Fall 2017


Cixousversaire: A Celebration of Hélène Cixous

a multi-day conference with Geoffrey Bennington, Tom Bishop, Anne Bogard, Hélène Cixous, Karen Finley, Peggy Kamui, Camille Laurens, Bertrand Leclair, Elissa Marder, Daniel Mesguich, Judith Miller, Olivier Morel, Eric Prenowitz, Avital Ronell, & Marta Segarra

September 14 to 16,
Thursday to Saturday

World renowned and revered French writer, literary critic, and philosopher Hélène Cixous celebrates her 80th birthday in 2017. To mark this occasion, New York University is organizing a major event that will bring Hélène Cixous to the Washington Square Campus once again, together with a number of distinguished scholars and writers from Europe and the United States.

Full program information here.

Hemmerdinger Hall
Silver Center
100 Washington Square East, 1st floor

Thursday, September 14
7 pm
Keynote by Hélène Cixous: Max & Moritz & My Mother

Friday, September 15
10:30 am to 12 pm
Peggy Kamui, USC
Eric Prenowitz, Leeds

2 to 3:30 pm
Marta Segarra, Barcelona
Geoffrey Bennington, Emory

3:30 to 4 pm
Olivier Morel: Film on Hélène Cixous

4:30 to 6 pm
CIXOUS SLAM: The Persistent Minoritization of Women and Writing
Panel: Hélène Cixous; Karen Finley, NYU; Avital Ronell, NYU

Saturday, September 16
10:30 am to 12 pm (in French)
Bertrand Leclair, writer
Camille Laurens, writer

2 to 3:30 pm
Elissa Marder, Emory
Olivier Morel, Notre Dame

3:30 to 4 pm
Daniel Mesguich: Readings

4:30 to 6 pm
THEATER OF THE SUN: The Plays of Hélène Cixous
Anne Bogard, Columbia; Hélène Cixous; Daniel Mesguich, director; Judith Miller, NYU; Tom Bishop, NYU (chair)

Full program information here.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; Department of Comparative Literature; Department of English; Department of French; Department of German; Department of Performance Studies; and Office of the Provost, Vice Provost for Faculty, Arts, Humanities & Diversity.



Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible

a discussion & celebration of the new book by Malik Gaines, with panelists Ricardo Montez, Fred Moten, & Alexandra Vasquez, with a response by Malik Gaines

** seating is limited and is on a first-come basis — doors open at 6 pm **

** panel will be livestreamed from the NYU Performance Studies Facebook page here **

September 21, Thursday
6:30 to 8 pm

Malik Gaines, Performance Studies, New York University

Ricardo Montez, Humanities, The New School

Fred Moten, Performance Studies, New York University

Alexandra Vazquez, Performance Studies, New York University

In his just published Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left, Malik Gaines illustrates the black political ideas that radicalized the artistic endeavors of musicians, playwrights, and actors beginning in the 1960s. These ideas paved the way for imaginative models for social transformation through performance. Looking broadly at performances found in music, theater, film, and everyday life—from American singer and pianist Nina Simone, Ghanaian playwrights Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo, Afro-German actor Günther Kaufmann, to California-based performer Sylvester—Gaines explores how shared signs of racial legacy and resistance politics are articulated with regional distinction. Three distinguished scholars of performance studies offer responses to Gaines’s book, followed by formal remarks from Gaines.

Performance Studies Studio
721 Broadway, room 612

Facebook event page here** seating is limited and is on a first-come basis — doors open at 6 pm ** 

** panel will be livestreamed from the NYU Performance Studies Facebook page here **

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



Apparatus of Power

a Decolonizing Vision Speaker Series artist talk with Shahzia Sikander

September 25, Monday
6 to 8 pm

Shahzia Sikander, visual artist

This talk will explore Sikander’s pioneering practice that takes classical Indo-Persian miniature painting as its point of departure and challenges the strict formal tropes of the genre by experimenting with scale and various forms of new media. Informed by South Asian, American, Feminist and Muslim perspectives, Sikander has developed a unique, critically charged approach to this time-honored medium –– employing its continuous capacity for reinvention to interrogate ideas of language, trade and empire, and migration.

Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality
285 Mercer Street, 4th Floor

Shahzia Sikander has been the subject of major international exhibitions around the world, including, amongst others, MAXXI | Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome (2016-17); Asia Society Hong Kong Center, Hong Kong (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2007); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2007); The San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego (2004); the Whitney Museum of American Art, Philip Morris/Altria Branch (2000); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (1999); Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (1998); and has participated in more than 400 group shows and international art forums. She has received numerous grants, fellowships and awards, including the Asia Society Award for Significant Contribution to Contemporary Art (2015), the U.S. Department of State National Medal of Arts Award (2012); and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, MacArthur Fellowship (2006). Sikander lives and works in New York.

For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at csgs(at)nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.

Co-Sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; Department of Art & Art ProfessionsDepartment of Art History; Institute of Fine Arts; Program in Asian/Pacific/American StudiesProgram in Gender & Sexuality Studies; and SouthAsiaNYU; and by South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC).



Pissed

a panel & conversation with Cassils, Jack Halberstam, Titus Kaphar, Joel Sanders, & Chase Strangio

September 26, Tuesday
7 to 9 pm

Announcing PISSED, a panel and conversation about art, architecture and legal action as tactics for promoting inclusivity. Held in conjunction with Cassils solo show, Monumental, at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, the presenters use their varying skill sets and imaginations to address noncompliant bodies and tactics for resistance.

The panel will feature Cassils (trans artist, Guggenheim Fellow), Chase Strangio (ACLU lawyer for Chelsea Manning, Gavin Grimm), Joel Sanders (architect) and Titus Kaphar (painter, Artist as Activist Fellow). The event will be moderated by Jack Halberstam, Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University. The panelists will discuss crossovers in their work and address alternative futures that refuse complicity in systems of oppression. Discussion topics will include Stalled!, an ongoing research initiative for promoting gender-inclusive restrooms and locker rooms.

Performance Studies Studio
721 Broadway, room 612

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



Unchain My Feet

a Decolonizing Vision Speaker Series artist talk with Sama Alshaibi

October 10, Tuesday
6 to 8 pm

Sama Alshaibi, Photography/Video Art, University of Arizona

This talk explores the intersections of contemporary migration crises through a selection of Alshaibi’s work. The lecture is informed by Alshaibi’s own biography and considers the impact of socio-political conditions on individuals under threat of the state or statelessness. These forces are contextualized when resources and land, mobility, political agency, and self-affirmation are compromised.

Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality
285 Mercer Street, 4th Floor

Sama Alshaibi’s (Palestine/Iraq) multi-media artworks disinters negotiations in spaces of conflict: the causation and aftermath of war and exile, the clashes between nation and citizenry, the vexatious dynamics of humans competing for land, resources and power, and finally, one’s own internal struggle with mental entrapment through self-policing emotions such as fear. Although she frequently uses her own body, Alshaibi is rarely representing herself directly. The body situates itself in allegorical contexts, trapped in time and space. The body juxtaposed with symbol, backdrop and gesture, constructs contexts of her physicality. The body as evolving metaphor. The body as site. The absence of her body in her artwork is still the context of the body absent.

Alshaibi has had over ten international solo exhibitions and her artworks are widely exhibited in prominent international biennials, film festivals, museums/institutions, galleries and fairs, including the 55th Venice Biennial, Honolulu Biennial 2017 (Hawaii), 2014 FotoFest International Biennial (Houston), MoMA (NYC), Edge of Arabia (London), Arab World Institute (Paris), Headlands Center for the Arts (San Francisco), The Bronx Museum (NYC), Paris Photo (Paris) and Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver). Aperture Foundation published her first monograph, “Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In” – it was released in March of 2015 in conjunction with her solo exhibition with Ayyam Gallery in London. Recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include “Sama Alshaibi: Silsila” at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (Arizona, USA, 2016) and at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University (NY, USA, 2017), “Collapse” at Ayyam Gallery in Dubai (2015) and “vs. Him” at Lawrie Shabibi Gallery in Dubai (2012). Her art residencies include Darat al Funun (Amman), A.M. Qattan Foundation (Ramallah) and Lightwork (NY). Alshaibi was awarded two national teaching awards and granted the title of ‘University of Arizona’s 1885 Distinguished Scholar’. She has been awarded the 2014-2015 Fulbright Scholars Fellowship to the West Bank, Palestine. She is currently Chair and Full Professor of Photography and Video Art, University of Arizona, where she has taught since 2006. Alshaibi is exclusively represented by Ayyam Gallery.

Co-Sponsored by the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute; Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; Department of Social & Cultural Analysis; and Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies.



The Criminalization of Womxn in America: Black Womxn & Girls

a panel with Miyhosi BentonMyaisha Hayes, & Mariame Kaba, presented by Students for Criminal Justice Reform & Wagner Women’s Caucus

October 12, Thursday
5 to 7 pm

Miyhosi Benton, Associate with the Women & Justice Project

Myaisha Hayes, Community Organizer

Mariame Kaba, educator, organizer, curator & Founder & Director of Project NIA & Co-founder of Survived & Punished

Womxn challenges the prevailing patriarchal belief that women are a subset of men and the lack of intersectionality on traditional feminist movements and discourse around “women’s issues.” At the height of mass incarceration, where approximately 2.3 million individuals are incarcerated, the conversation has been centered around the impact on men of color. Although that is a crucial conversation to have, it is important to discuss the rapid rate at which womxn are being incarcerated and marginalized as well.

Through a series of conversations, we will challenge the notion of criminalization through an intersectional lens. We will discuss the impact mass incarceration has had on womxn, but also broaden the conversation of criminalization to include the different ways womxn identities are oppressed.

The Puck Building
295 Lafayette Street
Rice Conference Room & Newman Reception Area, 2nd Floor

Presented by the NYU Students for Criminal Justice Reform and Wagner Women’s Caucus, & co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality.



Queering Asian American Contemporary Art

a forum with Jan Christian Bernabe, Greyson HongLaura Kina, Kyoo Lee, Zavé Martohardjono, & Saya Woolfalk

October 18, Wednesday
6:30 to 8:30 pm

Queering Contemporary Asian American Art (University of Washington Press, 2017), edited by Laura Kina (DePaul University) and Jan Christian Bernabe (Center of Art and Thought), brings together artists and scholars to challenge normative assumptions, essentialism, and methodologies within the study of Asian American art and visual culture. The featured essays, artist interviews, and artworks  explore the multiple axes of race and identity, queer bodies and forms, kinship and affect, and digital identities and performances.

Kina and Bernabe met at the A/P/A Institute at NYU’s 2012 NEH Summer Institute, “Re-envisioning American Art History: Asian American Art, Research, and Teaching,” which was the genesis for their new book. We are excited to welcome them back to A/P/A alongside contributors Greyson Hong (artist), Kyoo Lee (John Jay College), Zavé Martohardjono (artist), and Saya Woolfalk (artist) to discuss and celebrate the publication.

Asian/Pacific/American Institute
8 Washington Mews

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



From Field to Stage to Screen: Aesthetic Methodologies in the Making of Sweet Tea

a lecture by E. Patrick Johnson

October 19, Thursday
12 to 1:30 pm

E. Patrick Johnson, African American Studies, Northwestern University

Drawing on his research on black queers of the South, Johnson will discuss how he adapted oral history narratives and field research to a stage play and then to a documentary film. The lecture will also engage questions of ethics, advocacy and aesthetics.

Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality
285 Mercer Street, 4th Floor

E. Patrick Johnson has published widely in the areas of race, class, gender, sexuality, and performance. He is the founder and director of the Black Arts Initiative at Northwestern. He is also a Project& artist, a nonprofit arts organization engaged in art for social change and impact. Johnson is a prolific performer and scholar, and an inspiring teacher, whose research and artistry has greatly impacted African American studies, performance studies, and sexuality studies. He is the author of two award-winning books, Appropriating Blackness:  Performance and the Politics of Authenticity, and Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History. He is the editor of Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis by Dwight Conquergood (Michigan UP, 2013) and co-editor (with Mae G. Henderson) of Black Queer Studies—A Critical Anthology and (with Ramon Rivera-Servera) of solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews, and essays and Blacktino Queer Performance (Duke UP, forthcoming). He is currently at work on the companion text to Sweet Tea, entitled, Honeypot: Southern Black Women Who Love Women and an edited collection of new writings in black queer studies tentatively titled, No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies.

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



Intimate Relations: A Genealogy of Queer/Performativity

a lecture by Amelia Jones

October 25, Wednesday
6 to 7:30 pm

Amelia Jones, American Studies & Ethnicity, University of Southern California, Dornsife

This talk is based on the book project Intimate Relations, where Jones traces the interrelated histories of the terms “queer” and “performative” since 1950 in anglophone discourse. This genealogy suggests that the terms have deeply informed not only our thinking about queer, about performance and the performative, and about queer performance, but as well our understanding of how art works and comes to have cultural value (or not) over the past 70 years. In this paper, the focus is on examples in art discourse, where resistances to performance, the performative, and queer sexualities expose the limits of these disciplines’ capacity to address art that moves, takes place over time, and/or foregrounds non-normative sexual identities and identifications—suggesting that these terms are often articulated together in ways that determine how particular kinds of artistic expression are evaluated. Ultimately Jones will point to how the work labelled as queer and/or performative encourages a kind of bodily intimacy or relationality that is deeply threatening to the structures of the art world.

Performance Studies Studio
721 Broadway, room 612

Amelia Jones is the Robert A. Day Professor at the Roski School of Art and Design at University of Southern California. A curator and a theorist and historian of art and performance, her recent publications include Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (2012), Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in History (2012), co-edited with Adrian Heathfield, the edited volume Sexuality (2014), and, co-edited with Erin Silver, Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (2016). Her exhibition Material Traces: Time and the Gesture in Contemporary Art took place in 2013 in Montreal. She programmed the events Trans-Montréal (2015) and Live Artists Live (at USC in 2016). She edited “On Trans/Performance,” a special issue of Performance Research (October 2016).

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



The Right to Maim

a discussion & celebration of the new book by Jasbir K. Puar with panelists Liat Ben-Moshe, Fred MotenHelga Tawil-Souri, & Hentyle Yapp, with a response by Jasbir Puar

November 3, Friday
5 to 6:30 pm

Liat Ben-Moshe, Disability Studies, University of Toledo

Fred Moten, Performance Studies, New York University

Jasbir Puar, Women’s & Gender Studies, Rutgers

Helga Tawil-Souri, Media, Culture, & Communication, New York University

Hentyle Yapp, Art & Public Policy, New York University

This event celebrates the launch of Jasbir K. Puar’s long-awaited second book, The Right to Maim.  In that book, Puar brings her pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of disability. Drawing on a stunning array of theoretical and methodological frameworks, Puar uses the concept of “debility”—bodily injury and social exclusion brought on by economic and political factors—to disrupt the category of disability. She shows how debility, disability, and capacity together constitute an assemblage that states use to control populations. Three distinguished scholars–from multiple fields–will discuss The Right to Maim, to be followed by a response by Puar.

new location: 19 West 4th Street, room 101

PLEASE BRING PHOTO ID FOR ENTRY


Join us after the panel for a RECEPTION up the street at the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at 285 Mercer Street, 4th Floor.


Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for Disability StudiesCenter for the Study of Gender & SexualityDepartment of Art & Public PolicyHagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies; and Program in Gender & Sexuality Studies.


Liat Ben-Moshe is an assistant professor of disability studies at the University of Toledo. Her forthcoming book “Politics of (En)Closure” examines the connections between prison abolition, disability and deinstitutionalization in the U.S. (forthcoming with University of Minnesota Press and supported by an AAUW fellowship). Dr. Ben-Moshe is the co-editor (with Allison Carey and Chris Chapman) of Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada (Palgrave McMillan 2014) as well as special issues of Disability Studies Quarterly on disability in Israel/Palestine (Summer 2007) and Disability Studies Pedagogy (2015) and Women, Gender and Families of Color on race, gender and disability (2014). She has written on such topics as the politics of abolition; deinstitutionalization and incarceration; disability, anti-capitalism and anarchism; queerness and disability; inclusive pedagogy; disability in Israel/Palestine and representations of disability. For more information: utoledo.academia.edu/LiatBenMoshe

Fred Moten teaches and conducts research in black studies, performance studies, poetics and critical theory. He is author of consent not to be a single beingIn the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical TraditionHughson’s TavernB. JenkinsThe Feel TrioThe Little EdgesThe Service Porch and co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study and A Poetics of the Undercommons, and, with Wu Tsang, of Who touched me? Moten works in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University.

Jasbir K. Puar is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. Her most recent book is The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017). Puar is the author of award-winning Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007), which has been translated into Spanish and French and re-issued in an expanded version for its 10 th anniversary. She has also written numerous articles for mainstream, scholarly, and alternative venues. Currently she is completing her third book, a collection of essays on duration, pace, and acceleration in Palestine titled Slow Life: Settler Colonialism in Five Parts.

Helga Tawil-Souri is Associate Professor in Media, Culture, and Communication and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU, and the director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies. Helga is a media scholar who works on questions of spatiality, technology, and politics in the Middle East and especially Israel/Palestine. She is most recently the co-editor of Gaza As Metaphor (Hurst, 2016).

Hentyle Yapp is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Public Policy at NYU is also an affiliated faculty on the Disability Council. His research broadly engages the theoretical and methodological implications of queer, feminist, disability, and critical race studies for questions regarding the law and state. His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in American QuarterlyGLQVergeWomen and Performance, and other venues.



Asking For It: A One-Lady Rape about Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else!

a performance by Adrienne Truscott, & post-show conversation with Ann Pellegrini

November 10, Friday
7:30 pm

Adrienne Truscott, comedian, activist, & performance artist

Tickets start at $35 (student tickets $15) available here.
NYU Comedy Festival Combo pack: Buy 1 Adrienne Truscott and 1 Justin Vivian Bond for $50 (Save 30%)

Skirball Center
60 Washington Square South

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality and Skirball Center.



Combahee River Collective Mixtape: Black Feminist Sonic Dissent Then & Now

a panel discussion with Daphne Brooks, Kara Keeling, & Jacqueline Stewart

November 15, Wednesday
6 pm

Daphne Brooks, African American Studies, Yale University

Kara Keeling, Cinema & Media Studies and American Studies & Ethnicity, University of Southern California, Dornsife

Jacqueline Stewart, Cinema & Media Studies, University of Chicago

Join BCRW in celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Combahee River Collective Statement, the radical Black feminist manifesto completed in 1977 that laid out key tenets of intersectional theory and social justice reform. Taking the works of wide range of artists as our point of departure—from musicians such as the Knowles Sisters and Nina Simone to visual artists like Carrie Mae Weems and the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers—we aim to build a bridge from this historic document to the present and future of Black feminism. Audience participation is key, as we invite all attendees to find new directions in which music and image will allow us to carry forth the manifesto’s cogent wisdom.

Event Oval, The Diana Center
Barnard College
Broadway & 117th St

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, the Barnard College Center for Research on Women, and the Columbia University Institute for Research on Women & Gender Studies.



All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism

a lecture by & book celebration with Lydia X. Z. Brown

November 17, Friday
4 to 6 pm

Lydia X. Z. Brown, Visiting Lecturer, Tufts University

Lydia X. Z. Brown is a gender/queer and transracially/transnationally adopted East Asian autistic activist, writer, and speaker who disrupts institutional complacency everywhere from the academy to state agencies and the nonprofit-industrial complex. In collaboration with E. Ashkenazy and Morénike Giwa Onaiwu, Lydia is the lead editor and visionary behind All the Weight of Our Dreams, a new anthology of by autistic people of color.

Social & Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor

RSVP: Tyler Zoanni, tzoanni@nyu.edu

Venue is wheelchair accessible. Please contact tzoanni@nyu.edu if you need other accommodations

Co-sponsored by the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute; Center for Disability Studies; Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; Department of Anthropology; and Department of Social & Cultural Analysis.



Listening to Images

a Decolonizing Vision Speaker Series lecture by Tina Campt

November 20, Monday
6 to 8 pm

Tina Campt, Africana and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Barnard College

In this book talk, Tina Campt discusses her recently published monograph Listening to Images (Duke UP, 2017) which explores a way of listening closely to photography, engaging with lost archives of historically dismissed photographs of black subjects taken throughout the African diaspora. Originally intended to dehumanize, police, and restrict their subjects, these photographs — which range from late nineteenth-century ethnographic photographs of rural African women and photographs taken in an early twentieth-century Cape Town prison to postwar passport photographs in Birmingham, England and 1960s mug shots of the Freedom Riders — convey the softly buzzing tension of colonialism, the low hum of resistance and subversion, and the anticipation and performance of a future that has yet to happen. She hears in these photos a quiet intensity and quotidian practices of refusal. Campt will also share her most recent work: a meditation on renowned filmmaker Arthur Jafa’s remarkable seven-minute video installation Love is the Message and the Message is Death (2016).

Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality
285 Mercer Street, 4th Floor

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality and Program in Africana Studies.