past: Fall 2016


Convulsing Bodies: A conversation on religion & resistance in Foucault

with Mark D. JordanCarolyn Dinshaw, & Anthony Petro

September 22, Thursday
5:30 to 7:30 pm

Carolyn Dinshaw, English and Social & Cultural Analysis, New York, University

Mark D. Jordan, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University

Anthony Petro, Religion, Boston University

In his most recent book, Convulsing Bodies: Religion & Resistance in Foucault, the path-breaking historian of Christianity and sexual ethics Mark D. Jordan puts forward an innovative and powerful argument for the relationship between religion and resistant bodies in Foucault’s thought. In the book, Jordan focuses less on those passages where Foucault explicitly discusses Christianity than on the way Foucault engages and even practices religious rhetoric, an engagement, Jordan argues, that seeks to reveal how speech works on bodies—and how bodies resist speech and power. Offered as a kind of record of Jordan’s own experience of reading and thinking with Foucault, Convulsing Bodies becomes a profound and moving meditation on the time of reading and writing—and the traces books leave on us. This forum puts Jordan in conversation with Anthony Petro, an historian of American religion at Boston University, and NYU’s own Carolyn Dinshaw, a medievalist and scholar of gender and sexuality studies.

Social & Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & SexualityCenter for Religion & Media, Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, and Program in Religious Studies.



After Marriage: The Future of LGBTQ Politics & Scholarship

a two-day conference with featured speakers Karma Chávez, Lisa Duggan, Katherine Franke, Bridget Hughes, Simone Kolysh, Kevin Lotz, Darnell L. Moore, Mignon Moore, Robyn Ochs, Brandon Andrew Robinson, stef shuster, Steven Thrasher, Urvashi Vaid, & many others

October 1 & 2, Saturday & Sunday

For a full list of speakers and schedule, visit the conference website here.

Tickets for the conference are now on sale here for a sliding scale fee ranging from $25 to $65.

After the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling, rainbow memes and #lovewins hashtags flooded the internet. But we also began to hear more about what activists and academics have been saying for decades—that LGBTQ politics is about #morethanmarriage. The marriage equality campaign has been criticized for making invisible all of the many pressing issues that impact diverse LGBTQ-identified individuals. Since the ruling, donations to some LGBTQ organizations have declined, and longstanding organizations have shut down.

This conference will convene an urgently needed discussion about this turning point. We will debate the way forward through plenary roundtable conversations among both established and rising figures in LGBTQ politics and scholarship, and through dozens of academic panels, roundtables, workshops, and other breakout sessions put together from responses to our open call.

John Jay College of Criminal Justice
524 West 59th Street

Organized by CUNY Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS) and co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality.



Life & Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980 to 1983

a one-day symposium featuring Tim Lawrence (University of East London), Bernie Gendron (music historian), Leonard Abrams (East Village Eye), Patti Astor (downtown actor, Fun Gallery, Wild Style), Johnny Dynell (Mudd Club, Pyramid, Danceteria, Area), Steven Harvey (New York Rocker), Danny Krivit (Roxy), Sal Principato (Liquid Liquid), John Robie (musician, producer), Sharon White (The Saint), Pat Ivers & Emily Armstrong (Nightclubbing), Kit Fitzgerald (video artist), Marvin Taylor (NYU), Jeffrey Deitch (gallerist), Michael Holman (Canal Zone, Gray, Negril, breaking impresario), Chi Chi Valenti (Mudd Club, Danceteria), Michael Zilkha (ZE Records), & Sukhdev Sandhu (NYU)

October 8, Saturday
10 am to 6 pm

This day-long symposium is devoted to an era of NYC’s downtown music that barely earned itself a name, but whose protagonists – feeding dub, hip hop, new wave, no wave, orchestral music and rock feeding into the post-disco mix – created one of the most creative and dynamic periods in New York’s music history. Its backdrop is the rise of Ronald Reagan, real estate inflation, and, perhaps most of all, AIDS wreaking havoc on the city’s overlapping art and dance scenes. Soon music majors returned to dance with a vengeance (re-injecting it with a commercial edge that contributed little in the way of artistic innovation). The crack epidemic besieged the city’s poorest communities so that the conditions no longer existed for disparate groups to explore commonalities. The glorious reign of mutant exploration started to close down, though its creative and communal example would inspire future generations.

Performance Studies Studio
721 Broadway, 6th Floor, room 612

Followed by a photography show & book reception from 6:30 to 9:30 pm at Howl Gallery (6 East 1st Street), featuring Tim Lawrence, Allan Tannenbaum, Ande Whyland, Harvey Wang, Bobby Grossman, & Richard Boch.

For more information, please contact Sukhdev Sandhu at ss162(at)nyu.edu.

Organized by the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at the Draper Program, NYU and the Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University of East London; co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, Department of EnglishDepartment of Performance Studies, and Department of Social & Cultural Analysis.



Trans Capable: Fungibility, Fugitivity, & the Fleshly Matter of Being

a lecture by C. Riley Snorton

October 13, Thursday
6 to 7:30 pm

C. Riley Snorton, Africana Studies, Cornell University

Flesh provides one route into the proverbial question of how matter matters, and Hortense Spillers’ notion of “female flesh ungendered” guides Snorton’s analysis of sex and gender as racial arrangements, wherein the fungibility of chattel persons produced a critical context for conceptualizing transness and generated understandings of sex and gender as subject to revision in the arenas of medicine and law. In this talk, Snorton traces how fungible flesh became a mode for fugitive action, as seen in the recurrence of “cross dressing” and cross gender performance in fugitive slave narratives, including in Ellen and William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom and Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

Social & Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor

Co-sponsored by NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality and Department of Social & Cultural Analysis.



Sex Museums: The Politics & Performance of Display

a lecture by Jennifer Tyburczy

October 20, Thursday
6 to 7:30 pm

Jennifer Tyburczy, Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

All museums are sex museums. In her book Sex Museums: The Politics & Performance of Display, Tyburczy takes a hard look at the formation of Western sexuality—particularly how categories of sexual normalcy and perversity are formed—and asks what role museums have played in using display as a technique for disciplining sexuality. Most museum exhibits, she argues, assume that white, patriarchal heterosexuality and traditional structures of intimacy, gender, and race represent national sexual culture for their visitors. Sex Museums illuminates the history of such heteronormativity at most museums and proposes alternative approaches for the future of public display projects, while also offering the reader curatorial tactics—what she calls queer curatorship—for exhibiting diverse sexualities in the twenty-first century.

Fales Library & Special Collections
70 Washington Square South, 3rd Floor

Co-sponsored by NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality and Fales Library & Special Collections.



Seeking Sex, Procuring Porn: Explicit Materials in Archives, Libraries, Museums, & Flea Markets

a one-day symposium with archivists, librarians, collectors, & book dealers: Rachel Corbman, Emily Drabinski, Jeffrey Escoffier, Ian KahnLeeroy Kun Young Kang, Sur Rodney SuryQuito Ziegler, & others

October 21, Friday
10 am to 6 pm

Fales Library & Special Collections
70 Washington Square South, 3rd Floor

Organized by the NYU Department of Spanish & Portuguese Languages & Literatures; co-sponsored by the Center for the HumanitiesCenter for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, and Fales Library & Special Collections.



MAJOR! (95 min., 2015, Dir. Annalise Ophelian)

a film screening & discussion with StormMiguel Florez, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, & Annalise Ophelian

October 25, Tuesday
6:30 to 8:30 pm

StormMiguel Florez, co-producer/editor of MAJOR!

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, transgender activist

Annalise Ophelian, producer/director of MAJOR!

MAJOR! follows the life and campaigns of Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a 73-year-old Black transgender woman, a veteran of the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, and organizer who has been fighting for the liberation of trans women of color for over 40 years. Miss Major’s personal story and activism for transgender civil rights, from mobile outreach and AIDS prevention to fighting the prison industrial complex, intersects LGBT struggles for justice and equality from the 1960s to today.

The screening will include a Q&A with Miss Major and the filmmakers, Annalise Ophelia and StormMiguel Flores.

Tishman Auditorium, New School
63 5th Avenue

Co-sponsored by NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality and the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW).



Scripting Battered Women: Paths not Taken

a lecture by Kelli Moore with response by A.B. Huber

October 28, Friday
4 to 6 pm

Kelli Moore, Media, Culture, & Communication, New York University

A.B. Huber, Gallatin, New York University

This talk is part of Kelli Moore’s longer book-length project on legal and extra-legal debates over the subject of trauma and helplessness. In this presentation, she demonstrates surprising links between psychologists Lenore Walker, Martin Seligman, Silvan Tomkins, and Frantz Fanon – who briefly shared an institutional and intellectual milieu in the 1960s and 70s. This shared context, she argues, is a significant yet little remarked aspect of the archival landscape of domestic violence. The talk takes assumes an explicitly speculative posture to ask how we might understand domestic violence differently if Lenore Walker’s famous theory of the battered woman syndrome had explicitly followed Tomkins’ work rather than the theory of learned helplessness put forward by the American psychologist of motivation, Martin Seligman. Both Seligman and Tomkins engaged in writing practices that repeatedly figured the black American in analyses of passive subjectivity (Seligman) and the distress object (Tomkins). In contrast, Walker’s initial study of battered women excluded black participants.  In a related set of speculations, Moore enlists the work of psychiatrist Frantz Fanon—whose preoccupations included the structure of the colonial mind, Negritude, and the significance placed on anticolonial violence—to chart a cybernetic route to theorizing the “forensic subject.”

Kelli Moore’s presentation will be followed by a response by A.B. Huber and discussion with the audience.

MCC Commons
239 Greene Street, 8th Floor

Co-sponsored by NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality and the Department of Media, Culture, & Communication.



Pleasure Principles: Bad Asians, Bottomhood, & the Belated Archive

screenings & discussion with Erica Cho, Nguyen Tan Hoang, & Eve Oishi, and moderated by Gayatri Gopinath

November 4, Friday
7 to 9 pm

Curated by Leeroy Kang, A/P/A Institute Visiting Scholar

As a historical, temporal, and aesthetic exploration into queer experimental Asian/Pacific cinema, this event will gather four scholars, curators, and artists whose work addresses the subjects of racialized sexual politics, gender transgression, and the possibilities of pleasure within the queer Asian/Pacific imagination. Eve Oishi (Claremont Graduate University), Nguyen Tan Hoang (University of California, San Diego), and Erica Cho (University of California, San Diego) will screen and discuss moving image works spanning the past several decades to create new modes of speculation within a lineage of artistic practice and political inquiry. Moderated by Gayatri Gopinath (NYU Department of Social & Cultural Analysis).

Cantor Film Center
36 East 8th Street, Theater 101

For more information, please contact the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute at apa.institute(at)nyu.edu or 212-998-3700.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Asian/Pacific/American InstituteCenter for the Study of Gender & SexualityFales Library & Special Collections, Asian Film & Media Initiative in the Department of Cinema Studies, Tisch Initiative for Creative Research, and Department of Art and Public Policy; and by the MIX NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival.



Beyond the Scorched Earth of Counter-Cinema: Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen

a retrospective curated by Oliver Fuke featuring Laura Mulvey & many others

November 11 to 13, Friday to Sunday
times TBA

This is the first U.S. retrospective devoted to the individual and collaborative features of film theorists Laura Mulvey (b.1941) and Peter Wollen (b.1938). After writing their early influential texts – Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and Wollen’s Signs and Meaning in the Cinema – they made six films together between 1974 and 1983. Their varied output moves across – and, in some cases, combines – the genres of documentary, narrative, feminist and avant-garde film. This season, which will screen a range of works made for both film and television, includes Penthesilea (1974), Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), AMY! (1980), Crystal Gazing (1982), Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1982) and Friendship’s Death (1987).

Laura Mulvey will be in conversation with a rich cross-section of guests/interlocutors throughout the long weekend.

Cinema Studies
721 Broadway, 6th Floor, room 648

For more information, please contact Sukhdev Sandhu at ss162(at)nyu.edu.

Organized by the NYU Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at the Draper Program; co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, Department of Cinema Studies, and the Department of English.



Queer/Animal/Theory: Psychoanalysis & Subjectivity

a lecture by Carla Freccero

November 15, Tuesday
6:30 to 8 pm

Carla Freccero, Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

Both animal studies and queer theory share theoretical inheritances, even as they diverge in some of their philosophical and political commitments. This talk assesses the (non-exclusive) reciprocal impact of animal studies and queer theory. In particular Freccero is interested in how subjectivity and one of its privileged analytics, psychoanalysis, can be understood to be queer animal theory insofar as psychoanalysis has, since its inception, concerned itself with how mammals become human through specific technologies of subject-formation without assuming the successful result of such a process in advance. Psychoanalysis is always already queer in that it does not presume a pre-existing model of sexuality and gender from which to extrapolate a normative outcome. Likewise, Freccero argues, psychoanalysis does not presume “the human” as its starting point for analyzing how adult human subjectivity is achieved. This latter contention will occupy the bulk of Freccero’s argument as she experimentally sketches the possibility of non-anthropocentric theories of the specificity of animal subjectivity, all the while seeking to de-reify and de-universalize the presumed generality of such terms as “the animal” and “the human.”

Performance Studies Studio
721 Broadway, 6th Floor, room 612

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



State of the Union: Poetry of Witness

a poetry reading with Janani Balasubramanian & Camille Rankine

December 13, Tuesday
6 to 8 pm

The term “poetry of witness” refers to poems written in “conditions of social and historical extremity” (Carolyn Forché). This event presents writers Camille Rankine and Janani Balasubramanian, who write poetry of witness in response to their experience of America. Q & A and book-signing to follow the reading.

Jefferson Market Library
Willa Cather Room, First Floor
425 Avenue of the Americas

Janani Balasubramanian is a writer of speculative fiction and poetry whose art and editorial work have been featured in The New Yorker, Guernica, Creative Time Reports, The New Inquiry, and more. They’ve presented work at 160+ stages across North America and Europe, including The Public Theater, MOMA, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Janani is currently working on Sleeper—a dystopian trilogy about sleep, dreams, and physics.

Camille Rankine’s first book of poetry, Incorrect Merciful Impulses, was published in January by Copper Canyon Press. She is the author of the chapbook Slow Dance with Trip Wire, selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America’s 2010 New York Chapbook Fellowship, and a recipient of a 2010 “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Atlas Review, American Poet, The Baffler, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Octopus Magazine, Paper Darts, Phantom Books, A Public Space, Tin House, and elsewhere. She serves as chair for the Executive Committee of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and the board of The Poetry Project, teaches at Columbia University, and lives in New York City.

The reading is free of charge and open to the public. Seating is limited. General-admission seating begins at 5:45 pm.

Co-sponsored by NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality and the NYPL Jefferson Market Library.